A Cosmic View of Religion WILLIAM RILEY HALSTEAD WILLIAM RILEY HALSTEAD (Emctttmtit:: JENNINGS AND GRAHAM EATON AND MAINS COPYRIGHT. 1913, BY JENNINGS AND GBAHAM. CHAPTER CONTENTS. PART I. PAGE I. PRIMARY TRUTH INVESTMENTS, - 11 II. THE ULTIMATE KNOWABLE REALITY, 44 III. MIND A CAUSATIVE FORCE, 76 IV. PSYCHIC VALUES, - 91 V. THE FOUNTAINS OF LIFE, * 113 VI. CONTRIBUTIONS OF NATURAL RE- SEARCH, - 134 VII. NAKED NATURE, - - 142 VIII. PLEASURE AND PAIN, - 154 IX. ENDLESSNESS, - - 179 PART II. X. THE SUPERMOVEMENT, - 217 XI. RELIGION AND THE COMMUNAL LIFE, 232 XII. THE DEATHLESS IMPULSE, - 246 XIII. THE EASTERN MIND, - 254 XIV. THE COSMIC CHRIST, 267 XV. PROGRESSIVE INTERPRETATIONS, - 282 XVI. A COSMIC ABSURDITY, - 309 2064047 FOREWORD. THESE pages undertake to deal with religion in its generic aspects, and from the side of the uni- verse. The religious instinct is such a persistent radical, and so evidently here to stay, that the whole issue of the soul's fellowship with the Di- vine may be investigated from the viewpoint of the unity of creation. If man has come up out of things, he will not, in the long run, be largely influenced by any theory of detachment. The better understandings, therefore, of what this human is, in his inmost being, are to be reached by a careful estimate of his permanent outward correspondences, and of his actions under them, and of the degree of mastery which they have over him. We have come to the time when the serious- minded refuse to go to school to the teacher who has to have himself whipped into acceptance of the nature truths which research has uncovered. So great and unquestioned have been the recent advances in psychology, in chemistry, in physics, and in biology, that the whole quantum of human 5 FOREWORD. knowledge seems to demand a synthetic rehabili- tation. If religious thought is to be kept en rap- port with these newer acquisitions, some of its most familiar appeals sorely need the undergird- ing of a class of evidences which set themselves into the framework of things. The laboratories now offer to furnish the elements of a sound philosophy of religion; and, in the right hands, they will be able to make good. The stronger scientific currents have set in towards the con- ception of the spirit nature of all energy. Un- expectedly, an irreverent and long search after the last material fact has brought itself face to face with another somewhat, which threatens to block progress until it gets scientific recognition. As might be expected, tradition is out of sympathy with this new method of approach to the invisible if for no other reason than that it has upset the ark and gone around to see what is on the other side. But while the fearful-minded are in distress, the foundations are being strengthened. For instance thirty years ago a great scholar wrote three hundred pages to show that worship had its beginnings in the dreams and fears of savage men. The purpose of that writing makes of it a grotesque story. But since it has had a 6 FOREWORD. new evaluation, and has been historically ges- tated, it is now classified as an indubitable evi- dence of the cosmic Footings of religion. It proves a fundamental world fact. The term spirit is here understood to be di- vested of much of its common meanings pulled up from some of its root inheritances philolog- ically washed and scoured, and made to signify an all-pervasive, causative intelligence; never di- vorced from the forms of matter; but manifest through phenomena, in terms of positive knowl- edge. W. R. HALSTEAD. Terre Haute, Ind. PART I. CHAPTER I. PRIMARY TRUTH INVESTMENTS. THE natural introduction to any discussion of first principles is a statement of the terms of knowledge. Any writer on such themes is con- stantly making appeals to methods which he con- siders valid; and it is well for the reader to get these and know the writer's viewpoint. It clears the ground and saves time. Unless the processes of the human mind are brought to some unity of understanding, there is no protection against any sort of fanatical notion or interpretation. Knowl- edge is the truth perceived. It is the veritas cognitionis. The mind produces knowledge as the bee produces honey. The mind feeds and grows on its knowledge as the bee on its honey. That fact may be the open highway to endless being. At any rate, the truth apprehended is mandatory. We are never negatively related to any feature of it, and we are not authorized to pick out a piece and go with it, as a boy does with his bread and butter. A man can not refuse to know a thing 11 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. because it will not fatten his swine. The truth is not our servant it is our destiny. All the mean- ings and. consequences of human action depend on what the world is, and what man is. Life must get its character from the knowledge it has of the great realities which hedge it about. In a world of so vast and varied need as this, knowable things, even of a primary nature, are not unprac- tical. The spirit of man is enriched only as it interprets rationally the truths which have been put within its reach. Is it not worth while to search patiently for that to which we must sur- render finally? There can be no compromise with the inner life of the world and the universe beyond it. The yearning to apprehend the real is uni- versal. The common man quickly loses interest in the leisured student of abstraction who goes off into the fog and gets lost, but he never ceases to make the compelling inquiry about the main issue. "What kind of a world is this, and what am I, that I should fit into it in this way ? " Sekese, the savage Kaffir, said to M. Ambrouseille: "I sat down upon a rock and asked myself sorrowful questions. I can not see the wind, but what is it? Who brings it, makes it blow, and roar, and 12 PRIMARY TRUTH INVESTMENTS. terrify me? Do I know how the corn sprouts? Yesterday there was not a blade in my field; to-day I returned and found some. Who can have given to the earth the wisdom and the power to produce it? Then I buried my head in both my hands." The savage daily walks along the edges of an invisible realm and becomes a perplexed ques- tioner of the inner meaning of things. Whatever it is that launches him into being without his knowledge or consent, and lashes him, perhaps, with an untoward life, and takes him hence against his will, is no small affair to him. He may not suf- fer in his own state as keenly as the cultured man would under like circumstances, and he may not take any time off to think about it, but he is oppressed, nevertheless, with the dull feeling that at the bottom of his wild, rude state there exists a tremendous somewhat, which moves over about him, and underneath him, in a manner at times to put into him a nameless dread, and he bows down and propitiates. He crouches because he is haunted by his fears, being ignorant. The issue with this low man is knowledge. The issue with the race is knowledge. 13 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. Space and Time. There are three outer conditions for the human mind in its pursuit of truth which are so nearly axiomatic in their nature as to need only a brief statement to be accepted. First, there must be a place to put things which is space. Second, there must be a now and a then which is time. These truths are usually classed with our most primary apprehensions. They are truths of con- dition not of matter or substance. Being es- sential, they have their ground in necessity. They are universals. They are the home of being, the substrate and undergirding of reality. In the forms of matter everywhere, and in the action of mind, they are so clearly elements of the first instance that any prolonged discussion of them is needless in these pages. Connectedness. The other outer condition of knowledge is con- nectedness. The possibility of knowledge hinges on the question of continuity or discontinuity in nature. A disconnected natural system could not furnish the conditions of knowledge. Unity and continuity must be at the bottom of things if the mind has any hope to win understandings. 14 PRIMARY TRUTH INVESTMENTS. We do not live in a disjointed universe. No stray worlds. No stray atoms. The law of the inverse squares is active through all the spaces. Light, heat, and electricity are only different modes of motion. Some of the folks in the science departments are now making a pretty good case out of the proposition that rhythm is the master key of creation. Knowledge is not an extracted part of anything. Truth never breaks connec- tion is never static. The truth-getter may let go, but he can not carry off anything. That is, he may empty himself to the verge of being snuffed out, but he can not create an independency. To know ever so little is to have attachment to the system. Partial knowledge is not disaster. It need not be mixed error. It may be wholly true, measured by the knowing capacity. It may be true to the vision of one mind and error to an- other. A star is a bright speck to a child, but that degree would not work well in an astronomical formula. Herein lies the truth of pragmatism. The rational nature of a limited experience is provided for. We could not, if we would, deal with the absolute verities, and we are not obliged. It is not in the nature of mind to apprehend, or in the nature of truth to be apprehended in change- 15 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. less relations. The permanent dynamic of a growing mind is nextness nextness. It makes advances. It discovers error. It is then hin- dered and disturbed. It goes forward again. It comes to the summit of a series. It never reaches the actual limit above or below. The formal in- tellect is a slow learner. It has to stop and wait on itself. A dragon-fly, coming up out of the ooze of the swamp, climbs a bulrush stalk a few inches above the water, and then halts for its wings to dry. The bounds of the unknown are pushed away only as our mental correspondences are multiplied. The limit of the known is a point of science not a dead line. Newness of knowledge is the goal of research and that means relativity. We can not see across the ocean we start across and get there. It does not appear that the whole- ness of things need come up at any time for study. We go forward under limitations. The propo- sition that we know nothing because we do not know everything is not tenable. The standard is the capacity to perceive and use. We are not the masters of all relationships and never will be. A certain existence falls within a certain category and has certain attributes and qualities and cer- 16 PRIMARY TRUTH INVESTMENTS. tain modes of activity and manifestation all of which a baby knows when it sucks its thumb. The unconditioned must have nothing like it or nothing different from it, and it must not be subject to comparison or contrast. Whoever goes in search for the unconditioned goes gunning for spooks. The mightiest power in the universe is conditioned by its grasp and control of every atom in it. Sensation and Reflection. So much for the outstanding conditions; but how does the mind itself get what it knows? How does it know that it knows? Quite a while ago, some friends with Locke, engaged in serious dis- course, found they were making no headway be- cause they were at sea about the elements which constituted a satisfactory knowledge of anything. Locke, thereupon, sought to have a right under- standing of the intellect with itself. What are the ways of the mind's approach? What are its processes in quest of verity? What are the in- ward avenues to the outward correspondences? How may the mind know itself to be making sane and successful advances? How distinguish the real from the unreal? Is the unreal simply an 17 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. error of the understanding? How may it be known that truth is disparate with error? Is it possible to strike the right mental attitude and maintain it through the endless mazes of sensa- tion and thought to which experience subjects the life? There can be no hard and fast answers to questions like these; and yet there can be no profitable thinking where there is no understand- ing about the primary implications of thought. When we put to ourselves these deeper questions we are under the necessity of some sort of a lining up with an analytic mental perspective. So it comes about there is nothing quite so clear in the pages of philosophy as Locke's state- ment of the two terms of knowledge in sensation and reflection. That was a splendid start in the direction of the philosophic certainties. A child begins to live in its sensations. The earth is motionless. The sky and the ground come together not very far away. The moon is about the size of a plate, and the clouds which float over its face are about half way out there. We all begin life that way. We are at first con- fronted with appearances. We learn, after a time, that appearance and reality are divergent 18 PRIMARY TRUTH INVESTMENTS. terms. Things are not always as they seem. Appearances challenge the reflective faculty. It is not the function of sensation to shut down the gates against anything. The outer floods rush in and they fill us with deception and delusion. Half the people of the earth to-day are in bondage to the falsehoods of sense. They are not self- discriminating. This is why primitive peoples are so sorely smitten why they are oppressed with the vast or majestic or strange. They have not ceased to follow their simple reflexes. To sort out to put like with like and difference over against difference, to consider cause, to distinguish between a phenomenon and a mani- festation this is reflective. Sensation is the purveyor of the raw material of truth, and after that the relation of it to the knowledge already in possession of the mind must come up for settle- ment by the formal reason. It is clear that the discriminative intellect has the power to transcend the direct results of sensation and pass judgment on them, and demonstrate in itself a self-centered regal capacity for distinguishing between the real and the unreal. The reflective nature has em- ployment in any true experience. The broad and direct features of sensation are brought into 19 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. consistency by being thrown into the hopper and ground through. We get the grist, and not the assortment, by reflection. Feeling. But reflection, considered as the sufficient and final inward source and avenue of knowledge, leads to misunderstanding and confusions. The con- scious action of the intellect does not include the whole of the mind's work in the acquisition of truth. Much of that which we reliably know has come to us in an unrealized way. It must be remembered that the mere formal intellectual test of any thing is not always suf- ficient. The logical, or reasoning, faculty in man is notably dull. It has to stare at things. It is lubberly. A boy, usually, requires years to see the value of the multiplication table. It has always been a boaster of itself. It makes too much noise. When it stoops to exercise itself, it wants a verdict in its favor without delay. And yet it is obliged to shut itself up to the circle of the given. The limits of knowledge are enlarged only as this circle is broken into. So the intellect is often disturbed by the storms of sensation which beat down upon it. The thinking capacity is 20 PRIMARY TRUTH INVESTMENTS. but a part of man's knowing nature. Two per- sons, equally intelligent, and equally honest, will have daily contradictions of the reason. Except in the region of the exact sciences, it is very rare to find two minds arriving at the same conclusion from the same premises. The mere logical test is not a finality, and it is not of universal applica- tion. Read Longfellow's "Evangeline" and rule out the primitive emotions and we boggle all its mean- ings. To know what "Evangeline" is requires the inward capacity to see human life swayed by its simplest and strongest emotions. It must be read as the musicians urge us to sing with feeling. The heart's sympathies must be open and unafraid. It is certain, therefore, that our best judg- ments are not always the products of the logical understanding. They may be emotional and temperamental, or the results of a long expe- rience the phases of which are too intricate for analytic interpretation. Any aged man's life has taken into itself so many events and so many days that it will not unravel its details to him and yet he speaks from the ground of all that has transpired, and with a proverbial level-headedness. 21 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. There is a feeling of the truth which refuses to come within the limits of the logical faculty. By feeling we do not mean a flash of emotion. We mean that matured sensibility which has become a part of the whole intellectual nature. We may have a present feeling about that with which reflection has heretofore been exercised. The way we have been taught, the ideas of right and wrong we have entertained, the ideals we have pursued, the kind of life we have lived, the sort of people we have had as associates, the di- rection of the flow of life's currents, and pre- eminently our necessities all these enter into and help determine the feelings we have about any occurrence. Feeling usually voices the wholeness of that which has come about as we have gone the journey of the days; and, in this sense, it must be understood to be the directest avenue of ap- proach of the human spirit to the spirit nature of all being. A balance of judgment, as a function of the higher cerebral activities, is always of service; yet the right of the emotional nature to interpret itself must not be denied, because the deep-seated elements of experience are in it. The theory of life which plain people have is always best ex- 22 PRIMARY TRUTH INVESTMENTS. plained to themselves, and to others, through their emotions and these emotions are often the finest tests of character. And their value is not to be set aside because at times they are aberrant of the truth, or because they blur, occasionally, the finer distinctions of ethics. Feeling, without question, is the spring of action. Cold reason seldom gets further than the immediate facts in the case. We are able to see and accept an ir- reversible conclusion and then go to sleep on it. The appeal with consequence is the appeal to feeling. The sober judgment of the Nation about human slavery was settled long before Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote her dramatic story of " Uncle Tom" and his cabin. Japan was forty years working the patriotism of her people into a pas- sion, and the passion made her battalions resistless. This kind of associative feeling is not always able to give an account of itself, because the human mind is too dull to trace the social con- sciousness to its origins. Occasionally social feeling is radical and violent, and on the surface it may appear like an insanity, but in its final resolves it is most sure to show itself to belong to some through movement which has in it the higher reason. 23 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. So the spontaneities of the personal life, as tests of truth, must be regarded as having a positive value. Belief. The human mind is so constituted that it refuses to stop with the known. The impulse and desire to reach on to that which is beyond is natural. Imaginations, fancies, expectations, vi- sions are the prophets of the mind. Belief has probably as much influence over the life as exact knowledge. It probably holds more truth for us. It is rational to act on well-founded belief. It is prudent to be cautious; but to refuse to come to any decision or action until certain and full knowl- edge is secured is a distinct mental weakness. The hesitant mental state never discovers any- thing, never invents anything, never trusts any seed to the ground, never digs precious metals from the earth, never wakes up till the day after judgment. A negative attitude toward the uni- verse is disastrous. We can have certain knowl- edge of but few things in the common affairs of life. We know, for instance, that the physical life is nourished by food. But some substances having the appearance of food are poisonous. In 24 PRIMARY TRUTH INVESTMENTS. taking food at any time we face a degree of danger, for no one is absolutely sure. We believe the food we take is not poisonous. Precaution is reason- able, but constant suspicion is not so. So, in the broader ways of truth, if we run and hide when her face is only half-revealed, we miss the hand of the fair one. The passionate truth-seeker takes risks. Great students are always full of faith. They have imagination. They are dream- ers. They are expectant. It is never tenable to struggle towards belief without evidence. Belief, as a bare proposition, is without virtue or dignity. To try to believe a thing with all one's might is silly. It does vio- lence to the integrity of the intellect. Normal doubt is a safeguard against error. It helps the mind to escape its shallowness. Level-headedness often calls a halt until the reflective faculties can catch up and do their work and order some sane advance. There is a healthful mental reserve which insists on the last ray of light. But after the returns are in, after the tests have been ap- plied, after all the facts have had a grilling, the mind's confidences by that time ought to be so strengthened that it would not fear to lift itself toward the unresolved mass just ahead and greet 25 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. eagerly the first glint of light which promises any new inbreaking on the world of actual experience. The royal learner risks a prophecy and works it for all it is worth. It is a great mental exhilara- tion to live on the frontiers and take its hazards. Suppose you hold a belief which is without par- ticular evidence in itself? But does it make good? Is it in the center of progress and sound reform? Does it produce wholesome conse- quences? Does it stand the pragmatic test? If so, then it has proved its right to live. It is one of the world's verities. Hypothesis. Hypothesis is a mixture of evidence and be- lief. It comes about in this way. With any given content, at first a few facts appear. After a time these facts, taken together, are suspected of hav- ing tendencies in certain directions. They show a kind of kinship among themselves. It is natural, finally, to have a theory about them. In this way a working hypothesis is formed. At first it is no more than a guess. The guesser proceeds to verify his guess or to discover that he is mis- taken. There is no deceit about it, no bias or prejudice for or against; for it is understood, if 26 PRIMARY TRUTH INVESTMENTS. the facts set aside the theory, no regret is to be entertained, because the end is not the theory, but the truth. An untenable hypothesis has the value of showing where the truth is not. By so much it shuts the searcher into closer quarters. This kind of guess work is a favorite method in all scientific investigation. The Analytic and the Synthetic. A practical machinist takes apart or puts together, as occasion demands. The first method is analytic, the second is synthetic. The mind, in pursuit of its truth, uses, normally, both meth- ods. The analytic process, now much in vogue and overworked, is not new. The oldest thinkers made large use of it. They applied it to life and conduct in a masterful way. To them the whole- ness of things appeared too great for understand- ing. The writers of the ancient wisdom books had the real scientific spirit. They looked on life in detail. They examined conduct and put down what they found. The facts of life had, at their hands, a thorough overhauling. The result was a great accumulation of data. From these the laws of conduct, individual and social, have been written. 27 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. Unceasingly the analytic process furnishes material for generalization. The science depart- ments to-day are engaged in this business. They are distinguished from each other in that they each express so much of the totality of being. But the results of the separate sciences, as well as the method which each pursues, must be made valid alike, and must find their unity in some ultimate basal reality some thoroughgoing and universal truth. There must be a final concept which underbinds all the departments. The syn- thetic philosophy undertakes to fasten the inductive sciences together in other words, to reach some valid final conclusion which may be true of all of them. It uses no crucible or microscope or telescope or physical apparatus of any kind. It asks only for the groundwork and substance of things, and whether or not things hang together, cosmically, in obedience to an intelligent admin- istration. Significantly, the ages have been disturbed with a restless yearning to know the real. The common mind of the race has always made that sort of inquiry. Beyond this sensuous world there must be some masterful force which runs things. Such is the universal feeling. That tremendous 28 PRIMARY TRUTH INVESTMENTS. conviction may not be formally pursued by the common mind, nevertheless it inheres there in its dignity and power. Genetic Investments. We are in possession of much knowledge for which no deduction is accountable. It is a knowl- edge which has not been reasoned out. The ordinary terms of knowledge do not apply to it. It crosses lots. It sees straight. It is knowledge by immediacy. Before reason is active at all, the new-born child seeks the mother's breast. We call that instinct. But it is a knowing faculty. It is a capacity implicate at birth. It was not brought into being by the outer correspondences. It is the immediate unreflecting grip of the child-spirit on elemental truth. The capacity, with its di- rective will, comes into being with the child or- ganized and ready for business. That species of knowing has a genetic origin. Whatever be its nature, it has come marching through the nucle- ated cells of the prenatal state. The potential manlife is complete at the start. The child will flourish only after one pattern. If sensations get in on the ground-floor, they will find that pattern 29 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. in the cellar. It is a blue-print of procreative blessings and curses. The child does not load up with that determining investment after it has learned to swim in the sea of sensations. By that it learns to swim. Heredity is stronger than environment. As soon as we are born we are in possession of all the radical characteristics of the after-life. We are born with a mental clean sheet only in the sense that the prenatal life is a shut-in life. As long as the black cloth hangs over the nose of the camera the sensitive plate does not record impressions. Each child born is held by certain elements of truth as in a matrix, like a brick is held in place by the mortar, and the whole after-life must bend to these prenatal po- tencies. They have been given dominion with the human destination in view. They will not suffer themselves shunted aside, and the child, under them, has a knowing capacity which lies below consciousness. Kant writes profoundly of the inner mind of its synthetic and constructive powers, and of its masterfulness of all impressions and of a special subjective activity which is constitutive of what experience really is. True knowledge is not a mere grafting and classifying. The true experience is a worked-over experience, 30 PRIMARY TRUTH INVESTMENTS. and not a straight reflex. There is no place to get ready-made knowledge. The simple sensations which the mind appropriates are not as simple as they seem. They have not become affairs of thought until they have ' passed the gauntlet of relative impressions and are on their way to a balance of discreet judgments, and into which the personal equation has been worked. As an evidence that the mental content, with its potent basal unities, does not originate with ordinary sensation, it is sufficient to take account of the fact that in mental appropriation discontinuity is never reached. The very first mental mani- festations of the child have alignment as definite and clear as are the features of its body and face. An unrelated aggregate of simple sensations is unknown in genetic psychology. They are all cut to fit as they are appropriated. Sensations are subordinated to the mind plan. They do not meet there as strangers in a vacuum. We only begin to boggle with sensation after we grow awhile and get lazy. What we are is more genetic than cir- cumstantial. The human unit is cosmically set in. 31 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. The Subconscious Mind. With the later advances of psychological study it is not possible to ignore the existence and nature of the subconscious mind as a source of human knowledge. It goes with the saying that only a small feature of the intelligence of nature, as a whole, rises to consciousness. And it is in no small degree significant that a fact so confidently be- lieved and accepted for generations has not, before now, led to the hint of the same kind of intelli- gent underground in the human life. The older students of the human mind took it for granted that the formal outer manifestation of mind com- pleted its unity and made of it all that it could possibly be. They may have suspected the exist- ence of some mental factors which did not readily yield themselves to a classification under the in- tellect, the sensibilities, and the will, but they took no pains to investigate. They studied mind after it had come to consciousness, and put down all its phases in the categories which the schoolboy may learn. But these older students had no knowledge of a sustained consciousness anywhere, and ought to have gotten from the fact the in- timation that mind must be able to exist below consciousness. 32 PRIMARY TRUTH INVESTMENTS. Beyond all the rich values which our con- scious fellowships with the world bring us, it is always a pleasant discovery to us that we may make occasional use of a truth that lies behind the scenes. Many of our strongest personal con- victions take possession of us through subcon- scious channels. We often do not know how we* came by that which we hold dearer than life. In the ordinary way our senses are alert to get the best life has for us. We take pride in being alive to whatever is going on. As the years come and go we make the best possible use of expe- rience, and we expect confidently to get wiser as we get older. And yet we can not escape from the feeling that very much of what we are has been determined for us by some mysterious underpull, the nature of which we do not always understand and the purposes of which we are dull to interpret. We are like ships at sea. The buffet of surface winds and waves we feel; the tides and under- currents we do not feel. Now the evidences are, from the severest known tests, that the human mind is in posses- sion of faculties which lie below those in use in the ordinary ways of life. The evolutionists tell us that the human body has reached its final 3 33 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. stages. It has come to maturity. Man's physical life is now a finality. It has rounded itself out to express its powers and functions in the com- pletest way. It will not get any bigger or stronger or live longer. And it may be for this reason that the deeper nature of the mind is beginning to show itself. At least the limit of the action of the body is not a prophecy of a limit put on the action of mind. Indeed, the physical rounding-in may be the occasion of the mental breaking-out. That may be nature's meaning. The newer evolu- tion may be a leap from the summit of the phys- ical formula into a deeper expression of the essen- tial spirit-nature of that formula. Be that as it may, the human self is now known to be very complex, and it is not wise to hazard any limit to its powers, or to conclude that what we have not found out can not be found out. Robert Louis Stevenson, mentally, was a child of nature. He always prized very highly the subconscious products of his mind. He says: "Unconscious thought, there is the only method. Macerate your subject let it boil slow, then take the lid off and look in, and there your stuff is, good or bad." He often became a spectator of himself, curious to know what his unconscious 34 PRIMARY TRUTH INVESTMENTS. brain was going to do for him. Stocky-minded- ness is always flattered with the curt saying that genius lies next to insanity, and for that reason, probably, the sentiment lives. Genius is not exactly normal for the reason that the normal is the usual. Genius may belong to the higher sanities it may be an inbreak from the unseen which startles the incapacities of the common mind. It is certain that the master composers all worked under an afflatus. The orator is never great until he gets lost. The arithmetical wonders which have astonished the world did not express themselves through the ordinary apprehensions which we have of numbers. Very few of them have been able to give account of themselves. Whately's extraordinary computing powers only lasted him three years in childhood. He says himself they wore off and left him a dunce in figures. Abraham Lincoln was given to brood- ing. He would not be hurried into great con- clusions. Almost unconsciously to himself he gave his mental powers a gestative time to themselves. He paid but little attention to the modes by which he arrived at the wholeness of his con- clusions. Keen apprehensiveness, devout patriot- 35 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. ism, conscious honesty, and with the self-under- standing that these were in him, he had the simplest kind of faith that his political judgments would bring him out at about the right place. When he felt things in his bones, he went forward with great courage and great ability. He was the most unerring statesman of modern times. " We have potentially a subliminal self, which may make at any time an irruption into our lives. At the lowest it is only the depository of our for- gotten memories; at the highest we do not know what it is." (James.) With the mass of us, whether we wake or sleep, whether we wander into the woods or walk by the sea, OUT inner thought realm is always at work to bend things or break them in the direc- tion of our settled determinations. Burden the mind with a theme and we will make headway with it through the hours of sleep. When we retire at night the mind may be set to wake say at three o'clock in the morning. There is usually an awakening at that hour, or, if not, there will be a disturbed sleep. Many persons can depend on themselves to wake at the hour set when retiring. 36 PRIMARY TRUTH INVESTMENTS. You have stood alone on the bank of a great river and have felt the pull of the current. The feeling appears to be made up in equal parts of strength and majesty and dread. The common flow of it is placid the torrent of it is an up- heaval of power. It is a tradition among the In- dians that even a brave could not stand long in the presence of Niagara. He must break into the forest, out of sight and out of hearing. And yet Niagara is only the smooth stream above in culminant whirl. That figure may not go on all fours to express what the mind is in the wholeness of its deep nature; but certain it is that we are possessed of a hidden rational power which only in supreme moments asserts itself but when it does rise up to close with the open issues of life, it brings with it the authority of the absolute reason and our obedience is dumb. We are all acquainted with experiences of unusual mental exhilaration when we have awak- ened to some startling enlargement of conscious- ness when visions of thrilling rapture have seemed to transport the spirit out to the edges of a vaster realm from which, through other mysterious outreaches, it has seemed to articulate 37 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. vividly with the unseen; and at these high points of the understanding we have felt capable of being touched with a true inspiration. Aside from the violent and commanding voices of the subconscious mind, the evidences are ac- cumulating that we are never detached from its influence. Any strong personal desire any deep- driven purpose will bend one's energies in that direction in numberless and unexpected ways. Set a strong determination and nurse a justified ambition drive them both down to stay, and they will pull at the spirit through all the days; they will produce moments of astonishment. The nature of these self-experiences are such as to lead us to suspect that the undercurrents within us are, in some mysterious way, concurrent with the movements of the spirit forces in the universe, and that we tap not ourselves, but the fathomless cosmic mind. If such an intimation is in the direction of the truth, it is vastly prophetic. If it is a pure fancy it is a very rich one. If it is the truth it is an approach to God by way of the universe. Since the world began these deeper currents of the mind have been throwing scintilla- tions to the surface showing all the time a vast talent for the occult. 38 PRIMARY TRUTH INVESTMENTS. Hallucinations, mystic signs, seances, trances, omens, spirit rappings, hypnotisms, telepathies, witches what countless numbers are now under the influence of these and kindred kinds of belief and manifestation! It is known to scholarship now that much of the finding in this region is the stuff which the charlatan has picked up out of a rubbish heap. He makes merchandise out of the affinity of the uncultured mind for the weird and the strange. The explanation of the world's idolatries is the explanation for that. Spiritual- ism and Christian Science have a sturdy founda- tion for their fallacies. Destroy not the founda- tion. Pull it out from under. A vast literature which establishes no specific fact for the cult may be set aside, but it is time to heed all intimations from the human spirit that it has been struggling with impulsions which connect it in some mys- terious way with elemental undercurrents of a kind which do not find expression in the ordinary channels of knowledge. The question which looms biggest is not the degree of truth or falsehood in these mostly path- ological and absurd features of the mind's life; but what deep of the human spirit calls for such, and what deep of the cosmos makes any response at all. 39 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. It is the intent here that no appeal shall be made which the terms of knowledge will not justify, but to the scholarship of the world the inference appears fair that an underworld of power exists into which those who pursue knowledge have yet made but few sane advances. The human life is evidently set for its action in the edges of a region of perplexing and impenetrable mystery. On one side the objective mind, we may call it, has its centers in the organ of the brain. It is pure intellect, as we understand that term. It has capacity for observation and comparison and deduction. It makes its advances by the formal logical process. It goes the weary way of induc- tion. And that is said without invidious discrim- ination, for we shall never be able to dispense with it. It may travel on crutches, but it is an open, plain, and safe way. It is the way where con- fidence is buttressed about on every side. But if the spirit is to be shut up to its logical deduc- tions, it must be a slow learner forever. On the other side, and without in the least detracting from the idea of the unity of the mind as a whole, the subconscious mentality has a clearer intimacy and kinship with the universally- 40 PRIMARY TRUTH INVESTMENTS. diffused intelligence. The intuitions appear to spring up out of it. Unconscious cerebration may belong there, and also many of the fine things which possess the life through the emotions. The ordinary movements of the mind seem to be aside from the startling reserves of power which gen- iuses and prodigies show. Their messages appear to break upward directly from the great mother sea now in the musical numbers of a Beethoven, now in the mathetic capacity of the boy who could quickly cube nine numbers; now in the poetry of a Shakespeare; now in the revelations of the Nazarene, who touched fountains of truth by immediacy which have transformed the earth. Whatever may be any one's estimate of the nature of the Christ, only the natural features of His human career are here considered. His grasp of reality was a flesh-set mind-grasp. His mes- sage flowed out through the natural avenues of language and affection. He was also a citizen of the underworld of power; but it has come to pass that the New Testament evidences of that fact are not so wonderful as His saying, "Greater works than these shall he do." The works of Christ signify a yet unknown mastery of mind over matter; but they have been outclassed by 41 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. the achievements of modern science, as He said they would be. The veil of a great mystery drops down here, so small is the measure of human knowledge of the subliminal world; and yet we are possessed with the feeling which amounts to an assurance that, in this underland of our spirits, there is an original and originating power which is as superior to the ordinary human faculty as the sun is superior to the light of the glow-worm in the grass. The few measures we have of it stir us as the universe does. We can imagine how it might bulk too large for the earth and, by all honest inference, demand for its fuller expression the play-room of endless being. A loadstone of power we can not tell how great it is, but hard by all that we know of it, the sense of the divine sets in. Victor Hugo, above all that the world knows of his phosphorescent brain, fairly writhed in the agony of pent-up fires which were never brought to a blaze. He was sure that he had never ex- pressed the thousandth part of what was in him. We are all sure that we never completely express ourselves. Any mental worker knows that the plummet line of thought and research never goes to the bottom. So constantly is this test being 42 PRIMARY TRUTH INVESTMENTS. made that scholarship is now ready for the propo- sition, "There is ilo bottom." The human memory itself is only potentially perfect when it sinks down and looses itself con- sciously. The formal memory is a feeble flame a stocky mental capacity, whose value is over- estimated. The causative memory is subjective, and the true conservator of experience. It keeps the residue of values. It is the capacity by which we hold fast by letting loose. Cut the edges of an event clear, sink it down into the underworld, and then forget it as quickly as possible. It will stay there as a reserve for the crisis time. The principle holds for all the circumstances of life. Ruggedness, hard lines, attrition, sorrow will be its portion. All the tests of character, all the joys of achievement, all the smaller daily lessons are taken down and out of sight by the true memory and are held there in reserve for the exigencies of a broader day. Such a subconscious storage is prophetic. It is of the mind which is to be. It is the infinite apprehensiveness. A grub a pupa it may break through in the parturition of the ages. 43 CHAPTER II. THE ULTIMATE KNOWABLE REALITY. "WITHOUT which nothing" is the highest degree of certitude for the human mind. That much can only be said of a First Cause. For that reason the being of God is taken for granted in these pages. By the consent of scholarship the Divine existence is not approached or proven by the ordinary terms of knowledge. Healthful-minded- ness is impatient of all argument at that point. The absence of the sense of God in the human spirit is abnormal. Open denial is a species of insanity. God is. Now, what are the grappling hooks? How does it come about that the mind lays hold on that truth? And why should it be anchored there? If we can get an answer we shall reach the assurance that religion is more than a sentiment. Is Matter Real. Do the senses convey to us the evidences of a real world of matter? By the terms of common sense we say yes. By the terms which certify to 44 THE ULTIMATE KNOWABLE REALITY. exact knowledge we are not so sure about it. We say it has metes and bounds. It partly fills space. It maintains its identical weight in the last re- solves of the laboratory. All seeming destruc- tions of it are deceits. New bodies are made of collected substances. So far as we know, particles of matter do not come into being do not go out of being. Yet many acute thinkers have insisted that the objective has no real existence. The denial of matter is usually fortressed by a special defini- tion. It is named matter set apart matter as a dead entity an inert, senseless substance. The redoubtable Dr. Johnson would have none of these. He would charge up to his friends of the holy mystification some sensible definition and then waylay them with a remorseless irony. He would kick a stone and keep still. Reid and Beattie would tell Berkeley to go butt his head against a post. But Fichte could not see how the self had any outlet as long as it beat against things if it were held in like the waves are held in by the limitations of the shores. He could not see that substance normally conditions the self. Material substance is the basis of self-expres- 45 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. sion. There is no other way for the self to get out, or for outer ideas to get in. The house you live in, is it there, or not, when you are away? The flowers of the forest do they actually bloom unseen? The sight of an object conveys to the brain through the optic nerve the impression pic- ture which the light makes on the retina of the eye. This process, which conveys the sense of some of the qualities of the object to the brain, constitutes the sight capacity with its outer cor- respondences, and the result is the concept. But is the object invested with the colors we see? A million pairs of normal eyes, through the re- flective judgment, say it is. That is, the proper- ties of an object correspond with the sense im- pressions of what they are. The properties of an object thus related to the human capacity is a distinct marvel and a distinct fact. Objects wrought into beauty forms appear to have appreciation in view; but appre- ciation implies a realism and realism signifies the integrity of the object. The power acting in things makes them what they are envisaged veri- ties. Balfour says, "Everybody knows that color is not a property of the thing seen." Everybody knows nothing of the kind. The mass of folks 46 THE ULTIMATE KNOWABLE REALITY. refer color to the property of an object and not to the sensation. Suppose we see only a sensa- tion. Then the object is an inference. Is a sensa- tion valid and an inference not? A boy under- stands when he sees an object that the object does not get into his head; but no refinement of thinking will ever get him away from the position that the object is real. Certain objects produce certain sensations. The fact that sensation is sub- jective does not invalidate the reality of objects or their properties. When the coffee burns my tongue my tongue is hot, and the coffee is hot also. We do business on that kind of judgment without splitting hairs. If the property which produces the sensation does not belong to the object, where does it belong? Are we in the land of spooks? Sensation and reality are sometimes divergent terms, but we go on trusting our sensa- tions, under the ballast of. experience, without great hazard. If there is no real world of outside physical fact, we ought not to meet such disas- trous errors of interpretation. We ought not to find anything which refuses to yield when we push against it. Any pretense to a deeper view will not stand against the plain and palpable judg- ment of mankind that the outer world is actual. 