Chapter XIII: Religion (2)

A book of the time pointed out a science as far beyond this as this had been beyond the older chemistry, for there were far subtler and higher media of energy to be discovered and analysed than those of appetite and desire. Subtlest of all must be that in which the energy called soul moved. It appeared predominantly in none but the higher types of the human race, the men and women of wise creative power. Others had it as a faint aroma which asserted itself only in moments of great enthusiasm over the gross powers of appetite and passion and at other times seemed almost to vanish. In the Limanorans it had grown to be dominant over all the faculties and powers of the human system. The book foresaw that the medium of this noble energy would be found akin to that of the central energy of the cosmos, the great being whose phases and manifestations were stars and universes. And the loftier the mind, the more of this medium did it possess, and the clearer affinity it had with the creative power of infinitude. Not far below this was the medium in which the energy of morality moved; and the higher the morality the more sympathetic was its medium with that of creation. The new science foreshadowed by the book would display to the advanced race of the future the movements of these finer media, and the modes of action by which moral energy and spiritual and creative energy worked through them.

Then would they see their way to such continuance of their life as would seem to other men practical immortality. They would be able so to refine and sublimate the energies of their systems and the media through which they acted, as to be free from any of the transformations called death for almost measureless periods of time. For the subtler the medium, the more self-existent is the energy that moves in it, the less is it subject to change and the less it needs change in order to fulfil the purpose of all being. The nearer to creative power an energy comes, the less it needs alliance with grosser and more perishable media in order to rise in the scale of existence; decay and death become rarer and rarer incidents. As yet Limanoran science had not discovered absolute immortality; nor did it seem likely to discover it. Its experience of the cosmos pointed to change as the most widely spread of all principles; whatsoever is allied with any lower media must shed them, or in other words suffer death, if it is to continue its march upwards; the whole history of the earth was a continual record of these transformations. The Limanorans had taken this aim of terrestrial existence into their own hands, and by gradually rejecting the grosser and shorter-lived elements of their system, they had been able to extend their life, at first to hundreds, and afterwards to thousands of years. They now saw before them a limitless vista along which the necessity of death or transformation would be hunted farther and farther from birth. And the same story they saw written all over the cosmos, energy as it becomes purer and subtler and less dependent for evolution upon lower forms approaching nearer and nearer to what would seem immortality from the human point of view, coming closer and closer to the creative energy of the cosmos. To them therefore all their life was religion, and science was its true hierophant.

If the analytic sciences like chemistry revealed a path that led the minds of men towards God, the wide-ranged sciences like astronomy, astrobiology, and astromagnetism might themselves be called the highways to God. The embodied energy and life of the earth on this side of death seem to the human mind self-explanatory and self-involved; but the enfranchised life and energy that fill space have no human philosophy to account for them and have generally been denied by men. The Limanoran sciences had found space, as far as they could investigate it with their senses and their instruments, no less full of energy and life than the world itself, not merely the infinitesimal and attenuated life that they thought the débris of other worlds and systems, but the enfranchised life of highly organised beings, most of it so subtle and noble as to evade even the new senses of the Limanorans. It was the life of such beings that the science of this people aimed at knowing intimately. On some stars, they were certain, existed inhabitants subtly enough organised to cognise this interstellar life without aid of instruments; and they seemed themselves to be on the verge of attaining such a power. When they gained it, they might hold intercourse with that disembodied energy which perchance has close affinity with the soul of God. Towards this higher, enfranchised energy they laboured and struggled incessantly. They believed that its existence could be accounted for only on the assumption of some perennial fountain of free energy in the cosmos; that there must be some great centre of completely enfranchised energy; the course of cosmic evolution pointed that way, and every so-called death or dissolution was but the enfranchisement of some higher type of energy from the lower forms with which it had been for a time allied. Even the fixed nuclei of energy, what were called matter and the atoms, were ever aiming at liberation of the energy that formed their essence. Every dissolution, every step higher in the gradation, implied an ultimate energy that was free from all the trammels of lower forms. This must be the life of pure thought that sees time past and time to be as clearly as time present, that takes in the cosmos at a glance, that needs no sustenance from lower energies, and suffers no birth or dissolution. Towards this the whole cosmos strives; and perhaps there may be a time in the history of existence when all the fixed forms of energy shall have evolved into the free form, till at last there is nothing but space and disembodied thought which is universally perceptive and creative without the aid of mediums of energy or senses. Vast systems of worlds have come and gone in the infinite past only to distil the energy that was in them through living beings up into the final and immortal form that needs no process of dissolution or migration to purify it.

