"Du musst glauben, du musst wagen, Denn die Gotter leihn kein Pfand, Nur ein Wunder kann dich tragen In das schone Wunderland."
I will presently define exactly what I mean by G.o.d and by Theism, and explain what theories I referred to when I spoke just now of attempts to fly beyond the one and to outbid the other.
But, first of all, let me ask you to linger a moment longer over what I have called the reflex theory of mind, so as to be sure that we understand it absolutely before going on to consider those of its consequences of which I am more particularly to speak. I am not quite sure that its full scope is grasped even by those who have most zealously promulgated it. I am not sure, for example, that all physiologists see that it commits them to regarding the mind as an essentially teleological mechanism. I mean by this that the conceiving or theorizing faculty--the mind"s middle department--functions _exclusively for the sake of ends_ that do not exist at all in the world of impressions we receive by way of our senses, but are set by our emotional and practical subjectivity altogether.[2] It is a transformer of the world of our impressions into a totally different world,--the world of our conception; and the transformation is effected in the interests of our volitional nature, and for no other purpose whatsoever. Destroy the volitional nature, the definite subjective purposes, preferences, {118} fondnesses for certain effects, forms, orders, and not the slightest motive would remain for the brute order of our experience to be remodelled at all. But, as we have the elaborate volitional const.i.tution we do have, the remodelling must be effected; there is no escape. The world"s contents are _given_ to each of us in an order so foreign to our subjective interests that we can hardly by an effort of the imagination picture to ourselves what it is like. We have to break that order altogether,--and by picking out from it the items which concern us, and connecting them with others far away, which we say "belong" with them, we are able to make out definite threads of sequence and tendency; to foresee particular liabilities and get ready for them; and to enjoy simplicity and harmony in place of what was chaos. Is not the sum of your actual experience taken at this moment and impartially added together an utter chaos? The strains of my voice, the lights and shades inside the room and out, the murmur of the wind, the ticking of the clock, the various organic feelings you may happen individually to possess, do these make a whole at all? Is it not the only condition of your mental sanity in the midst of them that most of them should become non-existent for you, and that a few others--the sounds, I hope, which I am uttering--should evoke from places in your memory that have nothing to do with this scene a.s.sociates fitted to combine with them in what we call a rational train of thought,--rational, because it leads to a conclusion which we have some organ to appreciate? We have no organ or faculty to appreciate the simply given order. The real world as it is given objectively at this moment is the sum total of all its beings and {119} events now.
But can we think of such a sum? Can we realize for an instant what a cross-section of all existence at a definite point of time would be?
While I talk and the flies buzz, a sea-gull catches a fish at the mouth of the Amazon, a tree falls in the Adirondack wilderness, a man sneezes in Germany, a horse dies in Tartary, and twins are born in France.
What does that mean? Does the contemporaneity of these events with one another and with a million others as disjointed, form a rational bond between them, and unite them into anything that means for us a world?
Yet just such a collateral contemporaneity, and nothing else, is the real order of the world. It is an order with which we have nothing to do but to get away from it as fast as possible. As I said, we break it: we break it into histories, and we break it into arts, and we break it into sciences; and then we begin to feel at home. We make ten thousand separate serial orders of it, and on any one of these we react as though the others did not exist. We discover among its various parts relations that were never given to sense at all (mathematical relations, tangents, squares, and roots and logarithmic functions), and out of an infinite number of these we call certain ones essential and lawgiving, and ignore the rest. Essential these relations are, but only _for our purpose_, the other relations being just as real and present as they; and our purpose is to _conceive simply_ and to _foresee_. Are not simple conception and prevision subjective ends pure and simple? They are the ends of what we call science; and the miracle of miracles, a miracle not yet exhaustively cleared up by any philosophy, is that the given order lends itself to the remodelling.
It shows itself plastic to many of our scientific, to {120} many of our aesthetic, to many of our practical purposes and ends.
