CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

Three main thoughts should be kept clear: the end to be realized, the incongruity of the finite and the infinite order, and hence, thirdly, the indispensable ministry of frustration in the realization of the purpose of life.

In regard to the so-called moral end of life, there has been much variety and contrarity of teaching. I shall touch only upon that aspect of the doctrine expounded in the previous book wherein it seems to resemble other doctrines, and where a distinct statement of the difference is therefore imperative. “So act as to develop the faculties of thy fellowman” is not the rule proposed. “So act as to develop the so-called good qualities in the man” is not the rule proposed. The rule reads, “Act so as to bring out the spiritual personality, the unique nature of the other.” Now, in putting the matter in this way, we incurred the danger of seeming to concentrate attention on the individual as a detached being, we seemed to have him only in mind, though it is true, in respect to what is intrinsic in him, the irreducible ethical unit which he essentially is. We must, therefore, constantly remind ourselves that the ethical unit, while unique, is at the same time an inseparable member of a society of differentiated units; that its very distinctiveness consists in injecting, as it were, streams of dynamic energy into its fellow-beings. Or, as I have elsewhere figuratively put it, the distinctiveness of any ethical being consists, so to speak, in emitting a ray the color of which is nowhere else to be found, the miraculous quality of which consists in acquiring this color at the very instant in which it causes counter or complementary colors to appear in its fellow-being. (I am using the words “instant,” “miraculous,” “ray of light,” etc., of course, in a wholly figurative sense.)

We have at last, this is my belief, achieved a positive definition of the spiritual nature. The spiritual nature is that which forever is social in a supra-social sense, as embracing not only human society, but a universal society of spirits. The spiritual nature is that of which the very life consists in starting up unlike but equally worthwhile life elsewhere, everywhere. The spiritual experience to get hold of, therefore, is the consciousness of this interrelation.

The moral end to be realized, in accordance with the deductions of Book II, is “So to act upon another as to evoke in him, and conjointly in oneself, in the same movement and counter-movement the consciousness of the interlacedness of life with life, the reciprocal, universal, infinite interrelatedness.”

Now, as a fact, we never realize this end. If we did we should possess what alone is properly called freedom,—freedom in the positive sense being the exercise of power peculiar to ourselves, welling up out of our veriest self, and executing the totality of its effects. Freedom is marked by these two signs: energy coming unborrowed out of self, and producing the totality of its effects. I am free when the thing I do is verily my own, when the power released is the power of my essential self; and when that power is nowhere checked, inhibited or interrupted, so that it produces its due, that is, its universal effects.

An ethical being in an ethical universe would be free. The dynamic energy proceeding from it would be aboriginal. And since it would radiate upon every other member of the infinite society, it would also produce the unstinted plenitude of its effects. Each ethical unit, at its station, would be at once the _producer and the recipient of the totality of life_.[44]

It is apparent from what has been said that the superlative, sublime thing, freedom, is not realizable except in an infinite world. And hence that the supreme end to be realized by man as a finite being cannot be the full release of unique power in himself. But neither can the end be approximation. In so serious a business as a philosophy of life we ought not to play with words, nor delude ourselves with the implication of proximity seemingly contained in the word approximation. For it being admitted that we cannot reach the ideal, approximation seems to suggest that we come into its neighborhood. But the truth is that the more we advance the less do we arrive in the immediate neighborhood of the ideal, the distance at which it lies becoming ever more remote. The moral end, therefore, for a finite nature, like that of man, is just to realize the unattainableness of the end. There must be no heaven-on-earth illusions, no resting in the development of our inadequate human faculties, and no illusions as to approximation. The unattainableness of the infinite end in the finite world by the finite nature is the Alpha and Omega of the doctrine, as I propound it. Only after this truth has been fully faced and recognized, shall we be in a position to take in the vast significance of the fact that we are nevertheless under a certain coercion to persist in our efforts to attain the unattainable, and in inquiring into the source from which this pressure comes, we shall be led to infer the influence in us of an infinite nature enshrined in this finite nature of ours. In other words, to admit the unattainableness of the end in a finite world by a finite being is the very condition of our acquiring the conviction that there is an infinite world, and that we, as possessing an infinite nature, are included in it.[45]

I have now covered the points mentioned: the end to be realized, the incongruity of the two orders, and the cardinal importance of frustration as a spiritual experience, as a means of spiritual education.

