Chapter V: Part 5

The things I did, I did because, after all, I am that sort of a person--that is what life is;--and in spite of what others and what I myself might desire, it is that kind of a person that I am. The golden moments I can take a unique and splendid satisfaction in because they are my own; my realization of how poor and weak they might seem, if taken from my treasure-chest and exposed to the gaze of others, does not taint their preciousness, for I can see them in the larger light of my own life. Every man should realize that his life is an epic; unfortunately it usually takes the onlooker to recognize the fact before he does himself. We should oftener read our own epics--and write them. The world is in need of true autobiographies, told in terms of the adventure that life is. Not every one, it is said, possesses the literary gift, but what, on the other hand, is the literary gift but an absorbing interest in the personality of things, and an insight into the wonders of living? Unfortunately it is usually only the eccentric or the distinguished who reveal their inner life. Yet the epic of the humblest life, told in the light of its spiritual shocks and changes, would be enthralling in its interest. But the best autobiographers are still the masters of fiction, those wizards of imaginative sympathy, who create souls and then write their spiritual history, as those souls themselves, were they alive, could perhaps never write them. Every man, however, can cultivate this autobiographical interest in himself, and produce for his own private view a real epic of spiritual adventure. And life will be richer and more full of meaning as the story continues and life accumulates.

Life changes so gradually that we do not realize our progress. This small triumph of yesterday we fail to recognize as the summit of the mountain at whose foot we encamped several years ago in despair. We forget our hopes and wistfulness and struggles. We do not look down from the summit at the valley where we started, and thus we lose the dramatic sense of something accomplished. If a man looking back sees no mountain and valley, but only a straight level plain, it behooves him to take himself straight to some other spiritual country where there is opportunity for climbing and where five years hence will see him on a higher level, breathing purer air. Most people have no trouble in remembering their rights and their wrongs, their pretensions and their ambitions,--things so illusory that they should never even have been thought of. But to forget their progress, to forget their golden moments, their acquisitions of insight and appreciation, the charm of their friends, the sequence of their ideals,--this is indeed a deplorable aphasia! “The days that make us happy make us wise!” Happiness is too valuable to be forgotten, and who will remember yours if you forget it? It is what has made the best of you; or, if you have thrown it away from memory, what could have made you, and made you richer than you are. If you have neglected such contemplation, you are poor, and that poverty will be apparent in your daily personality.

Life in its essence is a heaping-up and accumulation of thought and insight. It should mount higher and higher, and be more potent and flowering as life is lived. If you do not keep in your memory and spirit the finer accumulations of your life, it will be as if you had only partly lived. Your living will be a travesty on life, and your progress only a dull mechanical routine. Even though your life may be outwardly routine, inwardly, as moralists have always known, it may be full of adventure. Be happy, but not too contented. Contentment may be a vice as well as a virtue; too often it is a mere cover for sluggishness, and not a sign of triumph. The mind must have a certain amount of refreshment and novelty; it will not grow by staying too comfortably at home, and refusing to put itself to the trouble of travel and change. It needs to be disturbed every now and then to keep the crust from forming. People do not realize this, and let themselves become jaded and uninterested--and therefore uninteresting--when such a small touch of novelty would inspire and stimulate them. A tired interest, in a healthy mind, wakes with as quick a response to a new touch or aspect as does a thirsty flower to the rain. Too many people sit in prison with themselves until they get meagre and dull, when the door was really all the time open, and outside was freshness and green grass and the warm sun, which might have revived them and made them bright again. Listlessness in an old man or woman is often the telltale sign of such an imprisonment. Life, instead of being an accumulation of spiritual treasure, has been the squandering of its wealth, in a lapse of interest, as soon as it was earned. Even unbearable sorrow might have been the means, by a process of transmutation, of acquiring a deeper appreciation of life’s truer values. But the squanderer has lost his vision, because he did not retain on the background of memory his experience, against which to contrast his new reactions, and did not have the emotional image of old novelties to spur him to the apprehension and appreciation of new ones.

More amazing even than the lack of a healthy interest in their own personalities is the lack of most people of an interest, beyond one of a trivial or professional nature, in others. Our literary artists have scarcely begun to touch the resources of human ways and acts. Writers surrender reality for the sake of a plot, and in attempting to make a point, or to write adventure, squeeze out the natural traits and nuances of character and the haphazardnesses of life that are the true adventure and point. We cannot know too much about each other. All our best education comes from what people tell us or what we observe them do. We cannot endure being totally separated from others, and it is well that we cannot. For it would mean that we should have then no life above the satisfaction of our crudest material wants. Our keenest delights are based upon some manifestation or other of social life. Even gossip arises not so much from malice as from a real social interest in our neighbors; the pity of it is, of course, that to so many people it is only the misfortunes and oddities that are interesting.