When the man of affairs, the artist, or the man of science fails, he is not reb.u.t.ted. He tries again. He says the impressions of sense _must_ give way, _must_ be reduced to the desiderated form.[3] They all postulate in the interests of their volitional nature a harmony between the latter and the nature of things. The theologian does no more. And the reflex doctrine of the mind"s structure, though all theology should as yet have failed of its endeavor, could but confess that the endeavor itself at least obeyed in form the mind"s most necessary law.[4]
Now for the question I asked above: What kind of a being would G.o.d be if he did exist? The word "G.o.d" has come to mean many things in the history {121} of human thought, from Venus and Jupiter to the "Idee"
which figures in the pages of Hegel. Even the laws of physical nature have, in these positivistic times, been held worthy of divine honor and presented as the only fitting object of our reverence.[5] Of course, if our discussion is to bear any fruit, we must mean something more definite than this. We must not call any object of our loyalty a "G.o.d"
without more ado, simply because to awaken our loyalty happens to be one of G.o.d"s functions. He must have some intrinsic characteristics of his own besides; and theism must mean the faith of that man who believes that the object of _his_ loyalty has those other attributes, negative or positive, as the case may be.
Now, as regards a great many of the attributes of G.o.d, and their amounts and mutual relations, the world has been delivered over to disputes. All such may for our present purpose be considered as quite inessential. Not only such matters as his mode of revealing himself, the precise extent of his providence and power and their connection with our free-will, the proportion of his mercy to his justice, and the amount of his responsibility for evil; but also his metaphysical relation to the phenomenal world, whether causal, substantial, ideal, or what not,--are affairs of purely sectarian opinion that need not concern us at all. Whoso debates them presupposes the essential features of theism to be granted already; and it is with these essential features, the bare poles of the subject, that our business exclusively lies.
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Now, what are these essential features? First, it is essential that G.o.d be conceived as the deepest power in the universe; and, second, he must be conceived under the form of a mental personality. The personality need not be determined intrinsically any further than is involved in the holding of certain things dear, and in the recognition of our dispositions toward those things, the things themselves being all good and righteous things. But, extrinsically considered, so to speak, G.o.d"s personality is to be regarded, like any other personality, as something lying outside of my own and other than me, and whose existence I simply come upon and find. A power not ourselves, then, which not only makes for righteousness, but means it, and which recognizes us,--such is the definition which I think n.o.body will be inclined to dispute. Various are the attempts to shadow forth the other lineaments of so supreme a personality to our human imagination; various the ways of conceiving in what mode the recognition, the hearkening to our cry, can come. Some are gross and idolatrous; some are the most sustained efforts man"s intellect has ever made to keep still living on that subtile edge of things where speech and thought expire. But, with all these differences, the essence remains unchanged. In whatever other respects the divine personality may differ from ours or may resemble it, the two are consanguineous at least in this,--that both have purposes for which they care, and each can hear the other"s call.
Meanwhile, we can already see one consequence and one point of connection with the reflex-action theory of mind. Any mind, constructed on the {123} triadic-reflex pattern, must first get its impression from the object which it confronts; then define what that object is, and decide what active measures its presence demands; and finally react. The stage of reaction depends on the stage of definition, and these, of course, on the nature of the impressing object. When the objects are concrete, particular, and familiar, our reactions are firm and certain enough,--often instinctive. I see the desk, and lean on it; I see your quiet faces, and I continue to talk.
But the objects will not stay concrete and particular: they fuse themselves into general essences, and they sum themselves into a whole,--the universe. And then the object that confronts us, that knocks on our mental door and asks to be let in, and fixed and decided upon and actively met, is just this whole universe itself and its essence.
What are _they_, and how shall I meet _them_?
