Chapter IV

BACK of all this absorption in physical and material welfare lies, of course, the preponderating intellectual influence of the century just past, with its passionate pursuit of truth through matter. No one wishes to decry the services of science to our knowledge of the physical world; the great discoveries in the theoretical field, the great inventions in the applied. It is one of the profoundest ironies of human existence that our blessings and our curses come subtly intertwined; we mortals forget that one seldom comes without the other, and are prone to take as pure blessing that which is new. The measure of curse in our latest great achievements may be greater than we dream, although it is difficult for people to believe, in the sweep of a great movement, that it can mean anything but pure progress in a straight line. Yet we move ever by zigzags, this extreme and that. When will the race ever learn the art of mental equilibrium, of steady advance, employing all the human faculties, instead of exploiting a few?

The many subtle wrongs done the human spirit by this complete surrender to the world of matter, it would be difficult to enumerate. I recall the emphatic assertion of one of the new thinkers, arguing with one who held in all sincerity the old, simple faith: “The only subject worth study is man, man considered from a biological point of view.” The initial genesis, the growth, the inevitable end, the physical actions and reactions,--that is man from the biological point of view. In the presence of people who hold this belief I feel as if an extinguisher were coming down, slowly smothering my very flame of life. You doubtless recall that iron chamber of Spanish Inquisition times, so fashioned that it closed in, day by day, a few inches upon the unfortunate inmate? So life to-day, for unnumbered people, grows narrower, threatening extinction. That earlier victim had no choice; one can but marvel at the modern folk, who themselves turn the key that shuts them in, and are content with their lessening world.

The voices of those who claim that mind is a secretion of matter, of those who find the way to truth through matter only, though not representing the wisest in our intellectual vanguard, have been heard above the others, and humanity is prone to follow where the loud voices call. Whether it is the fault of the leaders, or of the forlorn camp-followers who trail after the victorious army, picking up and misusing scraps of information; whether it is the fault of passive on-lookers, ready to believe anything that is told by anybody,--be it professional utterance or popular inferences therefrom, in many cases unwarranted,--certain it is that we have spent the greater part of our lives in the shadow of the crass materialism which is one of the by-products of the machinery, intellectual and other, of the period just drawing to a close. It is a doctrine which fits absolutely the great and sudden influx of wealth during the last decades, pandering to the same tendencies, the same blindnesses, a twofold materialism of theory and practice.

It is a materialism stupid, unfounded, turning its back upon the earlier idealisms of poet, philosopher, religious believer, not so much because of reasoning processes as because of a sudden shifting of attention. Wonderful things may be observed under the microscope, wonderful things through the telescope; wonderful things are day by day invented. Is it likely that there is anything beyond all this? To recent generations, as to that progressive dog, the reflection in the water seemed for the moment, as is often the case, more real than the reflected object; hence this tragedy of loss.

The human mind has been suddenly diverted by a loud noise outside; a sudden change of tension results. Where one looks quickly, all heads are turned. It is a noise of motor-boats, aeroplanes, engines of all kinds; a sight of airships, flying like birds; of submarines, diving like fish; of moving pictures with their endless panorama. Mankind is childishly diverted; the hearing of the ears, the seeing of the eyes,--it is enough. The skepticisms of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries tried to reason out their origins, to explain upon what they were based; not so here. This is the most unthinking of systems, not troubling to give a rational account of itself. Thought is out of fashion: nowadays we observe! Through this preponderance of observation over thought in this great period, the human mind has greatly suffered in surety of process, in logic, in differentiation of mental processes. The exercise of pure reason has become almost obsolete; the idea that thought can be exercised apart from sense, from study of phenomena, is all but forgotten. Whether or not we assume that matter is the origin and the end of all things, the world of to-day thinks in terms of matter; is content to live and breathe and have its being in matter; hopes, aspires, and prays, if it hope, aspire, and pray at all, in terms of matter.

Our very vocabulary is degraded; the most far-reaching symbols of our language come seldom into use, or appear with diminished meaning. Follow, for instance, the course of the word “infinite” through the antics of contemporary literature. Our phraseology has become carnal; our vital terms are terms of physical life. Nowhere is the limitation of contemporary thought more apparent than in these instruments of speech. One must read again Wordsworth, Shelley, Carlyle, Ruskin, Arnold, Meredith, to meet great words, now little employed, that make you realize the utmost reach of life; in so doing, one pauses in dismay, realizing how full contemporary speech is of lesser terms, how few employ the greater words that tell the inner life of the soul.

All forms of idealism have suffered during the past century of progress, more through being ignored than through being refuted; there still are thinkers who consider Kant, with his demonstration of the universe mind-made, a wiser teacher than any who have followed him, yet these have few disciples. Of the two old hypotheses, that this is a world of spirit, that it is a world of matter, the latter has been the predominant choice of our time. That choice has been reinforced by the impact of a wonderful physical and material development, while there has been no corresponding gain in the spiritual and the purely intellectual; for many years the best of the fine young energy of the race has busied itself, either in investigation or in invention, with the world of matter. We hear endlessly of the great advance of our time, of the surety of its knowledge, the doing away with baseless old idealisms. What, after all, has been achieved? The origin of human thought, the destination of the human thinker, are as profound a secret as before this unparalleled progress. Science, which has been the great intellectual adventure of the last century,--to what has it led us? Only again to that edge of the unknown, where we confront the infinite. It has not gained by one hair’s breadth upon the encompassing mystery of our lives.