Let our interests in the social world with which we come in contact be active and not passive. Let us give back in return as good an influence and as much as is given to us. Let us live so as to stimulate others, so that we call out the best powers and traits in them, and make them better than they are, because of our comprehension and inspiration. Our life is so bound up with our friends and teachers and heroes (whether present in the flesh or not), and we are so dependent upon them for nourishment and support, that we are rarely aware how little of us there would be left were they to be taken away. We are seldom conscious enough of the ground we are rooted in and the air we breathe. We can know ourselves best by knowing others. There are adventures of personality in acting and being acted upon, in studying and delighting in the ideas and folkways of people that hold much in store for those who will only seek them.

Thus in its perils and opportunities, in its satisfactions and resistances, in its gifts and responsibilities, for good or for evil, life is an adventure. In facing its evil, we shall not let it daunt or depress our spirits; we shall surrender some of our responsibility for the Universe, and face forward, working and encouraging those around us to coöperate with us and with all who suffer, in fighting preventable wrong. Death we shall transcend by interpreting everything in terms of life; we shall be victorious over it by recognizing in it an aspect of a larger life in which we are immersed. We shall accept gladly the wealth of days poured out for us. Alive, in a living world, we shall cultivate those interests and qualities which enhance life. We shall try to keep the widest possible fund of interests in order that life may mount ever richer, and not become jaded and wearied in its ebb-flow. We shall never cease to put our questions to the heart of the world, intent on tracking down the mysteries of its behavior and its meaning, using each morsel of knowledge to pry further into its secrets, and testing the tools we use by the product they create and the hidden chambers they open. To face the perils and hazards fearlessly, and absorb the satisfactions joyfully, to be curious and brave and eager,--is to know the adventure of life.

VII

SOME THOUGHTS ON RELIGION

In youth we grow and learn and always the universe widens around us. The horizon recedes faster than we can journey towards it. There comes a time when we look back with longing to the days when everything we learned seemed a fast gaining upon the powers of darkness, and each new principle seemed to illuminate and explain an immense region of the world. We had only to keep on learning in steady progress, it seemed, until we should have dominion over the whole of it. But there came a time, perhaps, when advance halted, and our carefully ordered world began to dissipate and loose ends and fringes to appear. It became a real struggle to keep our knowledge securely boxed in our one system, indeed, in any system, as we found when we restlessly tried one dogma after another as strong-boxes for our spiritual goods. Always something eluded us; it was “ever not quite.” Just when we were safest, some new experience came up to be most incongruously unaccounted for. We had our goods, for instance, safely stowed away in the box of “materialism,” when suddenly we realized that, on its theory, our whole life might run along precisely as we see it now, we might talk and love and paint and build without a glimmer of consciousness, that wondrous stuff which is so palpably our light and our life. The materialist can see in us nothing but the inert accompaniment of our bodies, the helpless, useless, and even annoying spectators of the play of physical forces through these curious compounds of chemical elements that we call our bodies. Or if, filled with the joy of creation, we tried to pack our world into the dogma of “idealism” and see all hard material things as emanations from our spiritual self and plastic under our hand, we were brought with a shock against some tough, incorrigible fact that sobered our elation, and forced the unwilling recognition of our impotence upon us again.

It is not, however, from an excess of idealism that the world suffers to-day. But it is sick rather with the thorough-going and plausible scientific materialism with which our philosophy and literature seem to reek. Pure idealism has long ago proved too intoxicating a confirmation of our hopes and desires to seduce for long our tough-mindedness. Science has come as a challenge to both our courage and our honesty. It covertly taunts us with being afraid to face the universe as it is; if we look and are saddened, we have seemed to prove ourselves less than men. For this advance of scientific speculation has seemed only to increase the gulf between the proven and certain facts, and all the values and significances of life that our reactions to its richness have produced in us. And so incorrigibly honest is the texture of the human mind that we cannot continue to believe in and cultivate things that we no longer consider to be real. And science has undermined our faith in the reality of a spiritual world that to our forefathers was the only reality in the universe. We are so honest, however, that when the scientist relegates to a subjective shadowy realm our world of qualities and divinities, we cannot protest, but only look wistfully after the disappearing forms. A numbness has stolen over our religion, art, and literature, and the younger generation finds a chill and torpor in those interests of life that should be the highest inspiration.

Religion in these latter days becomes poetry, about which should never be asked the question, “Is it true?” Art becomes a frivolous toy; literature a daily chronicle.