The whole flood of faiths and systems here rush in. Philosophies and denials of philosophy, religions and atheisms, scepticisms and mysticisms, confirmed emotional moods and habitual practical biases, jostle one another; for all are alike trials, hasty, prolix, or of seemly length, to answer this momentous question. And the function of them all, long or short, that which the moods and the systems alike subserve and pa.s.s into, is the third stage,--the stage of action. For no one of them itself is final. They form but the middle segment of the mental curve, and not its termination. As the last theoretic pulse dies away, it does not leave the mental process complete: it is but the forerunner of the practical moment, in which alone the cycle of mentality finds its rhythmic pause.
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We easily delude ourselves about this middle stage. Sometimes we think it final, and sometimes we fail to see, amid the monstrous diversity in the length and complication of the cogitations which may fill it, that it can have but one essential function, and that the one we have pointed out,--the function of defining the direction which our activity, immediate or remote, shall take.
If I simply say, "Vanitas vanitatum, omnia vanitas!" I am defining the total nature of things in a way that carries practical consequences with it as decidedly as if I write a treatise De Natura Rerum in twenty volumes. The treatise may trace its consequences more minutely than the saying; but the only worth of either treatise or saying is that the consequences are there. The long definition can do no more than draw them; the short definition does no less. Indeed, it may be said that if two apparently different definitions of the reality before us should have identical consequences, those two definitions would really be identical definitions, made delusively to appear different merely by the different verbiage in which they are expressed.[6]
My time is unfortunately too short to stay and give to this truth the development it deserves; but I will a.s.sume that you grant it without further parley, and pa.s.s to the next step in my argument. And here, too, I shall have to bespeak your close attention for a moment, while I pa.s.s over the subject far more {125} rapidly than it deserves. Whether true or false, any view of the universe which shall completely satisfy the mind must obey conditions of the mind"s own imposing, must at least let the mind be the umpire to decide whether it be fit to be called a rational universe or not. Not any nature of things which may seem to be will also seem to be _ipso facto_ rational; and if it do not seem rational, it will afflict the mind with a ceaseless uneasiness, till it be formulated or interpreted in some other and more congenial way. The study of what the mind"s criteria of rationality are, the definition of its exactions in this respect, form an intensely interesting subject into which I cannot enter now with any detail.[7] But so much I think you will grant me without argument,--that all three departments of the mind alike have a vote in the matter, and that no conception will pa.s.s muster which violates any of their essential modes of activity, or which leaves them without a chance to work. By what t.i.tle is it that every would-be universal formula, every system of philosophy which rears its head, receives the inevitable critical volley from one half of mankind, and falls to the rear, to become at the very best the creed of some partial sect? Either it has dropped out of its net some of our impressions of sense,--what we call the facts of nature,--or it has left the theoretic and defining department with a lot of inconsistencies and unmediated transitions on its hands; or else, finally, it has left some one or more of our fundamental active and emotional powers with no object outside of themselves to react-on or to live for. Any one of these defects is fatal to its complete success.
Some one {126} will be sure to discover the flaw, to scout the system, and to seek another in its stead.
I need not go far to collect examples to ill.u.s.trate to an audience of theologians what I mean. Nor will you in particular, as champions of the Unitarianism of New England, be slow to furnish, from the motives which led to your departure from our orthodox ancestral Calvinism, instances enough under the third or practical head. A G.o.d who gives so little scope to love, a predestination which takes from endeavor all its zest with all its fruit, are irrational conceptions, because they say to our most cherished powers, There is no object for you.
Well, just as within the limits of theism some kinds are surviving others by reason of their greater practical rationality, so theism itself, by reason of its practical rationality, is certain to survive all lower creeds. Materialism and agnosticism, even were they true, could never gain universal and popular acceptance; for they both, alike, give a solution of things which is irrational to the practical third of our nature, and in which we can never volitionally feel at home. Each comes out of the second or theoretic stage of mental functioning, with its definition of the essential nature of things, its formula of formulas prepared. The whole array of active forces of our nature stands waiting, impatient for the word which shall tell them how to discharge themselves most deeply and worthily upon life. "Well!"
cry they, "what shall we do?" "Ignoramus, ignorabimus!" says agnosticism. "React upon atoms and their concussions!" says materialism. What a collapse! The mental train misses fire, the middle fails to ignite the end, the cycle breaks down half-way to its conclusion; and the active {127} powers left alone, with no proper object on which to vent their energy, must either atrophy, sicken, and die, or else by their pent-up convulsions and excitement keep the whole machinery in a fever until some less incommensurable solution, some more practically rational formula, shall provide a normal issue for the currents of the soul.
Now, theism always stands ready with the most practically rational solution it is possible to conceive. Not an energy of our active nature to which it does not authoritatively appeal, not an emotion of which it does not normally and naturally release the springs. At a single stroke, it changes the dead blank _it_ of the world into a living _thou_, with whom the whole man may have dealings. To you, at any rate, I need waste no words in trying to prove its supreme commensurateness with all the demands that department Number Three of the mind has the power to impose on department Number Two.
Our volitional nature must then, until the end of time, exert a constant pressure upon the other departments of the mind to induce them to function to theistic conclusions. No contrary formulas can be more than provisionally held. Infra-theistic theories must be always in unstable equilibrium; for department Number Three ever lurks in ambush, ready to a.s.sert its rights, and on the slightest show of justification it makes its fatal spring, and converts them into the other form in which alone mental peace and order can permanently reign.
The question is, then, _Can_ departments One and Two, _can_ the facts of nature and the theoretic elaboration of them, always lead to theistic conclusions?
The future history of philosophy is the only {128} authority capable of answering that question. I, at all events, must not enter into it to-day, as that would be to abandon the purely natural-history point of view I mean to keep.
This only is certain, that the theoretic faculty lives between two fires which never give her rest, and make her incessantly revise her formulations. If she sink into a premature, short-sighted, and idolatrous theism, in comes department Number One with its battery of facts of sense, and dislodges her from her dogmatic repose. If she lazily subside into equilibrium with the same facts of sense viewed in their simple mechanical outwardness, up starts the practical reason with its demands, and makes _that_ couch a bed of thorns. From generation to generation thus it goes,--now a movement of reception from without, now one of expansion from within; department Number Two always worked to death, yet never excused from taking the most responsible part in the arrangements. To-day, a crop of new facts; to-morrow, a flowering of new motives,--the theoretic faculty always having to effect the transition, and life growing withal so complex and subtle and immense that her powers of conceiving are almost ruptured with the strain. See how, in France, the mummy-cloths of the academic and official theistic philosophy are rent by the facts of evolution, and how the young thinkers are at work! See, in Great Britain, how the dryness of the strict a.s.sociationist school, which under the ministration of Mill, Bain, and Spencer dominated us but yesterday, gives way to more generous idealisms, born of more urgent emotional needs and wrapping the same facts in far more ma.s.sive intellectual harmonies! These are but tackings to the common {129} port, to that ultimate _Weltanschauung_ of maximum subjective as well as objective richness, which, whatever its other properties may be, will at any rate wear the theistic form.
Here let me say one word about a remark we often hear coming from the anti-theistic wing: It is base, it is vile, it is the lowest depth of immorality, to allow department Number Three to interpose its demands, and have any vote in the question of what is true and what is false; the mind must be a pa.s.sive, reactionless sheet of white paper, on which reality will simply come and register its own philosophic definition, as the pen registers the curve on the sheet of a chronograph. "Of all the cants that are canted in this canting age" this has always seemed to me the most wretched, especially when it comes from professed psychologists. As if the mind could, consistently with its definition, be a reactionless sheet at all! As if conception could possibly occur except for a teleological purpose, except to show us the way from a state of things our senses cognize to another state of things our will desires! As if "science" itself were anything else than such an end of desire, and a most peculiar one at that! And as if the "truths" of bare physics in particular, which these sticklers for intellectual purity contend to be the only uncontaminated form, were not as great an alteration and falsification of the simply "given" order of the world, into an order conceived solely for the mind"s convenience and delight, as any theistic doctrine possibly can be!
