Chapter 2

Why should we trouble about vastness--mere extension in space? There is a sense in which the infinitesimally small is more marvellous, more disquieting, than the infinitely great. The ant, the flea, nay, the phagocyte in our blood, is really a more startling phenomenon than all the mechanics and chemistry of the heavens. In worrying about the bigness and the littleness of things, we are making the human body our standard--the body whose dimensions are no doubt determined by convenience in relation to terrestrial conditions, but have otherwise no sort of sanctity or superiority, rightness or fitness. It happens to be the object to which is attached the highest form of consciousness we know; but consciousness itself has neither parts nor magnitude. And consciousness itself is essentially greater than the very vastness which appals us, seeing that it embraces and envelops it. Enormous depths of space are pictured in my brain, through my optic nerve; and what eludes the magic mirror of my retina, my mind can conceive, apprehend, make its own. It is not even true to say that the mind cannot conceive infinity--the real truth (if I may for once be Chestertonian), the real truth is that it can conceive nothing else. "When Berkeley said there was no matter"--it mattered greatly what he said. Nothing can be more certain than that, apart from percipience, there is no matter that matters. From the point of view of pantheism (the only logical theism) God, far from being a Veiled Being, or an Invisible King, is precisely the mind which translates itself into the visible, sensible universe, and impresses itself, in the form of a never-ending pageant, upon our cognate minds. It has been thought that human consciousness may have come into being because God wanted an audience. He was tired of being a cinematograph-film unreeling before empty benches. Some people have even carried the speculation further, and wondered whether the attachment of percipience to organized matter, as in the case of human beings, may not be a necessary stage in the culture of a pure percipience, capable of furnishing the pageant of the universe with a permanent and appreciative audience. In that case the Scottish Catechism would be justified, which asks "What is the chief end of man?" and answers (as Stevenson says) nobly if obscurely: "To glorify God and to enjoy Him forever." But enough of these idle fantasies. What is certain is that we can hold up our heads serenely among the immensities, knowing that we are immenser than they. Even if they were malevolent--and that they do not seem to be--they are no more terrible than the familiar dangers of our homely earth. They cannot hurt us more than we can be hurt--an obvious truism but one which is often overlooked. And this brings us to the consideration of the second fallacy which sometimes warps our judgment as to the responsibility of the Power which invented life.

We are all apt to speak and think as though sentience were an article capable of accumulation, like money or merchandise, in enormous aggregates--as though pleasure, and more particularly pain, were subject to the ordinary rules of arithmetic, so that minor quantities, added together, might mount up to an indefinitely gigantic total. Poets and philosophers, time out of mind, have been heartbroken over the enormous mass of evil in the world, and have spoken as though animated nature were one great organism, with a brain in which every pang that afflicted each one of its innumerable members was piled up into a huge, pyramidal agony. But this is obviously not so. That very "individuation" which to some philosophies is the primal curse--the condition by all means to be annulled and shaken off[2]--forbids the adding up of units of sentience. If "individuation" is the source of human misery (which seems a rather meaningless proposition) it is beyond all doubt its boundary and limit. We are each of us his own universe. With each of us the universe is born afresh; with each of us it dies--assuming, that is to say, that consciousness is extinguished at death. There never has been and never can be in the world more suffering than a single organism can sustain--which is another way of saying that nothing can hurt us more than we can be hurt. Is this an optimistic statement? Far from it. The individual is capable of great extremities of suffering; and though not all men, or even most, are put to the utmost test in this respect, there are certainly cases not a few in which a man may well curse the day he was born, and see in the universe that was born with him nothing but an instrument of torture. But such an one must speak for himself. It is evident that, take them all round, men accept life as no such evil gift. It cannot even be said that, in handing it on to others, they are driven by a fatal instinct which they know in their hearts to be cruel, and would resist if they could. The vast majority have been, and still are, entirely light-hearted about the matter, thus giving the best possible proof that they cherish no grudge against the source of being, but find it, on the balance, acceptable enough. If it be said that this is due to stupidity, then stupidity is one of the factors in the case which the great Artificer must be supposed to have foreseen and reckoned upon. All these considerations must be taken into account when we try to sum up the responsibility of an organizer and director of life, acting of his own free will, although he knew that the conditions under which he had to work would make the achievement of any satisfactory result a slow, laborious and painful business.

