The records of the past can be studied variously. Events can be arranged
in the order of their occurrence: this is chronology or annals; in
addition to this, their connections and mutual relations as cause and
effect may be shown: this is historical science; or, thirdly, from a
general view of trains of related events some abstract aim as their
final cause may be theoretically deduced and confirmed by experience:
this is the philosophy of history. The doctrine of final causes, in its
old form as the argumentum de appetitu, has been superseded. Function
is not purpose; desire comes from the experience of pleasure, and
realizes its dreams, if at all, by the slow development of capacity. The
wish carries no warrant of gratification with it. No “argument from
design” can be adduced from the region where the laws of physical
necessity prevail. Those laws are not designed for an end.
When, however, in the unfolding of mind we reach the stage of notions,
we observe a growing power to accomplish desire, not only by altering
the individual or race organism, but also by bringing external objects
into unison with the desire, reversing the process common in the life of
sensation. This spectacle, however, is confined to man alone, and man as
guided by prospective volition, that is, by an object ahead.
When some such object is common to a nation or race, it exercises a wide
influence on its destiny, and is the key to much that otherwise would be
inexplicable in its actions. What we call national hopes, ambitions and
ideals are such objects. Sometimes they are distinctly recognized by the
nation, sometimes they are pursued almost unconsciously. They do not
correspond to things as they are, but as they are wished to be. Hence
there is nothing in them to insure their realization. They are like an
appetite, which may and may not develope the function which can gratify
it. They have been called “historic ideas,” and their consideration is a
leading topic in modern historical science.
Reason claims the power of criticizing such ideas, and of distinguishing
in them between what is true and therefore obtainable, and what is false
and therefore chimerical or even destructive. This is the province of
the philosophy of history. It guides itself by those general principles
for the pursuit of truth which have been noticed in brief in the earlier
pages of this book. Looking before as well as after, it aspires in the
united light of experience and the laws of mind, to construct for the
race an ideal within the reach of its capacities, yet which will
develope them to the fullest extent, a pole-star to which it can trust
in this night teeming with will-o’-the wisps.
The opinion that the history of mind is a progress whose end will be
worth more than was its beginning, may not prove true in fact—the
concrete expression never wholly covers the abstract requirements—but
it is undoubtedly true in theory. The progress, so far, has been by no
means a lineal one—each son a better man than his father—nor even, as
some would have it, a spiral one—periodical recurrences to the same
historical ideas, but each recurrence a nearer approach to the
philosophical idea—but it has been far more complex and irregular than
any geometrical figure will illustrate. These facile generalizations do
not express it.
Following the natural laws of thought man has erred infinitely, and his
errors have worked their sure result—they have destroyed him. There is
no “relish of salvation” in an error; otherwise than that it is sure to
kill him who obstructs the light by harboring it. There is no sort of
convertability of the false into the true, as shallow thinkers of the
day teach.
Man has only escaped death when at first by a lucky chance, and then by
personal and inherited experience, his thoughts drifted or were forced
into conformity with the logical laws of thought.
A historic idea is a complex product formed of numerous conceptions,
some true and others false. Its permanency and efficacy are in direct
proportion to the number and clearness of the former it embraces. When
it is purging itself of the latter, the nation is progressive; when the
false are retained, their poison spreads and the nation decays.
The periodical recurrence of historic ideas is one of their most
striking features. The explanations offered for it have been various.
The ancient doctrines of an exact repetition of events in the cycles of
nature, and of the transmigration of souls, drew much support from it;
and the modern modification of the latter theory as set forth by
Wordsworth and Lessing, are distinctly derived from the same source.
Rightly elucidated, the philosophical historian will find in it an
invaluable clue to the unravelment of the tangled skein of human
endeavor.
Historic periodicity is on the one side an organic law of memory,
dependent upon the revival of transmitted ancestral impressions. A
prevailing idea though over-cultivation exhausts its organic correlate,
and leads to defective nutrition of that part in the offspring. Hence
they do not pursue the same idea as their fathers, but revert to a
remoter ancestral historic idea, the organic correlate of which has
lain fallow, thus gained strength. It is brought forth as new, receives
additions by contiguity and similarity, is ardently pursued,
over-cultivated, and in time supplanted by another revival.
But this material side corresponds to an all-important mental one. As an
organic process only, the history of periodic ideas is thus
satisfactorily explained, but he who holds this explanation to be
exhaustive sees but half the problem.
The permanence of a historic idea, I have stated, is in direct
proportion to the number of true ideas in its composition; the
impression it makes on the organic substrata of memory is in turn in
proportion to its permanence. The element of decay is the destructive
effects of natural trains of thought out of accord with the logically
true trains. These cause defective cerebral nutrition, which is thus
seen to arise, so far as influenced by the operations of the memory,
from relations of truth and error. There is a physiological tendency in
the former to preserve and maintain in activity; in the latter to
disappear. The percentage of true concepts which makes up the complexity
of a historic idea gives the principal factor towards calculating its
probable recurrence. Of course, a second factor is the physiological one
of nutrition itself.
The next important distinction in discussing historic ideas is between
those which are held consciously, and those which operate
unconsciously. The former are always found to be more active, and more
amenable to correction. An unconscious idea is a product of the natural,
not the logical laws of mind, and is therefore very apt to be largely
false. It is always displaced with advantage by a conscious aim.
One of the superficial fallacies of the day, which pass under the name
of philosophy, is to maintain that any such historic idea is the best
possible one for the time and place in which it is found. I am led to
refer to this by the false light it has thrown on religious history.
Herbert Spencer remarks in one of his essays:236-1 “All religious
creeds, during the eras in which they are severally held, are the best
that could be held.” “All are good for their times and places.” So far
from this being the case, there never has been a religion but that an
improvement in it would have straightway exerted a beneficent effect.
Man, no matter what his condition, can always derive immediate good
from higher conceptions of Deity than he himself has elaborated. Nor is
the highest conception possible an idealization of self, as I have
sufficiently shown in a previous chapter, but is one drawn wholly from
the realm of the abstract. Moreover, as a matter of history, we know
that in abundant instances, the decay of nations can be traced largely
to the base teachings of their religious instructors. To maintain that
such religions were “the best possible ones” for the time and place is
the absurdest optimism. In what a religion shares of the abstractly true
it is beneficent; in what it partakes of the untrue it is deleterious.
This, and no other canon, must be our guide.
The ideas of religious history obey the same laws as other historic
ideas. They grow, decay, are supplanted and revive again in varying
guises, in accordance with the processes of organic nutrition as
influenced by the truth or falsity of their component ideas. Their
tendency to personification is stronger, because of the much greater
nearness they have to the individual desire. The one aspiration of a
high-spirited people when subjugated will be freedom; and in the lower
stages of culture they will be very certain to fabricate a myth of a
deliverer to come.
In like manner, every member of a community shares with his fellow
members some wish, hope or ambition dependent on unknown control and
therefore religious in character, which will become the “formative idea”
of the national religious development.
Of the various ideas in religious history there are three which, through
their permanence and frequent revival, we may justly suppose in
accordance with the above-mentioned canons to contain a large measure of
truth, and yet to be far from wholly true. They may be considered as
leading moments in religious growth, yet withal lacking something or
other essential to the satisfaction of the religious sentiment. The
first of these is the idea of the perfected individual; the second the
idea of the perfected commonwealth; the third, that of personal
survival. These have been the formative ideas (Ideen der Gestaltung)
in the prayers, myths, rites and religious institutions of many nations
at widely separated times.
Of the two first mentioned it may be said that every extended faith has
accepted them to some degree. They are the secret of the alliances of
religion with art, with government, with ethics, with science, education
and sentiment.
These alliances have often been taken by historians to contain the vital
elements of religion itself, and many explanations based on one or
another assumption of the kind have been proffered. Religion, while it
may embrace any of them, is independent of them all. Its relations to
them have been transitory, and the more so as their aims have been
local and material. The brief duration of the subjection of religion to
such incongenial ties was well compared by Lord Herbert of Cherbury to
the early maturity of brutes, who attain their full growth in a year or
two, while man needs a quarter of a century.239-1 The inferior aims of
the religious sentiment were discarded one after another to make way for
higher ones, which were slowly dawning upon it. In this progress it was
guided largely by the three ideas I have mentioned, which have been in
many forms leading stimuli of the religious thought of the race.
First, of the idea of the perfected individual.
Many writers have supposed that the contemplation of Power in nature
first stirred religious thought in man. Though this is not the view
taken in this book, no one will question that the leading trait in the
gods of barbarism is physical strength. The naive anthropomorphism of
the savage makes his a god of a mighty arm, a giant in stature, puissant
and terrible. He hurls the thunderbolt, and piles up the mountains in
sport. His name is often The Strong One, as in the Allah, Eloah of the
Semitic tongues. Hercules, Chon, Melkarth, Dorsanes, Thor and others
were of the most ancient divinities in Greece, Egypt, Phœnicia, India,
and Scandinavia, and were all embodiments of physical force. Such, too,
was largely the character of the Algonkin Messou, who scooped out the
great lakes with his hands and tore up the largest trees by the roots.
The huge boulders from the glacial epoch which are scattered over their
country are the pebbles he tossed in play or in anger. The cleft in the
Andes, through which flows the river Funha, was opened by a single blow
of Nemqueteba, chief god of the Muyscas. In all such and a hundred
similar legends, easy to quote, we see the notion of strength, brute
force, muscular power, was that deemed most appropriate to divinity, and
that which he who would be godlike must most sedulously seek. When
filled with the god, the votary felt a surpassing vigor. The Berserker
fury was found in the wilds of America and Africa, as well as among the
Fiords. Sickness and weakness, on the contrary, were signs that the gods
were against him. Therefore, in all early stages of culture, the office
of priest and physician was one. Conciliation of the gods was the
catholicon.
Such deities were fearful to behold. They are represented as mighty of
stature and terrible of mien, calculated to appal, not attract, to
inspire fear, not to kindle love. In tropical America, in Egypt, in
Thibet, almost where you will, there is little to please the eye in the
pictures and statues of deities.
In Greece alone, a national temperament, marvellously sensitive to
symmetry, developed the combination of maximum strength with perfect
form in the sun-god, Apollo, and of grace with beauty in Aphrodite. The
Greeks were the apostles of the religion of beauty. Their philosophic
thought saw the permanent in the Form, which outlives strength, and is
that alone in which the race has being. In its transmission love is the
agent, and Aphrodite, unmatched in beauty and mother of love, was a
creation worthy of their devotion. Thus with them the religious
sentiment still sought its satisfaction in the individual, not indeed in
the muscle, but in the feature and expression.
When the old gods fell, the Christian fathers taught their flocks to
abhor the beautiful as one with the sensual. St. Clement of Alexandria
and Tertullian describe Christ as ugly of visage and undersized, a sort
of Socrates in appearance.241-1 Christian art was long in getting
recognition. The heathens were the first to represent in picture and
statues Christ and the apostles, and for long the fathers of the church
opposed the multiplication of such images, saying that the inward beauty
was alone desirable. Christian art reached its highest inspiration under
the influence of Greek culture after the fall of Constantinople. In the
very year, however, that Rafaello Sanzio met his premature death, Luther
burned the decretals of the pope in the market-place of Wittenberg, and
preached a doctrine as hostile to art as was that of Eusebius and
Chrysostom. There was no longer any hope for the religion of beauty.
Nevertheless, under the influence of the revival of ancient art which
arose with Winckelmann towards the close of the last century, a gospel
of esthetics was preached. Its apostles were chiefly Germans, and among
them Schiller and Goethe are not inconspicuous names. The latter, before
his long life was closed, began to see the emptiness of such teachings,
and the violence perpetrated on the mind by forcing on the religious
sentiment the food fit only for the esthetic emotions.
The highest conception of individual perfection is reached in a
character whose physical and mental powers are symmetrically trained,
and always directed by conscious reason to their appropriate ends.