From this point of view the whole question of how to deal with the frustrations of life assumes a new aspect. Lessing published his well-known essay on the Education of the Race towards the close of the eighteenth century.[46] Interest in the subject has since been obscured by the scientific movement, and especially by the evolutionary philosophy. The latter excludes the idea of education in the proper sense, and substitutes for it a natural process, a genetic unfolding. The education of the human race, and of the human individual from the spiritual point of view consists in a series of efforts never to be intermitted, but not necessarily following each other in an orderly series, aiming to embody the infinite in the finite.

Both partial success and failure in these efforts are instrumental to the achievement of the task of mankind. Both serve to make more explicit the character and extent of the ideal, while the ultimate inevitable failure painfully instructs man in the fact of the incongruity of the two orders. The only outcome of human history that we can view with satisfaction on a large scale, is the same as that which we should regard as the best outcome of an individual life, namely, the growing conviction and the clearer vision of the eternal spiritual universe as real. We might say that that man had lived best who on his deathbed could declare with perfect truth: “I have achieved the certainty, and in through the vicissitudes of my life, that there is a universe.” I here emphasize again the distinction between universe and world. To say that the universe is “good” is equivocal. The term “good,” as commonly used, describes the moral striving of a finite nature, and not the quality that belongs to the spiritual universe and its members, thinking of them as ideally we must, as freed from finite limitation. Of the spiritual universe, we might use the term “supra-good,” only we should then be careful to add that the “beyond good” is to be conceived as lying in the direction of the good, while transcending it. Thereby we avoid the pitfall of Nietzsche and of others who speak in a totally different sense of the “beyond good and evil.” We read of a man blessing his children on his deathbed. The highest type of man is the one who _in articulo mortis_ can bless the universe.

The discrepancy of the finite and the infinite order appears on the physical and moral sides. On the physical side it thrusts itself upon our attention in the circumstance that juxtaposition and sequence are incapable of being unified, or totalized. Space and time and that which fills them, matter, are by nature incongruous with spirit. On the moral side the incongruity appears in the deflecting forces of appetite and passion which hinder us in the attainment of the spiritual end and in the fact that our so-called higher faculties are in irreconcilable conflict with one another. The harmonious union of all of them in any individual is a fiction. It is impossible to be fully developed on all sides. And in addition the social substrata in which the spiritual relation has to be worked out, are themselves too deeply beset with internal contrarieties to serve their purpose adequately. The sex relation, for instance, is to a certain extent favorable to the achievement of spirituality, that is, of living in the life of another; yet on the other hand there are elements in it that defeat this very object.

I write, therefore, at the head of such words of counsel as I can hope to give in respect to the conduct of life, the word _Frustration_. It is understood that this word is not used in the pathetic sense. First because there is partial achievement, moments in life at which the rainbow actually seems to touch the earth. Love and marriage, the completing of a beautiful work of art, the discovery of a new law of nature, the emancipation of an oppressed class, are examples. But these partial successes are presently seen to be partial; they are followed, or even in the moment of triumph, permeated, with the sense of incompleteness and the foreboding of new obscurities and perplexities advancing upon the mind. Yet essentially the doctrine is not a melancholy doctrine, because frustration, though a painful instrument, is yet a necessary instrument of spiritual development. We are not open to the reproach of dampening the zest and relish for life of those who are setting out to try the hazard of their fortunes. They shall put forth their best effort to succeed, but let them be so guided herein that they may meet in the right attitude of mind the disillusionment which is the condition of the revelation. The shadows will and must descend before they can be parted, disclosing the landscape of the spiritual universe.

FOOTNOTES:

[44] Incidentally it may be remarked that in introducing the category of interrelation we remove the objection against freedom which remains unmitigable so long as freedom is supposed to be a kind of causality, competing with natural causality. Causality is the unity of a temporal manifold of sequent phenomena. The concept of interrelation is the concept of the unity of co-existent entities.

[45] See some fine remarks on the unattainableness in Tyrrel’s _Christianity at the Cross-roads_.

[46] _Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts._