Part 13

He put the lever to its limit: the rhythm of the cosmos altered again in relation to his own. He had an extraordinary sense of being on the verge of a revelation. The universe--that was the same; but what he experienced of it was totally different. He had immediate experience of the waxing and waning of suns, of the condensation of nebulæ, the slowing down and speeding up of evolutionary processes.

The curious, apparently telepathic sense which he had had of the mental side of existence was intensified. Through it, the world began to be perceived as a single Being, with all its parts in interaction. The shadowy lineaments of this being were half seen by his mental vision--vast, colossal, slowly changing; but they appeared only to disappear again, like a picture in the fire.

Strive as he might, he could not see its real likeness. Now it appeared benign; at its next dim reappearance there would be a feeling of capricious irresponsibility about it: at another instant it was cold, remote; once or twice terrible, impending over and filling everything with a black demoniacal power which brought only horror with it.

If he could but accelerate the machine! He wanted to _know_--to know whether this phantom were a reality, to know above all if it were a thing of evil or of good: and he could not know unless he could advance that last final step necessary to fuse the rhythm of separate events into the sensation of the single whole.

He sat straining all his faculties: the machine whirred and rocked: but in vain. And at last, feeling desperately hungry, for he had forgotten to take food with him, he gradually brought back the lever to its neutral-point.

* * * * * * *

Of course, Mr. Wells would have done it much better than this.

* * * * * * *

And then there would have to be an ending. I think the newspaper man would take his opportunity to slink off into the laboratory and get on the machine with the idea of making a scoop for his paper; ... and then he would put the lever in too violently, and be thrown backwards. His head hit the corner of a bench, and he remained stunned; but by evil chance, the handles of the machine still made connection with his body after the fall. The machine was making him adjust his rhythm to that of light; so that he was living at an appalling rate. He had gone into the laboratory late at night. Next morning they found him--dead: and dead of senile decay--grey-haired, shrivelled, atrophic.

Then of course the machine is smashed up; and Mr. Wells begins to write another book.

* * * * * * *

I have spent so much time in frivolous discussion of rhythm and size and commonplaces that I have not pointed out another fundamental fact of biological relativity--to wit, that we are but parochial creatures endowed only with sense-organs giving information about the agencies normally found in our own little environment. Mind without the objects of mind is the very Chimaera bombinating _in vacuo_.

Out of all the ether waves we are sensitive to an octave as light, and some few others as heat. X-rays and ultra-violet destroy us, but we know nothing about them until they begin to give us pain; while the low swell of Hertzian waves passes by and through us harmless and unheeded. Electrical sense again we have none.

Imagine what it would be for inhabitants of another planet where changes in Hertzian waves were the central, pivotal changes in environment, where accordingly life had become sensitive to “wireless” and to nought else save perhaps touch--imagine such beings broadcast upon the face of the Earth. With a little practice and ingenuity they would no doubt be able to decipher the messages floating through our atmosphere, would feel the rhythms of the Black Hamitic Band transmitting Jazz to a million homes, and be able to follow, night by night, the soporific but benevolent fairy-stories of Uncle Archibald. I wonder what they would make of it all. They would at intervals, of course, be bumping into things and people. But would touch and radio-sense alone make our world intelligible? I wonder....

When we begin trying to quit our anthropocentry and discover what the world might be like if only we had other organs of body and mind for its assaying, we must flounder and bump in a not dissimilar fashion.

Even the few senses that we do possess are determined by our environment. Sweet things are pleasant to us: sugar is sweet: so is “sugar of lead”--lead acetate; sugar is nutritious, lead acetate a poison. The biologist will conclude, and with perfect reason, that if sugar was as rare as lead acetate in nature, lead acetate as common as sugar, we should then abominate and reject sweet things as emphatically as we now do filth or acids or over-hot liquids.

But I must pause, and find a moral for my tale; for all will agree that a moral has been so long out of fashion that it is now fast becoming fashionable again.

Every schoolboy, as Macaulay would say, knows William of Occam’s Razor--that philosophical tool of admirable properties:--“Entia non multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.”

We want another razor--a Relativist Razor; and with that we will carry out barbering operations worthy of another Shaving of Shagpat: we will shave the Absolute.

The hoary Absolute, enormous and venerable, grey-bearded and grey-locked--he sits enthroned, wielding tremendous power, filling young minds with fear and awe.

Up, barbers, and at him! Heat the water of your enthusiasm: lather those disguising appurtenances. See the tufts collapse into the white foam--feel the hairy jungles melt away before your steel! And at the end, when the last hair falls, you will wipe away the lather, and look upon that face and see--ah, what indeed?