There is thus a crucial intellectual dilemma that faces us to-day. If we accept whole-heartedly the spiritual world, we seem to be false to the imposing new knowledge of science which is rapidly making the world comprehensible to us; if we accept all the claims and implications of science, we seem to trample on our own souls. Yet we feel instinctively the validity of both aspects of the world. Our solution will seem to be, then, to be content with remaining something less than monists. We must recognize that this is an infinite universe, and give up our attempt to get all our experience under one roof. Striving ever for unity, we must yet understand that this “not-quite-ness” is one of the fundamental principles of things. We can no longer be satisfied with a settlement of the dreary conflict between religion and science which left for religion only the task of making hazardous speculations which science was later to verify or cast aside, as it charted the seas of knowledge. We cannot be content with a religion which science is constantly overtaking and wiping out, as it puts its brave postulates of faith to rigorous test.

The only view of religion and science that will satisfy us is one that makes them each the contemplation of a different aspect of the universe,--one, an aspect of quantities and relations, the other, an aspect of qualities, ideals, and values. They may be coördinate and complementary, but they are not expressible in each others’ terms. There is no question of superior reality. The blue of a flower is just as real as the ether waves which science tells us the color “really” is. Scientific and intuitive knowledge are simply different ways of appreciating an infinite universe. Scientific knowledge, for all its dogmatic claims to finality, is provisional and hypothetical. “If we live in a certain kind of a world,” it says, “certain things are true.” Each fact hinges upon another. Yet these correlations of the physical world are so certain and predictable that no sane mind can doubt them. On the other hand, our knowledge of qualities is direct and immediate, and seems to depend on nothing for its completeness. Yet it is so uncertain and various that no two minds have precisely the same reactions, and we do not ourselves have the same reactions at different times.

And these paradoxes give rise to the endless disputes as to which gives the more real view of the universe in which we find ourselves living. The matter-of-fact person takes the certainty and lets the immediacy go; the poet and the mystic and the religious man choose the direct revelation and prize this vision far above any logical cogency. Now it will be the task of this intellectual generation to conquer the paradoxes by admitting the validity of both the matter-of-fact view and the mystical. And it is the latter that requires the present emphasis; it must be resuscitated from the low estate into which it has fallen. We must resist the stern arrogances of science as vigorously as the scientist has resisted the allurements of religion. We must remind him that his laws are not visions of eternal truth, so much as rough-and-ready statements of the practical nature of things, in so far as they are useful to us for our grappling with our environment and somehow changing it. We must demand that he climb down out of the papal chair, and let his learning become what it was meant to be,--the humble servant of humanity. Truth for truth’s sake is an admirable motto for the philosopher, who really searches to find the inner nature of things. But the truth of science is for use’s sake. To seek for physical truth which is irrelevant to human needs and purposes is as purely futile an intellectual gymnastic as the logical excesses of the schoolmen. The scientist is here to tell us the practical workings of the forces and elements of the world; the philosopher, mystic, artist, and poet are here to tell us of the purposes and meanings of the world as revealed directly, and to show us the ideal aspect through their own clear fresh vision.

That vision, however, must be controlled and enriched by the democratic experience of their fellow men; their ideal must be to reveal meanings that cannot be doubted by the normal soul, in the same way that scientific formulations cannot be doubted by the normal mind. It is here that we have a quarrel with old religion and old poetry, that the vision which it brings us is not sufficiently purged of local discolorations or intellectualistic taints. But it is not a quarrel with religion and poetry as such; this age thirsts for a revelation of the spiritual meanings of the wider world that has been opened to us, and the complex and baffling anomalies that seem to confront us. It is our imperative duty to reëmphasize the life of qualities and ideals, to turn again our gaze to that aspect of the world from which men have always drawn what gave life real worth and reinstate those spiritual things whose strength advancing knowledge has seemed to sap. There is room for a new idealism, but an idealism that sturdily keeps its grip on the real, that grapples with the new knowledge and with the irrevocable loss of much of the old poetry and many of the old values, and wrests out finer qualities and a nobler spiritual life than the world has yet seen. It is not betrayal of our integrity to believe that the desires and interests of men, their hopes and fears and creative imaginings, are as real as any atoms or formulas.

Now the place of religion in this new idealism will be the same place that its essential spirit has always held in the spiritual life of men. Religion is our sense of the quality of the universe itself, the broadest, profoundest, and most constant of our intuitions. Men have always felt that, outside of the qualities of concrete things, there lay a sort of infinite quality that they could identify with the spirit of the universe, and they have called it God. To this quality men have always responded, and that response and appreciation is religion. To appreciate this cosmic quality is to be religious, and to express that appreciation is to worship. Religion is thus as much and eternally a part of life as our senses themselves; the only justification for making away with religion would be an event that would make away with our senses. The scientist must always find it difficult to explain why, if man’s mind, as all agree that it did, developed in adaptation to his environment, it should somehow have become adapted so perfectly to a spiritual world of qualities and poetic interpretation of phenomena, and not to the world of atomic motion and mechanical law which scientific philosophy assures us is the “real” world. Our minds somehow adapted themselves, not to the hard world of fact, but to a world of illusion, which had not the justification of being even practically useful or empirically true. If the real world is mechanical, we should have a right to expect the earliest thinking to be scientific, and the spiritual life to come in only after centuries of refinement of thought. But the first reactions of men were of course purely qualitative, and it is only within the last few minutes of cosmic time that we have known of the quantitative relations of things. Is it hard, then, to believe that, since we and the world have grown up together, there must be some subtle correlation between it and the values and qualities that we feel, that our souls must reflect--not faithfully, perhaps, because warped by a thousand alien compelling physical forces, and yet somehow indomitably--a spiritual world that is perhaps even more real, because more immediate and constant, than the physical? We may partially create it, but we partially reflect it too.

That cosmic quality we feel as personality. Not artificial or illusive is this deeply rooted anthropomorphic sense which has always been at the bottom of man’s religious consciousness. We are alive, and we have a right to interpret the world as living; we are persons, and we have a right to interpret the world in terms of personality. In all religions, through the encrustations of dogma and ritual, has been felt that vital sense of the divine personality, keeping clean and sweet the life of man. The definite appeal of the Church, in times like these, when the external props fall away, is to the incarnation of the divine personality, and the ideal of character deduced from it as a pattern for life. This is the religion of ordinary people to-day; it has been the heart of Christianity for nineteen hundred years. Our feeling of this cosmic quality may be vague or definite, diffused or crystallized, but to those of us who sense behind our pulsing life a mystery which perplexes, sobers, and elevates us, that quality forms a permanent scenic background for our life.

To feel this cosmic quality of a divine personality, in whom we live, move, and have our being, is to know religion. The ordinary world we live in is incurably dynamic; we are forced to think and act in terms of energy and change and constant rearrangement and flux of factors and elements. And we live only as we give ourselves up to that stream and play of forces. Throughout all the change, however, there comes a sense of this eternal quality. In the persistence of our own personality, the humble fragment of a divine personality, we get the pattern of its permanence. The Great Companion is ever with us, silently ratifying our worthy deeds and tastes and responses. The satisfactions of our spiritual life, of our judgments and appreciations of morality and art and any kind of excellence, come largely from this subtle corroboration that we feel from some unseen presence wider than ourselves. It accompanies not a part but the whole of our spiritual life, silently strengthening our responses to personality and beauty, our sense of irony, the refinement of our taste, sharpening our moral judgment, elevating our capacities for happiness, filling ever richer our sense of the worth of life. And this cosmic influence in which we seem to be immersed we can no more lose or doubt--after we have once felt the rush of time past us, seen a friend die, or brooded on the bitter thought of our personal death, felt the surge of forces of life and love, wondered about consciousness, been melted before beauty--than we can lose or doubt ourselves. The wonder of it is exhaustless,--the beneficence over whose workings there yet breathes an inexorable sternness, the mystery of time and death, the joy of beauty and creative art and sex, and sheer consciousness.

Against this scenic background, along this deep undercurrent of feeling, our outward, cheerful, settled, and orderly life plays its part. That life is no less essential; we must be willing to see life in two aspects, the world as deathless yet ever-creative, evolution yet timeless eternity. To be religious is to turn our gaze away from the dynamic to the static and the permanent, away from the stage to the scenic background of our lives. Religion cannot, therefore, be said to have much of a place in our activity of life, except as it fixes the general emotional tone. We have no right to demand that it operate practically, nor can we call altruistic activity, and enthusiasm for a noble cause, religion. Moral action is really more a matter of social psychology than of religion. All religions have been ethical only as a secondary consideration. Religion in and for itself is something else; we can enjoy it only by taking, as it were, the moral holiday into its regions when we are weary of the world of thinking and doing. It is a land to retreat into when we are battered and degraded by the dynamic world about us, and require rest and recuperation. It is constantly there behind us, but to live in it always is to take a perpetual holiday.