Self-government, founded on self-knowledge, wards off the pangs of
disappointment by limiting ambition to the attainable. The affections
and emotions, and the pleasures of sensation as well, are indulged in or
abstained from, but never to the darkening of the intellect. All the
talents are placed at usury; every power exercised systematically and
fruitfully with a consecration to a noble purpose.
This is the religion of culture. None other ranks among its adherents so
many great minds; men, as Carlyle expresses it, of much religiosity, if
of little religion. The ideal is a taking one. Such utter self-reliance,
not from ignorance, but from the perfection of knowledge, was that which
Buddha held up to his followers: “Self is the God of self; who else
should be the God?” In this century Goethe, Wordsworth, beyond all
others Wilhelm von Humboldt, have set forth this ideal. Less strongly
intellectual natures, as Maine de Biran, De Senancourt, and Matthew
Arnold, listen with admiration, but feel how unknown to the mass of
human kind must remain the tongue these masters speak.
Thus did the religious sentiment seek its satisfaction in the
idealization, first of physical force, then of form, and last of mental
force, but in each case turned away unsatisfied. Wherein did these
ideals fail? The first mentioned in exalting power over principle, might
over right. As was well said by the philosophical Novalis: “The ideal of
morality has no more dangerous rival than the ideal of physical
strength, of the most vigorous life. Through it man is transformed into
a reasoning beast, whose brutal cleverness has a fascination for weak
minds.”243-1 The religion of beauty failed in that it addressed the
esthetic emotions, not the reasoning power. Art does not promote the
good; it owes no fealty to either utility or ethics: in itself, it must
be, in the negative sense of the words, at once useless and immoral.
“Nature is not its standard, nor is truth its chief end.”244-1 Its
spirit is repose, “the perfect form in perfect rest;” whereas the spirit
of religion is action because of imperfection. Even the gods must know
of suffering, and partake, in incarnations, of the miseries of men.
In the religion of culture what can we blame? That it is lacking in the
impulses of action through the isolation it fosters; that it is and must
be limited to a few, for it provides no defense for the weaknesses the
many inherit; that its tendency is antagonistic to religion, as it cuts
away the feeling of dependence, and the trust in the unknown; that it
allows too little to enthusiasm ever to become a power.
On the other hand, what momenta of true religious thought have these
ideals embraced? Each presents some. Physical vigor, regarded as a sign
of complete nutrition, is an indispensable preliminary to the highest
religion. Correct thought cannot be, without sufficient and appropriate
food. If the nourishment is inadequate, defective energy of the brain
will be transmitted, and the offspring will revert ancestrally to a
lower plane of thought. “It thus happens that the minds of persons of
high religious culture by ancestral descent, and the intermarriage of
religious families, so strangely end in the production of children
totally devoid of moral sense and religious sentiment—moral imbeciles
in short.”245-1 From such considerations of the necessity of physical
vigor to elevated thought, Descartes predicted that if the human race
ever attain perfection it will be chiefly through the art of medicine.
Not alone from emotions of sympathy did the eminent religious teachers
of past ages maintain that the alleviation and prevention of suffering
is the first practical duty of man; but it was from a perhaps
unconscious perception of the antagonism of bodily degeneration to
mental progress.
So, too, the religion of beauty and art contains an indefeasible germ of
true religious thought. Art sees the universal in the isolated fact; it
redeemed the coarse symbol of earlier days by associating it with the
emotions of joy, instead of fear; commencing with an exaltation of the
love to sex, it etherealized and ennobled passion; it taught man to look
elsewhere than to material things for his highest pleasure, for the work
of art always has its fortune in the imagination and not in the senses
of the observer; conceptions of order and harmony are familiar to it;
its best efforts seek to bring all the affairs of life under unity and
system;246-1 and thus it strengthens the sentiment of moral
government, which is the first postulate of religion.
The symmetry of the individual, as understood in the religion of
culture, is likewise a cherished article of true religion. Thus only can
it protect personality against the pitfalls of self-negation and
absorption, which communism and pantheism dig for it. The integrity and
permanence of the person is the keystone to religion, as it is to
philosophy and ethics. None but a false teacher would measure our duty
to our neighbor by a higher standard than our love to ourselves. The
love of God alone is worthy to obscure it.
Professor Steinthal has said: “Every people has its own religion. The
national temperament hears the tidings and interprets them as it
can.”246-2 On the other hand, Humboldt—perhaps the profoundest
thinker on these subjects of his generation—doubted whether religions
can be measured in reference to nations and sects, because “religion is
altogether subjective, and rests solely on the conceptive powers of the
individual.”247-1 Whatever the creed, a pure mind will attach itself
to its better elements, a base one to its brutal and narrow doctrines. A
national religion can only be regarded as an average, applicable to the
majority, not entirely correct of the belief of any one individual,
wholly incorrect as to a few. Yet it is indubitable that the national
temperament creates the ideal which gives the essence of religion. Races
like the Tartar Mongols, who, as we are informed by the Abbé Huc, not
unfrequently move their tents several times a day, out of simple
restlessness, cannot desire the same stability that is sought by other
races, who have the beaver’s instinct for building and colonizing, such
as the Romans. Buddhism, which sets up the ideal of the individual, is
an acceptable theory to the former, while the latter, from earliest
ages, fostered religious views which taught the subordination of the
individual to the community, in other words, the idea of the perfected
commonwealth.
This is the conception at the base of all theocracies, forms of
government whose statutes are identified with the precepts of religion.
Instead of a constitution there is the Law, given and sanctioned by God
as a rule of action.
The Law is at first the Myth applied. Its object is as much to
propitiate the gods as to preserve social order. It is absolute because
it is inspired. Many of its ordinances as drawn from the myth are
inapplicable to man, and are unjust or frivolous. Yet such as it is, it
rules the conduct of the commonwealth and expresses the ideal of its
perfected condition.
All the oldest codes of laws are religious, and are alleged revelations.
The Pentateuch, the Avesta, the Laws of Manu, the Twelve Tables, the
Laws of Seleucus, all carry the endorsement, “And God said.” Their real
intention is to teach the relation of man to God, rather than the
relations of man to man. On practical points—on the rights of property,
on succession and wills, on contracts, on the adoption of neighbors, and
on the treatment of enemies—they often violate the plainest dictates of
natural justice, of common humanity, even of family affection. Their
precepts are frequently frivolous, sometimes grossly immoral. But if
these laws are compared with the earliest myths and cults, and the
opinions then entertained of the gods, and how to propitiate them, it
becomes easy to see how the precepts of the law flowed from these
inchoate imaginings of the religious sentiment.249-1
The improvement of civil statutes did not come through religion.
Experience, observation and free thought taught man justice, and his
kindlier emotions were educated by the desire to cherish and preserve
which arose from family and social ties. As these came to be recognized
as necessary relations of society, religion appropriated them,
incorporated them into her ideal, and even claimed them as her
revelations. History largely invalidates this claim. The moral progress
of mankind has been mainly apart from dogmatic teachings, often in
conflict with them. An established rule of faith may enforce obedience
to its statutes, but can never develop morals. “True virtue is
independent of every religion, and incompatible with any which is
accepted on authority.”249-2
Yet thinkers, even the best of them, appear to have had difficulty in
discerning any nobler arena for the religious sentiment than the social
one. “Religion,” says Matthew Arnold, “is conduct.” It is the power
“which makes for righteousness.” “As civil law,” said Voltaire,
“enforces morality in public, so the use of religion is to compel it in
private life.” “A complete morality,” observes a contemporary Christian
writer, “meets all the practical ends of religion.”250-1 In such
expressions man’s social relations, his duty to his neighbor, are taken
to exhaust religion. It is still the idea of the commonwealth, the
religion of morality, the submission to a law recognized as divine.
Whether the law is a code of ethics, the decision of a general council,
or the ten commandments, it is alike held to be written by the finger of
God, and imperative. Good works are the demands of such religion.
Catholicism, which is altogether theocratic and authoritative, which
pictures the church as an ideal commonwealth, has always most flourished
in those countries where the Roman colonies left their more important
traces. The reformation of Protestantism was a reversion to the ideal of
the individual, which was that of ancient Teutonic faith. In more recent
times Catholicism itself has modified the rigidity of its teachings in
favor of the religion of sentiment, as it has been called, inaugurated
by Chateaubriand, and which is that attractive form seen in the writings
of Madame Swetchine and the La Ferronnais. These elevated souls throw a
charm around the immolation of self, which the egotism of the Protestant
rarely matches.
Thus the ideal of the commonwealth is found in those creeds which give
prominence to law, to ethics, and to sentiment, the altruistic elements
of mind. It fails, because its authority is antagonistic to morality in
that it impedes the search for the true. Neither is morality religion,
for it deals with the relative, while religion should guide itself by
the absolute. Every great religious teacher has violated the morality of
his day. Even sentiment, attractive as it is, is no ground on which to
build a church. It is, at best, one of the lower emotional planes of
action. Love itself, which must be the kernel of every true religion, is
not in earthly relations an altruistic sentiment. The measure and the
source of all such love, is self-love. The creed which rejects this as
its corner stone will build in vain.
While, therefore, the advantages of organization and action are on the
side of the faiths which see in religion a form of government, they
present fewer momenta of religious thought than those which encourage
the greater individuality. All forms and reforms, remarks Machiavelli,
in one of his notes to Livy, have been brought about by the exertions of
one man.251-1 Religious reforms, especially, never have originated in
majorities. The reformatory decrees of the Council of Trent are due to
Martin Luther.
Either ideal, raised to its maximum, not only fails to satisfy the
religious sentiment, but puts upon it a forced meaning, and is therefore
not what this sentiment asks. This may be illustrated by comparing two
remarkable works, which, by a singular coincidence, were published in
the same year, and which better than any others present these ideals
pushed to their extreme. It is characteristic of them that neither
professes to treat of religion, but of politics. The one is entitled,
“An Attempt to define the limits of Government,” and is by Wilhelm von
Humboldt; the other is the better known work of Auguste Comte, his
“System of Positive Polity.”252-1
The first lays down the principle that the highest end of man is the
utmost symmetrical education of his own powers in their individual
peculiarities. To accomplish this, he must enjoy the largest freedom of
thought and action consistent with the recognition of the same right in
others. In regard to religion, the state should have nothing to do with
aiding it, but should protect the individual in his opposition to any
authoritative form of it. As a wholly personal and subjective matter,
social relations do not concern it. In fine, the aim of both government
and education should be the development of an individualism in which an
enlightened intellect controls and directs all the powers toward an
exalted self-cultivation.
Comte reverses this picture. His fundamental principle is to subordinate
the sum total of our existence to our social relations; real life is to
live in others; not the individual but humanity is the only worthy
object of effort. Social polity therefore includes the whole of
development; the intellect should have no other end but to subserve the
needs of the race, and always be second to the altruistic sentiments.
Love toward others should absorb self-love. “Il est encore meilleur
d’aimer que d’être aimé.”
Such is the contrast between the ideal of the individual as exhibited by
the Religion of Culture, and the ideal of the commonwealth as portrayed
in the Religion of Humanity.
The whole duty of man, says the one school, is to live for others; nay,
says the other, it is to live intelligently for himself; the intellect,
says the former, should always be subordinated to society, and be led by
the emotions; intellect, says the latter, should ever be in the
ascendant, and absolutely control and direct the emotions; the
theoretical object of government, says the former, is to enable the
affections and thoughts to pass into action; not so, says the latter,
its only use is to give the individual secure leisure to develope his
own affections and thoughts. Mutual relation is the key note of the
former, independence of the latter; the former is the apotheosis of
love, the latter of reason.
Strictly and literally the apotheosis. For, differing as they do on such
vital points, they both agree in dispensing with the ideas of God and
immortality as conceptions superfluous in the realization of the
theoretical perfection they contemplate. Not that either scheme omits
the religious sentiment. On the contrary, it is especially prominent in
one, and very well marked in the other. Both assume its growing
prominence, never its extinction. Both speak of it as an integral part
of man’s highest nature.
Comte and Humboldt were thinkers too profound to be caught by the facile
fallacy that the rapid changes in religious thought betoken the early
abrogation of all creeds. Lessing, the philosophers of the French
revolution, James Mill, Schopenhauer and others fell into this error.
They were not wiser than the clown of Horace, who seated himself by the
rushing stream, thinking it must soon run itself out—
Expectat rusticus dum defluat amnis; at ille
Labitur et labetur in omne volubilis ævum.
Vain is the dream that man will ever reach the point when he will think
no more of the gods. Dogmas may disappear, but religion will flourish;
destroy the temple and sow it with salt, in a few days it rises again
built for aye on the solid ground of man’s nature.
So long as the race is upon earth, just so long will the religious
sentiment continue to crave its appropriate food, and this at last is
recognized even by those who estimate it at the lowest. “To yield this
sentiment reasonable satisfaction,” observes Professor Tyndall in one of
his best known addresses, “is the problem of problems at the present
hour. It is vain to oppose it with a view to its extirpation.” The
“general thaw of theological creeds,” which Spencer remarks upon, is no
sign of the loss of interest in religious subjects, but the reverse.
Coldness and languor are the premonitions of death, not strife and
defence.
But as the two moments of religious thought which I have now discussed
have both reached their culmination in a substantial repudiation of
religion, that which stimulates the religious sentiment to-day must be
something different from either. This I take to be the idea of personal
survival after physical death, or, as it is generally called, the
doctrine of the immortality of the soul.
This is the main dogma in the leading religions of the world to-day. “A
God,” remarks Sir William Hamilton, speaking for the enlightened
Christians of his generation, “is to us of practical interest, only
inasmuch as he is the condition of our immortality.”256-1 In his
attractive work, La Vie Eternelle, whose large popularity shows it to
express the prevailing views of modern Protestant thought, Ernest
Naville takes pains to distinguish that Christianity is not a means of
living a holy life so much as one of gaining a blessed hereafter. The
promises of a life after death are numerous and distinct in the New
Testament. Most of the recommendations of action and suffering in this
world are based on the doctrine of compensation in the world to come.
Mohammed taught the same tenet with equal or even greater emphasis. In
one sura he says: “To whatever is evil may they be likened who believe
not in a future life;” and elsewhere: “As for the blessed ones—their
place is Paradise. There shall they dwell so long as the heavens and the
earth endure, enjoying the imperishable bounties of God. But as for
those who shall be consigned to misery, their place is the Fire. There
shall they abide so long as the heavens and the earth shall last, unless
God wills it otherwise.”256-2
In Buddhism, as generally understood, the doctrine of a future life is
just as clear. Not only does the soul wander from one to another animal
body, but when it has completed its peregrinations and reaches its final
abode, it revels in all sorts of bliss. For the condition of Nirvana,
understood by philosophical Buddhists as that of the extinction of
desires even to the desire of life, and of the complete enlightenment of
the mind even to the recognition that existence itself is an illusion,
has no such meaning to the millions who profess themselves the followers
of the sage of Kapilavastu. They take it to be a material Paradise with
pleasures as real as those painted by Mohammed, wherein they will dwell
beyond all time, a reward for their devotions and faith in this life.
These three religions embrace three-fourths of the human race and all
its civilized nations, with trifling exceptions. They displaced and
extinguished the older creeds and in a few centuries controlled the
earth; but as against each other their strife has been of little avail.
The reason is, they share the same momentum of religious thought,
differing in its interpretation not more among themselves than do
orthodox members of either faith in their own fold. Many enlightened
Muslims and Christians, for example, consider the descriptions of
Paradise given in the Koran and the Apocalypse to convey wholly
spiritual meanings.
There has been so much to surprise in the rapid extension of these
faiths that the votaries of each claim manifest miraculous
interposition. The religious idea of an after life is a sufficient
moment to account for the phenomenon. I say the religious idea, for,
with one or two exceptions, however distinct had been the belief in a
hereafter, that belief had not a religious coloring until they gave it
such. This distinction is an important one.
Students of religions have hitherto attributed too much weight to the
primitive notion of an existence after death. It is common enough, but
it rarely has anything at all to do with the simpler manifestations of
the religious sentiment. These are directed to the immediate desires of
the individual or the community, and do not look beyond the present
life. The doctrine of compensation hereafter is foreign to them. I have
shown this at length so far as the religions of America were concerned.
“Neither the delights of a heaven on the one hand, nor the terrors of a
hell on the other were ever held out by priests or sages as an incentive
to well doing, or a warning to the evil disposed.”258-1 The same is
true of the classical religions of Greece and Rome, of Carthage and
Assyria. Even in Egypt the manner of death and the rites of interment
had much more to do with the fate of the soul, than had its thoughts
and deeds in the flesh. The opinions of Socrates and Plato on the soul
as something which always existed and whose after life is affected by
its experiences here, struck the Athenians as novel and innovating.
On the other hand, the ancient Germans had a most lively faith in the
life hereafter. Money was loaned in this world to be repaid in the next.
But with them also, as with the Aztecs, the future was dependent on the
character or mode of death rather than the conduct of life. He who died
the “straw-death” on the couch of sickness looked for little joy in the
hereafter; but he who met the “spear-death” on the field of battle went
at once to Odin, to the hall of Valhalla, where the heroes of all time
assembled to fight, eat boar’s fat and drink beer. Even this rude belief
gave them such an ascendancy over the materialistic Romans, that these
distinctly felt that in the long run they must succumb to a bravery
which rested on such a mighty moment as this.259-1
The Israelites do not seem to have entertained any general opinion on an
existence after death. No promise in the Old Testament refers to a
future life. The religion there taught nowhere looks beyond the grave.
It is materialistic to the fullest extent. Hence, a large body of
orthodox Jewish philosophers, the Sadducees, denied the existence of the
soul apart from the body.
The central doctrine of the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, the leading
impulse which he gave to the religious thought of his age, was that the
thinking part of man survives his physical death, and that its condition
does not depend on the rites of interment, as other religions then
taught,260-1 but on the character of its thoughts during life here.