Physics is but one chapter in the great jugglery which our conceiving faculty is forever playing with {130} the order of being as it presents itself to our reception. It transforms the unutterable dead level and continuum of the "given" world into an utterly unlike world of sharp differences and hierarchic subordinations for no other reason than to satisfy certain subjective pa.s.sions we possess.[8]
And, so far as we can see, the given world is there only for the sake of the operation. At any rate, to operate upon it is our only chance of approaching it; for never can we get a glimpse of it in the unimaginable insipidity of its virgin estate. To bid the man"s subjective interests be pa.s.sive till truth express itself from out the environment, is to bid the sculptor"s chisel be pa.s.sive till the statue express itself from out the stone. Operate we must! and the only choice left us is that between operating to poor or to rich results.
The only possible duty there can be in the matter is the duty of getting the richest results that the material given will allow. The richness lies, of course, in the energy of all three departments of the mental cycle. Not a sensible "fact" of department One must be left in the cold, not a faculty of department Three be paralyzed; and department Two must form an indestructible bridge. It is natural that the habitual neglect of department One by theologians should arouse indignation; but it is most _un_natural that the indignation should take the form of a wholesale denunciation of department Three. It is the story of Kant"s dove over again, denouncing the {131} pressure of the air. Certain of our positivists keep chiming to us, that, amid the wreck of every other G.o.d and idol, one divinity still stands upright,--that his name is Scientific Truth, and that he has but one commandment, but that one supreme, saying, _Thou shalt not be a theist_, for that would be to satisfy thy subjective propensities, and the satisfaction of those is intellectual d.a.m.nation. These most conscientious gentlemen think they have jumped off their own feet,--emanc.i.p.ated their mental operations from the control of their subjective propensities at large and _in toto_. But they are deluded.
They have simply chosen from among the entire set of propensities at their command those that were certain to construct, out of the materials given, the leanest, lowest, aridest result,--namely, the bare molecular world,--and they have sacrificed all the rest.[9]
Man"s chief difference from the brutes lies in the exuberant excess of his subjective propensities,--his pre-eminence over them simply and solely in the number and in the fantastic and unnecessary character of his wants, physical, moral, aesthetic, and intellectual. Had his whole life not been a quest for the superfluous, he would never have established himself as inexpugnably as he has done in the necessary.
And from the consciousness of this he should draw the lesson that his wants are to be trusted; that even {132} when their gratification seems farthest off, the uneasiness they occasion is still the best guide of his life, and will lead him to issues entirely beyond his present powers of reckoning. Prune down his extravagance, sober him, and you undo him. The appet.i.te for immediate consistency at any cost, or what the logicians call the "law of parsimony,"--which is nothing but the pa.s.sion for conceiving the universe in the most labor-saving way,--will, if made the exclusive law of the mind, end by blighting the development of the intellect itself quite as much as that of the feelings or the will. The scientific conception of the world as an army of molecules gratifies this appet.i.te after its fashion most exquisitely. But if the religion of exclusive scientificism should ever succeed in suffocating all other appet.i.tes out of a nation"s mind, and imbuing a whole race with the persuasion that simplicity and consistency demand a _tabula rasa_ to be made of every notion that does not form part of the _soi-disant_ scientific synthesis, that nation, that race, will just as surely go to ruin, and fall a prey to their more richly const.i.tuted neighbors, as the beasts of the field, as a whole, have fallen a prey to man.
I have myself little fear for our Anglo-Saxon race. Its moral, aesthetic, and practical wants form too dense a stubble to be mown by any scientific Occam"s razor that has yet been forged. The knights of the razor will never form among us more than a sect; but when I see their fraternity increasing in numbers, and, what is worse, when I see their negations acquiring almost as much prestige and authority as their affirmations legitimately claim over the minds of the docile public, I feel as if the influences working in the direction of our mental barbarization were {133} beginning to be rather strong, and needed some positive counteraction. And when I ask myself from what quarter the invasion may best be checked, I can find no answer as good as the one suggested by casting my eyes around this room. For this needful task, no fitter body of men than the Unitarian clergy exists.
