Class 1_ 
 
 Book. 
 
 Copyright H?._ 
 
 COPWHGHT DEPOSIT 
 
 I 
 
THE INFINITE PEESENCE 
 
THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 BY 
 
 GEORGE M. GOULD, M.D. 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 MOFFAT, YARD AND COMPANY 
 1910 
 
-^5*^ 
 
 Qj^ 
 
 Copyright, 1910, by 
 MOFFAT, YARD & COMPANY 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 All Eights Reserved 
 
 )GLA2730S3 
 
TABLE OF CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I. The Infinite Presence ... 1 
 
 II. The Biologic Basis of Ethics and 
 
 Eeligion 39 
 
 III. The Eole of Maternal Love in 
 
 Organic Evolution .... 93 
 
 IV. Immortality . . . . . . 154 
 
 V. Back to the Old Ways ... 213 
 
THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 THE INFINITE PKESENCE 1 
 
 Kant said that two things were sublime : 
 the starry heavens above, and the moral 
 law within. Upon reflection, the stars sug- 
 gest to "the natural man" but a crude, 
 vague, and far from infinite idea of in- 
 finity, and many experts have " explained" 
 the moral law as a utilitarian and evolu- 
 tionary product. The philosopher's rev- 
 erence serves, nevertheless, to divide the 
 infinities into two classes, like all other 
 phenomena, those without and those with- 
 in, objective and subjective, or macrocos- 
 mic and microcosmic. It will be found 
 that a third class must be added which 
 will comprise a number that belong to 
 
 i The Atlantic Monthly, December, 1904. 
 I 
 
2 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 neither world exclusively, but are the joint 
 product of both. In a rigid Berkeleian or 
 Hegelian analysis all would be subjective ; 
 in a looser one all equally more or less 
 composite; and especially if one accepts 
 language at its par value, and common 
 sense at its own rating. 
 
 The eye of the mind that does not infer 
 sees the starry firmament simply as light- 
 points in a dark blue setting. Distant 
 these points are indeed, but any very 
 great distance is a teaching of hearsay, 
 or inference, and only the astronomer, or 
 one he has taught, has more than a vague 
 and extremely finite conception of their 
 immeasurable distance. The shepherds 
 thought the guiding-star of Bethlehem 
 moved and stood over the manger in 
 which lay the wonderful child. They had 
 no hint of the amazing distance, even of 
 the nearest star, and possibly even Kant's 
 thought of it was vague as compared with 
 that we now hold. How many Americans 
 and Europeans to-day suppose that a 
 meteor is truly a "falling star"? That a 
 star could not move, or point out a local- 
 ity upon the earth, or the earth itself, is 
 
INFINITE PRESENCE 3 
 
 not to be understood by the shepherd 
 mind. If a newspaper reader has seen a 
 long string of figures expressing a guess 
 at the distances of stars, they of course 
 express to him no idea more definite than 
 if the numbers were one tenth or ten times 
 as many. It becomes at once the some- 
 thing non-finite, as do all such things not 
 cognizable by his assumed finiteness. 
 The infinite is thus to most a mere nega- 
 tive, whatever its nature, an impatient 
 naming of the unexplored and unnam- 
 able. If one attempts to bring to the or- 
 dinary mind a somewhat more adequate 
 thought or picture of the infinite, trying 
 to replace its negative by<a positive idea, 
 he is met by a smile of incredulity or of 
 shrinking wonder, confessing renuncia- 
 tion and the inability to follow. Should 
 one bravely persist and endeavor to show 
 that the so-called "light" of the stars 
 exists only, and is created, in a tiny, 
 wholly dark space six inches or more be- 
 hind his own eye, there is a risk of a 
 not flattering answer. Add that not only 
 light, but color also, sound, hardness, heat, 
 cold, odors, etc., — all the "things" our 
 
4 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 senses tell us of, are sensations, mind cre- 
 ations, unknown products of unknown 
 things by unknown methods and mechan- 
 isms. That would be unkind to him, and 
 worse than useless. 
 
 Our language demonstrates the purely 
 negative and renouncing action of mind 
 as regards infinity. We have no word for 
 expressing it positively. * ' Endless, ' ' * ' im- 
 measurable,' ' " infinite,' ' etc., give no de- 
 sired positiveness, and even the quasi- 
 affirmation in the word "eternal" means 
 only that which endures for an age, the 
 latter meaning originally a lifetime. The 
 seeming positive notation of the word 
 "omnipotence" is no less essentially nega- 
 tive, because men have never thought of 
 it as anything but subjective, — an attrib- 
 ute of God. But God Himself, the idea 
 of Him held by the careless believer, is 
 only that of an unknown, unknowable, 
 non-finite, into which vast unknown are 
 indiscriminately flung all tormenting mys- 
 teries. He thus becomes philosophically 
 the reserve of inexplainables awaiting our 
 leisure and ability. One by one we must 
 take out and at least seek to solve our 
 
INFINITE PRESENCE 5 
 
 problems. God must be made cognizable. 
 We can hardly be as perfect as He, which 
 is commanded, if we cannot even know 
 and understand His characteristics ; surely 
 not, if we do not even attempt the least 
 of such knowing and understanding. 
 
 It is not an advanced psychology that 
 demonstrates the mental creation of finite 
 sensations, and it is also as early shown 
 that the larger makings of infinities are 
 from the materials furnished by the mind 
 rather than from the outside world. It is 
 a truism that seeing is slowly learned, 
 and that, whatever hints reflected ether- 
 waves bring the eye, vision — accurate, 
 useful vision — is a product of the brain 
 and mind. In the same way, evidently, 
 one can readily determine that the thing 
 actually seen, the blue sky with its dots of 
 light, beyond the reach of his flung peb- 
 ble, does not even suggest infinite space 
 or universe to the shepherd. Nor does the 
 objective give any positive idea of any 
 kind concerning the non-finite. An un- 
 known something out there in some in- 
 comprehensible way started some vibra- 
 tions which somehow or other were trans- 
 
6 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 formed, and at last got to the proper 
 brain cells. From numberless results of 
 the kind the mind made inferences and 
 reasoned of the outside sources of the 
 sensations. One need not proceed to the 
 Berkeleian extreme of denying all objec- 
 tive reality in order to take from that out- 
 side cause such vast quantities of attri- 
 butes as must be done to be just to the 
 spirit co-partner. Even the newest physics 
 resulting from radium discoveries may, 
 according to Professor Lodge, leave some 
 abiding nucleus of materiality at the center 
 of the many-guised, cunningly concealed, 
 ionic molecule. If at last that is dissipa- 
 ted into ions, empty centers of vibra- 
 tional forces, the vibrations at least exist, 
 and with them all that is essentially objec- 
 tive. The atomic theory is by no means 
 destroyed with the destruction of all 
 " atoms." 
 
 In the same way there remains at least 
 the assured residue of objective infinities, 
 but when the mind gets her proper share 
 of its endowments, they are not so rich 
 as supposed. Infinity dwells less without 
 than within, and mental cooperation is 
 
INFINITE PRESENCE 7 
 
 required for the creation of even the 
 crudest objective infinity. Summarize all 
 the racial sense-impressions, condense a 
 hundred kinds to the quintessential in- 
 stincts, still they would be finite in origin 
 and number. The multiplication of finite- 
 nesses by any fini^s number leaves the 
 product still as far from infinite as the 
 first unit. Were the mind a product of 
 materiality and finite experiences, the 
 word " infinite, " even with the negative 
 connotation, would not have been formed. 
 That it has positive significance is indu- 
 bitable, hence the iron law of causality 
 demands that it come from no finite 
 source without. We do, in fact, endow 
 that without with our own self-grown in- 
 finities. The analyses of reality, the prog- 
 ress of psychology, all show that our 
 new science is largely a transplanting or 
 taking back to our own minds the rich 
 qualities with which we had too generously 
 endowed matter. In our generosity we 
 lent the old actor our own wardrobe of 
 the spirit. He thereby acted the cosmic 
 role assigned to him with better grace and 
 seemliness, but he was in honor bound to 
 
8 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 return the gold-embroidered cloak and 
 gem-decked crown. He could not wear 
 them in the street. Nor did he need them 
 there, for in the highways of materiality 
 is no cold or warmth, nakedness or gar- 
 ment, beauty or grace. It is only person- 
 ality and sensation that need, or know, or 
 can own these things. When the intel- 
 lectual part of personality grows beyond 
 the charm of played amusements, it smiles 
 in pity upon the child's need and the time 
 when it found so much pleasure in imag- 
 ining into the sticks and wires of its mari- 
 onettes (world, space, and time) its own 
 greater, more infinite, personal comedies 
 and tragedies. 
 
 And yet the wealth and power which 
 materiality pays back bring their own re- 
 sponsibilities. Unused gold without in- 
 terest is of no more value than so much 
 iron, and to yield interest or profit, work 
 must be done. By no unimproved or un- 
 earned endowment do we come to the grasp 
 and enjoyment even of metaphysical 
 things. The possibility lies in our nature, 
 it is true, and in the nature of mind; but 
 it does not spontaneously exercise itself. 
 
INFINITE PRESENCE 9 
 
 We gain the heaven, not only of feeling and 
 duty, but of intellect and imagination, by 
 hardened muscles and tireless climbing. 
 Metaphysical athletics is the most strenu- 
 ous of all, but these scalers of the Alps of 
 the Spirit have seen views unknown to 
 others, and so superb, so indescribable, 
 that the rare light in their eyes is almost 
 the sole hint of the supernatural glory. 
 The philosophies and religions, the poesies, 
 literatures, and sciences, of the few climb- 
 ers, are only fainter suggestions; and yet 
 these have made the civilization which we 
 find so miraculous. If humanity itself 
 should attempt the great ascent, whence 
 the stars are seen, not as discrete light- 
 spots sown in the overhead blue, but as the 
 beacon-fires of the soul calling Life to vic- 
 tory over the world ! 
 
 The two infinities of Kant did not chill 
 or hurt him, but his fearlessness is shared 
 by few. Only for a short instant, at best, 
 will most persons consent to look open- 
 eyed at any clear image of fate or of in- 
 finity. Scarcely a friend of mine will look 
 steadily at the clear midnight sky for a 
 minute in silence. The freezing of the 
 
io THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 heart that follows, the appalling shudder 
 at the dread contemplation of infinity, 
 which may be called cosmic horror, is 
 more than can be endured. If those stars 
 are absolutely and positively infinite, then 
 there is no up or down, and they knew no 
 beginning, will have no ending. With any 
 such staring Gorgon of fatalism the sur- 
 charged attention is shaken, and the chem- 
 istry of common life seizes upon the liquid 
 crystals with avid hunger. 
 
 But why may not this cosmic horror be 
 turned to cosmic pleasure? It is at best 
 not bravery or athletic prowess, and at 
 worst it is a psychic want of equilibrium, 
 a morbid metaphysics. When one has 
 health, strength, and expertness to do a 
 thing there is pleasure in doing it. In a 
 word, the horror is from disuse of the 
 innate power, and the sublimest pleasure 
 may be found in excursions into the in- 
 finite. For not the least of the astrono- 
 mer's delights springs from the grand dis- 
 tances and incommensurables with which 
 he deals, the limitlessness of the pictures 
 nightly spread before him. And is not the 
 historian's similar pleasure in the sweep 
 
INFINITE PRESENCE n 
 
 of eye from age to age and from nation to 
 nation, correlating to unity millions of in- 
 dividualities and events hidden from those 
 who dwell in valleys and in singlenesses? 
 In his analyses and syntheses the philoso- 
 pher learns of another kind of grave 
 charm, whereby the apparent disorder and 
 fortuity of the world are systematized and 
 coordinated into order and unity by some 
 fair and far harmonizing principle. Such, 
 in truth, are athletes ; but their endowment 
 and ability differ in no way from that of 
 the shepherd following his star. 
 
 However modern and civilized the shep- 
 herd may be, should one rally him to an 
 attack upon the infinite (God's infinities 
 having been first set aside), he would 
 answer that there are at best but two in- 
 finities: space and time. And he would 
 see but one childish method — the stretch- 
 ing of the imagination. With perfect 
 plausibility may not one contend that there 
 are as many ways of "feeling after God," 
 as many routes of excursion into infinity, 
 as there are personalities? Every one 
 differs from all others, even from his 
 brother, in some quality, aptitude, or 
 
12 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 ability. The poorest soul has at least one 
 window opening upon the beyond-the-lim- 
 ited. Most are richer in windows than 
 they know. And richer in roads, too, for 
 these lead out and subdivide, the last being 
 but well-blazed trails, perhaps, — and fol- 
 low them at your peril and pleasure! — 
 conducting to great outlooking peaks. 
 The window-gazers, — well, they can at 
 least see their fellows yonder on the sum- 
 mit. But the infinite is not to be observed 
 alone; it is not only observation, it is ac- 
 tion as well. 
 
 Even the infinite of space may be sought 
 by different routes and methods. Many 
 are common, — by images of trains of cars 
 en route for the moon, the sun, or the 
 nearest star; by written figures giving 
 the lowest comprehensible unit and its 
 cumulated multiplications to a tottering 
 incomprehensibility ; by light-years ; x by 
 thought-spannings of standards derived 
 from time-exposures of plates in photo- 
 graphing nebulas; by spectrum analyses 
 of stars approaching or receding. Are 
 
 i The distance traveled by light in one year, at the 
 rate of 186,500 miles per second. 
 
INFINITE PRESENCE 13 
 
 such helps not often great hindrances? 
 More resolute imaginations find them so. 
 One may readapt an old likeness, devised 
 before spectrum analysis (and curiously 
 fore-feeling it) , and imagine an eye poised 
 upon a beam of light shot into infinite 
 space from the satellite of a planet of 
 some sun of a great solar system. If the 
 eye travels slower than the rays that left 
 after it, the unrolling process seems has- 
 tened beyond the actual; if it travels at 
 the same rate of speed as all the other 
 rays, then the moon and the system are 
 seen as if stationary; but if it travels 
 faster than the light that left before it, 
 then there is to it an inversion of the proc- 
 ess, and the satellite will be seen to draw 
 back into its planet, this return to its sun, 
 and finally the sun fade to the primitive 
 invisible nebula. 
 
 By such fancies the mind may conquer 
 its own weakness; but it must not be for- 
 gotten that materiality not only does not 
 suggest, but that it even disallows them. 
 Better methods are without images, by 
 sheer intellectual muscle, generally with 
 helpful suggestion of materiality, but not 
 
i 4 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 by mirroring alone, and always with vital- 
 izing feeling. One arrives sometimes by 
 means of straight contemplation from 
 mountain-tops, or even by gazing, by day 
 v and upon one's back, at the cloud-flecked 
 and apertured zenith. At night a help is 
 got by piercing beyond the easily visible 
 stars to fainter and for long invisible 
 deeper-lying ones, — and then the stretch 
 of endless blue depths still below; the 
 dizzying sight through a telescope of the 
 jagged crater-tops of the moon jutting 
 against the cold deep. Many such experi- 
 ences widen and vivify thought, and leave 
 enduring memories, psychic recuperating 
 stations against more resolute mounting. 
 It should not be forgotten that if there is 
 a really and positively infinite number of 
 stars, then at every conceivable point of 
 the firmament there is located a star. 
 Hence, if light were stronger or eyes more 
 sensitive, there would be no discrete light- 
 spots and star-points, but only a sheen of 
 slightly variant intensity everywhere. A 
 qualification of this image is required by 
 the fact that about all stars are, prob- 
 ably, circling black planetary bodies, 
 
INFINITE PRESENCE 15 
 
 which, rhythmically intercepting and re- 
 vealing the starlight, would cause the 
 diffused glitter or sheen of the sky to 
 quiver with an intense stippling. 
 
 Finally, to grasp within the mental hold- 
 ing an adequate idea of the infinity of the 
 spatial universe, recourse must be had 
 to the scientifically educated imagination. 
 Stretch the images and plays of fancy as 
 one will, multiply conceivable s with all 
 the expertness of the best metaphysical 
 prestidigitator, and yet if a limit is as- 
 signed beyond which stars and matter do 
 not extend, then one inevitable consequence 
 results; if finite, it must somewhere have 
 a center of attraction. To that center, in 
 an infinite time past, must have drawn the 
 entire matter of the universe into one huge 
 central sun. If planetization must follow, 
 then the central sun must still be large 
 enough to dominate all satellites as revolv- 
 ing servants. There is not only no proof, 
 there is perfect disproof that such a cen- 
 tral body exists, and that there is any such 
 revolutionary order of the visible stars. 
 Hence the matter and the suns of the uni- 
 verse extend, positively and limitlessly, 
 
16 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 and eternally endure. Touch the logic 
 with emotion, and one has realized the in- 
 finite of space. 
 
 There is a comforting corollary to this, 
 one that reestablishes the stability that 
 seemed to be slipping, and which tended 
 to arouse the old cosmic horror. Our own 
 solar-system home cannot swing beyond 
 certain gravitational limits — cannot be 
 "lost" — because it is held within infallible 
 topographic bounds by the pull of the in- 
 finity of matter upon every side. The 
 nearer it approaches any perihelion, the 
 more the opposed infinite calls its return. 
 
 One may play with the thought (rather, 
 the words) of infinite vacuity or emptiness, 
 pure space ; but the imagination balks ; and 
 the inevitable extension of the ether into 
 all unoccupied space renders the thought 
 resultless and useless. Moreover, the idea 
 of motion or velocity of a discrete point 
 or world in otherwise unoccupied and lim- 
 itless space is impossible and self-contra- 
 dictory. There can be no up or down or 
 direction of such a body. Even in a sun- 
 filled infinity there is no direction in any 
 final sense. Lastly, that final and all-dom- 
 
INFINITE PRESENCE 17 
 
 inating fatalism of the objective world, 
 gravitation, precludes any limit to that 
 world. 
 
 The mystery and the infinity of matter 
 seem now fast disappearing into ideas of 
 force. But one may rest secure that all 
 the essentials of an objective world will 
 remain. There is to be no utter deliques- 
 cence of externals into subjectivities. 
 Neither physics nor metaphysics can kill 
 the other in the duel of eternity. Periodic 
 vibrations and rhythms become no less 
 objective or real by the death of all the 
 atoms, and the essential of materiality re- 
 mains, possibly even more stable and un- 
 changeable, with these clotted swirls of 
 ions and ethers, than with the crude lumps 
 called atoms. 
 
 And, with all material resolutions and 
 Protean disguises, there remains gravita- 
 tion, that most unexceptional, inexplicable, 
 and primal of all the fatalisms of the ma- 
 terial universe. Only spirit is freed from 
 its dominance, and even that only when it 
 is freed from its bound body. In the 
 alembic of thought the old idea of the ma- 
 terial of the universe may, and probably 
 
18 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 will, disappear; but only to rise again as 
 motion, which will endure as essentially 
 objective. There is an ill-defined border- 
 line between spirit and body somewhere 
 along the track marked " sensation,' ' in 
 which motion seems both subjective and 
 objective ; but when one actually gets well 
 across it, supposed mentality on the one 
 side is clearly only motility, and on the 
 other it is as surely only immotile mind. 
 On the outside, as we look at it, the entire 
 product passing as the old conception of 
 "matter" is perfectly represented by the 
 word ' ' gravitation. ' ' Hence, transfixed 
 by our thought, it becomes the consummate 
 and convincing exhibit of omnipotence, or 
 the infinite of power. How absolutely it 
 fuses the mysteries and controls the facts 
 of matter is seen in any attempt to think 
 ungravitation. The result would be the 
 homogeneity and motionlessness of the uni- 
 verse reduced to uniform nebulosity. One 
 atom could not vary in distance or size 
 from any other, and none could be in mo- 
 tion. Thus, gravitation is the sole source 
 of quality and motion. Antigravitation, 
 the unlimited sway of centrifugalism, 
 
INFINITE PRESENCE 19 
 
 would be followed by a more striking ex- 
 tension of the component matter of the uni- 
 verse into infinite space, and this would 
 be simply an eternal thinning process, 
 wherein the increasing nebularization 
 would never quite become an impossible 
 nothing. On its positive side gravitation 
 thus becomes the best and most easily 
 grasped demonstration of the infinite of 
 power. And as no human intelligence has 
 scarcely caught sight of even a hint of an 
 explanation of this strange force, it stands 
 before us as truly supernatural, and all the 
 more amazing to the trained mind, because 
 unlike most thought of the supernatural, 
 it is uniform and exceptionless. No atom 
 ever escaped its control. It was the first 
 born of all fates and fatalisms. The con- 
 dition of true philosophy and mental power 
 is to realize and explain that which is the 
 most common. The poor mind concerns 
 itself least with that to which it is most 
 habited. To the other the oldest and most 
 invariable stimulates the most curious in- 
 quiry. If gravitation is ever explained, 
 the oldest source of awe and the greatest 
 sense of mystery will pass out of human 
 
20 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 life, and both peasant and philosopher will 
 have lost the splendid example of sublime 
 and omnipotent power. The charm of its 
 mystery will, at least, have been lost, and 
 the god of matter, gorgon to the at first 
 startled observer, restful to the resolved 
 mind, will have been dethroned by a math- 
 ematical and mechanical formula. Other 
 methods, of course, remain of reaching to- 
 ward the conception of omnipotence, but 
 none is comparable to this. Herbert 
 Spencer has given us the look of it in his 
 First Principles, when he sketches the con- 
 gelation of the solar system out of the 
 supposed primal nebula. In measureless 
 years he says the icicles are revaporized, 
 and thus the cold eternal heart of fate pro- 
 ceeds in rhythmic systole and diastole, each 
 beat a universe repeated every billion 
 years. One may forget that this is a corol- 
 lary, a method of action, of the wonder of 
 gravitation. 
 
 The infinity of time is sooner dispensed 
 with or mastered, because time is merely 
 the measure of vibrational motion. One 
 thus comes near reducing it to an attribute 
 of mind, a registering of revolutions, a 
 
INFINITE PRESENCE 29 
 
 method of mnemonics. Quicker or slower 
 become very relative gaugings, and to the 
 eye on the ray of light, meaningless and 
 self-contradictory. In a static, motionless, 
 or non-revolving universe, there could be 
 no time, and plainly none in vacuous space. 
 It therefore becomes the name for period- 
 icity of motion, begot of physical recur- 
 rence and of mentality, non-existent 
 without both parents. How necessary is 
 the subjective parent is illustrated by the 
 De Quincey opium dream. If the dream 
 would always result from the hashish as 
 it did in that instance, if the test were not 
 dangerous, if it were not morbid, and if 
 the tester were surely strong enough, a 
 single daring trial would be educative. 
 But pathologists and experimenters do not 
 advise it, and it is unnecessary because the 
 results are to be secured by normal meth- 
 ods and are more satisfying. The normal 
 dream of sleep furnishes an abundance of 
 data, too frequently undervalued, as we 
 know. Freed from the bindings of the> 
 body, the dream-personality plays reck- 
 lessly with the stupidities of the waking 
 sense of space and time. Our daytime 
 
22 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 efforts to condense or stretch time out can 
 never equal that dainty ease. We live so 
 fast or so slow then, we focus long stretches 
 to an instant, or find the dragging moment 
 never passes, or the trivial deed is never 
 done. We stride from mountain-top to 
 mountain-top with miraculous ease and 
 fearlessness, slide down clouds or along 
 the edges of the world with such fine un- 
 consciousness of impossibilities ! The sub- 
 jectivity of time is illustrated, too, by sleep 
 itself, especially if dreamless. Where has 
 time been since, eight hours ago, we 
 stopped thinking ? The sleep of anesthesia 
 is no more, nor less, striking. There 
 are also pathologic and traumatic lapses 
 of time in which, with the loss of mem- 
 ory, there is also a loss of personality, the 
 finding of another self, entirely alien, with 
 as sudden a resumption of the old self 
 after weeks or months. Under such cir- 
 cumstances the puzzle becomes, not what 
 is time, and where, but what is the ego 
 itself? Indeed, how large a portion of 
 what we call individuality, in a last analy- 
 sis, disappears in the mystery of memory? 
 In our best and most revelatory experi- 
 
INFINITE PRESENCE 23 
 
 ences with the infinite, there is a subtile 
 fusion of objective and subjective, each 
 illuminating the other, and each crying 
 "Brother!" The influence of rare com- 
 binations of mental sensitiveness and rarer 
 circumstances with almost unique compos- 
 ites of fact, may, once or twice in life, 
 bring an experience of incomparable stim- 
 ulation and rebirth. Such moments come 
 at some time to most of us. Once in our 
 life a sunset may occur, a perfect silence, 
 a sickness or a flower, a vision from a 
 still mountain-top, a billow-breaking rock 
 and a far, fine, sunshot horizon line, a 
 divine music-moment, a terrible line of 
 poetry, a bird singing in storm and shine, 
 some tale of heroism with its swift reflex 
 on our own failure or success, — how many 
 are the incidents that reveal the world — 
 and ourselves — to ourselves. Many infin- 
 ities may thus meet and blossom in the 
 soul to a marvelous flower. Here is one: 
 a becalmed boat, silent, upon a silent and 
 unrippled sea; a soft veil of enwrapping 
 fog blotting out all things of sky, ocean, or 
 horizon. By some lightening of the fog, 
 suddenly there gleamed out of the east the 
 
24 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 full moon, a huge globe of silver glory. 
 With a glance to the other side there was 
 seen the setting sun glaring through the 
 mist with crimson intensity. How infin- 
 itesimal the bit of human life poised in 
 nothingness between those two awful Eyes 
 of Eternity! 
 
 Moreover, not only infinitely small, but 
 infinitely large and extended ! As the ma- 
 terial universe is limitless so must Life 
 extend beyond finiteness. We know that 
 all stars and planets have essentially the 
 same constitution and nature as our own 
 solar system; sometime during evolution, 
 therefore, one or more planets in each sys- 
 tem will become the home of Life. If but 
 one in a million, Life which is intelligence 
 or spirit, is still absolutely limitless. 
 
 The best and richest of our infinities 
 are of the spirit's own creating. One said 
 of a certain rhapsodist that his gravitation 
 was upward. The unstruggling ease of the 
 bird's flight seems natural to us, but in 
 truth our thought is not subject to gravi- 
 tation ; it goes up or down with equal will- 
 ingness. There is even no direction in its 
 spaceless universe. Kant felt the moral 
 
INFINITE PRESENCE 25 
 
 law within as sublime, as convincing a 
 demonstration as the starry firmament. 
 Matter, space, time, and power, these words 
 express the whole of externality. The 
 rest is spirit-land. And how rich it is, how 
 much richer than that poor out-thereness ! 
 If the real and greater infinite is self, why 
 not navigate that universe? We may do 
 so as successfully, more so, one would sur- 
 mise, than by any lift or push or reflex of 
 materiality, any thrust through space or 
 time. How few have thought of discover- 
 ing themselves! It seems a strange per- 
 version that moved humanity to set out 
 upon its world voyage of discovery. The 
 journey of knowledge began in quest of the 
 farthest and least useful wealth of good. 
 Leaving the home Lares and Penates the 
 voyager sailed to discover stars ; the world 
 of astronomy and geography he would first 
 know. When he found his own earth, its 
 nature, geology, next moved his curiosity; 
 then its animals. Finally, coming ever 
 nearer, he discovered his own body, and 
 busied himself for long with its least im- 
 portant bones and muscles. At last he saw 
 the mirrored picture of his own face, and 
 
26 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 that of his brother. The acquaintance 
 should ripen into amity, for all his knowl- 
 edges and acquirements are epitomized and 
 reclassified, revivified in the ego, to study 
 which he now returns to the home. The 
 household gods are found in a sad state 
 of neglect, and in their place is the new 
 altar of Science, with the motto, Spiritus 
 mortuus est. The Father, he finds, has also 
 died. In his voyaging he had heard that 
 spirit does not die. The priest at the altar 
 of Science assures him that all force may 
 be transmuted, but not extinguished. Is 
 not mind, then, also a force f Is it not as 
 indubitable that the "mental" of humanity 
 is being increasingly worked into the very 
 warp and woof of the material world ? Ah, 
 but the weaver, man, at "the roaring loom 
 of time ? ' ' His spirit cannot be localizable, 
 as his body was, and the old cosmic horror 
 of infinity breaks or threatens once more. 
 The tragedy of broken faith recurs forever 
 new, until one learns that spirit is not here 
 nor there, and is as real, though not bound 
 by the realities of space, time, matter, or 
 gravitation. All previous studies of the 
 out-there were preliminary and prepara- 
 
INFINITE PRESENCE 27 
 
 tory muscular play before the trust of the 
 spirit wings in an air finer than the lumi- 
 nif erous ether. 
 
 How is it with the others, his brother 
 voyagers? The majority have remained 
 "common sailors/ ' the tools of a superior 
 directive will. They have felt no need, 
 nor essayed any power, of knowing the in- 
 finite. In their natural bodies (these sad 
 feeders and workers, not for themselves, 
 but for others) psychism may sometimes 
 nest. Promises and possibilities may from 
 the first be suggested, the beginnings of 
 the tool-making faculty of true mentality; 
 but they are themselves the pathetic tools 
 of the struggle for existence, the methods 
 of making secure the incarnation process. 
 Theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do 
 and die. The second great class take their 
 infinities on faith, trusting to the reports of 
 others as to the existence of such things — ■ 
 the routine accepters of unstudied creeds. 
 Allied to these are those who follow little 
 less blindly the school of prepared philo- 
 sophic or historical thought into which 
 their minds drop with the least friction and 
 hurt. 
 
28 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 But the number of the returning Cap- 
 tains of Thought, of the original discov- 
 erers of the infinite, constantly increases, 
 and they come to greet and to know one 
 another, from afar in either space or time. 
 
 For they are themselves normally space- 
 less and timeless, and hence true citizens 
 of a genuine Fourth Dimension. And they 
 are one, a united people. Each, by predi- 
 lection, may have, indeed must have, a 
 special method of realizing the infinite, but 
 all have the same ultimate ideal. They are 
 students, lovers, brothers of the Infinite 
 Presence. The universality of matter, the 
 infinity of filled space, the rhythms of time 
 and motion, the omnipotence of gravitation, 
 all have prepared the student to see, to feel, 
 and to know the Infinite Presence. 
 
 The definings of the name "God," even 
 by the most intelligent of its users, and 
 even by a sect, or by one person, make it 
 impossible to use the word longer so that 
 it shall have any definite significance. 
 Close analysis of a single attribute soon 
 lands us in contradictions, if not absurd- 
 ities. Mankind has so persistently accus- 
 tomed itself to make God the indiscriminate 
 
INFINITE PRESENCE 29 
 
 holder of its indiscriminations that the 
 term has become a mere receptacle for hu- 
 manity's unsolved problems, a sort of 
 universal question-box of antitheses and 
 puzzles. Instead of adding to the conglom- 
 erate, it is our duty to withdraw the slips 
 and answer the questions, if possible. 
 There is no valid reason against, and every 
 reason in favor of, the scientific study of 
 God, a rational theology. If there is any- 
 thing corresponding in the least to the 
 reality designated by the name, let us learn 
 carefully and accurately what it is. Even 
 the self-supposed atheists and materialists 
 are, to a degree, theists and believers in 
 spirit. It is incumbent on them to deter- 
 mine how far they must go and how little 
 they can believe. The jumble of incon- 
 sistencies and of moral and intellectual 
 cowardices that the weak have made of God 
 by no means excuses or warrants wholesale 
 denial and impatient cynicism. When the 
 tragi-comedian Heine would relieve his 
 own suffering by a sad laugh at the world, 
 he said, "Oh, He'll forgive me, it's His 
 business." The amazing extent to which 
 sin has dictated the conception of God is a 
 
3 o THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 terrible revelation of how little men have 
 lived up to their light. " Jesus died and 
 paid it all, all the debt I owe," — whole 
 theologies of such horrors do not lessen 
 the truth that vicarious atonements are 
 the commonest tragedies of our every-day 
 life. "God is Love," "He is Goodness 
 itself," sings the devout believer, and he 
 believes as fervently, or did once, in the 
 hell pictured by Adam de Eos and Dante. 
 St. Francis, Calvin, the burners of the 
 Albigenses, all used the same word for 
 their divinity. "He is Beauty" to the 
 artist; "but, first, Truth," cautions the 
 scientist; and to the poet, the union of 
 Truth, Goodness, Love, and Beauty. It 
 grows plain that the old way made of Him 
 the impossible alembic of all contradic- 
 tions, a sorry makeshift of dialectic 
 difficulty and ethical failure. The funda- 
 mental error of all the definers was that 
 of making Him responsible for the inor- 
 ganic universe, or cause of the material 
 world. Ultimate origins, they did not see, 
 are insoluble and inexplainable, and no 
 help was to be got in our intellectual trials 
 or practical woes by the absurd supposi- 
 
INFINITE PRESENCE 31 
 
 tion of an uncaused omnipotent person as 
 the cause of the physical universe. There 
 is no proof or suggestion of proof that the 
 inorganic universe came into being by any 
 such help. With the modern study of life, 
 however, came the recognition that, so far 
 as its incarnations are concerned, it is a 
 creation. We see its miracles, its millions 
 of organisms created by means of effort, 
 purpose, and ingenuity, every day; we see 
 a common endeavor and approximated 
 ideal in and behind all of them ; a guiding 
 purpose is evident, converging through all 
 biologic history to a plain and clear, and 
 not very "far off," "divine event." In a 
 word, there is manifest in all living things 
 the Infinite Presence. We endow it with 
 no other infinity but this of presence, for 
 to the derived user of the word "I," it 
 must be forever present. In every other 
 derived ego, it is as manifest, whether 
 flower, tree, animal, bird, or man. All are 
 plainly of supernatural origin, physical 
 forces their utilized tools. No purely 
 physical thing has an ego. It is utterly 
 undesigned and purposeless. To this a 
 consistent and earnest science is driven, 
 
32 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 or softly comes, by the inevitability which 
 Lord Kelvin, in his way, has recently ad- 
 mitted. How much or how little of the 
 attributes formerly crowded upon "God" 
 may be possessed by our "Biologos," none 
 may say. None may with impunity trans- 
 fer the old to him, or bring new. He is 
 not to be unloaded upon. The old god is 
 dead with the accumulated sorrows of the 
 ages. The new one is not the resolver of 
 our mysteries and forgiver of our sins. 
 His own world difficulties are enough, and 
 he demands of each of us to aid, not op- 
 pose Him. 
 
 And quietly grows the perception that, 
 when as person and spirit we do thus feel 
 and know it, we recognize it as like our- 
 selves, as one with us, as the Father of us, 
 we the Sons. He has no eyes and yet is 
 looking at us, no ears and yet He hears 
 us, no face and yet His smile greets us. 
 He is not here nor there, and yet both here 
 and there; not then nor now, but both, 
 and continuously — this Divinity of Biol- 
 ogy, Father of Life. 
 
 It remains for the modern cultivated 
 mind and sensitive heart to fuse into liv- 
 
INFINITE PRESENCE 33 
 
 ing personality the antitheses of religion 
 and science, esthetics and morality. As 
 the outcome of ages of specialized effort, 
 such a synthesis is at last possible. The 
 intellectual mirroring or coordinating 
 faculty, viewed in the most superb of its 
 philosophies or sciences or material civ- 
 ilizations, viewed in all of them combined, 
 is, of course, but a part, a small part, of 
 the living and feeling personality; it is 
 but a part of life's being and work here. 
 Eeligion also caught one of the most vital 
 and primal of the truths of existence, the 
 Fatherhood of life, and the childhood of 
 the living; but it ignored the beautiful 
 too much, the ethical — the objectively eth- 
 ical — far more, and the intellectual was 
 to it almost the same as the devilish. But 
 few artists have ever learned that beauty 
 is only the smile and the benediction of 
 gladness over the true and the good, the 
 loved and loving real, and can in no way 
 precede or ignore the three fore-running 
 gods of life, religion, reality, and morality. 
 Neither dare ethics do the same as to its 
 own three elder brothers. But nothing 
 now hinders the modern child of the ages 
 
34 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 from having the clear scientific grasp of 
 the world of a Kelvin, and at the same time 
 being as religions and as ethical as St. 
 Thomas, as beauty-loving as Ruskin. For 
 the Infinite Presence is instantly recog- 
 nized as being the living synthesis of all 
 these characteristics of which we as partial 
 incarnations present only facets. Eeli- 
 gion is but the yearning toward Him, and 
 actualizing Him in our own life, history 
 the record of the progress we and the bio- 
 logic process are making in this ideal- 
 realism. Civilization is the tool He places 
 in our hands for use toward that end, 
 morality the method of using the tool, 
 beauty and happiness the proofs that it 
 has been used wisely and unselfishly. We 
 now know that materialistic science is not 
 scientific, that exclusive morality is im- 
 moral, immoral esthetics not beautiful; 
 and that a zealot's religion is most irreli- 
 gious. Let us have done with partialism ! 
 And how different the infinity of the 
 Presence from the inorganic infinities! 
 Purpose, intelligence, ideal, beauty, — 
 these were the lendings of man to nature, 
 so far as the lifeless infinities were con- 
 
INFINITE PRESENCE 35 
 
 cerned; but every cell, organ, organism, 
 history, — the whole biologic process, — 
 is instinct with them. There is every- 
 where increasing success dominating al- 
 ways-present and partial failure, person- 
 ality without individuality, an eternally 
 new phasing of the Infinite Presence. 
 Because it is a genuine incarnation, his 
 indivisible life deputed in each cell and 
 in each mind, with its allotted duty and 
 work. But the reins are held in one hand. 
 We are free only as deputies, not abso- 
 lutely, and never without the daily ac- 
 counting, the night's necessary repairing 
 of sleep. 
 
 All history is revealed as experiment- 
 ings and exercises in methods of gaining 
 the consciousness of and unity with this 
 single presence. Eeligions and religion 
 first made the ideal clear, determined upon 
 its actualization, and, despite a thousand 
 failures, have always held the I-and-my- 
 Father-are-one steadily before reluctantly 
 obedient humanity. Each in his way, but 
 none doubting, the religious leaders, the 
 saints and the martyrs, heathen and Chris- 
 tian, forefelt, foreknew the unity that 
 
36 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 would come even when their own errors 
 should have helped to bring it. They may 
 have cursed the science necessary to bring 
 it about, and their curse helped the bring- 
 ing. Materialism and science may have 
 denied the religious brother, but each 
 was necessary to the other. Speculative 
 philosophy and dialectic were but a train- 
 ing of expertness. The systems fail, but 
 systematization succeeds in their failures. 
 The art that should unite truth and beauty 
 may have been untrue and unbeautiful, but 
 it kept the vision, cheered the worker, and 
 died for the new art coming or to come. 
 The best and most serviceable tool of the 
 Infinite Presence is civilization, and of its 
 uses we are as yet only dreaming the most 
 childish dreams. 
 
 For the one characterizing and domi- 
 nant fact of the biologic process is the 
 steady and measurable increase of its 
 control of physical and chemical force. 
 With every new and successful organism, 
 — amoeba, grass-blade, animal, man, — 
 there is, by so much, a detachment of 
 power from the inorganic, and an added 
 gain of energy at the disposal of design 
 
INFINITE PRESENCE 37 
 
 and purpose. The clear pointing is to a 
 vitalization of matter, at least a vital con- 
 trol of it and of its forces, a spiritualiza- 
 tion of tlie mechanical. The inorganic, the 
 infinities of space, time, matter, and force, 
 in and of themselves are inconsequent, 
 meaningless, have utterly no raison d'etre. 
 In the hands of spirit they may be of ser- 
 vice, and their existence justified. The 
 God of biology, the Infinite Presence, is 
 patiently, increasingly, gaining such con- 
 trol by means of civilization. 
 
 "The moral law within" merits the 
 grandeur of its office as seen by Kant, in 
 that it is simply and solely the command 
 of the Infinite Presence that we, His sons, 
 must become His heirs, helpers, and co- 
 partners. That of old is the significance 
 of all ethics; and of all religion, which is 
 but duty vivified, obligation motived by 
 love and graced by beauty. Morality is 
 our obedience to the call; happiness, of 
 the world or of any one of us, the proof 
 that we have obeyed, the benediction of 
 His "Well done!" 
 
 The commingling of transcendent ingenu- 
 ity with mistakes, of plain comedy, and 
 
38 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 plainer tragedy, in the incarnation process, 
 has its theoretical and its practical lessons. 
 The Infinite Presence is made more famil- 
 iar and lovable by them, despite the athe- 
 ist's scorn. They give proof of the spon- 
 taneous and indestructible primitive belief 
 that, though omnipresent, He is not en- 
 tirely omniscient, and far indeed from om- 
 nipotent. They convince us that He is 
 both Father and Elder Brother (surely 
 He is, although of whence and how we have 
 no thought), who wrests from Fate a new 
 world of design and freedom, and to whom 
 the ancient fatalisms are yielding prog- 
 ressive obedience. The unsuccesses in the 
 copartnership are those who theoretically 
 or practically deny the kinship, seeking 
 selfish instead of corporate advantage. 
 They are the sinners, the disobedients by 
 choice. Then there are the failures, his 
 mistakes or ours, the defective classes, the 
 parasites, the pessimists, the suicides, — 
 the egotists of all sorts and kinds. Are 
 there too few obedients left? Ours the 
 fault, at least in part, and certainly ours 
 the misfortune. To us most clear of all 
 comes His call to help ! 
 
CHAPTER n 
 
 THE BIOLOGIC BASIS OF ETHICS AND 
 RELIGION 1 
 
 I was recently taking a walk along one 
 of our principal streets in Philadelphia, 
 puzzled as to what I might say to a com- 
 pany of good people whom I had been 
 asked to meet. At one of the crossings 
 there seemed to be a far greater number 
 of persons gathered about the four corners 
 than usual. Upon the first corner I found 
 a man with a gaudily-painted star-figure, 
 mounted upon an easel; by whirling the 
 star and noting where the chosen ray 
 should stop, personal destiny, or fortune, 
 was foretold — all for five cents. This de- 
 vice was called "The Science of Solar 
 Biology. " Crossing the street, my atten- 
 tion was attracted by a man haranguing 
 a dozen loafers from an old express- 
 
 i An address to the Men's Club of the Lenox Avenue 
 Unitarian Church, New York City, November 9, 1898. 
 
 39 
 
40 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 wagon. It was a street-corner orator 
 electioneering for the boss who had di- 
 rectly or indirectly hired him. In three 
 minutes the man uttered the word destiny, 
 a dozen or more times, picturing the glo- 
 rious future of our country if we should 
 only absorb a sufficiently large number of 
 conquered islands and peoples, and, in do- 
 ing so, forget the evils of corrupt bossism 
 and local government. On another corner 
 a Salvation-Army squad was gathered, 
 and the speaker was imploring and warn- 
 ing — again as to destiny. Upon the last 
 corner was a gathering of monists, so sat- 
 isfied with "identity in diversity' ' and 
 "diversity in identity' ' that they cared 
 nothing for solar biology, Matt Quay's 
 success, or Salvation itself. Surely the 
 fates had conspired to give me a subject! 
 Predestination could not have commanded 
 more clearly. The destiny of the individ- 
 ual in this world, that of the' Nation, that 
 of humanity after death, and practical 
 agnosticism — I could not complain that 
 the subject was not comprehensive and 
 grand enough! It was another case of 
 "de omni re scibili et quibusdam aliis." 
 
BIOLOGIC BASIS 41 
 
 Could I do any better with it than the 
 " solar biologist/' the election orator, the 
 Salvation-Army lassie, or the beer-drink- 
 er? Nature, as I had seen, has kindly 
 endowed most of us with an ineradicable 
 belief in our own ability to solve the pro- 
 foundest and most unanswerable prob- 
 lems; should I not be more modest than 
 the destiny-solvers of the curbstone? But 
 it was useless to fight genuine destiny. I 
 tried to get your chairman to let me talk 
 to you about trees, of which I know some- 
 thing, but he demanded biology, of which 
 I know too little. My egotism conquered, 
 and as every mind, high or low, erudite 
 or boorish, must somehow or other make 
 for itself, choose, modify, accept (even in 
 rejecting), and finally conquer some kind 
 of a philosophy of existence, — wholly dif- 
 ferent let it be also noted, from that of 
 every other mind — it comes to this that 
 we need not fear to tell another of our per- 
 sonal philosophies, because we are each 
 pretty certain that the result of the think- 
 ing of that other is quite as distressing 
 a product as our own. 
 And this philosophic pessimism appears 
 
42 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 to me quite justifiable when we weigh the 
 vast majority of ethical and philosophic 
 ♦ systems of the past. Certainty, agree- 
 ment, science, cannot be predicated of them. 
 Is it far from the truth to say that the 
 search for certainty by means of specula- 
 tive philosophy, theology, and ethics, has 
 in the past ended in absolute contradiction 
 and nihilism ? Every i i Professor ' ' has his 
 system, but no two professors are in agree- 
 ment, even the most general or distant. 
 "When doctors disagree who shall decide? 
 Surely we children in philosophy are justi- 
 fied in doubting of both result and method 
 when we behold the utter want of agree- 
 ment of our teachers and elders. The 
 child at the street-corner is dazed by the 
 demands of the solar biologist, the polit- 
 ical and the religious exhorters, and the 
 monistic loafers. 
 
 And what is the cause of the chaotic dis- 
 agreement? Why have systematic ethics 
 and philosophy ended in fog and vacuity? 
 The splendid thinking of the philosophers 
 of erudition and the stupid thinking of the 
 philosophers of the street-corners have 
 both resulted in utter confusion and 
 
BIOLOGIC BASIS 43 
 
 subjectivism; and I believe, for precisely 
 the same reason. Hegel is quite as guilty 
 as the Salvation Army drummer ; each has 
 clutched out of the air a lot of premises 
 or prejudices, it matters not which, spun 
 together a lot of syllogisms and conclu- 
 sions — logically or not, matters not — re- 
 gardless, utterly oblivious, of the facts. 
 Each alike has been busied and delighted 
 with the whirr of the word-mechanism, in- 
 different and scornful of the truth that 
 words and the ideas behind them must be 
 simply pointers to and indicators of facts. 
 The fundamental sin of both has been de- 
 duction. The stupendous tragedy and 
 resultlessness of the world's systematic 
 thinking and unsystematic ethics should 
 make us forevermore abjure the method. 
 The agreement of two minds as to one 
 crude objective fact will result in more 
 truth and progress than all the deduction 
 and subjectivism from Plato to Neo-He- 
 gelianism. Scornful of the scorn of ideal- 
 ists and word- jugglers, let us henceforth 
 set ourselves to observe facts and draw 
 rigid inferences from them. Berkeley is 
 dead, and buried ; Darwin is dead, and liv- 
 
44 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 ing. Though half of Darwin's conclusions 
 be ultimately proved erroneous, Darwin's 
 method will finally lead us to truth. De- 
 duction leads to vacuity and pessimism; 
 induction, at least to optimistic hope. No 
 longer must the carnivorous tiger of pre- 
 formed theory be permitted to pounce upon 
 the guileless facts. He must be slain with 
 that modern weapon of precision, induc- 
 tion. 
 
 When we set ourselves to observe facts 
 and draw inferences from them, we soon 
 find that all objects cluster in two great 
 categories: All things are either living 
 or non-living; that is, the term life is 
 definitely ascribable to, or deniable of, 
 every fact in the universe ; the qualities of 
 living things clearly differentiate them 
 from all other things. When you hear 
 some long-eared materialist talk about 
 "The life of a crystal," or the life of the 
 earth, or of the sun, you know at once 
 he is a psychic plebeian, no more to be 
 taken seriously than the "solar biologist." 
 Every living thing shows assimilation, self- 
 motility, and sensitiveness. Anything not 
 exhibiting these qualities is not living. 
 
BIOLOGIC BASIS 45 
 
 Moreover, the condition of all thought- 
 transfer is agreement as to the meaning 
 of words ; to talk about the life of non-liv- 
 ing things is philologic nonsense. When 
 one hears an agnostic or an atheist con- 
 tending that he is religious, or a material- 
 ist chattering about the universe being 
 11 alive," one almost wishes to shut them in 
 a deaf and dumb asylum, or to secure com- 
 mitment there for oneself. 
 
 My friend demurs at my dualism, but if 
 he stands honestly on induction there is 
 not a scintilla of scientific justification of 
 monism. Spontaneous generation is dis- 
 proved nonsense. No observation has ever 
 been made of matter creating life, or of life 
 becoming or causing matter. What has 
 never been observed or known to have 
 taken place — well, let us not be too cynical, 
 but let us not waste more than a second 
 of precious time, or more than a single 
 spasm of our levator anguli oris muscle 
 in a derisive smile of pity concerning it 
 or its poor eulogizers. When the medieval 
 scholastic could find nothing else to do, 
 he devoted his mind to the solution of the 
 awful problem, "How many thousand an- 
 
46 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 gels can dance upon the point of a fine 
 needle at the same instant of time." He 
 was the prototype of the modern monist. 
 "When you inquire what monism is, you find 
 that it is a wishy-washy obfuscation as to 
 the distinction and definition of words; a 
 namby-pamby desire to spread an obscur- 
 antist curtain of unity and identity over 
 things that a clear eye sees are noniden ti- 
 llable, and that no eye, normal or blen- 
 norrhagic, has ever seen fuse into unity. 
 
 There are several arguments for monism 
 which seem quite strong to some, but 
 which seem very weak to me : — 
 
 1. The law of casuality, it is said, de- 
 mands a primal unity as the basis of all 
 reality. To this there are two perfect an- 
 swers. If "God" made both life and mat- 
 ter, who made God? If the law of mind 
 is valid and forces the question as to some 
 things, it forces it as to all things. It is 
 mental trickery to stop at one point and 
 say that casuality ends just there. The 
 law of casuality is not thus satisfied. The 
 second answer is also as convincing: We 
 find in our minds the demand for an ulti- 
 mate cause, and we cannot escape its strin- 
 
BIOLOGIC BASIS 47 
 
 gency. But this is solely the product of 
 the inherited results of our personal bio- 
 logic experience, an experience which ob- 
 servation proves to be that of one planet's 
 life, and of one set of conditions of life. 
 It is easy to see that there may be cate- 
 gories of existence in which the law of 
 casuality would ultimately have no neces- 
 sary application or stringency. Do not let 
 us take our individual or racial or cosmic 
 experience as the absolute test of all ob- 
 jective validity. There is certainly no 
 a priori necessity for doing it. 
 
 2. A more practical reason for monism 
 is the feeling of many that we must be 
 loyal to God ; i. e., he is so near omnip- 
 otence and omniscience that he must be 
 really all-causative, absolutely all-power- 
 ful, and entirely all-knowing. But a least 
 instant's observation shows that every one 
 of his organisms from birth to death is 
 struggling with difficulties and imperfec- 
 tions. A little observation would also 
 show that God makes mistakes, and very 
 often too ; all teratology is one small proof 
 of this. Then it is indeed consummately 
 poor praise of God to credit him with some 
 
4 8 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 of the evils and vilenesses of the world. 
 There is no escape from the dilemma that 
 either he does not wish or that he cannot 
 do some things differently. If he does not 
 wish to do some things he is certainly not 
 good, if he cannot do them he is surely 
 not omnipotent. In either case he is not 
 the God of the old-fashioned idea. 
 
 3. Then there is the flatterer, and it is 
 a sad fact that much theology is the prod- 
 uct of a rather cheap sort of selfish flattery 
 of God. It is safer to credit God with 
 all powers ; it is also easier. A man once 
 told me confidentially and as if he didn't 
 wish to let God overhear him, that the 
 Bible and the creeds were perhaps not true, 
 but it would be safer not to act on that sup- 
 position, as, after all, they might be true. 
 It is a bit of ancient wisdom that to flatter 
 tyrants is the shrewder way of getting on 
 with them, — and the old divinities were 
 most of them tyrants. 
 
 4. There is also the positive shirker of 
 sin, the professional scapegoater. The 
 old theologies are full of this philosophy, 
 the doctrine of the vicarious atonement 
 being a scarlet example. The popular 
 
BIOLOGIC BASIS 49 
 
 hymnology of evangelicism reeks with 
 slimy morbidity. " Jesus died and paid it 
 all, all the debt I owe," and " There is a 
 fountain filled with blood, drawn from Im- 
 manuePs veins; vile sinners plunged be- 
 neath that flood lose all their guilty 
 stains ;" were bellowed into my childish 
 ears by fat hypocrisy and lean frenzy. 1 
 
 5. There remains the monism of pseudo- 
 scientific materialism, one of the many dis- , 
 gusting products of prejudice and psycho- 
 logic cunning, not infrequent among a class 
 of folk who conceal their asses-ears of 
 atheism and materialism beneath the lion's 
 skin of science. Morality, kindness, social 
 duties, obedience to aspiration and the still 
 small voice — these things bring pain and 
 
 1 Froude quotes a conspicuous example, an English 
 Evangelical hymn: — 
 
 Nothing, either great or small, 
 
 Slothing, sinners, no; 
 Jesus did it — did it all 
 
 Long, long ago. 
 
 Cast your deadly doing down, 
 
 Down at Jesus 5 feet; 
 Stand in Him, in Him alone, 
 
 Gloriously complete. 
 
5 o THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 endeavor, and many avoid the pain and 
 duty by drowning conscience in the as- 
 sumption that science demands material- 
 ism, and hence of course determinism. 
 Heredity is their new Fate, and Law — with 
 a big L — is their new god, — with a little 
 g. These people have been taken off with 
 a sting of truth, in the following jingle : 
 
 ' ' To cut my burden short 
 It is rather rough to thwart 
 A soul that would propriety pursue ; 
 "When I want to be a Saint, 
 Says Hereditary Taint, 
 Better do a little sinning, and I do." 
 
 The truth, of course, is that any at- 
 tempted investigation of ultimate origins 
 and causes is utterly futile. The problem 
 is beyond our mental reach. Monism may 
 be true, or dualism or many other -isms, — 
 but we can probably never know which. 
 All are at present equally unthinkable. 
 Monism, however, I think distinctly im- 
 moral, because, shirk it as one may, deny 
 it as one will, the inexpugnable fact re- 
 mains that in its psychic results monism, 
 any conceivable sort or kind of monism, 
 
BIOLOGIC BASIS 51 
 
 is only another name for fatalism. Out 
 of its cruel face stare the hideous eyes of 
 determinism, and no human heart can help 
 being turned to stone by their gorgon 
 glare. All that one can say of dualism, the 
 dualism of life and matter, is that it is the 
 best provisional or working hypothesis 
 that has been offered or that is thinkable. 
 So long as spontaneous generation is an 
 exploded fallacy, any scientific-minded 
 person must admit our hypothesis to be 
 the only theory to which the facts will lead 
 by the inductive method. It also permits 
 and demands freedom, aspiration, energy, 
 cooperation with God, religion, hope, etc., 
 as the requisites of right character and 
 conduct. 
 
 When we pass by strict inference from 
 observed facts to the largest justifia- 
 ble generalizations concerning non-living 
 things, we finally reach the atomic theory 
 as the necessary basis of all exact science 
 or physics. Although it is called a theory, 
 it is strictly an inductive conclusion, the 
 foundation of all physical and scientific in- 
 vestigation. If one does not admit the 
 substantial verity of that induction, there 
 
52 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 is no use of speech; language itself be- 
 comes meaningless, and thought comatose. 
 Whatever may be finally determined as to 
 the nature of atoms, vibrations, ions, elec- 
 trons, etc., we wander in the blank inane 
 of psychic emptiness without the laws of 
 the atomic theory upon which rest physics, 
 dynamics, chemistry, and upon which 
 again is based all other knowledge. If one 
 think accurately or observe mathematic- 
 ally, atoms, whatever their construction or 
 nature, are the bases of physical things and 
 the causes of physical forces. 
 
 But whether gravitation is explained or 
 not, it is unthinkable that matter can have 
 been created, or can be annihilated. What- 
 ever else is true or false, matter must be 
 uncaused, self-existent, eternal and eter- 
 nally obedient to the fatalisms of its inher- 
 ent nature, displaying no evidence of de- 
 sign or purpose, each atom following math- 
 ematically and invariably the stresses, pro- 
 pulsions, etc., of its conditions, and accord- 
 ing to its molecular weight, specific heat, 
 etc., etc. The fatalism of matter, the rigid 
 necessarianism of the inorganic universe, 
 is the truth hidden in and justifying the 
 
BIOLOGIC BASIS 53 
 
 human belief in fate, the limitation of free- 
 will, etc., which no dogmatism or creed has 
 ever been able to banish from the mind of 
 thinker or of devotee. However free we 
 are, or may be, behind the daylight free- 
 doms of our sun-blinded eyes, there are the 
 billions of stars of limitless and eternal 
 fate which the illumined night of reflection 
 reveals in the boundless stretches of the 
 physical universe. 
 
 Moreover, the infinite extension of this 
 physical universe is as certain as gravita- 
 tion itself. If there existed anywhere a 
 limit to the stars of space, then there would 
 be a somewhere-existing center of gravity 
 for all the suns of space, no matter if their 
 number ran to unwritable strings of fig- 
 ures. As infinite time is also an axiom of 
 thought, as well as an inference from the 
 uncreatedness of matter, however far re- 
 moved from the assumed and necessary 
 center may have been the supposable 
 farthest star, not only itself, but every 
 other bit of matter must have long since 
 thundered to one central sun. Hence it 
 is sure that every star is held relatively 
 in its place in the sidereal universe by the 
 
54 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 infinite number of stars and worlds upon 
 every side of it. Its free-will is repre- 
 sented by its tiny revolutions, and, per- 
 haps, some glimpsed directions of solar 
 and stellar motions, but its fate is that of 
 a surrounding and absolutely limitless 
 stellar host beyond all cognition of the 
 imagination or of the mathematical fac- 
 ulty. Spectrum analysis makes it certain 
 that the suns of space are composed of 
 the same kinds of atoms as we have here 
 in our own sun, and if, as now seems prob- 
 able, matter is simply condensed ether, 
 then space by double proof is a plenum, 
 and nowhere is there a vacuum. The 
 "tragedy of astronomy/ ' the awe-struck 
 horror of the "pitiless stars,' ' is thus 
 converted into the security of neighborli- 
 ness and of physical connection with 
 the whole mechanism; no universal cat- 
 aclysm or catastrophe is possible. Empti- 
 ness gives place to fulness, and our feelings 
 of banishment, lostness and orphanage are 
 replaced by those of acquaintanceship, 
 comprehension, and even to some extent 
 of mastery. Cosmic horror is supplanted 
 by cosmic admiration and understanding. 
 
BIOLOGIC BASIS 55 
 
 The woe of mystery ends in the delight of 
 comprehensibility. 
 
 But what is this that comprehends, that 
 feels and loves, that looks out upon, that 
 can will, and that can move by a wish one 
 or two hundred pounds of sweet, sensuous, 
 mysterious, carnal mechanism? What are 
 these others like ourselves that we see, and 
 that speak to us? What are these, our 
 brothers the animals, who can not speak, 
 but in whose lambent eyes we look and 
 find a dumb pleading for love, for human- 
 ization, and for spiritualization, and whom 
 we find essentially one with ourselves? 
 What of the grass, the flowers, the grains, 
 and the trees, whose fate is bound up with 
 ours, and whose true inner being, again, 
 is at once recognized by a keen eye as 
 identical with that of our own? What, in 
 a word, is life? What is that subtile flame 
 of soft spirit reining to unity every part 
 of our bodies, endowing each with continu- 
 ity, obedient even to our unconscious wish, 
 and in feeling and intellect rising to self- 
 consciousness, to purpose, to the making 
 and the mastery of destiny itself? Has 
 this any likeness to, or any relationship 
 
56 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 and unity, conceivable or observable, with 
 the matter of the non-living worlds? It is 
 logical blasphemy to suggest it, and scien- 
 tific nihilism to assert it. 
 
 Any physicist who understands "the 
 mechanics of a closed system," any chem- 
 ist who knows of the release of energy in 
 a disintegrating and simplifying molecule, 
 any physiologist who has caught a glimpse 
 of the physics of digestion and assimila- 
 tion, knows well enough that the physical 
 energies of the living organism are gained 
 by the utilization of the liberated forces 
 of a complex molecule, first anabolized or 
 built up by life, then katabolized by the 
 same power when and where the liberated 
 force is desired. Something like 5,000,000 
 blood-cells, it is said, die within us every 
 second, and 5,000,000 new ones are created 
 and vivified to carry on the work. Thus 
 all vitality is supported in its world-work 
 by the dissipation of energy released in the 
 disintegration of a complex molecule of 
 matter. The mechanism of assimilation, 
 of heat-production, of movement, of every 
 bodily function, is that of the continuous 
 indrawing of streams of complex molecules 
 
BIOLOGIC BASIS 57 
 
 in which are locked condensed atomic mo- 
 tilities, of building them to greater com- 
 plexity, of extracting their energies by dis- 
 integration, and of discarding the refuse 
 and the used-up material. To be alive is 
 to do that; what does not do this is not 
 alive. But it is quite clear that the di- 
 rectional power and intelligence which does 
 that can never be identified with, is infin- 
 itely other than the poor blind fatalistic, 
 impassive atoms, molecules, and materials 
 thus used. The nail and the hammerer, 
 the engine and the engineer, belong to ir- 
 reconcilable categories of existence. No 
 monist has a glimpse of genuine scientific 
 methods. He has not learned the A-B-C 
 of science, which is the recognition of dif- 
 ferences in observed facts. 
 
 Parenthetically it should be observed 
 that in the vegetable world life has learned, 
 and in the animal has unlearned, the art 
 of building up the relatively simple veg- 
 etal protoplasm from inorganic materials. 
 The tree or plant takes up the purely me- 
 chanical molecules and anabolizes them to 
 vitalistic complexity. The animal has lost 
 this power, finds it too difficult, or rather 
 
58 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 unnecessary, and so utilizes the complex 
 vegetal protoplasm as the ingestion-mate- 
 rial or basis for the still more complex 
 bioplasm of the animal cell. Thus, all ani- 
 mal and human life depends upon the vege- 
 tal world for food and existence. It does 
 not follow that this is the only function it 
 serves, nor that we have not many other 
 relations, ethic, esthetic, etc., with the veg- 
 etal world, than that of ruthless food-get- 
 ting. 
 
 Now, every mind which is desirous of 
 understanding itself and the world, which 
 is unhappy in the presence of mysteries 
 not necessarily insoluble, soon meets 
 the physiologic mystery. "La premiere 
 chose," says Pascal, "qui s' off re a Vhom- 
 me quand il se regar&e, c'est son corps." 
 If one have any genuine scientific animus 
 he will speedily advance from the large 
 facts of motion, for example, or sexualism, 
 to the more intimate and essential ones, 
 e. g., of nutrition, nerve-communication, 
 and unity, etc. ; and if he is in downright 
 earnest he will before long arrive at the 
 question of the mechanics of all vital activ- 
 ity in and through the cell — the physiologic 
 
BIOLOGIC BASIS 59 
 
 unit and elemental component of all organs. 
 Cytology is the beginning and foundation 
 of all genuine philosophy, the suggester 
 and controller of all ethics, the way to 
 reach vivid, legitimate, and real religion. 
 Grasp your religion, your philosophy, your 
 esthetics, or your ethics, by deductive 
 methods out of the abstractions of your 
 own mind (your mind which itself is the 
 abstraction of abstractions), and you float 
 in the lawless incertitude of ethereal sub- 
 jectivism, without the quickening breath of 
 oxygenating air to stay your fluttering 
 heart, without the earth of reality to sup- 
 port your propless feet. Study rather the 
 pathology of inflammation, get down your 
 microscope and watch the white corpuscles 
 in the blood-stream crowd about a wound 
 and plunge through the rent vessel- walls 
 to repair the damage and heal the part. It 
 soon is clear that each blood-cell, and every 
 other cell in the body, is ruled from within, 
 is an individual which coheres from choice 
 and self-sacrifice with others — a million 
 here shaping themselves one way, another 
 million elongating, or flattening, or harden- 
 ing; this billion taking one function, an- 
 
60 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 other a different function, etc., until thou- 
 sands of families tell themselves off to a 
 thousand different labors and duties. But 
 whatever the work, or shape, or place, 
 each cell acts as an individual from within, 
 not by constraint from without. Its rul- 
 ing power is from its center of life within 
 itself. Its nutrition is effected the same 
 as that of the body; it draws into itself 
 streams of food, accepts some, exhausts 
 the force in the complex molecule, utilizes 
 the sucked-out force, and excretes the use- 
 less debris. Can a bundle of mechanical 
 atoms do the like? It is clear that intelli- 
 gence, purpose, ethics, self-sacrifice — con- 
 trol, in a word — reside at the heart of the 
 cell. But as all cells of the organ and 
 body ally and sacrifice themselves for a 
 common end, the cell-intelligence must find 
 a common unity in an intelligence behind 
 all cells, whereto all lines of direction lead, 
 and whereby all are governed. Life 
 reaches control of physical forces by the 
 cell-mechanism, and, so far as we know, 
 by it solely. No inorganic molecule shows 
 any evidence of intellect, design, or pur- 
 pose. It is the product solely of math- 
 
BIOLOGIC BASIS 61 
 
 ematically determinate and invariable 
 physical forces. The cell always exhibits 
 intellect, design, purpose, ethics, and me- 
 chanical genius. Nonliving matter is ut- 
 terly fatalistic, externally governed and 
 self-satisfied ; the living cell is free, intern- 
 ally governed, and finds the end or object 
 of its existence elsewhere and elsewhen. 
 