Filled with this new and sublime idea, he developed it in its numerous
applications, and drew from it those startling inferences, which, to
this day, stagger his followers, and have been in turn, the terror and
derision of his foes. This he saw, that against a mind inwardly
penetrated with the full conviction of a life hereafter, obtainable
under known conditions, the powers of this world are utterly futile, and
its pleasures hollow phantoms.
The practical energy of this doctrine was immensely strengthened by
another, which is found very obscurely, if at all, stated in his own
words, but which was made the central point of their teaching by his
immediate followers. The Christianity they preached was not a
philosophical scheme for improving the race, but rested on the
historical fact of a transaction between God and man, and while they
conceded everlasting existence to all men, all would pass it in the
utmost conceivable misery, except those who had learned of these
historical events, and understood them as the church prescribed.
As the ancient world placed truth in ideas and not in facts, no teaching
could well have been more radically contrary to its modes of thought;
and the doctrine once accepted, the spirit of proselytizing came with
it.
I have called this idea a new one to the first century of our era, and
so it was in Europe and Syria. But in India, Sakyamuni, probably five
hundred years before, had laid down in sententious maxims the
philosophical principle which underlies the higher religious doctrine of
a future life. These are his words, and if through the efforts of
reasoning we ever reach a demonstration of the immortality of the soul,
we shall do it by pursuing the argument here indicated: “Right thought
is the path to life everlasting. Those who think do not die.”262-1
Truth alone contains the elements of indefinite continuity; and truth is
found only in the idea, in correct thought.
Error in the intellectual processes corresponds to pain in sensation; it
is the premonition of waning life, of threatened annihilation; it
contains the seed of cessation of action or death. False reasoning is
self-destructive. The man who believes himself invulnerable will
scarcely survive his first combat. A man’s true ideas are the most he
can hope, and all that he should wish, to carry with him to a life
hereafter. Falsehood, sin, is the efficient agent of death. As Bishop
Hall says: “There is a kind of not-being in sin; for sin is not an
existence of somewhat that is, but a deficiency of that rectitude which
should be; it is a privation, as blindness is a privation of sight.”
While the religious doctrine of personal survival has thus a position
defensible on grounds of reason as being that of the inherent permanence
of self-conscious truth, it also calls to its aid and indefinitely
elevates the most powerful of all the emotions, love. This, as I have
shown in the second chapter, is the sentiment which is characteristic
of preservative acts. Self-love, which is prominent in the idea of the
perfected individual, sex-love, which is the spirit of the multiform
religious symbolism of the reproductive act, and the love of race, which
is the chief motor in the religion of humanity, are purified of their
grosser demands and assigned each its meet post in the labor of uniting
the conceptions of the true under the relation of personality.
The highest development of which such love is capable arises through the
contemplation of those verities which are abstract and eternal, and
which thus set forth, to the extent the individual mind is capable of
receiving it, the completed notion of diuturnity. This highest love is
the “love of God.” A Supreme Intelligence, one to which all truth is
perfect, must forever dwell in such contemplation. Therefore the deeper
minds of Christianity define man’s love of God, as God’s love to
himself. “Eternal life,” says Ernest Naville, “is in its principle the
union with God and the joy that results from that union.”263-1 The
pious William Law wrote: “No man can reach God with his love, or have
union with Him by it, but he who is inspired with that one same spirit
of love, with which God loved himself from all eternity, before there
was any creation.”264-1
Attractive as the idea of personal survival is in itself, and potent as
it has been as a moment of religious thought, it must be ranked among
those that are past. While the immortality of the soul retains its
interest as a speculative inquiry, I venture to believe that as an idea
in religious history, it is nigh inoperative; that as an element in
devotional life it is of not much weight; and that it will gradually
become less so, as the real meaning of religion reaches clearer
interpretations.
Its decay has been progressive, and common to all the creeds which
taught it as a cardinal doctrine, though most marked in Christianity. A
century ago Gibbon wrote: “The ancient Christians were animated by a
contempt for their present existence, and by a just confidence of
immortality, of which the doubtful but imperfect faith of modern ages
cannot give us any adequate notion.”264-2 How true this is can be
appreciated only by those who study this doctrine in the lives and
writings of the martyrs and fathers of the primitive church.
The breach which Gibbon remarked has been indefinitely widened since his
time. What has brought this about, and what new moment in religious
thought seems about to supply its place, will form an appropriate close
to the present series of studies. In its examination, I shall speak only
of Christian thought, since it leads the way which other systems will
ultimately follow.
In depicting the influences which have led and are daily leading with
augmented force to the devitalizing of the doctrine of immortality, I
may with propriety confine myself to those which are themselves strictly
religious. For the change I refer to is not one brought about by the
opponents of religion, by materialistic doctrines, but is owing to the
development of the religious sentiment itself. Instead of tending to an
abrogation of that sentiment, it may be expected to ennoble its
emotional manifestations and elevate its intellectual conceptions.
Some of these influences are historical, as the repeated disappointments
in the second coming of Christ, and the interest of proselytizing
churches to interpret this event allegorically. Those which I deem of
more importance, however, are such as are efficient to-day, and probably
will continue to be the main agents in the immediate future of religious
development. They are:
(1.) The recognition of the grounds of ethics.
(2.) The recognition of the cosmical relations.
(3.) The clearer defining of life.
(4.) The growing immateriality of religious thought.
(1.) The authority of the Law was assumed in the course of time by most
Christian churches, and the interests of morality and religion were
claimed to be identical. The Roman church with its developed casuistry
is ready to prescribe the proper course of conduct in every emergency;
and if we turn to many theological writers of other churches, Dick’s
Philosophy of Religion for instance, we find moral conduct regarded as
the important aim of the Christian life. Morality without religion,
works without faith, are pronounced to be of no avail in a religious,
and of very questionable value in a social sense. Some go so far as to
deny that a person indifferent to the prevailing tenets of religion can
lead a pure and moral life. Do away with the belief in a hereafter of
rewards and punishments, say these, and there is nothing left to
restrain men from the worst excesses, or at least from private sin.