Who can uphold the rights of department Three of the mind with better grace than those who long since showed how they could fight and suffer for department One? As, then, you burst the bonds of a narrow ecclesiastical tradition, by insisting that no fact of sense or result of science must be left out of account in the religious synthesis, so may you still be the champions of mental completeness and all-sidedness. May you, with equal success, avert the formation of a narrow scientific tradition, and burst the bonds of any synthesis which would pretend to leave out of account those forms of being, those relations of reality, to which at present our active and emotional tendencies are our only avenues of approach. I hear it said that Unitarianism is not growing in these days. I know nothing of the truth of the statement; but if it be true, it is surely because the great ship of Orthodoxy is nearing the port and the pilot is being taken on board. If you will only lead in a theistic science, as successfully as you have led in a scientific theology, your separate name as Unitarians may perish from the mouths of men; for your task will have been done, and your function at an end. Until that distant day, you have work enough in both directions awaiting you.
Meanwhile, let me pa.s.s to the next division of our subject. I said that we are forced to regard G.o.d as {134} the normal object of the mind"s belief, inasmuch as any conception that falls short of G.o.d is irrational, if the word "rational" be taken in its fullest sense; while any conception that goes beyond G.o.d is impossible, if the human mind be constructed after the triadic-reflex pattern we have discussed at such length. The first half of the thesis has been disposed of.
Infra-theistic conceptions, materialisms and agnosticisms, are irrational because they are inadequate stimuli to man"s practical nature. I have now to justify the latter half of the thesis.
I dare say it may for an instant have perplexed some of you that I should speak of conceptions that aimed at going beyond G.o.d, and of attempts to fly above him or outbid him; so I will now explain exactly what I mean. In defining the essential attributes of G.o.d, I said he was a personality lying outside our own and other than us,--a power not ourselves. Now, the attempts to fly beyond theism, of which I speak, are attempts to get over this ultimate duality of G.o.d and his believer, and to transform it into some sort or other of ident.i.ty. If infratheistic ways of looking on the world leave it in the third person, a mere _it_; and if theism turns the _it_ into a _thou_,--so we may say that these other theories try to cover it with the mantle of the first person, and to make it a part of _me_.
I am well aware that I begin here to tread on ground in which trenchant distinctions may easily seem to mutilate the facts.
That sense of emotional reconciliation with G.o.d which characterizes the highest moments of the theistic consciousness may be described as "oneness" with him, and so from the very bosom of theism a {135} monistic doctrine seem to arise. But this consciousness of self-surrender, of absolute practical union between one"s self and the divine object of one"s contemplation, is a totally different thing from any sort of substantial ident.i.ty. Still the object G.o.d and the subject I are two. Still I simply come upon him, and find his existence given to me; and the climax of my practical union with what is given, forms at the same time the climax of my perception that as a numerical fact of existence I am something radically other than the Divinity with whose effulgence I am filled.
Now, it seems to me that the only sort of union of creature with creator with which theism, properly so called, comports, is of this emotional and practical kind; and it is based unchangeably on the empirical fact that the thinking subject and the object thought are numerically two. How my mind and will, which are not G.o.d, can yet cognize and leap to meet him, how I ever came to be so separate from him, and how G.o.d himself came to be at all, are problems that for the theist can remain unsolved and insoluble forever. It is sufficient for him to know that he himself simply is, and needs G.o.d; and that behind this universe G.o.d simply is and will be forever, and will in some way hear his call. In the practical a.s.surance of these empirical facts, without "Erkentnisstheorie" or philosophical ontology, without metaphysics of emanation or creation to justify or make them more intelligible, in the blessedness of their mere acknowledgment as given, lie all the peace and power he craves. The floodgates of the religious life are opened, and the full currents can pour through.