[2] Mr. Wells himself is not far from this view. See _God the Invisible King_, pp. 73, 76, and this book, pp. 39-40.

"But sympathy!" it may be said--"You have left sympathy out of the reckoning. Unless we are not only 'individuals' but iron-clad egotists, we suffer with others more keenly, sometimes, than in our own persons." Sympathy, no doubt, is, like the summer sun and the frost of winter, a fact of common experience causing us alternate joy and pain; but it means no sort of breach in the wall of "individuation." Our nearest and dearest are simply factors in our environment, most influential factors, but as external to us as the trees or the stars. We cannot, in any real sense, draw away their pains and add them to our own, any more than they, in their turn, can relieve us of our toothache or our sciatica. They are the points, doubtless, at which our environment touches us most closely, but neither incantation nor Act of Parliament, neither priest nor registrar, can make even man and wife really "one flesh." It was necessary for the conservation of the species that a strict limit should be set to the operation of sympathy. Had that emotion been able to pierce the shell of individuality, so that one being could actually add the sufferings of another, or of many others, to his own, life would long ago have come to an end. As it is, sympathy implies an imaginative extension of individuality, which is of enormous social value. But we remain, none the less, isolated each in his own universe, and our fellow-men and women are but shapes in the panorama, the strange, fantastic dream, which the Veiled Showman unrolls before us.

In these post-Darwinian days, moreover, we are inclined to give way to certain morbid and sentimental exaggerations of sympathy, which do some injustice to the great Artificer whom we are for the moment assuming to be responsible for sentient life. Many of us are much concerned about "nature, red in tooth and claw." It is a sort of nightmare to us to think of the tremendous fecundity of swamp and jungle, warren and pond, and of the ruthless struggle for existence which has made earth, air, and sea one mighty battle-ground. In this we are again letting the fallacy of number take hold of us. There can be no aggregate of suffering among lower, any more than among higher, organisms; and the amount of pain which individual animals have to endure--even animals of those species which we can suppose to possess a certain keenness of sensibility--is probably, in the vast majority of cases, very trifling. Half the anguish of humanity proceeds from the power of looking before and after. The animal, though he may suffer from fear of imminent, visible danger, cannot know the torture of long-drawn apprehension. For most of his life he is probably aware of a vague well-being; then of a longer or shorter--often a very short--spell of vague ill-being; and so, the end. Nor is it possible to doubt that the experience of some animals includes a great deal of positive rapture. If the lark be not really the soul of joy, he is the greatest hypocrite under the sun. Many insects seem to be pin-points of vibrant vitality which we can scarcely believe to be unaccompanied by pleasurable sensation. The mosquito which I squash on the back of my hand, and which dies in a bath of my own blood, has had a short life but doubtless a merry one. The moths which, in a tropic night, lie in calcined heaps around the lamp, have probably perished in pursuit of some ecstatic illusion. It does not seem, on the whole, that we need expend much pity on the brute creation, or make its destinies a reproach to the great Artificer. Which is not to say, of course, that we ought not to detest and try with all our might to abolish the cruelties of labor, commerce, sport and war.

Again, as to the great calamities--the earthquakes, shipwrecks, railway accidents, even the wars--which are often made a leading count in the arraignment of the Author of Sentience, we must not let ourselves be deceived by the fallacy of number. Their spectacular, dramatic aspect naturally attracts attention; but the death-roll of a great shipwreck is in fact scarcely more terrible than the daily bills of mortality of a great city. It is true that a violent death, overtaking a healthy man, is apt to involve moments, perhaps hours, of acute distress which he might have escaped had he died of gradual decay or of ordinary well-tended disease; and a very short space of the agony sometimes attendant upon (say) a railway accident, probably represents itself to the sufferer as an eternity. But there is also another side to the matter. Instantaneous death in a great catastrophe must be reckoned as mere euthanasia; and even short of this, the attendant excitement has often the effect of an anodyne. In the upshot, no doubt, such occurrences are rightly called disasters, since their tendency is to cause needlessly painful death, under circumstances, which in the main, enhance its terrors; but the sufferings of the victims cannot be added together because they occur within a limited area, any more than if they had been spread over an indefinite tract of space. As for war, it increases the liability of every individual who comes within its wide-flung net to intense bodily and mental suffering, and to premature and painful death. Moreover, it destroys social values which _can_ be added up. In this respect it leaves the world face to face with an appalling deficit. But we must not let it weigh upon us too heavily, or make it too great a reproach to the Artificer of human destiny. For the soldier, like every other sentient organism, is immured in his own universe, and his individual debit-and-credit account with the Power which placed him there would be no whit different if he were indeed the only real existence, and the world around him were naught but a dance of shadows.

If there were a country of a hundred million people, in which every citizen was born to an allowance of five pounds, which in all his life he could not possibly increase, or invest in joint-stock enterprises, though he might leave some of it unexpended--we should not, in spite of the £500,000,000 of its capital, call that a wealthy country. Its effective wealth would be precisely a five-pound note. Similarly, given a world in which every one is born with a limited capacity of sentience, inalienable, incommunicable, unique, we should do wrong to call that world a multi-millionaire in misery, even if it could be proved that in each individual account the balance of sensation was on the wrong side of the ledger. It is true that if, in one man's account, the balance were largely to the bad, he would be entitled to reproach the Veiled Banker, even though five hundred or five thousand of his fellows declared themselves satisfied with the result of their audit. But if the Banker, in opening business, had good reason to think that, in the long run, the contents would largely outvote the non-contents, we could scarcely blame him for going ahead. And what if, for contents and malcontents alike, he had an uncovenanted bonus up his sleeve?

* * * * *

In this disquisition, with its shifting personifications, its Artificer, Author, Banker and the like, we may seem to have wandered far away from Mr. Wells and his Invisible King; but I hope the reader has not wholly lost the clue. Let us recapitulate. Starting from the idea that its total renunciation of metaphysics, its incuriousness as to causation, was a weakness in Mr. Wells's system, inasmuch as an eager curiosity as to these matters is an inseparable part of our intellectual outfit, we set about enquiring whether it might not be possible to abandon the notions of omnipotence, omniscience and omni-benevolence, and yet to conceive a doctrine of origins into which a well-willing God should enter, not, like the Invisible King, as a sort of remedial afterthought, but as a prime mover in this baffling business of life. We put forward two hypotheses, each of which seemed more thinkable, less in the air, so to speak, than Mr. Wells's scheme of things. We imagined a wholly callous, unpitying Power, wantonly setting up combinations in matter which it knew would work out in cruelty and misery, and another co-ordinate though not quite equal Power interfering from the first to introduce into the combinations of the Elder Deity a slow but sure bias towards the good. Then we proposed an alternative hypothesis, logically simpler, though more difficult from the moral point of view. We conceived at the source of organic life an intelligent and well-willing Power constrained, by some necessity "behind the veil," to carry out his purposes through the sluggish, refractory, hampering medium of matter. Supposing this Power free to act or to refrain from acting, we asked whether he could take the affirmative course--choose the "Everlasting Yea" as Carlyle would phrase it--without forfeiting our esteem and disqualifying for the post of Invisible King in the Wellsian sense of the term. In a tentative way, not exempt, perhaps, from a touch of special pleading, we advanced certain considerations which seemed to suggest that his decision to kindle the torch of life might, after all, be justified. Our provisional conclusion was that though, as at present advised, we might not quite see our way to hail him as a beneficent Invisible King, yet we need not go to the opposite extreme of writing him down a mere Ogre God, indifferent to the vast and purposeless process of groaning and travail, begetting and devouring, which he had wantonly initiated. That is the point at which we have now arrived.