Now, however, the world is growing to perceive that morality is
separable from religion; that it arose independently, from a gradual
study of the relations of man to man, from principles of equity inherent
in the laws of thought, and from considerations of expediency which
deprive its precepts of the character of universality. Religion is
subjective, and that in which it exerts an influence on morality is not
its contents, but the reception of them peculiar to the individual.
Experience alone has taught man morals; pain and pleasure are the forms
of its admonitions; and each generation sees more clearly that the
principles of ethics are based on immutable physical laws. Moreover, it
has been shown to be dangerous to rest morality on the doctrine of a
future life; for apart from the small effect the terrors of a hereafter
have on many sinners, as that doctrine is frequently rejected, social
interests suffer. And, finally, it is debasing and hurtful to religion
to make it a substitute for police magistracy.267-1
The highest religion would certainly enforce the purest morality; but it
is equally true that such a religion would enjoin much not approved by
the current opinions of the day. The spirit of the reform inaugurated by
Luther was a protest against the subjection of the religious sentiment
to a moral code. With the independence thus achieved, it came to be
recognized that to the full extent that morality is essential to
religion, it can be reached as well or better without a system of
rewards and punishments after death, than with one. Both religion and
morality stand higher, when a conception of an after life for this
purpose is dropped.
(2.) The recognition of the cosmical relations has also modified the
views of personal survival. The expansion of the notions of space and
time by the sciences of geology and astronomy has, as I before remarked,
done away with the ancient belief that the culminating catastrophe of
the universe will be the destruction of this world. An insignificant
satellite of a third rate sun, which, with the far grander suns whose
light we dimly discern at night, may all be swept away in some flurry of
“cosmical weather,” that the formation or the dissolution of such a body
would be an event of any beyond the most insignificant importance, is
now known to be almost ridiculous. To assert that at the end of a few or
a few thousand years, on account of events transpiring on the surface of
this planet, the whole relationship of the universe will be altered, a
new heaven and a new earth be formed, and all therein be made
subservient to the joys of man, becomes an indication of an arrogance
which deserves to be called a symptom of insanity. Thus, much of the
teleology both of the individual and the race taught by the primitive
and medieval church undergoes serious alterations. The literal meaning
of the millennium, the New Jerusalem, and the reign of God on earth has
been practically discarded.
With the disappearance of the ancient opinion that the universe was
created for man, the sun to light him by day and the stars by night,
disappeared also the later thesis that the happiness or the education of
man was the aim of the Order in Things. The extent and duration of
matter, if they indicate any purpose at all, suggest one incomparably
vaster than this; while the laws of mind, which alone distinctly point
to purpose, reveal one in which pain and pleasure have no part or lot,
and one in which man has so small a share that it seems as if it must be
indifferent what his fate may be. The slightest change in the atmosphere
of the globe will sweep away his species forever.
Schopenhauer classified all religions as optimisms or pessimisms. The
faith of the future will be neither. What is agreeable or disagreeable
to man will not be its standard of the excellence of the universe.
However unwillingly, he is at last brought to confess that his comfort
is not the chief nor even any visible aim of the order in things. In the
course of that order it may be, nay, it is nigh certain, that the human
species will pass through decadence to extinction along with so many
other organisms. Neither as individuals nor as a race, neither in regard
to this life nor to the next, does the idea of God, when ennobled by a
contemplation of the cosmical relations, permit to man the effrontery
of claiming that this universe and all that therein is was made with an
eye to his wants and wishes, whether to gratify or to defeat them.
(3.) The closer defining of life as a result of physical force, and the
recognition of mind as a connotation of organism, promise to be active
in elevating religious conceptions, but at the expense of the current
notions of personality. Sensation and voluntary motion are common to the
fetus, the brute and the plant, as well as to man. They are not part of
his “soul.” Intellect and consciousness, as I have shown, exclude
sensation, and in these, if anywhere, he must look for his immortal
part. Even here, error works destruction, and ignorance plants no seed
of life. We are driven back to the teaching of Buddha, that true thought
alone is that which does not die.
Why should we ask more? What else is worth saving? Our present
personality is a train of ideas base and noble, true and false, coherent
through the contiguity of organs nourished from a common center. Another
personality is possible, one of true ideas coherent through conscious
similarity, independent of sensation, as dealing with topics not
commensurate with it. Yet were this refuge gained, it leaves not much of
the dogma that every man has an indestructible conscious soul, which
will endure always, no matter what his conduct or thoughts have been.
Rather does it favor the opinion expressed so well by Matthew Arnold in
one of his sonnets:
“He who flagged not in the earthly strife
From strength to strength advancing—only he,
His soul well knit and all his battles won,
Mounts, and that hardly, to eternal life.”
Not only has the received doctrine of a “soul,” as an undying something
different from mind and peculiar to man, received no support from a
closer study of nature,—rather objections amounting to refutation,—but
it has reacted injuriously on morals, and through them on religion
itself. Buddha taught that the same spark of immortality exists in man
and brute, and actuated by this belief laid down the merciful rule to
his disciples: “Do harm to no breathing thing.” The apostle Paul on the
other hand, recognizing in the lower animals no such claim on our
sympathy, asks with scorn: “Doth God care for oxen?” and actually strips
from a humane provision of the old Mosaic code its spirit of charity, in
order to make it subserve a point in his polemic.
(4.) As the arrogance of the race has thus met a rebuke, so has the
egotism of the individual. His religion at first was a means of securing
material benefits; then a way to a joyous existence beyond the tomb: the
love of self all the time in the ascendant.
This egoism in the doctrine of personal survival has been repeatedly
flung at it by satirists, and commented on by philosophers. The
Christian who “hopes to be saved by grossly believing” has been felt on
all hands to be as mean in his hope, as he is contemptible in his way of
attaining it. To center all our religious efforts to the one end of
getting joy—however we may define it—for our individual selves, has
something repulsive in it to a deeply religious mind. Yet that such in
the real significance of the doctrine of personal survival is granted by
its ablest defenders. “The general expectation of future happiness can
afford satisfaction only as it is a present object to the principle of
self-love,” says Dr. Butler, the eminent Lord Bishop of Durham, than
whom no acuter analyst has written on the religious nature of man.