At all times we may have its beauty with us, however, as we may have prospects of far mountains and valleys. As we go in the morning to work in the fields, religion is this enchanting view of the mountains, inspiring us and lifting our hearts with renewed vigor. Through all the long day’s work we feel their presence with us, and have only to turn around to see them shining splendidly afar with hope and kindliness. Even the austerest summits are warm in the afternoon sun. Yet if we gaze at them all day long, we shall accomplish no work. Nor shall we finish our allotted task if we succumb to their lure and leave our fields to travel towards them. As we return home weary at night, the mountains are still there to refresh and cheer us with their soft colors and outline blended in the purple light. When our task is entirely done, it has been our eternal hope to journey to those far mountains and valleys; if this is not to be, at least their glorious view will be the last to fall upon us as we close our eyes. But we know that, whatever happens, if we have done our work well, have performed faithfully our daily tasks of learning to control and manage and make creative the tough soil of this material world in which we find ourselves, if we have neither allowed its toughness to distract us from the beauty of the eternal background, nor let those far visions slow down the wheels of life, distract us from our work, or blur our thought and pale by their light the other qualities and beauties around us--we shall attain what is right for us when we lay down our tools. In a living world, death can be no more than an apparition.

VIII

THE MYSTIC TURNED RADICAL

The mystical temperament is little enough popular in this workaday modern world of ours. The mystic, we feel, comes to us discounted from the start; he should in all decency make constant apologies for his existence. In a practical age of machinery he is an anomaly, an anachronism. He must meet the direct challenge of the scientist, who guards every approach to the doors of truth and holds the keys of its citadel. Any thinker who gets into the fold by another way is a thief and a robber.

The mystic must answer that most heinous of all charges,--of being unscientific. By tradition he is even hostile to science. For his main interest is in wonder, and science by explaining things attacks the very principle of his life. It not only diminishes his opportunities for wonder, but threatens to make him superfluous by ultimately explaining everything.

The scientist may say that there is no necessary antithesis between explanation and that beautiful romance of thought we call wonder. The savage, who can explain nothing, is the very creature who has no wonder at all. Everything is equally natural to him. Only a mind that has acquaintance with laws of behavior can be surprised at events.

The wonder of the scientist, however, although it be of a more robust, tough-minded variety, is none the less wonder. A growing acquaintance with the world, an increasing at-homeness in it, is not necessarily incompatible with an ever-increasing marvel both at the beautiful fitness of things and the limitless field of ignorance and mystery beyond. So the modern mystic must break with his own tradition if he is to make an appeal to this generation, and must recognize that the antithesis between mystic and scientific is not an eternally valid one.

It is just through realization of this fact that Maeterlinck, the best of modern mystics, makes his extraordinary appeal. For, as he tells us, the valid mystery does not begin at the threshold of knowledge but only after we have exhausted our resources of knowing. His frank and genuine acceptance of science thus works out a _modus vivendi_ between the seen and the unseen. It allows many of us who have given our allegiance to science to hail him gladly as a prophet who supplements the work of the wise men of scientific research, without doing violence to our own consciences. For the world is, in spite of its scientific clamor, still far from ready really to surrender itself to prosaicness. It is still haunted with the dreams of the ages--dreams of short roads to truth, visions of finding the Northwest passage to the treasures of the Unseen. Only we must go as far as possible along the traveled routes of science.

Maeterlinck is thus not anti-scientific or pseudo-scientific, but rather sub-scientific. He speaks of delicately felt and subtle influences and aspects of reality that lie beneath the surface of our lives, of forces and shadows that cannot be measured quantitatively or turned into philosophical categories. Or we may say that he is ultra-scientific. As science plods along, opening up the dark wilderness, he goes with the exploring party, throwing a search-light before them; flickering enough and exasperatingly uncertain at times, but sufficiently constant to light up the way, point out a path, and give us confidence that the terrors before us are not so formidable as we have feared. His influence on our time is so great because we believe that he is a seer, a man with knowledge of things hidden from our eyes. We go to him as to a spiritual clairvoyant,--to have him tell us where to find the things our souls have lost.

But the modern mystic must not only recognize the scientific aspect of the age,--he must feel the social ideal that directs the spiritual energies of the time. It is the glory of Maeterlinck’s mysticism that it has not lingered in the depths of the soul, but has passed out to illuminate our thinking in regard to the social life about us. The growth of this duality of vision has been with him a long evolution. His early world was a shadowy, intangible thing. As we read the early essays, we seem to be constantly hovering on the verge of an idea, just as when we read the plays we seem to be hovering on the verge of a passion. This long brooding away from the world, however, was fruitful and momentous. The intense gaze inward trained the eye, so that when the mists cleared away and revealed the palpitating social world about him, his insight into its meaning was as much more keen and true than our own as had been his sense of the meaning of the individual soul. The light he turns outward to reveal the meaning of social progress is all the whiter for having burned so long within.