When they turned back from these heights to view the history of the earth, it seemed to them that creative thought was written all over it; could there be any clearer manifestation of the vast intelligence informing the whole than this marvellous elaboration of genus and species raising terrestrial life step by step upwards from the microbe to the highest type of man? Their astronomical sciences pointed still more unmistakably upwards to the fountain of creative thought. The evolution of stars and systems and of life upon them seemed to them but the history of the intelligence of infinitude. They deliberately avoided all conventional idea of the thought of the cosmos, yet were ever tempted through desire of firm ground to use the analogy of a living terrene thing. Just as the body of a plant or animal is ever decaying, ever renewing itself, so is this cosmos, the material existence, the body of the spirit we call God, ever decaying, ever renewing itself, ever raising its energies into higher and higher forms. The universes and systems are molecules, the stars the atoms, of the infinite body of the cosmos, and each one of them is moving and developing in strict relation to all the others and to the abiding spirit that is their aim and master. There is law or thought guiding the history of every one of them and nothing of them is lost; the energy of everything that seems to die has but distilled elsewhere, or transmuted into something higher and less localised. What seems to us decay is but the liberation of an energy from the less refined forms with which it has been allied. Every process moves in rhythm to the pulsations of everlasting thought that is, and realises all that was and is and is to be. Nothing falls by accident. All is transformation, growth, development towards self-subsistent thought, which moves through all the processes, conscious of itself and of them all. To this final spirit of the cosmos ten thousand ages are but as a moment. The myriads of millions of years that some stars live, and that crush our puny thoughts with their vastness, are but one heartbeat of God. The whirling universes are but molecules looked at from the view-point of the final spirit; our telescopic is his microscopic.

Thitherwards all their astronomy pointed. Round our sun move our planets without failure of harmony, and ever round some still farther point moves our sun and his satellites, as thousands of other suns and systems do. Nor did the epicycloidal movement cease there; great systems of universes have still more inward centres. But all this infinitude of concentricism points to some ultimate centre which is again the pivot of the cosmos. Following their analogy from man, they occasionally allowed themselves to think that this was the brain of God, the concentration of His thought-energy. But they refused to let the analogy master them; they threw it off as but a metaphor and waited for clearer and farther-reaching light. To define what lay so far beyond their horizon was to falsify; and they knew too well from their own past history into what labyrinths of error a single untruth will lead a race, especially if it is planted and watered by religion.

Only where science flashed its light forth into the darkness would they dare to define any feature or form of religion. God, they felt, was the infinite conservation of energy. Up an infinite scale it ever climbed towards the ultimate, the purest of all energies, the divine, the goal to which creation groaned and struggled. The grosser forms of energy were the _caput mortuum_ of former mixed beings and worlds, after the sublimation of their purest elements. Out of this residue in its new period of probation were distilled again energies that swept upwards. If such lapses from the universal progress of the cosmos occur in self-conscious forms, as in the soul of man, then are they breaches of morality, or, from the point of view of the all, sins. Conversion is the entrance of consciousness of the universal law and of willing obedience to it into the nature. Religious and moral codes are strivings after it and, unfortunately, attempts to define it that soon falsify its spirit. Miracles are fore-glimpses of this law of progress half-understood, intrusions of an energy loftier than the sect or circle or star has been accustomed to. Every new faith is a miracle to its early believers; for it is a prevision of the universal law which is so far beyond their natural powers that it surprises them into enthusiasm; its miraculous quality makes them accept it as the final revelation, and their descendants, after they have advanced to a natural view of its truths, still uphold the tradition that it is divine, and strain every word and feature of it in order to find the divine in it.