 As we thus observe cells of myriad 
 shapes, natures, and functions, each di- 
 rected from within, fuse themselves to 
 organs, and organs again cohere to form 
 the complete animal organism, it com- 
 mences to break in upon the wondering 
 perception that the cell-mechanism is life's 
 method of getting entrance to the nonliv- 
 ing world ; moreover, as every cell exhibits 
 all the attributes of personality, loyalty, 
 self-sacrifice, ingenuity, intellect, far-away 
 planning, etc., etc., it grows plainer that 
 temporarily the cell is life's domicilium or 
 home, that life itself is incarnate in the 
 cell. If you wish to say Biologos, or God, 
 instead of Life, I heartily agree, and we 
 are face to face with the sublime fact of 
 biology: The cell is God's instrument and 
 mediator in materiality; it is the mechan- 
 
62 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 ism of incarnation, the word made flesh 
 and dwelling among us. 
 
 And this is my criticised dualism. If, 
 however, you can satisfy any demand of 
 scientific intelligence by identifying the 
 materials used, the molecules drawn in, 
 sucked of their power, and again thrown 
 out, these stupid, brute, fatalistic, dancing 
 atoms, with the intelligence, purpose, love, 
 ingenuity which uses them as mere tools, — 
 then you and I part company. It is not 
 very flattering to a watchmaker to say to 
 him that he and his tools and his watches 
 are fundamentally the same. The watch 
 may feel complimented, not its maker. 
 Monism is as impious as it is unscientific. 
 Let us have done with all the pantheisms, 
 materialisms, and idealisms, whose wreck- 
 age fills the lumber-rooms of the past. 
 The nonliving universe is made up of 
 driven atoms in various stages of close 
 or wide conglomeration, uncaused, dis- 
 crete, eternal, purposeless, fatalistic, be- 
 traying no trace of personality either in 
 origin or action. The living cell shows 
 personality and all its attributes, building 
 a complex and marvelous tool out of the 
 
BIOLOGIC BASIS 63 
 
 dead atoms, and every organism of cells 
 in all the world is fused into harmonic 
 unity and continuity with every other by 
 lines of directional control centering in 
 what we represent to ourselves by the 
 word God. 
 
 Human personality therefore can only 
 be a unity of greater differentiations of 
 function, a higher and fuller incarnation 
 than the single cell-incarnation. Life, or 
 God, is in the cell. It is He incarnate, 
 ceaseless, sleepless, absolutely present, in- 
 stantly acting. The cell's intelligence is 
 His. The human personality is also at 
 last Himself and only Himself. Our free- 
 dom is his freedom. Our self-conscious- 
 ness is made possible by such perfection 
 of the organismal mechanism that to it 
 may be added the deputization of control, 
 denied to the lower or less perfect organ- 
 isms by the very fact of their imperfection 
 as organisms. But our self-consciousness 
 is only a degree of His, largely dependent 
 upon our loyalty (i. e., again, upon the 
 perfection of the mechanism) in recogniz- 
 ing and accepting His designs as our per- 
 sonal ideals. 
 
64 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 His designs — ah, but what are they? 
 What is the object of Life ? What is God's 
 purpose with us, and in the process of 
 cosmic incarnation? It seems somewhat 
 strange that philosophers, system-makers, 
 they especially of the ethical and religious 
 kinds, should have been so indifferent to 
 the most important of all questions, the 
 object of the world, or of life. A rational 
 ethic must, of course, be absolutely con- 
 ditional upon an answer to this question. 
 To any reader of history or careful ob- 
 server of his fellows, it must be plain that 
 men often do evil by the most sincere 
 obedience to conscience. Men are usually 
 willing to do right, indeed do generally 
 obey their consciences ; but willingness and 
 obedience do not tell what is the right. 
 All action that is right in result, as well 
 as right in motive, must depend upon really 
 carrying out God's wishes, upon what His 
 wishes are, or upon what is the final cause, 
 as the theologians would say, of existence* 
 To me the inorganic universe has no cause, 
 either first or final, and any attempt to 
 think teleology into lifeless matter will re- 
 sult in a whirling dervish-like ecstacy of 
 
BIOLOGIC BASIS 65 
 
 mind, or an atheistic pessimism. If God 
 is responsible for that, I will none of Him ! 
 He is then utterly unthinkable, unknow- 
 able, and unlovable. 
 
 The old theologians occasionally tackled 
 the question, but their answers as to the 
 final cause were sad evidences of their dis- 
 respect for themselves and for God. If 
 "to praise God and to enjoy Him forever,' ' 
 be the end and aim of existence, I think 
 "existence' ' would better never have wak- 
 ened out of Schopenhauer's famous Nichts. 
 The truth is, that starting with the deduc- 
 tionists' God, omnipotent and responsible 
 for the creation and upholding of the en- 
 tire universe, there is no conceivable ob- 
 ject of existence. We settle back into the 
 practical atheism and intellectual nihilism 
 of the majority of mankind. The mind 
 balks and rebels at too much God, and in 
 teaching theism the old " God-drunken' ' 
 teachers made atheists, in much the same 
 manner as Bishop Butler did, by proving 
 too much. I am also profoundly convinced 
 that a vast deal of the pessimism and sen- 
 sualism of the world is due to the incon- 
 ceivability by deductional methods of any 
 
66 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 object or final cause of the world. So long 
 as the Gorgon of an omnipotent Creator, 
 responsible for the universe, stands at the 
 entrance of the intellectual temple, the very 
 blood and marrow of reason is frozen by 
 a simple glance of its stony and fatalistic 
 eyes. If this is so, then such "theism" 
 is criminal. For my part at least, Heaven 
 preserve me from this sort of monism? 
 From that trance of death-like abstraction 
 my dog's nose, thrust under my hand, beg- 
 ging for love, brings me safely back to 
 reality and sanity with tears in my eyes. 
 For, when one of my God's creatures wants 
 something, it is He that wants it. 
 
 If we look at the great incarnation-proc- 
 ess in its entirety, as a world-phenomenon, 
 we find the most inclusive generalization 
 to which all of the facts lead up, is that 
 by and through the process, Biologos (as 
 I call God) is each instant gaining an in- 
 creased control of the forces of the non- 
 living universe. Every increase in the 
 numbers of humanity is per se an added 
 victory; but by civilization the very forces 
 of the solar system are being harnessed 
 and broken to Life's intent and use. 
 
BIOLOGIC BASIS 67 
 
 Every discovery in mechanics, physics, 
 chemistry, and in science of al± kinds, dou- 
 bles his control of the forces of the physical 
 world. So amazingly rapid is this gain 
 in directional control that one almost hes- 
 itates to set any limits to our future dom- 
 ination over and use of the physical forces 
 of the universe. We may yet visit Mars ! 
 Every gain is at once put at the service 
 of all men for their intellectualization and 
 spiritualization. The object of Life, then, 
 presents itself to me, at least tentatively, 
 as the mastery of physical forces (through 
 the mechanism of the cell) for Life's di- 
 rectional control, and the rationalizing and 
 spiritualization of humanity. Other and 
 deeper objects may lie concealed behind 
 these plainest ones, but these primary ones 
 are patent to eyes that desire to see. The 
 glorious words of Christ, startling in their 
 prescience, are likewise those of Biologos : 
 "I am come that they might have life, and 
 that they might have it more abundantly. ' ' 
 Fullness of life, perfection of life, control 
 of power, these are the things most pro- 
 foundly desired by every human heart; 
 viewing the mechanism and progress of 
 
68 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 the incarnation-process they are also pre- 
 cisely the things God most desires. 
 
 But to desire things is not to have them 
 in the case either of cells, of plants, of ani- 
 mals, of men, or of God. The invasion 
 of the material world by Biologos shows 
 strain, struggle and incompleteness, during 
 every instant of history and throughout 
 the biologic world. This is the most ap- 
 palling and the most evident of all living 
 facts. Every cell of every living thing 
 that has ever existed or that exists to-day 
 is carrying on its function with effort, fore- 
 fending disaster, healing hurts, nourishing 
 itself with consummate solicitude and fore- 
 sight, and fulfilling its duty with loyalty 
 and self-sacrifice that is simply divine. 
 The same is true of every congeries of cells 
 called an organ. Only the physiologist 
 and physician can realize the intensity of 
 this endeavor. The same is also true of 
 the congeries of organs called the individ- 
 ual. No weed, grass, tree or animal, but 
 that has attained its small degree of per- 
 fection by the thousands of mechanisms 
 of offense and defense which botany and 
 zoology cannot even catalogue, and every 
 
BIOLOGIC BASIS 69 
 
 one bears the pathetic marks of imperfec- 
 tion, enemies, disease, scars, frustrated 
 endeavors, and the rest. All archeology 
 and history are the records of man's strug- 
 gle ; is there one of us to-day in this world 
 of 1500 millions who is satisfied and unde- 
 siring? And there, soon or late, stands 
 certain death awaiting every cell, and every 
 individual, whether plant, animal, or man ! 
 By the circumvention of sex and repro- 
 duction death is cheated of complete vic- 
 tory, but at what expense to the process, 
 and to the process-maker! But if all 
 things that live do so with every instant's 
 struggle, if imperfection, want and death, 
 stamp every product, is the producer, God, 
 then, not finite, and a struggler, all too 
 pathetically far from omnipotent ? 
 
 And if so, is His heart not as full (nay 
 is it not more full?) as yours of unfulfilled 
 desire and thwarted effort? Is not every 
 failure his failure, and every success also 
 His success? Your suffering is His suf- 
 fering, your tragedy certainly is His. 1 
 
 1 Since the above was written, I find in Professor 
 Royce's Studies of Good and Evil the following: "The 
 only possible answer [to Job's question] is one that 
 
70 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 e Aoyo's 2ap£ iyivero is the truth of Scrip- 
 ture, but how more enormously, more sub- 
 limely true it is than the Bible-writers 
 dreamed! Every cell of the billions of 
 your body is His handiwork, and the com- 
 ing to consciousness of the human bundle 
 of these cells is His success in perfecting 
 the mechanism, and our acceptance of the 
 duties of becoming His deputies. Free- 
 dom and control are offered us on condi- 
 tion of loyalty, and this loyalty is the basis 
 and warrant of all rational and practical 
 ethics. His plain aim is to extend and 
 perfect the incarnation-process ; ethics and 
 duty consist simply in helping God, nothing 
 else ! The function of intellect consists 
 solely in understanding first the material 
 upon which and through which God and 
 
 undertakes to develop what I hold to be the immortal 
 soul of the doctrine of the divine atonement. The an- 
 swer to Job is, God is not in ultimate essence another 
 being than yourself. He is the Absolute Being. You 
 truly are one with God, part of his life. He is the 
 very soul of your soul. And so, here is the first truth: 
 When you suffer, your sufferings are God's sufferings, 
 not his external work, not his external penalty, not the 
 fruit of his neglect, but identically his own personal 
 woe. In you God Himself suffers, precisely as you do, 
 and has all your concern in overcoming this grief." 
 
BIOLOGIC BASIS 71 
 
 man must both work, and second, the laws 
 of vitalized matter, and the adaptation of 
 means to the desired end. Esthetics is 
 the beautification of the process and de- 
 light in it ; and religion is love of the proc- 
 ess and its Author. 
 
 "Be ye therefore perfect even as your 
 Father which is in heaven is perfect." 
 Are these electrifying words of the world's 
 greatest teacher longer to remain a mean- 
 ingless and stupefying paralyzant of awed 
 finiteness? Did Jesus mean anything by 
 them? Are not his words usually amazing 
 revelations of terrible earnestness and 
 reality? If the heavenly Father is the in- 
 finite and awful being of philosophy and 
 theology, the command of Jesus is simply 
 nonsense. But if the heavenly Father is 
 the most learned of all physicists and chem- 
 ists, the prototype of all chemical synthet- 
 ists and physiologists, the most consum- 
 mate of all mechanicians and artists, then 
 is He the artificer of civilization and the 
 "elder brother," whom we can in truth 
 imitate and love. It seems clear, there- 
 fore, that the beginning of philosophy is 
 in physics and chemistry, and the starting- 
 
J2 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 point of all true theology is in physiology. 
 God's primary perfection, as seen by in- 
 duction, consists in His knowledge and 
 control of molecular physics, and the build- 
 ing of the organic molecule. The cell, so 
 far as we know, is indeed His sole method 
 of entrance into matter and His single 
 means of control of mechanical forces. 
 Those who utterly ignore His first, great- 
 est, and continuous method of work are 
 surely poor lovers and imitators of Him. 
 They are not very consciously striving to 
 be perfect as He is perfect. 
 
 God's greatest difficulty and sorrow is 
 denutrition and disease. Every living 
 thing is thwarted, stunted, scarred, imper- 
 fect, and His most wondrous ingenuity is 
 to overcome and circumvent the ills that 
 beset the evolution and limit the life of 
 every organism existing on earth. No- 
 body can realize this as can the physiol- 
 ogist and physician. From before concep- 
 tion or fructification, the strain and the 
 eager attention, the every-inst ant's care 
 of every cell and of every organic bundle 
 of cells, is profoundly devoted to keeping 
 up the minute mechanisms of nutrition and 
 
BIOLOGIC BASIS 73 
 
 in preventing and overcoming harms and 
 curing diseases. I have heard that the 
 root of a bit of prairie grass has been fol- 
 lowed sixty or seventy feet straight down 
 through the dry, arid sands to tap a more 
 moist stratum, and any physician who has 
 seen the human organism struggle with 
 disease for a life-time, for several consec- 
 utive life-times, — any such physician who 
 is an atheist, — well he is a poor physician 
 also ! God is the first and the ideal of all 
 physicians. All our science is learning 
 His methods ; all our art consists in help- 
 ing and imitating Him. May we some 
 time be as perfect physicians as He is ! 
 
 And thus by induction we at last secure 
 a clarifying and enlarging view of the 
 world's problem of evil. In its last analy- 
 sis evil is but another name for the diffi- 
 culty of cellular and organic nutrition. 
 What are love and sexualism and all their 
 consequent evils but the circumvention of 
 organismal and cellular death, the problem 
 of the running-down mechanism? Death 
 is only the impossibility of making a per- 
 petually active cell-mechanism. The indi- 
 vidual life is a truce with matter, which 
 
74 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 will not allow perpetual motion of a sys- 
 tem. Sex and regeneration are the devices 
 for continuing the truce, and outwitting 
 the fatalism of matter. Look at the affair 
 closely and it is seen that all war, slavery, 
 disease, all evil whatsoever, any question 
 of inethicality, is at heart and at < base a 
 question of nutrition — cellular, organismal, 
 social, national, or cosmic. Every advance 
 in civilization is but a partial conquering 
 of this nutritional difficulty. All health, 
 beauty and joy is the more or less perfect, 
 and, alas, temporary solution of the nu- 
 tritional problem, a victory of the con- 
 structive forces of organic life. Play is 
 the expenditure of an overplus of victorious 
 force. 
 
 We thus surely reach an adequate con- 
 ception of sin and error. To imitate God, 
 to be perfect as He is perfect, is the com- 
 mand of Christ and of biology. The ideal 
 of all human character and the end of all 
 endeavor thus become the participation in 
 God's work. We are good in so far as 
 we are His actual coworkers and helpers ; 
 we are good-for-nothing just in so far as 
 we fail to help. Sin is the conscious re- 
 
BIOLOGIC BASIS 75 
 
 fusal to help the incarnation-process, trait- 
 orousness to the evolution-ideal. Error is 
 failure, from ignorance, selfishness, etc., 
 with varying degrees of consciousness, to 
 understand what God is doing and how He 
 is doing it in this world. To further the 
 objects of the process, willingly, obedi- 
 ently, lovingly — this is our one sole duty. 
 The stupid error of the old subjectivists, 
 of the outworn philosophies, monisms and 
 deductions, the sin, downright sin, of the 
 outlived and antiquated theologies, con- 
 sisted in not studying facts, not finding 
 and teaching an object of life. Ask any 
 one of all your acquaintances what is the 
 purpose, end, and aim of existence, and his 
 mind is a blank; probably he will think 
 you decidedly daft. But ask him to under- 
 take a labor that will require years or his 
 lifetime, ask him to travel with you to the 
 middle of the ocean, or of the Sahara des- 
 ert, and he will ask you for what end. 
 Now has all this strain and million-year 
 endeavor of the biologic process no end in 
 view ? God forbid ! But if not, if the neg- 
 ative answer of all subjectivism, if the 
 silly fuddle of the theologian's answer is 
 
76 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 allowed, then we end in pessimism and ma- 
 terialism, and we get the result we see — 
 the poor Asiatic Buddhist scheming to 
 undo the incarnation-process, the active 
 and sane Caucasian plunging into the mad 
 whirl of pleasure-seeking, or the dehuman- 
 izing fury of money-getting. At the door 
 of the subjectivist, the so-called philoso- 
 pher and theologian, was laid the pathetic 
 and orphaned foundling of modern misery. 
 Science and its civilization had to take the 
 refused gift, nurse it in its hospitals, train 
 it in its industrial schools, and put it to 
 work in its laboratories and workshops, 
 all to fit it for a coming and renovated 
 future. One Stephen Girard, or one 
 Virchow, is of more value to God than the 
 combined system-spinners of metaphysics 
 and theology since man began to watch the 
 whirring wheels of his own thoughts. 
 
 The mechanism of the cell and its nu- 1 
 trition constitute, then, the fundamental 
 means whereby the incarnation-process is 
 carried on. The simplest observation of 
 this process as a whole shows an increase 
 of the control of the physical forces of the 
 
BIOLOGIC BASIS 77 
 
 universe, an extension and perfection of 
 life. All history exhibits a progressive 
 spiritualization or civilization by means of 
 the forces gained, and every glance into 
 our present world shows this process 
 reaching to a future greater control and 
 to a rapid progress in knowledge, comfort, 
 art, and power placed under the rule of 
 Biologos. Again the sublime, prophetic, 
 the godlike words recur to the astonished 
 memory: "I am come that they might 
 have life, and that they might have it more 
 abundantly." How closely do true reli- 
 gion and true science unite in work and 
 ideal! The object of life, of Biologos, is 
 plainly the extension and perfection of 
 the incarnation-process; it is to dominate 
 the dead physical forces of the universe, to 
 make them the servants of spirit, to in- 
 crease the sum-total of incarnate life, and 
 to exhibit the essential qualities of life, 
 which are ingenuity, power, love, beauty, 
 freedom, etc., so fast and so far as the 
 thraldom and inertia and death, the fatal- 
 ism and infinities of purposeless matter 
 will permit. In a word it is to vivify the 
 
78 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 objectless world of infinite matter, to thrill 
 the dead universe through and through 
 with God's own life. 
 
 To aid the process, I repeat again, to 
 help God, is the aim of all endeavor, the 
 ideal of all ethics, the test of all worth, 
 and the decision as to all sin. I had in- 
 tended to show how this test will lighten 
 and clarify all history, but I fear I have 
 already taxed your patience. I wished to 
 cast a glance into the night of archeology 
 and prehistoric darkness which envelops 
 our noon of to-day. For example, the 
 traveler in some dense tropical or semi- 
 tropical forest comes upon a hint of the 
 old crime and error in the shapo of a 
 crumbling and ruined palace, built untold 
 thousands of years ago by the enslaved 
 energies of millions of men, for the greed 
 and pride of one, or for mistaken worships 
 and useless ends. The final purposes of 
 the incarnation-process were not served by 
 these nations or by their endeavors, and 
 the ruins were covered with the better life 
 of vegetation. The pyramids and the 
 sphinx of Egypt, — for what were they 
 
BIOLOGIC BASIS 79 
 
 builded? The wastes of sand at their 
 bases are not more purposeless. 
 
 The purposelessness of Asiatic life, the 
 twilight glooms in which our historic eyes 
 lose clear sight, reveal the same disregard 
 for the extension and perfection of the 
 evolutionistic life-process, and we watch 
 all such lethargic nations sleeping out their 
 half -failed and now rapidly dying life. In 
 clear-eyed Greece, History seems startled 
 to a semiconsciousness, and to have looked 
 about her like Dore's frightened young 
 monk ; but she was careless of the other, of 
 the slave, on whose back was burdened her 
 labor, and of the "barbarian" she scorned; 
 she failed to catch the hint of induction, 
 obey the duty of observing, did not grasp 
 the offered hand of Science, dreamed her 
 platonic dreams, scoffed and laughed with 
 her Aristophanes, — and was conquered by 
 the more virile Eoman. Hard-eyed, self- 
 ish-hearted Eome conquered the world, 
 taught it a rough lesson of justice and of 
 power, but at last became gluttonous; the 
 cosmic parasite sucked the juices of her 
 host too cruelly, and the freedom-loving, 
 
80 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 forest-bred Hun struck the tyrant a death- 
 blow. "The ghost of the old Roman Em- 
 pire sitting on its own grave/ ' as Catholic- 
 ism has been not untruthfully described, 
 formed at least a sort of carrier of the 
 classic result, a transmitter of the book of 
 wisdom to the modern nations. Spain re- 
 fused the wisdom, and, in the ruthless 
 despoliation of intoxicated selfishness, 
 committed every crime against the biologic 
 process that was conceivable. God's 
 splendid irony is shown in the fact of her 
 handing over to the rulers of the very 
 world which she had discovered, and had 
 ruined with rapine, the keys of misused 
 power, with the unconfessed Peccavi of 
 callousness, ineptitude, and defeat. The 
 Teuton again showed his warrant to life 
 from the God of Life. France forgot the 
 nutrition-lesson, and despoiled her serfs — 
 82 per cent of the productiveness of her 
 worse than enslaved Jacques Bonhommes 
 being demanded for her Versailles and its 
 hideous gaieties. Again the parasites for- 
 got the simplest lesson of self-interest in 
 the treatment of their host, and the mani- 
 acal fury of the Revolution was a fitting 
 
BIOLOGIC BASIS 81 
 
 but fatal atonement of Bourbon sin. She 
 then turned her self-torture upon the out- 
 side world, and the Teutons again had to 
 teach the old lesson to the Napoleonic for- 
 getters of God. In reducing her birth-rate 
 to an equality with her death-rate, this 
 demimondaine of the nations has given the 
 most downright insult to the incarnation- 
 process, and the Dreyfus exhibition of dis- 
 honorable " honor" reveals the swiftly- 
 coming and deserved end. Thus the 
 Greek and Latin type of character, built 
 upon parasitism and the indifference to 
 and spoliation of the organic sources of its 
 life-process, is passing away, and the dem- 
 ocratic Teuton, the Anglo-Saxon, has al- 
 ready inherited the world. 
 
 And why? Because he furthers, not 
 despoils, aids, not hinders, the incarnation- 
 process. This is the light that reveals a 
 real philosophy of history; send its search- 
 ing rays out among all the tangles and 
 mysteries of history and it reveals the 
 reasons of failure and the causes of suc- 
 cess. Does the average of a nation's ac- 
 tivity and character, under the existing 
 circumstances, conduce to the general ex- 
 
82 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 tension and perfection of biologic evolu- 
 tion? If so it dominates and inherits from 
 the less helpful the control of the lands 
 and opportunities. A volume could be 
 filled with illustrations of this truth. One 
 alone must suffice: Why is England the 
 best and most successful colonizer the 
 world has ever had? Solely because she 
 encourages the people she subjugates to 
 fuller and larger life. She does not rob 
 them of the products of their labor, and 
 she forces them to be just to one another ; 
 that is, to allow each and all to participate 
 in the extension of the great life-movement. 
 God is a free-trader. 
 
 And that is the lesson also of all institu- 
 tions. Do they help in the incarnation- 
 process? If so, they live, in spite of all 
 their lesser evils. Do they not so help 
 God? They die, despite a thousand other 
 heavenly virtues and innocences. From 
 birth, asceticism is stung with certain 
 death. Eeligion itself, if it forget the nu- 
 tritional and life-increasing duty, must be 
 buried out of sight of living things. 
 
 Eoman law, all laws that men put in 
 force or obey, are but corollaries of the 
 
BIOLOGIC BASIS 83 
 
 command of Biologos, to help Him in His 
 work of life-extension and life-perfection. 
 The legislatures or the judges who fail to 
 follow that Ariadne-thread miss their way 
 — fail in their vocation, and their labor 
 comes to naught. 
 
 Only when medicine got its microscope 
 and began studying the intimate processes 
 of cellular structure, cellular laws, cellular 
 pathology, and physiologic chemistry, only 
 now, that is to say, has medicine become 
 the ally of the divine Pathologist and the 
 coworker of the heavenly Healer. Only 
 when theology descended from metaphysi- 
 cal moonshine to vital social duties, — that 
 is, only when theology became religion, has 
 it been vivifying, useful, and shown 
 growth-power. 
 
 Only when speculative philosophy be- 
 came science, when Hegel was renounced 
 and Darwin born, did light begin to come 
 into the chaos of systematic thought, and 
 the intolerable mystery of being. 
 
 Only when charity — selfish, subjective 
 charity — became objective and scientific — 
 only when it studied the thing it did — only 
 then did charity begin to lessen instead of 
 
84 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 increase the very suffering with which it 
 busied itself. ' ' ' Sound men, ' said Justice 
 to Charity, 'are made cripples by the use 
 of your crutches.' " 
 
 Only when science began studying the 
 world of plants and animals did we begin 
 to know of the unity of all life, of the 
 interdependence of man and the lower 
 forms. We are only now becoming con- 
 scious that we have duties to trees, ethical 
 relations with insects, and interests in 
 birds, that may not be ignored. 
 
 Lastly, only when man began to study 
 and imitate God's organic ingenuity were 
 brought forth those modern inventions — 
 the steamship, railroad, the printing-press, 
 and all the rest — whereby the whole prob- 
 lem of nutrition, the feeding of the world, 
 the prevention of famine, of localized war 
 and evil, and the spread of intelligence, 
 have been secured. Modern commerce and 
 civilization are in essence and result pri- 
 marily the mechanisms of securing the 
 organic unity of the world, of preventing 
 localized waste, of forfending the nutri- 
 tional evils of isolation. 
 
 With this key of all ethics in our hands, 
 
BIOLOGIC BASIS 85 
 
 we may also open the closed mysteries of 
 many social contradictions about us to-day. 
 The institution or custom that hinders or 
 does not help toward extending and per- 
 fecting the biologic process is as surely 
 doomed as it is sure that God lives. Lux- 
 ury, for example, is often but another name 
 for parasitism, of eating more than is pro- 
 duced by the eater. Life will crush the 
 ruthless seizor of the products of other 
 men's lives for personal consumption. 
 Wealth is per se no sin, nor is it necessarily 
 a proof of sin, but the use of wealth for 
 self-glory or self-satisfaction, regardless 
 of whence or how it came, or whither it 
 ieads — that is mad disloyalty to the in- 
 carnation-process. We must not be de- 
 ceived: God has a cunning way of using 
 self-seekers for the common good, and 
 tricking them out of their game ; moreover, 
 it is the equivalence of service that is the 
 point, not the expenditure of effort or cor- 
 respondence with false ideals of duty. One 
 hour of "duty" may yield an overplus of 
 good above fifty years of "sin," or fifty 
 years of duty may be lost in the ruin of 
 one moment's error. The tree of life can 
 
86 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 only be judged by its fruit, and one saved 
 seed or grass-blade may be the means of 
 covering with vegetation a devastated 
 country. 
 
 One of the ominous signs of lethal lux- 
 ury is that the energies of the life-process 
 are being too much extracted, and too self- 
 ishly used by the so-called "ladies" of 
 fashionable, or would-be fashionable, life. 
 Millions of American women are fast learn- 
 ing some deadly sins, aspiring to doless- 
 ness, irresponsibility, hysteria, childless- 
 ness — "ladyhood." Much of the guilt of 
 France will be forgiven her because her 
 women have learned in one way or another 
 that muscular action is the condition of 
 health, and that responsibility develops 
 mental power. We shall have yet to pay 
 dearly for our cruel kindness and morbid 
 chivalry to women. 
 
 And for the political leaders who do not 
 lead, for the demagogic statesmen, for the 
 bosses who through bribery rule for them- 
 selves and their "pals," not for the people 
 — for these are we not already paying a 
 high price? For imperialism when we 
 cannot govern a few Indians, or even our- 
 
BIOLOGIC BASIS 87 
 
 selves, for millions of disfranchised men 
 in a democratic country with a fifteenth 
 amendment, for extension of rotten gov- 
 ernment over a thousand or two islands — 
 what indeed shall we not yet have to pay 
 for these and for many such things ? 
 
 For governing the personal life, for the 
 guidance of conduct there is no rule so 
 comprehensive or so comprehensible, none 
 so applicable by each, as this of the duty 
 of cooperating with God, of aiding Him in 
 His biologic work. All accepted ethical 
 laws are but corollaries of it, and the sim- 
 plest mind can at once test the virtue or 
 sin of an act or temptation by this touch- 
 stone. The decalogue is the expression of 
 a few simple phases of it, and codified law 
 is a reaching out towards its logical and 
 actual validities. Conscience tells us to 
 do right ; but only study of the incarnation- 
 process can tell us what is the right thing 
 we should do. Increase and replenish the 
 earth is, for instance, the primal command 
 to ameba and to man, and the man or the 
 people that too generally disobeys, that 
 cheats sexualism of its object, that makes 
 marriage an affair of money and bargain- 
 
88 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 ing, that legalizes prostitution within or 
 without marriage — that person or nation 
 is doomed. Individuation, or individual- 
 ization — self-dependence — is a fundament- 
 al law of the biologic process, but com- 
 munism, socialism, too much paternalism 
 in government, too much "charity" and 
 sentimentalism — all have their condemna- 
 tion in a biologic necessity none may wisely 
 ignore or safely seek to cheat. 
 
 Into the process of organic evolution 
 there has been injected one quality which 
 on any ground of materialism or utility is 
 unaccountable. Whenever it has been pos- 
 sible, beauty has been added, and even 
 when it has positively endangered the proc- 
 ess itself. A few years ago a single 
 scarlet tanager visited my country home, 
 but now he comes no more. There is some- 
 thing far more and other in the flower than 
 is demanded for plant-propagation, — nay, 
 to bring the matter to its last analysis, 
 the chromatic sensations of the eye are in- 
 finitely more sweet and wonderful than are 
 required to differentiate objects by ethe- 
 real vibrations, and sound is far beyond 
 the suggestion of air-waves. Thus Biol- 
 
BIOLOGIC BASIS 89 
 
 ogos is the greatest of all artists, the first 
 lover and maker of beauty. What theology 
 has so brought Him to men's minds ? That 
 beauty has been added to the incarnation- 
 process as a pure gratuity, and not seldom 
 to the harming of that process, is more 
 than a hint that once this process is better 
 assured and perfected, it will be literally 
 flooded with a fulness of that divine radi- 
 ance of smile and benediction whereof we 
 have little dreamed. The tolerance of sin 
 and a seeming divinely artistic careless- 
 ness of what is conventionally called moral- 
 ity might suggest that the great Life- 
 Lender cares even more for beauty than 
 for so-called ethics. Surely Puritanism's 
 conception of Him is very different from 
 that of the naturalist. 
 
 Again let me quote from Jesus an- 
 other astounding and wondrous command : 
 "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all 
 thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with 
 all thy mind;" I take it that means with 
 all thy emotional nature, with all thy spir- 
 itual nature, and with all thy intellectual 
 nature. With the best will in the world 
 it is utterly and absolutely impossible for 
 
90 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 any human soul to obey that order who con- 
 ceives of God as the " great first cause 
 least understood," of Pope, or in the way 
 the philosophers and theologians demand. 
 It is a psychic impossibility to love an om- 
 nipotent God, and no one ever did. Jesus 
 and St. Francis loved God, but not the God 
 of the creed-makers, nor of the metaphysic 
 folk. No monist who has the faintest con- 
 ception of what monism means can have 
 the slightest emotion of affection for the 
 "infinite maker of heaven and earth." 
 Jehovah is a supremely unlovable and un- 
 lovely being. "When I pretended to believe 
 in Him I only feared Him, and when I quit 
 believing in Him my concealed hatred of 
 Him became conscious and rational. To 
 love, we must feel the affection of the be- 
 loved one within, about, and over us, as a 
 helpful, thoughtful spirit of tenderness, 
 thrilling us with sweetest pride; we must 
 also know, feel, see, and realize the very 
 being of the loved one as like unto us, as 
 finite, suffering, self-sacrificing, planning, 
 tirelessly patient — in a word as like our 
 best self in all essential nature and char- 
 acter. Allah, Jehovah, the absolute, the 
 
BIOLOGIC BASIS 91 
 
 unconditioned, the creator and upholder of 
 the universe, etc., etc., is not such a being, 
 and is a figment of the unintelligent, awe- 
 struck imagination. Anthropomorphism 
 is necessary to the conception of such a 
 being and an anthropomorphic god is an 
 ungod, a pitiable device of mental inca- 
 pacity, and the product of mystical sub- 
 jectivism. There is no fatherliness in him 
 or to be got into him. To love God with 
 our intellects is not to neglect His entire 
 work in biologic evolution, not to ignore 
 His purposes as revealed in the incarna- 
 tion-process. Only the scientist loves God 
 with his intellect. 
 
 But if we look with open eyes out into 
 the world, first of our own marvelous bod- 
 ies, and then of the splendid crowding of 
 a million species of other living forms ; if 
 we behold the unrolling and the progress 
 of these living forms from the primitive 
 biologic ages to the present time; if we 
 understand even partly the cytologic mech- 
 anism of this incarnation-process, and that 
 all of it is reined to unity and comprehen- 
 sibility by the fact that it is our Father's 
 very life, lent to each, and welling up within 
 
92 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 every one of us ; if we feel that duty is His 
 call to help Him, and beauty and love His 
 rewards for our help — ah, then, we can 
 love, nay, we cannot help loving God with 
 all our heart, with all our spirit, and with 
 all our intellect. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 MATEKNAL LOVE IN ORGANIC EVOLUTION * 
 
 In his address before the British Asso- 
 ciation Lord Salisbury stated anew the 
 three great mysteries to the solution of 
 which science has in vain directed her at- 
 tention. The origins of atoms, of ether, 
 and of life, are to-day the most utter mys- 
 teries. To account for them no human 
 mind has framed even the faintest concept 
 worthy of consideration. We have only 
 the merest hints of the possibility of ex- 
 planation of gravitation; concerning elec- 
 tricity we are getting only a little better 
 idea; but as to physiologic chemistry our 
 little knowledge serves only to make our 
 great ignorance more frightful. All ori- 
 gins of things are shrouded in impenetrable 
 mystery, and our philosophies are but weak 
 
 i Read before the Wistar Biological Association, 
 Philadelphia, Dec. 14, 1894; The Philadelphia Associa- 
 tion of Kindergartners, April 7, 1896, etc. 
 
 93 
 
94 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 and sorry attempts to widen a little the 
 light-space about us. No philosophy and 
 no religion explains finalities, and all ef- 
 forts end only in resolving many lesser 
 mysteries into fewer great mysteries. The 
 conception of Biologos, incoming light and 
 love, entering inorganic worlds and matter 
 as a great incarnation-principle and spirit- 
 ualizing force, electrifies and quickens the 
 mental, imaginative, and moral man as 
 none other ; but, of course, it too ends only 
 in a little broadening of the light-way about 
 our darkness-encircled lives. 
 
 But it seems to me that so far as con- 
 cerns the individual manifestations of life, 
 we may and we must differentiate clearly 
 between the love of one's own life and the 
 love of the life of one's descendants. The 
 cuckoo bird has not enough strength of the 
 maternal instinct to build a nest and in- 
 cubate her own eggs. In pigeons the male 
 has a far stronger maternal instinct than 
 the female, and in some other birds the 
 male has resolutely to fight for and defend 
 the eggs from the destructive habits of the 
 female. Some animals will expose them- 
 selves to danger, even die most heroically 
 
MATERNAL LOVE 95 
 
 in defending their young, whilst the kan- 
 garoo mother, it is said, will, when hotly 
 pursued, drop one or more of her little 
 ones to lighten her load. In human life, 
 also, as we well know, some people care lit- 
 tle for children, even for those of their 
 own flesh and blood, whilst others will sac- 
 rifice their own lives with most pathetic 
 heroism for the education and up-bringing 
 of their young. 
 
 It therefore appears to me plain that we 
 should distinguish sharply between self- 
 love and child-love. Fundamentally, I 
 doubt not, they proceed from one ultimate 
 unity, but in biologic manifestation they 
 may be considered as two distinct exhibi- 
 tions or phases of the life-force. One is 
 devoted to the saving of the individual life, 
 the other to the perpetuation of life in 
 new individuals. It is perhaps easy to 
 recognize the one as a blind, purposeless 
 force, but the incoming of maternal love is 
 not thus to be accounted for. 
 
 I have been forced to use the term ma- 
 ternal love in default of a better one to 
 express an unnamed fact or generaliza- 
 tion of facts much larger than that of 
 
96 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 simple maternity. In many animals we 
 find the father taking upon himself many 
 of the duties usually fulfilled by the mother, 
 and at all times the purposes and results 
 of the genesial instinct are carried out 
 by an intrinsically-interwoven and corre- 
 spondent series of duties of both parents. 
 Moreover, if we descend to the vegetable 
 world the eye that is trained to observe 
 facts rather than the accepted wordings 
 and ideas of facts, sees everywhere that the 
 phenomena of reproduction, whether in 
 anemophilous, entomophilous, or crypto- 
 gamic orders, are really asexual, and the 
 plants or trees themselves have no funda- 
 mental morphologic differences of struc- 
 ture due to sexualism. Indeed, the so- 
 called "male" and "female' ' organs are 
 often produced by the same plant, and 
 even by the same twig and the same flower. 
 I have racked my brain to find or invent 
 a term that should indicate the large bi- 
 ologic instinct that prepares the organs for 
 reproduction, that begets, and that cares 
 for the new being after it is begotten, 
 whether it be in the plant, the animal, or 
 the human world. We have observation of 
 
MATERNAL LOVE 97 
 
 a profound and unitary force that directly 
 or indirectly dominates all organic life dur- 
 ing almost every hour of adult existence. 
 In the plant-world every function pertains 
 to or ends in seed-production, and just as 
 a father horn-bill reduces himself to a 
 skeleton and utter exhaustion in getting 
 and carrying food to his mate and nest- 
 lings, just as a human parent wears life 
 out in heroic sacrifice for beloved children, 
 just exactly so will a tree under like dis- 
 advantageous conditions of nutriment com- 
 mit suicide in the production of seeds. An 
 Indian mother, in order to rescue her baby 
 a few feet away, crawls from behind the 
 rock protecting her from the guns of 
 United States soldiers. She knows the act 
 may bring a bullet in her brain, but she 
 saves the baby and dies. A hen in a burn- 
 ing barn gathers her chickens beneath her 
 and is burned to a statuesque cinder, but 
 the singed chicks are saved by the dead 
 mother-body. Is it not the same divine 
 love that filled both hearts ? Is there any- 
 thing else in the world which unites and 
 holds in one all living things? I pity one 
 who does not see in such things the living 
 
98 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 God instantly present and profoundly in- 
 terested in carrying on his biologic world. 
 
 There is one silent, subtle, palpitant pang 
 and power of love that thrills through all 
 organic life, that murmurs in all living 
 things, and swells and sings its unheard 
 song in the inmost hearts of grass, rose, or 
 tree ; of cow, tiger, or bird ; of man, maid, 
 or mother, — all straining eye and hope to- 
 ward the renewed young world to come. 
 It is this great supernatural force for which 
 I would find a name applicable to all kinds 
 of life and all phases of its function. In its 
 purest and sweetest quality it is mother- 
 love, and so in order to give it a naming 
 we may call it that. But I would wish 
 that the connotation may not be forgotten 
 that it is also father-love as well, and that 
 it is one and identical with that beautiful 
 power which makes the pigeon turn the 
 eggs upon which she sits, that makes the 
 grass bloom, and the bee to seek the bloom. 
 
 Possibly some of the more "scientific" 
 of you were a little startled when I used 
 the word "supernatural." It has been 
 quite the fashion among a certain class of 
 good folk to think that anything named 
 
MATERNAL LOVE 99 
 
 scientific must not have aught to do with, 
 such foolish old used-up words. Indeed, it 
 is supposed that science is wholly given 
 to explaining things by the agency of phys- 
 ical strains and stresses, by reactions and 
 reflexes, mechanic laws and natural selec- 
 tions, struggles for existence, and all that. 
 It positively makes some people purple 
 with rage if one dares to suggest that there 
 may be such a thing as " vital force," or 
 "soul," and a hint as to the possible ex- 
 istence of divinity, either in man or above 
 him, elicits a pitying contempt of you that 
 freezes the very circumambient air. Well, 
 well ! These are very wise people indeed, 
 but the birds will sing and build nests after 
 these brethren are gone to their agnostic 
 heaven. Even they have their uses in a 
 world of incongruous and changeful condi- 
 tions ! 
 
 Science, I take it, is, chiefest of all things, 
 the unprejudiced, open-eyed observation 
 and systematization of facts ; the construc- 
 tion to be put upon them, the meaning of 
 facts, is another matter, and differs some- 
 what according to the person who philoso- 
 phizes. Facts are very patient, uncom- 
 
ioo THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 plaining things ; very pliant and compliant, 
 at least for a time; they bear a deal of 
 strange philosophizing over and about 
 them, very meekly. Some people have 
 been known to ignore them entirely, and 
 yet the patient facts did not worry or stop 
 existing. And those who thus falsely con- 
 strue, or who thus ignore, are quite happy 
 also. All things have their compensations, 
 and it would be a great pity if dogmatism 
 and atheism were denied the compensation 
 at least of self-satisfaction. 
 
 The criticism of much that passes under 
 the name of science, and the fault of many 
 so-called scientists, is lack of sympathy. 
 It is only a keen sense of love, interest, 
 and fellow-feeling, that gives that alert use 
 of the imagination that leads to a knowl- 
 edge of the truth. The collator of facts 
 with the light only of cold reason and in- 
 tellect will never find lots of facts in the 
 world. 
 
 It begins slowly to break, even upon the 
 most dry-as-dust scientist, that there are 
 some things not dreamed of in the evolu- 
 tion-philosophy, and the suggestion may 
 not bring danger to the suggester that the 
 
MATERNAL LOVE 101 
 
 fight to death for the supremacy of the 
 deer herd is not an unqualified necessity 
 from the axioms of the "struggle for ex- 
 istence," nor from the "law of the reac- 
 tion of the organism to the environment.' ' 
 If the "environment" of maidenly beauty 
 in Juliet begets "the reaction" in Eomeo's 
 fancy of springtime love, whence it may 
 be asked, whence Julia and her beauty? 
 Or, to put the question in another form: 
 Does not the stupidest intelligence catch 
 hint from the universality, the self-sacri- 
 fice, and the power of the maternal instinct 
 in every living organism, weed, insect, or 
 human, that there is purpose and signifi- 
 cance poured down into these beings from 
 above, not growing out of them from any 
 need or logic of present circumstance, or 
 from any demands of their organisms, con- 
 sidered as single and self-sufficient me- 
 chanisms? Does the "environment," or 
 any so-called "law," or any so-called ex- 
 planation of science, show why these bil- 
 lions of ever renascent beings should spend 
 every energy of their lives in producing 
 and caring for new beings to take their 
 places ? Why should we, animals and men, 
 
102 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 care a fig whether our places are taken or 
 not? The sexual and maternal instinct 
 holds masterly reign and control of the 
 soul of every biologic thing, and gives the 
 instant and incontrovertible lie to the libel- 
 ous chatter that all is selfishness, all is me- 
 chanic, adamantine law and purposeless 
 change in our life below. Without the su- 
 pernatant ocean of divine life and love 
 behind it, the miraculous tide of maternal 
 love could not infill and inthrill the tendrils 
 and hearts of all living things, any more 
 than, on a thousand miles of shore without 
 the throbbing gush of ocean-tide, would a 
 million little bays and inlets be filled and 
 bathed with flashing wave and liquid life. 
 When not thus full-flooded with the tide 
 of love, the little empty estuaries of our 
 individual lives are occupied in panting for 
 its future coming, in mourning that it does 
 not come, or in pensive memories of its 
 past blessedness. 
 
 But possibly the hard-eyed is disgustedly 
 muttering that this is all poetry and non- 
 sense. Give us, he is probably saying, give 
 us something scientific, something about 
 "nature red with tooth and claw;" about 
 
MATERNAL LOVE 103 
 
 bones; about protoplasm; dying planets; 
 the pump-like action of the heart ; and re- 
 flexes, and natural selection, and the sur- 
 vival of the fittest. And to the hard-eyed 
 I might make answer that the truth of 
 poetry is truer than the truth of science; 
 that teeth and claws are very beautiful 
 structures and serve glorious purposes; 
 that bones were made by Biologos, and 
 when dead are excellent objects of study 
 for the hard-eyed ones; that none of us 
 know anything about protoplasm except 
 that it is living and mysterious ; that 
 neither of us know anything about dead 
 planets ; that natural selection is half -lie, 
 half-truth, and that the survival of the "un- 
 fit" is a wonderful fact. 
 
 In all seriousness, and with the most 
 sober scientific resolution, I contend that 
 among the philosophies and sciences of the 
 universe, whether idealistic or material- 
 istic, the role of maternal love is either un- 
 recognized entirely, or held in too light 
 estimation. The term, "struggle for ex- 
 istence," for example, has been much 
 talked about, and has been supposed to be 
 the fundamental explanation of the phe- 
 
104 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 nomena of organic life, and with natural 
 selection, to furnish the solution of the rid- 
 dles of organic evolution. But in most 
 prosaic literalness, can any one not see that 
 the distinguishing and determining charac- 
 teristics, both in morphology and physi- 
 ology, have been more dominated by the in- 
 stant and ceaseless influence of the instincts 
 pertaining to reproduction? Can any one 
 doubt that the progress of evolution, that 
 the possibility and actuality of civilization 
 have been instigated by the upworking and 
 the outworking of the sexual passion, and 
 the desire to find houses and food and place 
 for the little ones? It is maternal love 
 alone that has produced all the ideals and 
 actualities of Beauty and Esthetics that we 
 have; and so art, novel, drama, society, 
 and ambition are the creations of this mys- 
 terious power. 
 
 In the plant-world every phase of form 
 or function exists as a product of the strain 
 toward inflorescence and seed-production. 
 The trunks of the forest monarchs are the 
 props of the flower to raise it high in air 
 where the sun may reach and ripen, and 
 where the winds may catch the pollen and 
 
MATERNAL LOVE 105 
 
 carry it to waiting mates. Every form of 
 leaf, every shape of growth, every colora- 
 tion and build of flower pertain to the one 
 end and aim of existence. Think of the 
 inexhaustible ingenuity, the millionfold de- 
 vices for scattering seeds. Every sort of 
 balloon conceivable has been made by the 
 cunning mother-trees for wafting their 
 babes to far-away nourishing resting- 
 places. My friend, Lafcadio Hearn, tells 
 me of the ceiba tree in the West Indies, 
 which bursting its pod like a gun, floats its 
 white-winged seeds like a snow-storm over 
 a city, and when they settle, quickly must 
 the natives clear every one off the roofs, 
 for if a single one lodges it will wreck and 
 crush the house with its prolific roots. 
 The natives think the tree has personality, 
 like animals or men, and if you wish one 
 of the trees cut down you must make your 
 wood-cutter drunk in order to get him to 
 do it. 
 
 Some of these tree-mothers surround 
 their little ones with such impervious shells 
 that they float and drift with tides and cur- 
 rents for weeks and months, and yet re- 
 tain their life and growth-power till 
 
106 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 washed ashore. There are hairs, spines, 
 and hard shells to protect ; acid juices and 
 poisons to sting and harrow; husks and 
 hooks and spears to cut and hurt; and 
 thousandfold devices for getting the better 
 of the curious or the hungry. Some make 
 hooks and claws that catch any passing 
 animal, and who, most tormented, as all 
 boys and dogs well know, must carry them 
 far and wide. But the birds, too, are great 
 helpers. Darwin found that a clump of 
 dried mud weighing nine grains, from the 
 leg of a partridge, and which had been kept 
 for three years, contained seeds from 
 which he raised eighty-two distinct plants. 
 Especially in eating the seeds for the sake 
 of the fruit, the seeds preserving their vi- 
 tality, the birds, as also animals, are great 
 helpers in the distribution of the flora of 
 the world. If you think that in nest-build- 
 ing a swallow probably travels about 400 
 miles a day, and in migration (also for 
 love's sake) birds travel straight away 
 from 500 to 1000 miles a day, we see how 
 great must have been the influence of birds 
 in plant-distribution. A curious and purely 
 accidental function of the birds is the 
 
MATERNAL LOVE 107 
 
 chance stocking of lakes and rivers above 
 high falls with fish, which, caught below, 
 escape from claws or bill as the birds seek 
 their nests, and dropping into these high, 
 remote waters, people them with their kind ; 
 the life within and about the water in such 
 localities is often thus entirely readjusted. 
 But I wish to call attention to a fact, 
 our familiarity with which leads, as usual, 
 to a forgetfulness of its far-reaching im- 
 portance and significance. There are few 
 people, even those who know better, who 
 do not mistake a seed's stored-up supply 
 for the seed itself. The seed may or may 
 not be nutritious, but even if it is so, the 
 true seed constitutes the infinitesimal part 
 of what we roughly call the seed. The 
 great bulk of every grain or seed is com- 
 posed of a stored-up stock of concentrated 
 nutriment clustered about the true seed, 
 and upon which it feeds whilst springing 
 its rootlets downward and its leaflets up- 
 ward. Thus the bread, the potato, the ap- 
 ple we eat, is the food that has been 
 cunningly prepared by the mother-plant 
 for its offspring to use whilst it is getting 
 its own organs of food-supply ready for 
 
108 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 their work. The yolk-sac of the fish or 
 the egg of the bird is exactly the same 
 sort of a contrivance. 
 
 But a remarkable deduction is to be 
 made from all this, a deduction that is 
 perfectly evident when we think of it and 
 realize it, but it is a deduction that many 
 of us seldom or never make. It is this: 
 It is of course, self-evident, that the entire 
 animal world, including the human, is 
 wholly dependent upon the vegetable for 
 food, and for the means of continuing its 
 existence. Without the nutrient material 
 furnished by the vegetable kingdom, 
 the animal kingdom would at once die of 
 starvation. But now consider well the im- 
 plication of the fact, that it is entirely by 
 means of nutriment stored up by plantsi 
 to nourish their young, that, as it were, 
 stolen by the animal world enables it to 
 live. In other words, it is that great cos- 
 mic, regenerative force, biologic maternal 
 love, that has been ingenious enough to 
 manufacture concentrated food with the 
 necessary "keeping" qualities, and capa- 
 ble of supporting the life of plants and 
 of animals. Their food is our food ; what 
 
MATERNAL LOVE 109 
 
 nourishes the vegetable children nourishes 
 the animal children. Thus we under- 
 stand, in passing, why chloroform and 
 other drugs affect plants exactly as they 
 affect us. Driven by the spur of solicit- 
 ousness and love for its young, the plant 
 has found out the great secret of food- 
 formation. In this connection it is nec- 
 essary to add a word as to the food of man 
 derived from the animal. The flesh of ani- 
 mals is ultimately derived from grass and 
 fruits and seeds, and this muscular tissue 
 is thus itself the very product of the sub- 
 tile, silent weaver of life we have called 
 maternal love. The most perfect foods of 
 man, milk and eggs, products of double 
 distillation in the cellular alembic of ma- 
 ternal life, this wonderful strained white 
 blood and living flesh, — what can we say 
 of these works of the divine physiologic 
 chemist? If we have grateful hearts and 
 seeing minds, we can only thank and rec- 
 ognize the hand that fashioned and that 
 reaches them to us, as the hand of God, 
 who keeps up the repeopling of the world, 
 and hence, who sees well to it that his little 
 ones should be fed. 
 
no THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 Although perhaps logically, and you will 
 say also rhetorically out of place, I can- 
 not forbear at this point to interject a 
 word as to our care and treatment of hens 
 and cows. Please do not smile at the sud- 
 den transition. When seen with the eyes 
 of science, or with those of pure sympathy, 
 there is nothing about living things that is 
 not beautiful and winning and dignified. 
 This great question of the willing obedi- 
 ence, loyalty, and service of the animal 
 world to the human world, constantly 
 arouses in sensitive hearts a multitude of 
 painful thoughts. From every prolific 
 grain or fruit, from dog and horse, es- 
 pecially from every maternal organism 
 there run back to the divine center reins 
 of guidance and control which ensure loy- 
 alty, obedience, and service to a common 
 "dim, far-off, unseen event.' ' Else why 
 the continued giving of milk when the calf 
 has gone, why the continuous egg-produc- 
 tion by the nonincubating mother? Ani- 
 mals are not so stupid as that ! Dairy-folk 
 well know the difficulty of getting cows to 
 "give down" when they are maltreated, 
 when the food is not good, or when de- 
 
MATERNAL LOVE in 
 
 prived of their calves. Livingstone speaks 
 of the African cows as especially "bad" in 
 this respect, and that only "milk-fever" 
 will compel them to give their milk. The 
 milkers in the Scottish highlands used to 
 have peculiar songs which made their cows 
 generous. The hen and the cow are the 
 most loyal of man's helpers and purveyors, 
 and yet it is grievously shocking how un- 
 grateful we are to them. We are only be- 
 ginning to learn that our self-interest 
 commands us to care for cows better, but 
 even now their suffering from cold, the 
 carelessness of farmers as to their food 
 and water, the filth in which they live, is a 
 disgrace both to our selfishness and to our 
 humanity. If human mothers would only 
 think of what these other mothers endure 
 and how they are abused, there would be 
 some hope that the milk given human babes 
 would soon be purer, freer from disease, 
 and yielded by a healthier and happier 
 animal. It is known that violent emotion 
 poisons human milk ; why also may not the 
 beatings and abuse of the cow change her 
 milk harmfully? Babies, human and ca- 
 nine, have died in convulsions soon after 
 
ii2 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 nursing when the mother had just been 
 furious with anger or emotion. It may be 
 confidently stated that, fed, housed and 
 treated as eows should be, and the milk 
 cared for as it should be, there would be 
 little enough profit to the dairyman if milk 
 were furnished by him at twenty cents a 
 quart. But it will probably require the 
 scourges of tuberculosis and various dis- 
 eases to teach us the little lesson that the 
 commonest human sympathy should long 
 ago have taught. The same thought runs 
 out as regards our egg-supply. 
 
 Let me extend my parenthesis by a word 
 or two of advice as to teaching children 
 sympathy for and fellow-feeling with ani- 
 mals. Enlist every child's interest in do- 
 mestic pets and make young naturalists of 
 them as soon as possible. But guard 
 against making them mere collectors of 
 dead animals. It is living not dead biol- 
 ogy that quickens the sensibilities and 
 deepens the child's conception of the world. 
 Let him learn physiology rather than anat- 
 omy, psychology rather than neurology. 
 What is needed is the lightning-like glance 
 of intellectualized sympathy (at least the 
 
MATERNAL LOVE 113 
 
 sympathy) flashed among the play and 
 functions and relations of all palpitant life. 
 Trained scientists are better museum- 
 makers than children. Don't let the child 
 kill and delude himself that that is science 
 or biology. So soon as a child under- 
 stands anything it can understand the 
 pretty story of Mohammed cutting off the 
 flaps of his coat in order not to disturb his 
 kitten sleeping upon it. The animal child 
 and the human child have a vast deal in 
 common. There is nothing humanity 
 needs more than to learn the duty of kind- 
 ness and sympathy for all animal life. 
 Have a multiplicity of domestic pets. Let 
 children almost live in the Zoological Gar- 
 dens. Beware of a person who doesn't 
 like animals; something is deeply wrong 
 with such a person. 
 
 Let Lubbock and Eomanes wait for older 
 heads. It is a strange family that does not 
 think its cat and dog the most remark- 
 able and lovable cat and dog in the world. 
 Every pet will show animal spirit strug- 
 gling toward the human, dumbly begging 
 for human sympathy and help; and, too, 
 there frequently occur phenomena that 
 
ii 4 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 make us shiver as if we should look into 
 the sky and see great divine eyes beckon- 
 ing ; facts that point to the unity of all life, 
 infallible signs of the dependence of the 
 body upon spirit, — soul and sentiment pen- 
 etrating sense and flesh like hidden elec- 
 tricity. The anesthetics we use in surgery 
 paralyze plant-metabolism and action, as, 
 e. g., in the sensitive plant ; and snake poi- 
 son retards the germination of seeds. A 
 friend of mine was kept awake nearly all 
 night by some strange noise at the window. 
 A dead cuckoo told the story of an en- 
 deavor to reach the supposed mate of the 
 "cuckoo clock.' 9 I went once a long dis- 
 tance to see a chickless hen which had 
 driven the old cat away and was brooding 
 over a lot of kittens, very watchful, very 
 happy, and very proud. Mrs. Martin tells 
 a similar story of a widower ostrich play- 
 ing the role of a most excellent foster-moth- 
 er to a half hundred tiny puff-balls of incu- 
 bator chicks, guarding, watching, careful 
 not to put his great feet on them, etc. A 
 childless dog tried to steal some little pup- 
 pies, but failing, took a toy dog made of 
 rubber and tried to nurse it, licked and cod- 
 
MATERNAL LOVE 115 
 
 died it tenderly for a long time. I have the 
 photograph of a cat, deprived of her kit- 
 tens, who is ecstaticly nursing the mother- 
 less squirrels given her to eat. An Eng- 
 lish physician describes the mother-zeal of 
 a Maltese cat, a strict monogamist, faithful 
 even in widowhood. But if any of the 
 other cats had kittens she would manage 
 to get some of them, and in a few hours 
 she had an abundant supply of milk for 
 them. The dependence of this milk-secre- 
 tion upon pure mother-love began in this 
 wise : At seven years of age she witnessed 
 an accident to a little kitten just weaned, 
 to which she had previously had a great 
 aversion. This kitten fell, and hurting it- 
 self, cried, piteously. At once dislike dis- 
 appeared; "Zettie" ran to it, caressed it, 
 and carried it upstairs. At this time she 
 had been a widow for fourteen months, 
 but she now began nursing the little or- 
 phan and continued to do so for two 
 months. I have elsewhere related an ex- 
 actly similar fact, except that it was a little 
 dog, long childless, or puppyless if you 
 please, that nursed a lost kitten. Numer- 
 ous instances are on record of men having 
 
n6 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 an ample milk- secretion and nursing babes. 
 Wagtails use the backs of friendly stronger 
 birds upon which they ride in long migra- 
 tions. Elephants and men are the only 
 animals that shed tears in weeping. Cows 
 have been known to be so severely home- 
 sick that to save their lives they had to be 
 returned to their old home. Dogs have 
 returned home over 800 miles of unknown 
 country ; even when chloroformed it makes 
 no difference in their return. A crow with 
 clipped wings left his thieving new master 
 and walked four miles through the snow 
 to the old master. Dogs, monkeys, birds, 
 and ducks have been known to die of a 
 "broken heart/ ' from loss of young, loss 
 of their masters, etc. Euskin tells the 
 story of a race-horse that took sick and 
 only got well when his pet kitten was tel- 
 egraphed for and put in his stall. He then 
 won the race! A mother monkey, the 
 elder Kipling says, will carry with her for 
 weeks the dried and dead body of her lit- 
 tle one, fondling and petting it as if alive. 
 It is said that if the male bird of Paradise 
 is killed the female will continue to sit 
 upon her eggs until she starves to death. 
 
MATERNAL LOVE 117 
 
 I have said that sympathy with the whole 
 world of living things is the prime requisite 
 of learning truth. This is true whether 
 the truth be scientific, philosophic, or re- 
 ligious. It is especially so with children. 
 The recognition of the maternal instinct 
 in all other living things tells the young 
 the nature of the world in which we live 
 more than all the books and laboratories 
 in the world. Take up the question of the 
 growth and relative degrees of intelligence 
 in animals. Guided by sympathy and a 
 careful observation of facts we can show 
 the child clearly on what biologic intelli- 
 gence depends. Careful scrutiny shows 
 that all vegetables and animals have an in- 
 finite wealth of what may be called uncon- 
 scious intelligence struggling for outlet. 
 Every living thing, in its form, color, 
 and function, is a palimpsest; behind the 
 later bolder writing we see dimly the 
 deeper, richer characters and messages of 
 a more ancient truth. The intelligent 
 energy that constitutes the essential being 
 of all things is the same in all, but is pre- 
 vented from coming to individual expres- 
 sion by the peculiarities of organization 
 
n8 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 and the necessities of life. The greater, 
 the infinitely greater part of the intelli- 
 gence <s>f our being, exists unconsciously, as 
 cellular or physiologic intelligence. Out 
 of this great mine of unconscious wisdom 
 we quarry rich gems of our individual, 
 willed, or conscious intelligence, and the 
 progress of all personality as of all civili- 
 zation consists in adopting the intelligence 
 of the unconscious as that of our personal 
 wills. The work of all true life and evolu- 
 tion is to transform cellular or physio- 
 logic wisdom and morality into conscious 
 willed intelligence and morality. 
 
 Look carefully at the plant-world. 
 Plants are prevented from showing individ- 
 ual intelligence by the fact that they have 
 no powers of locomotion, and therefore do 
 not need a centralized nervous system that 
 is the agent of bringing cellular conscious- 
 ness to personal consciousness. But they 
 choose, they show emotions, likes and dis- 
 likes, and they have evident joys and sor- 
 rows. If you don't think so it is not the 
 fault of the plant. It sees more without 
 eyes than you do with them ! 
 
 In the animal world the conditions per- 
 
MATERNAL LOVE 119 
 
 mitting the development and showing of 
 intelligence depend upon — 
 
 1. The sensitiveness and amplitude of 
 sensitive surface exposed to the external 
 world. — This is a great and beautiful law, 
 a key that unlocks thousands of mysteries 
 for us. The interposition of hoofs be- 
 tween the feet and the ground is the most 
 noticeable illustration. The hard hoof 
 prevents knowledge of the ground, and the 
 perceptions are not sharpened. All hard- \J 
 
 footed animals are, as a rule, less intelli- 
 gent than soft-footed animals. The pos- 
 session of other sharpened senses may 
 help to compensate, however. The mobile 
 lip of the horse helps him, and the knowl- 
 edge of his own body gained by the sensi- 
 tive tail also aids ; and also his association 
 with man. The hog's nose and rooting 
 propensities account for its relative intel- 
 ligence over the sheep and other hard- 
 footed brothers. The soft feet of birds are 
 supplemented by the bill and the tongue, 
 and especially by the wings. The mobile 
 lips of the dog, his tongue, his expressive 
 tail, together with his association with man 
 have aided his soft sensitive feet to de- 
 
120 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 velop his intelligence greatly. The same 
 may be said of the cat. But, it is the trunk 
 of the elephant, one of the most remark- 
 able physiologic structures in the world, 
 that has made this wonderful animal the 
 most intelligent of all, except the monkey, 
 who has learned to use his front feet as 
 hands, and thus (the prehensile tail and 
 mode of life aiding), of all animals he has 
 been put in the most intimate connection 
 with the world. 
 
 2. The second condition of expression of 
 animal intelligence relates to the extent of 
 the external world thus known. — The low- 
 est degree, life in one element alone, will 
 give very limited knowledge, as e. g. 9 of the 
 earth alone, as in animals that live in the 
 ground deprived of the light. But even 
 here the contact of the whole body with 
 the earth greatly enhances the possibilities 
 of sensitiveness and recompenses the mole, 
 for instance, for his little range of media. 
 Fish are relatively stupid because of the 
 single medium they know, but they have 
 a large and sensitive surface in the fin and 
 tail and mouth, to compensate. They have 
 also good eyes. They have, however, no 
 
MATERNAL LOVE 121 
 
 hearing as we know it, though they have 
 a perception of vibrations and jars. 
 