It is this empirical and practical side of the theistic position, its theoretic chast.i.ty and modesty, which I {136} wish to accentuate here.
The highest flights of theistic mysticism, far from pretending to penetrate the secrets of the _me_ and the _thou_ in worship, and to transcend the dualism by an act of intelligence, simply turn their backs on such attempts. The problem for them has simply vanished,--vanished from the sight of an att.i.tude which refuses to notice such futile theoretic difficulties. Get but that "peace of G.o.d which pa.s.seth understanding," and the questions of the understanding will cease from puzzling and pedantic scruples be at rest. In other words, theistic mysticism, that form of theism which at first sight seems most to have transcended the fundamental otherness of G.o.d from man, has done it least of all in the theoretic way. The pattern of its procedure is precisely that of the simplest man dealing with the simplest fact of his environment. Both he and the theist tarry in department Two of their minds only so long as is necessary to define what is the presence that confronts them. The theist decides that its character is such as to be fitly responded to on his part by a religious reaction; and into that reaction he forthwith pours his soul.
His insight into the _what_ of life leads to results so immediately and intimately rational that the _why_, the _how_, and the _whence_ of it are questions that lose all urgency. "Gefuhl ist Alles," Faust says.
The channels of department Three have drained those of department Two of their contents; and happiness over the fact that being has made itself what it is, evacuates all speculation as to how it could make itself at all.
But now, although to most human minds such a position as this will be the position of rational equilibrium, it is not difficult to bring forward certain {137} considerations, in the light of which so simple and practical a mental movement begins to seem rather short-winded and second-rate and devoid of intellectual style. This easy acceptance of an opaque limit to our speculative insight; this satisfaction with a Being whose character we simply apprehend without comprehending anything more about him, and with whom after a certain point our dealings can be only of a volitional and emotional sort; above all, this sitting down contented with a blank unmediated dualism,--are they not the very picture of unfaithfulness to the rights and duties of our theoretic reason?
Surely, if the universe is reasonable (and we must believe that it is so), it must be susceptible, potentially at least, of being reasoned _out_ to the last drop without residuum. Is it not rather an insult to the very word "rational" to say that the rational character of the universe and its creator means no more than that we practically feel at home in their presence, and that our powers are a match for their demands? Do they not in fact demand to be _understood_ by us still more than to be reacted on? Is not the unparalleled development of department Two of the mind in man his crowning glory and his very essence; and may not the _knowing of the truth_ be his absolute vocation? And if it is, ought he flatly to acquiesce in a spiritual life of "reflex type," whose form is no higher than that of the life that animates his spinal cord,--nay, indeed, that animates the writhing segments of any mutilated worm?
It is easy to see how such arguments and queries may result in the erection of an ideal of our mental destiny, far different from the simple and practical religious one we have described. We may well begin {138} to ask whether such things as practical reactions can be the final upshot and purpose of all our cognitive energy. Mere outward acts, changes in the position of parts of matter (for they are nothing else), can they possibly be the culmination and consummation of our relations with the nature of things? Can they possibly form a result to which our G.o.dlike powers of insight shall be judged merely subservient? Such an idea, if we scan it closely, soon begins to seem rather absurd. Whence this piece of matter comes and whither that one goes, what difference ought that to make to the nature of things, except so far as with the comings and the goings our wonderful inward conscious harvest may be reaped?
And so, very naturally and gradually, one may be led from the theistic and practical point of view to what I shall call the _gnostical_ one.
We may think that department Three of the mind, with its doings of right and its doings of wrong, must be there only to serve department Two; and we may suspect that the sphere of our activity exists for no other purpose than to illumine our cognitive consciousness by the experience of its results. Are not all sense and all emotion at bottom but turbid and perplexed modes of what in its clarified shape is intelligent cognition? Is not all experience just the eating of the fruit of the tree of _knowledge_ of good and evil, and nothing more?