47 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. When matter obtrudes itself everywhere, that is the end of it for the common understanding. Matter is a basal reality and the sole means by which intelligence makes its expressions and wins its understandings. The Actual Least Particle. The actual mass means the actual least particle. It may be the atom, or the corpuscle, or the electron, or whatever term may stand for the ultimate material analytical refinement. We know that matter combines in certain proportions. The ultimate active unit must therefore be a definite mass. That unit has never been discovered, but we know it to exist as certainly as if we had taken it between our thumb and forefinger. We know it as we know of the existence of an undiscovered planet, by the way it pulls the other planets around. We think of the atom as a first physical fact, but that kind of thinking amounts to an intellectual excision. The ultimate unit, in all actuality, is a unit of energy. As a physical fact it obeys multiple commanding and orderly forces. It is not a dead thing. In soil and rocks and air and water and minerals and meteoric stuff and fire-mist the atom is a living force. It is a some- 48 THE ULTIMATE KNOWABLE REALITY. what with eyes with a temper and a passion. It belongs to a well set up kingdom. It fits into an administration which does not turn aside at our behest, nor is it disturbed by our little invasions and inquiries. Each atom is known to follow the law of its own behavior in the presence of all other atoms. We call that affinity. The atom does not do anything anywhere without reference to or expectation about all other atoms with which it is associated. It recognizes the fact of its affin- ities. The units of responsive force in each atom must equal the affinities involved in its fellowship with all other atoms in a definite combination. That staggers the imagination. Law a Transcendence. In each of the elementary substances the ele- ments combine in different proportions, giving to each substance its atomic weight. This propor- tion is what constitutes it an elementary substance. The elementary ratios and arrangements have an integrity of their own. There are no gold or silver atoms. When the laboratory is able to handle the question of ratios and arrangements with the pre- cious metals the days of alchemy are here. Both quantitative and qualitative laws may be relied 4 49 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. on. They never fail the experimenter when he has been able to master them. They respond as promptly and intelligently as the voice of a friend. Whether or not the chemist can resolve the ele- ments further than their molecular groupings we are not informed, but if he can he can not put them together again. By which we understand the material feature of the atom to be one essence and the atomic relatedness another. The law, as a transcendence, coerces the stuff. These ultimate particles may not mirror the world, as Leibniz thought they did, but they mirror their own his- tory in the laws which grip them and which con- stitute them what they are living, intelligent units of energy able to keep tryst with marvelous affinities. Furthermore, it is a distinct wonder in syn- thetic chemistry that it has been able to take the atomic rhythm of many substances which nature has always produced and build these substances themselves in the laboratory. Indigo is an in- stance; and synthetic rubber is the next expecta- tion. These achievements, we are told, come about, not through a discovery of the atomic equivalents, but through a discovery of how the atoms go together in a compound. It is a dis- 50 THE ULTIMATE KNOWABLE REALITY. co very of the arrangements of the atoms. The different relative positions of the elements of a molecule account for the different compounds which may have the same quantitative chemical value. Nature, therefore, achieves her wonders in the production of animal and vegetable compounds simply by a different arrangement of the atoms in each particular case. Any little shake of the kaleidoscope will produce a new and startling combination of geometric lines and colors; and so vast is the reach of the mathetic rhythm that the chance of the return of the same figure is prac- tically negligible. So a single letter in the alphabet set differently is capable of bringing about thou- sands of variant meanings. The laboratory, as we understand, makes use of a feature of this law. But the particular thing to be noted, and which is of value to this discussion, is that these isomeric forms do not introduce us into a world of chance. The same arrangement of the atoms in the mole- cules produces the same compound invariably. The laws of chemical compounding are equal, in the certainties of their action, to those which com- pel the steady movements of the planets. So, also, if we look where the telescope points, the evidences are equally clear that the real aspect 51 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. of truth is a spirit aspect. Instance the higher mathematics. Symbols, we know, are used to express the formal laws of invariance. The mind is not seriously clogged with the symbols of mathe- matics because they are palpably so. The truth which the mind pursues is far and away beyond the vision of the blunt fact of the symbol, which is but a flimsy handle, and the mind knows it. The logical constants of the stellar universe yield them- selves to the calculations of the student through the symbols, as conveniences simply, while above them the mind lives in a realm of spirit. The mathematician grapples with potencies and laws in the spaces which have an action like the action of his own intellect. He interprets generic law, which is primary to the law of numbers in com- mon use. The mathetic spirit elects for its uses letters, signs, diagrams, equations, formulas, and by their substitutions and transformations, in end- less ways, it pursues its course into a region where it grasps perceptions which do not vanish. The visible symbols sustain the thought they husband its movements until it can pull itself up to where it has an immediate discerning of the things of mathematics; and that point of arrival is none other than a psychic illumination. 52 THE ULTIMATE KNOWABLE REALITY. The Present Tendency of Research. In any form of matter is another somewhat besides the form. We use the word intelligence to express what we detect. And that word always confuses the people who can not see intelligence except as it connects with a human brain. We do not see an entity separate from form, but we suspect that the way of nature is the path of an intelligence. The tools of the laboratory have been a little slow to take hold of a supreme fact. Retorts and reagents are used for the disjointing of nature. They run a fact into a corner and shut the door on it. They are severely, and almost exclusively, analytic. The outcome has been a philosophic one-sidedness. A supra-sensible mystery now lies flush with the latest experiments in physics and chemistry. The processes of nature are seen to be secondary to that which decrees them. The human understanding does not come to rest when it has traveled the road certain forces have taken. The why of the way is a vital inquiry. The old idea of dead matter of inert stuff has gone from all the departments of the sciences. Students of high attainment and position are giving recog- nition to the manifestations of the non-material. 53 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. Mr. Reid, the American Ambassador to Great Britain, in an address to the University College, Bristol, expressed the opinion that the tendency of the American educational system was to shift the emphasis from the purely practical and scien- tific to the intellectual and spiritual. A keener apprehensiveness of primary things has come about. A reconstruction of viewpoint is taking place in the realms of analysis. The honest searcher for truth now deliberately goes around to see if there be not another than the phenomenal side. The suspicion is out that the elect have been entering the temple of truth at the back door. Students of phenomena are having their attention called to a class of facts which compel a new hypothesis concerning them. Those who have thought their work done when they have classified phenomena, and have demonstrated the modes of their action, have been mistaken. They now walk among the extra-physical and the extra-human forces. They are held by the hush of sacred things. They walk softly while nature speaks to them through her laws, which are as clear in their ac- tion as the motions of the human intellect. The known forces of the universe may now be har- nessed in any little shop. 54 THE ULTIMATE KNOWABLE REALITY. Whether or not the modes by which spirit concretes itself is on the point of discovery, science surely sees something very great in every sensuous thing. And matter is none the less phenomenal after it is found inlaid with a great spirit process. How keen the sense of the growing forces of nature just now! What a vivid feeling among educated people that both life and being are best interpreted under the idea of a universal spirit immanence! Nature in its inward action is being lifted toward a positive fellowship with the human life. And this whole tendency has not a particle of mysticism about it. Research now holds itself strictly to the study of phenomena for that which may be known of the ultimate nature of being, first empirically, then reflectively. The religion of the future must include some of its findings. If a spirit world has been set into intimate corre- spondence with man's spirit nature, then he is in positive fellowship with everything about him. In the fullness of that fellowship he must meet the divine. Worship can not be made a side issue. It must be brought into the center of all motives and actions it must control his understandings and sway him fundamentally, because its elements surround him everywhere. 55 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. The Reality of Spirit. In the last known physical test the student of phenomena is still left with a profound sense of the presence of an inward-working law, which de- termines the states and forms of matter. His reason can not grasp the scope and greatness of the power which is adequate to that which he sees, but he knows that something is doing all the while. The larger meaning of any object lies below its first sensuous impact. We may take up any- thing and ask, "What is that?" And we may ask that it be distinguished from other things, and then make the further inquiry about its uses and purposes; but the health and strength of the human intellect demands more than that about anything. What are all things made of, and what are they for? The intellect demands some unity of concept. It needs what it feels to be the funda- mental grasp. The true judgment of any one object depends on a right understanding of the nature of all objects. The regal capacity for knowl- edge consists not so much in seeing the properties of an object analytically as in being able to see all the known properties in their places for whole- ness of apprehension. The stability of the human life depends on sound generalizations of truth. 56 THE ULTIMATE KNOWABLE REALITY. "I am convinced that in the next century there will be a state of science in which the known will be conceived as peopled with powers whose existence is justly and necessarily inferred from the knowledge which has been obtained from their manifestations." (Shaler.) "All things cover some mystery; phenomena are only veils." (Sabatier.) "There is more hidden force in existence than experience has hitherto revealed to us." (Hoff- ding.) "So far as our knowledge of nature goes, the whole momentum of it carries us onward to the conclusion that the unseen world . . . has a real existence." (Fiske.) "Concerning the es- sence of matter, the most exacting caution freely admits the reality of something which yields the phenomena universally ascribed to matter." (Winchell.) "The conditions which surround a rational being living anywhere on the globe are such as to cause him irresistibly to infer the existence of spirit." (Ward.) "Underneath, in the universal consciousness, there lies the insight that in some way sees that mind is different from matter, and that behind matter is something not matter, and out of which mind and soul have emerged and to which they are responsible." (Grosscup.) "Nature's forms are brought about 57 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. by an internal and primordial force." (Naudin.) "Back of the instruments which we see are other instruments, not of matter, but of mind and spirit." (McConnell.) "May there not be a great degree of open-mindedness to the light of truth in its attitude, and by a method which takes into account the data of spirit?" (Storms.) "The physical is covered over its whole area by the spiritual, as the elastic atmosphere covers over its whole area the surface of the sea the atoms which constitute matter' become the vehicles of the forces which are non- material." (Fitchett.) "It is only in times of deep experience that the veil of the commonplace is lifted, and we catch a glimpse of the eternal verities which lie beneath the surface of our everyday lives." (Kuhns.) "What is the true hierarchy of existence? Does the pathway lead up from man, and his little spark of life, to some immense oversold; and is that life the substance of the temporary phenomena which we call the world?" (Bigelow.) "We are, perhaps, beginning to understand, not in a purely poetical sense, but in a very real one, that there may be around us, in heaven and in earth, things beyond measure, of which philosophy knows nothing has not even dreamed." (Langley.) 58 THE ULTIMATE KNOWABLE REALITY. "All of us, more or less, are led beyond the region of the ordinary, some in one way, some in an- other; we seem to touch and have communion with that which is beyond this visible world." (Bradley.) "It is eternally true that the things that are seen, that can be estimated, numbered, and labeled, are transitory and vanishing; the things that are not seen, that must be discovered, if at all, through keenness and nearness of spir- itual vision these things are eternal." (Downey.) "The discovery of supra-sensible forms of energy proves that the limitations of reality are not con- fined to the material world as we directly know it, but that there may be vast regions of energy which can be inferred or known only by its effects in the physical cosmos." (Hyslop.) "All things are but the vestures and vehicles of larger things of spirit import; the presence of the non-ma- terial is ubiquitous it confronts us everywhere." (Jowett.) "We shall gain the most compre- hensible solution of the riddle of existence if we conceive the psychical to be the inmost center of existence and the material as an outer sensuous form of this inward life." (Hoffding.) "There can be no doubt about the fact that this world is spiritual in its inmost nature. The spiritual ani- 59 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. mates every particle of matter, and appears in its most beautiful and grandest development in the human soul. The spiritual is no accidental feature of reality, but an intrinsic quality of its existence, which will sure blaze out in the course of the evo- lution of the worlds. It is, as it were, the revela- tion of the secret concealed in the potentialities of the elementary conditions of the universe." (Cams.) Since the material world is an object of thought, and potent in its relation to immediate experience, it can hardly lie in the same plane of reality with the thought to which it appeals." (Santayana.) "What is the producing cause? clearly something akin to the result. A man generates a man; a plant produces another plant like itself. There is therefore implied in the re- sulting thing a productive force distinct from the matter upon which it works." (Cocker.) "Spirit is conceived as something existing where it is not conscious." (Baldwin's Dictionary.) "The soul is one throughout and indivisible." (Biram.) "There is a science of the invisible as well as the visible." (Latimer.) "The mother sea of reality beyond." (James.) "Behind all manifestations, inner and outer, there is a power manifested; while the nature of that power can not be known, while 60 THE ULTIMATE KNOWABLE REALITY. we lack the faculty of forming even the dimmest conception of it, yet it is the universal the ab- solute fact about which there can be no relative fact." (Spencer.) "This world has its roots in an invisible and impicturable world of power and possibility of purpose, and the reason for all spatial and temporal manifestation must ulti- mately be sought in the world of power." (Bowne.) Simon Newcomb time and again, in his studies, hints at more than a physical sphere; but he ventures only an opinion about it. He bows him- self out of the discussion in the usual way "There is no scientific knowledge beyond the visible frame." The common blunder is to look into the beyond for the spiritual. We determine through phenomena, by reflec- tion and insight, whether or not the universe is grounded in an invisible reality. We do not look away into the sky of abstraction. We are able to apprehend a determinate nature a causative prin- ciple in things. The sensuous world in every part of it is a manifestation of the cosmic mind at work. But this great fact of positive knowledge, reflect- ively derived, is not to be understood as an ab- solute principle. It is nature's kinship which makes possible the advance of knowledge. It in- 61 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. vites to companionship but not to worship. It is the way of approach to the Divine immanence, from which it must be distinguished. The Question of Unity. If the energy of matter is spirit, what kind of wholeness of view can we have about it? Does it contravene the modern demand for unity? Is an ultimate one substance either a possibility or a need? Hseckel sees two laws the chemical law of the constancy of matter, and the physical law of the constancy of force and in the unity of these he sees the law of substance. Matter, to his mind, is an entity, but he distinguishes force from mat- ter. Force is the living energy, unchangeable, never extinguished a manifest constant in the chemis- tries, in physics, in organisms. His law of substance has a dualistic base. He invents the word hylozoism to express the idea that the ultimate substance has two fundamental attributes. As matter it occupies space; as energy it is endowed with sensation. It has a phenomenal and a non-phenomenal side. It is a clear-cut, dualistic monism if anybody knows what that means. Professor Ladd insists on an ultimate unity in reality as the self-consistent source of all 62 THE ULTIMATE KNOWABLE REALITY. existence. He perceives the two immovable dis- tinctions on which experience is based. These have unity and a common ground of thought as the body and mind have; but he has no expecta- tion that another substance will be envisaged as existing. The unity of the two existences is the only possible ground for a rational system of the sciences. The everlasting two-sidedness of things is a fact which must stand above any desirable theory. The interactions of matter and spirit do not appear to project into any further impersonal reality. If unity is a requirement of scientific thinking, it must not be forced; it must not be dis- parate with the facts of nature. The system may be one and all the rest experience. Professor Hoff- ding has written a definition of unity which ap- pears to answer the demands of both philosophy and science: "A force or power in virtue of which everything which is and anything which happens is interconnected, is held together in a relation of continuity." Then relatedness is necessary to the sense of unity. One ultimate primal substance must be unrelated, because it could not have anything co-ordinate with it. Two primal entities constitute the necessary conditions of relatedness, and they give expression to a kind of unity which 63 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. does not disregard the facts of experience. "The duality of two kinds of objects, and the incom- parability of their qualities and changes of states, is also a part of the content of knowledge. In- deed, that things and minds are not the same realities is a truth which enters into our ordinary, and even into our scientific, convictions more deeply, and more comprehensively, than any con- viction of either a more primary or a higher unity." (Ladd.) Matter and Spirit Co-ordinated. Matter is a permanent co-ordinate of spirit. The two entities are never separable except in thought as the faculties of the mind are only separable for analysis and understanding. The idea that spirit and matter are independent enti- ties is the traditional thinking about these two terms of being. The teaching is widespread that spirit may animate the body for a time, then leave it, and thereafter live apart as pure spirit. The evidences to sustain such a proposition from nature or life are not forthcoming. There is an intrinsic cosmic necessity for the constant union of matter and spirit. Facts of data verify matter. Facts of inference verify spirit. The two classes 64 THE ULTIMATE KNOWABLE REALITY. of facts have no intermediary boundary. Where matter leaves off and where spirit begins we do not know. The idea of a spirit potency outside or above . material substances is now largely repudi- ated by scholarship. "The principle in which all relations are ultimately summed up, and which is the basis of the unity of nature, can not, there- fore, be transcendent to sensible reality." (Berg- son.) Spinoza had the idea that bodily substance and thinking substance were separate entities, and that they did not react at all. He thought of them as confederated, but mutually independent. He could not see how the testimony of the senses could have any validity as proofs of that which was not sensuous. He could not conceive of the non-existence of an invisible power, but on the positive side he could not see that power through the sensible attributes of things. The error with him hinged on his adhesion to the idea of sepa- rateness. An ultra-material world is a tradition. An ultra-spirit world is a tradition. We have belief and theory and doctrine in plenty. We have no knowledge of pure spirit, or crass dead matter. Even Berkeley says, "Such is the nature of spirit, or that which acts, that it can not of itself be perceived, only by the effects which it 5 65 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. produceth." That is, the effect of a spirit potency is some phase of matter. A sensation and a spirit manifestation both appear from the same object at the same time. The action is sensed. The spirit is manifested. Knowledge has its begin- nings and its progress in a world of concrete things. The learner starts with both feet on the ground, and if he makes sane advances he must stay there. It is of the very nature of sensuous impression to make the mind aware, directly, of a mysterious immanence, about which it then begins to inquire in a never ending way. The phenomenal phases of things are the stiff draperies through which the splendors of the underworld are conveyed to the understanding. That matter and spirit are so related that they may coalesce or fly apart is a tradition from which the modern mind does not easily free itself. How fondly the thousands cling to the idea that the spirit life may be isolated and lifted above all the conditionings of a world of matter, and be suspended so high above the earth as to make doubt about it an irreverence. The whole vision is a mental mirage. If such an idea were realized in fact, the whole order of nature, as we now understand it, would be destroyed. We are not 66 THE ULTIMATE KNOWABLE REALITY. acquainted with any taking apart or putting to- gether process. We can not even make a separate study of the mind or the body. Begin the ex- clusive investigation of either and the other be- comes an embarrassment. Consciousness itself is always related to cerebral action. The out and out materialist must be forever dealing with in- vestments and endowment and potential energies, and all the self-directing movements of life. His own thought becomes an entelechy of material existence. The concrete expression is the data of the mind revealing the transcendent truth. Spec- ulation loosed from verifiable sensuous fact is a dreamy mysticism. The ballast of the material senses is necessary to any healthful thinking on any subject. Anaxagoras is probably the first thinker who gave to man the formal proposition that mind is the cause of order in the universe. He made reason the regulative faculty and the ground of certitude; but reason perceived the nature of things through things themselves. Knowledge does not take us beyond coexistence. We so think in sensuous images that we see things with our eyes shut. The most complete phases of subjective mental action take place in a physical body. 67 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. Matter is the transmissive agent of all we know. Truth can not possibly be so abstracted as to have no reference to experience. Our dreams are chorded and hawsered to what the mind has known of the world-ground. They build their ab- surdities in a concrete world. Hobbes and Locke discussed the question of knowledge by con- tiguity or association. They saw that an abstract truth must be more than a figment it could not have all its features cut away from material sub- stance. This universal materialization of things is the deceit of materialism. Knowledge supersensuously conveyed is an impossibility. Cosmically, all men- tal action is impinged on a physical organ. Kant's error, if we understand him, lies in the idea that, as science deals strictly with phenomena, it is of no service in the determination of the world really as it is. He works tremendously under the notion of the separableness of mind and matter. It did not occur to him that science might furnish the indispensable data of philosophy. And it was not in his dreams that it might contribute the data of the realism of religion. The mind has no conception of anything dis- associated from the conditions of matter. It 68 THE ULTIMATE KNOWABLE REALITY. yields itself to the concrete whenever it makes truth into knowledge. Such terms as super- sensuous, incorporeal, pure spirit are language in- ventions made in a time of very limited knowl- edge of nature's ways, and of the nature of the mind, which makes of matter a permanent co- ordinate. "Matter and mind are united by the kinship of a common origin; and it is impossible to form an intelligible conception of mind without invest- ing it with the material attributes of extension; so it is impossible to frame any explanation of matter which does not involve an immaterial element." (Pearson.) "Now, the first thing to notice about spirit and matter is that, however we regard them, whether as totally different things or as different aspects of the same thing, we only know them as facts in combination." (Illing- worth.) "Power which does not reside in any material habitation does not exist. Energy is not a reality apart from matter, and matter is not a reality apart from spirit." (Rix.) "Force act- ing at a vacuous distance is unthinkable, or at *east incomprehensible." (Mathew.) "Mind is always associated with matter." (Van Norden.) "There is no form of energy separate from mat- 69 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. ter." (McConnell.) " Conception must, be empty without the matter supplied by sense." (Wenley.) "We can not have any knowledge of anything which lies outside the world of possible experience." (Munsterberg.) "It is impossible for any or- ganic being, including man, to produce any effect whatever on matter, except through the agency of material force. Mind, with all its superiority over matter, can not move an atom but by the agency of matter." (Armstrong.) "We have no means of describing our internal states except by the use of physical figures." (Bowne.) "There is in human nature an ingrained naturalism and materialism of mind which can only admit of facts that are actually tangible." (James.) Some of the later experiments in wireless te- legraphy show that something closely resembling matter passes out with the cathode ray from the conductor. Professor Crookes exhausted the air from the X-ray tube to the millionth of an atmos- phere. The gas then seemed to take on a new character, which he named radiant matter, or matter in the fourth estate, which is the emana- tion of the cathode ray. But when the exhaustion went beyond the millionth of an atmosphere the electric current would not pass through the tube. 70 THE ULTIMATE KNOWABLE REALITY. Experiments like these, which represent, prob- ably, the finalities of research, have for these pages a philosophic significance. So far as we know the very last limit of knowledge has a ma- terial content. Idolatries. The co-ordinations of matter and spirit help to an understanding of the idolatries of the world. The crass worship of the image is not a very large feature of the world's religious life. Normally the image is a symbol. The low mind of the savage occasionally gets waterlogged with the symbol; and there are individuals among all ethnic peoples who say the idol is, rather than that it represents, the worshipful power: but these are exceptions, and ought to be charged to stupidity. Religion, over the earth, is a spontaneity that is, it arises out of a primary impulsion of the human spirit. It shows itself everywhere, and does not die out anywhere. Like the other instincts, it is deathless in history. The issues about it are not concerning the fact of it that is settled. Nor does the future involve any doubt about a re- ligious destination of the race. The religious problems of the world are questions of its prin- 71 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. ciples and the ways in which its radicals of truth have become matters of knowledge. Idolatry is a first stage in the evolution of religion. Under- neath its forms is the feeling after God. It is the best that type of mind can do for itself. It van- ishes inevitably with the advance of knowledge. It is not so degrading as has been described. Overmuch has been made of the case against it. It is a mandible of power for a darkened mind. The Greek mind broke with its idolatries as soon as somebody climbed to the heights of Olympus and discovered that the gods did not live there, and yet for generations afterwards Greek cities were ornamented with sculptured images of the divine idea. An idol contains the generic abstract. The worshiper uses it as a method of mental approach to some conceived phase of spirit being. An im- pulsion and a necessity is involved. The first is the headlong drive toward the unseen, and the second is the grip of the physical. Sad and regret- ful as are many of its forms, it has in it an under- current of reason. It ought not to be coercively put out of action. It could not be, because its roots are cosmically set in. A fish could not be made to abolish the sea. An idol expresses the 72 THE ULTIMATE KNOWABLE REALITY. struggle of a child mind to grip the reverent idea. When Phidias made his statue of Jupiter, he defended himself against idolatry by saying that such a conjunction of art and power represented that which is invincible and inexpressible. Wil- liam Erskine states the case of the Brahmin in his idolatry in this way: "The mind, lost in medi- tation and fatigue, in pursuit of something which, being divested of all sensible qualities, suffers the thought to wander without finding a resting place, is happy, they tell us, to have an object on which human feelings and human sense may find repose." It was the custom among certain savage tribes in America to take their young men approaching the manhood age and drive them into the soli- tude of the forest. Each one must go alone and remain there the allotted number of days. The belief was, as he was about to take on him the spirit of a brave, it would be good for him to go away and have some things out with himself. He was not born a full Indian, but must become one in the tremendous struggle to realize what tribal honor and tribal devotion meant. His savage nature then made a journey, not into the forest, but into an underworld of spirit. He appropriated to himself only that aspect of the cosmos of which 73 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. he was capable. He measured his powers against all the reality he knew, and let us suppose it had its absolute values for him. His outreaching is in the dark, but in the right direction. Any lack of formal understandings of the being of God must not be made to stand between his spirit and its bottom necessity, which is a spirit fellowship with a spirit universe. He does not worship as the uplifted mind understands worship, but he has been cosmically magnetized as only a savage can be, and the fact becomes an element of strength in his nature. On his way back to camp he selects for his totem the first live thing he sees, and that becomes the ancillary of his savage devotions. In all this primitive-mindedness the human spirit appears to be pathetically, ceaselessly beating its way out toward God. And the most despairing fact of life is the time already consumed and the struggle not yet ended. The obligations of intelligence are to carry knowledge to the mind which bows down to idols, and lift its capacities towards the higher pictur- able forms, to an understanding of the true nature of symbols, because the purest conceptions in de- votion are yet envisaged verities. 74 THE ULTIMATE KNOWABLE REALITY. Fraternal Symbols. About every other man or woman we meet these days wears an emblem of some kind. It is a big "G" with compass and square and triangle, or three golden links, or an elk's head, or an eagle and bow and arrow and pipe of peace, or a skull with cross swords, or a shield with anchor, or a globe with a Hebrew tent, or a harp and clasped hands, or a lantern and signal flags, or a cross and ivy wreath. Of the same nature are paintings, pictures, crucifixes, swinging censers, candelabra, fasts, penances, pilgrimages, sacraments, seals, flags, escutcheons. These are made use of by people of broad understanding, who assess them at their true psychological value. They are the familiar evidences that the human mind is set in a material matrix in which it does its work and gets its knowledge and makes its advances. Man is a truth seeker with his feet on the ground. By that fact he is steadied in the deepest grasp he may have of the nature of causation. 75 CHAPTER III. MIND A CAUSATIVE FORCE. A Brain Not Necessary to Ideas. THE notion that the human brain, or some kindred organ, is the only possible thinking ap- paratus has no scientific standing. Even the human intelligence is not localized in the brain. At most, the human mind has only its reflective and executive centers there. Mind so pervades the whole body that the functional action of any part implies the co-ordinate action of all other parts; and intelligence there, in the wholeness of its action, is not radically unlike the intelligence of the natural world. The human spirit is known to be in constant reaction with a nature of things very much like itself and from that fact arises the capacity for knowledge getting in its broader generalizations. The inner personal world and the outer are not alien. The basal unity of all reality is a spirit co-ordination with matter. Spirit is the distinguishing term which stands for an essence the ultimate knowable manifesta- 76 MIND A CAUSATIVE FORCE. tion as the ether is probably the basal generaliza- tion of the material universe. Spirit is pure in- telligence. Mind is the administrative differen- tial of spirit being. There is a power in matter to definitely direct its motions. Mere existence, or mere force, with an equal inclination to act in all directions, would be a nullity. There is "a seeing force which runs things." Carpenter says, "The source of all power is mind." Whoever has to do with the sciences has to do with an order and a system. Whoever takes the measurements of matter to the thousandth part of an atom notes with wonder the last calculable particle. An electrified corpuscle shows the presence of a name- less supremacy so clearly that the material feature of it is of secondary interest. Scholarship is being challenged at the point of the last analytic particle to consider the heretofore inscrutable to have some kind of understanding with a new kind of fellowship. It is not enough to say that students in special research keep to consistent methods. They have to, if they get anywhere. At the farthest point of science nature rings clear. The so-called lifeless sciences are not mindless. The primacy of mind is not invalidated by any form of matter known. That which is grasped by 77 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. thought must be of the nature of thought. Every- where matter is being woven into definitely intri- cate shapes, as woof and warp are woven into the figures and designs of the fabric. In the long, glorious journeys which Mr. Dar- win took into regions where nature's processes were most likely to be laid bare to him, he asked and answered for himself the ultimate human question. In explanation of how things came to be, short of a First Cause, he conceived of two essences, one of which had the power to begin action. It is certain that matter is endowed with active and indestructible qualities. So far as we know, the connection between matter and its en- dowments is indissoluble. It is a waste of time to talk about dead matter. The reality of matter, aside from its endow- ments, is unthinkable. Knowledge consists in the perception of these orderly movements. A blind principle of action is repugnant. "The intelligence which guides things is not something external to the scheme, clumsily interfering with it, as we are constrained to do if we interfere at all; but it is something from within, inseparable from it, as human thought is inseparable from the action of our brains. In some partly similar way we may 78 MIND A CAUSATIVE FORCE. conceive that the multifarious processes of nature, with neither the origin nor the maintenance, of which we have anything to do, must be guided and controlled by some thought and purpose, im- manent in everything, but revealed only to those of sufficiently awakened perceptions." (Johnson.) Successful research implies a world without which has a nature akin to the inmost nature of the seeking mind. The universe has an intelli- gible nature which true knowledge interprets. No understanding is possible between disparate quali- ties. The human mind, in the evaluation of the ages, has come to that degree of self-consciousness in which it is able to turn about and seek formal fellowship and understanding with that which marks the path of its evolution. It could not, by any possibility, do this unless the order and connection of things was the same as the order and connection of rational thinking. It can not be claimed that the human personality is par- alleled in nature. Mind there has other and diverse features which do not exactly square them- selves with our traditional notions of the term mind. And yet there can be no experience of mind in nature which would make rough sailing with the sciences. Mind in nature expresses itself 79 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. in natural law. The law itself is a mind potency. The forms and states of matter bend to mind. Mind is constructive to the last degree. Causation. The secret of causation is now not very far away. If we know anything we must be familiar with it. It is not apart and above. It is at work among the bugs and bettles and angle-worms, and all lowly things. It ought to be as familiar to us in its action as the ends of our fingers. The child sees things becoming. The word force does not express that which takes place. We see a very gymnast which thrills every atom of matter, and flashes out in definite directions. We see a series of actions which the term mind best de- scribes. The knowledge we have of cause is one with the sequences of science. We say the law of gravity is the law of the inverse squares. That is the way gravity acts that is science. But the cause of such a law of action may become a sub- ject of inquiry, and the inquiry may yield knowl- edge. A causal agent in gravitation is a reality. Its expression in movements and physical forms is a reality. It has mastery over matter it is not blind; it is orderly, it is intentful these are 80 MIND A CAUSATIVE FORCE. realities. If this cause is where it is active, its immanence is a reality. These are so many glints of light into the darkness of a mystery. To be employed with the subject of causation is to seek to know something of the nature of the forces which produce the spectacles in nature. Incapacity for that inquiry is incapacity to know the real. Reality is the unfolding spirit power of the world. With every motion of even the human activity something new is being brought into being. Each new aspect of nature's evolving life is new to the universe and what is that but a creation? The bringing into being of something out of nothing, instantly, is the traditional notion of creation. Whatever may be the crass possi- bility of such a feat, the modern mind, facing con- structive powers in nature, to the greatness of which it has but little conception, is not in sym- pathy with the idea. The over-mastering nat- uralism of the time does not think of creation as a drastic shut-off, or an omnipotent fiat, but a continuous and orderly dynamic process. In its active features it is an unfolding system. It is not an extraneous power reaching down to touch nothing into being by a celestial magic, but a ceaseless inward urge to new forms of matter, new 6 81 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. modes of life, new relationships of truth. It is not necessary to consider everything given in block in the beginning. That the whole of nature is eternal, and given at one stroke, is a pure as- sumption and a pure prejudice. There never was a time when anything was finished, or brought to a state where no betterment was possible. That would signify a limitation of the creative powers. Always and with everything is the potential of approach towards a higher state. The universe is not finished it is growing. New worlds added all along, new phases of matter, new forms of life, new creations in thought. The record is not closed. The creative impulse is still on. Places are now found where cinders and ashes are being made, but even there the cosmic fires are cleaning off a place for the appearance of life. Over against the fact that the universe is alive that it is not an irrevocably fixed order, stands the assurance which a great First Cause has in its own ongoings. The inconceivably vast mind potency which is the active creative principle, which is bringing into existence endlessly new co-ordinations with itself, is a distinct pledge that the universe shall grow increasingly rich in its splendors; and at the same time it holds out to the human midget full pro- 82 MIND A CAUSATIVE FORCE. Vision for any fellowship within the reach of his capacities. The Mind a Body Builder. What man is, and has been, religiously, has come about by the reactions of the kind of nature he has with the kind of a world he lives in. A certain value, therefore, attaches to the action of the mind on the physical organ of the body. It is clear that there is a limit to the direct power of the mind over the body. We can not think an arm off. Pneumonia or a case of rabies can not be cured by force of will. We can not think a hot object cold or a round one square. Never- theless, the mind has a direct power over physical states. The mind may depress or inspire the life forces of the body. It may weaken them for a poor fight against disease, or strengthen them for a strong fight. Extreme mental excitement, when accompanied with a decisive action of the will, puts into the muscles twice the supposed limit of their strength. The muscles, under tense action of the mind, will sustain a weight which would tear dead muscles apart. Would it be accurate to say the mind exercises a tremendous force back of the flesh? Muscular skill is in reality mental. 83 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. The dolt never becomes a skilled workman. The mind must take an interest in what the muscles do well. That which the mind dislikes is never done well. The physical life is always a reflex of the mental temperament. The body is always marked by the features of the pursuit in which the mind engages it. The farmer has his country gait, the physician his quiet approach, the clerk his instinct of polite attentions, the lawyer his legal attitudes, the preacher his ministerial air and tones. Intense and prolonged attention to any pursuit fashions the faculties and the physical life in the direction of it. When a particular class of ideas register themselves in the brain, they leave their permanent posits on the neurons. In a sense, the inventor thinks his mechanism into being at least the destruction of the idea would be the neglect of the mechanism. A boy would drop his penknife by the wayside, if his idea of it were gone. The idea will reproduce a destroyed mechanism. The will to execute, me- chanically, works under the idea. Mechanism is projected mind. Its first and large meaning is the outpicturing of thought. Character, the most significant product of the earth, is a formation of creative thought. What 84 MIND A CAUSATIVE FORCE. we think we are. The sentiments and feelings we entertain of life and of self and of others fasten the selfhood down. The libertine's life writes itself on his face and features, and he is not able to hide it from the open day. The world knows what he has been thinking about. On the other hand, the love of knowledge, art, music, or exalted thinking or great ambitions are positively redemp- tive. Mental Healing. Mental healing in late years has come to take a recognized place in the therapeutic world. Doc- tor Leibault, of Nancy, France, first introduced into Europe the method of healing by suggestion. He demonstrated that diseases may often be checked and cured by suggestion. The science of medicine has its place aside from suggestion, which is a handmaid only. Suggestion does not always master the situation, neither do drugs. The whole effect of suggestion goes to show that the psychic and physical functions are co-ordinate in the human body. The only ones who dissent here are the faith healers. The mind does not lift the body out of its disease ab extra. It does not turn seventy years back into blooming youth. 85 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. It does not conquer a constitutional disease. The physician may make use of the constant inter- dependence and the mutually related movements of the mental life with the integrating forces and the chemistries of the body. It means the use of psychic law by means of simple suggestion. The basis of it is the tendency of the mind to take and realize suggestion. Binet and Bernheim have written standard works on the subject, and thou- sands of physicians now make use of it, and in its use have given themselves no further credit than that which belongs to ordinary tact. Drugs do not cure, anyway. The physician only removes obstacles. The cells of the body heal and cure. The seat of the healing is psychic. For instance, it is known that the toxin of typhoid fever con- centrates itself usually in the lower intestines. With the first symptoms of the disease, physicians have noted with wonder, the rush of the white corpuscles of the blood to this region to begin a life and death struggle with the poison. The strategies of human war do not excel in adroitness, and craft, and abandon of bravery the desperate struggle which these micro-organisms make for the health of the human body. They act as in- telligently as the trained soldiers of an army. 86 MIND A CAUSATIVE FORCE. Cell resistance to disease cell reconstruction of injured parts is a psychic function of the body, aside from the formal action of the intellect or the will. When the cells go about their business to heal the body, they understand what kind of material to use when they knit a bone, or heal a muscle, or replenish a loss of blood. Each cell knows. But the point in hand is, the cells are naturally stimulated in their work of healing by the hopeful emotional states of the mind. In this way sug- gestion takes its place among the curative arts. If the imagination is awakened, or if expectation is aroused; if hope and good cheer find their way to the sick room a state of mind is induced favor- able to the best action of the cells. The whole force of mental healing the whole truth of it is cell stimulation through a confident and cour- ageous state of mind. It will be seen, therefore, that the influence of mind over disease is direct and simple. Its values are too wholesome to be degraded into a religious cult, and exploited as Christian Science, when it is not Christian in any particular sense. Much of the world's sickness is mental. Some slight ailment brings about a de- pressed will, which is followed by indisposition to 87 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. effort, and directly the spring of action is gone and the way is open for any indisposition to be- come intensified and persistent. These patients do not need drugs. They need what psycho-therapy has learned of the power of the mind over phys- ical conditions. Many of them never take what they need, and they die professional invalids. Mind Functions the Brain. Certain scholars claim to have demonstrated that thinking is a mode of motion. Motion is a concomitant of thought, but not its cause. When it is shown that particular molecular changes always accompany certain classes of ideas, only a particular set of phenomena have been shown to accompany the dissipation of energy, and no approach has been made towards the proof that the ideas involved in that change have occurred in mechanical fashion. Ideas are not held in leash by the neurons of the brain. They hold high car- nival among themselves. They track one an- other through long trains of reasoning. They command the structure of the brain, often in an imperial way. They set its phosphorescent sub- stance aglow. They exhaust it like a jaded road- ster, give it a rest, then rally it again. They 88 MIND A CAUSATIVE FORCE. compel it to its work and spur it on. Ideas make their permanent marks on the brain stuff. They make it look like the uses to which it has been put. They train it to skilled responses along the lines of their preference. They function its mole- cules until they are full and hardened to a definite use, so that they are not, thereafter, very alert or yielding to any kind of service with which they have not been occupied. Busy men who have applied themselves can not, as a rule, successfully take new trades or professions after half the life is gone. The physical organ is impact with the uses which have been made of it. It can not be made over instantly, or be functioned in new di- rections, except under difficulty and distress. The reconstruction and resetting of a professional life is a very painful process usually. The effort brings about cosmic misunderstandings in the human brain. Matter, as a yielding substance, has its limitations. Matter shaped into a particular .tool for a particular purpose can not always be shaped over into something else. When the brain mole- cules have been hammered in certain directions for years, they resent the radicalism of cross-cur- rents. They do not yield themselves gracefully to mental movements unlike those with which 89 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. they have been loaded. The whole body, in greater or less degree, partakes in this fashioning force of mind. The face, the eyes, the nose, the handshake, the gait, the penmanship all show a plastic yielding to the thinking principle. The stuff of the brain shifts every few years; but the original endowments and the acquired capacities and habits hold over. Memory, habit, artistic skill, trained intellect disengage themselves from the outgoing material and resist displacement with the incoming material. These permanent elements are inconsistent with the idea that the mind, as a whole, is physico-chemical. The assumption of a supreme endowment a tremendous capa- bility, working from within outwards seems to be the only adequate explanation of the facts as we find them. 90 CHAPTER IV. PSYCHIC VALUES IN ANIMALS, BIRDS, IN- SECTS, AND PLANTS. THOSE who have had most to do with wild ani- mals, and are best acquainted with them, assert, without dissent, that they think and reason. And yet, the intelligence of the animal world can not be judged by the human standards. It is of its own kind and acts in its own way; and in any life form it will be seen to respond to the needs of that form. Dogs and cats and horses do not show the capacity for reflection. They possibly do not think about things at all. Gauged by the human standards, they are an inferiority. Their corre- spondences with truth are more direct, fewer, and simpler. Yet each animal, after its own grade, and manner of life, is brilliantly endowed. Animals and men, after all, are placed very close together. The points of contact are so many and of such nature that, if all common likenesses and parallels of mental method were extracted, both would instantly perish. 