 The space, even in one medium, over 
 which locomotion extends also conditions 
 the intelligence. Wide-roaming, easily- 
 moving animals are smarter than stay-at- 
 homes. Locomotion calls for vision, and 
 vision is the very sine qua non of conscious 
 intelligence, or that under the control of 
 the will. Some animals that move about 
 freely when young, with eyes and other 
 important organs, lose their eyes and 
 senses when they attach themselves to one 
 spot and become plant-like in habits. 
 
 Those animals which know the air alone 
 are also handicapped. But the bat has de- 
 veloped such a sensitiveness of his interdi- 
 gital membranes that he detects the relative 
 density of the air near objects by this 
 means alone, and is thus able, though blind 
 or in the dark, to avoid objects perfectly. 
 
 Most air-livers have soft, sensitive feet, 
 as well as the wonderful wings, so that 
 they know two media, the air, and such 
 solid objects as trees, the ground, etc. The 
 greater number of these media known, the 
 greater the intelligence, other things being 
 
122 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 equal. So that amphibious birds, those 
 also that swim as well as fly, are relatively 
 nobler than those that fly alone. If they 
 have good walking powers on land, this 
 also helps. 
 
 3. The development of intellect also de- 
 pends on the relative development of the 
 senses. — Fishes are put to a disadvantage 
 by a lack of the senses of hearing and of 
 smell. Snakes are also without the sense 
 of hearing, but their long, lithe, soft bodies 
 help them to know the ground, and by a 
 peculiar structure of the ribs and scales 
 each scale becomes almost a foot, so that 
 getting a hundred little leverages on in- 
 equalities, e. g. y of bark, some of them can 
 crawl slowly up an almost perpendicular 
 surface. Deer and dogs have an astound- 
 ing development of the sense of smell which 
 helps them greatly, as a hundred hunters' 
 stories tell us. 
 
 4. Length of life is also a noteworthy 
 condition of mental development. The ele- 
 phant with its hundred years of life, has 
 a great advantage in learning and remem- 
 bering experiences over his less long-living 
 
MATERNAL LOVE 123 
 
 relatives. Things that live but for an hour 
 or a day know but one instinct. 
 
 5. Association with man is lastly a pow- 
 erful helper of intelligence. Our domestic 
 animals imitate and learn of us with avid- 
 ity. Some dogs have learned to under- 
 stand ordinary conversation. Chickens 
 are slow in this respect, because their feet 
 are hard, they have lost the power of fly- 
 ing, etc. 
 
 Thus, what an understanding of the 
 world we get by sympathetic observation 
 of life! Universal cellular intelligence is 
 aided in becoming specifically manifest, or 
 in becoming the instrument of the indi- 
 vidual will, by the sensitiveness and ampli- 
 tude of the bodily exposure to contact with 
 the world thus sensed; by the relative de- 
 velopment of other senses; by length of 
 life ; and by association with man. 
 
 6. But it is especially the strength and 
 exercise of the maternal instinct, which 
 besides governing the unconscious develop- 
 ment, and being one of the most funda- 
 mental of the conditions of intelligence, is 
 specifically a powerful factor in the pro- 
 
124 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 duction of the intelligence of tlie genus and 
 of the individual. One of the stupidest of 
 animals, whose feet are hard, whose lips 
 and tail are in this respect useless, the 
 sheep, may be spurred to ingenuity by 
 love, as by no other thing, A patient told 
 me of a mother sheep which had no milk 
 for her little one. It only needed one ex- 
 perience to teach her when her lamb 
 bleated with hunger, to run with the little 
 one headlong to the house, a long distance 
 away, where it was fed "by hand" by the 
 kind-hearted human sisters. Tropical cats 
 know all about artificial respiration. A 
 friend saw a cat take its drowned kitten 
 and roll it up a hill, the fore-paws alter- 
 nately squeezing the lungs at every step; 
 in about half an hour of almost frenzied 
 labor the kitten was resuscitated. 
 
 Literature is filled with the devices and 
 marvelous proofs of ingenuity of animal 
 parents in raising and defending their 
 young. The feigning of death of opos- 
 sums, snakes, and birds ; the simulation of 
 wounds, the trailing of wings, the building 
 of nest over nest by the summer yellow bird 
 to prevent the incubation of the egg of the 
 
MATERNAL LOVE 125 
 
 shameless cuckoo, the hiding of snakes 
 under the mother's coils or down her 
 throat, the thousand protective devices and 
 ingenuities — all show how strong a force 
 is maternal love in the development of the 
 intelligence. Opossums leave the marsu- 
 pial pouch early, and clinging to the 
 mother learn many things of the world 
 very early. Nicols tells a comical story of 
 a young kaola which was taken by a cat 
 to nurse with her own kittens. But the 
 kaola had inherited the habit of riding 
 about on its mother's back, a habit that 
 the pussy foster-mother didn't like at all. 
 But she was very patient about it all. A 
 writer in Science, some time ago, tells of 
 the curiosity of a monkey, which in hunt- 
 ing other game on an opossum in his cage, 
 discovered the wonderful pouch full of 
 opossum babies, and examined them with 
 tenderness but profound curiosity. Nicols 
 tells of the laughable attempt of a little 
 kangaroo to find the pouch of its dog fos- 
 ter-mother. 
 
 It is frightful to think of the evil that 
 results from the dissociation and aliena- 
 tion of humanity from animals, or, what is 
 
126 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 worse, from the nasty habit of considering 
 them as soulless slaves to be used, or as 
 targets to be shot at. When I see some 
 savage human female riding about the 
 streets behind horses whose necks are suf- 
 fering from infernal check-reins, and 
 whose eyes are rubbed sore by stupid blind- 
 ers, driven by a fool who knows nothing of 
 horse-character, I feel very much like wish- 
 ing to pull that creature out of her cush- 
 ions, cut off her hair, stick a bit in her 
 mouth, and yank her head back in the same 
 way as she has done with her horses. 
 What else but having been brought up with 
 animals and thus learning how lovable they 
 are, will ever eradicate out of fiendish hu- 
 mans the idea that when they have an hour 
 or a day to spare from their work of plun- 
 dering their fellow-men they must spend it 
 in murdering some animal. " Let's go out 
 and kill something ! ' ' That is sport ! And, 
 of course, woman will never permit men 
 to be worse than she can be, and so goes 
 on the insane and awful destruction of our 
 birds, of beautiful winged life all over the 
 globe. Beware of a woman with a bird 
 on her hat! 
 
MATERNAL LOVE 127 
 
 What genuine and delightful happiness 
 these little beings give us ! I shall always 
 look back to the days when my dog and I 
 played hide-and-seek in the woods for 
 hours together, and I regret nothing more 
 than the fact that I was unjust or harsh 
 to him once or twice. Knowledge and sym- 
 pathetic study of animals teaches one more 
 and truer psychology than all the books can 
 do, because in their artlessness they show 
 the secret springs of motive, and of evolu- 
 tion, and form a mirror wherein one may 
 see himself reflected. 
 
 Just one glimpse of the "one touch of 
 nature which makes the whole world kin." 
 Does this anecdote by Kipling Sr., not re- 
 call the relations of some human couples 
 we have known? 
 
 ' i One morning there came a monkey chieftain, 
 weak and limping, having evidently been worsted 
 in a severe fight with another of his own kind. 
 One hand hung powerless, his face and eyes bore 
 terrible traces of battle, and he hirpled slowly 
 along with a pathetic air of suffering, support- 
 ing himself on the shoulder of a female, a wife, 
 the only member of his clan who had remained 
 faithful to him after his defeat. We threw them 
 
128 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 bread and raisins, and the wounded warrior care- 
 fully stowed the greater part away in his cheek- 
 pouch. The faithful wife, seeing her oppor- 
 tunity, sprang on him, holding fast his one sound 
 hand, and opening his mouth she deftly scooped 
 out the store of raisins; then she sat and ate 
 them very calmly at a safe distance, while he 
 mowed and chattered in impotent rage. He 
 knew that without her help he could not reach 
 home, and was fain to wait with what patience 
 he might till the raisins were finished. It was a 
 sad sight, but, like more sad sights, touched with 
 the light of comedy. This was probably her first 
 chance of disobedience or of self-assertion in her 
 whole life, and I am afraid she thoroughly en- 
 joyed it. Then she led him away, possibly to 
 teach him more salutary lessons of this modern 
 and ' advanced ' sort, so that at the last he would 
 go to another life with a meek and chastened 
 soui." 
 
 We have seen that the absolute condi- 
 tion of the existence of the human and 
 animal world depends instantly and con- 
 tinuously upon the secret of the fabrication 
 and storing of food about her seed-chil- 
 dren, by the Chemist-Mother of the plant- 
 world. The existence of the living world 
 depends then upon mother-love and upon 
 
 A 
 
MATERNAL LOVE 1129 
 
 mother-foresight for food, the primal con- 
 dition of life-perpetuation. 
 
 But not only for food, but for the feed- 
 ing itself. The lambent flame of limpid 
 love that burns in the startled wondrous 
 mother-eye of cow, or dog, or human 
 mother, as she gazes down upon her little 
 nursling, is perhaps the most revelatory 
 thing in the world. All the world loves a 
 mother, and all mothers, human or animal, 
 are sisters. A common passion links and 
 unifies them all and makes them alike holy, 
 all commissioned by another mother-heart 
 to be sharers in a divine duty. Step into 
 a pigeon loft. There is one bird which a 
 few hours ago was liberated 250 miles out 
 at sea. He was taken there in a closed 
 basket. He knew nothing of compasses, of 
 astronomy, or of steamers and oceans, but 
 when the basket-cover was raised, by the 
 guidance of an "instinct' ' the nature or 
 mechanism of which we know utterly noth- 
 ing, he darted toward home, toward the 
 place of his duties as monogamous hus- 
 band and as caretaker of the young. "With- 
 out indecision or varying he came straight 
 to his home over hundreds of miles of wa- 
 
130 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 ter, where no landmarks existed. At once 
 he begins his domestic duty of driving and 
 tormenting his wife toward the nest. The 
 imperious fellow will brook no shilly-shal- 
 lying. Eggs must be laid — Voila tout! 
 When there are enough of them they must 
 be hatched, which on occasion he will help 
 to do, turning the eggs regularly, bringing 
 the outside ones toward the center, etc., so 
 that all the children shall be born together. 
 When the young are there he has an abun- 
 dance of "soft food" macerated, in his 
 crop, a kind of bird-milk, ready to feed 
 them until their digestive powers are ready 
 for common food. The mother may now 
 go about her business of getting ready for 
 more eggs, and the mother-father attends 
 to the babies, teaching them by and by 
 where to go for food, etc, etc. Who taught 
 the mother to stand over the already laid 
 eggs instead of sitting on them, before the 
 time of incubation of the whole lot should 
 begin? Who formed each wondrous egg 
 with such provisions that the "white' 9 or 
 food of the young unhatched chick should 
 surround the yolk, and again the yolk about 
 the germinal vesicle, and about all the en- 
 
MATERNAL LOVE 131 
 
 casing, protecting shell, with, pores or 
 breathing spaces through it for the chick's 
 supply of air? 
 
 "The section of an egg proceeding from the 
 outside to the center, shows, first, an outer layer 
 of calcareous matter containing the coloring pig- 
 ment, then the inner layer, both being penetrated 
 by minute canals for the admission of air when 
 the shell is dry. Next within lies the shell mem- 
 brane, which is separated at the larger end of 
 the egg into a double layer, and includes a small 
 air-space, which increases in size as the egg 
 grows stale and becomes unfit for incubation. 
 Immediately in contact with the shell membrane 
 is the albumen, a white viscous fluid, and again 
 within that the vitellus, or yolk, containing the 
 germ enclosed in its own membrane, and lighter 
 than the albumen. The difference in specific 
 gravity between the yolk and white is made, by 
 a singular contrivance, to promote the develop- 
 ment of the germ most effectually. From each 
 side of the yolk in the direction of the long axis 
 of the egg, proceeds a cord of condensed albu- 
 men extending towards, but not meeting, the end 
 of the egg, and vulgarly called 'the tread,' under 
 the erroneous impression that it represents the 
 influence of the male. Between those cords, — 
 one passing toward the large and the other 
 toward the small end of the egg — the yolk is, as 
 
i 3 2 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 it were, slung in the albumen. Thus while the 
 germinal vesicle on the outside of the yolk is 
 prevented from coming into actual contact with 
 the interior of the shell by its * moorings' in the 
 denser substance of the albumen, the lightness 
 of the yolk determines it to float toward the 
 surface, and the cords allow it to go just so far 
 as is sufficient to keep the germ spot always 
 nearer the upper side of the egg, whichever way 
 it may be turned on its axis. Consequently, that 
 part of the yolk where the most vital part is 
 situated remains, in all circumstances, nearest 
 the source of heat, the mother's body." 
 
 Let me also sketch for you the cares of 
 another mother. This mother, though a 
 vertebrate, has had to develop the hind 
 legs and arches of the pelvic bones in 
 such a way that the young must be born 
 very early, so early indeed that there is 
 no placental connection with the mother, no 
 blood-feeding of the kangaroo baby before 
 its birth. When born, indeed, it is merely 
 an egg y without a shell, an inch long, a 
 helpless bit of fragile protoplasm. Only a 
 kangaroo mother could care for such a 
 baby. This she does by sticking it in a 
 wonderful pouch of skin beneath her body, 
 
MATERNAL LOVE 133 
 
 and how this is done, and how the nipple 
 is got into the mouth and clear down the 
 throat into the stomach of the unformed, 
 muscleless, motionless bundle, are mys- 
 teries of kangaroo motherhood. What is 
 still more wonderful is, however, under- 
 stood. Without formed muscles there can 
 be no suckling, but nature is, as always, 
 equal to the emergency. The muscles are 
 in the mother's breasts, and she can ex- 
 trude the milk at will. Another bit of 
 "special design " is required by the fact 
 that as the kangaroo babies grow (the 
 mother moving by jumps, as all know) 
 their weight would burst the marsupial 
 pouch if it were not braced and supported 
 by the marsupial bone which grows out 
 beneath it, and is thought to be ossified 
 tendons of the external oblique muscles. 
 The enormous brontosaurus has two such 
 huge bones beneath the pelvic cavity. 
 
 The pursuit of food for mate and little 
 ones is, as we have seen, a more subtile 
 but active cause of mental growth. The 
 swifts in building their nests out of inspis- 
 sated mucus from the large salivary glands, 
 thus transform a weight of material much 
 
134 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 greater than that of their own body into 
 this gelatinous substance. This drain on 
 the system is so great that if the nest is 
 stolen the second one is not, as was the 
 first, white and pure, free from foreign 
 substances, but is made up largely of feath- 
 ers, hair, etc, Gould took from the lining 
 of the nest of a long-tailed titmouse some 
 2000 feathers. The body of the nest was 
 made up of lichen, moss, hair, etc. The 
 weight of the eggs of one sitting is 
 much more than that of the mother's body, 
 and this expenditure of energy in nest- 
 building and egg-bearing is in all birds 
 relatively enormous. Doubtless to feed 
 the nurslings a bird ordinarily flies from 
 300 to 500 miles a day — with how many 
 wing-strokes to the mile? To illustrate 
 the cooperation of the purely physiologic 
 or unconscious processes of the body with 
 the bird's willed or unconscious work, it 
 may be noted that during incubation the 
 temperature of the mother's body rises 
 several degrees. God helps mothers ! In 
 this connection also it may be noted that 
 the hornbill feeds his wife and young ones 
 (whom he has securely walled in their 
 
MATERNAL LOVE 135 
 
 nest) through a little hole, with the pre- 
 pared and regurgitated food, in a bag or 
 pellicle, derived of course from the lining 
 membrane of his own stomach. 
 
 The genesial instinct is more plainly the 
 origin of educational ingenuity in birds 
 than in other animals. No two species of 
 birds build nests exactly alike, and the 
 mechanic and artistic ability in some is 
 astonishing. That mother-love in birds 
 begins and carries on the education and 
 elevation of mentality there can be no 
 doubt. It is certainly at the bottom of 
 that astounding fact, bird-migration, a phe- 
 nomenon of wonderful significance in the 
 distribution of the flora, and even of the 
 fauna of the whole world. 
 
 But the same dominant desire also, I 
 judge, governs the entire habits, distribu- 
 tion, and character of all animals. To find 
 a lair or place of safety for mother and 
 young, and to secure food for those at 
 home, must dictate the place of living, and 
 thus, finally, the type morphologically and 
 psychologically of every species of ani- 
 mals. The ability to elude enemies by a 
 thousand devices must form mental habits 
 
136 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 according to the peculiarities and the 
 length of time of those habits. Volumes 
 might be and have been written describing 
 the myriad means of securing safety and 
 food, and for starting the youngsters in 
 life so that they shall be able to do the same 
 thing again. Pigeons leave the nuts 
 abundant in a thousand trees where they 
 are raising their young, and fly hundreds 
 of miles to get their food, so that when 
 hatched the weak-winged youngsters shall 
 have food in plenty where they are. To 
 illustrate this fact let me describe one 
 thing I have not seen in print, and which 
 shows the instant and incessant govern- 
 ment by the reproductive instinct : A pa- 
 tient from Mexico tells me he has about 
 1000 brood mares on his ranch. Each stal- 
 lion defends and commands from 15 to 30 
 mares, according to his fighting ability. 
 He keeps his family always distinct from 
 every other and this segregation is so 
 rigid that when the whole thousand are 
 "rounded up" and driven pell-mell into a 
 corral, it takes the stallions perhaps hours 
 of intense running, neighing, whinnying, 
 fighting, and hunting, before each has his 
 
MATERNAL LOVE 137 
 
 flock separated by winding but clearly-de- 
 fined alley-like spaces between each group. 
 Then the men may enter ! When running 
 loose, if one group comes near another, one 
 leader may try to drive or woo a mare of 
 another family, at once resulting in a 
 pitched battle between the two leaders. 
 The fighting is done largely on the hind 
 feet, the fore legs little used, the aim be- 
 ing to seize the other's neck with the 
 mouth. If one gets a good "hold" in this 
 way the result of the battle and the pos- 
 session of the object of battle is soon set- 
 tled. The period of gestation of the horse 
 is eleven months. My informant knows 
 that it several times occurred in one family 
 that colts born nine or ten months after 
 a mare had been placed in the family were 
 at once kicked to death by the jealously- 
 wise head of the family, who had not been 
 consulted in regard to the matter. 
 
 A number of amphibious animals have 
 the trick of living long beneath the water, 
 and of keeping the submerged body en- 
 tirely out of sight while exposing the tips 
 of the nostrils to breathe. To find a home 
 and security for his family the beaver has 
 
138 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 developed a marvelous degree of reason 
 and architectural genius tliat has long been 
 the admiration of man, and is superior 
 to that of the bee. The platypus burrows 
 in the bank of a stream, one tunnel enter- 
 ing below the surface of the water, another 
 above it, and both leading to the nest. 
 Thus he can use either and escape all ob- 
 servant enemies. 
 
 It seems at present impossible to es- 
 timate the due proportion of influence this 
 necessity of nest-making, cave-homing, and 
 lair-devising, all for the young, has had 
 in developing ingenuity and mentality in 
 animals, but I cannot doubt it has been the 
 preponderating influence, direct and indi- 
 rect, in spurring one species of animal into 
 the human. Archeology and anthropology 
 teem with hints and proofs of this fact. 
 Home-making lies at the basis of all prog- 
 ress out of animality into humanity, and 
 of all advances out of savagery into civ- 
 ilization. And is it not plain that the fam- 
 ily relation is the direct product and ma- 
 chinery of maternal love in its large sense? 
 Every element of the most complex civili- 
 zation springs from or is vitally related 
 
MATERNAL LOVE .139 
 
 with the home-making industry. Mere 
 food, until a high degree of civilization 
 is reached, is perishable almost in an hour, 
 and therefore is the object of the hour's 
 need; but possession of one place of meet- 
 ing, or of seclusion, begets the fact of own- 
 ership. Tools, investments, houses, all 
 things manufactured or durable, become 
 possessions, and hence arises the concep- 
 tion of property, and the entire legal as- 
 pect of human relationship is thus seen 
 to spring out of the family relation and 
 flows inevitably from that relation. 
 
 One of the most sympathetic and open- 
 eyed observers of animal life, Hudson, says 
 that most all wild animals have their 
 games, dances, plays, or amusements, and 
 especially all birds. What an influence 
 love exercises in the formation of plumage, 
 coloration, forms and habits, of all ani- 
 mals is now known of all biologists, in- 
 deed, of all intelligent people. Certain it 
 is, therefore, that most all beauty in the 
 animal world (and of course in the world 
 of flowers it is wholly true) springs from 
 some phase of maternal love. An oriental 
 proverb says that "even the young of the 
 
140 ,THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 ass is beautif ul ! ' ' Childhood, either of 
 plant, of animal, or of man, is the one su- 
 perlative exhibition of beauty. A glimpse, 
 a perfume, a flashing and gleaming of 
 something superhumanly, supernaturally 
 beautiful, lingers long and caressingly 
 about all young things. The greatest pic- 
 ture, the ever-painted model, the never- 
 realized ideal of art-excellence, is the 
 mother and her child. Whatever power 
 for good or evil from Troy-times to pres- 
 ent-times womanly beauty and charm has 
 had in human life, — surely the whole of it 
 can be credited or debited to but one thing. 
 Art, whether in poesy, drama, novel, sculp- 
 ture, or painting, is simply myriad-phased 
 love. Back through all forms of life, clear 
 to the protozoa, the beautiful is linked with 
 the maternal in indissoluble unity. Es- 
 theticism, art, all the charms and delights, 
 are the rewards and benedictions of the di- 
 vine Father and His pleasure in the re- 
 newal of living forms. 
 
 Now, exactly the same truth applies to 
 morality, or the emotion of altruism! In 
 all family life when the sexual or family 
 relation is not in action, there is selfish- 
 
MATERNAL LOVE 141 
 
 ness, utter indifference, or positive enmity 
 always manifest. The principles of indi- 
 viduation, the struggle for existence, the 
 preservation of self, called the first law 
 of life (but wrongly socalled), have un- 
 limited and absolutely exclusive sway over 
 all beings and functions, except when love 
 and the care of the young come in to con- 
 tradict and overrule them. Maternal love 
 is the miracle of all biologic existence. It 
 cannot be conceived as arising by any ac- 
 tion of " environment " or from the neces- 
 sities of the organism standing nakedly 
 there. Into every life, nay, into every fi- 
 ber, bone, and cell of every living thing, 
 the great God, Love, stoops down and per- 
 meates, nay, He clutches and masters each 
 for a purpose beyond and after. From 
 the standpoint of present-day science, from 
 the standpoint of determinism, fate or 
 chance, from the standpoint of the ag- 
 nostic, or of his twin-brother, the atheist, 
 this maternal-paternal love, this all-power- 
 ful, all-forming, and all-transforming en- 
 ergy is the most illogical, most uncaused, 
 most utterly unaccountable thing conceiv- 
 able. "We can explain all things else in 
 
142 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 some half -blundering, half-satisfactory 
 way, but for this exotic wonder there is 
 no scientific accounting that would not 
 make a mummy laugh. It is, it comes to 
 us from without, and that is all we can 
 say. It is the one patent, convincing, un- 
 answerable proof of the divine, or the su- 
 pernatural, entering and grasping the or- 
 ganic mechanism for ends beyond that 
 organism itself. And its first, last, con- 
 tinuous, and increasing effect is to make 
 every organism value and cherish a being 
 that is not self. It is therefore the very 
 basis and essence of all that is ethical and 
 religious. Every animal is put in training 
 by it for humanization, and becomes 
 through it a faultless illustration for us 
 of the supernaturalism and the glory of 
 ethics of other-love. To the childless a 
 hundred animal stories teach that there 
 are orphans we could make our own chil- 
 dren. Alas! The heart-broken sadness, 
 the pathos beyond tears of the motherless. 
 Bead Kipling's Baa, Baa, Black Sheep, 
 and then think of what is going on in 
 the breasts of thousands of children in the 
 
MATERNAL LOVE 143 
 
 " barrack-schools " of England, and in the 
 orphan asylums of America. 
 
 The limits within which the role of the 
 maternal instinct is confined are more 
 rigid in the animal world than in the hu- 
 man. I doubt if anyone knows anything 
 about the old bachelors and old maids 
 there. Of course, there are but few such, 
 but these few must occupy strange posi- 
 tions in life. After the productive age has 
 passed, one wonders if wild animals keep 
 up the relics of family life. Probably not, 
 I fear. At least, one species of birds, the 
 cuckoos, are sharp little scoundrels. They 
 build no nests, and carrying their eggs in 
 their mouths, slip them into the nests of 
 other birds, where they are hatched some 
 days in advance of the eggs of the rightful 
 owners. Then with characteristic inhu- 
 manity, or unbirdity, they proceed to gob- 
 ble up all the food and kick out of the nest 
 the rightful children. Male birds often ar- 
 rive in migration from their thousands of 
 miles of flight before their mates, but the 
 same mates do come, and they come year 
 after year to the same locality and rebuild 
 
144 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 their nests in the same neighborhood or 
 spot. This home-attachment has numerous 
 illustrations. A water-wagtail once built 
 her nest on the framework beneath a rail- 
 way passenger car, which later was put into 
 local service, running four times a day 
 between Cosham and Havant, in England, 
 in all about forty miles. At this time there 
 were four young birds in the nest, and the 
 little father, while his family were away, 
 promenaded the turntable, etc., awaiting 
 the shunting of the car bringing back his 
 wife and babies. A pair of tomtits for 
 three years built their nest in a letter box. 
 All the letters posted fell upon the sitting 
 bird, and the splendid postman carefully 
 gathered the letters and left the birdies. 
 
 Among animals the limits of the control 
 of the maternal feeling are rigidly con- 
 fined to simple necessity. Love seems to 
 disappear as soon as the young can pos- 
 sibly fly and get their food — another proof 
 of its supernatural quality and origin. I 
 have often wondered, too, at the general 
 indifference of the father to the young. 
 Jn many, perhaps most animals, the father 
 seems to care no more for his children 
 
MATERNAL LOVE 145 
 
 than if they were moving bushes. Cer- 
 tainly, he cares no more for his own than 
 for those of another, and the idea of any 
 love toward grandchildren is absurd. Not 
 even the mother shows this. 
 
 But it is of the greatest interest to note 
 that with the appearance of humanity and 
 with its ideas of home and of property 
 (both products of maternal love) there 
 arises a natural extension of the scope and 
 control of the family instinct, and the in- 
 terest of the parents continues into or 
 through adult life. Support and protec- 
 tion of the mother continues beyond the 
 child-bearing period, grandchildren are 
 beloved (sometimes I have noticed, even 
 more than the children themselves were), 
 more distant relatives are held within the 
 family affection, and the patriarchal type 
 of society is established. When the higher 
 ideals of society and civilization are per- 
 mitted to arise, the egis of love is extended 
 over the nation, and patriotism with its 
 great influence in war and history appears. 
 Finally, the highest development of hu- 
 manity arises, and, still an actual out- 
 growth and extension of maternal love, 
 
i 4 6 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 ethics and love of humanity, and of the 
 divine Father-Mother of humanity, and of 
 all life, takes possession of the loyal be- 
 ing, whether he be social reformer, philos- 
 opher, pietist, or religionist. 
 
 I fear that I have wearied you: Let 
 me then epitomize the principles about 
 which I have gathered my much-wander- 
 ing and perhaps incoherent thoughts : — 
 
 1. Among the factors of evolution there 
 is one of which scientists have made too 
 little or no account. This comprises the 
 entire grouping as one, of all the instincts 
 variously denominated genesic, sexual, or 
 reproductive, the whole series of the vari- 
 ous functions, necessities, and results, go- 
 ing to the begetting, gestation, nourish- 
 ment, and training of the young. Con- 
 ceived thus in its entirety we may, for 
 want of a better name, denominate it ma- 
 ternal love. 
 
 2. In the vegetable this energy largely 
 and entirely dictates the morphology and 
 physiology of all types and species of 
 plants, and is the sole factor in their flow- 
 ering, seed-forming, and in the phenome- 
 non of growth. 
 
MATERNAL LOVE 147 
 
 3. The stored food, fashioned by the 
 cunning and secret chemistry of the plant, 
 and provided by maternal love for the first 
 nourishment of its young in the seed, is 
 the ultimate source of nourishment of the 
 entire animal world, humanity, of course, 
 included. 
 
 4. In the animal world the maternal sen- 
 timent more largely than any other or all 
 other causes, leads directly or indirectly 
 to the development of ingenuity, nest- 
 building, and other forms of home-making, 
 and hence to mental evolution and progress 
 to higher types. 
 
 5. It is doubtless in this special way 
 the prepotent factor in the humanization 
 of the one genus or species of animal from 
 which we have sprung. 
 
 6. In the human race it has been the 
 dominant influence in the formation and 
 progressive growth of society through its 
 effects in the creation of property and pri- 
 vate rights, and in the founding of homes, 
 of families, etc. 
 
 7. In both the animal and the human 
 race it has been almost the sole source 
 of the appreciation, ideals, and facts of 
 
148 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 esthetics, all forms of art drawing their 
 inspiration and data primarily or at sec- 
 ond hand from its exhibition and function. 
 
 8. Eeligion and the belief in the super- 
 natural apart, there is not, so far as we 
 can see, any other cause that has been in 
 the least operative in producing, through- 
 out all biologic history, any ethical or 
 altruistic fact or function whatsoever. To 
 this great instinct is entirely due all the 
 practices operative in plant or animal for 
 the welfare of any other than self. And 
 in the highest society of to-day every eth- 
 ical act derives, directly or indirectly, from 
 it. 
 
 9. Almost all other evolutionary factors 
 may be more or less satisfactorily ac- 
 counted for on theories of "natural" 
 causes, such as "natural selection," the 
 persistence and correlation of energy, the 
 "sensitiveness of protoplasm," etc., etc., 
 but viewed in its singleness or in its en- 
 tirety, this instinct, so far as our intelli- 
 gence can judge, is plainly uncaused and 
 inexplicable, and, to put it boldly, is a 
 miracle, thrust among all other natural 
 
MATERNAL LOVE 149 
 
 forces, and dominating all for its half- 
 hidden, half -revealed purposes. 
 
 May I relate a dream? 
 
 I thought that maternal love and all per- 
 taining thereto ceased appearing in our 
 world because mankind did not appreciate 
 the beautiful and gratuitous gift, and were 
 so ungrateful, even abusive of it, that God 
 grew tired thrusting it upon us. Men 
 and women had grown so callous that they 
 took upon themselves the awful duties of 
 parenthood, and then neglected their chil- 
 dren. They made orphans by thousands 
 and then left them to be cared for in hor- 
 rible asylums, their tender, unpracticed, 
 unguided longings bruised, or like cellar- 
 plants, left groping for hidden light. 
 They ruthlessly killed and destroyed all 
 things for selfishness and amusement. 
 
 And so, in my dream, all that related 
 to maternal love silently ceased to be, and 
 I wandered among strange-seeming peo- 
 ple and profoundly changed scenes. The 
 whole animal world became other; orna- 
 ment, color, gay feather and lightsome 
 
ISO THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 song gave place to sad makeshifts of utili- 
 tarian hair, bristles, splotches, screeches, 
 and grunts. Even in the eyes and faces 
 of my best friends everything became dif- 
 ferent, hopelessly pitying or inhumanly 
 hard ; deep-seated selfishness gleamed upon 
 one everywhere from snake-like eyes. 
 Smiles one never met, but an occasional 
 risus diaboli; cacchinations of derision or 
 ridicule were heard, for men and all things 
 were painfully grotesque and altered in 
 appearance. Men jeered at each other be- 
 cause all beards had disappeared; the 
 glory of woman's hair had also gone. 
 Worse than this, the beauty faded out of 
 woman's form and feature, and instead 
 of the divine charm of laughing eyes and 
 radiant winsomeness, they all became half 
 or wholly repulsive, coarse, much like men, 
 and yet without the dignity or strength of 
 men. The men had likewise become wom- 
 anish without becoming in the least degree 
 womanly. The beautiful, except perhaps 
 the flash of the moon on wave or sun on 
 mountain-top, had gone out of the world. 
 
 No children were born, and those that 
 existed were thrust out to die or live neg- 
 
MATERNAL LOVE 151 
 
 lected, or were fed out of illogic pity. 
 There was not a flower in the world. Al- 
 most all human social gatherings ceased; 
 why should people meet together now, 
 when they had no pleasure in each other, 
 and when each looked on the other thinking 
 only how his money could be taken away 
 from him? Men left their homes and were 
 never heard of again, and in all places 
 strangers, uncouth, ill-clothed, brutal, and 
 cruel, came and went in objectless ebb and 
 flow. Who had wealth turned it into gold 
 or portable goods. All commercial credit 
 ceased; banks closed their doors; every 
 one barricaded his house, and went about 
 " armed to the teeth.' ' The iron-mills and 
 rolling-mills went on, and many manufac- 
 tories, but everywhere was harshness, and 
 grinl, and ugliness. Despair and idiocy, 
 and crime and insanity instantly increased 
 a hundred-fold. An awful shudder, a cos- 
 mic horror crept like cold snakes through 
 the arteries; the blood curdled in all 
 hearts. Women whispered to men an aw- 
 ful message, and men moaned it to each 
 other ; hungry-eyed dogs divined it in their 
 masters' eyes; it ran like doom along the 
 
i 5 2 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 branches of the leafless trees, down to the 
 roots, and there every mole and insect was 
 frozen with terror of it. God is dead! — 
 were the agonizing words that palsied 
 thought and emotion, and that clutched at 
 the life-springs of every bosom. 
 
 Slowly the prices of everything com- 
 menced rising and famine began. It was 
 found during the second year that the 
 stock of grain was nearly or quite ex- 
 hausted. Seed sowed in the ground came 
 up, but there was no new seed formed. 
 The cattle had died off in great numbers 
 during the first and second winters because 
 the owners kept the little corn that was 
 left to still their own personal hunger. No 
 calves or lambs were born, no chickens 
 hatched, and the older animals could not 
 get enough grass, leaves, or roots during 
 the summer to carry them into the next 
 winter, the third, when death would surely 
 come. But they were not allowed to live 
 that long; and during this second year 
 every animal all over the world and of 
 whatsoever kind that could be reached by 
 the ingenuity of man's hunger had been 
 sacrificed. Then began universal famine, 
 
MATERNAL LOVE 153 
 
 cannibalism, and unutterable horror. Ev- 
 erywhere was death, and death was every- 
 where. Within two years from the death 
 of love there was naught but death. Bocks 
 and sand and waters there were, a desert- 
 world just like that before the angel of 
 maternal love came among the rocks and 
 sands and waters, and made out of them 
 the world we know, the world of grain and 
 fruit, the world of sweet, cool grass, the 
 world of rustling leaves, the world of beau- 
 tiful, wonderful animal forms, the world 
 of friends, the world of baby-faces, — the 
 world of God! 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 IMMORTALITY 
 
 If you sit down in the quiet of your own 
 room and calmly ask yourself what it is in 
 reference to a life after death that you real- 
 ly desire and what you may reasonably ex- 
 pect, you will probably be surprised to 
 find what a blank your mind is upon the 
 subject. I doubt if you will find that you 
 inwardly desire it, in the same manner, 
 for example, that you desire wealth, or 
 fame, or beauty. You have grown up in 
 the belief that it is right to desire and be- 
 lieve, but that, you know, is quite a differ- 
 ent affair from actual yearning. 
 
 Nearly every one puts the thought aside 
 as beyond solution. One says, "My think- 
 ing will not change the fact nor my long- 
 ing bring it about. The duty of the pass- 
 ing day is all I can fulfill." Under this 
 cover of postponed examination the world 
 
 154 
 
IMMORTALITY 155 
 
 has grown as indifferent to the question 
 as it was formerly engrossed by it. Fear 
 of offending delicate sensibilities and es- 
 tablished beliefs keeps the doubter and 
 modifier silent; whilst the extreme of the 
 omnivorous believer is set over against the 
 out-and-out denier. But the great major- 
 ity of people are neither believers nor dis- 
 believers, but indifferentists — slowly sett- 
 ling toward an agnostic non-committalism 
 that is destructive of all intellectual and 
 moral earnestness. 
 
 It is my conviction that this abrogation 
 of curiosity and examination is a most 
 culpable and dangerous fact. If we live 
 after death it is of tremendous importance ; 
 if we do not it is of no less vital import, 
 and the belief, the disbelief, or the evasion 
 is of the most constant influence, uncon- 
 sciously, subtly, upon every thought and 
 act of every day's living. 
 
 Suppose now we divest ourselves of the 
 creeps and shudders usually accompany- 
 ing a discussion of death and immortality, 
 and fearlessly test the common dogma with 
 a little analysis in the light of scientific 
 research and reason. Let us suppose you 
 
156 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 are a believer: what is it you believe? 
 You desire : what is it you desire, and how 
 far is your desire feasible? You are con- 
 vinced : but what is the truth? If possible, 
 in what way and to what extent is a future 
 life possible? If attainable, by whom or 
 by what means? Moreover, the kind of 
 belief makes all the difference in the world. 
 I have read somewhere about an African 
 chief who killed his wife's lover, and was 
 defeated at last by his wife's unswerving 
 belief in immortality, she committing sui- 
 cide in order to join her lover. But the 
 chief was equal to the emergency and he 
 in turn killed himself in order to follow the 
 pair and break up their tete-a-tetes in the 
 other world! It all depends upon what 
 you propose doing with a future life 
 after you get it. You might just as 
 well be digging clams on this earth as 
 "singing Hosannas around the throne" in 
 heaven. 
 
 Do you believe in or fervently desire 
 what, with splendid bravery and abandon 
 the old creed called "the resurrection of 
 the body ' ' ? Terrible counter-queries 
 arise. At what age in your life would you 
 
IMMORTALITY 157 
 
 choose as best representing the ideal body 
 for your resurrection? Would you prefer 
 your body as it was when you were a child, 
 when youthful, when mature, or when old? 
 Moreover, it is changing every minute, this 
 body. It is estimated that something like 
 five million blood-corpuscles die every sec- 
 ond of your life. Even the two or three 
 pounds of minerals in one's bones are only 
 a little more permanently fixed. All com- 
 ponent parts are undergoing change every 
 instant: they soon become grass, grain, or 
 tree, passing again into others' bodies, and 
 so on forever. Is it the form and feature 
 you desire to preserve and not the con- 
 stituent particles? But form and feature 
 change every day or year, and are as im- 
 possible to fix as the atoms themselves. 
 Indeed, is not the whole matter put beyond 
 choice by the evident fact that unless by 
 the fiat of an extramundane deity the only 
 moment possible to fix the bodily form in 
 the mould of eternity would be the death- 
 moment? And yet this were the most un- 
 desirable of all seasons, since at that hour 
 the body is in the weakest, most useless, 
 and most wretched condition of all the 
 
* 5 8 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 hours it has served us. Supposing there- 
 fore, that you are so in love with your own 
 body that you would wish to call it into life 
 again and for forever, we see at once that 
 no moment or phase of development could 
 be chosen, except perhaps the dying mo- 
 ment, the least desirable of all, and that 
 the particles of one's body have served 
 their turn in myriad other bodies each hav- 
 ing an equally valid claim to his "proper- 
 ty." Besides this the absurdity of the 
 whole is emphasized by the crushing fact 
 that all the organic matter of the world has 
 been used over and over for bodies and 
 the earth has not enough hydrocarbons to 
 fit out again with bodies a small fraction 
 of the souls that have lived upon it. 
 Doubtless the combined weight of all the 
 organic bodies that have lived on the earth 
 would be many times the total weight of 
 the globe including its minerals, elements, 
 and gases. It may be frankly admitted 
 that no bodily resurrection is possible. 
 
 And it is as certainly undesirable. The 
 old dogma was the crudest materialism, 
 wholly unworthy of the credence of those 
 who pretended to believe that God is a 
 
IMMORTALITY 159 
 
 spirit, and that they are his children. 
 The belief in bodily resurrection was a 
 natural concomitant of the age of sensual- 
 ism before the mind and spirit had risen 
 to their modern heritage. The desire for 
 such a resurrection stamps the person with 
 a self-confessed imperfection of mental 
 and moral development. The impossibil- 
 ity of such a resurrection is one of many 
 proofs that life is no sensualist at heart 
 and that ideality is the final outcome, the 
 trend of actuality. Nature compels us to 
 take wings though the sluggish Psyche lin- 
 gers lovingly in the pretty little cocoon 
 of materiality she has built about herself. 
 Is it perhaps your understanding, reason, 
 or intellect that you desire to perpetuate 
 forever? Frankly, now, are you so in love 
 with your mental outfit? In your more 
 modest and sane hours are you not sadly 
 conscious how very imperfect it is ? While 
 we are young and very conceited we may be 
 filled with self-satisfaction and trust in our 
 own judgment, but as the years drag by, 
 we, looking back over the past, grow more 
 and more conscious that our intellect is 
 not to be trusted. Think of the intermin- 
 
160 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 able series of blunders of which your life 
 is the record ! How poorly you have mis- 
 judged people and circumstances! How 
 your reason has fooled you many times and 
 again ! How many illusions and delusions 
 you have lived through! With what sad 
 clearness you now see your former stupid- 
 ities, and with what blindness you fail to 
 see your present ones! Looking about 
 you, you find others equally as gifted as 
 yourself holding your opinions as loath- 
 some. Looking above you, you see the 
 most intellectual and the most educated 
 diametrically opposed in their opinions of 
 God, man, and nature. Two great men, 
 two brothers learned and trained in dia- 
 lectic and logic, soon grow apart. One be- 
 comes a cardinal of the Eomish church, 
 accepting papal infallibility and a thou- 
 sand such absurdities, the other as firmly 
 convinced that the fallacies of the English 
 church are God's gospel. Looking below 
 you, you see the great mass of men wreck- 
 ing their minds and lives upon a thousand 
 outrageous beliefs and prejudices. There 
 is no sadder spectacle in the world than 
 this that the people love error. But each 
 
IMMORTALITY 161 
 
 one with imperturbable conceit is con- 
 vinced that he sees better and plainer than 
 another. Every partisan democrat or re- 
 publican has no sort of doubt that he is 
 right about every financial or govern- 
 mental measure, though he has never stud- 
 ied finance, history, or political economy 
 five minutes. He does not dream that he 
 is a dupe of low-lived politicians and of 
 his own lack of intellect. All history is a 
 tangle of such poverty-stricken intellec- 
 tion. One can but be amazed at the prone- 
 ness of everybody to see things and do 
 things every way but the right way. And 
 this is the kind of a mental equipment you 
 would stamp with the seal of eternity ! 
 
 Possibly you may protest that it is a 
 more perfect and purified intellect that you 
 wish. Ah, yes, but that would not be your 
 intellect. You want to be made over, made 
 in another person. That would not be 
 your immortality but that of another. 
 That would imply that it is pure intellect 
 and perfect, in the abstract, that you are 
 interested in. Have you shown much in- 
 terest in that sort of intellect in the past? 
 If you wish such an immortality of a per- 
 
162 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 fected intellect you must certainly possess 
 it before it can be made everlasting. 
 
 Perhaps, again, you will say that it is 
 the ever-progressive ever-growing intellect 
 you desire. This is subterfuge. That is 
 not what you wish but what you would 
 take in default of your first choice. Les- 
 sing said that if God held out to him abso- 
 lute truth in one hand and in the other the 
 everlasting search for truth he would 
 choose the latter. But the condition of 
 everlasting search would be the condition 
 of everlasting imperfection of intellect. 
 Lessing's choice seems to me impious. 
 
 I therefore conclude, that at heart you 
 do not wish to eternalize your crude im- 
 perfect intellect, and that the sole method 
 of getting an exalted and perfected intel- 
 lect is to cultivate it here and now. Have 
 you in the past obeyed reason and not pas- 
 sion or self-interest? Have you studied 
 logic, history, and science with a sincere 
 desire to do your political and social duty, 
 and to free yourself from prejudice, error, 
 superstition, and conceit? If not why 
 should God suddenly endow you with a 
 perfect intellect ready-made? Is it God's 
 
IMMORTALITY 163 
 
 way in this world, to give excellencies un- 
 asked and unearned? Eest assured he will 
 not do it at your dying hour. It is no 
 particular merit in you to die ; why should 
 you be rewarded with a new intellect then ? 
 Or, again, you may say that it is not so 
 much your intellect that you wish to make 
 immortal as it is your emotional nature, 
 affection, etc. Love and friendship, you 
 complain, are cut off by death and the ten- 
 drils of the heart die because they find 
 nothing to cling to or rest upon. You 
 would like to renew beyond the grave the 
 love and sympathy that has made the 
 earth-life endurable, and even beautiful. 
 Now is this, in very truth, just so? Are 
 you really satisfied with your devotion and 
 love? Have not your outgoings of the 
 heart been quite fickle, illogical, selfish, and 
 calculating? Has not your love and grati- 
 tude been often a lively sense of benefits 
 to come? Has your love to woman not 
 been of the "Kreutzer-Sonata" type, a 
 little better and more subtly-concealed 
 perhaps, but at heart the same? If you 
 are a woman have you been seeking to get 
 or to give love, and has your little affection 
 
164 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 been but payment for protection and a 
 home? Have you chosen true and noble 
 friends and been true and noble to them? 
 Has your charity been but alms-giving 
 without kind sympathy and helpfulness? 
 Have you as married folk, perhaps, been, 
 as the cant phrase has it, "devoted to each 
 other,' ' but oblivious of the duty of affec- 
 tion toward the rest of the world, — grin- 
 ning examples of I 'egoisme a deux? Is your 
 family a fetich, an enlarged sort of selfish- 
 ness ? Do you at heart care much for any- 
 body except your own precious self? And 
 a too exclusive love, even of the purest 
 type, may be sin in God's eyes. If you 
 bind all your affection upon one weak life 
 you risk a precious value upon too single 
 and narrow an object, and deprive others 
 of the sympathy that need it more. "Just 
 wrapt up in one," as the sentimental 
 jargon has it, is often if not always a 
 pleasant way of great sin. Affection may 
 become morbid — a disease, quite as well 
 as any abuse or exaggeration of any other 
 characteristic. 
 
 I take it that they who are the most 
 satisfied with the strength, purity, and 
 
IMMORTALITY 165 
 
 constancy of their love and emotional na- 
 ture are precisely they that have neither 
 actual strength, purity, and constancy of 
 sentiment, and are thus accurately they 
 that should not have immortality. 
 
 Lastly, if neither body, intellect, nor the 
 affectional nature are such as you wish 
 made eternal, are you any better contented 
 with your moral nature ? The question at 
 once raises a smile. The feeling of our 
 own ethical unworthiness has crystallised 
 into the great Christian dogma of Christ 's 
 vicarious sacrifice. In the words of the 
 old hymn, " Jesus died and paid it all, all 
 the debt I owe." No man hoped to get to 
 heaven on his own merits. Much of the 
 zeal of religion has consisted in the joy of 
 the belief that by a sleight-of-hand trick, 
 a big sponge of forgiveness was wiped over 
 the ethical debit and credit account by the 
 lachrymose deity, whose occupation, as 
 Heine said, was to forgive. History is one 
 long monotonous list of man's sins and 
 inhumanities. I think it probable that you 
 will not urge the ethical aspect; I would 
 leave that plea aside. We all know that 
 we are very much like a lot of pigs, each 
 
166 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 after the most and best corn and the warm- 
 est bed. The amazing immorality of try- 
 ing to get to heaven on another's merits 
 was the most brazen example of how little 
 heavenliness there was in the heaven- 
 hunters and heaven-sealers. Of course 
 the desire for heaven itself, the desire for 
 one's happiness was immoral when condi- 
 tioned upon the misery of others. Nature 
 in this respect is better than man, denying 
 him his childish materialistic desires and 
 forcing him to wait for immortality until 
 he can learn to live in the spirit and seek 
 no selfish heaven. 
 
 Just as the body is ever changing, and 
 it is impossible to seize upon any hour 
 when we could eternalize it, except at the 
 undesirable death-hour, so it is the same 
 in reference to intellect, love, and morality. 
 There are no two days in life when we are 
 the same. As to intellect we have little 
 before adult life is reached, and most peo- 
 ple have little after fifty or sixty years. 
 It is proverbial that few change their opin- 
 ions after that age, but subsist on old 
 prejudices and ideas. The mental powers 
 get into ruts and habits, true reason being 
 
IMMORTALITY 167 
 
 abrogated. As to love we laugh at our 
 fickleness, and our habits and ideals of 
 friendship get sordid as each year strips 
 off the freedom and expansiveness of youth 
 and the dear cold ghost of self is more 
 exclusively worshipped. And our ethical 
 standards change with each day's passing. 
 We have at every hour to clutch ourselves 
 by the throat and cry, "Stay! Who art 
 thou?" And lo ! while we ask our protean 
 self the question, we have become another. 
 We seek perpetuity of existence for some- 
 thing ever becoming other. We seek per- 
 sonal identity after death, but we have no 
 personal identity before death: how then 
 can we have it afterward? Do you not 
 see that what makes you recognizable, dif- 
 ferent from other individuals, and what 
 would make personal immortality possible 
 depends upon the accidents of organiza- 
 tion, — depends firstly upon the bodily pe- 
 culiarity, and secondly upon imperfections 
 of mind that you do not wish to perpetu- 
 ate ? Twins sometimes wear a knot of rib- 
 bon as a signal whereby their friends may 
 recognize them. Our faces and bodies are 
 but such little symbols or signals that our 
 
168 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 souls have hung out for the day. Divest 
 your best friend of his body and would you 
 recognize him? Have you ever thought 
 how the photograph of your friend's soul 
 would look? If bodily form and imperfec- 
 tions make up the most of what we call 
 individuality it becomes evident that in 
 casting off imperfection we become less 
 narrow, less individual. As you become 
 freed from the cramping littleness of self- 
 love and the bonds of self -gratification, as 
 you rise into the life of the spirit, you find 
 yourself less individual. One fitted for a 
 true heaven would not care for the old 
 immortality. What is good to carry over 
 into the future life is not so much personal 
 identity as personal non-identity, not so 
 much the imperfections that make us indi- 
 viduals as the perfections that free us from 
 individualism. We must lose our life to 
 find it. We have overestimated the value 
 of individuality. Self-consciousness has 
 become hypertrophied, and the summum 
 honum of life is held to be the preservation 
 of a little puckered-up individuality. 
 This over-development of individualism is 
 doubtless due to the fierce struggle man 
 
IMMORTALITY 169 
 
 has had to elevate himself out of savagery. 
 It has been possible only through excessive 
 carefulness and love of the ego. The 
 struggle for existence is now taking on 
 class and corporate characteristics so that 
 the common weal is an ideal quite as much 
 as individual satisfaction and safety. 
 Hence the exaggeration of personality may 
 now return to something like a healthy 
 normalism. As a natural outgrowth and 
 consequence of this over-development of 
 the individual consciousness, there came 
 the absurd attempt to carry over into the 
 after-life the same sort of existence that 
 had been developed here, — consisting in a 
 neglect of the actual world of one's de- 
 scendants, an ignoring of death that ends 
 the body and products of organization, and 
 a failure to see that a future life after 
 death must be a life of the spirit, of per- 
 fections, and of the common life, not of 
 peculiarities and imperfections. If this 
 seems an aery height and a too rare air 
 it argues against your preparation for the 
 only desirable as well as the only possible 
 kind of immortality. It argues against 
 you just in the same way that your horror 
 
170 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 of death does. It is only participation in 
 the divine life of the spirit that can see 
 death as right and good. Death comes to 
 shatter our baseless trust in the evanescent 
 physical and teach us dependence upon the 
 everlasting spiritual. They dread death 
 whose life is of the physical type. God 
 never gave to man a greater blessing, after 
 life itself, than death, and nothing more 
 strikingly proves the divine government of 
 the world than the certainty of its coming 
 to us all. If death is your enemy, life is 
 not your friend. The brutal attempt to 
 ignore the fact, the belief that the body 
 with its pack of heathenish appetites and 
 needs could push through death and come 
 out fresh and renewed on the other side 
 is the very insanity of individualism 
 and the intoxication of materialism. The 
 mourning, shudder, gloom, and horror of 
 death, — God-sent if anything is — is prac- 
 tical pessimism and reckless atheism. 
 Death's one lesson is that we must love 
 and cultivate what he cannot touch. One 
 who has lived a life of kindness and spir- 
 ituality has no horror of death, and to him 
 it has little mystery. But to him whose 
 
IMMORTALITY 171 
 
 divinity has been self and whose religion 
 the worship of his physiological senses, 
 death must be the ugliest of enemies who 
 is to rob him of his all. Did you ever 
 notice how life is plastic and free when 
 first fashioning for itself a body? "All 
 heaven lies about us in our infancy.' ' In 
 youth we are unselfish, aspiring, and noble. 
 As the years go by the power of the organ- 
 isation, the material, grows, and limits 
 more and more the freedom of the spirit. 
 Frankenstein turns upon its maker. With 
 age men get narrow, cold, calculating; 
 women snakey, scheming, cruel. The soul 
 finds itself more and more the slave in- 
 stead of the master, and by and by when 
 the slavery becomes unendurable, it takes 
 flight, and this you call death. It is the 
 body's reward for insubordination. I 
 think we deserve little sympathy for dying. 
 Most of us have well-merited death before 
 it comes — I speak, of course, only of the 
 death of those in life's afternoon. Few 
 keep the young life pliant and free beyond 
 the age of fifty. If people could see that 
 life is the maker and molder of organiza- 
 tion, and if they would seek immortality 
 
172 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 upon earth, I believe men might come to 
 live a hundred years. Trees learn to live 
 thousands of years, but they keep youth, 
 and spring, and trust, and love, forever 
 nestling with the birds among the rejuv- 
 enescent leaves of spring. We die not be- 
 cause the body is weak, but because it has 
 become too strong. We die because there 
 is no real continuance and strength in any- 
 thing but the non-physical, and we have 
 trusted in the physical. Matter without 
 free life is inert, moved only from without : 
 the dead body is simply matter without 
 life. It is not the blacksmith's arm that 
 is strong; without nerve-force it cannot 
 raise an ounce, cannot raise itself. 
 Whence the nerve-force? From the gan- 
 glionic gray cells of the spinal cord and 
 brain. And whence these little gray cells? 
 The dear stupid physiologist has now 
 reached his limit, and you can confidently 
 answer for him that it was Life that cre- 
 ated these things, Life that existed before 
 muscles, nerves, and cells, and that slowly 
 fashioned them; Life, an order of exist- 
 ence in no imaginable way analogous to, 
 
IMMORTALITY 173 
 
 or to be confounded with matter or mech- 
 anics. There is in the history of thought 
 no more ludicrous and dismal failure than 
 the attempt to explain life in terms of 
 mechanics. The hope of the materialist 
 that science would prove his prejudice is 
 torn to tatters. The children of the spirit 
 are amazed at the bat-blind inability to 
 see the fact, — to see that life is more cer- 
 tain and enduring than matter, soul than 
 sense. The organs of the body are 
 changed, diseased, die ; the body itself dies ; 
 generations of bodies die, but like a re- 
 taining cord of silk, on which all the glit- 
 tering beads of flesh are strung, there is 
 the soul, the life, ever the same, persisting 
 unchanged through all change, giving unity 
 to diversity, molding, making, discarding, 
 choosing, healing, working to far-away 
 ends with blind, and dead, and obstinate 
 materials. You love the flesh over-much 
 and jealous life says to you, "Take it, 
 then, this so loved and wondrous flesh ; me 
 you have not loved,' 9 — and lo! the dead 
 body, useless, decaying, lies before you. 
 Let no materialistic misreading of science 
 
174 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 hoodwink you into any blurring of the out- 
 lines between matter and life. 1 The two 
 are as far apart as heaven and earth, are 
 as dissimilar as thought can conceive, — 
 perhaps in a final analysis, are the only 
 two things of the universe. There is no 
 fact of science showing the faintest war- 
 rant for confounding the two. Even Hux- 
 ley calls materialism the most baseless of 
 all dogmas. It will probably be found that 
 there is but one element of which all others 
 are duplications and combinations, atoms 
 being but centers of force. But life is 
 irresolvable into any form of matter or 
 mechanical energy. It is not only unthink- 
 able that matter could originate life, but 
 it is demonstrably absurd. No scientist 
 to-day believes in spontaneous generation. 
 Ornne vivum, etc., is an axiom. The plant 
 has no nervous system and yet has every 
 physiological function possessed by the hu- 
 man body. It has contractility, irritabil- 
 ity, respiration, anabolism, katabolism, and 
 
 i Those who think this view is the voice of faith 
 and not of true science may profitably read a little book 
 that has come to my notice since writing these pages: 
 Life Theories and Religious Thought, by Lionel S» 
 IBeale. 
 
IMMORTALITY 175 
 
 reproductivity, — that is, it has spontane- 
 ous movement, it responds to stimulation, 
 it breathes, it assimilates, it excretes, it 
 begets its like, — and physiologically this 
 is all you can do. Nay, more than this, 
 even a drop of the jelly-like protoplasm 
 that makes up the basis of all cell-struc- 
 tures, animal or vegetable, has also all of 
 these qualities or powers. 1 There are 
 bundles of wholly structureless, unorgan- 
 ized jelly that exhibit these capacities in 
 a wonderful degree. There is, for in- 
 stance, Hydra viridis, that has no eyes and 
 yet sees, no brain or nerves and yet lies in 
 wait for prey, pursues and fights, or flees 
 from danger. Turned inside out it lives 
 
 1 According to the latest scientific researches the de- 
 pendence of all organization upon life is more clearly 
 shown than ever. My friend Dr. Edmund Montgom- 
 ery twenty-five years ago, as a result of extended ex- 
 periment and research, showed that the body of ani- 
 mals is not an aggregation of cells, the force of the 
 whole being derived from the enslaving and utiliz- 
 ing these subordinate organisms, but that the whole 
 body is a single protoplasmic living connected mass or 
 unit with functionally specialized parts. That this 
 view is the scientific view of to-day and that the cell- 
 aggregate theory is dead may be seen by consulting the 
 article "Zelle," by Prof. Frommen in Eulenburg's Real- 
 Encyclopddie der gesammten Heilkunde, 1890. 
 
176 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 and digests its food as well as before. It 
 holds live worms down with an improvised 
 arm when they try to get out of its stom- 
 ach. Any part reproduces all. Cut off 
 the bottom of its stomach and it goes on 
 eating, quite untroubled by the little acci- 
 dent, — and so on. A great, wise, blind 
 man has defined evolution, or life, as the 
 integration of matter and the dissipation 
 of motion during which the matter passes 
 from an indefinite incoherent homogeneity 
 to a definite coherent heterogeneity, and 
 during which the motion undergoes a par- 
 allel transformation. Some one else im- 
 proved upon this by saying that it was "a 
 change from a no-howish, untalkaboutable 
 all-alikeness, to a some-howish and in gen- 
 eral talkaboutable not-all-alikeness, by con- 
 tinuous something-elsifications and all- 
 togetherations." Schelling said that life 
 was the tendency to individuation. But 
 the crystal or the planet shows that, and 
 they are not living. As the hand cannot 
 grasp itself, neither can life define itself. 
 All definitions I have seen miss the essen- 
 tial and primal characteristics of spontan- 
 eous movement. But all definitions begin 
 
IMMORTALITY 177 
 
 by begging the question — assuming the 
 thing explained. The truth is that there is 
 no definition or explanation possible. The 
 dualism of matter and life must be ac- 
 cepted. There is no monism can bridge 
 the gulf between mechanics and life. In- 
 organic matter with its inherent forces and 
 laws cannot be conceived as ever coming 
 into or as passing out of existence. From 
 all eternity it was as it is, and so it will 
 remain. The physical universe shows no 
 hint of design, no glimpse of freedom, no 
 trace of intelligence, no suggestion of a 
 maker or God. It has no power of choice, 
 no spontaneous motion. But the merest 
 speck of living matter is utterly and abso- 
 lutely different. It may have eyes or no 
 eyes, and yet it sees, ears or not and yet 
 it hears, nerves or not and yet it feels and 
 reacts, brain or not and yet it thinks and 
 plans, and acts in accordance with intel- 
 lectual resolves. The dead body of your 
 child is most inconceivably different from 
 the living body of an hour ago. 
 
 The one fundamental mystery of the ex- 
 plainable world is why life seeks objectifi- 
 cation in material forms, and why it seeks 
 
i;8 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 it with such vehemence and ardor. Life 
 seems to bite at matter as if with fam- 
 ishing hunger. One wonders if from some 
 other planet life is being suddenly starved 
 out or banished by some catastrophe, and 
 as a consequence there is thence an over- 
 emigration of the hungry Huns upon 
 our earth. Certain confused and con- 
 fusion-breeding philosophers in the in- 
 terests of a theoretical monism or panthe- 
 ism pretend to find or to believe that the 
 rorganic is born out of the inorganic, 
 that the physical world shows evidence of 
 design, that life and mentality were im- 
 plicate and latent in preexistent mat- 
 ter. Yet they will accept the evidence 
 against spontaneous generation derived 
 from the fact that if you kill all organic 
 life by intense heat and then exclude 
 life from without you will never find 
 life to arise. But it is plain that in the 
 condensation of the dust of space into suns 
 and planets all organic life was killed in 
 the hottest of all conceivable heat. But 
 as the planets cool, life appears. It must 
 have come from without, and must there- 
 fore be a universal self-existent power. 
 
IMMORTALITY 179 
 
 Why, or how, or whence life comes to us 
 we do not know now, but the transcendent 
 miracle is ever before our eyes: infinitely 
 rich and free ; life is filling, thrilling, sur- 
 charging every molecule of matter to which 
 with wondrous power and ingenuity it can 
 gain access. It covers every thousandth 
 of an inch of the earth's surface, dives into 
 the deepest ocean depths, fills the air as 
 high as the mountain tops, ever unsatisfied, 
 ever grasping up a million million renais- 
 sant forms, never resting, never baffled. 
 Before this omnipresent god one stands in 
 rapt amazement and worship. To matter, 
 then, life first brought, and still ever brings 
 the power of organization, of adaptation, 
 of spontaneous energy, and of movement. 
 But when the death of the organization 
 takes place, the life that preceded and 
 formed it is not lessened or affected. 
 When the watch wears out does it 
 prove that the watchmaker is dead? It is 
 more rational to suppose that the watch- 
 maker has kept on with his work, that he 
 has made and will make many more 
 watches, and I therefore judge that the 
 life of each of us, that existed before our 
 
180 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 bodies, that formed our bodies, will still 
 form other bodies after ours. The Ori- 
 ental doctrine of the transmigration of 
 souls is not to be accepted in its crude 
 details, but it is doubtless a great truth. 
 It is more rational and more consonant 
 with what we know of life, than the theory 
 of wasted life implicate in the barbaric 
 notion of sending numberless millions of 
 souls to hell to do nothing but suffer use- 
 less pain, and other millions to heaven to 
 suffer (I use the word advisedly) useless 
 pleasure. Any theory of immortality that 
 rests upon the assumption of uselessness 
 and waste may be quickly set aside. Just 
 as matter and force are indestructible, 
 various forms of force being interchange- 
 able, so it must be with life. There must 
 be a conservation of life-energy just as 
 rigid, and this truth must remake and re- 
 mold the whole conception of immortality. 
 When a mechanical force disappears in one 
 phase, it at once reappears in another 
 aspect. Thus vegetable animal and mental 
 life are but different aspects of life-force, 
 and suffer no loss when transformed one 
 into the other, or when the body disappears 
 
IMMORTALITY 181 
 
 altogether. And as it is the inherent na- 
 ture of force never to rest so there is no 
 rest for life. Banishment of life to a 
 heaven of inaction is as impossible as it is 
 absurd. 
 
 This extension of the law of the con- 
 servation of force to things biologic and 
 psychic is a two-edged sword: it offers 
 conclusive evidence of the fallacy of the 
 materialist and unbeliever. There is no 
 annihilation; your life at death not only 
 may not stop but cannot stop. Life is as 
 inextinguishable as physical force. On the 
 other hand this sword deals the death blow 
 to two equally shallow fallacies of believ- 
 ers. Just so sure as it insures the preser- 
 vation of your life, of all that is worth 
 preservation, just so sure it denies the 
 possibility of preserving what was bound 
 up with and produced by organization, — 
 that is, individuality and personal identity. 
 These things, if not entirely, are certainly 
 largely the products of your peculiar 
 physical and physiological organization. 
 Whatever is born of the flesh must perish 
 with the flesh; what is born of the spirit 
 shall inherit eternal life. But the pro- 
 
182 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 foundest and most distinguishing rebuke is 
 given the unscientific, puerile, selfish as- 
 sumption of the waste, loss, and useless- 
 ness of life involved in the old theory of 
 heaven and hell. "When from a chemical 
 compound you take away and liberate one 
 element or compound radicle, does it then 
 shoot off into space to " flock all by itself" 
 for eternity? By no means! It at once 
 rushes into a new combination with its 
 nearest neighbor, quickly picking up again 
 the round of its duty and function. The 
 curious notion that after having done work 
 in one body, life or souls should at once 
 rush off to some far-away star, there to 
 sing or howl for eternity was a childish ab- 
 surdity. One wonders where even an 
 omnipotent God could get material for such 
 an amazing manufacture and loss of souls. 
 The theory also forgot that logic demands 
 that what should live forever in the future 
 must perforce have lived forever in the 
 past. A rope, if it have one end, must 
 have two ends. What, therefore, have our 
 souls been doing during this past eternity? 
 The truth is that absolutely speaking there 
 cannot be souls, but only soul. Life 
 
IMMORTALITY 183 
 
 is a unit, and indivisible. The tiniest bit 
 of bioplasm holds and represents all of 
 life. Neither yon nor it are separable 
 from the whole. There may be education 
 and progressive evolution of life as a 
 whole, but there can be no individual and 
 selfish salvation apart from the salvation 
 of all other souls. The idea that release 
 from the body at once releases a soul from 
 action, duty, and the work of life, is an 
 illogicality that could have arisen in no 
 mind conversant with the demonstrated 
 law of the non-wastage of force in any 
 work of energy elsewhere. Life is never 
 tired; it is the body that requires rest not 
 the spirit. The old doctrine of heaven, an 
 eternity of laziness, was the sigh of the 
 sluggish flesh whipped to ceaseless work 
 by the unresting life. The desire of 
 heaven was the desire of eternal death. 
 
 This extension of the idea of non- wast- 
 age, the rigid conservation and intercon- 
 vertibility of force, to things of life, gains 
 a new significance and grandeur when we 
 consider that whatever proves the immor- 
 tality of man proves the immortality of 
 every other animal or vegetable form. 
 
184 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 The tree and horse have a soul quite as 
 well as you, and must live after death 
 quite as surely as you will. It is the flim- 
 siest of conceits that makes men think they 
 are endowed with a special sort of soul or 
 divine life, different from that of animals 
 or plants. Don't flatter yourself. God 
 takes quite the same loving pains and care 
 in the elimination of a leaf that he does of 
 a brain-cell. Man is but a small part of 
 the animal world, and the whole animal 
 world is but a small part of the total life 
 of the globe. Don't despise the vegetable 
 kingdom: it can do something you cannot 
 do — make living matter out of mineral 
 substances. You could not live a day with- 
 out the food furnished you by "your 
 brothers, the plants." Hence if human 
 life or souls cannot be sent off into space 
 to do nothing, neither can the souls of ani- 
 mals and plants. If we are to have our 
 heaven they must have theirs also. Does 
 not this tangential theory begin to be 
 clumsy and work with huge creakings and 
 difficulties? It looks like reductio ad ab- 
 surdum. 
 
 Not only is the tangential theory contra- 
 
IMMORTALITY 185 
 
 dictory of all physical analogies and all 
 known laws, but it is positively immoral. 
 It is but a refined selfishness. Worldliness 
 is none the less sinful because it is other- 
 worldliness. If billions of souls could thus 
 be wasted in an eternity of useless pain 
 or pleasure, could thus, drunken with in- 
 dividuation, hug their own sweet ghosts 
 for never-ending time — then were life a 
 farce, the universe a huge meaningless ma- 
 chine for grinding out waste and useless 
 souls. But if all life, past or future, is 
 one and indivisible, purposive, educational, 
 then the world becomes full of meaning 
 and the face of the Father, Life, smiles 
 out at us from every living thing. The 
 faith of all good men that goodness is at 
 the heart of things is justified. The Earth 
 becomes our home, that we can love; our 
 Father ever dwelleth here; we cannot be 
 banished. When we have finished our 
 task, when our body has worn out, tireless 
 life, of which we are the children and heirs, 
 gives us here and now other work to do. 
 
 To matter, this tremendous cosmical 
 game of incarnation can mean nothing. 
 .We see the dead flesh break up into sim- 
 
186 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 pier chemical forms and the atoms finally 
 spin off unaltered by their flesh-dance, 
 again to be caught up by the mystic and 
 unseen Master, again to be pressed into 
 organic forms, — forms that like empty 
 sea-shells only show where life has been. 
 And so on forever. But to life some edu- 
 cative purpose must be operative through 
 it all. Life that made eyes must see more 
 than eyes; life that made brains must 
 know more than brains. There is doubt- 
 less pain and strain ; but is there to be no 
 ultimate justification? We may catch 
 glimpses of reasons. Do we not see an 
 increase both of quantity and quality of 
 life in geologic times? Is life trying to 
 do away with death and heredity? Are 
 they but makeshifts, death but a discarding 
 of too obstinate material? Birth but a re- 
 tempering and reworking of the same 
 material? Heredity but the temporary 
 means of passing life and its experiences 
 onward until death and birth shall be 
 found unnecessary in a growing command 
 of chemical and physical forces that shall 
 banish old age out of the world? There 
 is no inherent reason why a body should 
 
IMMORTALITY 187 
 
 grow decrepit. If it can be made to pre- 
 serve its suppleness for fifty years why 
 not for a thousand? It may transpire that 
 the dream of an elixir of life may come 
 true through scientific progress despite the 
 savage death-blow given it by Brown- 
 Sequard. The more sin, selfishness, and 
 wrong there is the shorter is the average 
 length of human lives. If you will look 
 into the rich and awful science of statistics 
 you will find proof of this in every class 
 of society. When we apply ourselves to 
 enrich and lengthen our life-time with the 
 same zeal we now use in killing each other 
 1 — when the endowments of the world's 
 scientific schools equal the cost of the 
 world's armies then there will be a very 
 different life-table found in the insurance- 
 offices. 
 
 Finally with mournful echoing recur- 
 rence comes the old question: How much 
 of individuality persists and passes un- 
 touched through death's fingers? How 
 far does the graduate life carry with it the 
 results of experience? I would answer: 
 All that you ought to desire, all that is best, 
 all that you will want when you fully 
 
188 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 understand how little and poor is individu- 
 ality and that there is something including 
 it and far better. I have a strange inabil- 
 ity, personally, to understand the, to me, 
 absurd hunger after personal identity. It 
 appears to me a childish obtuseness of 
 character. The great and glorious free- 
 ness and largeness of life, the decentral- 
 ized, impersonal quality of it seems to be 
 unappreciated. I do not see how people 
 can fail to understand that personal iden- 
 tity is not only impossible, does not exist 
 now and here, but that the desire of it is 
 the renunciation of progress. We grow 
 and advance only by change, only by break- 
 ing up identity and becoming other. 
 Think also of the lack of identity or indi- 
 viduality in nature. There is no person- 
 ality and individualism there, and yet there 
 is something that includes personality and 
 is much more. There is will, conscious- 
 ness, intelligence, life, — but not identity 
 or individuality. So the life that is the 
 heart of us invites us to leave our little 
 self and find a larger self. Eeligion is our 
 yes to that invitation. Materialism and 
 pessimism is the saying no to it. The 
 
IMMORTALITY 189 
 
 immortality that is alone possible or de- 
 sirable is the losing of our life, the indi- 
 vidual identity-loving life, again to find it 
 as the impersonal but richer, deeper life 
 of nature and God. God denies you an 
 immortality of individualism and identity 
 because he loves you so well that he re- 
 fuses you your crude childish desire in 
 order to offer you something infinitely bet- 
 ter. People do not seem to see how 
 narrow, small and partial is the dissociate 
 speck of the individual, and that as an 
 individual progresses in all the virtues of 
 character he ever becomes proportionally 
 less individual and less centralized, always 
 more like the divine prototype of his im- 
 personal father, Life. The love of indi- 
 vidualism is the love of imperfection. 
 This may to some seem a hard doctrine. 
 It is not perhaps an easy task for the 
 butterfly to break its way out through the 
 manifold bonds of its cocoon, but when 
 risen into the large air and sunshine does 
 it regret the birth-struggle? They who 
 think they are being cheated of reality for 
 a metaphysic illusion will find in breaking 
 through the bonds of flesh that they also 
 
igo THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 have brought with them splendid wings 
 for rising in the no less real but rarer air 
 of spiritual trust in life. It is not that we 
 love less the thousand ties of flesh, home 
 and kindred, but that in recognizing the 
 paternity and fraternity of all life, we find 
 love commensurate with that life. I do 
 not think there was any cold, stony harsh- 
 ness in the face of Jesus when he uttered 
 those most profoundly significant of all 
 words, "Who is my mother, and who are 
 my brethren ? Whosoever shall do the will 
 of my Father, the same is my brother, and 
 sister, and mother." What a recall to the 
 common life of the spirit? What unity 
 with the common life based upon loving 
 obedience to the will of the Father. What 
 a wonderful rebuke of the love of individ- 
 ualism. He did not love his mother less 
 but humanity more. The more we rise 
 into that impersonal atmosphere the more 
 are we careless of the fate of per- 
 sonal identity. The composite photograph 
 shows the fundamental and enduring qual- 
 ity, the average feature. In a certain 
 sense life and history are taking human- 
 ity's composite photograph; but, inordi- 
 
IMMORTALITY 191 
 
 nately-loving individualism, each sitter 
 conceitedly demands that his own picture 
 be left -untouched and unblurred by that 
 of the others, and that his poor little por- 
 trait shall stand alone and forever — pre- 
 cisely what the divine photographer does 
 not wish and will not permit. Obstinacy 
 persists and God smashes the negative to 
 the ground with the unanswerable argu- 
 ment called death. Because it is more 
 than metaphor that in many ways your 
 body may be likened unto a photographer's 
 negative: created, for example, by the in- 
 flashing of a heavenly ray of light among 
 the highly unstable chemicals of matter; 
 useless, except as an intermediate step to 
 a clearer showing of the character; black 
 and invisible unless shone through by the 
 pure light of life and love ; fragile as glass, 
 — and lastly the poor, weak, shadowy, dead 
 counterfeit of a throbbing, marvellous, liv- 
 ing reality. The hunger for an immortal- 
 ity of the body, of the senses, the lust of 
 immortality, is, in empty fatuousness, only 
 comparable to the mania of a crazy pho- 
 tographer interested only in his negatives, 
 and who never " develops " one, or to the 
 
192 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 foolishness that values photographs more 
 than the friends themselves. If we once 
 get our spiritual eye fixed upon the deep 
 reality and unity hidden by the Maia-veil- 
 ings of individuality and flesh, the cravings 
 of our weak hearts for eternal continuance 
 of our little bundle of littlenesses, would 
 fall away from us as softly as the wayward 
 longings of childhood. We could then see 
 that it is the quality of all life, the progres- 
 sive purity, power, and increase of life in 
 the abstract, that become all-important. 
 Eeligion would become the love and ven- 
 eration of Life the Father of us ; morality 
 the cheerful obedience of the individual to 
 that Father ; Heaven the reentrance of the 
 individual life into the great unity. Much 
 of the old religion was irreligious ; its God 
 a far-away dead abstraction, not a living, 
 ever-present-love; its immortality was at 
 heart a desire for death, its spiritualism 
 at heart a barbaric materialism. To this 
 death of faith and irreligious religion, 
 comes the sympathetic study and love of 
 nature — that is, science — and reveals to us 
 the opulence of life, the infinity of intel- 
 lect in nature, the inexhaustibleness of her 
 
IMMORTALITY. 193 
 
 resources and of her diversity, her beauty, 
 and her splendor. The old materialistic 
 degradation of religion forefelt its doom 
 would come from this spiritualistic revivi- 
 fication, and the devotees cried out against 
 science as atheistic. And science found 
 some foolish enemies in her own camp who, 
 misreading their divine book, joined in the 
 cry — ' ' Nothing but mechanics ! ' l It was a 
 dismal short-lived croak. We now see that 
 not only are science and her workers reli- 
 gious, but without scientific knowledge 
 there can be no adequate idea or practice of 
 religion. You can't love God unless you 
 love and know what he is doing in this 
 universe. The man who in a walk goes 
 neglectfully and obliviously by a million 
 mysteries and wonders which God has been 
 toiling to eliminate for ages, — such a man 
 cannot lay much claim to God's friendship. 
 If we love our friend, we have some inter- 
 est in the deepest concern of his life. The 
 foolishest of all fears is the fear that sci- 
 ence is somehow going to destroy all good 
 things of faith and life. In truth it reveals 
 all good things. It demonstrates and man- 
 ifests both God and immortality, — God as 
 
i 9 4 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 the Father of all life, immortality as the 
 surety of the conservation and non-wastage 
 of that life. Much of the fear of science, 
 is, as I have said, the fear of the old mate- 
 rialistic religion in presence of the larger 
 faith that burns up its beloved errors. 
 They who had been promised and had 
 argued themselves into a groundless belief 
 in the value and immortality of a bundle 
 of sensual appetites, selfish desires, and 
 imperfections saw far in advance that any 
 large study of life and nature would dash 
 their wretched faith to atoms. And sci- 
 ence has over-ridden this unfaithful faith. 
 "He that soweth to his flesh shall of the 
 flesh reap corruption; but he that soweth 
 to the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life 
 everlasting." This is as true scientifically 
 as it is true morally and religiously. 
 
 People generally cherish the delusion 
 that their hunger, pretended or real, for 
 immortality is a virtue and a thing to be 
 proud of. Careful observation has con- 
 vinced me that in many cases it is distinctly 
 and nothing less than a very narrow sort 
 of selfishness. It does not usually flow 
 from a large love of life, or of the things 
 
IMMORTALITY 195 
 
 Life is seeking to bring about in this world. 
 People who believe most vindictively in 
 the belief are such as have done very little 
 toward enlarging their own life or that of 
 their fellow-men. It is commonly sup- 
 posed that there can be no greater heresy 
 and injury to both religion and morality, 
 than any negative attitude toward the be- 
 lief, or doubt thrown upon it. But I am 
 convinced that it is very commonly, if not 
 usually, of distinctly pernicious influence 
 upon character and society. If one be- 
 lieves in the old-fashioned "soul," and in 
 its " salvation/ ' and that one's own soul 
 has a surety of heaven, nothing can more 
 effectually breed practical fatalism, laissez- 
 faire, and egregious conceit. The consum- 
 mate ludicrousness of a " sanctified' ' and 
 saintly crank is only better concealed in 
 many who have been less clumsy in the 
 self-cheating and delusional processes of 
 mind whereby they have erected a very 
 high wall to hide ugly truths and plain 
 duties from view. The perfervidness of 
 the belief, moreover, has always a plain 
 smell of intoxication about it; it is almost 
 always an artificial emotion, whose 
 
196 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 strength is largely dependent upon the 
 amount of misery and poverty hidden by 
 the illusion of a false gaiety and a pre- 
 tended certainty. 
 
 There was once a splendid scoundrel who 
 defied government and armies with a horde 
 of invincible slaves to whom danger was 
 delight, and who sought death by unfal- 
 tering obedience to their master. Their 
 belief in after-life, and in its disposal by 
 their tyrant god, was made incomprehen- 
 sibly strong by the trick of drugging them 
 with a narcotic, and, while insensible, con- 
 veying them to a mountain paradise where 
 every delight of every sense was drenched 
 with satisfaction. After this foretaste of 
 heaven, they were again put to sleep and 
 conveyed to the world, and after this there 
 was no doubt about obedience to the com- 
 mands of a master who had at his dis- 
 posal such a heaven as that. To get on 
 the safe side, to win by excess of flattery 
 or obedience the good will of a tyrant god, 
 has been too common a characteristic of 
 religion; and so, alas, has the seeking of 
 immortality often been a sharp looking out 
 for " number one" in the chances of life. 
 
IMMORTALITY 197 
 
 Just as the sacrificial aspects of much re- 
 ligion, scape-goat sheep and scape-goat 
 Christs, have been tricks, fine or flimsy, 
 to get rid of conscience and compound 
 with the devil called God, so the attainment 
 of heaven has frequently been a fine game 
 to get the advantage of one's enemies, 
 and of those not so cunning. The rabid- 
 ness of the belief has usually depended 
 upon the proportion of the few saved 
 and the many damned, and the frightful 
 immorality of any salvation whatsoever 
 enjoyed, while there was any damnation 
 suffered, was a thought kept well out of 
 sight. 
 
 The unconscious power and origin of the 
 belief, however, have, of course, come from 
 larger and deeper minds and reasons than 
 such self-seekers could fathom. The aris- 
 ing of the belief in historical times and 
 religions, where it was heretofore non-exis- 
 tent, seems to me another example of the 
 breaking forth of the consciousness of 
 man's divine origin in nature, this con- 
 sciousness and belief having been kept in 
 abeyance by the demands of the nutritional 
 struggle and progress in incarnation. 
 
198 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 These early shapings of the doctrine are 
 the crude ploughing and breaking of the 
 ground for a better harvest. No great re- 
 ligious truth comes so suddenly to perfec- 
 tion as this, and the belief must yet cleanse 
 itself of outrageous crudities, and perfect 
 itself to finer issues and more truthful 
 truth. After the establishment of the fact 
 comes the limitations of degrees, and the 
 refinement of qualities. Like all other de- 
 ductive and religious truths, this belief 
 must be made scientific; the rational sys- 
 tematizing consciousness must take it in 
 hand, and it must submit to the calm es- 
 timation of proof, limit, and degree, of a 
 sympathetic but unbiased judgment. 
 
 "If a man die shall he live again !" 
 The very wording of the question betrays 
 the visible hope, the doubtful longing. 
 One feels the wavelet poised for an instant 
 in semi-independence, and the large ocean 
 certain to draw it back again. The word- 
 ing also betrays the crudity of the con- 
 ception, and answers itself. There is 
 shown an entire lack of discrimination as 
 to meaning of words, and extent of facts. 
 What is man? What is death? What is 
 
IMMORTALITY 199 
 
 it to live again? To the unthinking the 
 answers seem very easy to give, but to the 
 thoughtful they arouse profound counter- 
 queries. 
 
 In the ordinary and accepted definition 
 of the word, "a man" is understood to 
 be any representative of the genus Homo, 
 whether he be a nameless African savage, 
 or one of civilization's most cultivated 
 scientists. If the fact of possession of the 
 human form implies the possession of an 
 undying soul-life, then no line can be 
 drawn at the upper limits of the animal 
 or vegetable kingdoms. Everything that 
 lives is so strikingly filled with the same 
 mental force, that it is the veriest trifling 
 to deny any animal and plant the same 
 right and necessity of future living as our- 
 selves. This brings into view the clear 
 evidence of absurdity in the common doc- 
 trine. According to that doctrine heaven, 
 or the function of the future life, is 
 to be one of enjoyment and general 
 objectlessness. There is here a with- 
 drawal of divine energy from use or work 
 that is unlike anything else known or 
 thinkable in all the worlds of mind or mat- 
 
200 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 ter. If the possession of such "soul," di- 
 visible from body, is certain in man, it is, 
 as I have said, certain in animal or plant, 
 and if by natural or divine ordering, this 
 homo-soul, at the death of the body, rushes 
 away from earth and work, so, precisely, 
 must animal and plant-soul spurn matter 
 and life therein. Not to assent to this in- 
 troduces a new principle: either animal- 
 soul and homo-soul are essentially differ- 
 ent, (which nobody would now be silly 
 enough to affirm), or there is introduced 
 a stage of progress or a degree of soul only 
 thus rewarded. To make salvation or the 
 heaven-getting of soul depend upon any 
 such indeterminate and indeterminable 
 point of progress or merit is, from that 
 point of view, to land the whole question 
 in an immovable cloud of vagueness. To 
 drain off from earth and from functional 
 activity the souls of plant, animal, and hu- 
 man beings that die in one year alone, 
 would require an infinite inexhaustibleness 
 of the Source of Life. There is not the 
 least reason to suppose that the law of the 
 conservation of energy is not as rigidly 
 applicable to Life as to any other form of 
 
IMMORTALITY 201 
 
 force. To attempt to conceive it other- 
 wise lands us at once into unthinkableness 
 and nonsense. 
 
 We therefore see that any fact of immor- 
 tality must be in harmony with the fact 
 of the life or soul of all living things, and 
 that functionless life or soul is quite as 
 abhorrent and unthinkable as functionless 
 force of any kind. The beauty of such a 
 conclusion is the proof that the sort of a 
 soul and heaven commonly desired is as 
 inethical and irreligious as it is unscien- 
 tific and impossible. " Salvation " was a 
 spoiled child's theft of the cake of hap- 
 piness and hiding in the garret of heaven 
 to eat it alone. There may be such a 
 heaven of inactive enjoyment and selfish 
 pleasure, but God's Buddhas do not enter 
 it while the struggle of the world-process 
 is still going on, and I have such a firm 
 conviction of His loving justice that if 
 His Buddhas beneficently postpone it of 
 their own will, selfish laziness will hardly 
 be able to steal past His inattention. Par- 
 asitism is, after all, a very small fact in 
 the world, and even that is usually made 
 to confer indirect blessing. The radiation 
 
202 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 of the sun's light into space is not lost or 
 losable, and if there is such an irradiation 
 of Soul into the regions of space as the 
 common idea holds, I suspect it is none 
 the less functional and utilized somewhere 
 and sometime. As neither can be annihi- 
 lated, they must go on until " absorption' ' 
 does take place. What is the influence 
 upon character of persistent enjoyment or 
 resting, is plainly seen in the depravity 
 and mental vacuity of our social do-noth- 
 ings. Life is a force, and Biologos is of 
 all things a worker: it is hardly probable 
 He will excuse His forces from activity, 
 or His souls from work. Heaven is quite 
 the last and absurdest thing to think of. 
 
 As we daily see, there are two ways 
 whereby soul-activity is kept persistent, 
 and immortality really attained : by hered- 
 ity, and by spiritual influence. The first is 
 more physical in mechanism, and seem- 
 ingly the more powerful ; but the second, I 
 doubt not, is, in a large way, quite as real 
 and more effectively strong. Marcus 
 Aurelius sends his thoughts, the sample 
 and ideal of his soul, down the centuries, 
 and procreates spiritual children wherever 
 
IMMORTALITY 203 
 
 his words go. But by heredity is the more 
 certain and methodical manner, and no sin 
 is greater than that of large minds and 
 hearts refusing or ignoring the duty of 
 child-raising. It is towards this that the 
 world-process has struggled for a million 
 years, and the thread of purpose, tire- 
 lessly and patiently followed through the 
 long labyrinth of development, is thus 
 cruelly snapped in an hour of selfishness 
 and waywardness. If there is any signifi- 
 cance and object in the incarnation-process, 
 it is bound up with the best type of civ- 
 ilized manhood and womanhood. There- 
 fore, the very acme of sin against the Holy 
 Ghost is refusal to perpetuate that type. 
 If the old idea of a judgment-day were a 
 truth, the first question asked of the civ- 
 ilized sinner would be not as to murder 
 or any crime against present society alone, 
 but as to the more heinous crime of dis- 
 loyalty to God Himself, to His work, and 
 to the future, by wilful disobedience to the 
 second law of the incarnation-process. 
 
 And if by circumstance or accident child- 
 raising is refused to one, it behooves him 
 to devote the same energy and self-sacri- 
 
204 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 fice to the fundamental aim of Biologos: 
 orphans are to be raised, and the work 
 helped onward as evidently purposed. 
 Or, if perhaps to such be given an excep- 
 tional power of thought, or other means of 
 after-death influence upon the world, that 
 function should be exercised as a distinct 
 atonement. "It is dangerous to be be- 
 lieved," only when the belief inculcated 
 contradicts the evident purposes of the 
 subtle wisdom moving all life. There is 
 never much danger in simple kindness, and 
 much of our misery and sin come from 
 lack of it. 
 
 The genuine "victory over death " and 
 the grave will come only in the persistence 
 of continuity of the pliant and progressive 
 individual. In the meantime, the thought- 
 ful kindness of God is shown in the peace 
 and silent ease with which duteous souls 
 slip the bonds of finished life. To those 
 who have completed their clear duties, 
 death's visage is no horrible one, and to 
 them the final rest comes as the night's 
 sleep, which is indeed a daily warning and 
 reminder of it, and initiator into it. 
 From His obedient animals He has hidden 
 
IMMORTALITY 205 
 
 the very knowledge of death, and at life's 
 proper ending His obedient human chil- 
 dren have become so wearied with the long 
 day's work, and the twilight of life's even- 
 ing so softly and sweetly passes into the 
 night of death, that the silence of the un- 
 seen stars only equals the silence of the 
 tired-out heart. The body has not been 
 their chief love, nor things corporeal their 
 sole concern, and, in losing the body, self 
 has not therefore been lost. But it is they 
 who have not been loyal to God and aidful 
 in His work, they who have not found, ex- 
 plored, and utilized their own spiritual na- 
 tures, these are they that fear death and 
 shudder with horror at his approach. Ee- 
 liance upon the spiritual generates that 
 confidence in it that robs death of his terri- 
 bleness. They who have loved life for the 
 body's sake, thinking corporeality the end 
 and not the means, such naturally feel that 
 in giving up the body, all is given up. 
 "The lack of evidence of immortality," 
 of which the complaint is common, seems 
 to me a most wise provision on God's part. 
 The lack must continue until the task to 
 which we are set is completed, and the 
 
206 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 consciousness of one's own immortal na- 
 ture is so clear that evidence of the com- 
 mon sort would be positively needless, or 
 even repulsive. It is well that the evi- 
 dence furnished by the motley crew of 
 spiritists is so valueless and inconclusive, 
 else the race in possession of such a cer- 
 tainty would become as spiritually de- 
 graded and vapidly materialistic as these 
 precious folk. God would indeed be cruel 
 to provide such a heaven for us, or to make 
 us so convinced of an undeserved immor- 
 tality, that the lesson of corporeal life 
 would be utterly misused. Mankind are 
 always seeking and making for themselves 
 the illusions of fatalisms and certainties 
 which excuse inertia and obviate the pain 
 and fact of progress. None such is more 
 potent for evil than this of an unfaltering 
 belief in immortality, which, even if the 
 desired were obtainable, hides duty too 
 deftly, and neglects that preparation of 
 spirit here that alone would make a heaven 
 anywhere. The doubt and the doubtful 
 hope arouse the startled heart to a study of 
 the conditions of immortality, and keep it 
 plastic to the ideas and influence of the 
 
IMMORTALITY 207 
 
 spirit of God ever drawing us subtly and 
 kindly to the life of tlie spirit. 
 
 A little reflection will show us that what 
 is usually prized most as worth a life after 
 death, are those things least liable and 
 least truly worthy to outlive the body. It 
 is individuality, peculiarity, or the specific 
 difference of self that is hugged with an 
 exaggerated care and fervor. But all spir- 
 itual progress is progress out of individ- 
 ualism and peculiarity and difference. 
 Beaching and gaining true personality is 
 leaving and losing true individuality. As 
 we approximate perfection we become 
 nearer alike, and the ideal of all perfection 
 of character is that of God, all imperfec- 
 tions of finiteness having been left and the 
 equilibrium of all attributes attained. 
 The belief in any specific difference of es- 
 sential being is largely begotten and 
 nourished by those differences of organi- 
 zation and corporeality which are consti- 
 tuted by the accidents of incarnation. It 
 is almost impossible to think of them as 
 not rooted solely in matter. As we travel 
 inward along any or all lines of sensa- 
 tion, each organ referring elsewhere for its 
 
208 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 raison d'etre, and as we follow out the 
 reference until is reached the last secret 
 chamber beyond which, there is no refer- 
 ence, we find that we have long since left 
 behind us most that renders us recogniz- 
 able, or individually peculiar. We have 
 thus attained a purity and perfection of 
 our deep inner being that is nearly or quite 
 identical with that of the essential being 
 of everything else that lives, and like that 
 of pure spirit before clothing itself with 
 individuality and materiality. 
 
 Whether a spiritualized and noble per- 
 sonality can hold unified, through and be- 
 yond death, the cluster of peculiarities and 
 attributes which, if existing, are uncaused 
 by the accidents of organization, and that 
 therefore do not end with disorganization, 
 this peculiar cluster that we specifically 
 distinguish as our friend — this neither God 
 nor reason nor experience has certainly 
 told us, and for this doubtful, hopeful, 
 blessed ignorance, let us thank God, and 
 seek not too curiously to raise the veil. 
 Perhaps our ignorance is proof of the com- 
 parative unimportance of the question. 
 As the highest souls value the distinct and 
 
IMMORTALITY 209 
 
 separate individuality ever less, and al- 
 ways seek the perfection of non-individual 
 personality, so our means of the attain- 
 ment of genuine immortality is in that 
 power of spirit over time whereby the fu- 
 ture is always present and mortal life is 
 merged into the immortal before death 
 comes. Such souls have long known that 
 materiality or corporeality is the scaffold- 
 ing about the steeple of life (the tower 
 supporting the scaffold as the spirit does 
 the body), and when the spire is completed, 
 the workmen and death remove the hiding 
 framework of both buildings to allow the 
 self-sustaining column to stand forth in 
 naked beauty and aspiring strength. And 
 as in everything else, the beauty and 
 strength, both of spire and of spirit, will 
 approximate the ideal exactly in propor- 
 tion as each has escaped the peculiarities 
 and defects of individualization, and has 
 realized the unique purity and perfection 
 of the divine Architect. 
 
 It requires but a little study of neurology 
 and psychology to give demonstration to 
 this truth. The products of organization 
 die with disorganization. Most, if not all, 
 
2io THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 of what people mean by individuality and 
 personal identity is a product of organiza- 
 tion, is an accident of incarnation. Chil- 
 dren are similar to each other; they are 
 lovable partly because idiosyncrasy and 
 individualism have not yet developed. As 
 we grow older we cultivate individuality, 
 until the very old are often angular, cranky, 
 individual with a vengeance! Death, 
 thank heaven, is the end of that, the cer- 
 tainty of a non-eternalizing of the imper- 
 fect. Birth is a new trial. Incarnation 
 and reincarnation are the ever-renewed 
 work of Life. Through the laws of he- 
 redity, through physiology, sociology, and 
 biology, science is tirelessly illustrating to 
 us how all life holds together, how individ- 
 ualism is valueless, and sacrificed to the 
 common weal. There is no escape, sensual 
 or supersensual, from the world's great 
 common life. The old selfish dream of a 
 heaven apart from incarnation, from doing 
 and becoming was a pitiful mistake. You 
 cannot clutch your cake of happiness and 
 like a spoiled child run into the attic of 
 heaven to eat it alone. Life will see to it 
 that you do not slip off. And if you have 
 
IMMORTALITY 211 
 
 been born again of the spirit you will have 
 no such desire, but will beg for kindred 
 work upon the old earth-home. 
 
 In the meantime the conclusion is clear : 
 to love and aid the work of our master Life 
 we need not wait for death. We may not 
 seek our own salvation; it is no matter 
 whether you and I are saved or not. The 
 reincarnation of life is our work here and 
 now. It took you twenty years to fashion 
 out of a microscopically-small speck of un- 
 organized protoplasm your body and 
 brain. Within us we are to keep that or- 
 ganization from cramping and binding the 
 life, — keep life as large and free and pliant 
 as possible. Outside of us the incarnation 
 goes on as well, and every person you in- 
 fluence either for good or for ill, thus by 
 the fact becomes a product of your incar- 
 nating work. Every day you have a hun- 
 dred opportunities to give, without lessen- 
 ing your own supply, some of your own 
 life, to increase the quantity and to elevate 
 the quality of the general stock of the 
 world's life. Help the young, they inherit 
 the world and will use it well or ill accord- 
 ing to your teaching and example. Stop 
 
212 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 cruelty to animals, they are your brothers, 
 filled with the same life as your own ; fight 
 the political ruin we are preparing for our- 
 selves by partisanship, bribery, and class- 
 legislation; discourage war and intemper- 
 ance and lessen the tyranny of the strong 
 and wealthy. Wage a ceaseless war to the 
 death against luxury, the poison that is 
 eating and rotting the hearts of all of us ; 
 love trees, meadows, clear brooks, the 
 mountains and silences of Nature. Love, 
 not so much your own or another's in- 
 dividual life, as Life itself. There is oth- 
 erwise no immortality. 
 