A pioneering book of the time attempted to point the way of biological psychology towards the goal of religion. It showed how the plant has a dim sense of its being moulded from without, chiefly by the grosser forms of energy; and how the animal though subject to them is yet capable of moving amongst them and rebelling against their power; whilst the human is attained when this rebellion rises into capacity to rule them and mould them to its will. It emphasised the Limanoran distinction between the grossly human and the wisely human, and held that there were geological ages of development lying between these; for the one is conscious of the self as merely allied with the grosser forms of energy like the animal; the mark of the other is the consciousness of self as a part of the all, as allied with the law of the all. It conceived that the next grade was the divine, distinguished by consciousness of the all as created and guided by the self. The wise amongst men in its view had thus in them a share of the divine. There was it is true in all men the possibility of this, though in most it was latent. The loftiest kind of energy they had yet discovered had as its distinction the sense of continuity of existence, the power to think back through the past and forward through the future; this is perhaps what is meant by personal identity in Western philosophy, the capacity to keep the self from being merged in the mass of energies that fill space. Men have attained it in but a fitful and shadowy way. In savages and in those of the civilised who fall away from the universal law of progress it is obscured or buried by the dominance of the lower and transitory forms of energy. The book imagined that when the wise die this highest energy is so strong in them that it cannot amalgamate again with those they have been accustomed to upon earth; it seeks higher alliance and higher spheres than it has hitherto known; and, once having found its new and sublimer affinities, it can move amid the grosser forms and elements untainted, unsubdued, unrecognised, by them. Gravitation and heat and electricity have no power over it and come into relationship to it only when it wills to use them; for they are the mediate forms of energy that move the molecules and atoms; and they are moved and piloted by still higher forms, that are perchance the will-power or spirit of God; these higher forms come not yet within the range of human senses, but are inferred by human reason and conceived by human imagination as conscious of themselves, evident every where by their results, the marks of intelligence throughout the cosmos. But this book imagined that the disembodied energy of the wise knew and felt them, and thus came nearer to the spirit and fountain of all. Once our universe has distilled its best energies into space and has accomplished the best it can, our swarm of firefly worlds “paling their now ineffectual fires” encounter in their natural epicycloidal course round unperceived centres the systems that they have encountered myriads of geological ages before; and the collision of the two again sends them on their career of the evolution of their lower energies into higher.

But the Limanorans were chary of claiming anything that they discovered or conceived as the ultimate or the absolute; so many absolutes of the past had after a time yielded points of view into infinities beyond them. Hundreds of their scientific highroads led manifestly towards one centre; but they could not say that that was the final centre or God. Just as their sun with its satellites moved round another centre, which was itself in revolution, so might the common point to which their various sciences seemed to converge be but on the outer rim of a series of sciences that had a still more inward centre. Their highest faculties might have above them faculties belonging to other beings in the cosmos as superior to reason and imagination as reason and imagination were to the sensuous perceptions of the animals. The savage had no power to comprehend the results of the reasoning capacities of the civilised man; and the soul of the sage, when disembodied, might begin to perceive the heights of development in faculty he had still to climb. All their recent experience bade them wait further light and refuse to accept any revelation of being as ultimate, and in the rejection of all dogmatism they attained the true religious attitude for imperfect seekers of knowledge like men, the attitude of waiting for light. The book had embodied in it an apologue that put this belief concretely.

If the parasite of a microbe in the body of a flea were able to examine and analyse its conditions and surroundings and had the faculty of reverence, its first religion would have as its object the host on which it battened, and would endow its deity with its own parasitic faculties and desires. But as its horizon widened and it found its host but the dependent of another vital centre, it would contemn the mediacy of the microbe, and fix all its reverence and adoration upon the flea, which would seem to it a miraculous and omnipotent edition of itself. With its vision and all its powers of observation fixed upon the host of its host, it would soon come to see how its deity was not self-subsistent but ricochetted from spot to spot, and the human body with its comparative infinitude would afterwards take the place of the flea in the reverence of the microbe’s parasite, and be accepted as the vastest and most etherealised edition of itself the parasite could conceive, having no means of ascertaining the real limits and faculties of its new deity. As soon as it was able to measure and define these, it would undeify man and substitute for him that which man inhabited, and endow it with all its own parasitic powers and limitations.

Following the analogy, the new book saw an infinitude of pitfalls and disillusionments before the religious faculty of man, and refused to accept man’s similes and metaphors as in any way accurate representations of the truth. Similes and metaphors they must remain marked by all the narrowness of human limitations. Scientific discovery must be the only guide of religion; and the more they advanced in their sciences, the nearer they came to the true God. For this reason it was that they felt it to be sin to withdraw any portion of their energy or time from scientific pursuits and investigations. To know the cosmos better was to approach nearer to the spirit of the cosmos, to grow more truly religious.

The last decennial review that I witnessed, occurring as it did just before I set out over the circle of mist, impressed upon me the provisional as well as the fundamental character of their religious ideals. Most of the books dramatically presented in Loomiefa at that period had the final aim of cosmic life and energy as their theme; to me they struck far beyond all that the most idealistic of Western religious books had ever attempted to foreshadow; and yet they were wholly based upon the indications that recent discoveries had given. In a still more startling way, they were taken as but temporary satisfactions of futuritive yearnings; they bent the highest energies of the Limanorans into paths that led beyond what they could see from their actual standpoint in science; but they knew from past experience that the full blaze of noon would before long fall upon these dim regions now lit up only by presciential imagination. These books they now reverenced for their pioneering power; but as soon as scientific advance should wither them into the trite and commonplace, nothing could ever make them again guides into the darkness of the unknown, nothing in short could ever restore their sacredness.