In the essay on “Our Social Duty,” the clearest and the consummate expression of this new outward look, there are no contaminating fringes of vague thought; all is clear white light. With the instinct of the true radical, the poet has gone to the root of the social attitude. Our duty as members of society is to be radical, he tells us. And not only that, but an excess of radicalism is essential to the equilibrium of life. Society so habitually thinks on a plane lower than is reasonable that it behooves us to think and to hope on an even higher plane than seems to be reasonable. This is the overpoweringly urgent philosophy of radicalism. It is the beautiful courage of such words that makes them so vital an inspiration.

It is the sin of the age that nobody dares to be anything to too great a degree. We may admire extremists in principle, but we take the best of care not to imitate them ourselves. Who in America would even be likely to express himself as does Maeterlinck in this essay? Who of us would dare follow the counsel? Of course we can plead extenuation. In Europe the best minds are thinking in terms of revolution still, while in America our radicalism is still simply amateurish and incompetent.

To many of us, then, this call of Maeterlinck’s to the highest of radicalisms will seem irrelevant; this new social note which appears so strongly in all his later work will seem a deterioration from the nobler mysticism of his earlier days. But rather should it be viewed as the fruit of matured insight. There has been no decay, no surrender. It is the same mysticism, but with the direction of the vision altered. This essay is the expression of the clearest vision that has yet penetrated our social confusion, the sanest and highest ideal that has been set before progressive minds. It may be that its utter fearlessness, its almost ascetic detachment from the matter-of-fact things of political life, its clear cold light of conviction and penetration, may repel some whose hearts have been warmed by Maeterlinck’s subtle revelations of the spiritual life. They may reproach him because it has no direct bearings on the immediate practical social life; it furnishes no weapon of reform, no tool with which to rush out and overthrow some vested abuse. But to the traveler lost in the wood the one thing needful is a pole-star to show him his direction. The star is unapproachable, serene, cold, and lofty. But although he cannot touch it, or utilize it directly to extend his comfort and progress, it is the most useful of all things to him. It fills his heart with a great hope; it coördinates his aimless wanderings and gropings, and gives meaning and purpose to his course.

So a generation lost in a chaos of social change can find in these later words of Maeterlinck a pole-star and a guide. They do for the social life of man what the earlier essays did for the individual. They endow it with values and significances that will give steadfastness and resource to his vision as he looks out on the great world of human progress, and purpose and meaning to his activity as he looks ahead into the dim world of the future.

IX

SEEING, WE SEE NOT

It is a mere superstition, Maeterlinck tells us in one of his beautiful essays, that there is anything irrevocable about the past. On the contrary, we are constantly rearranging it, revising it, remaking it. For it is only in our memory that it exists, and our conception of it changes as the loose fringes of past events are gathered up into a new meaning, or when a sudden fortune lights up a whole series in our lives, and shows us, stretching back in orderly array and beautiful significance, what we had supposed in our blindness to be a sad and chaotic welter. It is no less a superstition to suppose that we have a hand in making the present. The present, like the past, is always still to be made; indeed, must wait its turn, so to speak, to be seen in its full meaning until after the past itself has been remoulded and reconstituted. It is depressing to think that we do not know our own time, that the events we look upon have a permanent value far different from the petty one that we endow them with, that they fit into a larger whole of which we see only a dim fraction--and that the least important because the seed of something that shall come much later into full fruition. Must our short life pass away without knowledge or vision of the majestic processes which are unfolding themselves under our very eyes, while we have wasted our admiration and distorted our purpose by striving to interpret the ephemeral, that is gone as soon as we? Even the wisest among us can see with but a dim eye into the future, and make rather a lucky guess at its potentialities than a true prophecy based on a realization of the real tendencies of the time. It is only the Past that we really make. And this may account for our love of it. This fragile thing of tradition that we have so carefully constructed and so lovingly beautified, this artistic creation of a whole people or race, becomes most naturally the object of our tenderest solicitude. Any attack upon it that suggests a marring of its golden beauty, any new proposal that threatens to render it superfluous, elicits the outraged cry of anger, the passionate defense, of the mother protecting her child. For the Past is really the child of the Present. We are the authors of its being, and upon it we lavish all our thoughts, our interest and our delight. And even our hopes are centred in the Past, for the most enthusiastic among us can do no more than hope that something worth while will come out of the Past to nourish us in the approaching Present. Concern for the Future is so new a thing in human history that we are hardly yet at home with the feeling. Perhaps, if we thought more about what was before us, we should come to know more about it. Meanwhile our only consolation is that if _we_ cannot see, neither did the generations that were before us. And we have the advantage of _knowing_ that we do not see, while they did not care about their ignorance at all.

We have constantly to check ourselves in reading history with the remembrance that, to the actors in the drama, events appeared very differently from the way they appear to us. We know what they were doing far better than they knew themselves. We are in the position of the novel reader who looks, before he begins to read, to see how the plot turns out. This orderly and dramatic chronicle of history that thrills us as we read has only been orderly and dramatic to readers of the present time, who can see the _dénouement_ of the story. History is peculiarly the creation of the present. Even the great men of the past are largely the agglomerations of centuries of hero-worship. Genius is as much a slow accretion of the ages as an endowment of man. Few great poets were seen in the full glory of their superhuman capacity by their fellows. Contemporary opinion of the great has been complimentary but seldom excessively laudatory, and there are sad instances of the decay and deflation of a supernatural personality through the smooth, gentle, imperceptibly creeping oblivion of the centuries.

We rarely see what is distinctive in our own time. The city builders of the West are quite unconscious of the fact that they are leaving behind them imperishable and mighty memorials of themselves. Few of the things that we admire now will be considered by posterity as noteworthy and distinctive of our age. All depends on the vitality of our customs and social habits, and some show as high a mortality as others do a stubborn tenacity of life. What we are witnessing is a gigantic struggle of customs and ideas to survive and propagate their kind. The means of subsistence is limited; it is impossible that all should be able to live. The fascinating problem for the social philosopher is which of these beliefs and tendencies will prove strong enough to overcome their rivals and make their stock a permanent type. How many of the fads and brilliant theories and new habits of thought and taste will be able to maintain their place in the world? If we could discern them, we should know the distinction of our age. Definite epochs of the past we distinguish and celebrate because they contained the germs of ideas or the roots of institutions that still survive among us, or customs and habits of thought that flourished in them with great brilliancy but have now utterly passed away. Now these beginnings are quite too subtle for us to see in our contemporary life, and there are so many brilliancies that it is impossible to pick out with any definiteness the things which have power to project themselves into the future, and cast a broad trail of light back to our age. Most of those very things that seem to us imperishable will be the ones to fade,--fade, indeed, so gradually that they will not even be missed. It is this gradual disappearance that gives the most thorough oblivion. History remembers only the brilliant failures and the brilliant successes.

We are fond of calling this an age of transition, but if we trace history back we find that practically every age--at least for many centuries--has been an age of transition. If we must set a starting-point from which we have been moving, the social philosopher will be inclined to place it about the beginning of the sixteenth century. If we have been in transition for four hundred years, it seems almost time to settle down from this wild ferment of beliefs and discoveries that has kept the world’s mind in constant turmoil since the time of the Renaissance. There are signs that such a crystallization is taking place. We are weeding out our culture, and casting aside the classical literature that was the breeding-ground for the old ideas. We have achieved as yet little to take its place. Most of the modern literature is rather a restless groping about in the dark for new modes of thinking and new principles of life, and thus far it hardly seems to have grasped the robust and vital in the new to any appreciable extent. One can hardly believe that this morbid virus that is still working with undiminished vigor and deadly effect will succeed in making itself the dominant note in European literature for the next five hundred years. One hates to think that our posterity is to be doomed to torture itself into appreciating our feverish modern art and music, and learn to rank the wild complexities of Strauss with the sublimities of Beethoven. Shall we be sure that the conquest of the air is finally achieved and a third dimension added to man’s traveling, or is it all simply another daring and brilliant stab at the impossible, another of those blasphemies against nature which impious man is constantly striving to commit? There are few signs of the Socialistic State, but who knows what births of new institutions, of which we are now quite unaware, future ages will see to have been developing in our very midst? Is religion doomed, or is it merely being transformed, so that we shall be seen to have been creating amid all our indifference a new type and a new ideal? Will our age actually be distinctive as the era of the Dawn of Peace, or will the baby institution of arbitration disappear before a crude and terrible reality? Are we progressing, or shall we seem to have sown the seeds of world decay in this age of ours, and at a great crisis in history let slip another opportunity to carry mankind to a higher social level? It is maddening to the philosopher to think how long he will have to live to find an answer to these questions. He wants to know, but in the present all he can do is to guess at random. Not immortality, but an opportunity to wake up every hundred years or so to see how the world is progressing, may well be his desire and his dream. Such an immortality may be incredible, but it is the only form which has ever proved satisfactory, or ever will, to the rational man.

X

THE EXPERIMENTAL LIFE

It is good to be reasonable, but too much rationality puts the soul at odds with life. For rationality implies an almost superstitious reliance on logical proofs and logical motives, and it is logic that life mocks and contradicts at every turn. The most annoying people in the world are those who demand reasons for everything, and the most discouraging are those who map out ahead of them long courses of action, plan their lives, and systematically in the smallest detail of their activity adapt means to ends. Now the difficulty with all the prudential virtues is that they imply a world that is too good to be true. It would be pleasant to have a world where cause and effect interlocked, where we could see the future, where virtue had its reward, and our characters and relations with other people and the work we wish to do could be planned out with the same certainty with which cooks plan a meal. But we know that that is not the kind of a world we actually live in. Perhaps men have thought that, by cultivating the rational virtues and laying emphasis on prudence and forethought, they could bend the stubborn constitution of things to meet their ideals. It has always been the fashion to insist, in spite of all the evidence, that the world was in reality a rational place where certain immutable moral principles could be laid down with the same certainty of working that physical laws possess. It has always been represented that the correct procedure of the moral life was to choose one’s end or desire, to select carefully all the means by which that end could be realized, and then, by the use of the dogged motive force of the will, to push through the plans to completion. In the homilies on success, it has always been implied that strength of will was the only requisite. Success became merely a matter of the ratio between the quantity of effort and will-power applied, and the number of obstacles to be met. If one failed, it was because the proper amount of effort had not been applied, or because the plans had not been properly constructed. The remedy was automatically to increase the effort or rationalize the plans. Life was considered to be a battle, the strategy of which a general might lay out beforehand, an engagement in which he might plan and anticipate to the minutest detail the movement of his forces and the disposition of the enemy. But one does not have to live very long to see that this belief in the power and the desirability of controlling things is an illusion. Life works in a series of surprises. One’s powers are given in order that one may be alert and ready, resourceful and keen. The interest of life lies largely in its adventurousness, and not in its susceptibility to orderly mapping. The enemy rarely comes up from the side the general has expected; the battle is usually fought out on vastly different lines from those that have been carefully foreseen and rationally organized. And similarly in life do complex forces utterly confound and baffle our best laid plans.

Our strategy, unless it is open to instant correction, unless it is flexible, and capable of infinite resource and modification, is a handicap rather than an aid in the battle of life. In spite of the veracious accounts of youths hewing their way to success as captains of industry or statesmen, with their eye singly set on a steadfast purpose, we may be sure that life seldom works that way. It is not so tractable and docile, even to the strongest. The rational ideal is one of those great moral hypocrisies which every one preaches and no one practices, but which we all believe with superstitious reverence, and which we take care shall be proven erroneous by no stubborn facts of life. Better that the facts should be altered than that the moral tradition should die!

One of its evil effects is the compressing influence it has on many of us. Recognizing that for us the world is an irrational place, we are willing to go on believing that there are at least some gifted beings who are proving the truth and vindicating the eternal laws of reason. We join willingly the self-stigmatized ranks of the incompetent and are content to shine feebly in the reflected light of those whose master wills and power of effort have brought them through in rational triumph to their ends. The younger generation is coming very seriously to doubt both the practicability and worth of this rational ideal. They do not find that the complex affairs of either the world or the soul work according to laws of reason. The individual as a member of society is at the mercy of great social laws that regulate his fortune for him, construct for him his philosophy of life, and dictate to him his ways of making a living. As an individual soul, he is the creature of impulses and instincts which he does not create and which seem to lie quite outside the reach of his rational will. Looked at from this large social viewpoint, his will appears a puny affair indeed. There seems little room left in which to operate, either in the sphere of society or in his own spiritual life. That little of free-will, however, which there is, serves for our human purposes. It must be our care simply that we direct it wisely; and the rational ideal is not the wisest way of directing it. The place of our free will in the scheme of life is not to furnish driving, but _directing_ power. The engineer could never create the power that drives his engine, but he can direct it into the channels where it will be useful and creative. The superstition of the strong will has been almost like an attempt to create power, something the soul could never do. The rational ideal has too often been a mere challenge to attain the unattainable. It has ended in futility or failure.

This superstition comes largely from our incorrigible habit of looking back over the past, and putting purpose into it. The great man looking back over his career, over his ascent from the humble level of his boyhood to his present power and riches, imagines that that ideal success was in his mind from his earliest years. He sees a progress, which was really the happy seizing of fortunate opportunities, as the carrying-out of a fixed purpose. But the purpose was not there at the beginning; it is the crowning touch added to the picture, which completes and satisfies our age-long hunger for the orderly and correct. But we all, rich and poor, successful and unsuccessful, live from hand to mouth. We all alike find life at the beginning a crude mass of puzzling possibilities. All of us, unless we inherit a place in the world,--and then we are only half alive,--have the same precarious struggle to get a foothold. The difference is in the fortune of the foothold, and not in our private creation of any mystical force of will. It is a question of happy occasions of exposure to the right stimulus that will develop our powers at the right time. The capacity alone is sterile; it needs the stimulus to fertilize it and produce activity and success. The part that our free will can play is to expose ourselves consciously to the stimulus; it cannot create it or the capacity, but it can bring them together.