 The divine story tells us that after meas- 
 ureless suffering and self -purification, 
 Buddha had gained the right to enter Nir- 
 vana. With compassion filling his heart 
 he put his merited reward aside and re- 
 solved to remain without to teach and to 
 help until every child of earth should have 
 become his disciple, and until every dis- 
 ciple should have entered Nirvana before 
 him. Such must be the resolve of every 
 true lover of life and of every right seeker 
 after immortality. 
 
CHAPTEE V 
 
 BACK TO THE OLD WAYS ! * 
 
 While God was still alive and Love was 
 Life, it was not so. In those dear far-off 
 days the young, entering on their work 
 learned to say : 
 
 My duty towards my neighbor is to love him 
 as myself, to honor and obey the civil authority, 
 to submit myself to all my governors and teach- 
 ers, spiritual pastors, and masters ; to order my- 
 self lowly and reverently to all my betters; to 
 hurt nobody by word or deed; to be true and 
 just in all my dealings; to bear no malice nor 
 hatred in my heart; to keep my hands from 
 picking and stealing, and my tongue from evil- 
 speaking, and lying, and slandering; to keep 
 my body in temperance, soberness and chastity; 
 not to covet or desire other men 's goods ; but to 
 learn and labor truly to get mine own living, 
 and to do my duty in that state of life unto 
 which it shall please God to call me. 
 
 i Putnam's Monthly, September, 1907. 
 213 
 
214 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 An echo from some lost Arcadia, that — 
 a sigh of banished ones, as they see the 
 gates of Paradise closing behind them! 
 Do the young at present, do the older ones, 
 indeed, see any meaning in the words, 
 Duty toivards my neighbor? Does one 
 even love himself nowadays? May it not 
 almost be asked, has one really any self? 
 Is not personality itself forgotten or an- 
 nihilated in the mad intensity of the rage 
 for doing and getting? Being is lost in 
 doing. What youth — boy or maid — sub- 
 mits to governors or teachers, desires to 
 do so, or admits that for him pastors and 
 masters exist? Do the young have " man- 
 ners,' ' and are lowliness and reverence to 
 be found in colleges, in preparatory schools 
 or even in common schools ? Do not these 
 boys and girls deny by word and deed that 
 their betters exist? In dealings do they 
 seek to be truthful and just? Is there any 
 aim to keep malice and hatred out of their 
 hearts? "Picking and stealing, evil-speak- 
 ing, lying and slandering," — what crowd 
 of loafing boys or girls, men or women, 
 in any village or city of all the United 
 States, does not illustrate rather than dis- 
 
BACK TO THE OLD WAYS 215 
 
 prove? Is it the aim of many of us to keep 
 our bodies in temperance, soberness and 
 chastity ? It is the age of commercialism ; 
 does not the business youth or the "suc- 
 cessful boss" he emulates covet and desire 
 other men's goods? Who labors truly to 
 get his own living instead of the living of 
 his neighbor? Who feels that God calls 
 him to a state in life, and desires to be 
 satisfied in it? 
 
 Financially it is the stockbroker's age — 
 the village and the small city are held as 
 subordinates of the larger capitalistic cen- 
 ters, which again are simply cunningly 
 woven spider-webs for catching the unwary 
 smaller gamblers. The word, "graft," 
 characteristic if any is of our time, ex- 
 presses the malevolence of its coiners and 
 illustrators. Into a healthy stock, well- 
 rooted and of pristine virtue, the farmer 
 inserts a later cultivated stem, which trans- 
 forms the sterling parent sap to liberal 
 fruitage and more generous yielding. But 
 all for the good of the farmer and culti- 
 vator! Capitalistic cunning caught the 
 hint, and wherever there is an honest pro- 
 ducer there are innumerable grafters, in 
 
216 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 graded series, seeking to steal and wholly 
 take away from him, rooted there in the 
 soil, all his life and sap, and squander the 
 fruitage of his virtue upon the iniquities 
 of distant luxury and vice. Government, 
 an amazing democracy (falsely named), 
 strikes hands, and by means of a so-called 
 protective tariff makes the producer buy 
 at artificially inflated prices and sell in the 
 competitive market. Thus a nation of de- 
 serted farms, of exhausting natural soils, 
 forests and resources, and of systemat- 
 ically embruted farmers. The living, 
 growing thing, the produce of the cultiva- 
 ted land, as we all know and all strive to 
 forget, is the condition not only of a 
 healthy and virtuous people, but of social 
 living itself. To cheat the farmer is poor 
 policy, either nationally or personally, and 
 the appeal to the physicist and chemist, in 
 "the struggle for nitrogen," will \>e of no 
 avail. No more than children will fam- 
 ilies and farmers, wheat and corn and ani- 
 mals, grow without love. God cannot be 
 cheated even by a Wall-street expert. 
 Farming, either of the capitalistic or the 
 small-farm variety, has become like all 
 
BACK TO THE OLD WAYS 217 
 
 other trickinesses, a game of exhausting 
 the soil, which profits for only a little while 
 and in the long run ruins the short-sighted 
 plunderer. When the game is system- 
 atized and governmentalized, it is only an- 
 other ease of " after us, the deluge !" Ex 
 Oriente Lux! As in so much else Japan 
 shows the prodigal Occident the way. 
 With a few thousand square miles of ara- 
 ble land — a mere fraction of that which 
 we wastefully misuse, — she supports, by 
 scientific and prudent cultivation, a popu- 
 lation one-half as great as our own. Back 
 to the Land! must be our insistent and con- 
 tinuous cry. 
 
 Because economics (household govern- 
 ment) is the foundation of all prudence, 
 it is also the foundation of morality; and 
 the cheating and enslaving and brutalizing 
 of the farmer are the greatest and most 
 needlessly stupid of all national sins. The 
 road, Back to the Old Ways leads first Back 
 to the Old Farm, for it is there one best 
 and most thoroughly "learns and labors 
 truly to get his own living." We should 
 even reverse the whole proceedings of the 
 1 ' protective tariff. ' ' The manufacturer 
 
218 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 can surely look out for himself — he needs 
 no artificial stimulus. But the profits of 
 the small-farmer, the tiller of the ground, 
 are hardly gained and doubtfully har- 
 vested; all manufactured and all foreign- 
 made things should be cheapened and 
 brought to his door by every help of legis- 
 lation and device of mechanics. That gov- 
 ernment should plot a game of "graft" 
 upon the 85 per cent of its citizens for the 
 benefit of 15 per cent, is an astonishing 
 evidence of the infamy of the New Ways. 
 To "turn the rascals out," and not put 
 new rascals in, seems therefore the simplest 
 and first duty of farmers and of all who 
 labor truly to get their own living. 
 
 But to do this they must first go back to 
 another of the old ways, the town-meeting 
 — that is, they must first demand back from 
 their political bosses a representative gov- 
 ernment, a true democracy, or a genuine 
 republicanism — for both are the same 
 thing. Democracy must become demo- 
 cratic, and republicanism must re-establish 
 the republic. The old Declaration of In- 
 dependence must be redeclared, and its 
 modern substitute abrogated ; but very ac- 
 
BACK TO THE OLD WAYS 219 
 
 tual dependence must be utterly abolished. 
 It will not be necessary to fight plutocracy 
 if we gain the easy victory over graft- 
 ocracy and bossocracy. 
 
 My friend the tinsmith was yesterday 
 repairing the eaves-troughs about my 
 house and I invited him in to lunch with 
 me. I never sat at table with a better-bred 
 gentleman. He taught me more about la- • 
 bor, trades-unionism, etc., than I had 
 learned in all my reading. His father was 
 one of half a dozen brothers, all good work- 
 men at the tinsmith trade, and one after 
 another he taught his ten sons the same 
 expertness and morality, and these ten men 
 are now at work tinsmithing in two States, 
 all successful, healthy and happy. A man, 
 he said, could make more money, at least 
 for a time, in the city, but he has no 
 mind to move from the village, and for the 
 best of reasons. " There are no appren- 
 tices now," he says, and dozens of his 
 schoolmates who sought careers, foolishly 
 supposed more aristocratic, are sorry fail- 
 ures in life and character. So far as oc- 
 cupation goes the advice to hitch one's 
 wagon to a star is to tumble wagon, horses 
 
 \j 
 
220 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 and driver into the gutter of a deserved 
 failure. In grinding his lenses Spinoza 
 made a poor attempt to " think God," but 
 it was better than to think ungods and no- 
 gods. 
 
 The present-day lens-grinders behind 
 your optician's shop also think some kind 
 of a God — but what kind? They have as 
 good opportunity and as much time for 
 the thinking as had Spinoza. They prob- 
 ably waste both in cursing the "fate" that 
 ties them to their tasks. They are free, 
 however, to break their fate, and their fa- 
 talism. If socialistically inclined, they are 
 certain to bemoan civilization's "differen- 
 tiation of function, ' ' which they think com- 
 pels them to kill mind and ingenuity by 
 day-long, life-long, redoing of the little, 
 humdrum thing. Is not that a confes- 
 sion of inability or disinclination to be like 
 Spinoza, and pass to a freedom of mental 
 action which rests the fingers, the eyes and 
 the attention, drops the lowly stint, and 
 walks among the gods, and with God? 
 Disgust with the calling is not the way to 
 progress. We must all work, and it is a 
 crude observer who has not seen that they 
 
BACK TO THE OLD WAYS 221 
 
 who do not work, if such there are, are 
 not so happy as the workers. The squan- 
 derers and idlers are far more unfortunate 
 than the farmers, the housekeepers or the 
 "servants of machines" in our multiply- 
 ing factories. Is the capitalist more for- 
 tunate or more enviable than his workman? 
 Surely not, unless he has mentality and 
 unselfishness which outrun "capital" and 
 "labor"; and such altruism is as entirely 
 in the laborer's reach as in that of his 
 "master." To do well and to have pride 
 in the doing and the condition of well-be- 
 ing and satisfaction, rather than to do 
 greater things and wield larger power. 
 For the least bolt of the machine of civ- 
 ilization is of as distinct a value as the 
 "governor," and, egotism apart, the gov- 
 ernor itself is a small part of the whole 
 mechanism of modern life. What non- 
 sense is it to be cast down because one is 
 only a cog, or to be puffed up because one 
 is a throttle-valve ! The greatest financier 
 is, in the end, as much a "slave and tool" 
 of the vast social mechanism as the dime- 
 savings-bank depositor. Envy or disdain 
 <on the part of either bears equal witness 
 
'222 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 to his pitiful limitations. Each prefers 
 his slavery to an easily acquired manumis- 
 sion. It is as monotonously wearying, it 
 is as hard labor, to lend, spend, or even 
 to give away an income of millions, as one 
 of a thousand. And the hardest and most 
 pitiable toiler is he who with an income 
 of a few thousands tries to ape the mil- 
 lionaire. In a different sense from this, 
 too, a man may be a millionaire on a thou- 
 sand-dollar income. Should one wish to 
 do veritable good in a charitable way, it 
 is literally true that he may be as helpful 
 to others by a dollar discriminately given 
 as by thousands given without discrimina- 
 tion. One who personalizes charity will 
 accomplish more uplifting by giving him- 
 self than by giving money. The poorest 
 benefit is the financial one, of course. The 
 greater part of bequests and endowments 
 work evil in the long run, as all students 
 of economics well understand. The giver 
 of self, moreover, benefits himself the most, 
 — for the miracle of love is the increase 
 that comes by giving, the breaking up of 
 one's own limitations and bonds by giving 
 freedom to others. As with light, so with 
 
BACK TO THE OLD WAYS 223 
 
 true wealth, sharing with others does not 
 lessen one's own store. And the hidden 
 and denied God knows that labor alone 
 creates character. Character is the reac- 
 tion of will against circumstance. In all 
 things psychic and moral the popular evo- 
 lution doctrine is false. The environment 
 is not the maker of the spirit ; unless fought 
 against, it is the spirit's degrader. Sci- 
 ence, however, has not yet learned that man 
 has a spirit. The nearest it has come to 
 that knowledge is what Bagehot called 
 "the cake of custom;" but even this labor 
 only can make ; this labor is the guarantee 
 of that settledness of social life, without 
 which all is chaos. Bach to Labor I 'then, 
 is the command, renouncing the fashion- 
 able pleasure and leisure, if we would have 
 true pleasure and leisure. Eemember, 
 said a wise, good teacher, remember that 
 Happiness is an angel ever at your side 
 if you do not turn your eyes to look upon 
 her. If you turn, she disappears ! All are 
 turning now to woo her — and they are 
 most miserable, for Happiness has left us ! 
 The most fundamental and far-reaching 
 of all the distinctions among mankind are 
 
224 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 those of sex, and how one solves the eter- 
 nal sex question, in thought, feeling or 
 practical living, will dictate or indicate his 
 solution of most other questions. Because, 
 whom does not Love rule, and where is He 
 not Lord? He most enslaves his ascetics, 
 deniers and traitors, and least the fool. 
 Love is in truth the riddle of the sphinx, 
 and, as Weininger found, she ruthlessly de- 
 vours those who do not solve it. Too 
 many have forgotten that love is as much 
 subject to the law of evolution or progres- 
 sive development as any other biologic 
 thing. It is the most typically "henid" 
 product of life. How could it be other- 
 wise, when it is not only product but also 
 spring and mechanism of life? God never 
 ceases to teach that there is something 
 better for us than individuality, and that 
 personal immortality is not His chief 'aim 
 with us. Woman, as most of us admit, 
 is far more obedient morally, more reli- 
 gious than man, is in truth the ethical 
 agent of the biologic continuance of the 
 race. Beyond question, Teutonic love 
 needs development out of its homogeneity, 
 or its "henidism." For what biologic or 
 
BACK TO THE OLD WAYS 225 
 
 psychologic attribute is of greater com- 
 plexity, and usually of less differentiation, 
 than love ? Since we have left the monkey- 
 type, there has been added, how many 
 phases, often as yet interfused and await- 
 ing unfolding. Finck has found thirteen 
 more varieties of love than Weininger, and 
 Finck 's fellow countrywomen could each 
 have added another. "But all depend 
 upon and lead to one thing V 9 Yes, and so 
 does all life — to that, and to the education 
 of the begotten. What else but that is 
 there to it all? Go to! In the last thirty 
 years we Americans have gone too far 
 back, even to the Eoman " simplicity. ' 9 
 But since we left Eome the idea of love, 
 the practice of it, by enduring families, 
 has become rapidly more complex. To the 
 unum necessarium, never omitted, have 
 been added permanency, monogamy, home- 
 keeping virtues, pedagogy, public health, 
 civic and political honor, democracy, and 
 a thousand such components. Our riotous 
 modern divorce practices and statistics are 
 the sole proof needed that our forgetful- 
 ness of the hundred associate parts of love 
 and returning to Eome were a going too 
 
226 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 far back to the old ways. For, as in all 
 things else, it is only the more recent old 
 ways to which the return is urged. There 
 is an end of the matter with the statement 
 that that sort of love will not suffice for 
 building the future which is based solely 
 upon sensualism. Henceforth there is no 
 advisable love unless it is as reverent as 
 it is romantic, as permanent as it is pas- 
 sionate. The foundation has indeed been 
 built since karyokinesis began, and verily 
 let us have no fool's nonsense that ignores 
 clean, pure, strong, animalian sensualism. 
 But just as little, from now, may its con- 
 sequences be ignored or refused — the 
 mother, and the child which insures all 
 future motherhood. The hideous divorce 
 statistics point to far more unspeakable 
 things in our large cities, denied by none 
 and lately much in evidence. 
 
 Note, now, what all admit — that women 
 are what men have made them; always 
 less bad, however, than men, for the women 
 of any Babylon are more ethical than the 
 Babylonian men. Otherwise, of course, 
 propagation would stop and that Babylon 
 would end. Kant's great rule was that 
 
BACK TO THE OLD WAYS 227 
 
 we must never use humanity as a means to 
 our individual ends. That marriage and 
 that divorce are immoral which break 
 Kant's immutable law. Back to the Old 
 Ways! Back to the older woman, indeed, 
 for the "New Woman" is already entirely 
 too old — hoary with the vices of antiquity, 
 and the woman of a hundred years ago is 
 timeless and will always be young and 
 lovely! She found us young and she will 
 always keep us so. 
 
 And it was woman who made the Home, 
 — the home we are so fast disusing and 
 forgetting. There will be no abiding and 
 true civilization, no enduring happiness 
 except in and through homes. Flats, 
 hotels, palaces and watering-place " vil- 
 las/ ! rented walls, yardless and landless 
 buildings, rows of thousands all alike — 
 these are not homes, and they can never 
 breed the virtues that rise in the simplest 
 houses built for one's children, and in 
 which the grandchildren will live. Urban- 
 ization is the lure of Mephisto whereby the 
 undiscriminating sell their souls for a 
 sorry and fitting gain. What a commen- 
 tary, it is that the lovely and virtue-ex- 
 
228' THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 pressing word, homelike, should have de- 
 generated by our unvirtue into homely, the 
 unlovely and unseemly! Back to the 
 Home is again the command, if we wish 
 our name and hope to relive in the valor 
 and virtue of our children, and of their 
 children. 
 
 As to the priest and the preacher: In 
 ancient times the greatest criminal, mas- 
 querading as king, chose to commission 
 some sycophantic parasite to flatter him 
 before as many of his dupes as could be 
 drilled into the cathedral. They were al- 
 lowed to worship God theoretically and a 
 little, on condition of worshipping the king 
 practically and a good deal. The modern 
 king, Pluto, has not forgot the trick, and 
 an amazing spectacle it is to see million- 
 aires support the religion of the carpenter- 
 preacher who once delivered a famous 
 Sermon on the Mount. If the Catholic 
 could be catholicized, if the Protestant 
 could be protestantized! If all could be 
 humanized and religionized! Certainly it 
 may not be except through teaching the 
 old catechism, by practicing, — "Duty to- 
 
BACK TO THE OLD WAYS 229 
 
 ward my neighbor is to love him as myself, 
 etc." 
 
 As to the lawyer: A great one lately 
 died; he was not a promoter, nor "a cor- 
 poration lawyer;" his aim in life was not 
 to do illegal things by means of legal 
 acumen and diabolism. He was never a 
 politician, nor a partisan, nor a hunter 
 after the modern trinity of gods, Success, 
 Finance and Fame. This is what he wrote, 
 reviewing his life : 
 
 I have indeed much to be thankful for. I have 
 received numberless kindnesses from judges, 
 counsel and solicitors, as well as from clients. 
 I have never had a serious personal difference 
 with anyone, and have never been a party to a 
 lawsuit. I may be said to have been fortunate, 
 but I believe that the road to such success as I 
 have had is open to any young man entering the 
 profession who may choose to follow it, and de- 
 vote himself to legitimate professional work, and 
 abstain from moneylending, company promot- 
 ing, financing builders, and speculative business, 
 and give constant, careful and anxious thought 
 and attention to the professional business from 
 time to time entrusted to him. 
 
230 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 As to the physician: It is much the 
 same story, but, as the rule is, with a dif- 
 ference. A few country practitioners are 
 left who practice medicine with the single 
 desire to cure their patients. The bedside, 
 clinical, empiric wisdom and duty have 
 been deserted for the "scientific" profes- 
 sional and laboratory unwisdoms and non- 
 duties. In practice, more than in theory, 
 of all these great diseases that afflict hu- 
 manity — headache, i ' migraine, ' ' dyspep- 
 sia, nervous and mental diseases, epilepsy, 
 crime, insanity and a hundred kinds of 
 functional and nutritional disorders — 
 there is almost no curiosity as to cause, and 
 there is less inability to cure. Every lec- 
 ture of every Professor in all the morbidly 
 large medical colleges of the land should 
 begin with: Gentlemen, Bach to the Bed- 
 side! and should end with: Seek to learn 
 the causes of Functional Diseases! When 
 you have learned these causes, and when 
 you have cured your individual patient, 
 then you will have heard the divine com- 
 mand to commit professional suicide by 
 preventing disease! 
 
 Every physician, indeed, knows in his 
 
BACK TO THE OLD WAYS 231 
 
 heart that we have eaten of the tree of 
 knowledge more than we can digest, and 
 that if the known laws of public and 
 private hygiene were put into execution 
 the death-rate would instantly drop 50 
 per cent. Moreover, the modern serpent 
 in the tree is atheistic, monistic, determin- 
 istic, and therefore hopelessly loveless. 
 There can be no cure, nor is there any 
 prevention, of disease unless the little 
 physician is the child of the Great Phys- 
 ician, and learns of Him how wounds heal, 
 how sleep restores, how wise "Nature" 
 persists for years, for a lifetime, through 
 all lives, to outwit, heal and undo the in- 
 juries of disease. Aping an unenviable 
 and blind science, medicine has been too 
 prone to materialism, although before the 
 physician's eyes, as before those of no 
 other man, have been the amazing mira- 
 cles of sexual and mother love, of the heal- 
 ing of wounds, of the giving of the body 
 to be normalized in sleep to something in- 
 finitely wiser than we, and of the ceaseless 
 struggle of the hidden physiologic God of 
 Health against the hurts of disease. All 
 these, in addition to the absolute non-ex- 
 
232 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 istence of spontaneous generation, would 
 convince men with logical and open minds 
 that materialism atheism and determinism 
 are the shallow delusions of fools. 
 
 And as to Science itself: Every scien- 
 tist self-supposed or real knows and ad- 
 mits that its only legitimate method is and 
 must be induction, but every one is ruled 
 by prepossession, theory and deduction, to 
 the infinite loss of science. We are not a 
 step nearer explaining the origin of life 
 than we were fifty years ago. None has 
 ever produced organic or living substance 
 from the inorganic or non-living, and yet 
 biologists deny life, and living beings say 
 they came from lifeless sources. Even 
 so great a man as Huxley set the fashion, 
 but Huxley was too great to live in such 
 a state of muddle-headedness. He re- 
 pented of his silly "Bathybias," but no 
 modern imitators who discover Bathybi- 
 ases every day imitate Huxley in his 
 repentance. They dominate facts with 
 theory, and unblushingly invent new gods 
 every other day, — Protoplasm, Chemism, 
 Chemotaxis, Electricity, Eadium, Hered- 
 ity, Law, Ions, tout ce que vous voulez. 
 
BACK TO THE OLD WAYS 233 
 
 They are constant only in scorn of "vital- 
 ism' ' and the "vitalists," they who are 
 vitality, and of superstition, they who are 
 most superstitions. They hate Lamarck 
 because he allows the existence and play of 
 spirit in the biologic process, and they 
 worship Darwin and Spencer who counsel 
 monism and materialism. Oh, let us go 
 back to pure induction ! 
 
 In pedagogy where are we? The com- 
 petition for endowments, the rivalry for 
 success, the greed for hugeness, the sale 
 of honorary degrees to kings and famous 
 men, the cultivation of " athletics, * ' which 
 means mostly the purchase of football 
 fighters and the limitlessness of rowdyism, 
 the prevalence of young men old in club- 
 dom and vice. It were best to return to 
 the old love of scholarship and gentleman- 
 liness. 
 
 Do we entertain any hope of present- 
 day literature? They who read it of 
 course deserve their fate. But the future 
 will forget and bury in fitting Carnegie 
 mausoleums most that our scribblers now 
 grind out. The apotheosis of the craze 
 is the modern newspaper. Even the least 
 
234 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 yellow of the sell-souls do not preserve a 
 copy beyond a day — so cheaply and prop- 
 erly do they and the public value all the 
 enormously expensive product. The old 
 books of more than a generation ago, a 
 score or so of them, should suffice for in- 
 telligent and discriminating tastes. 
 
 Philosophy, Metaphysics, Psychology ? 
 Did they not begin and end with Kant? 
 After him has metaphysics done more than 
 deny metaphysic, the very existence of that 
 which is beyond the physical? Do the 
 aftercoming philosophers love wisdom? 
 And the up-to-date psychologist says there 
 is no psyche, and sets up laboratories to 
 measure the reaction-time of nerve-cur- 
 rents. Post-Kantian philosophy, that 
 which has had vigor and vogue, is sum- 
 marized in the perverse pessimism of 
 Schopenhauer, the insane individualism of 
 Nietzsche, the scintillating impudence of 
 Weininger, all sick and sickening men, all 
 brilliant, pessimistic, untrue and untrust- 
 worthy ; the logic of their labor, deny it as 
 they will, ends in suicide. Back to Kant ! 
 
 The cynic may interject that the advice, 
 
BACK TO THE OLD WAYS 235 
 
 Bach to the Old Ways has been the cry of 
 every age and of the dissatisfied of all 
 times. Wherefore now repeat it again 
 from the very heart of a civilization avid 
 with desire, feverish with activity, and 
 sated with unparalleled comforts and sat- 
 isfactions? And yet it was not always a 
 meaningless or inappropriate crying. Our 
 most popular philosopher has taught elo- 
 quently and rightly that all movement is 
 rhythmical, rushing advances alternating 
 with back-currents, ebb following flow, 
 crest and then trough of wave, eternally. 
 These sallies and surges, some of them at 
 least, must sometimes have been abnormal, 
 even morbid. Experiments in Life they 
 may be called, and we are well aware that 
 many have been sorry failures. Going 
 back and experimenting again may be the 
 only method of going forward. Paleontol- 
 ogy is a record of more failures than suc- 
 cesses. Why not, then, Sociology ? 
 
 The great modern multiform failure is 
 easily explained. In the last one hundred 
 years, for all modern nations, but espe- 
 cially for our country, has come what may 
 
236 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 be called, The Great Awakening. The 
 elements or causes of this awakening have 
 been: 
 
 1. Democracy. The realization of the 
 power and value of the individual, or, what 
 amounts to the same thing, the belief in 
 the value and the power, whether justified 
 or not, whether simply morbid egotism or 
 proper self-appreciation. It would be 
 supererogation to point out the proofs, 
 most manifest and sometimes appalling, of 
 this swift extension of personal claim in all 
 that governmental and social life we call 
 civilized. 
 
 2. Territorial Expansion. Every nation 
 having the power — and all have had or 
 have claimed to have it — has acquired vast 
 areas of land in every part of the globe. 
 
 3. Wealth. Not only have the rich be- 
 come richer, fortunes which kings never 
 had being now too common to attract atten- 
 tion, but millions now live in a state of 
 luxury hitherto unknown. 
 
 4. Material Invention and Discovery 
 have placed power and opportunities hith- 
 erto undreamed of at the disposal even of 
 the poorest. 
 
BACK TO THE OLD WAYS 237 
 
 5. Science and Knowledge have been 
 offered to all. 
 
 6. The Printing Press has almost forced 
 the unwilling, if such there are, to supple- 
 ment personal experience by that of all 
 others. 
 
 7. Relief from the Error and Wrong of 
 Religion has brought over-reaction and 
 landed us in Atheism and Materialism, 
 theoretical or practical. 
 
 The first fact to be held in fixed attention 
 is that in all other countries except ours 
 these seven factors of the Great Awaken- 
 ing have not come suddenly or synchron- 
 ously, so that the universal arousing has 
 been more slow and conservative than with 
 us. Indeed, in only one country, France, 
 did one or two of these calls to action come 
 explosively and overpoweringly. But in 
 the United States all seven have acted at 
 once, with enormous and cumulative power. 
 
 The second fact to remember is that 
 those called to exercise these amazingly 
 vast freedoms, opportunities, and energies, 
 had no training, experience, or expertness 
 for the unwonted responsibilities. There 
 could be but one result — national, social 
 
238 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 and individual intoxication, and an extrem- 
 ism which, if it were not humorous as well 
 as tragic, if it were not drunkenness in- 
 stead of insanity, if we were not at bottom 
 Teutonic, would have consumed the last 
 man in chaotic revolution, and ended in a 
 militarism madder than that of Napoleon. 
 As it is we survive, so far at least, for the 
 danger is not past, but at what an awful 
 expense ! We are still drunk with absurd 
 individualism, with unutilizable expansion, 
 with diabolic luxury, with the pandemon- 
 ium of machinery, with undigested and un- 
 truthful knowledge, with yellow journalism 
 and magazinism, and more than all, with 
 practical and blatant materialism and de- 
 terminism. Such appears the full and 
 fitting explanation of our unfortunate, 
 preposterous predicament, our national 
 tragicomedy. This is the warrant for 
 Back to the Old Ways. 
 
 Every one will return when and how he 
 pleases, in his own individual fashion, be- 
 cause we are all over-individualized, and 
 one must travel anywhither from the place 
 where the present finds him, and in accord 
 with the personal character, good or bad, 
 
BACK TO THE OLD WAYS 239 
 
 he has acquired. Among the many there 
 are three chief routes, however, which 
 finally lead to old-time certainties and sat- 
 isfactions : that of induction, knowledge or 
 true Science; that of kindness, duty or 
 Ethics; and that of feeling, esthetics, or 
 Art. Genuine knowledge, the knowing by 
 observation and induction, can alone tell 
 us what the world truly is, and what we 
 ourselves are. We must ignore the de- 
 ductive, the pseudo-science, and practically 
 also the ultra, the overtechnical and theo- 
 retic varieties, which are of no use cer- 
 tainly to common folk and amateurs. We 
 already have more of the undoubted true 
 than we can bring into blessed practice 
 for a generation or two. 
 
 Despite themselves all have some of the 
 seeds of sympathy and duty in their hearts, 
 so that by means of love we may be aroused 
 and led back to a purer and sweeter family 
 and social life. All need love and each 
 needs to give it as much as to receive it. 
 Since the world began it is the savior and 
 the perpetuator of the race. 
 
 Beauty invites through the half-opened 
 door of art. Whence the beautiful? It is 
 
2 4 o THE INFINITE PRESENCE 
 
 wholly miraculous, most illogical and in- 
 congruous in a world of matter, fate or 
 law. It may not be defined except in met- 
 aphor and symbol — that it is, for instance, 
 God's smile of joy at the perfection and 
 success of His work. Art, then, is the 
 answering smile of man, music the singing 
 of the soft, low laughter, poetry the chant 
 of those who cannot sing, sculpture the 
 memory of a passing smile fixed in form, 
 and painting the glimpse put in light and 
 color. Ethics thus grows clear as the way 
 we may help our Biologos, and our success, 
 the fact of our helping, our happiness, His 
 I Thank You! 
 
 With these as our companions on our 
 return journey, there will come to all 
 glimpses of the eternal wonder, thrills of 
 recognition, which more and more bring 
 an end of care, strain, or doubt, of scep- 
 ticism and of wrong. Atonements are not 
 sudden and dramatic, we know, but are 
 made up day by day of a thousand little 
 feelings, willings and doings: — some fair 
 sweet afternoon, for instance, of sunshine 
 and breeze, some deepening twilight sleep- 
 ing into starlight silence; some landscape 
 
BACK TO THE OLD WAYS 241 
 
 witchery, or vision of unsuspected beauty ; 
 a sudden offering of gratitude, or a service 
 needlessly done ; the reach of a noble truth 
 finally grasped; the perception of the 
 cruelty of greed, the vanity and worthless- 
 ness of luxury; the forgiving of sin, and 
 the forgetting of injury; the slipping of 
 the bands of fate ; and the coming of divine 
 freedom; the pleasure and delight of the 
 growing corn; the nestling of a child's 
 hand in yours; the pathos of your dog's 
 glance of dumb desire for humanization ; 
 the miracle of a flower, a strain of music, 
 the meaning of a bird's song ; the solemnity 
 of great forest trees, the silence of atten- 
 tive mountain heights ; the brooding of the 
 sky over his beloved earth, your sweet- 
 heart's kiss, and the whole wide world's 
 wonder of love; the sudden sight of God's 
 eyes looking steadily into yours — the rev- 
 elation of the infinite — the Infinite Pres- 
 ence Himself, always there! Ah! such 
 things come to them alone who seek the 
 old ways, and wish to do their duty in the 
 state of life unto which it shall please God 
 to call them. 
 
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