Chapter VI

WE have our choice; both propositions have been made: we are all body, wholly involved in a mechanical scheme of things, or we are partly free, recognizing within us faculties not wholly subordinated to the rigid physical law of necessity, free to choose, to struggle toward high aims, to succeed in part, in part, perhaps, fail. Pending proof to the contrary, let us assume that our wills have a certain freedom. It is at least better “strategy and tactics” in the battle of life than the reverse. In the absence of a microscopic test to determine the matter, it may be well to demonstrate the existence of the power by using it, making decisive choice of the finer hypothesis, and asserting our right to do so. Perhaps the trouble has come not wholly from the activity of the materialists, but partly from the failure of the idealists to stand by their guns. The folly of perpetual defensive on the part of the idealist has been abundantly demonstrated in late years; it is for him to take the offensive, to claim and hold his own, ceasing to be shame-faced, explanatory, apologetic! Whatever special form our denial of the supremacy of matter may take, whether philosophic or religious, of Plato and Kant, or of Christ, we should band together against this tyranny that threatens the inner life of the race, and affirm the supremacy of spirit.

Consider our forefathers’ faith in the light of a working hypothesis, if you will. It is an age of hypotheses; science is ceaselessly busy with them. Its finest achievements have followed great imaginative conceptions, some of which have been verified by observed fact, some of which have been disproved, some of which, neither proved nor disproved, are still looked upon as a firm basis of knowledge.

The odd thing is that, in science, a whole fundamental assumption may go without interfering with the validity of the information based thereon; disproving one hypothesis, science goes serenely on. They taught me in my college days the indivisible atom quite as dogmatically as, earlier, I had been taught the literal reality of the story of Eve and the serpent. The fact that the atomic theory is now questioned, if not overthrown, in no way invalidates the truths of chemistry, while the passing of the serpent has, in some strange fashion, meant for many people the passing of the Christian faith. It has, in reality, nothing to do with the central tenets of the Christian faith, which are: that the universe is a universe of spirit, controlled by a great spiritual force, for great ends; that, for the guidance of stumbling humanity, the great spiritual force took human form; that mere human beings, keeping mind and soul intent upon that great example, may work out through love and sacrifice immortal meanings in their lives. Has any better working hypothesis ever been suggested to humankind?

Science says, “Here are certain phenomena which we can explain in no other way”; and gives its splendid guess. Why deny to our spiritual life a method freely used in science, the assumption of an hypothesis that most nearly explains observed facts, with the hope of proving it true as knowledge grows more profound? Why may we not say, “Here are certain persistent hopes, inner needs, longings, which we can explain only on the assumption that the universe is a universe of spirit”? These beliefs have been associated with the age-long growth of the race, and are perhaps the very condition of its mental and spiritual development. These facts of the inner life are as truly facts as are those of the outer world, though scientific absorption in matter has made mankind forget this. It is strange that a generation so fond of emphasizing fact should have ignored or even denied the most important facts of all, and so have brought about a crushing limitation to our endeavor. Not only in the external world are facts to be found: the hope, the faith, the long aspiration of the race, those persistent convictions of enlarging destiny which have played so great a part in human growth,--shall these be of no account? When such immense importance is attached to every phase of physical growth in the past, how can we deny the wealth of spiritual experience without being false to the very laws of thought?

So we ask, not what happened to our remotest forbears in the Garden of Eden, but what has happened to our nearer forefathers, whose needs were akin to our own, that will help our human existence. To what have they gallantly held? To what have they come back? To what did they inevitably turn in cruel times of suffering? What are the hopes they could not forget, slow century by century of trial, disappointment, aspiration, agony? Persistent faith in unending life, in which should come the crowning of the spiritual endeavor of this; indomitable belief in righteousness, in distinction between right and wrong; God, a divine wisdom working through all the show of things,--such was their faith. Our forefathers tried and proved it and found it good, living difficult lives and dying hard deaths full of a sense of conquest, of triumph. Their working hypothesis has yet to be surpassed.

The old teaching--whether or not we share the exact shade of intellectual interpretation of ultimate mystery--brought a better sense of relative values than we have now, and a far greater chance of progress. Faith in soul is a better working programme than faith in body. Working forward, however eugenically, toward the Perfect Brute is a poor hope at best. There can be no growth without the boundless, the illimitable, ahead, and the great hopes, undisproved, still shine before us. Life must be made great in its scope, its demand, if it is to achieve greatly. It is a sorry thing to have the guiding forces mere shallow intellectual forces,--mere intellectualism is always shallow,--to reduce the whole of the hope and the wonder and the terror of life to the seeing of the eye, the hearing of the ear, the mere logical deduction, while the larger nature sleeps abashed. A sound hypothesis must cope with all the facts involved; our working hypothesis of life must reckon with the deepest striving of our nature, its furthest longing, its most imaginative reach. There has been great waste of unused powers in these later decades of our period of progress. Half only, and the lesser half, of the human being has been called into activity; the better part of the human faculties have been among the “unemployed.”

Is it not time for the sleepers to waken, rub their eyes, and say, “There is a greater in us than you have let us recognize. This attempt to solve the problems of human nature while leaving the best of human nature out of account has shown its inadequacy. The materialistic interpretation of the universe with its attendant cult of the body is a _cul-de-sac_. Life, personality, are full of larger needs and larger powers than the present trend of thought permits us to recognize; and life must know the diviner hunger, the deeper thirst, if it is to win significance.” This progress, which ignores the higher aspiration, the profounder stirring of the nature,--shall we be therewith content?

Through hope, through faith, through love’s
transcendant dower
We feel that we are greater than we know,

wrote a poet-philosopher who dared trust his soul as leader. In this mathematical and scientific age there is a dread of feeling, of impulse; a fear of this greater self that hopes and fears and prays. We recognize the great part that feeling and impulse play in the evolution of the world of living creatures; yet man, in trying to solve the riddle of his destiny, is forever searching for some narrow rationalistic explanation which will shut these large factors out. There is great distrust of intuition, of the imaginative faculty, when dealing with the inner life; yet imagination, intuition, hold an important place in the study of the outer world; the greatest discoveries in science are, no less than the great achievements of creative art, the result of imaginative grasp of the unrealized. If intuition, daring conjecture, afford such signal service in winning knowledge of the world of matter, why should we, who wish to believe something deeper than that world can ever teach us, be deprived of the use of our larger faculties? Feeling, emotion, play a large part, perhaps the best part, in our sum of human wisdom; passion is a fine instrument of discovery,--spiritual passion, of spiritual truth. Of the utmost help these can give us we have utmost need, as we have of imagination, the divining power, that seer into the inner realities of things, and of “the will as vision.”