I will not be so banal as to attempt to describe that sight in detail. You will have seen it already in your mind’s eye: “or else” (to quote Mr. Belloc)--“or else you will not; I cannot be positive which.” If not, you never will; if yes, what need to waste more of the compositor’s time? But of him who forges that razor, who arms those barbers, who gives them courage for their colossal task, of him shall a new Lucretius sing.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Belloc, H. “The Bad Child’s Book of Beasts.”

Bergson, H. “Time and Free-Will.”

Carroll, L. “Alice in Wonderland.”

---- ---- “Alice Through the Looking Glass.”

Clerk Maxwell. “Collected Papers.”

Einstein. See Kant.

Hegel. See Einstein.

Kant. See Hegel.

Lear, E. “Nonsense Songs and Stories.”

Lucretius. “De Rerum Natura.”

Macaulay, Lord. “Essays.”

Mee, A. “Children’s Encyclopædia.”

Meredith, G. “The Shaving of Shagpat.”

Occam, W. de. “Opera Omnia.”

Shapley. Proc. Nat. Ac. Sci., 6, 204.

Swift, J. “Gulliver’s Travels.”

Wells, H. G. “The New Accelerator.”

Wheeler, W. M. “Ants” (Columbia University Series).

FOOTNOTES:

[41] Read before the Heretics Club, Cambridge, May 1922.

[42] The reading of this paper brought a string of informants eager to let me know that Mr. Wells had already written a story on this theme. I was grateful to them for having caused me to read the _New Accelerator_, which by some strange chance I had managed to miss: but Mr. Wells’s treatment is so wholly different from that which I have sketched that I feel no scruples in letting it stand: and, if amends are needed, at least I make him a present of the germ of a new tale, and so feel that honour should be satisfied.

VI

RATIONALISM AND THE IDEA OF GOD

GODS

Surprised by doubt, and longing but to know, I asked of men and books what God might be:-- “An immanent spirit, clothed with the world we see”-- “A King of kings, ruler of all below”-- “Pure Love”--“A golden calf set up for show”-- “A jealous chief and tribal sectary”-- “Figment of fear and Man’s servility”-- “The final Judge that dooms to joy or woe” ...

I turned away; and found my God alone. God is the world--yet captive in our thought: Our thought--when it the head of the world is grown: Love--with what love we to ourselves have taught. The Soul must incarnate Divinity, And God in each anew must builded be.

RATIONALISM AND THE IDEA OF GOD

“Du gleichst dem Geist, den du begreifst.” --GOETHE.

“Nowadays, matters of national defence, of politics, of religion, are still too important for Knowledge, and remain subjects for certitude; that is to say, in them we still prefer the comfort of instinctive belief because we have not learnt adequately to value the capacity to foretell.”--W. TROTTER.

No one who has read Flaubert’s _Tentation de St. Antoine_ will be likely to forget that amazing procession of Gods, hundreds upon hundreds, in every diversity of form, defiling past the visionary Saint to topple over into the abyss of nothingness and be for ever destroyed--the doomed and outworn divinities of man’s childhood and adolescence, put away as he came to maturity. “Man created God in his own image,” wrote the irrepressible pen of Voltaire; and if it is not always true that Gods have been in his own image, but also in the image of animals and monsters, of embodied fears and hopes, it is indubitable that man has created God after God, only to throw them on the scrapheap as he outgrows them, like a child rejecting his old toys for new.

Indubitable--in a sense; indubitable that he has given each of them their peculiar and characteristic form, endowed this and that God with different qualities. But there is another part which he has not created, which he can only perceive, mould, clothe. The raw material of Divinity and its elemental attributes are given--man can but take it or leave it; and, what is more, it is difficult for him to leave it. It is given as the raw material and elemental attributes of life are given, and the evolutionary process can but take them. Man moulds and forms; but evolution has no more created living matter than he Divinity.

* * * * * * *

I propose, then, to lay down as my main point that the idea of God is an inevitable product of biological evolution, arising when the human type of mind first came into being, and taking shape and form as a definite God or Gods. That the Gods who thus arise, although of course they play a rôle in the affairs of the human species only, have a definite biological function. That the term God can still be properly and profitably employed to denote a certain complex of phenomena, with a certain function in human evolution.

What, then, do we mean by saying that the idea of God arises inevitably with the appearance of man upon the evolutionary scene? How can the appearance of man account for such a curious phenomenon?