91 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. It is an unfortunate error of thinking that the intuitions and instincts of the human life are animal traits the dregs of the evolutionary proc- ess, to be grilled into silence and extinction as soon as possible. The tendencies of modern cul- ture have been to bury the primal impulsions of the soul and to over-stimulate, relatively, the logical and perceptive faculties. And for that reason, in the life of the world to-day, a second place has been given to poetry and music and art and architecture and the realisms of religion. Cold reason is king. The age is practical. In- stinct is blind. An emotion is a weakness. The natural impulsions of the human heart are put under such restraint that the fountains of its tenderness threaten to run dry. We are building a cold, heartless civilization. We shall not, by any means, go back to the beast, but greatly quicken and strengthen all the high values of life when we take greater account of its cosmic likenesses to the animal world. The instances given below are evidences of mind in organisms. They furnish proof that the same plastic power has been at work on the animal and on the human. No theory of detachment is of any worth. 92 PSYCHIC VALUES IN ANIMALS. Animals. A dog, trained to the hunt, will, in the course of the chase, turn suddenly in scores of directions, and with such intent on the quarry that no keep- ing of directions is possible; but when the game is captured, or lost, the dog turns about to know his directions immediately. A rabbit will seek out a place of safety in case of flight, against the day when it is pursued by dogs or other carnivora. From any location it knows the nearest place to burrow itself. It will take great risks to reach that place. If hindered, it will speed to another. The young rabbit will seek and examine these places before it has ever had a race for its life. Lapse of memory is un- known. The removal or destruction of a burrow- ing place will shortly be discovered. The trait is one of sleepless adroitness an apprehension be- forehand, and an ancestral transference. The struggles of this little, harmless animal to reach these places of safety are very vivid; probably for the reason that so many of its species have been so often stirred to such supreme exertion in the life crisis of the chase, where only swift-footedness survives. 93 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. A field mouse, disturbed in her nest and obliged to run for her life, takes her young with her. At her command, a dozen of them will fasten them- selves to her sides with a bull dog grip. Then she runs with the whole brood into any place of safety open to her. Beavers build houses in which they live. They shun conditions where they might have to struggle against floods in the streams. They build largely in shallow places, and at the heads of water- sheds. They build dams across streams to get an elevation of still water in their houses. When they cut a tree with their teeth they know how to take advantage to make a tree fall the way they want it. They cut timber above the dam, pref- erably, because they know what logging up stream means. When a break occurs in a beaver dam, the width of the break is measured before the timber is cut to mend it. They show remarkable engineering skill. The beaver, dam across Gibbon River in Yellowstone Park has a striking resem- blance to the great English dam at Fashoda across the Nile that is, in its angles of resistance and points of attachment to make it secure against the force of special currents. 94 PSYCHIC VALUES IN ANIMALS. When the female antelope is about to bring forth her young, she haunts the edges of the prickly cactus until she finds a place thickly grown. Then she leaps several feet into the thickest of it and stamps about with her feet, then leaps out again. She repeats this performance until she has beaten down a place large enough in which to bring forth her young. The cactus shelter becomes an effective protection against wolves and coyotes, to whom the cactus is a poison. From this cactus defense the mother goes forth during the day and returns at night leaping each time from the edge to the hiding place. If she sees eagles in the sky she stays near, and if they dis- turb her young she gives fight with reared body and striking hoof. On the farm, years ago, our little child, two and a half, slid down the front steps and out of doors. The impulsion of being on his legs was warrant enough for him to strike out. As soon as he was missed the household began a search. He was found directly, out in the clover field, making headway for the cows. The Newfound- land dog had gone with him, and was seen putting himself in front of the child to hinder his progress; 95 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. and yet he submitted to being pounded out of the way. Presently a cow came toward the two in anger, and at the moment she was in the act of making a dash for them, the dog whirled and nipped her heels; and when she turned on him, he did the unprecedented thing for a Newfound- land he caught her by the nose and held on. There was a bellow, the scream of a frightened child, and the man of the house on the scene shortly. Hunters say the stag weeps when his last hour is approaching. Dogs have been known to weep when the master goes away. Dolphins shed tears abundantly at the moment of death. An elephant weeps if he is wounded and can not escape. It is not unusual among domestic cattle, when they are hurt severely, or frightened in capture, for them to shed tears. This is the expression of a wounded and outraged animal feeling. It is life's last awful appeal. "When animals are in terrible trouble, and have done all that they can do and are face to face with despair and death, there is then revealed to them an instinct, deep laid, and deeper laid as the animal is higher, which prompts them, in their dire extremity, to throw themselves 96 PSYCHIC VALUES IN ANIMALS. on the mercy of some other power, not knowing, indeed, whether it be friendly or not, but very sure it is superior." (Seton.) The death bellow of cattle over the smell of blood of their own kind is an instance of the same deep feeling. Such nerve racking language of sorrow can not be described to those who have never heard it. It is not like distant thunder, because that is inani- mate. The voice of life there strikes the death chords; and we wonder if these animals reflectively consider what death means. Mimicry and Mesmerism. Mimicry and mesmerism are significant psy- chic elements in the animal world. Animals play at make-believe. The dog plays at biting the master's hand. The cub tiger is a passionate lover of rough play. Young elephants pull away a piece of termite hill, roll it in the mud, and make a huge ball of it; and then they play ball. Cats play with their tails and the mice they catch. Lambs gambol on the green. Pigs and calves have their outrageous romps. The boss cow stands in the gateway and laughs over her sovereignty. The opossum, under a slight stroke, feigns death. So do many bugs and beetles, and serpents and 7 97 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. toads, at times. A fox will swim down a stream to confuse the hounds on the trail. And if they get ahead of him in the turns of the chase he will back track. He will double on his own track to confuse the hounds. Squirrels make use of cer- tain bark resemblances to hide themselves. Many of the higher animals are skilled in several kinds of deceit. Certain frogs have the capacity of pro- tective coloring for a moment; they can take on, at will, the color of their surroundings. Either in anger or in fright, nearly all animals and birds, and many serpents and insects, have the mesmeric note. The squall of the cat and raccoon and panther, the squeal of the horse and the hog, the bellow of the bull, the bawl of the cab*, the growl of the tiger, the roar of the lion these are familiar. The ignominious little bat is able to assume a most frightful war attitude, and its squeak is positively galvanic. The common rabbit a most defenseless little creature when swift running does not avail, and when captured, as a last resort utters, often, a piercing cry so positively paralyzing in its effect, that by means of it escape is often made. Many a boy at that moment has lost his nerve and his game. The snap of the snapping bug has in it more than the 98 PSYCHIC VALUES IN ANIMALS. noise and the motion. Both of these are insig- nificant. The mesmeric potency is positive. It is clearly a nerve-racking psychic outgo. All these mesmeric notes are acutely distinct and unlike. They are also sparingly used. They do not lose their effect by becoming unduly fa- miliar. The undermeaning of this peculiar, and yet widely diffused, nature power is the same everywhere. It is a challenge to unnerve the enemy, or to startle and distract while escape is attempted. The very sight of a serpent is positively mes- meric. The nerve-failing effect is to startle the nerves unpleasantly. All the higher animals are similarly affected. They shun its rattle and its hiss, except the wild deer, which has an impulsion to hoof it to death. The evident use of this psychic capacity to the serpent is protective. It is not difficult to understand how this nature's provision for the perpetuation of the species, should be made a fetich among undeveloped peoples. The fact is, no early religion seems to be free from some form of serpent worship. It has been made a symbol of evil in the Eden story, and it was erected into a kind of totem in the Hebrew camp after the hejira. 99 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. Prenatal Expectations. In the prenatal life of all the species of the higher animals a remarkable series of adaptative and anticipative movements take place. Legs and arms and breathing apparatus and ears and eyes and jaws and teeth and tongue are all begun and rounded out in the day of little use. The fully- developed sense organs are there with the clearest expectation of parturition. The whole prenatal functioning process is a getting ready for other and expected life conditions. From the moment of conception premonitions of the time to come utterly possess the foetus. Birds. There is a species of bird in the Philippines which attaches its nest to a pendulous limb above the water of a stream. It builds the nest of grasses, and it is enclosed entirely, except the opening through a long woven tube hanging below. This tube is loosely put together, so that serpents, or other enemies, attempting to enter, will fall, through the breaking of the pendulous tube. When the turtle dove is nesting on infertile eggs, she knows when the time is up, and on the 100 PSYCHIC VALUES IN ANIMALS. eighteenth day she leaves her nest and goes with her mate to build anew. Many species of birds pip the eggs, when nesting, just at the time when gestation is fin- ished. Could they do this without the idea of the completed process? The mother quail, to save her offspring, will mimic the cripple to perfection. Her performance can not be a reflex of experience, for she never saw a quail with a broken leg or wing. The com- mon sense explanation is when she faces danger to her young, the mother instinct, sweet and strong, stirs her to an act of clear-cut adroitness to the best defense she knows. She will deceive a dog every time, and occasionally, with a quick spaniel, she loses her life. Birds have been known to ligate and bandage their own wounded limbs. Dumonteil says he shot a woodcock in the afternoon of a day, and did not find it until next day. In the meantime it had placed a bandage of feathers around each wounded limb. Doctor Wood, a leading English naturalist, says, "I think there can be but little 101 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. doubt that snipe, at least, understand the art of binding a broken limb, by means of a splint." Like statements have been made by numerous naturalists and sportsmen. M. Fatios' observa- tions on this subject were some time ago brought before the physiological society of Geneva, and it was stated that snipe had often been known to secure a broken limb by means of a ligature. Carrier pigeons have a sense of orientation which amounts to a special intelligence of the direction of the home nest. They have it with- out the mediation of objects or knowledge of the points of the compass. It is a direct knowing. It is knowledge by immediacy. It is an animal telepathy. It is in some way sensed, but the mode of it is a great mystery. "Well-trained pigeons, even if taken very far away, say several hundred miles from the pigeon cote, get their bearings in a normal atmosphere with wonderful promptness, without turning about in other di- rections, without rising to a great height. Before one can count fifty, they have disappeared. These same pigeons, left in the open air in their baskets, several minutes before releasing them, while they are given food and drink, look around them, walk 102 PSYCHIC VALUES IN ANIMALS. to and fro, evidently studying the sky, until, hav- ing found out what they sought, they remain quiet. Then, if the baskets are opened, they fly low and almost horizontally, without zigzags and in a straight line, in the right direction." (Thausies.) We stand in awe of the nature of such knowledge. Insects. The mud wasp places her cells where the rains will not drench them. She never uses the kind of mud which softens when it dries. When the house for her young is about finished, she care- fully selects spiders and flies, filling nearly the whole cavity of the mud cell. She gives to each insect she captures a mild anaesthetic, so that it will remain still, and yet not die for a time. Then she lays her egg in the end of the cell, stops the orifice, and goes about building another house. When the solitary wasp makes her nest, she bores hi the earth about an inch deep, and then excavates a larger chamber, where she can store her caterpillars for her young. In capturing a caterpillar she gives it several stings, one between each segment, usually, and waits for it to become still before she carries it to her nest. When the 103 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. egg is laid she closes up the hole, filling the cavity solidly. Professor Packard saw a wasp pick up a little pebble and use it as a hammer in pounding down the dirt. Yet he thinks the movement has no meaning above an advantageous reflex or a masterful instinct. Language terms will not change the nature of that performance. She goes about to do a thing and does it. The egg of the ordinary yellow nit fly is known to develop in the stomach of a horse. The fly lays its eggs on the legs and shoulders of the horse parts of the body which can be reached by the teeth of the horse in response to the itching sensation produced by the deposit of the egg. When the little beetle satiris deposits its eggs at the entrance to the house of the ground bee anthropora, it is with the future of that egg in view, certainly. From that place it fastens itself first on the male bee, then to the female, then to her egg, and, after metamorphosis, to her honey; and from thence it develops to the perfect beetle. Forel, who has given many years to the study of ants, says that we must not confuse mind with consciousness. The intelligent movement of ants, 104 PSYCHIC VALUES IN ANIMALS. he thinks, shows no signs of consciousness. Their actions, therefore, can not be interpreted in terms of the human psychology. The fact appears to be at the disadvantage of consciousness, rather than the ants; for they have memory and the sense of smell; they love, they hate, and they are highly endowed, socially. They will help an en- tangled comrade out of a difficulty. In moving a particle of food too large for one insect, others will help. An ant will work for hours in overcoming an obstacle. They will co-operate to expel an intruder from the colony. They go out on war- like expeditions. The will force of an ant is clearly strengthened in successful battle, and it is de- pressed and discouraged by defeat. Like a de- moralized army, panic will, at times, seize a whole colony, and the flight will be unnecessary and cowardly. The law of the colony is absolute in each insect. In any time of forage or war the whole number can be depended on. Forel took a handful of ecitons hundreds of miles from where he found them and placed them on the ground, and in five minutes they had gath- ered up their effects, the larvae, and had arranged themselves in file to begin a systematic search for a new place suitable for a home. 105 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. Several eminent naturalists have noted the companionship between caterpillars and ants. The ants will run around and over the caterpillars without the expected disturbance in a contact of different species. The larvae of the caterpillar will often be found in the nests of the ants. The ants do not molest them, while they carry out other foreign substances. The caterpillar secretes a viscous fluid, which the ants delight to feed upon. It is an arrangement by which the ant gets food and the caterpillar gets protection. No dead timber is found in the forests of upper inland Africa. The African ant devours all wood fiber as soon as it dies. This wood ant, according to Drummond, is the feeder of the soil of Africa, as the angle-worm is in America. The African ant protects itself from its enemies with great adroitness. The whole inside parts of a log or other dead timber will be eaten out before there are any signs of the devouring insect on the out- side. A permanent wooden house in that region is impossible. The insects enter fallen timber from the ground. To reach the dead limbs of standing trees they protect themselves by building a covered causeway from the ground over the 106 PSYCHIC VALUES IN ANIMALS. bark of the standing tree, and from the ground to the desired limb. The saubas, or leaf-cutting ants of the Amazon valley, are skillful agriculturalists. They cultivate the fungus on which they live. Their dwelling places are veritable underground gardens. The leaf fragments which they carry below with them are not food for the colony directly, but for the fungus. They train it to grow in filaments along the sides of their dwellings. When a new colony is to be established, some female carries a pellet of the fungus to start the new growth. Who has not been excited to wonder by the ballooning spiders say on an October day in the fields? They climb to the tops of fence posts, or of the tallest weeds, and dextrously throw out into the air long, sinuous filaments, and by means of several of these, undercaught by the currents of air, they are lifted and transported, often great distances before alighting. If the wind is strong, and the intimations are that the little aeronaut is being carried too far afield, it will begin hand over hand to pull in the long filaments until it slowly descends to the ground. 107 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. Netter, of Paris, makes some remarkable state- ments about the intelligence of bees. He says that they make the maximum amount of honey in the minimum amount of time. Different species of flowers are apportioned out among themselves. The number of bees engaged in the ventilation of the hive is increased exactly as the amount of honey is increased. He says this is only a mathematical reflex an action like the closing of the eye with a motion toward it. The bee does that which its nervous organism fits it to do. Very well, it is an organization at least finely-equipped. Forel is of the opinion that bees have minds that their action can not be a mere automatic ac- tivity. Vision and its memories do not furnish a satisfactory account of the power of orientation exhibited by bees. When a bee has made thou- sands of gyrations among the underbrush and flowers, its vision of general direction is lost. But it will rise and get its sense of direction in the time of a second. Bees and wasps and hornets sense the direction of a missile. Any country boy knows better than to stand in the open and throw a stone or an apple close to a hornet's nest. Bees have the spirit of self-effacement for the colony. The workers fight for the hive with ab- 108 PSYCHIC VALUES IN ANIMALS. solute fearlessness. The stinging point of the insect is a life offering. If honey for the winter hive has not been secured, or has been taken away, the workers will feed the queen and die themselves of starvation. It has been estimated that the glow-worm produces its given amount of light with one-fiftieth of the energy expended on that amount of artificial light. It excels all optical instruments and ap- pliances. And yet the glow-worm has no brain. What it does is the executive act of pure atten- tion. It does not have to pass muster of any con- fusion of desires. It is not disturbed with present or prospective interests. It has no fear of failure. These are brain weaknesses. The glow-worm light is a splendid little piece of cosmic mind. Plant Life. In vegetable life we probably have to do with psychic movements which are not conscious. They need not be. Consciousness is not a constant hi the human life. But the sensitive plant has a strangely human reaction against outside inva- sions. A tree bent downwards will show dis- quietude and struggle towards an upright position. House plants reach out towards the light with a 109 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. yearning as distinct as a babe's cry for food. The psyche of the plant is not far removed from the psyche of the insect and the animal. "There is nothing unscientific in classing plants and animals together from a psychological standpoint. In this I rely on the opinion of a well-known psychologist, Mr. James Ward, who reaches the conclusion thai it would be scarcely going too far to say that Aristotle's conception of a plant soul is tenable to-day." (Darwin, Jr.) "Plants possess only that kind of a soul by which they are nourished." (Caesalpino.) "The total response of plants to out- side stimuli is equal to that of animals." (Stack- pole.) Plants have a will to execute. They taste and see and feel. When the leaves of the bean plant, or when blades of corn, are being pained by too much sunlight, they turn their edges so that less rays strike them. A human being lifts an umbrella for the same reason. The leaves of plants spread, facing the sun, when they need it. They recognize light and the direction from which it comes. They have the sense of direction, there- fore. They discriminate in taste. They feel the slightest wound. They are influenced by electric currents. Broken roots and limbs display the same features that broken bones and wounded 110 PSYCHIC VALUES IN ANIMALS. flesh display. The roots of all plants are able to direct their growth towards the moist places in the soil. The sundew plant is a trap to catch insects. Any other small object put against the tentacles of the leaf will be enclosed, but a little later it will be released. A fly placed in possible reach of the leaf will cause a motion towards the insect to secure it. The cynips punctures a leaf tissue. The wound it produces is no more than a pin point would make, and the leaf would heal without a scar. But the leaf becomes malformed, and its whole tex- ture is taken to build a gall-ball, which is both house and food for the grub. A new idea entered with the parasite egg, and carried out the cynips' type. Some seeds, such as the cherry, blackberry, and raspberry, are surrounded by a pulpy, luscious fruit, which the birds eat, and the stones of the fruit pass through the bodies of the birds and are scattered far and wide. Other seeds are supplied with fluffy tufts of cotton, and by that device are blown afield and spread for new germinations. Others are held by bushy tops which break before the seed pods do and go tumbling over the ground to new 111 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. places for the seed growth. Others are protected by hard casements which may be carried by floods to great distances. Others are provided with arrangements by which they fasten them- selves to passing bodies, and are thus disseminated. Protective resemblance is psychic. The regu- lar stinging nettle is self -protective. The white nettle is regularly shunned because it is so near like the other. On the Riviera grows a species of euphorbia so acrid that its juices protect it from many enemies. The yellow bugle which grows in the same region escapes by protective resemblance. "A tree is a thought, a unity, a rational, re- sponsible whole; the matter of it is but the medium of expression. Call it matter, tree, or a physical production, and have we yet touched its ultimate reality? Are we quite sure that what we call a physical world is, after all, a physical world? The preponderating view of science now is, that it is not. The very term material world, we are told, is a misnomer, and that the world is a spiritual world merely employing matter for its manifesta- tions." (Drummond.) 112 CHAPTER V. THE FOUNTAINS OF LIFE. The Cell. THE working basis of the life sciences is the cell. All life might have been derived from a single cell. Nature's prodigalities with its myriad forms of utility and beauty have come up from plasm germs which are absolutely indistinguish- able. Cell life, chemically and physiologically considered, is identical in organisms of widely differing structure. With such a homogeneous base, and with similar outer conditions, diverse structure must have some other accounting than the straight action of the organic chemistries. We have to deal surely with some other unit of force, some difference of life potential which does not show itself phenomenally at first, but in the outcome of things. Would the basal stuff begin a cleavage unless the differential was there to induce it? Are we not compelled to have an explanation of what comes to pass in the produc- tion of definite organisms. Mere cell division is 8 113 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. mechanical. That is, it is a straight measure of the increase of life; but in order to account for what is, it must get itself mixed up with a lot of headlong potencies which the laboratory does not disclose. In other words, if, in the first stages, it is practically impossible to distinguish the animal cell from the man cell, and even if the fact shows that life is continuous, does not the unfolding life of each cell in its own way, and in its own direc- tion, go to show conclusively that the organic chemistries are not yet masters of all the forces actually at work in embryology? The most painstaking empirical tests are not able to set forth that which is a fact about these embryos. There is an animal cell. There is a man cell. In each case this will be so before we have the means to know it, except by knowing their procreative sources. The fertilized ovary, by all physical tests, is identical in material and structure with hundreds of thousands of cells about it. But the fact is, from the moment of impreg- nation a masterful somewhat, which eludes all analysis, instantly demands a word picture of that which is to come about in the swift evalua- tions of life. And when a start has been made toward a definite organization, there are no devia- 114 THE FOUNTAINS OF LIFE. tions, no confusions, no scarred edges through border contacts, no careless throw of the shuttles in the loom of life. Individuality of the Cell. The tendency among students in embryology now is to take large account of the individuality of the cell. The cell has a degree of independency of life over the molecular aggregates to which it may belong. There may be living cells in a body after life has become extinct. Leucocytes may be taken from their living home, and kept for days, in a citrate chloride solution. The heart of a tortoise has been taken from the body and kept alive for weeks by supplying it with artificial blood, made of salts and grape sugar. The cell, therefore, has a distinct life focal of more or less tenacity. To a degree, it is independent of the overlap of the complex life unit to which it may belong. Goeble makes a statement of Negeli's idea of cell investment as follows: "There are also in the nature of plants themselves intimations of laws of variation which lead to a perfecting of organic forms, and to their progressive differentia- tion independently of their struggle for existence, 115 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. and of natural selection." He sees an inner and an originating capacity for adjustment and vari- ation. The individuality of the cell is shown by the fact that each has its own predetermined man- ner of development. All young cells of any young plants are, at first, nearly similar in form and size; but, later on, each cell is seen to follow cer- tain laws of growth which are, to a certain extent, independent of all external forces. From these laws, together with various mechanical causes, arises the great variation of forms in the cells of ordinary plants. The peculiar form common to certain unicellular plants illustrates even better than those of higher ones the inherent tendency of cells to grow in a certain manner." All physio- logical units maintain the integrity of their ar- rangement because the primordial units from which they are derived ordain an arrangement of that kind. For the mysterious somewhat which dominates the protoplasm of a single nucleus, Sachs invents the term "Energid." The energid is a free agent within limits a mighty fighter, and the repre- sentative of the struggle of the individual cells to maintain themselves against extraneous control which would blot out an inherent individualism. 116 THE FOUNTAINS OF LIFE. "The most perfect picture of the plant, or of the protoplast, must necessarily fail to reveal the hidden and invisible causes which make it assume its specific form." (Pfeffer.) The invisible cause is known to be a fact. A definite energy resides within the cell. It has intricate movements and endowments of its own. It is the unit of the associated organic achievements. As in a free government, the electors are what the social units are; so the type of any organism is fixed by what the cells contain. It is certain that procreative characteristics and powers center in the cell. The number of cell chromosomes in an animal are the same in all animals of the same species. Where the method of sex reproduction prevails the chromosomes of the sperm cell and the ovum are always equal, which is probably the biological explanation of sexual affinity. Furthermore, all special life characteristics ap- pear to originate in the cells. So also by special cell capacity each plant takes its food from the common supply and runs it through its own unique laboratory. The endlessly diverse features of life prevail in a realm of free choices and autocratic commands. 117 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. Definition. The cell itself is a microscopic enclosed mem- branous sac. It has an outer membrane or skin, which is firm and elastic. The plasm, or cell substance, contains albuminous matter which is called protoplasm. In this cell substance is a nucleus or kernel. The kernel also contains a smaller kernel, called the nucleolus. With its fibers and liquids and granules and nuclein, the cell is a very complex little body. It is probably one-two-hundredths of an inch in diameter. Mi- nuter divisions are still found inside the nucleolus, and they are as finely and definitely wrought as if a plastic and infinite skill had been there before the microscope ever set forth the fashion of it. One glimpse at a living cell puts despair into all human efforts to manufacture life. The features of the cell are all too fine for any imitation of human skill. The marvel of it is not inferior to that of human personality itself; and yet nature, in many small organisms, builds a million of them in a minute. It is known that plants and animals grow by the process of cell division. Under the growth impulse the cell begins to contract across the center, and it separates itself into two about equal 118 THE FOUNTAINS OF LIFE. parts, each part becoming a new unit of life; and the same act is repeated indefinitely. The increase is geometric. There are evidences that cell divi- sion is not altogether mechanical. For instance, the cell nucleus is not always in the center of the plasm. And as the first discoverable movement towards division takes place there, when the nucleus is on one side, the line of least resistance, mechanically, would be to make an incision on that side; but the nucleus always lays the division plate down through the center of the plasm to the outer wall of the cell. This kind of proto- plasmic reasoning repeats itself with the regularity of law many million times in the life of any plant or animal. The living cell is the base, the protoplasm. The quality of life in the cell has very much to do with the particular characteristics of the proto- plasm, which is not a simple compound, with an invariable molecular composition, produced on order in the laboratory. There are as many kinds of protoplasm as there are kinds of organisms; and the determining element in an organism is cell individuality. If, at the moment when a cell gets itself shunted in the direction of its particular life form, we could detect its definite bent, we 119 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. would almost have the secrets of life between our thumb and finger. We may yet only look on with wonder, and say with Drummond, "Observe with what unerring aim the one type unfolds, never pausing, never uncertain, in its direction, refusing arrest at intermediate forms, passing on to its flawless maturity without waste of effort or fa- tigue." "There must be mind somewhere in the responsive power of protoplasm in making cells, in building tissues, and in the construction of organs." (Henslow.) "Mind, or at least some- thing so like mind that their phenomena can not be distinguished, seems to belong to all organized matter, even down to its lowest forms." (McCon- nell.) Cell individuality is notable in micro-organ- isms. These bodies are alike in their littleness and in their simple structure, which consists in a single cell; but otherwise they are as much unlike as other folks. They belong to a well set-up kingdom. But they are of all kinds commoners, aristocrats, marauders, sleepyheads. Not many questions of precedence and primordial right have been settled peaceably among them. The micro- scope shows to the human eye a psychic surging tragedy. Relentless wars are waged with more 120 THE FOUNTAINS OF LIFE. millions in each army than ever peopled the earth. Vanquished species lie buried everywhere. In each cubic foot of air the warring hosts swarm like the locusts of Assyria. If a drop of water containing infusoria is placed under the microscope, minute bodies may be seen swarming in every direction. Some of these swim around obstructions, others push them to one side. They show a capacity for voluntary movement, therefore. One species may be seen rushing about in search for food. Another waits for food to come its way. Another casts corpuscle darts at an enemy, which seem to have an electric or para- lytic effect. Binet makes very much of this psychic feature of cell life. The higher animal forms are supposed by him to be colonies of dif- ferently endowed cells. The distinct functions of the animal body are given the same explanation. Bone and muscle and hair and nails and adipose tissue and brain substance are so many assem- blages of protozoans equipped especially for the work they have to do. He undertakes to account for the affinities of the higher organisms, such .as the tiger for blood and the duck for water, by this sort of cell investment. Such a theory practically fastens on nature a blind determinism, and at 121 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. the same time it posits intelligence in the last analytic expression of life. Its claims may be held in reserve. Its determinism, however, has to do with a phase of cosmic action so far below the choices and freedoms of the human intellect that as a plausible hypothetic it is perfectly consistent with a free personal will. Equilibrium of the Sexes. A favorite theory is that which brings about the equilibrium of the sexes in the higher organ- isms. In the two elements of fecundation the tendency of the male cell is to produce the female, and the tendency of the female cell is to produce the male. On the basis of this dual tendency, the equalization of the sexes becomes a question be- tween the individual and the community. Males in excess would produce an overplus of male energy, which, in fecundation, would mean an increase in the stream of female tendencies, and that intensified current would continue until the balance is restored. The same principle holds on the other side. The sex of the offspring is de- termined by the question of sex superiority the sex being that of the inferior parent, according to the principle of the cross heredity of sex. If the 122 THE FOUNTAINS OF LIFE. male is superior, the progeny will be female; and if the female is superior, the progeny will be male. The dairyman who handles the Jersey cow is often perplexed by the appearance of so many male calves. He might find the cause of it in the mating of an overtaxed male, usually, with a highly-fed and pampered and sparingly bred female. The eggs of the queen bee, before fecundation, produce males (drones) exclusively. Those laid after fecundation produce the workers, which are females. The total self-procreative response of the queen bee is maleways. The total response in fecundation, through the drones, in which there is a vast overplus of male energy, produces a fe- male progeny altogether the potency of the queen being entirely obliterated. Thus the hive intent is carried out in a remarkable way. The arrangement has in it a prevision of the whole life of the species. An intimation of the action of the same prin- ciple (which, as with the bee, does not accomplish the equalization of sex in the colony life, but does accomplish the hive intent in another direction) may be noted in the procreative habits of the honey ant of South America. The female there is ordinarily infertile; but when the pressure of 123 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. colony conditions are extreme it seems that she is capable of producing progeny; and not being fer- tilized, her total response is maleways. Self-Fertilization. The female cell of a grain of corn lies unseen in the husk, and sends out a pendant in search of the male germ, which, from the tassle, has been cast into the air. The conjunction of the two cells completes the fertilization of the grain, which embodies itself in the kernel. Now, besides the pollen grain, which impregnates the female germ, there is another substance in the grain of corn which, in union with a responsive substance in the embryo sac, begins the production of starch, which is to serve as food for the germ from the time it quickens until it can appropriate the more intractable elements of the soil and air. This is the mother milk of the new life as it starts on its upward way. This twofold process is so clearly defined in a grain of corn that the starch and heart are clearly distinguishable by the naked eye. A critical examination will show the molecular groupings of the food material to be classified into localities in the grain so as to be serviceable in the order of their need during the first few days 124 THE FOUNTAINS OF LIFE. of growth. A millionaire in his palace, with his larder full, and wrapped in his blankets, has not made more careful provision for a rainy day than this unit of life whose palace is a grain of corn. Heredity. The distinct marvel of life is heredity. When two cells meet in copulation, the prophetic organ- ism, which is then begun, partakes of the genetic characteristics of each cell. A transfusion of the most intricate and far-reaching of ancestral traits takes place. Two streams of genetic tendencies have confluence in the unities of a new life. The particular psychic cell investment here, which starts and carries forward the most complicated and abstruse interacting influences, and which begins to shape a new bodily and mental life pre- natally, and which so mingles the dissimilar traits of two beings as to produce in the progeny an infinite series of differences, and at the same time conserves and keeps clear on each side ancestral traits ceases not to be the wonder of the world. When a child is born we meet a body of im- pulsions, instincts, desires, and primal tendencies which do not take that youngster in haphazard directions, but in the way of the balanced totals 125 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. of their power. They show themselves to be self- directive of a certain order for that life and a certain kind of surrounding. They form for the child its constitutional base of experience, and they are largely determinative of what the life is to be. The procreative impulsions are of first significance in fixing the characteristics which dis- tinguish one human being from another. We may be blind to the order of such a law or not, obedient or not it usually has its way with us to bend or break things. This radicalism of the genetic power is yet consistent with the freedom of the human will, which has, as the life goes on, oppor- tunity to execute its formal decisions; but it is evidently not the intent of nature that its power should be equal to the shift of these deep-laid original determinations. Without question, the exercise of the will weakens or strengthens both the good and the bad inheritances; and it may be said, at times, to overcome and conquer them; but the human will, in resistance to the inbred tendencies, always fights a battle against odds. The logic of the freedom of the will is responsi- bility, which does not limit itself to the action involved. Its scope is often enlarged to identifica- tion with the race. The power of the will, too 126 THE FOUNTAINS OF LIFE. frequently, is called into action at the wrong time after heredity seals the fates with its con- sequences. The more positive assurances of a free will are propaedeutic rather than remedial. Those who were most largely responsible for the Jukes family lived their lives before the Jukes family had its notorious history. The will makes more headway when it undertakes to guide the currents than when it tries to dam up the floods. Varietal change is also prominently congeni- tal. If we could make an analysis of the in- born tendencies of any human being we would find in them traces of the vanished units of the races to which that being belongs. We would find the better traits of a long line, and the lower traits also, legibly marked. The human brain itself, in its inmost detail of structure and tempera- mental nature, is a repository of the ancestry of that brain for more generations than the books show. Above this, the posits of experience are seldom, if ever, predominant. Truth values through the sense avenues remain secondary to the unitary power of these undercurrents. We shall never be able to make ourselves over into some- thing new. We only fall in line with the course of things when we make the human destination a 127 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. question of preference. Even family and racial features usually have their way. They fix for each newcomer into the world its finally dis- tinguishing traits. The common people have the whole truth when they say, "There is something in the stock." It is not contended anywhere that the labo- ratory is able to disclose the presence of these basal investments. Its tools are not made with that intent. Our mental and moral elements are spirit scintillations. Matter is the yielding sub- stance the fact of the crass outward vision, the servant of the inward inclination. It gets be- marked with the real. Goodness and honor set their seals in the face. Evil has no power to cover its tracks. The villain must of necessity take the manners of a thief. The eye is spirit. The lips are spirit. The whole bodily movement is an expression of the inward equation. Heredity has in it more meaning for the race than education, as we understand that to mean the drill and in- forming of the mental faculties. When the he- reditary impulsions are understood, as they give promise of being, and are implicity obeyed, the work of character building will approach the mas- terfulness of a science. 