Yet nothing is more certain than that the spirit of true religion wages
constant war with the predominance or even presence of selfish aims.
Self-love is the first and rudest form of the instinct of preservation.
It is sublimed and sacrificed on the altar of holy passion. “Self,”
exclaims the fervid William Law, “is both atheist and idolater; atheist,
because it rejects God; idolater, because it is its own idol.” Even when
this lowest expression of the preservative instinct rises but to the
height of sex-love, it renounces self, and rejoices in martyrdom. “All
for love, or the world well lost,” has been the motto of too many
tragedies to be doubted now. By the side of the ancient Roman or the
soldier of the French revolution, who through mere love of country
marched joyously to certain death from which he expected no waking, does
not the martyr compare unfavorably, who meets the same death, but does
so because he believes that thereby he secures endless and joyous life?
Is his love as real, as noble, as unselfish?
Even the resistless physical energy which the clear faith in the life
hereafter has so often imparted, becomes something uncongenial to the
ripened religious meditation. Such faith brings about mighty effects in
the arena of man’s struggles, but it does so through a sort of
mechanical action. An ulterior purpose is ahead, to wit, the salvation
of the soul, and it may be regarded as one of the best established
principles of human effort that every business is better done, when it
is done for its own sake, out of liking for it, than for results
expected from it.
Of nothing is this more just than religion. Those blossoms of spiritual
perfection, the purified reason, the submissive will, the sanctifying
grace of abstract ideas, find no propitious airs amid the violent toil
for personal survival, whether that is to be among the mead jugs of
Valhalla, the dark-eyed houris of Paradise, or the “solemn troops and
sweet society” of Christian dreams. Unmindful of these, the saintly
psyche looks to nothing beyond truth; it asks no definite, still less
personal, end to which this truth is to be applied; to find it is to
love it, and to love it is enough.
The doctrine I here broach, is no strange one to Christian thought. To
be sure the exhortation, “Save your soul from Hell,” was almost the sole
incentive to religion in the middle ages, and is still the burden of
most sermons. But St. Paul was quickened with a holier fire, that
consumed and swept away such a personal motive, when he wrote: “Yea, I
could wish that I myself were cast out from Christ as accursed, for the
sake of my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh.”274-1 St.
Augustine reveals the touch of the same inspiration in his passionate
exclamation: “Far, O Lord, far from the heart of thy servant be it that
I should rejoice in any joy whatever. The blessed life is the joy in
truth alone.”274-2 And amid the pæans to everlasting life which fill
the pages of the De Imitatione Christi, the medieval monk saw
something yet greater, when he puts in the mouth of God the Father, the
warning: “The wise lover thinks not of the gift, but of the love of the
giver. He rests not in the reward, but in Me, beyond all
rewards.”275-1 The mystery of great godliness is, that he who has it
is as one who seeking nothing yet finds all things, who asking naught
for his own sake, neither in the life here nor yet hereafter, gains that
alone which is of worth in either.
Pressed by such considerations, the pious Schleiermacher threw down the
glaive on the side of religion half a century ago when he wrote: “Life
to come, as popularly conceived, is the last enemy which speculative
criticism has to encounter, and, if possible, to overcome.” The course
he marked out, however, was not that which promises success. Recurring
to the austere theses of Spinoza, he sought to bring them into accord
with a religion of emotion. The result was a refined Pantheism with its
usual deceptive solutions.
What recourse is left? Where are we to look for the intellectual moment
of religion in the future? Let us review the situation.
The religious sentiment has been shown to be the expression of
unfulfilled desire, but this desire peculiar as dependent on unknown
power. Material advantages do not gratify it, nor even spiritual joy
when regarded as a personal sentiment. Preservation by and through
relation with absolute intelligence has appeared to be the meaning of
that “love of God” which alone yields it satisfaction. Even this is
severed from its received doctrinal sense by the recognition of the
speculative as above the numerical unity of that intelligence, and the
limitation of personality which spiritual thought demands. The eternal
laws of mind guarantee perpetuity to the extent they are obeyed—and no
farther. They differ from the laws of force in that they convey a
message which cannot be doubted concerning the purport of the order in
nature, which is itself “the will of God.” That message in its
application is the same which with more or less articulate utterance
every religion speaks—Seek truth: do good. Faith in that message,
confidence in and willing submission to that order, this is all the
religious sentiment needs to bring forth its sweetest flowers, its
richest fruits.
Such is the ample and satisfying ground which remains for the religion
of the future to build upon. It is a result long foreseen by the clearer
minds of Christendom. One who more than any other deserves to be classed
among these writes: “Resignation to the will of God is the whole of
piety. * * * Our resignation may be said to be perfect when we rest in
his will as our end, as being itself most just and right and good.
Neither is this at bottom anything more than faith, and honesty and
fairness of mind; in a more enlarged sense, indeed, than these words are
commonly used.”277-1
Goethe, who studied and reflected on religious questions more than is
generally supposed, saw that in such a disposition of mind lie the
native and strongest elements of religion. In one of his conversations
with Chancellor Müller, he observed: “Confidence and resignation, the
sense of subjection to a higher will which rules the course of events
but which we do not fully comprehend, are the fundamental principles of
every better religion.”277-2
By the side of two such remarkable men, I might place the opinion of a
third not less eminent than they—Blaise Pascal. In one part of his
writings he sets forth the “marks of a true religion.” Sifted from its
physical ingredients, the faith he defines is one which rests on love
and submission to God, and a clear recognition of the nature of man.
Here I close these studies on the Religious Sentiment. They show it to
be a late and probably a final development of mind. The intellect first
reaches entire self-consciousness, the emotions first attain perfection
of purpose, when guided by its highest manifestation. Man’s history
seems largely to have been a series of efforts to give it satisfaction.
This will be possible only when he rises to a practical appreciation of
the identity of truth, love and life.