With man, for the first time in the history of life upon the earth, an organism appeared capable of generalizing, of framing concepts, and of communicating them to his fellows. Through sense-organs and brain, an organism reflects in its mind some of the events of the world outside, creates some sort of a microcosm over against the macroscosm. But the animal with no more than associative memory can at best create a haphazard microcosm, a mere cinema record, and incomplete at that, of the most elementary organization; while all one can say of its power of profiting by experience is that a certain primitive plot is thus provided for the series of adventures which make up the scenario.

With an organism like man, however, in which to the faculty of associative memory there has been superadded the power of framing concepts and of accumulating experience by tradition, the picture is altogether changed. The microcosm becomes more highly organized; from rough-and-tumble cinema it develops into an elaborate drama, whose plot is knotted up in the same general way as that of the great macrocosmic drama unrolling itself outside. Microcosm images macrocosm more nearly, both in its form and in its scope. As result of this, life is for the first time enabled in man’s person to frame some general ideas of the outer world. Not only is it enabled, it cannot help but do so. The outer world is there; it impinges through man’s sense-organs on his mind, and his mind is so constructed that, if it thinks at all, it must think in general terms.

For the first time, life becomes aware of something more than a set of events; it becomes aware of a system of powers operating in events. These powers (to use a general, and what is intended to be a non-committal, term) are in constant action upon man’s life. There is a power in the sun, a power in the storm, in the growth of crops, in wild beasts, in strange tribes, in the unrealized recesses of man’s own heart; and in the course of his life man is brought into contact with these powers, which may act with him or against him. Man frames his own idea of these powers; and once that idea is framed, it exerts an effect upon the rest of his ideas, upon his emotions, upon his conduct. The more strongly the idea is held, the greater the effect.

But the idea may obviously be held and organized in many different ways. It is when the idea is organized in one particular way that we call it religious. We call it religious when on the one hand it involves some recognition of powers operating so as to underlie the general operations of the world; and, on the other hand, when it involves the emotions. It must involve the idea of the general powers operating in the outer world; so that an emotional reaction entirely limited to a single human being, or to beauty, or to a single event, is not religious. And it must involve the emotional nature of man, so that a purely intellectual investigation of the powers in operation, or a purely practical response, a purely moral reaction to them, is again not religious.

* * * * * * *

In primitive societies, as the studies of a Frazer or a Rivers have shown us, the whole of life is enmeshed with religion, and there is scarcely an activity of man which is not spun round with religious emotion and ritual. Very often the idea of God has not in this stage been clearly formulated; there is simply a notion of _power_, of mysterious influence, sometimes partly crystallized round a primitive deity. Later, however, the power became frankly anthropomorphic, and Gods came into being--many or one. Man had projected the idea of that active agency he knew best--human personality--into his idea of cosmic powers.

Into the God thus fashioned there are always projected, to greater or less degree, the ideals of the community; and thus, at a certain stage of development, we find definitely tribal Gods. Here the biological function of Gods becomes extremely obvious. The God, by his inspired prophets and priests, orders the destruction of his rivals--the false Gods of neighbouring tribes--or of his enemies, the members of those tribes.

The people of the tribe, however the result may have been brought about, do as a matter of fact find themselves, all unconsciously, caught up in the system which they and their forefathers have made. They have fashioned their God so that their inmost life is joined to him. When they sin, they fear him; when they look into their own hearts to take stock of their ultimate ideals, they find that these are attached, through the impalpable but infinitely resistant fibres of tradition, of childish memory and of education, to him; he is on their side against their enemies, so that their advantage is on the whole his.

Whatever, therefore, arouses the idea of God in their minds will send messages into every corner of their being. And if they can be firmly persuaded that God wishes something done, the call will pull at their heart-strings and bring them to convinced and united action.

The most familiar example of this type of effect is to be found in the history of the Jews in the Old Testament. But even to-day such tribal ideas are not extinct: an educated and charming lady said to me during the war--“I am convinced that if Jesus Christ were alive to-day He would be fighting on the side of the Allies.” ...

* * * * * * *

In our further analysis we must carefully distinguish between the outer and inner components of the idea of God. The outer components are the powers acting upon man. Some of these are inorganic--storms, winds, floods, the sun and moon; others are organic--wild beasts, pestilence, crops, and fruits, domesticated animals; others again are human--personal or national enemies, the community in which the individual lives. And they may act upon man’s body or upon his mind. The sun warms his body, but makes an impression on his mind as well. The practice of astrology shows what power can be exerted on the mind by quite imaginary properties of external reality. But, whatever we may think of these outer components, there they are, and they do affect us for better or for worse. Before such a heterogeneous assemblage as is constituted by the outer components can operate as a single idea, can deserve a single name such as God, they must be elaborately organized.

The contribution to the idea of God from within, from the mind of man himself, is its form; and this form is the outcome of a process of mental organization every bit as real as the physical organization occurring in the unborn embryo.

The essential thing about both is, as we have indicated, that unity should arise in spite of diversity, and the resulting entity--organism in the one case, organized idea in the other--should thus be able to act as a single whole.

The system of ideas which man holds concerning external powers may be thus organized by thinking of it in terms of magic, of “influence,” manifesting itself in different ways in different operations of Nature; or in terms of personality, the manifestations of power being supposed to result from the activities of a being or beings more or less similar to ourselves; or it may be organized, as we shall see, on more scientific lines, by carefully pruning away all parts of it which are either definitely the mere product of our own imaginations, or else are not proven.

Thus what we have called the raw material of Divinity is given in the outer forces of nature, which not only act upon man as they act upon all organisms, but are by him perceived so to act in a way special and peculiar to man alone.

But, being so perceived, they are inevitably taken up into his mental life and made part of his mental organization. They are often perceived emotionally--to take the simplest examples, pestilence with horror, storm with fear, the growing of crops with gratitude. They are bound to enter into relation with his emotions, with his ideals and hopes; bound also to be in some degree generalized intellectually. When thus emotionally and intellectually built up so as to form a coherent and unitary idea, then only do they deserve the name of a God.

In parenthesis, let us make it quite clear that we are speaking of God and Gods as they operate in human affairs, as they can be classified by the anthropologist, analysed by the philosopher, experienced by the mystic. These have always been constituted as we have described--as a particular _idea_ of the powers of nature, the cosmic forces taking shape through the moulding and organizing capacity of human thought, or, if you prefer it, as an interpretation and unification of outer and inner reality. The Absolute God, on the other hand, may be one--may, in fact, operate as a unitary whole in the same sense as this extraordinary product of the evolutionary process, this anthropological God; but we can never know it as such in the same sense as we know a person to be one.

This may be illustrated by a common fallacy--the ascription of personality to God on the ground that a purpose exists in the universe. Paley saw proof of this purpose in adaptations among organisms. Modern theologians, driven from this position by Darwin, take refuge with Bergson in the fact of biological progress. But this, too, can be shown to be as natural and inevitable a product of the struggle for existence as is adaptation, and to be no more mysterious than, for instance, the increase in effectiveness both of armour-piercing projectile and armour-plate during the last century. The time has gone by when a Paley could advance his “carpenter” view of God; when a Fellow of the Royal Society could be sure of general approval, as could D. Pront in his Bridgewater Treatise, with a work entitled _Chemistry, Meteorology, and the Function of Digestion, considered with reference to Natural Theology_, or when a distinguished geologist like Buckland (almost foreshadowing later writers of a certain type on labour questions) could ascribe to a Beneficent Designer the existence of Carnivora, as a means to the increase of the “Aggregate of Animal Enjoyment,” and solemnly open a sentence such as “while each suffering individual is soon relieved from pain, it contributes its enfeebled carcass to the support of its carnivorous benefactors.”

No--purpose is a psychological term; and to ascribe purpose to a process merely because its results are somewhat similar to those of a true purposeful process, is completely unjustified, and a mere projection of our own ideas into the economy of nature. Where we experience only phenomena of one order we cannot hope to reach behind them to phenomena of another order, or to the Absolute.

The ground is now cleared for our real investigation--our inquiry into the task which Rationalism has before it in finding how best what we have called the raw material of Divinity may be organized by the mind’s activity, how best clothed with word or symbol to make it more the common property of mankind as a whole.

The current Christian conception of God is of a person who is also the creator and the ruler of the universe. This person has certain attributes--is omnipotent, omniscient, and somehow, in spite of all the unhappiness and squalor and cruelty in the world, all-loving. He has personal qualities--he created the universe, and all that is in it; he takes pleasure in being worshipped; is displeased when men or women neglect him, or commit crimes or sins; takes pity on the follies and sufferings of man; and was so moved by them (albeit after a very considerable period had elapsed since man had first appeared upon the scene) that he sent his son into the world as a redeemer. (For simplicity’s sake, I omit all reference to the complexities of Trinitarian doctrine, which, however important in distinguishing Christianity from other religions envisaging an omnipotent personal God, do not affect the essential point at issue.) Further, he grants petitions, reveals himself to certain chosen persons, and is enthroned in a somewhat elusive heaven, where he is (or will be after the Day of Judgment--opinions seem to differ somewhat on the subject) surrounded by the immortal souls of the elect.