128 THE FOUNTAINS OF LIFE. Several noteworthy theories of heredity have been advanced which are of value in this discus- sion only because they attempt to pursue the physical basis of it to its limits. The reproductive act, of course, is the center of interest. The union of a single sperm cell with a single ovum cell builds the microscopic bridge across which the wonders of life pass. The potencies of two beings a male and a female, each with limitless an- cestral records coalesce in the impregnated germ and start a new life unit. Mr. Darwin's explanation is substantially as follows : All the cells of the multi-cellular organism appear to throw off very minute "gemules," which disperse themselves through the system and mul- tiply by self-division. These gemules have an intense mutual affinity, and are called together by the reproductive glands of the organism, and con- stitute the material of the ovum and the sperm cell. These cells are not to be distinguished by what they are in their organic structure, but by the invisible forces which they contain. These forces are not to be discovered in the reproductive cells in themselves, but in the new organism, as it develops and shows the marks of a myriad an- cestry. Darwin admits that there is no experi- 9 129 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. mental evidence of the existence of these so-called gemules. Weisman says the multi-cellular organisms are composed of two kinds of cells, "Germ cells" and "Somatic cells." The germ cells are continuous from body to body. They are stable and endless and constitute the physical basis of all life. Their function appears to be to carry over hereditary investments. They transmit them only through the generative act. They are not subject to any of the influences of environment. The somatic cells, on the other hand, make up the bulk of the organism. They are subject to all outer condi- tions, but transmit nothing. All acquired qualities expire with them. The germ cell is a causative force, and makes life on the earth a continuous stream. Nageli insists that at the base of all organisms are certain ultra-microscopic particles which he calls "Micellae." These are the ultimate potencies of life, and the determinants of all variation. Life does not originate from a single cell, but shows itself where the conditions prevail. The micellae become oriented into a form of life, which he calls "Ideoplasm." Ideoplasm ramifies all organs by becoming a part of the content of the cells of all 130 THE FOUNTAINS OF LIFE. organisms. It is the ultimate particle of matter invested with mind. In all the shifts of evolution it crosses each line a deathless substance. These theories are efforts toward a physical explanation. No experimental proofs appear of gemules, or germ cells, or micellae. Ideoplasm is a better term for the inner content, because it is a symbol of intelligence. Nageli uses it probably for the reason he uses the term "enlagen." He means the constitutional feature of germ-plasm. He endows it with originating capacities. He makes it a determinant of direction. He means the line along which an organism will develop. He means a plan, preconceived and executed. He means an organ, plus a formative power. His pages are rich in phrases like the following: "The molecular forces arrange themselves;" "Dynamic influence;" "The action of the internal forces;" "Oriented micellae;" "Capability of the primordial plasm;" "Integrity of the organism;" "Ideo- plastic determinants;" "Automatic perfecting prin- ciple." The real has broken in on him, and he is here struggling to give it detachment of thought. His ultimate material unit is not able to walk alone. When it is idealized, it expresses what he feels to be present in any life form. It is not pos- 131 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. sible to see the true nature of life without the hypothesis of an organizing capacity. Biologists are obliged to do all their work under that assump- tion. The research which traces the action of living matter back to the cell and its nucleus settles no question in philosophy. The smallness of the material unit only increases the wonder and the mystery. When a thread of matter too small for the microscope is yet large enough to carry over the mighty forces which we know do get over; when a sightless unit is yet comprehensive of a far-extended race history; when a particle of matter so small that it can not be known, except in the way it combines with other particles of matter, yet holds in its grip mystically inwoven powers, which have in them the decisive elements of the human character, we are about to the point of "being crowded to our knees" in its presence. "Life is not force; it is combining power. It is the product and presence of mind." (Bascom.) "Mind may be predicted of all animal life in one sense or another, and we may also form the view of Agassiz and others, that a spiritual element is the originating cause in every embryo cell, de- termining its development." (Barker.) 132 THE FOUNTAINS OF LIFE. Cosmic Spontaneities. But further; there are some facts observable in procreation for which these theories do not account, and for which no interpretation of hered- ity can possibly account. It involves a spontane- ous and an originating action of the cosmic super- force. For instance, among a given number of children of the same parents, which implies sim- ilar genetic influences, and substantially the same outside conditions, no two of them will be alike; and, as is often the case, one of them will show a personal equation of such personal force as to make him unique among his kin. If we are to be limited to the straight action of the primary in- heritances, there is no accounting for a Shake- speare. He rises above his family lines, above his race. He is not a summary of what evolution has done. With him some personal factors have been differentiated on the spot. Shakespeare is a pro- creative originality. Some monad there arose instantly to mightiness. Spontaneity of mind in the realm of life makes the genius possible. Genius is prophetic it is a flash of the potential race mind. 133 CHAPTER VI. CONTRIBUTIONS OF NATURAL RESEARCH. A Rich Discovery. THERE can be no valid objection to the hy- pothesis that the human mind is an evolution from the psychic states of matter. And there need be no feeling against the claim that the mental capacity and power has been acquired by gradation. The validity of either of these opinions includes the other. They both imply a psychic potency in the realms of life adequate to that which has come about. Specialists may or may not have been equal to the task of revealing all the stages by which the full-orbed human fac- ulty has ascended. From a certain angle of vision the road traveled over has yet the appearance of being a highway with several bridges gone. Nev- ertheless the general course of it has been pretty well staked out, and it may be put down in the annals of research as a find so rich that its con- tribution to knowledge is even now very much underestimated. 134 CONTRIBUTIONS OF NATURAL RESEARCH The history of nature's processes was so well worked out by Darwin, and Wallace, and others in the beginning days of that kind of study; and it so had the fascination of a romance in science, and so quickly set the world of scholar- ship into a new way of thinking, that it became overstimulated in the start, and had put on it the onus of an explanation of all things natural as if there was nothing more to say. No attempt here will be made to enter into a discussion of the doctrine of evolution, further than to state in brief some reconstructions of the earlier ideas and to set forth the religious sig- nificance of the new knowledge. The Ulterior Reality. We do not get much understanding of that which evolves by an analysis of that which is evolved. For purposes of explanation, and for tracing processes, we may take any number of forms and make out a case of likenesses, per- sistences, variations, descents. That work may be very interesting and very profitable, but it does not go back to the genesis of things. The ulterior reality must be a cause of the evolving aspects. We may say that mind made its ap- 135 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. pearance somewhere along the unfolding way; but the way, in itself, is a mind movement. Darwin saw a primordial force. Nageli invented the word ideoplasm to explain his conception of a deter- mining super-force. Eimer saw a definitely di- rected evolution. Any idea of life which implies a subordination of inner to outer processes which implies the hard and fast action of observed law is faulty in the extreme. Tendencies toward continuous adjustment, outwardly, are secondary to the integrity of form in organisms. The issue with philosophy lies in the term integrity. And a sound philosophy, with any department of science, will be respected sooner or later. The synthetic values of research are its only practical values. Philosophy demands the survival of in- tent. With organisms the intent is in the form, and the form is an idea. The stream of living matter, chemically understood, is a whirlpool a seething chaldron, through which form survives. And the survival is not froth or foam it is not slag. Things did not have a cakewalk and come out as they are. Types and species are not the long-drawn re- sults of accidental variations. They are evolved, but inwardly. Henle conceived of life as a non- 136 CONTRIBUTIONS OF NATURAL RESEARCH material agent, associated and identified with all organisms and adequately endowed to produce and reproduce the type forms without waste or decay of its powers. The inward urge in things manifests itself in a series of progressive appear- ances. Any healthful thinking about the behavior of living matter appears to demand the hypothetic of an adequate psychic power whose movement is from within outward. Millions of species of plants and animals are now known. Millions more await the discoverer. Other millions await the creative process. The resident and intrinsic energies of matter consti- tute an endowment which is great beyond esti- mate. And, thought about in that way, investi- gation starts with a theory of intelligence. A psychic presence also implies a degree of spon- taneity. We have to do with wills and choices. A few of the early explorers, who lived on the frontiers, did not seem to have full appreciation of that fact, and they overloaded evolution with the doctrine of descent, feature by feature. What a strain and a vagueness has been attached to a theory by the inconceivable stretches of time which the law of variation must be given to per- fect these millions of species. Out of identical 137 f A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. physiological conditions will come forth reptiles and birds and animals. It is known that these identities suddenly reach a shunting point; and then the transformations are so swift and head- long and radical that an implicate of prevision is a necessity. How could the animal eye, for in- stance, be developed by other than a co-ordination of the life forces? In the building of such an organ accidental variation would be fatal to sight. In the building of a tree, is there not a somewhat on the spot which commands the situation and resents interference? Are not the organic chemis- tries there light, heat, moisture, air, nutritive material all under orders to build a certain type of tree? Has any dextrous brain ever produced so fine a mechanism? The power which encompasses the wholeness of things there is it blind? The Psychic Initiative. All of the great natural life groups show traces of a spontaneous psychic initiative. For instance, the articulates among invertebrates consist usu- ally of a single nervous system with central gan- glia, and from these direct nerve radiations to all the organs of action. The articulates are splen- didly armed with such instruments as wings and 138 CONTRIBUTIONS OF NATURAL RESEARCH legs and mandibles and paddles and diggers and stings and antennae. Articulate life is deeply grooved, but it has its never-failing reactions. It has swift capacity to clear the deck for action as soon as the first shock of the enemy is felt. The most insignificant bug by the roadside, or the beetles under a log, will show astonishing resent- ment when aroused or challenged. The articu- lates, so to speak, are armored cruisers. They have a horny head or a thick integument, or the skeleton of the body on the outside, so that lever- age and efficiency are given its appendages. The common ant can manage and move an object a hundred times the weight of its own body. Cer- tain soft-looking worms find their way into the hardest woods. The muscular grip which the land tortoise has with its shell is greater than the strength of giants. If man, unaided, could exert as much strength, according to his size, he could carry off greater things than the gates of Gaza. But while articulate action is peculiarly adapted to its uses, and shows a distinct vigor, the whole of it is so near to the nature of a reflex that it deserves the name automatic. Its sense of the outer fellowships is exceedingly dull. The vertebrates, on the other hand, are in- 139 f A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. fluenced by a class of tendencies which could not have found their origin at the highest conceivable point of automatic vigor. In the outer appre- hensiveness, in adroitness and tact, in the use of the values of experience, in the use of tools, in the awakening to consciousness vertebrate hie is so positively divergent in its directions as to make reasonable the supposition that a psychic intent presided at its beginnings. If it is established that nature shows even a single case of this kind of sudden redirection of the modes of life, it can be made to appear that the "lost link" is a fetich. It establishes, in strong probability, the theory that there has never been any break in the ascent of real being. What despairing search the folks have had: what in- genuity and contrivance in placing tooth with tooth and claw with claw in the hope that some extinct species may yet relieve the strain on a theory. Physical continuity, as an invariable law, is a fiction. After hah* a century of profound re- search, the facts are not at hand to sustain it. Each after its own kind is a law which does not account for radical divergences which are known to exist. When naturalists can not keep up with 140 CONTRIBUTIONS OF NATURAL RESEARCH nature's fruition in the creation of life forms, how untenable must appear the theory of accidental variation as a sufficient explanation of the growth and development of organisms! In any square rod of an old field life forms may arise simply out of the conditions. Spontaneous generation proved beyond question is the most desirable next achieve- ment of science, in the interest of religion. It will demonstrate the spiritual identities of matter in all its forms. It will relieve the world's thought permanently of the implication that religion is simply a sentiment. The world has given Mr. Darwin credit for being a master in finding out how living forms came to be as they are. It is not to his discredit that he did not see all the features of his problem, or all its consequences. He certainly did not have any intent towards that result of his patient labor which has become a splendid and enduring monu- ment of his life work. The old tradition was that man had dropped down into things. Darwin has shown that man himself is the product of natural law; that he has come up out of things and is the greatest of all growers; that he belongs to the universe and is neither a superior nor an alien. 141 f CHAPTER VII. NAKED NATURE. NAKED nature that is, its open, direct, and first contact with the mind and heart has always been man's greatest teacher. The school of first impressions is life's school of absolute democracy. The savage, the child, the youth, the artist, the scholar make up a class of all sorts. On the same terms they get the same lessons in the same way. Scholarship has no advantage over childhood, except in its larger capacity of appreciation, be- cause with the primary instincts external objects are to both etherealized. The smithies of wonder forge out much truth. All the poets and lovers and dreamers prefer to walk the open-eyed way of direct impressions they wish to go to nature unafraid, as to an unbetraying mother, and they choose to woo and win rather than work with hammer and tongs. "See, now I hold my heart against this tree; The life that thrills its trembling leaves thrills me; There is not a pleasure pulsing through its veins That does not sting me with ecstatic pains; 142 NAKED NATURE. No twig or tracery, however fine, Can bear a tale of joy exceeding mine." Angela Morgan. " 'T is not in the high stars alone, Nor in the redbreast's mellow tone. Nor in the cup of budding flowers. Nor in the bow that smiles in showers, But in the mud and scum of things, There alway, alway, something sings." -Emerson. "To sit on rocks to muse o'er floods and feel, To slowly trace the forest's shady scene, Where things that own not man's dominion dwell, And mortal feet hath ne'er or rarely been, To climb the trackless mountain all unseen, With the wild flock that never needs a fold, Alone o'er steeps and foaming falls to lean This is not solitude." Byron. "I have felt A presence which disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts, a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns; And the round ocean, and the living air, And the blue sky, and the mind of man, A motion and a spirit that impels All thinking things, all objects, of all thoughts, And rolls through all things." Wordsworth. "To breathe the air, how delicious! To speak, to walk, to seize something by the hand; To be this incredible god, I am: O amazement of things, even the least particle: O spirituality of things." Whitman. 143 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. " 'T is but the unseen that grows not old nor dies, Suffers not change, nor waning, nor decay, This that we see, this casual glimpse within The seething pit of space these million stars And worlds in making, these are nought but matter. All are slaves to That power immense, mysterious, intense, Unseen as our own souls, but which must be Like them in the theme of thought, with will and might To stamp on mindless matter the soul's will." Gilder. "Sometimes, in walking through a bit of wood- land, one chances on a quiet and darkly serene pond; a pool amid the trees that looks small and shallow, that hardly draws the eye from the flicker- ing sun and shade playing their immortal game of hide-and-seek over the tree trunks and through the shrubbery. Yet should one pause and look down into the brown water, one presently finds it a difficult matter to resume the tramp. The pool holds you; its gold reflections, its peace, its mysterious silence mean more from moment to moment. The woods you have been walking through are more beautiful seen through the re- vealing medium. There is the exquisite tracery of a fine bough against the blue sky, and a gleam of scarlet on yonder wayfaring trees, which you would have passed unnoticed; even a distant 144 NAKED NATURE. cloud, rose-hued, telling of approaching evening. The pond brings nothing to you which you might not have seen for yourself, but as you see it now, through the clear beauty of its own observation, with an addition of tranquillity, in itself a beauty, it is no longer woods and leaves and clouds you see, but their spiritual effects." (Benson.) Robert Louis Stevenson, in his Samoan home, was habitually strung up to the out-of-door pitch. He always felt the incommunicable thrill of things. When he set out to clear the spaces about his house, the struggle of the grasses and the vines he uprooted went to his heart like supplications. And since his death the natives forbid the use of firearms on the hillside where his body is buried. They wish his spirit to enjoy the birds unmolested. William Dean Howells, in his last visit to Oxford, found himself at a loss to keep in memory each renowned roof and minaret and spire. The May morning, the May air, the radiance of sun- shine and flower held him fast. The "blurr of leafy luxuriance," the "foliage of green trees" so embowered the colleges that Gothic nave and stone-wrought transept became second to the in- sistence of flowery color everywhere in bloom. A 10 145 f A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. man captured in the shades of Oxford by those highwaymen, the trees. A scholar with large appreciation of academic things, and duly reverent before the hoary history of an institution of learn- ing, and on his way to don a cap and gown, gets suddenly thrown off his feet and swept aside by the voiceless magic of nature's doings. Thoreau tells us why he went to the woods to live: "I went to the woods to live because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the es- sential facts of life, to see if I could learn what it had to teach, and not, when I come to die, dis- cover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation unless it was quite neces- sary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life; to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life; to cut a broad swath and to shave close; to drive life into a corner and reduce it to its lowest terms; and if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it and publish its mean- ness to the world; or, if it were sublime, to know by experience and to give a true statement of it in my next excursion." 146 NAKED NATURE. In a like mystic mood, Brierly says: "Is there anything so tender as that caress with which nature, when we are sick or overwrought, wooes us back to strength. Robust health is very well in its way, but there is a subtle happiness which it does not know. It is tasted by the man of nervous organization when, strained to ex- haustion point, he flies for recovery to his healer; when far away on the sea, or meeting the keen breezes of the moorland, he knows that every breath he draws, every glint of the open heavens, every bit of scenery his eye rests upon, every moment of the delicious resting time is forming one great system of beneficence that is working to make him well." Dr. Wm. V. Kelley says: "At Table Rock, Niagara, we can not name the elements which sub- due us. Our joints are unloosed, our reins tremble, and we are dazed in all our senses by the thunder of an unsyllabled voice, the yawning of an un- measured abyss, the sweep and swirl of waters concealed by foam, the vast gulf obscured with explosive bursts of mist, the fury of vague and awful forces. We are crowded to our knees with blanched faces by the indefinable." 147 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. When Moses killed his man in the name of justice, the supreme question of the enigma of existence began to envelop his spirit. Under the burden of it, he soon fled to the desert to have it out with the long, lonesome days, and the stars, and the silences of the great Infinite. He took time for reflection, time for his soul to ripen, time to find himself, and to mature holy ambitions. The place in all the world for that was the Midian solitude. Alone in his tent, with the lonesome deserts about him, Mohammed's spirit brooded into ma- turity the faith which has been accepted by a thousand millions of people. He was under the spell of the illimitable sandy wastes when he was first convinced of the unity of the world and the oneness of the Creator. A shadow passed over his dwelling place, and he saw in it the masterful Presence. The thunder above the Arabian hills was the voice of the great, strong God. Mo- hammed had a marvelous sense of the divine. Will any one, since what has come about, deny him that? He was under the limitations of knowledge. Errors of ignorance, fanaticisms, cruelties, cor- 148 NAKED NATURE. ruptions have since crept in, to make of a sublime monotheism what Islam is to-day. John Burroughs says: "I can not tell what the apparition of the simple earth and sky mean to me. I think, at rare intervals, that they have an immense spiritual meaning, altogether un- speakable, and that they are great helps after all." Robert E. Peary says: "No man can live for years surrounded by the great white mystery of the Arctic without feeling that within and behind it is an Intelligence, watchful and responsive." Doctor Milne, a British medical officer, after long living in the marshes of the Upper Nile, says: "My respect and reverence for this mighty river grows more deep and profound. Living for many weeks in the vastness of these swamps, one's very soul gets bitten with the appalling sense of isola- tion and the vastness of the monotony." Hseckel says of Rapello, his place of study on the Mediterranean: "I was stimulated by the constant sight of the blue Mediterranean, the countless inhabitants of which had, for fifty years, afforded such ample material for my biological 149 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. studies; and my solitary walks in the wild gorges of the Ligurian Appenines, and the moving spec- tacle of its forest-crowned altars, inspired me with a feeling of the unity of nature." The great analyst comes out of his study and turns mystic. He is uplifted and stimulated by the sea. The enrap- turing charm of mountain crevasses moves his spirit to solitude and reverence. The beauty, the sublimity, the unity of nature inspire him as he walks the restful way where the hills have builded their altars. So Rodin believed himself to be devoutly wor- shipful when caught up by the moods of nature. The sense of mystery took hold on him, and he approached the shores of the unknown in the deepest humility. Bradford Torrey says, "Stand- ing still in the woods is a positive refreshment." But what does it all mean? Why make a string of mystic pearls like that? Because the material is at hand for the making. The world is full of it, and only because the universe itself makes of it the most commanding of all influences on the life. In open-mindedness, with the heart's sympa- thies uncovered, the secret is in the fellowship; 150 NAKED NATURE. and the fellowship is born of likenesses and iden- tities. Dissonance of essential being would be estrangement. The elements of all human ideas are in objects everywhere. Real knowledge is consonant with the real idea in nature. The human and his surroundings are one. If an inner and an outer unlikeness existed there could be no understanding, no research, no intimacy. A simple walk in the open fields would confuse and blur the mental powers. The lover of the out-of-doors could not wander in the meadows and thickets and gulches with such keen delight unless he found there a sanity and an order which made itself to him a source of mental burnishing, worthy also of his mettle, a challenge to his highest capacities. Creation demands some theory of intelligence. " We have come pretty widely to discredit the idea that the presence of law in nature does away with the need of mind." (Downey.) "No dead mech- anism moves the stars, or lifts the tides, or calls the flowers from their sleep." (Mabie.) "The human mind in every age has spontaneously and instinctively recognized the existence of an in- visible presence and power pervading nature." (Cocker.) Doctor Cocker, in the above sentence, evidently means the divine presence and power. 151 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. In these pages thus far we do not mean that. We make a distinction with a difference. The fear of the worship of nature is born of superficial think- ing. A child may walk, entranced, in a garden of flowers, without having to give any theological account of itself. A baby in long clothes may roll over in the grass and pluck a bluebell for its mouth without becoming a pantheist. Nature is not God. Cosmic mind is not God. The human mind is not God. We say God is immanent in all things; how, we do not know. What God is we do not know. The human understanding is impotent before the idea. Those who dare it are very ignorant. Does a little child, in its mother's arms, know what the mother is? It knows enough to snuggle. We know what God is to us and that is the truth. We were born with the inward assent to a First Cause, which is the ground of unity. We belong to an intelligent order, and the cause of it must be intelligent. We approach God by way of all that the universe is. We have become acquainted with a moral order, and we may know that God is good. We have become aware of a beneficence like that of a parent to a child and we call God our Father. We have 152 NAKED NATURE. seen that an orderly scheme is in harmony with the kind of intelligence which makes room for special messages in the divine administration of this world. If the base of things is spirit, then our most familiar experience is its tendency to incarnate itself. We can then see how that the incarnation of a special message might be a cosmic necessity. We know the passion of the Christ on the cross to be a master note of creation, and positively redemptive everywhere. All this, God is to us, and more. The Great Book itself refuses detach- ment from nature's doings. "Let the floods clap their hands: let the hills be joyful together. Let the sea roar, and the fullness thereof. Let the sun and moon praise Him, and all the stars of light. Fire and hail: snow and vapors: stormy wind fulfilling His word: mountains and all hills: fruitful trees, and all cedars: beasts, and all cattle: creeping things, and flying fowl: both young men and maidens: old men and children let them praise the name of the Lord." 153 CHAPTER VIII. PLEASURE AND PAIN. Has Nature an Ethic? ANY theory of reality must meet finally the question of "moral values. Experience consists in more than a direct cognition of physical states and their supra-material manifestations. General knowledge never reaches its final acquisitions until it has included the consideration of what ought and what ought not to be. The ultimate rational appeal is ethical. We can establish no moral relations with nature unless it has an ethic of its own. Has nature, then, any good intent, or is it mere weather? Is it possible to translate the common natural forces with which we have to do into terms of well-meaning and beneficence on the part of the power which runs things? Weeds and flowers grow on the same hillock. Song birds and vipers live in the same thicket. Microbes and deadly diseases lurk in the richest foods. Cold freezes. Fire burns. Death approaches with any careless moment. Those of wholesome life are often struck with loathsome and fatal maladies. 154 PLEASURE AND PAIN. What a crazy-patch nature appears to be, with its freaks and extravagances, its strifes and con- fusions. The hideous, the frolicsome, the gaudy, the comic, the profitless, the condemnatory all these exist. Many forms of life answer neither the demands of utility or beauty, and others are like wild colts, broken from an enclosure, to en- gage in mischief and depredation. Abhorrent mal- formations appear six-footed quadrupeds, animals with two heads. Siamese twins, isolated females producing offspring. Is the system rational then? Well, the mad-houses are full of human beings; so are the penitentiaries. Man is either guilty, or he is the subject of all the features here named. Is he rational then? We are inclined to say he is rational nevertheless. Rationality has its ob- verse side. And that principle applies to the limits of all things. Is Life Illogical? Can this world's life of antagonism and con- flict justify itself from an intellectual standpoint? Is it able to meet the demands of the scientific understanding ? We get pretty well knocked about in this world by the time we are through with it. We writhe and twist under the jolt of things. About 155 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. the safest way is to rise up and fight, because if we dodge and shirk we are sure to get thrown under. But whence comes the courage for the conflict? Is there anything adequate in it? If the issue of the struggle leaves the situation no better for anybody, it is not worth while. There ought to be a balance somewhere to the credit of advantage or justice. Reason will justify any sort of a bloody dash, if the issues are big enough. Is there anything to be gained? Is there a right and wrong anywhere? And if so, what do they signify? If, in the more familiar natural events, we are not able to detect the action of the kinder- garten moralities, if gravitation does not reverse itself to save the life of a falling child; then, in the aggregates of nature's ongoings, is there any kindliness at all? Is there anything sweet or clean or good about them? Have they an upward move- ment? Have they any preference for pleasure over pain? Are there any irreparable wrongs? Is nature illogical? Is it a moil of contradictions, with no mother sea of goodness anywhere no goal but a black perplexity? Many acute and sincere minds have raised these questions; and they make up a tremendous issue. Before certain standards of the human judg- 156 PLEASURE AND PAIN. ment the cosmic forces are put under a strain. Some of the features of the natural world have their downpull. And these constitute no small part of what nature is. The dance of a few ad- verse midgets might be set aside, but the fact of pain, in the evolution of life, is of such vast ex- tent it so touches every phase of organic his- tory that a reason must be found for its existence. It can not be ignored. And it can not be answered with any devout didactic. Carl Snider, and John Stuart Mill, and Fred- rick Palmer, and Huxley, and Spencer, and a host of others have arrived at the conclusion that nature is not kind, or loving, or wise, but cruel, and uncanny, and plundering in her hor- rors. Possibly this judgment is at fault. Possibly the race has not yet found the secret of nature's way. Man himself may have missed the normal direction of his faculties, and he may be powerless to radically change his nature. But the moral problem is not less intense by the truth or false- ness of any of these surmises. The way of the approved human life means a struggle. Virtue is the result of positive aggres- sions and of strong resistances. Vice is the way of the loose rein, and is marvelously attractive to an 157 f A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. indolent spirit. Hurt and hunger, adverse expe- riences, surprises, disappointments, defeats, humili- ations, bitter regrets so set themselves in the pathway of all men that, unless they can be shown to have some value in the final adjudications at farthest, we have not reached any moral explana- tion of existence. Strife and conflict and suffering in the human life are very general features of the cosmic plan if it has any plan. The lower or- ganisms are all in constant and relentless strife. Millions of microbes hold high carnival of war in each cubic foot of air about our heads. They fill the meshes of our clothing, our carpets, our tap- estries. The pores of our skin are crevices where they fight and die. Disease parasites pierce all the tissues of the body and swim in all the blood channels. And they survive there, in a way which shows that they must do so, where the forces of life and death play hide-and-seek with as ghastly a diplomacy as has ever been known in the councils of the armies of men. No need of further instance. Resignation. The race at large, to date, has undertaken to meet the facts of pain and sorrow and adversity in two ways. 158 PLEASURE AND PAIN. The first is the way of resignation, which mani- fests itself largely in the Orient. In the farthest East it has developed into the doctrine of Nir- vana, which signifies, in brief, the conquest of desire. The outward struggle is thus escaped. It is the opiate of indifference. The result is indi- vidual and social stagnation. More than half the human race is now testing out this way. Count- less, weary millions walk over life's thistles and stones with bleeding feet, doing their best to deny the experience of pain. The drama of Job is a word picture of the age-long issue. The inner spirit of Buddhism is resignation to the remediless ills of life. Edwin Arnold states the case of Buddha in this way: "The fair show Veiled one vast, savage, grim conspiracy Of mutual murder, from the worm to the man; Who himself kills his fellows." Then Buddha "Gives himself up To meditate the deep disease of life, What its far source, whence its remedy, So vast a pity filled him, such wide love For living things, such a passion to heal pain." Tradition has it that Buddha forsook royalty and wealth and a beautiful wife that he might 159 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. know for himself life's sorrow. He became a mendicant beggar and lived in penance and ob- scurity; and he returned to his native city finally greater than a prince, because he had learned wis- dom in sorrow and suffering. Suffering, with its attendant sorrow, together, are the sources of wisdom in the sense that, until we know these, we do not really know life; but Buddhism has overstimulated that side of human experience by giving it the first place in a propa- ganda. It has for its outcome the world's greatest brotherhood of poverty and sorrow. It throws down the lance and refuses to enter the lists, but it does not escape the conflict. It has silenced the outward cry and resentment against pain and abuse, and against social wrongs which need to be righted; and it has produced the deadliest kind of inward consequences. The appeal to expe- rience which prides itself in endurance and sub- mission has in it only the logic of a listless indif- ference. Conquest Through Struggle. The other way of meeting the adverse facts of nature is the way of conquest through struggle, 160 PLEASURE AND PAIN. The larger values of life are supposed to be wrested from the opposition. The real life is militant and overcoming. We achieve a character when we face the full force of all human mutabilities. Some- body has to stay out and square themselves with moral and physical issues as they come. Only the coward runs away. When the ascetic tries to escape by retiring from the world, he does not propose a fair deal with the rest of the folks. A strenuous career is the easiest way through. The mental powers are rounded out by being blended with the elements of a many-sided experience. The will and the courage to take one's place in the world, to challenge its untoward circumstances, to accept a tussle with the actual conditions of a chosen sphere, and to remain true to its higher admonitions this is character. The attrition which calls for caution and wisdom and courage and adaptableness and versatility and patience drive the elements of the personality together and create a self -centered unit strong enough to stand the strain of things. It is doubtful if we can call that personality which has not encountered and overcome opposition. The surrender of principle, at any time, is a damage to the spirit. We are sane ll 161 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. as long as we struggle hopefully against adverse conditions. We are sane also when we surrender in a fight against the stars. Philosophy of Pain. Pain is a fact of life which can not be con- jured away. In itself it is a natural and inevitable reaction against that which produces it. A child's finger touches the fire and muscular reaction takes place immediately. In that pain something of swift adroitness must go to the credit of the nerves of sensation; but the greater value is a mental consequence. If the wisdom of experience takes the place of another burn, the hazard of a like pain is escaped, because the mind has in- vented a smoother way. Mental suffering has the same meaning. Its warnings are in the direction of a reconstructed life. Its demand is for a strengthened will, with its measureless values. The stings of conscience are the appeals of the spirit to rush from an inferno. And that impulsion is by so much redemptive, because it is an escape. Aside from the punitive consequences of crimes, such as are often the stern voices of justice, they may have the value of guideboards along life's way. They furnish to the oncomers foreknowl- 162 PLEASURE AND PAIN. edge of what retribution is. They give faithful warnings without flattery. In a negative way, they contribute towards the perfecting of the moral faculties they limit the hazards of er- roneous living. Pain, in itself, is not desirable. Proofs of an overplus of it in the natural system would, we think, present the most difficult of all problems in casuistry. While it probably does not predom- inate over pleasure, it is nevertheless the universal concomitant of life; and the knife-edge of its suf- fering must be compensated by some reflex of value which belongs to it. Physiologically, pain is the inability of the suffering organ to bring against it an adequate reaction. A state of life anywhere without it would be a state in which all subject organs were qualified at all times to react successfully against its intrusions. But is it not clear that such a state would produce inactivity and indifference? If hunger could be warded off by the action of the organs which produce it, there would be no further effort to get food. If the heat of the body could always resist cold and lack of shelter, the incentive to build houses and fires would be gone. If the inward reactions always amounted to complete 163 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. resistance, the spur to mental energy would be gone. A state of unalloyed physical happiness is not conceivably possible. Even the cultured and growing capacity to appreciate life implies always an increased and keener susceptibility to mental distress. As the ideals of men are perfected, the sense of life's contrasts and contradictions be- comes clearer. Both pleasures and pains intensified are the concomitants of culture. High-thinking, when- ever that comes about, must face the certainty of some counterpart of refined suffering. Life is more difficult in its higher phases. All sharpened enjoyments have their keen reversions. Does the fact furnish a motive against refinement or the finesse of civilization? The ox is happy when he is full of stover, but who wants his place? Mill says, "Better a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied." It is a sign of nobility to be able to measure the force of life's inescapable shafts. It is a sign of strength to be able to stand erect and receive them one by one and at the same time to keep one's self in hand with reserve of energy, and ready for concentration on the work of any hour. We do not understand how there can be such 164 PLEASURE AND PAIN. a state as sheer misery unrelated to an orderly scheme. Pain is not always an effect, the cause of which ought to be removed. The surgeon's knife ought not to be taken away for that reason. It deals in futures. Its physical good consequence is a beneficence and a beneficence is ethical. Pain must have some of its reasons, therefore, in its reflex values. In its direct action it is not at all desirable. The impulse to escape it is as deep- seated as the capacity itself. It does not assuage its own asperity. It drives on, rather, to an in- tolerable torment. There is not a particle of sweet in its bitterness. Its direct influence is to stir the powers radi- cally to get away from it. A part of the secret of happiness is at that particular point. Convul- sions and contagions are challenges. The life powers which survive them must be sinewy. Physically we are never strong to resist these enemies unless we are fortified beforehand by frugality and healthful industry and habitual obedience to the laws of healthful living. The whole discipline admonishes to farsightedness. The good of it is not in itself, but in the dynamic of its banishment. It is the whip towards an ascendant vitality. 185 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. The Stress of Circumstance. In a world where hunger haunts all the days of every human being in it, the wish to escape the harassing and constant danger of striking the bottom of the flour-barrel is not altogether un- natural. But the wish, nevertheless, is a great weakness. Complete physical luxury is of doubt- ful benefit in any case, and it breeds degeneracy in all cases. For a few generations, now, man has been improving, as he calls it, his domestic animals. By feeding and care and cross-breeding he has grilled out the wild traits, because he has no need for them; and he has bred in, and fattened in, that which he did need. If our present breeds of horses and cattle and hogs were cast out into the wild, and left to survive and perpetuate them- selves, they would quickly perish. A life of toil may be exchanged for a life of ease. The hardened muscle may be bartered for the flabby one. The taxed and active brain may quit its work and begin to dawdle. But when we have made all these changes, we must have somebody ready to take care of us. It has always been possible for a few folks to live an uneventful, dreamy, idyllic life. They have few wants, a limited knowledge, 166 PLEASURE AND PAIN. and a consciousness unaroused to any special purpose; and they are able, apparently, to slip along without much graving of the rocks any- where; but, on the whole, they are of no value to themselves or to the world. Tension is vital to advance. The human spirit comes to know its own higher capacities, and their value, only as it consents to touch the live wire of a many-sided experience. A certain Russian literary artist thinks it a flaw in his work that he can not give joy. He would probably do that at the risk of his powers; for his pictures of the cruelties of Russian life constitute his appeal to men. He buffets the world with the distress of his country- men. He throws up a distress signal from a region where the rights of the common citizen have not yet been made secure. He moves free- men with a spectacle of injustice. The wrongs of tyranny cause sorrow, and the sorrow commands attention. The sympathies of any liberated people are on the side of the man who is socially down and under. The Mystic Appeal of Sorrow. Life is on a minor key with large numbers of people, because they have felt so much pain. And they are altogether admirable folks. The chas- 167 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. tened spirit, the quiet approach, the charitable view, the subdued tone, the charm of courtesy, the winsome humility, the devout contentment these are virtues born of suffering, often, and they have the charm of a positive refreshment. "I plucked a feather from an eagle's wing, And thought to write a song of epic might, Whose deep-toned music would men's dreams excite And plaudits which, as seas, should swing In ever-widening billows, and should ring Like living laughter that would change the night And silence into joy and grace and light, And make its glooms and solitudes to sing. I wrote, and no one read my poem through. And then I found a feather from a mourning dove, Dropped from its wing in flying through a wood, And wrote a psalm of pain and pity, true To life, and tender with immortal love: And weary hearts both read and understood." Quayle. Is Nature Gruel? Joseph Conrad, a writer of the sea, describes, in graphic fashion, a rescue of the survivors of a water-logged derelict which had been drifting in mid-ocean for weeks. The merciless struggle which the survivors had made was at last too much for them, and their hearts were broken and delir- ium set in. After the crazed ones were taken off, and the sinking brig went down, Conrad describes his own feeling about it in this way: "I looked 168 PLEASURE AND PAIN. with other eyes on the sea my conception of its magnanimous greatness was gone. I looked upon the true sea the sea that plays with men until their hearts are broken and wears stout ships to death. Nothing can touch the brooding bitter- ness of its heart; open to all and faithful to none, it exercises its fascinations for the undoing of the best." The beauty and the pathos of that state- ment saves it from petulance. When a boy strikes his foot against a stone he gets out of patience with the stone. Mr. Conrad has slept many a night in security with only a plank between him and the ocean's depths. The sea which he thus describes could furnish a clean grave for each one of the millions who ply their crafts on its waves; but only on rare occasions does disaster overtake them. Across the sea our dear ones come and go in comparative safety. The sea makes the world habitable; and it has become a highway for human fellowships and federations. Majesty and terror sleep there, and wake at infrequent times. It is indeed destructive to those forms of life which have no adaptation for living in it. But the bulk of the world's life plays in rapturous joy beneath its waves. The most gor- geous palaces of all life are there. A human drops 169 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. in now and then, which is pathetic, from the human side, not because of the sea, but because of the instinct of life in the human. There is no sorrow at the bottom of the sea when the denizens of the earth drop in. The fishes do as they are done by. The human resentment against any tragical aspect of creation is a partial view, or no view at all. The natural system has an august dignity which does not bend to sentiment where the steady going of a law is involved; but she has no betrayal for the obedient. Occasional culmi- nants of force seem terrible but the system is not of that kind. Animals, in fright, or in the death moment, are doubtless in terror, because the ever-present struggle is with them, as with all life; but they do not live in that state. Beneficently the narrowest of escapes leaves not a single tremor. Moments of hazard are often exhilarants. They are occasions for bringing out perfections of speed or skill in the strife to live. Nature appears to be intentful about the improvement of the species. She does not send a fine young warrior to fight her battles for a better type of his kind without providing him with adequate mental and bodily training. 170 PLEASURE AND PAIN. This he gains along with his growth in incessant struggles with his playmates; for at birth she has implanted within him an insatiate passion for rough play. He masters the fine art of defending vulnerable points in mimic war. Much practice renders his actions in defense as instantaneous as the automatic blinking of a threatened eye. But where one survives many go down. The masterful bull of the prairie herds is always a fine fellow, and in his get are the potencies of an improved species; but he has come to his place through a hundred battles without a single de- feat. The vanquished also belong to nature's scheme. The conflict yet means to them that every living thing must be at its best. The strug- gle they have made for mastery is an approach towards perfection. The weaker individuals take second place, but that place is in the direction of proficiency and progress. The defeated ones are more sinewy for having felt the strength of the giant. When we come closely to look into the action of this kind of law, and its results, it is difficult to conceive of a kindlier or better pro- vision for the perpetuation and improvement of life forms. 171 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. The Principle of Self-Giving. The physical life is shifting, tentative, provi- sional, and is not a supreme goal. A thing is not essentially immoral because it inflicts pain or de- feats the smooth way. The voluntary surrender of life is often heroic. Some of the most prized possessions of the race have been purchased by sacrifice and death. The exigencies of history often demand a large life offering. Life touches the high point of its value when it is thrown down in the name of liberty and human right. The larger question about the body is not whether it is sick or well, whether it lives or dies; but whether or not it serves its function. When the death of a patriot contributes to the happiness of the race, his life is not lost. When the body can render that sort of service it is worth while to live worth while to die. The memory of such an act is always held in universal veneration. Life-giving, in that way, is cosmic gain. Life is often the cost of that which is worth what has been paid for it, dear as life is. Whenever the issue comes, and a man's flesh creeps, he is a softling. But the principle of survival through conflict, with its limited altruistic intimations, is only one feature in the evolution of life forms. The lowest 172 PLEASURE AND PAIN. life units with which we are acquainted are held by the law of mutual dependence. The predom- inant impulse of the cells is to give themselves utterly to the increase of life. They rush with hilarious joy to their own undoing that is, to an extinction into multiples. The process of cell division is cell response to the cause of life. The cells may not be aware of the higher complexes into which they enter, but they give obedience to the life-law of the larger unit. The cell realizes on its own investment when it gains identification with the larger life. It gives to get. We see the action of the law of mutual dependence and mutual helpfulness. So also the higher organisms are composed of closely-related organic functions, which have no normal independent action. The disjointed action of an organ is impossible. "The eye can not say unto the hand, 'I have no need of thee.'" Relatedness, dependence, helpfulness, mutuality are distinguishable ethical factors in the action of the lowest life forms. "The first chapter or two of the story of evolution may be headed the struggle for life; but take the book as a whole, it is not a tale of strife; it is a love story." (Drummond.) The life sciences have in them this romance. 173 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. ^ The dominant note is altruistic. The ethic is one, from side to side, in the narrow strip of life. In the ascent from the micro-organisms, ethical cor- respondences increase with the complexities of a growing world; and when we have that under- standing we have the key which opens the way to the controlling elements in the human life. Man's nature is not alien to that from which he has been derived. His moral sensibilities root them- selves cosmically, as surely as do his physical powers. Collectivism. The law of collectivism is active from the hu- man plane down to the simplest plasm germs. Wheat heads, grass blades, corn stalks, forest leaves all die for the common weal. Any grass- blade which conies to perfection has had an as- sociative history. Seeds and bulbs and rootlets do not reach maturity alone. They must have the help of those of their kind, and they must give as well as take. The trees of a forest strengthen and support one another. The finest colorings of the flowers are where they grow in acres. When birds flock together, each individual is advantaged. Animals do best in herds. The sleuth habits of 174 PLEASURE AND PAIN. the carnivora threaten their extinction. Those forms of life prosper best which show most af- fection. The law of ultimate survival is attractive, and not coercive. Enormous as are the scars of tooth and claw, that feature of the animal life is not the prevailing one in shaping nature's way. Among the gregarious animals, the end of war is the beginning of prosperity. The first grim lesson of sanity for both sides in a war is, "This is not the way to do it." Then they make peace. And the greatest things man knows of liberty and progress have had their finest expressions in the times when the arts of peace have prevailed. "Peace on earth, good will to men" is the highest of all proclamations because it appeals to the fealties of the human heart. Federations, frater- nities, brotherhoods grow out of it. There is noth- ing segregated. Nothing exists alone. No stray atoms, no wandering worlds broken from their places. There is no such thing as an unrelated existence. Humanly speaking, selfishness may seem prof- itable at first. The idea of being cut away from other people's rights is superficially attractive. The prodigal felt cramped with the father's family life. Its mutual dependencies, its essential re- 175 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. straints, and its common possessions hindered him, as he thought, and he believed he could get along better in unrelated living; but when he took the step he insulted a fundamental law of life. What we call sin the whole of it is born of that mental blunder. "Sin is selfishness." (Downey.) Responsibility. That nature is good in its massed movements is a truth of appreciation largely. The whole problem bulks too large for the reason. We have the confident assurance that an all-pervading mind means to enthrone justice finally. We see an "irresistible passion which billows in the direc- tion of righteousness." (McConnell.) Then, from the larger conception of the power which ordains such an outcome, we are impelled to the belief that all the modes and movements of matter, from the least to the greatest, must be under a moral as well as under a physical code. An indifferent, a neutral, elemental force will not be found anywhere. By this we do not mean to say that the problems of Euclid will show signs of a conscience measured by the human standards; but we do mean to say that they have an ethic of their own that their center of draft is the eternal 176 PLEASURE AND PAIN. righteousness. Therefore, when we have put a right estimate on the moral values of human history, we will find also that the laws of creation respond in sympathy and that the human life is at no time cosmically disconnected. What man is nature is. The ground and authority of human law projects itself into the nature of the world of life and being, from which the human has never been detached. The theory that moral ideas are only a result of the reactions of the associative life of the world, and are the conventionalities of society, therefore, is not tenable because it breaks down in practice. A moral law strong enough for the slums must connect itself with the universe. All within and without is one piece. The dissonant notes as to what right is and what wrong is, in any given case, are notes of interpretation. If we do not know, we are to find out, and destiny is involved in getting an answer. We are subject to the reality in things, and we must bend our pride. Ignorance at this point is a radically ad- verse fact. Open disobedience is disaster. This broad cosmic law, which relieves creation of its confusion, turned selfward and searched to the bottom, means for the human life its personal responsibility to the universe. 12 177 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. Glad as we might be, under stress of circum- stance, to have obliterated the turpitude of an evil course under any softening hypothesis, there is no escape under such a plea. The criminal does not go free by getting through the night into the next morning, or by living across a span of years. He may escape his hanging he will not escape his deed. Our actions, therefore, are' invested with a tremendous majesty. Our duty to the moral law, cosmically derived and being tried out among men have we met it or have we dodged it? Will any man dare, with this view before his eyes, take smooth turns and quirks for momentary advantages; will he play the shirk, and then face the divine everlasting night of death with his record when it is morally certain the very stars fight against him? 178 CHAPTER IX. ENDLESSNESS. Naturalism. THE crown of culture at this time is an over- mastering naturalism. Tradition is dead so is teaching by authority and signs and wonders no longer make the supreme appeal. Whatever is verified by the terms of knowledge has place and standing. It would be difficult to overestimate the general value of the tendency to constantly make severer the tests of truth. The growing im- patience of the last fifty years to reduce things to their lowest terms has been followed by great achievements in the realms of exact knowledge. But such a dogged demand for verifiable fact has threatened to hammer the human imagination to death. Often the logic of the situation has looked as if music and poetry and beauty and the other fine arts had come upon evil days, and must, perforce, step aside and let the grim demonstrable realities have their way in the world. But the case is not quite so serious as that. As soon as 179 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. the facts of creation begin to show their pedigree, they show themselves akin. Each new empirical advance increases the human appreciation of the vastness and the unity of the kingdom of truth. We may detect, therefore, among educated and thoughtful people a growing desire to under- stand the nature of things in the broadest way. If the universe has one law throughout, why not one life and one mind throughout? And it is easy to see how the human heart quickly gets into that kind of inquiry. Cold science has trouble with the affections and the desires when it begins to ask the final questions. Pragmatic Values. In a sense we may say the future is not known because it is beyond experience. The sunrise of to-morrow at most belongs in the realm of con- fident assurance. We have no scientific proofs of endless being. But that kind of line-drawing with the laws of evidence limits knowledge to the sensuous avenues. It repudiates the cosmic mind. It is a theory of knowledge with which feelings, hopes, intimations, aspirations have no standing. Man in all ages has expected to live has wanted to live has believed in the endlessness of 180 ENDLESSNESS. his powers. And if all of that is no more than a nebulous unfounded feeling, it has yet been of no detriment. He has found in it the motives to hope and patience and moral courage. When we put the final adjudications all into the present moment we put despair into the life, because many of these moments are thick with blackness. There must be some reason somewhere for the singular inclination of the human spirit to cling to that for which it has not a shred of experimental evi- dence. In the first place, the hope of endless being is a positive dynamic in the practical life of the race. If this world is a show-world, if it is a dis- solving view, if its elements are not permanent, its events are not of large significance. If this mental afflatus is only a flicker, can the motives of life have in them anything of a higher or lower value? The part which is to carry over, if there is any such part, must certainly have primary significance. If there is anything great, it is that which abides the tension and the stress. The outlook is with that which gets through. If a principle is priceless, it must be permanent. It would be the height of unwisdom to suffer loss or make sacrifice for that which is not to endure. It is clearly rational to surrender the incidental 181 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. thing for the future permanent thing, even if those who make the surrender do not reap the fruits of it. Patriots and heroes have done this. The Christ did it. Men will go to their death in the fight for righteousness when they believe in a day of reckoning. Life always has a higher value when it is considered from the position that some of its elements are in their nature non-temporal. If ever the feeling of security and steadiness can be extracted from the everlasting flux of things, life has added to it that much of dignity. If it can be made to appear also that the human per- sonality may hold over in the wreck of forms if the self-grip of its correspondences are such as to make credible the belief that it survives phys- ical dissolutions if its self-conscious reactions with the outer world take on the appearance of its being indestructibly related to these surging tides which beat things into shape, and sover- eignly knead them as the potter the clay; then the worth of life is made clear and its motives of virtue and honor are of unquestioned strength. The Sense Test. When those about us die, plainly the whole being goes out from us, and the inference in front 182 ENDLESSNESS. is extinction. So far as we know, when we come to rally our small array of senses on an event like that, we say of our friends, "They are not." But when we put to the credit of physical death the extinction of the whole nature of man, is it not possible that we make overmuch of sensuous deductions? It has been contended already in these pages that even a physical brain is not essential to the action and integrity of mind. It is also well known that the human personality exhibits very great independency of the states and conditions of the flesh formula. It can rise up in reflective consideration and say, "When my body gets sick I send for the doctor." That kind of initiative and creative power can not be classed with the plain chemical disintegrations of physical death. Endlessness of Influence. There are certain endless consequences to the energies of any human life which no one doubts. We speak accurately when we talk of influences which go out never to return never to die. The way of any life is an endless projection an end- less progression. The conservation of the per- sonal forces, as a natural principle, is as clearly 183 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. established as the conservation of the forces of matter. Our feelings, our thoughts, our actions appear again in others, and go on repeating them- selves indefinitely. The poet Tennyson had the anthropomorphic bias. He held to the traditional idea of endlessness as an exclusive and increasing separateness. He was committed to the view of endless being which holds together and magnifies the combination with which he had become con- sciously familiar. He said, "I should consider that a personal liberty had been taken with me if I were made merely the means of ushering in some- thing higher." Sound thinking will, of course, allow him to take out the word "merely;" but the rest is life's highest practical ideal. The life is exalted as its potencies are sent out to become an undiminished power in the world. This slipping of the consequences of human action and achieve- ment into the universal life currents, to be con- served under new and evolving forms perpetually, is an inspiriting view. Endlessness of influence has in it the endless adjudications. Retributions and rewards take to themselves more time than the personal life or history gives them. The life career to which we belong is too incomplete too fragmentary to express the judgments of an 184 ENDLESSNESS. unerring administration. We create that which goes out to mingle as a drop in the ocean. Is that so bad? How can that which we do take up more space unless it is bigger? Our largeness here con- sists not in the space we fill, but in the capacity we have to impress ourselves on the wholeness of life's projections. Is not that view satisfying, so far as it goes, and attractive? Even under the untenable theory that the diffusion and conserva- tion of personal energy is the sole form of endless being, as Mr. Harrison contends, are we utterly bereft? The idea itself has in it the tremendous motive to get at something and achieve before sundown. ^ If that is all we are to get, the idlers and do- nothings had better be stirring around. The whole truth is not there; but this truth is unless we get that, we will not get anything more. The useless life waiting for an immortal crown is a cosmic burlesque. But any honest man, under the action of this great law o the endless pro- jections, may go to his work in the morning with the understanding that if he dies before night the work he finishes and sets apart will not get into the casket with his body. Any sturdy, sincere toiler, therefore, has an outlook, for what he does 185 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. goes into a stream which never ceases to flow. Life's potencies touch and influence others con- stantly, and with consequences which do not be- come less in the event of death. Social Progress. The law of the transmission of personal in- fluence is the principle of social advance which, with whatever increment of gain it may show, reverts again to the individual. The center of intent, socially, does not appear to be in the individual first, but in the body. As the law acts, the individual is not disadvantaged. All threads of personal effort, of acquirement, and inheritance are taken up and woven in as an expression of nature's attention to the mass. The larger social unit is a conservation of values. The ideal personal energy is an outgo, and not an in- take. A stalk of corn comes to maturity to dif- fuse itself in multiples of power it manifolds itself into other units like itself. It is nature's law to drive the energies of the individual out- ward to constitute the energy of the species. Individuality, for the present, is the advance agent of a better type. The personal equation, 186 ENDLESSNESS. according to this law, is measured by its con- tribution to the future. If we think well of our- selves, we must, of necessity, think well of our ancestors, for they are in us mystically. Even if we are to be snuffed out when we die, it could only be in the sense in which we have been snuffed in. The receipts are equal to the expenses. Con- clusive of this thought, the life energy, as a pro- jected influence, is not a grievous outlook for the world's workers. Posterity will lift its hat or curse as we select, and in that is a motive to get busy with our preference. Let it be noted that the personality is not taken up into these projected influences, and that the stronger and higher intimations of personal endlessness are questions apart from this feature, which is only to be given credit for what it is worth in the cumulative argument. Life has no explanation by that law, acting alone. Under it, for instance, an evil life becomes a remediless horror. It does not take into consideration the tendencies of both nature and history to burn out the evil and preserve the good. If the universe has an ethic, it must cleanse itself finally. 187 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. Heredity. The law of heredity, which has to do with the transference of life, affords some intimations of endlessness. Heredity is persistence of quality and characteristic, through which the personality becomes a new and original self-expression. What- ever may prove to be the true theory of the phys- ical basis of heredity whether that of Darwin or Weisman or Negeli or some other explanation not yet matured the fact remains that the most complex mental and physical and moral elements are carried forward from life form to life form along very simple states of matter. The range of the properties of matter are now known to be so great that a single atom might become the bridge on which cross over measureless potencies. In the world of inorganic substances, matter simply wins for itself its forms and chemical states; but when the life grade is reached it begins to quiver with sensibility and to come to a state very favorable for the transfer of power from form to form. Living molecular aggregates multiply themselves and transmit their qualities across gossamer threads which are only detected by the microscope. Life is so transmissive of its own 188 ENDLESSNESS. virile temperamental features that even acquired capacities and habits show strong evidence of yielding to the law of heredity. Mental and moral qualities pass from generation to generation. Na- ture appears most at home and supremely exhil- arant where it begins to fill infinitesimal threads with the spiritual forces. A complex organization of matter is not necessary for the transmission of great spirit powers. Matter, in its simplest or- ganized modes, becomes very fruitfully spirit- bearing. We know, as a fact, that inconceivably great and masterful forces cross a tremulous thread of matter from one unit of life to the begin- ning and building of another. The marvel of that which we know takes place never ceases to be great. Scholarship is not yet ready to put a limit on the psychic properties of matter. What becomes of the soul in physical dissolution we do not know, but we do know what the capacities and attributes of matter and spirit are co-ordi- nated at equivalent points. The positive knowledge we have of the transfer of elements out of which the personality is builded are intimations of a probable like survival at death. 189 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. The Stream of Life. Heredity makes a distinct contribution to the idea of a stream of life. The naturalist comes across no fact which would lead him to conclude that the life stream, from the beginning, was ever interrupted or ever will be. We can not think of this planet's life being without issue. Its powers have a smooth and unbroken flow. Life ahead partakes of the features of life present. The get- ting of that which is into that which is to come is life's great business. Its expansions and fruitions are also prophetic. Embryology builds a life within a life and shows it a way to escape to its own fuller expressions. Life in gestation breaks away, directly, into parturition. What we call death is only the breaking of certain correspondences. At no time do all the correspondences of anything break. Science knows no dead kingdom. Every- thing is alive in one direction or another. The laboratory will probably never manufac- ture life. The analysis of a single living cell puts despair into the effort. What nature does about the original life unit is another matter. Nature is virile in the spontaneous production of life forms. So far as any one knows to the contrary, cases of it 190 ENDLESSNESS. may be found in any square rod of an old field. And the fact is proof that the nexus of being is organic and not arbitrary. It means that the chemistries of the soil may bloom into life when the conditions arrive. The two kingdoms are psy- chically interlaced. The power to produce, de novo, a life unit is easy with nature. Will the human life unit be projected into the endless future? We have not seen the performance. We have seen the action of a law which is equal to it. Man and Death. In the reflective consideration which man gives to the subject of death he is a solitary. An ani- mal will struggle to escape death, but it shows no sorrow or grief over its hazards. A sparrow will escape, by the pluck of a feather, the talons of the hawk, and in a moment the alarm is gone and the unconscious joy of life returns. The bird lacks the capacity to appreciate the tragic features of death. Man also struggles to the limit of his power to escape death; and he also thinks of it beforehand of its mysteries and its consequences. Its meanings, its interests, its perplexities have al- ways attracted attention to themselves in a man- 191 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. ner strongly to suggest that he may be related to death in another way. No Extinction of Being. We have no experience of the extinction of being. The survival of the elements, in all changes of material form, is an established scientific dogma. When organisms fall into decay their elements are distributed. Nature never gets weary of working over its frayed and used-up material. It takes the decayed parts of dead organisms, turns them about, and fashions them again into forms of freshness and beauty. Philosophy and biology are in agreement about the meaning of death, in itself considered. A blind man is dead to sight. A deaf man is dead to sound. When death completes itself, all avenues like these have been closed. But there is as much doing as ever. The magnetism of life breaks at one point and attaches at another. It breaks to catch. The death incident is the handmaid of survivals. Chemical survivals are the feeders of life. Biolog- ically death is a bridge. "It is not quickened except it die." A grain of wheat is a wrapped-up unit of life. When it decays the life principle goes out to its multiples. The new life comes up out 192 ENDLESSNESS. of the decaying grain. In terms of exact thought it is a resurrection the only kind nature knows anything about. The grub survives in the butter- fly. The butterfly comes into being through the grub. There is a somewhat in the grub which escapes into the butterfly. The unit of one form breaks out into the unit of another and it breaks back directly. It is nature's fantasy and she has myriad instances like it. It has been said that Butler's Analogy here is illegitimate, because a spirit fact can not be constructed out of the material on earth. But we face first a fact, and not an analogy. Indubi- tably, a spirit fact is manifested. We apprehend a transference of life potency into a new form. Does any one question that? The fact of nature's capacity is then established. Certain psychical identities have had a shift. When we know that the world of life fairly plays with transformations like this, nature's power to transfer the psychic unit from one form to another can not be ques- tioned. Let the analogies go? Butler may have overworked them and some of his followers may have made them absurd. Nature's doing here is a dead shot to materialism. 13 193 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. Life's Redundancies. Smallwood says of the lower organisms those composed of a single cell: "The parent does not die, but, as a result of the division, there are now two individuals where before there was one. Each moner passes beyond its individual life, but it merges into two; and the two into four; and the four into eight, and so on. Nature has not provided for any ending to this law of increase. While the extinction of cells and of life forms accompanies this process, and holds its otherwise limitless multiples within bounds, the life stream never ceases to flow. In the process of life known as gemmation the life potency is such a redun- dance that the death element is a mere incidental to the main business, which is the effulgence of life. In the generative act among the higher organisms millions of sperm cells are thrown about the ovum, and all go to their death but one. Yet the life principle at that point is the supreme care. The holocaust of death itself is a make-sure. Death there becomes the servant of the life forces. In the case of the complex organisms, super- ficially, the massed significance of the greater body puts the moner out of view; but the connected- ness of the life stream is still in the hands of the 194 ENDLESSNESS. moner. The formative principle of the cell pos- sesses and infills everything. Cell division goes ceaselessly on, and at the same time relates its work with the larger life unit. The cell carries with it the vast investment of life's unbroken stream without being unhitched from its com- plexes. And now, to speak softly, this is endless life, rather than endless individual identity. The Human Personality. The common mind of the race will not con- sider the above intimations of very great value for the reason that they do not satisfy the heart's interest. They are too impersonal, too dim, too far-away, and slightly too unselfish. The searching question about endlessness cen- ters in that clearest of all apprehensions the human personality. The self-conscious life of the mind is our nearest understanding of what ul- timate reality is. It is the norm and unit of all our estimates of value. The personal view is the controlling view. The outside world, with all it may mean, is at most a mother ground for the aspirations and fears of the self-hood. The per- sonal unit is always surer of itself than any other reality. It is known that the human personality 105 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. preserves its identity in its surroundings and through life. But does it persist afterwards? The world of induction has no clear answer to that daring question. It has some brilliant intimations which, like censers thrown out into the shadows of the sky at night, gleam with hope and anticipa- tion. The New Uses for the Body. Personality is not a passing phase or a suc- cession of sensations or a mere dynamic of the acting perceptions or conscious states. It is the abiding conscious self, with a sovereign integrity of its own. It is the wholeness of the mentality. The progress of the race has given distinctness to the personality, so much so that it is evidently shifting the physical powers into new directions. The theory has been prominent among scholars that the human body has become a finished prod- uct of evolution. The body at the present time has reached a point of adequacy for physical needs, but in doing so it has, in a remarkable way, be- come subject to the swifter advances of the re- flective intellect. The physical life has been marked for a new day and for new uses. Some of the older adaptabilities, such as the capacity for 196 ENDLESSNESS. endurance or the brusque vigor of life, in the strife for ascendency are weakening under the finesse of civilization. The ruder giant energies of the body appear to be veering in the direction of re- finement and accuracy and into the delicacies of music and art and poetry and beauty. As a re- sult it has become a finer instrument of the mind. But these are only the beginning days of these new uses of the body. Man's beastly power to wield a battle-ax has about left him. His brutal- ities are more and more being referred to a higher court of decision. His mastery of the elements just ahead will make his wars archaic. The self- assertive intellect is master. The center of interest is mind. The body is now on its way to ethereal- ization. The incursions of science and the en- larged and enlarging apprehensions of the universal relationships of being strengthen constantly the timbre of thought. An exhaustless kingdom of truth is being invaded by a truth-gathering intel- lect, which makes a place for the new experiences, because it knows no limits to its capacity to re- ceive the truth. What an unfathomable recep- tacle the mind is! What hungry outreachings ! How it feeds on the truth and grows! It is never filled up never broken down. It is keyed to the 197 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. universe and appropriates it. A bottomless mental nature reacts on a bottomless realm of truth. Is this any time for things to go to staves? In What Does Endlessness Consist? There are reasons for the belief that the ca- pacity of the mind for new truth involves the law of its own continuance of being. It is certain that old age never comes to the truth-getter. The only abhorrent death is an atrophied mind. The pur- est quality of life we know is an upspringing in- tellect. Research knowledge-getting by any of its methods is, in itself, of the nature of an end- less persistence. It is not enough to be rational. The capacity for reason is not an end in itself. In the utmost realism the mind reacts against that which is its life; and, so far as we know, the impact is endless. The human personality slowly approaches a completer mastery of its own ex- periences. It interprets, time after time, in a better way the nature of the phenomenal world. It is taking larger and larger account of the values of pure reflection. It has come to possess itself so thoroughly that resistance to its advances has reached a vanishing point. How can the break- 108 ENDLESSNESS. down of the flesh formula be in the way of that kind of arrival? The Maturity of the Intellect. The growth of the intellect towards maturity is an approach to permanence of being. We ex- pect the elements of character, whatever they may be, to become fixed as old age comes on. The physiological explanation here is also the philo- sophic one. The brain is never active without producing certain functional and psychic con- sequences. To illustrate, take the rather distress- ful fact of hallucination. In normal sense per- ception the object which awakens it actually exists. In hallucination it does not exist. It is a deceit of the senses. The cause of the vision must, therefore, be inside of the brain. It is a mental picture which the imagination has co- erced. It does not transcend experience, however. Nothing exactly like the picture may have come to pass in the life, but the picture will never be utterly strange to the thought life of the subject. Then, it is known that each event of experi- ence leaves a certain posit in the brain. The brain cells are the repositories of the realism of sen- 199 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. sation. These posits are permanent. They carry over and through the break-down of physical substance, to which the organ is subject. The brain cells get old and decay, but they do not carry out with them life's accumulated experi- ences. Cell disintegration goes on constantly, and the life of the organ is conserved through con- stant renewals; but the psychic posits of experi- ence hold over. So we have a clue to that much of the mystery of permanent knowledge. Delbeauf says: "Every impression leaves a certain ineffaceable trace; that is to say, the molecules, once they are arranged otherwise and forced to vibrate in a different way, will not re- turn exactly to their original state." Whether or not each sensation demands a new and different molecular vibration need not here be decided. If experience is a graving of the molecular structure at all, it is ineffaceable, because it becomes inde- pendent of the flux of matter. The permanent elements there can not be of the same nature with the physical particles which get themselves shoveled out directly. At any rate, it comes to pass that one's business habits, sentiments, feelings, thoughts, actions all make their impact on the brain in a way which time 200 ENDLESSNESS. does not wholly efface. A fact like this is im- portant, because it stands for the truth of the proposition that after any conscious event of life one is never quite the same. This is the wisdom of experience. When age has approached, and the brain been loaded with the posits of the past, it becomes more or less dull to present events. The time for new impressions threatens to go by. The affairs of life do not make the keen impress of the earlier years. Our aged ones are a little dull to present things. The common notion is they are dying to the real values of life, when the fact is they are coming to permanence. With old folks, beneficently, circumstance after cir- cumstance slips by without being noticed. The dull vision, the deaf ear, the lost palate for sweet- meats accompany the fruitioned brain. Those who have used life wisely sit in the midst of the treasures of experience with the assurance that they will not be dispossessed of them by any turns of fortune whatever. It is good for them that they are no longer strung for the strenuous life. If they were as keenly alive to all things as in youth, they would be served too harshly. They have come to where they may take the buffet and fury of life un- 201 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. moved. They are not so keen to remember or so swift to acquire they have the dulled sensibility and the reminiscent temper because the neurons are full and the mind is beginning to take an in- voice of its own accumulations. If the dulled senses are of less service outwardly, the intellect is given opportunity to become more fully alive to whatever is of most worth in a human career. It is a notable fact that in the climacteric years say from sixty to seventy all intellectual interests are distinctly enlarged. The constructive intellect often comes to an end before the end of the years, but the mental and moral integrities remain intact. Old age at last comes with its childish whimsi- calities, but no contradictions of character appear. Positive resentment will meet any attempt to throw the life then out of its currents. Physical Decrepitude. Young America affects contempt for age. It is the dreaded and dreary season. It is the down- grade. It is the time to be set aside to be put in a corner. Old folks sometimes live too long on the property of their heirs. When the life has to let go of that which occupied its vigorous years, it is supposed to be empty of human interest. 202 ENDLESSNESS. There is nothing new under the sun after we cease to go about. Memory treads the wearisome ground of the old days, and wears it smooth and bare. When the face is wrinkled, when the juices of life go and the body gets on crutches and under shelter, the life is supposed to be finished. Women resent the imputations of age. Men sham youth till the gaze of eternity gets into their eyes. What idiocy of pretense! Physical decrepitude is a negligible incident in any well-furnished life. It brings inconveniences of a certain kind, but it does not interfere with life's best acquisitions and lessons. Grief over the decay of the physical powers is a great ab- surdity. The reasons for a long life have been misunderstood when old age struggles to keep alive the desires and manners of youth. A gay old man is always a gay old fool. Nothing worth while ever goes into decay. The world gets roomier as the days go. Beauty of character is most resplendent in old age. Time brings out the finer lines. A vicious life at first appears advantageous and desirable. A life of sturdy virtue at first is a prosy com- monplace. Give the two time to run into old age and they establish the moral order. We do 203 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. not get away from the past nor get by the present. The present makes up the future. That which we are to be to-morrow is in us now. Consciousness. The desirability of endless being evidently hinges on the question of consciousness, because that is the self-appreciative faculty. The term is one of very familiar use. To be conscious or to lose consciousness are ideas well understood, even by those who do not pursue their own mental states further 'than to know they are normally active. Physiologically speaking, consciousness has been defined as a manifestation arising out of the process of nervous transmission through the ganglionic centers. That is about equal to saying somebody passed our door this morning, for we heard the rumble of the carriage wheels on our pavement. Consciousness is awareness. That is its simplest definition. The term signifies a men- tal state, from which the integrity of the mind must be distinguished. It is not an indiscerptible unit nor an essential concomitant of mind action. It is not a dissolving view which compels that upon which it is conditioned to fade when it does. The life of the mind abides in the come and go 204 ENDLESSNESS. of consciousness. Take a little oxygen out of the air and it is gone. Hypnotism will extinguish it; so will terror or religious ecstasy. It records a stream of impressions, it is alert to the spec- tacular, it delights in lively sensations, it listens to stirring music or speech and does not hear the clock strike. It shuts down at night and wakes up in the morning. There are no difficulties of thought, therefore, in the evidences of the loss of consciousness in physical death. The fact of it does not stand against the intimations of the mental permanence. It is neither a cause nor an effect. It is not an entity to be kept from perishing. It is the realiza- tion of being simply. It conditions a certain grade of being and certain states of that being. We rise into it like a bird rises into the air and light of the morning. Insensibility is not an alarming situation. Physicians now put us to sleep while severely kind things are being done. This view does not at all undervalue the sig- nificance of the self-conscious state. The point of its arrival is one of tremendous import. The capacity for reflection begins there. It is the introduction to any appreciation of the self and of the universe. It makes possible the analytic 205 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. and the synthetic judgments, and opens the gate- way to spirit values so great that they stagger the imagination. Does the Personal Unit Go Out Embodied? The question of consciousness is not nearly so perplexing as the fact of physical dissolution in death. Scientifically, the continuous life of the spirit necessitates its interaction with matter with- out break. We have no evidence whatever of the existence of thought apart from substance in some form. So invariable is our experience of spirit or mind, associated with matter, that if our thought undertakes to depict a non-material state it uses material figures. The savage will imagine his after-life with pony and gun and venison. The Oriental thinks of crowns and pal- aces and gold-paved streets and retinues of serv- ants. No mental image of a pure spirit state can be formed. Continued being, without some place for it, is an impossible thought. The room- iness of the universe, with so much in it, must enter into reality. There is nothing of an earthly experience to intimate to us the possibility of a disembodied state. Thought becomes impotent when we begin to struggle with the idea of the 206 ENDLESSNESS. cessation of physical substance. Existence, with substance left out we can not think of what kind it is. We do not wish it. It has no motive or appeal. Not unclothed, but clothed upon, is the universal feeling. If we consider this life in any sense a preparation for a possible life beyond, we know that we have been practiced in the drill- room of materiality. At this stage of our knowl- edge the scientific requirement is that we go out embodied in some way. We must grip some con- dition of matter. If the spirit nature be con- ceived as infinite in duration, it must be con- ceived as transmitted from one material state to another. Matter is the invariable concomitant of the transmission of force. At the present time each mental act is accompanied by molecular changes and displacements in the brain substance; and these motions are evidently responded to in the universe beyond. Things do not exist apart from their properties. We interpret the proper- ties of things by the way they manipulate material substance. "We can not imagine the exercise of force except through the instrumentality of some- thing having extension." (Spencer.) Philosophy can not overthrow that dogma of science if it would. 207 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. The Vibrant Universe. Let us now go as far as we know and not under- take to avoid a mystery. The universe, in a re- markable way, is vibrant with transmitted energy. It is like a mighty dynamo, sending out light and heat and power, to turn spindles or to quiver with intelligence along wires overhead or under- neath the ground, or along the bottom of the seas, or over the seas without wire transforming the planet into a neighborhood. Any limit put on the modes of matter is purely conjectural. When we see with what facility nature's forces shift their forms in the chemistries and in physics and in organisms, we may take, with a few grains of salt, the traditional thinking that matter and spirit fly entirely apart in physical death. It has already been shown in these pages that the distinct temperamental characteristics of any human life which have been differentiating them- selves for hundreds of generations, and over thou- sands of years of time, may cross in the gener- ative act along a microscopic thread of matter to constitute a new personal unit. It is scientific- ally credible that a unit of spirit force might find wings on a single corpuscle, to pursue its destiny anywhere in the realms of being. Anyhow, it is 208 ENDLESSNESS. known that matter exists under conditions of tenuity far greater than the senses can detect, even with the help of the finest mechanisms. If the ether, for instance, is an impalpable form of matter so tenuous as to defy microscopic re- search if it moves between the particles of mat- ter as freely as the wind blows among the trees of a forest we are estopped from doubt about the capacity of matter to become an invisible media of all spirit correspondences. Besides all this, the human personality is the clearest cut and ruggedest form of earthly energy known. It survives tremendous catastrophes. Its memories, its accumulations of experience, its self-conscious sovereignties maintain themselves from childhood to age. It has maintained itself in a physical formula which has been all the time a very fire of conflagrations. The very way of life looks like a drill-room of the personality lead- ing towards the shift it is to make with physical death. Reversal of the Law of Waste. An attractive intimation of endlessness is found in what may be named the reversal of the law of physical waste. The law of economy in ma- 14 209 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. terial things is well understood. The more you spend the less you have. The toiler can not spend his wage and keep it. Physically there is an outgo which does not return. Effort must be made to replenish waste. Allowance must be made for wear and tear. Those who control vast industries have become shrewd in the knowledge that economy in production and in exchange make all the difference between profit and bankruptcy. The sorrowing millions who have not mastered the law of waste get hungry and thirsty and struggle in the marts of trade to get and to hold. They bend themselves to the one business of mak- ing and hoarding money. The money maker is the first citizen. Industrial strife is a bread riot. Business is war. Idle luxury lives on one side the street and cringing penury on the other. Cap- ital and labor are both organized, and for the same reason. Both blunder, and both are de- ceived. The lesser things are thought to be the greater. The situation makes the heart sick. Easily-applied makeshifts such as legislative pan- aceas and reformative betterments, or another chance to go and vote have not in them a single heartening thing, for the sullen stream deepens and widens. Vast numbers come up out of it and 210 ENDLESSNESS. walk the streets and highways with livid faces. The slums reek with other thousands more ut- terly degraded than the world's savages. Cellars and garrets are full of children and young people who, after a brief hunger for sweetness and purity, are swept downwards into hopelessness and all moral infamies. No soft-hearted altruism ever reaches this situation. No reformation ever makes a rift in this dark Tartarus. A little higher up in the treadmills of the industries are other millions; honest toilers, un- consciously dying an aesthetic and spiritual death. Beyond these in the fields are other millions, worked to the limits of all endurance because their views of life do not include its highest values. What failures, what wreckage, what scudding before adverse winds, what streams of tendencies stronger than men? Is it not possible that this world's life in these Western lands may have moved forward with some of its prime elements of strength and prosperity disastrously under- estimated? May it not be so that men are wear- ing their lives away in pursuit of a game which is not worth the powder and shot? It may be the life of modern civilization itself strikes a dissonant note. Are not men enslaved and killed for no 211 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. adequate reason and because civil society itself lacks the life vision? As long as men are compelled to exhaust themselves in the crass struggle for bread will the pain of living ever be less? Have not the royal fountains become muddy? Have we not put a first estimate on relative things and a second estimate on absolute values? Is not any civilization fundamentally unwholesome which tends to wean the common mind away from its mothering in a world of absolute spirit? Is not the social viewpoint of life in radical error? How could any active principle be necessary in the personal life and not so in society? Could the lifted vision the endless motive apply to the individual and not to society? If the law of spirit values is supreme for the personal life, can it then become a social indifference without disaster? The expenditure of force in the spirit world is not a waste. It thrives on its own outgo. Giv- ing doth not impoverish. Withholding doth not enrich. The more one gives the more one has. A fortune bestowed is a fortune husbanded. Material inheritances may be alienated by others or by one's self. Spirit possessions are secure against invasion. The common honesties the upright life without ostentation, the practice of 212 ENDLESSNESS. the neighborly spirit, generous recognition of the feelings of others, the disinterested motive, the sweet humanities, self-surrender to the world's happiness the exercise of these virtues are re- versals of the law of waste. Wherever they are outwardly co-ordinated in society they constitute an investment in which accumulations are com- pounded and not drawn upon. Shut-in capacities are starved for lack of use. We need not hesitate to converse or to give out knowledge freely, be- cause there is no loss to the giver. The press is free, and books and libraries, because that kind of outgiving is under the law of intellectual self- expansion. Everybody is enriched when the truth treasures of the world are possessed by the poorest of the poor. Vast sources of knowledge are now open to all who wish to make use of them; because no sense of limitation or exhaustion is ever felt. The young truth seeker to-day, with his first moment of inquiry, is in reach of these un- wasting accumulations. In mathematics, for in- stance, its language symbols are a great saving to beginners. They start with formulated state- ments of what the ages have accomplished. The multiplication table, the equations of al- gebra, the theorems of geometry, logarythms, the 213 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. dry figures in the almanac are in a vital way in- heritances. With them the studert performs the very greatest calculations with a very remnant of work. On this kind of storage anybody can draw without any loss to the bins or to the people who filled them. The motives of self-seeking are ab- sent in all the things which we can have without price of the finished labors of others. If we add anything to our spiritual inheritance, we are profited by the use others may make of it. The more they take the richer we are. When we with- hold the action of our faculties we impoverish ourselves. WTien we refuse the investment of a talent we bury it. The world may get along with- out the use of our powers we can not. Often what we construct is an evanescence. W T e are always building ourselves. The building is the builder. This is life's deepest law. It has in it all the elements of permanence. Under its action, the royal self is able to take a part of the sub- stance of all experiences and transmute them into that which the whip of any cosmic wind will not wear away. 214 PART II. CHAPTER X. k THE SUPERMOVEMENT. History. No comprehensive understanding of what hu- man history is can be reached by the sole con- sideration of the subject of it as a creature of biological and chemical changes. Only in a sub- ordinate way is man a physical survival. He has, it is true, come to a supreme position in the king- dom of life, and the steps by which he has reached this vantage ground are pretty well understood and commonly accepted. But the human life, as it is, can not be interpreted under the action of one law. The human body may be an ascent from lower forms of life, but it is not so, feature by feature. That theory, ingenious as it is and ca- pable of making a fine show for itself in a region where cosmic mind brings about similar forms for similar functions everywhere, and where the variations of form and function are almost in- finite, has never been proven. It requires incred- ible reaches of time incredible stretches of the imagination. Evolution is a great truth in the 217 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. unfolding and development of life forms, but it will not bear the onus of all explanations. Evo- lution must be made to consist with the action of psychic law in nature, and that introduces the spontaneous. And only in the same way shall we have any collective understanding of the race. The social instinct may be depended on to keep human beings together in families, tribes, and nationali- ities. And very much may be known of the ways of men by the events which have been chronicled of them, one after another. How they have lived together and increased in numbers and built civil- izations and left enduring monuments of art and architecture and literature and law. How they have also turned on one another to devastate and destroy. How famines and pestilences and scourges of many sorts have eaten them up by the million. How conquest and diplomacy is constantly shift- ing the geography of nations. How the arts of peace, in favored times, have grown into the ascendant and called into life an industrial age and sent ships of interchange and commerce into all the seas. This is common history and worthy of record. But the temper of the time is to weigh events 218 THE SUPERMOVEMENT. by a kind of scale which often magnifies the less spectacular things and which occasionally puts the affairs of the world out of joint chronolog- ically. And for the reason that man has come to be considered the subject of an order which in- cludes more than his human associations and fellowships, and which identifies him with the profounder concerns of his cosmic correspondences. We belong to a political and social and religious order, and we also belong to a scheme too great for us to understand much about, and with which we do not have very much to do. The planet on which we live turns on its axis, and it moves in the plane of its orbit about the sun and the knowing ones tell us that the system to which we are attached is rushing towards an apex of its own at the rate of four hundred million miles a year. We are not sensuously conscious of any of these movements. We are in the grip of them we can not help ourselves. In the equipoise of tremendous antagonism we can lie down and go to sleep, and wake up cared for. Neither are we aware of the numberless in- fluences which shape our social career. We are daily absorbed in the projection into life of our own little energies, and as they go out from us 19 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. we are able to see somewhat of their value. We are not able to estimate the true and full social effect of a single word or action. All the words and actions of a single life of all lives are thrown out a hodge-podge they are wrought into an order. Above the prevision of any life of all lives we get the sense of a superforce, which appears to be kneading the human forces and which guarantees, somehow, the safety of the social system. We can no more understand it, or manage it, than we can control the weather. We are not great enough to have historic causa- tion charged up to us we are not good enough. We are not even able to stand by and appreciate the modes by which the actions of individuals and the social currents are co-ordinated to do service in the determining tendencies of the world's life. Many of these modes slip by us unnoticed and others come upon us like divine surprises. The inquiry we make here, however, is healthful and practical, because there is a sense in which we may get in front and be ground to powder. The Swarming Instinct. When the bees swarm, each insect is, appar- ently, held absolutely to obey the hive intent. 220 THE SUPERMOVEMENT. When the new queen flies out into the air to call the hosts after her, it will be noticed that the dividing line between those who go out and those who stay is a place of great excitement. The smallest movements there decide the issue for single bees. But there are no coercions, no hold- ing of an election, no detail of numbers. Although the situation is very complex, the excitement is not a confusion. They know what they are about without knowing they know it. The psychic forces at work there are inherent attractive; and they are one with the law of the conservation of the species. Salmon by the million, at ripening time, come out of the deeps of the ocean and ascend the rivers hundreds of miles and deposit their spawn. Then they abandon it. The warm, shallow waters, the ooze of the shores, the bulrushes and grasses, the detritus of the mountains, and the great salt seas again appear to have a distinct care for the life of the species. The ancient Hyksos hordes swarmed down into Egypt. The Hebrews swarmed out of the deserts, up into the hill country about the Jordan. The Moors swarmed clear across the north coast of Africa and up into Spain. Vandal migrants * 221 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. swarmed down into the Mediterranean countries. The Crusaders, with an unreasoning impulse, threw themselves, time and again, into the Asiatic prov- inces in futile efforts to retake the Holy City. Much of the meaning of these surges of the human life remains profoundly hidden. They were not trumped up. They do not belong to the logic of ordinary events. They were not insani- ties. Impelling forces like these seem at times to beat down on the mass like the weather or the seasons. The beneficence in them is patient and far-reaching, shielding the race from wreck, but not from strifes and confusions. and reversals. By no sort of madness are men able to close out the human career they are compelled to remain auxiliary to universal tendencies. This feature of the doctrine of determinism must stand. It does not call in question the freedom of the human will and its responsibilities. The personal will has free play to the end of its hawser, which is the outer limit of the human capacity. Indi- viduals may give speed to the course of things. They may project permanent values into the life of the world. They may advantageously block the way of certain tendencies, as sand bags on a levee may shunt the rising waters ahead in the channel. 222 THE SUPERMOVEMENT. They may make, for a time, flat resistance to the whole current, and their degree of success will, by that much, be catastrophic, because a great river dammed up soon breaks all bounds. The king did not stop the rising tides with his wand. A midget can not do anything with a giant's load. We are in the grip of forces greater than any conceivable human combination. Free will and responsibility are involved in the way they help or hinder. Social Conservations. Man belongs to the changeless order, there- fore. The personal life has an orbit of its own, but it is included in the orbit of the associative life, beyond which it is impotent to go. We tramp up and down the stairways of an ocean vessel; we walk from stem to stern; and all the while the vessel holds on its way. The huge ship hugs a thousand people together and carries them all in its movement. In a sense the individuals need have no care about the situation. To stay on board is to get to the destination. But did not men build that ship, and are they not running it? De novo, no! The conservations of history are in a ship. The harnessed ocean, the measured stars f 223 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. are in it. For thousands of years men have worked on the patterns of an ocean liner, and only a few finally got the stuff together and finished the job. In some such way the larger movements of humanity are made to compass the energies and the plans of individual men and put them together and lift them up into the broader unities which never fail to show themselves, with time given. Demagogues, theorists, social reconstructionists, anarchists do not affect the social status very much. That which they are able to do of mis- chief does not often justify the alarm made about them. It is not possible for anybody to radically change the way things hang together, socially or economically. The social order as an evolution is biologic. Brilliant and erratic and well-intentioned visionaries flash in and flash out, and the old order remaineth. The life of human society, on the whole, verifies itself along a line of associative experiences which must correspond to the unal- terable nature of the human spirit itself. Human nature can be depended on to hold the even tenor of its way in the face of all proposals to bring out, like Jonah's gourd, a new thing in a night. New social or economic principles do not appear as inventions. People first see the intimation, then 224 THE SUPERMOVEMENT. they see the plain action of a new feature of the social administration; then they get about it to sharp-cut its edges and universalize it by erecting it into law. The Authority of Law. The new elements in human society are life phases. And because they are so, they do not brook any rude handling. Those who see social ills, and mix panaceas to cure everything at once, are visionaries. They do not have a true con- ception of what the social order is. Even the in- dustrial world has not been put together mechan- ically, and it can not be structurally mended. Social law is not a human product by any concert of understandings. The law first discovers itself by what it does. It often holds things together while the subjects of it wrangle about it. In a free country the majorities rule, as they ought; but they do not make law. They arrogate the right to say what it is, and they are occasionally mistaken. The legislative codes are burdened with many misfit statutes. Their administration does not yield the highest degree of justice. Real law can not be unmade or set aside. It may be ignored or disobeyed. It may be resisted till the f 15 225 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. heart is sick, but it does not break down. The law is never inherently weak. The lifted arm of revolt gets broken sooner or later. The supremacy of natural law does not center in Congresses or Parliaments. A law-making body is really a political laboratory of research. Those fit to legislate are those who hear the sound of a going in the mulberry trees. Obedience to actual law is peace and prosperity. And no escape has ever been known from the retribution which writes itself legibly on the other side. Gravitation does not reverse itself when we leap over a precipice. Then shall we nurse a deadly social virus and expect immunity? Moral issues are not settled by a show of hands. The Ten Commandments did not come into existence at Sinai. They were formulated set into language there. Under dramatic conditions, Moses wrote a brief in casuistry he made a vest- pocket edition of a code which has shown itself broad enough to include all of man's spiritual impulses. That record remains to this day the mggedest, mightiest declaration of the ages. The things embodied in it are essential to the orderly administration of this planet. They are not human first, but cosmic; and no deceit of observation or 226 THE SUPERMOVEMENT. subterfuge will ever be able to set them aside. We may knock against the bars, we may fret and surge as we please, we may tear OUT flesh and waste our strength resistance is invariably dis- aster. Defiant and disobedient generations have been smitten, one after another, by an outraged moral law. The very ground of great geographies has, time and again, been swept so clean of human beings that the chastened remnant has been glad to obey when a new day and a new life begins. The most fearful of all social insanities is that form of it which has no respect for or pays no attention to a cosmic law. That law is patient and slow-moving, but it secures the settled human destinations in history by putting out of action the opposition. That may mean the overthrow of institutions, the de- feat of governments, the burial of civilizations. The supermovement does not mean a smooth sea always. It does mean that the human capacity and will, personally acting, or collectively, are both keyed to a supremacy of control in such a way that nothing which the race is, or is to be- come finally, can be invalidated by any un- toward event in history or by the resistant spirit of individuals. Progress stages of growth as * 227 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. well as reversals, are included in the inviolable supermovement. We may not know what the end of history is, but we have discovered the steady-going resistlessness of its way. We are in the grasp of the outstanding concurrences, and we are held by them in such a way that the bare fact in itself threatens to bury us for our insig- nificance. But the issue with philosophy is not quite so serious at this point. Are these outer determinations good for man? Have life's conditions improved? Is the way of history an ascent? Has the intellect made a larger place for itself? Have the humanities and the nobler virtues held their own? Survivals. Far from the other side of his written records this human has come. He was a tribal savage, with his animal instincts predominant. He was a low creature aimless and cruel. Through all that prehistoric period he must have been the subject of some masterful life principle which brought him, finally, to where he became a conscious helper of, and by which he has made the ascent, to where he is to-day. He is not yet fully on his feet, but he has scored an advance. He has gone 228 THE SUPERMOVEMENT. up and not down. The supremacy of the upward tendencies premits him now to go their way with confidence, though they do not shield him from casualties. He may find repose in the masterful scheme which bears him onward. Progress has been defined as that which is left over after social successes and reverses have been balanced. It is a remainder a residue often very small. There are times with communi- ties, and with nations, when about everything ap- pears to be turning from bad to worse when social ideals are in eclipse, when the usual safe- guards of society are not able to execute them- selves, when crime is rampant in public and private places, when even that old stay of com- munities, hearthstone morality, is not good form; when the serious-minded have come to wonder if decay has not fallen on human institutions. Such social and political situations have often looked like finalities. But there are no finalities. Re- newals always follow the crises times. Small signs of betterment at first appear, then new values begin to work themselves loose from frayed and worn-out forms; and it is soon noted that the best things of the dead time seem to have re- mained over for the very intent to be put into 229 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. the melting pot. Gold, ivory, gems get sepa- rated from the dross of things, and they are di- rectly given a better setting than they had before. The air clears after a storm. Moral and political and religious values show themselves able to get through a conflict. The world's pestilences and famines and conflagrations are not without their survivals. It has been supposed that the destruc- tion of the Alexandrian Library threw the world irretrievably backwards. But any library accumu- lation is only secretarial. The virile life the men- tal activity the culture which produced such a repository, could not be nailed fast to any record of itself. A bonfire could not be made of the achievements of the Alexandrian age. The real worth of such a period could not be put out of the stream of history. The nature of man's actual world will not allow the radical advances of the race to be lost. Things of great worth appear to get out of view for a time, like germs going down into the soil, out of sight, to come up later in new dress and vigor of life. There is no more waste in history than in physics. Human beings can not have trouble so great as to put the course of history permanently out of its way. The law of the human conservations has its centers of draft so 230 THE SUPERMOVEMENT. far above the heads of men that they can not tip-toe and touch it. Any confusion at any time may rationally be accounted an unresolved strug- gle, even if the events in it do not get to the end of their action in the period of a brief lifetime. The general movements of the world are so intri- cate and involved they are made up of so many elements and affect so many and diverse peoples that a single mind, however capable, only grasps a few of their massed consequences, and then only for a moment; and it is not able, therefore, to put on them any appropriate value. But we do come to know a progress which is inherent and an ad- versity which is not remediless. 231 CHAPTER XI. RELIGION AND THE COMMUNAL LIFE. The Overlap of Life Units. THE little plumularia of many seashores is composed of a mass of tiny structures, each hav- ing a life of its own and at the same time perform- ing a functional part in the life of the larger or- ganism, which is a colonial unit. The compound coral is also an assemblage of organic units. It is a life within a life showing very complete and complicated mutual depend- encies. The millions of cells of the human body are classified. Over and above the fact of cell in- dividuality, the cells are known to have a struc- tural and functional belonging. One set con- structs the bony framework, another the con- nective tissues, another undertakes the enormous work of nutrition; but hi no moment of that de- tailed division of labor is there a forgetfulness of their vital co-ordinations with the larger unit to which they belong. The red corpuscles have 232 RELIGION AND THE COMMUNAL LIFE. in view the life of the body they build all the structures. The white corpuscles fight disease. They throw themselves against an enemy with utter abandon one against a thousand. It is their hilarious business to die for the life of the body. When a fever rages the lucocytes are waging war. Only in a mathetic sense, therefore, can it be said that the living body is the sum of its living cells. The body is a distinct life unit composed of unicellular life units. The biological situation may be described as an overlap of life units. Nothing is separate, nothing apart, noth- ing segregated. Life forms are wrapped about each other the smaller transfused through the larger everywhere. This is one of the first lessons to be learned in biology, and the sociologist never makes any headway until he becomes familiar with it. Indi- viduals and families are interfused into that dis- tinct organism we call the state; and in the same way that bees are put together to constitute the hive. The hive instinct endows each insect with the best it knows of itself. A single bee gives it- self, without reserve, to the hive, without knowl- edge, perhaps, that such a giving is the supremest expression of self-preservation. 233 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. The New Testament law of human service is this same law brought up into the domain of man's life, and not a new thing. "He that loveth his life shall lose it" states broadly a great natural law, which did not drop down out of the sky, but came up out of the ground. The self-seeking life is narrow and self-de- structive. Our richest personal findings are in our outgivings of effort for others. We are a part an integral part of the larger life of the family and society. We are fitted in as the bee is fitted in. We can think of a bee with the crass capacity to fly out from the hive and never re- turn. It would then take to itself all the sweet of every flower and have nothing to carry back to the hive. What glorious freedom and what insanity and suicide of life! The bee, however, has no will to execute such a feat. Refusal to accept associative obligations is revolt against a cosmic law. Its supposed ad- vantages are a deceit it is a blundering to a fall. The larger outside values to the individual are his social co-ordinations. "For no man liveth to himself, no man dieth to himself." That state- ment can be verified as true from an examination of any physical aspect of creation. 234 RELIGION AND THE COMMUNAL LIFE. Socialisms. The communal life is the basal life anywhere. Individualism is not an increasing separateness it is an increasing identity with community ad- vantages. It is the capacity to make use of the world's accumulations. The last fifty years has brought to the notice of scholars a decided uprising of discontent with those phases of the social order which have ex- pressed themselves on a selfish or individual basis; which have undervalued collective advantages and overvalued individual rights; which have so mag- nified individual rights as to defeat individual hap- piness. There has been a growing interest in the communal advantage, as a survival, for the reason that it makes itself an offering to each individual born into it. As the social complexes approach perfection, personal privileges and gifts multiply geometrically. When it comes to pass that gas and water and coal and pavements and roadways and telephones and free mail delivery and the parcels post and schools and churches and li- braries and art museums and public parks can be enjoyed by all, at the rates which the poor can afford, then the poor are as rich as the rich in these things. 235 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. The richer the community in social advan- tages, the richer the entire citizenship in an equality of privilege. The real need of large personal ac- cumulation of wealth becomes less as social bene- fits increase. The community life now, as we understand its working among the most ad- vanced peoples, has in it the potentials of un- precedented bestowments on the whole mass alike; and social growth, in that direction, ought certainly to weaken the motive towards personal gain, since the richest things for which money stands may be secured for all, on equal terms. More and more does it come to pass that the one man is a molecular part of the larger body he is the group in miniature, and his larger bene- fits are group offerings. A civilized and cultured man, stark naked, in the heart of Africa, and doomed to stay there, has no show for the larger life. We are all born in debt to communal aggre- gates so great that we shall never be able to meet value with value. About the best we can do now is to leave OUT inheritance intact, with an added contribution by the time we go hence. The strength of the modern socialistic propaganda lies in these particular facts and tendencies. Socialism, until now, has been hindered by radical and un- 236 RELIGION AND THE COMMUNAL LIFE. reasonable features. It has attracted those who desire to reap where they have not sown. It has had violent and unjustifiable expressions. Its first theories were largely revolutionary and de- structive. It proposed to raze the ground and make a clean place on which to build a social paradise. And the whole spirit of it has not yet become unified. Its thought leaders do not see eye to eye. But in the bedlam of sounds are some voices of the new age. Not in its radical- isms, not in its previsions of an ideal society, but in its ability to hear the cry of the oppressed and to pull strongest on the downmost man. It is this which makes it attractive to many minds. The human heart responds to that appeal wherever the teachings of the Christ have gone. The move- ment is not a backward one. Any theory which proposes to lift the masses will now find advo- cates. Its birthplace and home is among ad- vanced peoples who are capable of being moved by the kindlier feelings which, in Germany the other day, prompted one hundred thousand men to say, "Let us see if we can not come to a better understanding with England?" Any peaceable propaganda has a right to it- self. In a free country no danger inheres in the 237 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. constructive theories of those who propose to abide their day and obey the law. Social advances, of course, are always made at the expense of greater or less friction with vested interests. And, on the other hand, free investigation and test will grad- ually purge advanced theories of their vagaries. The attrition of progress will leave its residue of values, and we may not know what these are until we reach them. But this one thing is sure. Every student of the practical life of man sees a tendency in the modern world to increase the powers of govern- ment and to illeviate the distress of the submerged classes. And in the time ahead it is inevitable, with the increase of populations, which means an approach to the limits of subsistence and an in- crease of the hazard of getting on in the world, that government must multiply advantages for the common man. The order of society must receive constant improvement in the direction of a social ethic which begins with the first man and does not stop until the last man is reached. Poli- ticians, statesmen, scholars have done so little for the last man that we may justly suspect that the controlling institutions of men, until this time, 238 RELIGION AND THE COMMUNAL LIFE. have suffered misdirection by some fatuity of the reason. Bee hives and ant hills have in them the ele- ments of associative control more perfect than any human government on earth. They have communal property, but not in a sense which contradicts personal holdings among men. The communal life is there. If the formal reason is to take the place of that, reason has boggled its business, because it has produced the "last man." There are no last ants in the hill or last bees in the hive. Group Action. Benjamin Kidd, in his "Social Evolution," is sure that animals do not act in concert. But most birds, in their migrations, go in flocks. They feed together, delightedly they fight together. The gregarious animal species are more prosperous. Let a bunch of thrifty shoats become aroused to the sense of danger as of a dog rushing among them and they throw themselves into line, each head against the shoulder of the one next in front, each mouth open, showing vicious tusks; the husky nerve-racking banter of battle in each 239 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. throat, and not a single shoat out of line they move in a swift-closing circle about the enemy and, with a resistless rage, they usually put him to flight. A few students yet incline to refer all human achievements to their supposed centers and orig- inations in the individual. Whatever comes to pass must be interpreted in the terms of personal action. Each event must go down to the credit or discredit of somebody. But if a million people have to do with an event, and are the subjects of it, how is it possible to locate a personal cause? With the growth of industrialisms, the initiative of the individual tends to lose out. The causes of social change are to be sought more and more in the spontaneities of the group. Often we do not know where nor how social sentiment masses itself. The Fraternity Phase of Industry. The latest kind of legislative work is to formu- late the law of the group. The effort is being made, with the private citizen in view, not only to give him his rights and equal opportunities, but to define his status in the class to which he may belong. The old struggle of the individual 40 RELIGION AND THE COMMUNAL LIFE. for a place and bread and a fair chance is slowly being taken over into the bodies which represent a group fellowship of understandings. Unhin- dered personal freedom, in a crowded industrial state, is a fiction of democracy. The single man is becoming less and less a free force. Whether or not the tendency is good for him is aside from the fact. In a blunt way he refuses longer to hug a term which has in it a deceit and a treachery. He sees the uselessness of holding to an idea which is no more than a phantom. Why say to the workman, "There is room at the top," when he has no more chance of reaching the top than he has of taking a trip to the moon and when to reach the top would not increase his happiness. The average workman wishes to remain in his own state and live his life among his fellows, and to find what success is and content in the line of his preferences and aptitudes. And rather than to climb to the top, which is an everlasting out- climbing from where he is into a strange place, more and more he prefers to refer himself, his opinions, his actions, his place, his work, his wage to the class with which he is industrially related. The fraternity phase, which, at bottom, is a feature of the evolution of the religious life, 16 241 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. has evidently come into the industrial world to stay. When the larger business concerns throw work- men together in classes, and when competition is strong, collective understandings become neces- sary. The group may be industrial or fraternal or social or scientific or artistic or religious the thing to be noted is, the age is running in con- centrics. The situation is one which attends progress, and it is not always free from strife. The old-time competition, which was first between individuals, and which was supposed to be the life of trade, has been the death of the traders. Large business concerns of the same kind now save themselves from mutual losses by quickly coming to the group understandings. In this turbulent social sea the individual is such a midget he is too small for the social complexes to take him in. He must become iden- tified with the groups. If they leave him out, he is in constant danger of sinking into helplessness and despair. His chances to get along in the world get away from him, and he is undone. Alarmed by the risks of living, he seeks mutual protection in the mutual fealties of the organization. He turns a part of his liberty over into it. He finds 242 RELIGION AND THE COMMUNAL LIFE. there, with those of his guild, companionship, protection, leadership. He finds a sphere to his liking, and one that does not overtax his powers. The advantage is a very clear one to him, and it will remain if the group expressions are held to their legitimate functions. The business world is now well acquainted with this kind of collective intelligence. Massed bodies have a distinct place in the industries. Success- ful employers have learned to deal successfully with them. Laborers have come to an under- standing of their rights and they no longer leave one another to fight a solitary warfare for a just wage. They line up and act in concert. A com- mittee will make a wage scale and a term contract with employers for thousands of men. Employers say this is often better for all concerned. The industrial groups now perform the most com- plicated functions in the adjustment of labor to the corporate employment of it. Modern industrial conditions are not ideal, but they are an advance over anything the world has known. They have come about under a truer estimate of the worth of the personal man. The human life is above business success, above profits, or any material thing. The workman to-day is 243 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. not unfair in his request for a chance to live decently to have a home, to have time enough away from the treadmill of toil to take a breath- ing spell, to cherish his wife and play with his children, and to cultivate the instincts of friend- ship and sociability. Fraternity. The spirit and methods of the labor guilds have not always been commendable. Labor has often taken positions which were untenable and unfair to outside workmen and unfair to society. Their leaders have been, at times, unwise. Boycotts and intimidations and destructions of property and life make a long and regretful list. These are the insanities of the movement. They de- serve to have put against them the utmost re- pressive measures. Methods which outrage the moral sense of people hinders the cause of labor, even where it has a just complaint. But let the whole of that be admitted and regretted, and let good citizenship exercise its right to put stout resistance against the mistaken views of laborers, as well as against their clannishness and narrow- ness; nevertheless, the strength of the whole move- ment is the brotherhood idea. 244 RELIGION AND THE COMMUNAL LIFE. Strong brothers in the labor world have builded a mighty democracy. The fraternal spirit is hav- ing a great growth among the wage earners, and fraternity, wherever found, is one of the permanent elements of religion. 245 CHAPTER XII. THE DEATHLESS IMPULSE. The Growing Capacity. THE fact of a human religious instinct is es- tablished beyond dispute, and needs no extended proof in this discussion. The desire to know, the social impulse, the sex instinct, and the intu- ition of a superior power are the four ineradicable elements of human nature. Religion is not a pro- jection of anything into life. It is the conscious action of powers which have been creatively pro- vided. The human spirit comes into existence with that distinct bent. It is a birth capacity and an inheritance vastly greater than we yet know. Religious teaching everywhere dependably as- sumes its existence. The whole problem consists in calling it out and giving it direction in the light of all knowledge. The outer correspondences of the world are the channels along which the inward capacity runs, to leap at last into the flame and afflatus of true devotion. The younger Booth of the Salvation Army expresses the deep 46 THE DEATHLESS IMPULSE. philosophy of that remarkable propaganda when he says, "The spark of the divine lies hidden and smoldering in the soul of the wastrel." And it is also of profound cosmic significance that the man "down and out" is captured with kettle-drum and fife. Thrown under and despoiled, he yet has an ear for that appeal. When he follows it down the street he does not go far, but he is on his way out. One of the curses of religion is the aristocracy of its methods. Let it be understood that the foundations of character are laid in the reactions of the human spirit with an intelligent, natural world. And that excludes nothing. All experiences have the builder's stamp. They are not crass sensations. Mysteriously, in all sounds and voices and colors and days and seasons the divine is enmeshed. The revealing process starts in infancy and follows the growing intellect. Some materialization all the time leads the way. The self-revelation of God is not a down-letting it is an uplifting. God is not a prince on a raised platform. God is in everything, always a satisfying response to the human capacity. The idea of the divine, even among advanced peoples, is a growing composite. A star, to a child, is a bright speck in the sky. 247 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. The child may know more about the stars as it grows. The stars are the revealing potentials rich with bottomless truth. The limitations of the starting point, with a child, are negligible, if it is a grower. What God is to us we know. That knowledge is real, practical, livable. What God is all in all is absolutely inscrutable. The Primitive Man. Self-evidently the primitive-minded man could only have primitive notions about anything. The student of the early records of the race must take large account of childish fears and superstitions. The low man, who is a savage, is disturbed by strange emotions mental vagaries, dreams, ghosts, invisible enemies, spirits of ancestors, storms, earthquakes, cyclones, scourges of pestilent dis- eases; for he believes these have in them a threat to destroy him. He has also aspirations and yearnings and outreachings which he does not understand. He has a vague feeling of dependence on a superior power which perplexes and distresses him. Strange noises startle him; he creates an- other world out of dreamland; he hangs up a charm in his hut; he carves an image on the rocks; he seeks an open place in the woods and bows down 248 THE DEATHLESS IMPULSE. when the sun rises that is, he comes out a wor- shiper. A mole may take to the ground and a fish to the sea; but man moves out toward the mystery which surrounds him. He has a spontaneous, an unreflecting grip on a somewhat in nature like himself. His food comes from the soil. Water quenches his thirst. The seasons come and go with regularity, and to his advantage. He learns to know certain things as the bird knows the nesting time and the time of migration north or south. The violent natural forces may awaken in him reverence or terror; and he may cry out, as the animals cry in fright or pain; but above the animal a dim sense of the divine possesses him. Unconsciously the deeps of his inmost being answer to the deeps of the world of nature, and the truth of the invisible breaks in on him little by little. He can not extricate himself. He can not get above or below things. He must persist in things and meet the facts of experience. He takes the substance and the form together, in an unreflecting way. His formal reason is not in action. His spirit nature responds to a spirit world. The kinship is generic. His birthright inheritances determine for him a human destination and a deathless interest in 249 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. the invisible world. All the elements of experience which beat down on him from without are wrought into a definite alignment of tendencies in harmony with his nature, just as the nutritive substances which reach his body are assimilated in the build- ing of the physical organism. The savage does not know how he is related to either the pleasures or the distresses of his lif e, and he is therefore likely to be mastered more by his fears than his confi- dences. If the religious impulsions were founded originally in fear, they are none the less legitimate and rational. A baby's fright at a strange noise is not a weakness, and it is not irrational. When the child mind among the races remains a wor- shiper when that mind, through knowledge, emerges into culture and civilization, and the impulse to worship yet remains the fact itself is proof positive of the validity of religious ideas. The Universe Appears. We are not able to see any justifiable disap- pointment in religion as an evolution. If what the world now knows of God and duty has its rootings in the soil of the beginnings of the human life, do we not have in that a secure thought basis for religion? Is it not a very sturdy ground- 250 THE DEATHLESS IMPULSE. ing for the faiths of men? That knowledge of the divine which is inlaid with experience is less likely to be mixed with error than any supposed informa- tion which comes instantly out of the sky, and which the modern mind at least is inclined to dodge, as it would a meteoric stone. The per- manent religious values of the world are not dis- paraged when their root ideas are found among backward peoples, who do not grasp the concep- tion of a beneficence worthy of worship, or who are strangers to the finer ethical distinctions of the advanced races. Nature manifests to the low man an inscrut- able power, and he goes about to get some prac- tical understanding of it he becomes a perplexed questioner of his surroundings as the animals do; and above them he undertakes to know whether things are cruel or good a friend or an enemy. "As soon as a man becomes conscious of himself, as soon as he perceives himself as distinct from the persons and things about him, he at the same time becomes conscious of a higher self a higher power without which he feels that neither he nor anything else would have any life or reality." (Muller.) Man's estimates of life's values approach ab- 251 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. soluteness as he believes he approaches the ul- timate reality; and the ultimate reality always engages his religious feelings. Value in the human mind is so related to reality, and reality to wor- ship, that the religious question has always been very tense and vital. It is a breeder of fanatics and flagellants and self-torturing ascetics and masterful hotheads who do the world damage. The deeps of the human spirit are always stirred when it approaches what it feels to be the last things. Whenever the mind reaches the shore line of an immensity, beyond which it can not go, both the solemnity of its own limitations and the silences of a great mystery bend it down in submission and expectancy. And the natural in- clination with the undeveloped mind is to per- sonate the power which it does not understand. An image is the translation of the invisible into the self-understanding. Idolatry is the beginning articulation of the mind of man with the universe. The worshiper, at first a low, unreflecting suf- ferer, looks out to the end of his vision; but in any direction he sees enough to dwarf him. The days and the years glide by in monotonous reg- ularity the sun rises and sets, and the stars keep their places at night; storm and tempest beat 252 THE DEATHLESS IMPULSE. about him and drive him to shelter; hunger gnaws at his vitals and he finally goes from the end of his vision to the end of his life. Then his gen- erations follow, and a thousand years go by; and at last the universe appears. The human mind, Lifted to a conception of the universe, is differentiated instantly. It is the crisis time of the soul. Consciousness breaks in to make a creature of the simple reflexes a thinker. The unity of creation soon appears to a thinker. Causation is the background of a thinker's life. He has, then, a place to put his findings. He has the same place to file his mysteries. He is then under the sway of a new set of tendencies. He has come to his own. Monotheism begins where the mind first apprehends the unitary nature of existence. "The idea of God is revealed to man in the natural and spontaneous development of his in- telligence, and the existence of a supreme reality, corresponding to and represented by this idea, is rationally and logically demonstrable, and there- fore justly entitled to take rank as a part of our legitimate, valid, and positive knowledge." (Cocker.) 253 CHAPTER XIII. THE EASTERN MIND. The Divine Unity. WE do not detect among primitive people any attempt to disseminate by special effort, or by formal organized understandings, the primary ideas which they are known to have held. They do not show the missionary spirit. Nevertheless, it is certain that at any early time the unity of the divine nature was widely accepted by them, especially by dwellers in the extreme East. A thousand years before Christ, Zoroaster pro- claimed to the Persians the doctrine of a Supreme Being. India was deistic before Buddha's day. Babylon and Assyria gave Asshur a first place among the gods. The germinal religious concep- tions of Arabia were monotheistic from the earliest known records of that region. Dr. Livingstone says of the South African tribes, "There is no necessity for beginning to tell the most degraded of these people of the existence of God." The Book of Job is an interpretation of ancient Oriental 254 THE EASTERN MIND. thought from the Mediterranean to the banks of the Indus. The idea of the unity of the divine nature could not have been taken to such different and diverse peoples through a dissemination of the doctrine. It must have come up indigenously. Wherever the mind of man was able to break through the incrustation of his sensations the uni- tary Cause appeared. The dogma of Mohammed, "There is one God," was a common belief, which he wrought into a fanaticism; and only after it was heralded by the sword did its religious truth become hard- ened into a vast political idea. Vast numbers of people have since bowed to its intolerances and despotisms and to its values. When a modern Bedouin of the Sahara climbs down from his camel and turns his face towards Mecca and the palms of his hands towards the sky, and cries out, "Allah il Allah," he is at that moment about the greatest and most uncompromising religious figure on the earth. That type of man might as well be let alone until he can be lifted by the acceptance with him of whatever is true of his beliefs. The appeal of Paul on Mars' Hill was first to the truths of Greek philosophy. The appeal of Mohammed was to a * 255 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. religious consciousness which was substantially one with the Hebrew theocracy. It is so evidently a truth of the first instance it has so taken hold of the Moslem mind, it is so clear-cut, so simple of grasp, so bottomlessly unitary, so free from de- grading images of itself, and so completely has it been wrought into the life habits of one-third the human race that it will not likely yield to outer persuasions. To the Arab it is the ultimate reason. It is an imperious radical among religious ideas. It will never be coerced. It need not be. It must become a base of the broader religious understandings. The religions of the world are not fundamentally antithetic. We have come to see a Christian ethic even among ethnic peoples. In the war council of Portsmouth, a few years ago, Japan, for the sake of peace and the humanities, being the victor, yielded point after point, and at the last astonished Christian nations by her generosity. She set a world mark in the ethics of diplomacy. The re- ligious instincts of the whole world have in them certain unitary tendencies, growing out of basal likenesses, and they bear with them the meaning that at last there shall be no diverse religious destinations. We all have the same food, the 256 THE EASTERN MIND. same sunshine, the same air, the same senses, the same aesthetic inclinations, the same language en- dowments, similar religious instincts; we swim in the same cosmic sea, and we make kindred con- tributions to what the race is to be. God is one, nature is one, the human life is one. Climates, geographies, colors, traditions, political institutions these are superficial. The misunderstandings men now have are caused by lack of knowledge, and of acquaintance and the charity which is universal. Resemblances among men are more numerous, when we are able to see them, than the occasions of an arrested fellowship. The Eastern Man. The Westerner is sure that his life and insti- tutions express, in a better way, what a man ought to be than the life and civil affairs of the Asiatic. Nevertheless, the Occidental man has been greatly enriched by the values which have come from the region he affects to discount. The Orient teemed with exalted human interests three thousand years before America was redeemed from savagery. The man of the yellow races does not measure very well by Western standards. He is not so militant or so material or so aggressive 17 257 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. or so inventive or so masterful of the elements of self-control socially. His provincialisms fasten him down and make of him a slow-crawling builder worm, enthroned in patience. The social forces at work on him have done their worst and have dug a channel for themselves; so that he obeys them and not the outside folks. The average Chinaman to-day is running around like a pig after his breakfast and taking no sort of interest in the remarkable political changes of his country. So stolid is he in the traditions of his life that the Chinese Republic, just ahead, may be found not to exist. Inland Asiatic peoples have had no fresh blood infusions for thousands of years, and they have never swarmed. They are now huddled about like ant-hills in little nucleated, self-controlling centers. The villages govern themselves. They are self-perpetuative and self-recuperative. They hold together and work out a community destiny under an unformulated and invisible code not superior to that of a colony of bees. The indi- viduals vibrate in narrowly-confined limits. Life, there, has more distress in it than a Western man would tolerate. Customs and caste have so lim- ited individual initiative, and set each one into 258 THE EASTERN MIND. such a narrow place of privilege and duty, and for so long a time, that each one's place among his fellows has become most desperately sacred. Population also presses a disheartened soil. The seasons bring on an annual crisis. Food supplies are being pressed to the last limit of human sub- sistence. We are fat people living on a virgin soil, and we think we could show China the way out; but we will be able to give more good advice after we have taken a population of four hundred to the square mile and have gone on with it for four thousand years. The Asiatic is the religious man of the earth using that term in its philosophic aspects. He is a prince among those who revel in introspection. He has a keen perception of the existence of an invisible world. He has the profoundest kind of insight into the ceaseless tendency of spirit being to incarnate itself. His mind lies uncovered to the mysticisms of nature. Out of the few facts which he knows of variations and transformations of form in the kingdom of life he has constructed a very brilliant and iridescent vision of what he conceives to be going on around him. The doc- trine of reincarnation is now the breath of the religious nature of millions of Indian people. The f 259 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. air is full to bursting of the spirits of the departed. The sensuous world teems with the new forms of his ancestors. His beliefs are so innocently ani- mistic that they intoxicate him and profoundly shape his inmost spirit. Granted that he lives in a world of dreams and fancies, and not one of solid fact, he is yet not far away from a great truth. Every sprouting seed germ is a reincarnation of type. The Negro woman who wished to look through the telescope to see her Lord was as near the whole truth as the astronomer who saw only revolving planets. One was ignorant and super- stitious; the other was mad. General Nogi, when the siege of Port Arthur was about hah* over, built a rude monument in the dip of the hills to the honor of the twenty thousand Japanese al- ready dead; and he made a speech to them which was an apology for the necessity of having to send them out of the world. Yet, when the em- peror dies, Nogi and his wife, of their own accord, keep him company. Following the battle of the Japan Sea, the interchange of congratulations between the ad- miral and the emperor contained a rare recog- nition of the ancestral faith. The formality had in it a dramatic appeal to that deep feeling of a 260 THE EASTERN MIND. nation that it was better to be numbered with the heroic ancestors than to be alive. After Japan's war with China, and Port Arthur was taken by Russia, no less than forty officers of the Japanese army, unable to endure the national humilia- tion, committed suicide by seppuku. The ex- planation of Japan's desperate battalions through the war with Russia was a patriotism which had its center of draft in another world. The sense of that world sways the Japanese mind in all psycho- logical moments. This little man of blood and iron, who has taught his children through forty generations to endure pain without flinching, on the other side of him, has a keen sensibility to every lesson of beauty and joy. A flower by the roadside sends him into ecstasy. The very heart of him is open to all pleasures of sight and sound. Errors of understanding, with the Asiatic, are adverse facts there, as elsewhere; but he lives close to the root ideas of the world. Prophetically, he is a strong man on this planet. He will prob- ably not be an inferiority in the world's last find- ings. He may show himself prepared to take a man's part in that rising empire of human con- servations which must precede the final federa- tions. 261 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. Defective Viewpoint of the West. The Western mind, supposedly vastly superior, glorifies the wood, the hay, the stubble. Land, sea, ships, iron, coal, silver, gold, railroads, manu- factories, commerce, cities, highways, palaces, in- heritances, politics, diplomacies, armies, dread- noughts, salted with a little poetry and art and music and mental culture; but nothing worth while outside of that category. These are the practical concerns of a practical age. Self-poise, which we have constructed into a crutch, has come to mean a disinclination to consider seriously the primary facts of life joy, sorrow, accounta- bility, God. Religion? It will not work in a store or in politics. It is sentimental. These major practical millions throw themselves with remorseless energy into the one business of mak- ing money, and seventy-five per cent of them fail to get what they go after. And yet they are practical. In this new, fresh country in any great city already there are whole acres of people pos- itively retrogressive. They are struck with aes- thetic and spiritual death. The very viewpoint of life with them is a cosmic insanity. Vast ener- gies are now at work in the Western world to grill out a primary personal instinct. The American THE EASTERN MIND. public school system is educating childhood away from one of its cosmic moorings not by intent, but through the lazy policy of trying to move along a line of least resistance. The defect is funda- mental, and without fundamental correction our civilization can not last. A Theocracy, and its Humanistic Values. Monotheism reached its purest Oriental form among the Hebrews. Their conception of the one God appears to have almost completed itself in the time of the patriarchs. It became a fanat- icism as much so as it is with the Arab to-day. Through an idolatrous time among idolatrous peoples, and in the face of every grievous error of life, they made their way with it, in unyielding devotion, for three thousand years. From the moment of their escape into the Arabian wilder- ness they began the building of a theocratic gov- ernment which, for efficiency and strength, had no equal at the time, and has since been one of the unique marvels of statecraft. In the directest way they were a God-ruled people. His will was made known to them through Moses and the priests and the prophets. They saw the incense cloud by day and the glare of the altar fires at 263 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. night. The authority to which they gave heed, and under which they were unhesitant in moving forward, was absolute and inerrant. God, to them, was a being of infinite power, wisdom, and righteousness creator and preserver of all things lawgiver, ruler, king. The Hebrew outlook on life was God possessed to the last details of events. But he was narrow-visioned. He expected his God to stand with him in his vindictiveness against his enemies. The logic of the exasper- ating contrasts of his own life did not bother him. His victories over his enemies were always favors from God. He was intense, fanatical as the Mos- lem is to-day. The French Government has lately piped fresh water from the springs of the uplands into the cisterns of Aglabites in Kairowan, and the Turks are very thankful that Allah made the Christian dogs work for the benefit of the faithful. The point of credit to the Hebrew is he nursed the God idea in history to a permanence. His political career was hapless. The more pow- erful nations about him made his country a buffer state for many wars and devastations. The strong currents of classic and Oriental history flowed through and about this Palestine country 264 THE EASTERN MIND. and made it a favored territory for the dissemina- tion of the religious ideas of which the Hebrew was the conservator. It is because of the pro- found sense which these people had of the per- sonality and righteousness of God that they were able to invest the divine idea with its humanistic values. The Brahmin call was to meditation, to the quenching of desire, to Nirvana. The Greek mind filled the whole earth with divinities, whom it worshiped largely through the plastic beauty of its art. It never distressed itself over the law of duty. If authority was invested in the absolute, it was the far-away reason and could not be pla- cated. The Hebrew God was always before any man's eyes. The human life always stood convicted in the presence of the terrible righteousness. "I have set before you life and death." "I kill and I make alive." The sacrifices of the altar all recog- nized that fact. Nowhere else, among any people, do we find such insistence on personal obedience to God as the supreme law of life. The prophets did not mince words. They were aflame with the message of righteousness. They were faithful in exhortation, heroic in rebuke and denunciation. They had a hard time of it. They were stoned, 265 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. sawn asunder, tempted, slain by the sword, wan- dered in sheep skins and goat skins, were desti- tute, afflicted, tormented. They wandered in deserts and mountains and hid in the dens and caves of the earth; but they never sounded a false note. The moral code of these teachers had fiber. It passed into history a thing of life. On its own face, in its own nature, by right of its serviceable- ness to men, by reason of the compulsion of its principles and teachings to the conservation of what is just in human relationships, and obligatory in worship, it has become an essential of the absolute religion. Hebrew history to the tune of Christ has in it, therefore, two essentials. The first is the righteousness of God. The second is the human obligation which that imposes. An adequate con- ception of the divine character links itself with a moral code which embodies the basal necessities of human action. These two features now stand in the religious world like axioms in mathematics. They are self-evident self-evidencing. They have the direct assent of the moral judgment. The world lives and grows under their action because they are life. Both have lived beyond all hazard of losing out from among permanent religious values. 266 CHAPTER XIV. THE COSMIC CHRIST. The Incarnation. THE second chapter of this book contains the following basal contentions: First the reality of material substance. Second the ultimate know- able nature of being is spirit. Third material substance and spirit being are evidenced by their constant and ceaseless co-ordinations. Fourth any theory of intelligence applied to the move- ments of matter must include the natural order; but it implies also a degree of spontaneity, be- cause it is of the nature of intelligence to become initiative, creative, administrative. This world's life has no adequate explanation under the theory of the unbroken sequence of law. Fifth the human mind has no capacity to understand that which is not sensuously imaged forth. The above implications, we think, make room for the Christ of history in the cosmic plan. In- carnation, or the manifestation of some unit of nature, phenomenally, is the most familiar fact of 267 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. life. The Wordmade flesh has its analogies to the outer limits of human knowledge. Redemp- tion is philosophic. Spontaneous expressions in moral government are also. The central truths of the Christ character and the Christ message probably do not have exclusive application to this planet. They are evidently active in the control of intelligences everywhere. The Divine immanence can not be out of harmony with it- self, and the whole universe, therefore, must have one ethic for its self-cleansing. The Works of the Christ. We get the deeper understandings of the cos- mos as we detect its unitary tendencies. The glow-worm's fire is a direct apprehensiveness with- out a brain. Wild geese sense an approaching storm five hundred miles away. The yellow- tipped plover, by a direct knowing, makes its unerring way from the tablelands of Mexico to the coasts of Labrador. The best we can do with that marvel of orientation is the plover knows because it knows. The bugs and angle-worms do things which are the same as miracles to us. We are obliged to face the facts and file the mys- 268 THE COSMIC CHRIST. teries for future reference. The terms of human knowledge are so often outclassed in the special truth correspondences of these lowly forms of life that we are not in a position to say that anything is impossible. We are not sure of our ground when we say that the Christ knew as the birds know, but His endowments were such that He entered a realm of truth which was to us out- standing, and in a way we do not know. There are certain features which distinguish the Christ ministry from all other teachings. As sure as the world stands, Christ had access to an underland of power and truth which has made His teaching of matchless interest and delight to the human mind. Out of the deeps, by immediacy, Christ brought a divine message to men and set it into language. Out of the same deeps He had power over disease and death. That record is so legible it will not rub out or fade. But it is clear that He did not make this extra-human investment of first import in His ministry. Above His "works" He placed His life messages in the parables. Above them He placed His completed world idea of God as the Father. And above everything like a signet in the center of the truth of the 269 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. universe, He placed that outflung passion of His heart which brought Him to the sacrifice of the cross. Blood Brotherhoods. Unpleasant sensations are produced by the bellowings of a herd of cattle when they scent the fresh blood of one of their kind. It stirs the human feeling like the sadness of a death wail. The oldest herdsmen often mount their horses and ride out of hearing until it assuages itself. The sight of blood often causes dizziness and fainting. With the soldier in battle it banishes fear. A savage would soon learn that when his blood flowed out his life went out. He would then connect his blood with his life. Any savage would be equal to that idea. He would know its im- portance. He would order his life by it. He would deal with it as a first blunt fact of expe- rience. He would say, "The blood is the life" which is not scientifically true; but to any dark- ened understanding it is practically true: and it is the working idea of a large majority of the people of the world to-day. The Levite code says the life is in the blood, which is a nearer approach to the real fact. This was the reason why blood 270 THE COSMIC CHRIST. eating was forbidden by the Jews. For the same reason the early Gentile converts were forbidden to eat animals strangled. Influenced by the tradition, many at this time have a revulsion against blood as food. Because of the strong feelings which the sight of it produces, and be- cause of the notion that, realistically speaking, it is the Me of the body, at a very early time in man's history, and among most peoples, blood became the symbol of strong friendships. The mutual pledges of the Arabians were often sealed by rubbing the palms of the hands together, after incisions had been made in them. Our own custom of hand-shaking is a mild-mannered trait, remaining, of the ancient barbarity. The Cata- line conspirators passed around among them- selves goblets of wine mixed with blood, of which they partook with an oath. When the Scythians made strong friendships, they came together and cut their fingers simultaneously and let the blood mix with their drinks. It was the custom of ancient kings, when they made an agreement of peace, to tie their thumbs together, and when the blood pressed to the surfaces to make small incisions, and each king then would lick the bleed- ing thumbs. The Dyaks of Borneo enter into an 271 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. oath of friendship by drawing a little blood from the arm of each covenanter then they partake of it. In Tahiti a marriage ceremony is celebrated by the two mothers of the married pair sprink- ling mingled drops of their own blood at the feet of the bride. The ceremony is supposed to level all ranks and claims to family precedence and make one the family lines. Among the Karens of Burmah, when a covenant of peace is made be- tween tribes, they hold a solemn public meeting, at which blood is taken from the thigh of each chief and mixed. Then the chiefs mutually touch the blood with their fingers and put it to their lips. A recent traveler says she saw the family and friends of two young men meet at the base of the mountain of Lebanon, where the covenant of blood was entered. Each young man took a piece of parchment and wrote on it his pledge of fealty, for life, to the other. Each one took his own oath and folded it tightly, and put it in a small leather pocket and sewed it up securely. Then the two exchanged packages, to wear with a string about the neck after each package had been sprinkled with then" mingled blood. The women of the South Sea Islands, when moved 272 THE COSMIC CHRIST. strongly by their affections, are likely to strike their heads with some sharp instrument and let the blood run down over their faces and shoulders. An Egyptian woman rushed out in front of a young man who was carrying the baggage of a tourist, and she struck herself in the edge of ner hair with a shark's tooth, and the blood ran down over her face as she looked with eagerness into the face of the young man. The traveler protested, and the young man said, "She is my mother; she is expressing her love for me." Mr. Stanley, in his second trip of exploration, after trying, without success, to avoid the ubiq- uitous chief Mirambo, decided, if possible, to make a covenant of friendship with him. After much parley they met in an open space and took seats on a buffalo robe, facing each other. An incision was made in the black arm, another in the white one, and the blood from each was put into a pot of beer then each man drank half the beer. Then the medicine man held a dagger over Stanley's .head, with imprecations if he violated his oath of friendship. He did the same with Mirambo. Then the two arms were crossed at the point of incision and the blood was trans- fused. Mirambo's idea was then that a part of 18 273 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. his own life had passed into Stanley, and to kill him would be to strike at himself. Mr. Stanley made great use of this rite, familiar to many of the tribes. The root idea among these black natives was the blood is the life, and blood transfusion is a transfusion of natures. A custom prevailed among the ancient Ger- mans, at their banquets, to open the veins on their foreheads and mix drops of blood with their drink, each one partaking as the highest act of hospitality and friendship. The American In- dians made use of the scalp in their most binding friendships and tribal treaties. The wildest of these Northern tribes were likely to devour a captured foe of great prowess they aimed to get his spirit. The Aztecs of Mexico were cannibals. The custom had a religious base, growing out of the idea that the blood is the life. Damon the Pythagorean gave himself as a hostage for his friend Pythias; and they were probably covenanted brothers. Damon proved his friendship by offering his life. Abraham and Abimelech made a covenant of peace and good will. The form of the ceremony is not given in the context, but the customary form was probably used. 274 THE COSMIC CHRIST. David and Jonathan made a covenant under very affecting and trying circumstances. The ceremony is not given. The language hints at the idea that they cut a covenant. They became brothers in the highest and holiest sense known to the Oriental mind. That oath of mutual fealty was never violated. Jonathan thereafter sur- renders his right to the kingship to David. And years after Jonathan was dead, and when David had come to the throne, a crippled son of Jona- than sits at the royal table for life, as a token of a friendship which was stronger than death. The custom of blood covenanting connected itself in a very early time, naturally, with the religious instincts. If the gods were angry, the effort was to appease them as an enemy was ap- peased. When the gods were propitious, their favor was sealed as the good will and devotion of a friend was sealed. The primitive man's god was made tangible in an idol. His own life was tangible in his own blood. He made his life speak to his god in that language. In that barbaric way he propitiated the mysterious powers. 275 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. The Substitute Blood. Animal blood as a substitute symbol is a higher and more humane use of it. Cain and Abel brought their sacrifices to God. Cain made a respectful offering of the products of the field. It was of equal value, doubtless, to that of Abel. Cain made God a present. It was a kind of ex- change between the high contracting parties. Abel brought an animal and sacrificed it. The blood shedding was a symbol of his life offering and fealty to God. It was the language of contrition and obedience. For that reason he worshiped acceptably. Then appeared the human nature to resent that which rebukes it. Cain killed Abel. After the murder Abel's blood cried out from the ground. To the modern mind that is a forceful figure of speech to the Oriental it was a realism. Animal blood was not entirely substituted among the Hebrews. God made a covenant with Abraham and promised him seed as the stars the supreme ambition of a nomad sheik. Abra- ham pledged obedience. The token was circum- cision. The blood of Abraham's foreskin was poured out on the ground. He had a test of his faith in the lonesome years when Sarah was barren. He sees again the divine faithfulness when Isaac 276 THE COSMIC CHRIST. is born. When Isaac is demanded he risks all in obedience and then he is taken into the heights, where he learns that the will of God is not a human death sacrifice, but the offering of the living powers in service. Abraham then entered the throne-room of the Eternal he became the friend of God. His descendants, now scattered over the earth, keep sacred that most remarkable religious rite of circumcision. The Jewish blood covenanting is the life offering to God. After Isaac then Jacob, and the going down into Egypt; then the fruitfulness in Goshen; then the bondage; and finally two millions and a half of people out of the loins of Abraham cross the Red Sea into the Arabian wilderness. They take with them the black marks of slavery, their super- stitions and their sins; but they take also the radicals of their faith a life offering of obedience to God. Each Israelite conies to the altar with his own gift. The blood symbol is the only lan- guage he can understand. It is to him a spiritual grappling hook. He is yet a low creature, and prone to lose sight of its meanings and get himself held by the glitter of the tabernacle and the smell of burning meats. It took a vast time to drive him, and through him into history, this first 277 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. lesson of the absolute religion. The divine right- eousness put over him an ethical code under which he prospered whenever he obeyed. The law of the individual was the law of the mass. The curses and blessings of Ebal and Gerizim followed that hapless people until the law of a nation's life became as clear as any open day. In the later Hebrew periods, when a better culture and a broader acquaintance with the world made possible a degree less of emphasis on a crass symbol, the bloody ceremonial of the earlier time was greatly abbreviated. The later sacred ad- monishings placed the emphasis on the reality, rather than the token of it. "Will I eat the flesh of bulls, or drink the blood of goats? offer unto God thanksgiving." "To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices?," "Bring no more vain oblations, wash you, make you clean." Any ceremony is an abomination when its significance is lost. Any symbol is a misfortune when the mind does not get beyond it. The Crucifixion. This Jewish epoch closes with mighty mean- ings. The libraries are rich with much fine writ- ing about the preparation of the world for Chris- 278 THE COSMIC CHRIST. tianity; but more significantly it seems that many generations must have had in view a mind pre- pared to understand the crucifixion. A Teacher now appears whose speech and thought and habits reveal Him to His age. Any student of the times, and of what He said and did, and of how He lived among the people, might well believe He was the son of David. His words were commanding by the fact that ordinary his- tory made room for them in its necessities. He was a wide-awake Oriental, and not out of sym- pathy with His times. No teacher ever made such splendid use of the traditions and heredities of his own people. He restored to them the lost Old Testament meanings. He spoke in terms which they knew, and brought to them a larger conception of the divine. The austerities of the old righteousness, under which they lived, He softened with a fuller under- standing of what God is to man. God is the infinite Father, and all the people of the world are His children. The rule of the outward author- ity He changed to the inward motive. His teach- ing, in a brief period of three years, immediately vitalized itself in a world of hungry human beings. 279 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. His words were all intensely human. He in- terprets the needs of every lowly heart. The spiritually starved multitudes hang on His lips. He tells the story of the Father's love. He gave Himself utterly to doing good. He seals both His story and His gift in the death on the cross. He calls His own blood to witness that God is love. His arrest and trial and conviction was a mis- carriage of justice in an ordinary criminal pro- cedure. The treachery and the horror of it are not very great mysteries. He died on a gibbet, but He made of it a sacrament. The cruelties of the moment are now put aside, and He comes to express His divine affection in a way which is beyond the capacity of formal speech. An Ori- ental could not mistake what He meant. The blood symbol was to Him, and to all about Him, the highest and most sacred of human utterances. All reserves are swept away. There He hangs, the blood-stained Lover of men. He poured out His life, as His blood, in a compassion which has been breaking the world's heart ever since melt- ing it down to make it tender with immortal love. We come to a place where a child may under- stand. No abhorrent substitutions, no govern- mental theories to patch and sustain, no angry 280 THE COSMIC CHRIST. God to placate, no divine demon to send Him to such a death. The gates swing outward to all God's children now. When the prodigal comes to himself, and the Father's love breaks in on him, and he turns around and goes home, the at-one- ment is complete. The power is not in the blood, but in the love. When we look for healing in the material blood we are waterlogged with the sym- bol. How sadly the Christian ages have over- stimulated a supposed efficacy in the blood in an effort to get out of it a meaning and a merit which was never there. The crucifixion of Christ gives awful emphasis to a cosmic fact. The divine love atones and makes moral distinctions clear, and becomes boundless in its power the moment a sinner flies to it for refuge and rest and service. 281 CHAPTER XV. PROGRESSIVE INTERPRETATIONS. The Right Mental Perspective. WE see no reason why the same principles of interpretation should not apply to the records of a divine revelation as are applied to any piece of Oriental writing. The thing to be aimed at, with any ancient document, is a continuous under- standing of it. If the message is a thing of life, usually it is shunted out of a dead language into a new one, and from one language to another. Its method, style of thought, images, figures, rhetoric, with the coloring which it has received from the outward intellectual conditions of its production, are carried over, to a degree, into new language expressions. An understanding of facts like these is an understanding of the writing. It is always human. The grammar and the diction- ary are always necessary helps to get at the mean- ing of any document; but certain classes of writ- ings do not reveal all their meaning in that way. JSsop's Fables say one thing and mean another. 282 PROGRESSIVE INTERPRETATIONS. They are very untrue to fact, but very true to life. It would be absurd to force them to mean what they say. The reader usually has no diffi- culty with these rich, wholesome sayings. Why does "Don Quixote" live through the generations? The narrative, on the face of it, ought to be buried for its arrant nonsense. Is it a fool fighting wind- mills? That puts the method of the book in front of its meaning. The serious business of "Don Quixote" is to incorporate some living lessons of its age. It is a satire on mediaeval extravagances. It laughs to scorn a bombastic chivalry. There are good reasons in the book why we can not possibly have derision for its jangled intellect. Is Dante's "Inferno" a trip to perdition and back? Is it a disgusting piece of realism? The world refuses to let it die, notwithstanding a lack of relish for its gruesome images, because in the dramatic narrative are noble lessons and an austere morality. In the same way myths, parables, allegories, fables, visions, dreams may have in them im- perishable values. It is often no more than a child's work to distinguish the substance of a writing from its form. The form may be felicitous or not it is the substance which gives it per- 283 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. manence. Kipling says the magic of literature is in the words, and not in the man. He ought to know; but, indeed, words go together by no trick. They may have a wizardry of their own, but if they are not the voices of a life if they convey no flame of thought, no glow of affection they become a hollow, noisy mouthing. A piece of literature is not an assemblage of words fitly chosen. It is not anything material. The form may be overdrawn, and yet justified if it grips vividly the idea. No one knows who wrote "The Arabian Nights." The author long ago received recog- nition of his genius, and that is sufficient. He was not a recluse or a sleepy head. The book is still a classic, of its kind, even among Western peoples. Children are entranced by the wonders of these stories. Grown folks are charmed by the odorous air of Araby which blows through its pages. Its dreamy images have brought into intellectual unity the legends and folk-lore of a thousand years of the history of a corrupt and indolent people. When we wish to feel a Simon-pure Mos- lem pulse, we read the Thousand and One Nights rather than formal history. Who wrote the Book of Genesis? Inasmuch 284 PROGRESSIVE INTERPRETATIONS. as nobody knows, the reader ought to be released from any bondage to the letter of it and feel free to ask the blunt question, "What does Genesis mean?" No document so old as that could have been preserved so long unless it had a message for the life of man. Is it the record of the rather swift business of shaping the earth in six work days? Is it Adam made out of a pinch of dust? Is it Eve made out of Adam's rib? Is it the snake standing on end? Is it a text-book in geology? It is well known to scholarship that Genesis, grammatically interpreted, will not stand any scientific test. Those who put it to such a test have not yet learned to read an Oriental docu- ment. When they split hairs between the west and northwest sides, and then decide to let the whole of it go the way of "Homer's Legends," what will they do with that in Genesis which makes it live through the centuries? God, crea- tion, moral government, human responsibility the sabbatic day? If they let these go they will go mad! Genesis means God, creation, moral government, human responsibility the institu- tion of the Sabbath. These make it the heaviest weighted document in print. And when we con- sider the adaptation of a document to people in 285 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. all stages of development and growth, and to all times, the form itself, of Genesis, is at least a stroke of genius. It will be noted that we have these secretarial records of the Bible embedded in this kind of remarkable and various form throughout. The book is a very library of all sorts allegory and dream and vision and his- tory and law-giving and poetry and drama and epic and pastoral and prophetic teaching and denunciation and parable and narrative and doc- trine and precept. These are set into a stream of history and among a wayward people. The great book is unitary only in the substance of its revealing. Is it not clear on the face of the situation that the revelation does not impinge itself on any question of the authorship of a book or on the way a book has been put together or on the place of the book in the body of the Scriptures or on its age or on its inerrancies. As life messages they are independent of any question of criticism or of scholarly research for the last facts about them. Their value is not in their form any more than a man's value is in his clothes. All freedoms of speech, all mental Oriental indirections are in the book. The man of Patmos takes vast excursions 286 PROGRESSIVE INTERPRETATIONS. like an Arabian knight; and his gorgeous and mixed figures would bring the modern mind into confusion if it were not for the fact that he returns to the earth at about the right time and says, "He that hath an ear let him hear what the Spirit saith to the Churches." The revelation of God and the moral law are now accomplished facts. In themselves consid- ered they command the assent of man's rational nature; and they command him to obedience and service. They have been put to the test of expe- rience and have been proven wholesome and good. The welfare of the world has been immeasurably advanced by them. They need no other defense. They do not now hinge on secretarial inerrancies or on the errors of sense through which they may have been first put into script, because they have become a part of the life of the world. When we partake of a feast and are strength- ened and refreshed, the argument is at an end about the quality of the food. We miss the whole point of view when we magnify the smaller things, under the mistaken idea that the vitalities of the revelation are hazarded by questions of criticism, high or low. The records have lived, and yet they have not escaped the disapproval of the * 287 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. scholar who has a hectic for finding small blem- ishes. It would be remarkable, in the low state of civilization through which they have come, or in the bad morals of a stiff-neck people, or their craftiness, or their intrigues and treacheries, or their bad men at the head of affairs, if some- body had not touched these pages with soiled fingers. It is a dull vision which does not see David's vindictiveness in some of the Psalms. Then, the books of the Bible were written without special reference to one another. If any of these authors had the least conception of the compilation as we have it now, no intimation has been left of the fact. Not until the whole spirit and teaching of the gospel had become embodied in a strong and conquering Church were these writings collated. And when that work was done, it expressed only the godly judgment of devout believers that they were of transcendent spiritual worth. Nothing more is needed. So many are these written documents, and so diverse in quality, and yet all in one key, that no mistake is possible about the primary implications of all the books. Each book has been written by a holy one who had the spiritual understanding, and he has made it sweet and clean and clear-ringing, and, without 288 PROGRESSIVE INTERPRETATIONS. collusion, its note is in accord with all the others. When we take into account the way in which the Bible has been put together, these facts furnish for it the highest kind of credibility. But the message does not depend even on that accredit- ing. They have made their appeal to the pure reason of the world, and have been accepted for what they are in their inner spirit and teaching. Besides, the vitality of the record has had expansion. It has gotten beyond the print be- yond the ecclesia. A great capitalist, who does not go to Church on rainy Sundays, and who is not passionately fond of preachers, nevertheless is fully possessed with the notion that the only thing for a man to do with his life is to throw the full force of it in the direction of the betterment of the world. The very wind of the doctrine has blown around the corner and caught him up in its currents. The Scriptures will survive. No body of writ- ings is so secure in the world's affections. They will not be revised, except in the little details of grammar and rhetoric. They will be taken from dead languages and put into live ones, as they have been. These traditions of form have become sacred, and they will not even be modernized. 19 289 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. Any other dress for the meanings would appear strange to us. For these reasons many of us do not enjoy the new version. The Bible could not even be limited in bulk without irreverence and without much harm, because the obsolete features of the Word yet have a decided value, in that they help to maintain the connectedness of the life stream through which the revelation has been given. The great Book does not need improve- ment. Some of its readers need deliverance from the letter which killeth. Does Revelation Mend Nature? The teaching has been widespread that revela- tion is the mending of a breach in the cosmic movement. That breach is made to account for the cruelties of nature and for the fact of physical death. Nature is never supposed to be at work at any intelligible task or to temper its cruel way with any beneficence at all. Against its harsh mysteries they hold up Christ as the Consolator. Christ broods over a seething chaos He comes to mend an abhorrent scheme. And yet how rich the Scripture is in its naturalisms. Nature, there, is made a positive revelator in the shadowed great rock, the green pastures, the refreshing dew, 290 PROGRESSIVE INTERPRETATIONS. the soothing oil, the cool running brooks, the trees by the river side, the growth of lilies, the water of life, the vine and its branches, the seed cast into the ground, the leaven in the lump, the sparrows, the trees, the shepherded flocks, the seasons, the light of the sun, fire and hail, snow and vapor, stormy wind fulfilling His word, mountains and all hills, fruitful trees and all cedars, beasts and all cattle, creeping things, and flying fowl. In a great wealth of images like these the Word be- comes a teacher of sweet, clean things. By such voices the human heart is actually called back to its cleansing in an unpolluted stream. Are the Scriptures a Finality? If so, in what sense? In the sense that they are the secretarial records of a true life movement, in which the divine is set forth to the human understanding. They are a transcript of the doings of a representative people, and for so long a time that they are sure to have no dissonant notes for the deep strivings of the human heart in any future time. They are sure to have no con- tradictions of historic law, because all the cosmic elements of any nation's life were surely wrought to their consequences among the Jews. The 291 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. Scriptures are sure not to break with the acquisi- tions of general truth in the coming ages because they are not only expectant, but they make pro- vision for the growth of the human mind. The Scriptures do not complete all knowledge, because the world moves; but they fit into and strengthen whatever comes to pass in human development. They do not forestall new events or discoveries they transmit to the world a life message so vast in its provisions that in it all things whatsoever may be included. Not Inerrant. The grammar and the dictionary must come into use all the time when we seek an understand- ing of the life message, but if exclusive use is made of them we shall be thrown into confusion. We have to do with an ancient language and an an- cient mental outlook. We must deal with a people under a low civilization and with a mind almost utterly void of the ballast which scientific knowl- edge gives; so that under the conditions any hard and fast interpretation of their language is an absurdity. Christian scholars have wrangled in great fury over verbs and prepositions and root meanings concerning which the writers of the 292 PROGRESSIVE INTERPRETATIONS. documents were utterly innocent. The Word is not a dictation. It is not inerrant. All language terms are imperfections. A verbally inerrant message must, of necessity, be set in an inerrant and absolute language. There is no absolute language. The human mind is not equal to the mastery and use of that kind of language. If the divine message could have been made perfect in expression in the begin- ning, the mutations of human speech would soon have thrown it into confusion. The Bible is a human document about God and duty. Its cen- tral teachings have been set into so many facets of light they have been presented to the human mind in so many different angles of reflection; they have been illustrated in so many different phases of experience that they are easily under- stood, and have in them the universal quality. The wayfarer need not stumble if his heart is un- covered to all impressions as he goes through the Book, because its first truths lie on the surface. They are a democracy of response to universal need. Read the Book with the devotional spirit and it kindles and flames on every page. The Bible is a handbook of private worship for the uncritical reader. A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. The Writing and the Inward Nature. Furthermore, the Bible, in a very profound sense, is the world's fundamental document of religion; and that means that it is permanently and vitally related to all the world's advances. And being in the form of written speech, it be- comes, by that fact, subject to all the conditions of any written constitutional document. For instance, in the interpretation of the Con- stitution of the United States it is necessary not only to have a continuous, but a growing, under- standing of it. It is important, in the human law, to keep clear the distinction between the written code and the inward nature of the law itself. Gravitation, we say, acts inversely as the square of the distance. We make that proposition easy sledding to the boy in school when we say such is the mode by which a principle acts. Both the speech formula and the rule of action must be distinguished from the force which acts. Legal codes, set in language, aid the common understanding and conduce to uniformity of ad- ministration. But the law did not come into being with the language. Written law is like the plaster cast of a living face. It may be true to life, but not for any length of time. The living features are 294 PROGRESSIVE INTERPRETATIONS. constantly changing, and the cast soon comes to be "what they were then." Written laws do not keep up for the reason that any body of legal words enfolds a life. It is of the nature of life to expand. Words form a matrix which do not yield easily to new conditions. They require to be reset. A boy's boots do not yield to his growing feet. Written civil documents may be felicitous state- ments they may be comprehensive of all legal needs; but, after a time, they become impotent to express the new phases of things which the growing life of man calls out. This is not new, and it might remain a child's lesson were it not for the fact that grown men now execute much po- litical writing in which dogmas are expounded as absolute law. A zealous patriot is likely to think of the con- stitution of his country as an ultimate political document. He makes of it a standard a meas- uring line of political ideals. He expects the constitution, for all time to come, to sum up the exact co-ordinations of justice for all citizens and between the citizens and the institutions of gov- ernment. The law which serves men in their ^advances in the science of government can not be 295 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. nailed down to the grammatical form of an un- yielding code. Language as an invention lacks the fluidity. The supremely difficult problem of gov- ernment in the last five hundred years years which have recorded the swift advance of nearly all peoples has been to adapt their written codes to the legal necessities which expansion and growth always bring about. Constitutional law forms are made purposely difficult to change; and for the reason that all writings of this kind have been prepared with the idea not only to express the broader and more secure elements in the civil life of man, but to guard them against the gusts of popular capri- ciousness. Primary personal right, protected even against the will of the majority, is one of the safeguards of liberty in the swift growth of institutions. The last and lowest man must have his rights. Much as may be found in the administration of modern justice to positively mock that idea, the* democ- racies of the world are slowly approaching it. With natural rights a sudden majority ought not to interfere. A slow process of constitutional change is, therefore, usually ordained. And at the same time it is well known that the swiftest 296 PROGRESSIVE INTERPRETATIONS. things to become effete are the fundamental law documents of a nation. The boy's boots hurt him. The English constitution is not codified at all, and where the basal understandings are in no danger of confusion it is probably ideal; which is law interpreted in terms of life rather than in arbitrary letters and words. Growth of Roman Law. The old Roman law, in its first form, was no more than a body of unwritten municipal customs. These were well diffused and accepted, and they had about the full force of statutory provisions. A little further along the twelve tables came into being. These tables, through their clearness of definition, brought to the application and adminis- tration of the law a wholesome understanding. But before a great length of time the normal action of legal principles was hindered by the existence of these twelve tables. They began to be in the way of the incorporation of much law, which was demanded by the growth of the Roman civil spirit. These tables finally became archaic, and they were expanded under processes not very dissimilar to the methods of law growth at the present time. The Roman custom was a magis- 297 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. trate definition of the principles of the law in each case. These decisions, in special cases, were pre- served. The praetor took the evidence, set it into a formula, and passed it over to the judex to be preserved. In course of time a set of decisions was on hand. Pleadings and court rulings came to be buttressed by the precedents of the records. The law necessities of the empire were met by this sort of court procedure. The Roman citizen always had an innate reverence for the law; con- sequently the magistrate of that time had a tol- erably free hand. The beginnings of equity courts may be traced here. The equity phases of court proceedings meant then what they do now; that is, they imply that written law can not be made inclusive of all equity situations. It is not fine- featured enough, and can not be made so. The elements of justice applied to life are of infinite detail. This is why the judicial sense of what was right became a legal principle. Under the im- mediate strain and balance of court procedure some of the finest things man has learned of civil justice came into practical existence. Court de- cisions now, as we understand, constitute a dis- tinct body of legal principles. The reasons for equity procedure accumulate as human society 298 PROGRESSIVE INTERPRETATIONS. becomes more highly developed. The natural reason, under stress of a case in hand, voices often the purest and highest law. The written law, however, will always have two reasons for itself. It is a diffused understanding of the ac- cepted law; and it is a provision against the haz- ards of a corrupt judiciary. The Spirit Nature of Law. Real law must have an existence before it can be put into speech. When the time comes to write it down, and disseminate the knowledge of it, its virility has already been felt. Efficient law does not mean a sturdy governor or a first-class constable. These officers could not execute for long a misfit statute. They might chain citizens to stakes, but they could not change their real social needs or compel administrative monstros- ities. The law which does not substantially con- form to the inner demands of the social life can not be brought to the sticking point. Community law grows out of the social need, which is always a question of interpretation for legislators. Their business is to formulate the legal necessities of the people. The real nature of law is spirit and not a piece of writing. If it 299 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. is in print, it nevertheless has been evolved under the attrition of the civil fellowships. In a word, it may be said that the life of the race on this planet has an inner history of its own, which cul- minates, from time to time, into what might be called the conservative judgments of men. The whole course of history is a path of liberation for these matured and ripened principles. We can not give the movement a lesser meaning, because its path is not a chaos. The confusions of its par- ticulars clear away sooner or later. Its universals are the conservators of the social order. In this broad way history is making itself. The permanently practical and indispensable fea- tures of the law are a kind of social exuding from the life of the unstudied and unreflecting masses, who usually get a first grip on their value; and they are about the first to rise up and knock at the doors of any enthroned and threatening au- thority and demand an accounting of human rights. It was so at Runnymede. It was so with the American colonists. It was so with the Burghers of South Africa, who fought and were defeated; but they see now coming to pass about all they stood for in the test of arms. 300 PROGRESSIVE INTERPRETATIONS. The Primary American Law Document. The statesmen of the earlier time of the Ameri- can Commonwealth came together to formulate certain personal and political rights which the War of the Revolution had made clear to them. The severities of the strife had sobered and made cool their heads. They were to deal with some accomplished and living issues of free govern- ment. They knew about what was in the air. That which had come up through the growth of opinion, and which had been sealed in the arbit- rament of war concerning the spirit of self-con- trol, they embodied in a remarkably complete, but brief, fundamental political document. In that piece of writing they put the things for which the Anglo-Saxon had been struggling for centuries. They were also obliged to pass over some issues which were not then historically gestated. It took the Civil War to sharp-cut the question of federation and to quench the blazing brand of slavery. The document, therefore, is remarkable for what it does not contain. Moreover, the provision made in the instrument for its own amendment has not been equal to the necessities of the growing life of the Nation. The Supreme Court of the United States has been the way out 301 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. of that dilemma. A court which is set primarily for the interpretation, and dares not transcend it, finds itself often called to adjudicate issues for which no express terms are found in the constitu- tion. The court, then, makes its appeal to the general nature of the document and to the char- acter of the government which has come into being under its principles. Our primary law, therefore, is expressed in the primitive document, plus a vast accumulation of judicial rulings which are of the same nature and force. The law is expanded without being contradicted or judicially abrogated. A growing State demands the exposi- tion of the law as an applied and growing science. Judge Winslow, of the Supreme Court of Michi- gan, says: "The changed social, economic, and governmental conditions and ideals of the time, as well as the problems which the changes have pro- duced, must also enter into the consideration of and become influential factors in the settlement of problems of construction and interpretation." The Growth of Bible Principles. The self-revelation of God in history plainly has had to do with the expediency of setting its spiritual principles into the mechanism of written 302 PROGRESSIVE INTERPRETATIONS. speech, and the common rules for the under- standing of that speech must apply in the mean- ing of the Scripture records. Then, if the written expressions of law prin- ciples are under the necessity of being revised and rewritten occasionally, because of the incapacity of language to furnish an adequate fluid body for their growth, why have not the Scriptures, in the growth of the religious life of the world, been compelled to a rewriting long ago? The answer is apparent. Constitutions and statutes are docu- mentary. They are dogmatic. They take on themselves the nature of a creed. The Scriptures are not documentary. They are not dogmatic. Doctrines and morals are not systematized there. They are as fresh and vital to-day as when they were first written, because they have been cos- mically derived. The divine revelation has been set into a life stream of history. And the stream is broad enough and long enough to have included in its currents every conceivable small detail of human experience and all the broad conditions upon which a nation lives or dies. Several thou- sand years of the hopes and fears, the successes and defeats, the virtues and sins of a representative people have been used to show the will of God 303 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. in all actual situations. The Scriptures make up a book of the human life with God in it; and they will not go out of date until human nature changes and until the divine manifestation contradicts itself. They are more comprehensive than we know. But if the written revelation, as we have it, was an unfolding plan if it was as a light break- ing in on the world by degrees may not the growth of the world since the time of Christ have enriched some of its meanings? The fundamental religious elements are all in the Book, and at the same time the modern dis- ciple may have a greater Book than the early Christian. The heavens mean more to an as- tronomer than to a child. There is a traditional view of the sacred records which nails them down. It makes no provision for any accumulation of religious knowledge since they were written. It assumes that God finished His revelation of Himself with them. The fact is, we have come into possession of very much re- ligious knowledge since the time of Paul, and it has been read into the Book by a just interpreta- tion and incorporated into the practical life of the world. The revelation was made up and em- 304 PROGRESSIVE INTERPRETATIONS. bodied in history to the intent that it should live in history. If the records did not make room for growth they would not be what they purport to be. They would deny for the world's life ahead what they are in themselves. It appears trite to say the world grows, but the statement that the religious life is creative, and in constant process of evolution, is questioned by many good people. Certainly the revealing truths are intensified by the new phases of his- tory and by the new increments of knowledge which each succeeding age brings as a contribu- tion to the sum total of what is known of God and human obligation. Scripture meanings are inten- sified by what they have brought about. They have the prophetic vision. They make room for the culminants of knowledge. Christianity af- firms a self -revealing God, but not a finality in the revealing medium. The closed canon was not a shut-down. The cosmic derivation of the Scripture records is, in itself, an endorsement of the right of the world to be open-eyed and open-minded to all impressions of the divine in nature and life and history. The records can never become untrue, because they are life; but they take up into them- selves, by the logic of their own method, all the 20 305 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. broader acquisitions of the race since the time they were transcripted. A revelation of the revela- tion itself is now, and is always, taking place. The social and civil conditions of the Scrip- ture times have passed away. The Jewish cere- monial is dead. The Levite code has no applica- tion anywhere. The patriarchal life and its modes of thought, as we have them given in Genesis, are not known anywhere on the earth. The great Teacher called the people about Him in the by- ways and open spaces to listen to His words, which they comprehended only with darkened un- derstandings. Revelation certainly did not com- plete itself in these hearers. A religious cata- clysm was not ordained to be closed with them. The proposition that all possible and final mes- sages of religious truth to this world culminated and completed themselves through a small num- ber of people more than two thousand years ago is absurd. They comprehended only parts of the Christ message, which had in it then the prin- ciples of all progress, some applications of which were in reserve because the conditions were not there to call them out. Life now is more com- plex more advanced and mandatory of higher experiences and stronger obligations hence the 306 PROGRESSIVE INTERPRETATIONS. revealing records must be interpreted in the light of the larger range of subjects and interests with which the human mind has come into positive and permanent correspondence. The Scripture content is a growing content. It is a well of water fed by ceaseless currents. Fresh religious values are being sent to men through the records all the time. What fatuous blunders of Church councils through the ages at- tempting to fix things by decrees which declare just what the Scriptures mean, so much and no more, and the future fastened down. Decretals of the Church can no more fix and limit the divine revealing than they can stop the advance of the sciences. The inbreakings of research throw new light on the ancient revealing. One of the cease- less fascinations of the Word lies in the fact that the old truths, with which we are familiar, like diamonds well-cut, show facets for a new glint of light from any direction. Would a student of science undertake to fix and limit the application of any physical principle? He may write out the law of it, but he turns it loose. He knows that the principle itself is always strengthened by its related understandings. The human mind is not ^permitted to play hide-and-seek with any quality 307 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. of truth which may break in on it from the out- standing universe. The assured results of science are as clearly a revelation of God as anything found at first hand in the Scriptures. Indeed, the Scriptures provide for the appropriation of their religious values when the spirit of the Word is declared to be a leader into all truth. Then is natural truth, so called, and the wisdom which comes of common experience of equal and bind- ing force with the plain first teaching of the Scrip- ture message? Why not? We are obliged to obey the nature of natural law; and if it has an ethic and a devotional voice, these are also bind- ing. "The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmanent showeth His handiwork; day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night showeth knowledge." 108 CHAPTER XVI. A COSMIC ABSURDITY. Institutional Defects. MAN has not yet learned the fine art of creat- ing an organization which is perfectly self-adapt- able. The institutional feature of any set of principles, in the nature of the case, is a kind of unyielding matrix, needing constant attention. Men combine themselves in collective under- standings to foster and carry forward any interest they may think worthy of their mutual efforts, and they find that the methods they employ are easy to get at outs with the spirit of their enter- prise. This is especially so in any time of swift transition, when the old and the new are brought, often, into disagreeably sharp contrasts. In the family life it is the direct attrition between youth and old age. In the social body it is the con- servatism which is slow to yield to progressive policies. In the law its enactments become effete before they can get themselves off the statute books. 309 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. The life of nature does better with its organ- isms, because it puts on the inside the principle which works outwardly towards the renewals and transformations which are to meet the exigencies of a new day. This dullard of a human is in- clined to neglect his social mechanisms and let them cramp the life out of that for which they stand. He really can not put into them the fluid principle which nature does. No sooner is any cause taken to heart by any number of people, and they put themselves together to promote it, and have success with it, than the need arises to consider the betterment of the means they have employed. Guilds, clubs, orders, schools, chari- ties, Churches if they answer the ends for which they were begun, must pay the price of a struggle against opposition somewhere, or they must be- ware of worn-out methods, or they must have some trouble with the gate-keepers who, as soon as they reach a snug place, begin to warn folks not to touch the ark. But institutional defects are often overmag- nified. You can wear your out-of-style hat, com- fortably, a while after it really needs attention. Your grandmother is out-of-date; and yet it is usually best to let her alone. Her age has an 310 A COSMIC ABSURDITY. evaluation on its own account. It is easier to show the defects of a method than to actualize a better way. That explains the professional critic. It is not always wise to be changing what is for the newest thing offered. Social forms, as they exist, may not fully express the life of things, and at the same time wholesale denunciation is not justified. The modern theater, for instance, is a response to the public demand for amusement. It has many objectionable features. It needs municipal attention. But the modern playhouse will not be brought up to what it ought to be by the easy ways which the average reformer pro- poses. Five hundred young men in a low theater means five hundred unclean minds. The real tragedy there is a fact of the social consciousness; and that only yields to the inbuilding of other social and personal ideals. The Church. The Church is an organized expression of Christian principles. It aims to conserve the re- ligious forces of society. It economizes effort. It makes possible by united action that which could not otherwise be done. It has no special sacred character. It has no end in itself. The reasons 311 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. for it are the reasons for getting the religious mes- sage out among men. Its object is Christian character. It gets men and women together to work on absolute values. It deals with serious, worthy, and adequate truths. It shuts itself up to the great questions of joy, sorrow, life, death, time, probation, destiny. It stands for clean things and high ideals. It builds about a great Book. It provides in a vast way for the public assembly. Houses built for this purpose and for religious teaching in them ornament all our cities and countrysides. The common sense way of it for the provision of community needs could hardly be improved upon. The money for the whole of it has been a free offering in America. And in these buildings has been kept at work the most persistent teacher of the ages. He is not always eloquent or learned. Occasionally he is a fanatic, or he is not an admirable man, or he is a functionary, giving offense to a living mes- sage; but when the worst is said, his ranks con- tain a host of the clean and capable. There is no social substitute for the modern preacher. Peda- gogically his method has never been, and never will be, superseded. The living man before the living people, face to face, is the most effective 312 A COSMIC ABSURDITY. way for instruction and appeal. This man of pluck and poverty is everlastingly at the one business of calling men and women to consider the way of life. Besides this, the modern Church is behind a tremendous missionary propaganda which has gone beyond its experimental stage; and its broad and statesmanlike policies have made the Christian civilization sure to cover the face of the earth for the future. The Crisis. But now, in this Church of the home land where its greatest victories have been achieved; where the highest results of equipment and method have been secured; where the discipleship rep- resents a character never before equaled in the annals of the Church we are compelled to con- front the most perplexing situation the Church ever had to consider. As tendencies now go, in another ten years the Church in America will be brought to a standstill in its membership. With- out question, a crisis has been reached. It is supreme folly to try to cover up a fact. The masses are not being reached, and the Churches are becoming empty. We knock with fists of 313 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. flesh against granite walls. Neither is it a case of slow sailing through quiet waters. It is not a dip in the rhythm of advance for this generation. Only a few of the tender-minded and devout are expecting, like Jonah's gourd, a great new growth in a night. The hard-handed, who have been under the burdens and have not flinched, and who see the signs of the times, have not a particle of expectation of breaking the social incrustation and of reaching the fabled last man with the gospel. The defects of the organization are palpable enough; but they are of secondary significance. Defects of method get out of the way when there is anything doing. Forty of the king's horses could not catch the man who makes the state- ment that the Church is not doing its work; never- theless, the Church has come to a state of paralysis which threatens to push the prayer of every Christian into a wail. The Church has had taken from it, unwit- tingly, but none the less surely, its rightful oppor- tunity of effective appeal to the American intel- lect 314 A COSMIC ABSURDITY. The American Theory of Church and State. Such a radical statement means a challenge to make it good. It will be necessary, first, to consider in brief the historical situation. In- telligent people are familiar with the theory of the government which ordains the complete sepa- ration of the two classes of institutions which ex- press respectively man's social and his religious instincts. We have a free Church in a free State. We are strangers to the asperities of the State- Church conditions of Europe. We have escaped the older ecclesiastical dominations. It is under- stood that republican government and religion are not enemies. The government is secular, but not irreligious simply absurdly silent. The civil and religious elements in this country have been so persistent and tireless in swearing the fealties of good will towards each other that the sus- picions of some have been awakened. The dip- lomatic politeness is a little strained. The situation is one of superficial harmony and fundamental misunderstanding. Latin and Medieval Mai-Adjustments. The early Christian Churches were pure de- mocracies. They were self-governing local units. The religious bond among the disciples was so 315 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. strong that it largely shaped their domestic and economic affairs. They had no political outlook. Their notion of government was the common one a power somewhere from above dropped down, and with which they had nothing to do but bend their necks. Among themselves they had all things in common for a time. Their formal Church regulations were few and simple. The beginning forms of their faith were at first very secretive. They were possessed of that new, strange life which had completed itself in the Christ, and they went with it out and down to the poorest of the poor and saw them transformed. It spread like wildfire. It was tremendously constructive. For a long time the world did not understand it became alarmed at its successes and tried to stamp it out. The persecutions were a failure because Christians were born into the Kingdom faster than they could be killed. The evil day approached when the organization of the Church took the place of its life. Slowly the earnest evangel of the earlier day was transformed into the domineering priest. It could be proven by the Scriptures that the Church, rightfully, had civil ascendancy. If Christ is King, why should not the kingdoms of the world 316 A COSMIC ABSURDITY. be subject to Him or, which is the same thing, to the Church to which He had delivered the keys? Constantine was persuaded by that fatuous logic; and he made the offer, and it was accepted. An era of outward splendor followed. Mutual ad- vantages appeared at first in the coalition. Vast cathedrals were built. Prebendaries were made rich with endowment. The fascination of the new theocracy was complete. The lure of the secular power crept into the Church and made a great outward show. There was no break in the logic of the situation which, to this day, struggles for the old assertion. The organization became an end in itself. The simple message of the Christ to the human heart and life lost out, and it took the Church a thousand years to build for itself the charnal house of the Dark Ages. State Churches. With the dawn of learning on this side of the medieval time, and with the struggle of the human spirit to regain for itself the vitalities of religion, Martin Luther begins his work. He was the herald of a revolt and a new day. But he was only one factor. Multitudes of tendencies con- spired to help on the Reformation. The German 317 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. princes, one after another, broke away from the pope, who was then the federal representative of a fearful moral despotism. The authority to rule recrystallized in social institutions. But religion, seen to be a necessity, was taken under the pro- tection and nurture of the State. The outcome of that idea is the State-Church arrangements of European countries. The divine right of the pope was self-transferred to the divine right of kings an error which is yet held by a few crowned heads. Protestant Sects. The idea of infallibility, invested somewhere, appeared to be a necessity for the common mind of that early reformative time. It was an idea to conjure with by all hands. The pope claimed it, the king claimed it, and Martin Luther was equal to the occasion when he proclaimed the infallibly dictated Word. He put an error over against a fetich. It had for him at least the pragmatic sanctions. He whipped the Reformation wagon through on that basis. But he did not see the absurdity of a divine and infallible dictation set into a fallible language. He did more than he knew. He made the individual mind a free force 318 A COSMIC ABSURDITY. in questions of belief, and set it to read and inter- pret an infallibly dictated Book. That new in- tellectual situation produced the Protestant sects. They grew in numbers to three or four hundred, each one proclaiming itself the old blue hen's chicken each one teaching "the Word of God says this" with the anathema against all her- etics. We are now, in America, it is to be hoped, passing through the last forms of that confusion of tongues. It has made of Protestantism a "rope of sand." Nevertheless, these zealous believers, in their struggles over prepositions and adverbs, have yet held in common the primary meanings of the Word, and have kept among themselves the spirit of true devotion. They have stood un- brokenly for an austere morality. They have been free from the old penances and shrivings and absolutions. The unitary elements of religion have expressed themselves to the modern world through these distinct bodies because they were all sincere teachers. An Establishment. In the midst of this new religious ferment, the American Nation was born. The Revolution ^accomplishes its purpose, and the colonial patriots 319 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. set about to put in form the organic law of a free people. They determined to appropriate to themselves all that man had then learned of liberty and progress. They intended also to shun the breakers of history. The old ecclesias- tical tyranny loomed like a monster across the sea. The young Republic must be guarded against that forever. Permission to carve the Nation's destiny must not come from Europe in the mail bags. Then the sects were here, each with an insistent voice of its own. How can the young Republic take action on the religious ques- tion without vast confusion, especially since the Jamestown type of colonies were sent over here with the propagation of the gospel written in their charters. The Constitution makers were afraid to touch it, because the loose confederation would probably not have stood that issue if it were put in with the first draft to be adopted. The document, as they first accepted it, is a supreme historical precipitation, and yet it left the religious question undecided. They certainly knew it to be vital, but they were not unac- quainted with the untoward strifes which grew out of the long-time institutional maladjustments of the instincts of society and religion. The founders 320 A COSMIC ABSURDITY. of the Government waited until the federation was centralized by the adoption of the organic law, and then they set about to protect the young life of the Nation from the unseemly strifes of Old World history. They did it in the first amendment " Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." It was at the time a justifiable line of least re- sistance. It was born of a wholesome fear of the old ecclesiastical tyrannies. It aimed to put an end to the State-Church conditions of some of the colonies. It aimed to relieve the civil ad- ministration of possible complications with Prot- estant expressions of the Christian life. The threefold purpose was accomplished by declar- ing against an establishment. The Constitution plainly makes a distinction between an estab- lishment and religion itself. The American spirit in the application of the principle of law makes no distinction. It says to the establishment, "We will neither help nor hinder you take your piece of human nature and go with it. The prohibitory feature of the Constitution is a provision of politi- cal expediency, and it has been wisely taken. It i* means for the establishment to keep its hands off 21 321 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. the political administration and, as such, to stay out of politics. The American spirit resents both, and rightfully. The point is not there. It is with an instinct which has nine lives, and seldom dies alone; which may be brought to silence, but not until it has produced an abhorrent thing. The Essentials of Civilization. A true civilization must, of necessity, recog- nize certain primary elements of human nature and build on them, with the understanding that they are mutually related and inseparable. 1. It must deal with the sexual instinct which builds the institution of the family. 2. It must deal with the natural thirst for knowledge, which brings about educational insti- tutions. 3. It must deal with the social instinct, which expresses itself in civil society. 4. It must deal with the instinct of worship, which in its institutions designs a provision for the responses in the human spirit to the nature of the universe and to God. There is not anywhere a feature of civilization but may be arranged under some one of these four heads. And human happiness depends on their 322 A COSMIC ABSURDITY. normal and co-ordinate development. There is no true progress with any one of these personal elements left out. The institutions called out by each must support and build the others. "The eye can not say unto the hand, 'I have no need of thee.' " The Unfair Situation. Social institutions at the present time have grown to be a sort of big brother; but only so because, in the evolution of the world's life, he has come to represent in some measure a federation of understandings. He has . no other superior parts. Social institutions have never been more significant than religious institutions. The first customs of the world were religious. The first ceremonials of the world were religious. The first art and the first music were religious. The hoariest monuments of the ages are religious. The first literature of the world was religious. The first laws of the world were religious. The first governments of the world were religious. Neither are social institutions superior to the family. The first unit of society is the family. All social aggregates recognize the fact and are loyal to it. The statutes of all civilized peoples 323 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. bulk large in provision for the family institution. With the utmost formal directness, the State goes about to make the sexual instinct express itself in the one man united to the one woman in marriage, and it provides for the economies and the fidelities of that union. The instinct of knowledge is known to be one of the springs of social progress. Popular educa- tion has, therefore, come to be one of the chief functions of any well-ordered civil life. The statutes of all the States provide for and per- petuate schools of learning of the highest type; and thus the State gives positive endorsement and assistance to the finest grades of scholarship. The State does its best for the family in self- protection. Each family unit has in it the ele- ments of all government, and the child, learning obedience to rightful authority there, takes that obedience into the broader duties of citizenship. It has the greatest care about education for the same reason. Among a self-governing people an intelligent electorate is essential. Ignorance is danger. And where government becomes complex, scholarship is necessary. But the religious instinct, on the part of the State, is generously permitted to set up shop for 324 A COSMIC ABSURDITY. itself. It is simply not hindered. The Constitu- tion forbids the recognition of the establishment of religion, which is very well, but not very brave at the present day because the old ecclesiastical tyranny is as dead as the dodo, and sectarianism is on its last pegs. The American civil spirit nega- tives the instinct of religion itself. The public schools are not godless in the blunt actual sense of that term, because the teach- ing force in them until this time has represented a very high type of character. Very many of these teachers are devoutly religious. The schools are godless in the civil sense and in a sense the Con- stitution never intended. The whole logic of the civil neutrality is to cultivate indifference to the primary religious values of the child life. The emphasis is placed on intellectual equipment. The theory of education is to rifle the brain and give it self-mastery. Ethical and spiritual values are incidental. A discreet silence is maintained towards all the healthful responses of the child heart to the call of the divine. And this, when it is known that the life and health of human society depends as much upon goodness as upon knowl- edge. And goodness finds its authority and . strength in religion. 325 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. Beaulieu, the French statistician, attributes the fearful decline in the birth rate of France to the immorality of the family life, which has come about through the absence of religious conviction. He asserts that the responsibility lies with the statesmen, who have almost from the time of the Revolution made war on the religious instincts of the French people. The attempt was made to build a democracy divorced from faith, and the result is a mutilated national life. Religion is the premier support to the social force, and always will be, because, as Huxley says, it is the basis of the moral life of the world. It takes religion to make morality strong enough to secure order among a self-governing people. There is now a widespread and growing dissat- isfaction with the values which come to society from the public schools. It has been charged to impractical methods, to inefficient teaching, to the lack of industrial training, to partisan adminis- tration, and strangely of late to ignorance of the child nature. The fact is, the public schools have never been set to the task of taking an all- round interest in human nature. The work done is radically one-sided. As drill-rooms for the intellect the schools are fine. But an educated 326 A COSMIC ABSURDITY. intellect is not an educated man. The school can not take its piece and run. The family instincts and the religious inclinations are not normally co-ordinated with intellectual training. Modern biology has made possible the education of the sex impulsion and, therefore, the cure of a can- cerous rot in the human life. Delicate subject? nonsense. There is nothing quite so clean or quite so pure or so near the divine as the procreative provisions of nature. Catholic centers of author- ity have seen this educational absurdity from the beginning of the Nation's history and have strug- gled against it. When they go about educating their children under religious auspices they give justifiable emphasis to the cosmic fact that a child's education is not complete with the domes- tic and moral estimates left out. But now, what has come of such discrimina- tion? What has the organized religious life of America to show for itself? It has undertaken, unaided, to sustain the principle of religion. The self-support of religion and the free course of it are both acceptable to the organization itself. All the tendencies towards a State supervision of re- ligious interests in this country have been suc- cessfully resisted. The prevention of an estab- 327 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. lishment by the organic law has not hindered the success of the Church. Side by side with the civil life religious institutions have grown and have had their greatest triumphs. It will not be denied that the bonds of human society have been mightily strengthened by the Churches. They are everywhere to exhort and admonish to the highest ideals of life. Their effort is ceaselesss to make good citizens out of bad ones. The Church openly proclaims itself in harmony with the civil administrations. Every pulpit declares for the making and execution of laws for the protection and nurture of childhood and the home and the personal life and the morals of the community. It puts itself like flint against encysted social evils and makes the age-long struggle so often necessary to overcome social evil. It is known also that religious institutions strengthen the bonds of the family life. They make sturdy contention for the household moral- ities and for the sacredness of the marriage cov- enant. They were frontiersmen in the work of higher education; and they are now placing mil- lions annually to that kind of disinterested use. The Churches have stood for the family life and the school and the civil authority openly, 328 A COSMIC ABSURDITY. formally, positively, aggressively. On the other hand, the family life, by its nature fitted to train the religious instincts of childhood and give to the Churches its mighty moral leverages, to say the least, has become vastly indifferent to re- ligion. And the failure is at the vital point where the child ought to get the divine motives for its moral life. So, also, the logic of negation and silence in the public schools is agnostic. And the limit of good form for our big brother, the State, is to offer the patronage of his good will. In the first few decades of the Nation's life the ill effects of this institutional maladjustment were not se- verely felt. The Churches until now have been able to hold the day against these adverse winds of discrimination. But at last, In the perplexi- ties of the unbalanced adjustments of the cosmic co-ordinations of the personal life, the Churches have come to a halt. They are not doing their former work. It becomes everybody to withhold criticism, because the situation is not a fair one. The Churches in America now have a right to demand from other institutions a return for the values they have received from the Church. It is tremendously important that school ad- A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. ministrations come quickly to some understanding about what they are going to do with the spir- itual apprehensions of childhood. The unspoiled mind of the child has for its first right all-round- edness of training. To rob it of that right know- ingly, is a species of highwayry. The immanence of the divine is the latest dogma of science anyway. When the natural re- sponses of youth are given leeway to the Divine immanence during the school days, the ground- work of the higher elements of Christian thought, experience, and practice will be laid and the State will then have given endorsement to religion itself and no movement will have been made towards an establishment. Ten to eighteen years of school drill and ten to eighteen years of silence about a cosmic instinct puts the youthful mind in a state of indifference to religious issues. It considers them academic or purely questions of preference and sentiment. The first result of such a policy is to take from the Church its rightful power of approach to the school-trained mind; but the full pathos of the situation is in the fact that when the educated thought of this country has come to the conclusion that the religious life is of no value to itself, it has come to madness ! 330 A COSMIC ABSURDITY. A godless nation can not endure! The citizenship of a free country must not only be capable and discriminating in economic and political questions, but about ethical and spiritual values. If the average voter is not fond of life's high meanings there can be only one result. The Churches have now come to a halt against the adverse currents. It is unreasonable to expect them to make headway against a stolid and trained intellectual indifference. They are at work now on an impossible task. The opposition is institutional. The way out is a fundamental re- construction of methods and policy. 1. Let the supreme emphasis of the volun- tary religious forces be placed on the family life. The forward movement with consequences is with childhood in the home. 2. The public schools may undertake to teach the sacred cleanliness of the procreative foun- tains, and, by interpretation of nature's intent, help the young life to self-mastery especially in that time when the mystic breezes begin to blow from out the cosmic seas in the time of adolescence. Execute the teaching in municipal administrations and in the divorce courts. 3. Put the old-time household moralities into 381 A COSMIC VIEW OF RELIGION. the common schools, and teach them openly in all the grades and flavor them with a little salt of Spartan austerity. 4. Teach in all schools the Divine imma- nence, and let the child go out with a reverent sense of God's being. Teach do not prove only sharp-cut an instinct about the edges. The Churches in America do not ask favors or seek special privileges, with the very life of the nation in view; they demand simply institutional justice in other words, fair play. 332 INDEX. A Syrians. Africans, 273. South Sea Islanders. American nation, 320. Egyptians. Animal intelligence, 91. Germans. Analogy, 193. Anaxagoras, 67. Indians. Hebrews. Analysis, 27. Armstrong, 70. Burroughs, 149. Buddha, 159. Arnold 59. Butler, 193. Arabian Nights, 284. Byram, 60. Atom, 48. Byron, 143. Aztecs, 274. Bird intelligence, 100. c B Causation, 80. Balfour, 46. Carpenter, 77. Bascom, 132. Caesalpino, 110. Barker, 132. Carus, 60. Beethoven, 41. Cells- Seattle, 45. resistance, 86. Berkeley, 45, 65. basis of life, 113. Bergson, 65. Beruheimer, 86. individuality, 115. energy, 117. Benson, 145. definition, 118. Beaulieu, 326. growth, 118. Belief, 24. heredity, 132. Bigelow, 58. potency, 194. Binet, 86, 121. Chromosomes, 117. Bible- Chemistry, 51. secretarial, 286.' Character, 84. books, 288. a survival, 161. expansion of, 289. in old age, 201. interpretation, 293. fundamental document, 297. Christ access to an underland of power, 269. Blood- crucifixion, 278, 279, 280. sight of, 230. Church- covenanting, 275. definition, 312. substitute, 276. American theory of, 316. symbol, 276. Latin, 315. life-offering, 277. ascendency of, 317. Bradley, 69. European, 317. Brain and mind, 96. crisis, 311. Brierly, 147. Protestant, 318. Bowne, 61, 70. Catholic, 327. Booth, 246. self-support, 327. Brotherhoods, 270. and citizenship, 328. Arabians. and home life, 328. Scythians. social ills, 328. Cataline conspirators. education, 328. Dyaks. Civilization, 322. Tahitans. Connectedness, 14. Burmans. Christian Science, 30. 333 INDEX. Cocker, 60, 151, 263. Conrad, 168. Conflict, 171. Collectivism, 174. Conservation, 230. Colonial units, 232. Continuity, 140. Consciousness, 67. and death, 204. value of, 205. Constit utions Growth of, 294. American, 299. English, 297. Crookes, 70. Creation continuous, 81. D Darwin, 78, 129, 135, 137. Drummond, 106, 112, 120, 173. Darwin, Jr., 110. Determinism, 122. Dante's Inferno, 283. Decalogue, 226. Decrepitude so-called, 202. Delbeauf, 200. Death the sense test, 183. definition of, 192. physical decay, 206. Discontinuity, 31. Divine unity, 254. Doubt, 25. Downey, 59, 151, 176. Dumonteil, 101. E Education in America, 54. Eimer, 136. Emerson, 143. Endlessness of influence, 180. Erskine, 73. Experience posits of, 200. Equity courts, 298. Evolution, 217. Patios, 102. Family life, 329. Fertilization, 124. Feeling, 20. First cause, 44, 82. Fichte, 45. Fiske, 57. Fitchett, 58. ForeL 104. Freedom, 241. Fraternity and religion, 240. Free will and heredity, 126, 227. Genetic investments, 29. Geniuses, 35. Genesis, 284. Gilder, 144. Goeble, 115. Grosscup, 57. God the sense of, 44. the idea of, 152. righteous, 265. Fatherhood of, 269. H Haeckel, 52, 149. Harrison, 185. Henslow, 120. Heredity, 125, 129, 188. Henle, 136. Howells, 145. Hoffding, 57, 59, 63. Hugo, 42. Huxley, 157, 326. Hypothesis, 27. Hyslop, 59. Hobbes, 68. Idealism, 41, Idolatry, 71, 252. Ideas, 88. Illingworth, 69. Impregnation, 114. Immanence, 62. Intelligence, 63, 76. Indians, 73. Intuitions, 41. Insect intelligence, 103. near-nation, 153. ntellect maturity of, 199. nstinct swarming, 220. ndividualism, 235, 242. ntelligence collective, 243. Institutional expressions, 310. Infusoria, 121. Japan, 9,3. James, 36, 60, 70. Johnson, 45, 79. Jowett, 59. E Knowledge, a cosmic impulse, 12. partial justi Jed, 15. relativity, 16. by immediacy, 29. and coexistence, 67. 334 INDEX. Kelley, 14T. Milne, 149. Kant, 30, 68. Mill, 157. Kuhns, 58. Monotheism, 263. Kipling, 284. Mohammed, 148, 255. Muller, 251. L Munsterberg, 70. Laboratory methods, 09. Langley, 53. Latimer, 60. Mind, 132, 151. its methods, 17. in sleep, 36. Ladd, 62-64. hidden power, 37. Leibault, 85. undercurrents, 38. Leibniz, 50. objective, 79. Labor guilds, 244. unity, 80, 209. Language, 293-295. without a brain, 53. administrative, 77. a transcendance, 49. a mind potency, 80. legislators, 226. a body builder, 83. and mechanism, 84. and healing, 91. moral resistless, 227. precedes the statute, 294. spirit nature of, 299. a social exhuding, 300. comes up out of the mass, 300. Lincoln, 35. suggestion, 85. functions the brain, 88. and intuitions, 134. primitive, 248. subconscious, 32. unfathomable, 197. Livingstone, 254. Literature is life, 284. N Love the atonement, 281. Longfellow, 21. Nazarene, 41. Naudin, 58. Locke, 17, 68. Nageli, 130, 136. Luther, 518. Naturalism, 179. Life Npwpnmh fil manufacture of, 118. Netter, 108. is it illogical? 155. surrender of, 172. Norden, Van, 69. Nogi, 260. the stream of, 190. redundancies, 194. overlap of units, 232. greatest teacher, 142. ethic of, 154, 174. is it rational? 154. M strife in, 158. Mabie, 151. intent, 162. Mathew, 69. is it cruel? 168. Man a physical survival, 217. and social movements, 224. an underplay, 219. Eastern, 257. Western, 262. Matter- reality of, 44. Orientation, 102. Organization, 314. Oriental provincialisms, 258. social centers, 258. caste, 258. dead, 53, 78. transmissive, 68. its endowments, 78. religions, 259. reincarnations, 260. limitations, 89. spirit bearing, 189. P McConnell, 58, 70, 120. Patriotism, 33, 172, 261. Memory, 43. Packard, 104. Mesmerism, 93. Pantheism, 152. Mimicry, 93. Palmer, 157. Mocro-organisms, 120. Paul, 255. 335 INDEX. Pain- reflex value of, 162. overplus of, 163. dea'nition, 163. and culture, 164. a challenge, 166. Peary, 149. Pearson, 69. Permanence, 181. Personality, 183, 195, 209. Pfeffer, 117. Plant life, 109. Philosophy its province, 28. its demand, 136. Psychic initiative, 138. spontaneities, 137, 141. Plant intelligence, 109. Progress social, 186. inherent, 227. Preacher, 312. Protoplasm, 119. Pragmatism, 15, 36, 180. Prenatal life, 100. Public schools, 325. Quayle, 168. Q Reid, 45-54. Resignation. 158. Responsibility, 176-178. Religious impulse, 246. Redemption, philosophic, 268. Reality, 44, 81. 135. Reflection, 17. Reason its limits, 21. and intuition, 92. Rk, 69. Rodin, 150. Roman law, 297. Rhythm, 15. Religion origin in fear, 250. an evolution, 250. unitary tendencies, 256. premier social force, 326. Revelation, 286. and nature, 290. independent of criticism, 286. a part of the world's life, 287. not a closed message, 306. historic movement, 303. comprehensive, 304. new knowledge, 305. never untrue, 305. a finality, 291. Sabatier, 57. Santayana, 60. Sachs, 116. Sciences not mindless, 77. tests of truth, 179. results a revelation, 308. departmental study, 28. Script will survive, 289. not inerrant, 289. not dogmatic, 303. a growing content, 307. Sex equilibrium, 122. Self-giving, 172. Self-seeking, 234. Shaler, 57. Shakespeare, 41, 133. Sensation, 17. Smallwood, 194. Snider, 157. Sin, 176. Sorrow, 167. Spencer, 61, 157, 207. Spinoza, 65. Spiritualism, 39. Space, 14. Spontaneity, 133, 191. Social instinct, 218. Socialism, 235-237. Spirit being, 55. manifest, 61. Co-ordinated, 64. and phenomena, 65. and mind, 76. and law of waste, 214. Struggle, 160. Stevenson, 34, 145. Storms, 58. Survivals, 228. Symbols mathematics, 52. fraternal, 75. idols, 71. Tennyson, 184. Theater, 311. Thoreau, 146. Thausies, 103. Time, 14. Truth- mandatory, 11. elemental, 30. unity of, 180. 336 INDEX. U Waste- Unconditioned, 17. law of, 209. Unity and relatedness, 63. social effects, 210. Universe, Wenley, 70. intelligible, 79. Weisman, 130. growing, 82. Wealth personal, 236. has an ethic, 177. Whately, 35. vibrant, 208. Whitman, 143. conception of, 253. Winchell, 57. Wordsworth, 146. w Winslow, 302. Ward, 57, 110. Wo<>d ' 10L Wallace, 135. A 000 040 366 7