I hope it need not be said I do not attribute any substantive value to the hypothetical myths here put forward and discussed--that I do not accept either of them, or propose that anyone else should accept it, as a probable adumbration of what actually occurred "in the beginning"--a first chapter in a new Book of Genesis. My purpose was simply, since myth-making was the order of the day, to hint a criticism of Mr. Wells's myth, by placing beside it one or two other fantasies, perhaps as plausible as his, which had the advantage of not entirely eluding the question of origins. I submit, with great respect, that my Artificer comes a little less out of the blue than his Invisible King--that is all I claim for him.

But here Mr. Wells puts in a protest, not without indignation. Myth-making, he declares, is _not_ the order of the day. Had he wanted to indulge in myth-making, he could easily have found some metaphysical affiliation for his Invisible King. What he has done is to record a profound spiritual experience, common to himself and many other good men and true, which has culminated in the recognition of an actual Power, objectively extant in the world, to which he has felt it a sacred duty to bear witness. Very good; so be it; let us now look more in detail into the gospel according to Wells.

IV

THE APOSTLE'S CREED

A gospel it is, in all literalness; an evangel; a message of glad tidings. It is not merely _a_ truth, it is "the Truth" (p. 1). Let there be no mistake about it: Mr. Wells's ambition is to rank with St. Paul and Mahomet, as the apostle of a new world-religion. He does not in so many words lay claim to inspiration, but it is almost inevitably deducible from his premises. He is uttering the first clear and definite tidings of a God who is endowed with personality, character, will and purpose. To that Deity he has submitted himself in enthusiastic devotion. If the God does not seize the opportunity to speak through such a marvellously suitable, such an ideal, mouthpiece, then practical common-sense cannot be one of his attributes. Which of the other Gods who have announced themselves from time to time has found such a megaphone to reverberate his voice? St. Paul was a poor tent-maker, whose sermons were not even reported in the religious press, while his letters probably counted their public by scores, or at most by hundreds. Mr. Wells, from the outset of his mission, has the ear of two hemispheres.

What, then, does he tell us of his God? The first characteristic which differentiates him from all the other Gods with a big G--for of course we pay no heed to the departmental gods of polytheism--the first fact we must grasp and hold fast to, is that he lays no claim to infinity. "This new faith ... worships _a finite God_" (p. 5; Mr. Wells's italics). "He has begun and he never will end" (p. 18). "He is within time and not outside it" (p. 7). Nothing can be more definite than that. There was a time when God did not exist; and then somehow, somewhen, he came into being.

Perhaps to ask "When?" would be to trespass on the department of origins, from which we are explicitly warned off. It would be to trench upon "cosmogony." Yet we are not quite without guidance. "The renascent religion," we are told, "has always been here; it has always been visible to those that had eyes to see" (p. 1). "Always," in this context, can only mean during the whole course of human history. Therefore God must have come into being some time between the issue of the creative fiat and the appearance of man on the planet. This is a pretty wide margin, but it is something to go upon. He may have been contemporary with the amoeba, or with the ichthyosaurus, or haply with the earliest quadrumana. At the very latest (if "always" is accurate) he must have made his appearance exactly at the same time as man; and if I were to give my opinion, I should say that was extremely probable. At all events, even if he preceded man by a few thousand or million years, we are compelled to assume that he came in preparation for the advent of the human species, determined to be on hand when wanted. For we do not gather that the lower animals stand in need of his services, or are capable of benefiting by them. One might be tempted to conceive him as guiding the course of evolution and hastening its laggard process; but (as we shall see) he scorns the rôle of Providence, and resolutely abstains from any intromission in organic or meteorological concerns. It would be pleasant to think that he had something to do with (for instance) the retreat of the ice-cap in the northern hemisphere; but we are not encouraged to indulge in any such speculation. It would appear that the activity of God is purely psychical and moral--that he has no interest in biology, except as it influences, and is influenced by, sociology. In short, from all that one can make out, this God is strictly correlative to Man; and that is a significant fact which we shall do well to bear in mind.

As we have already seen, the Infinite (or Veiled) Being is not God (p. 13); nor is God the Life Force, the "impulse thrusting through matter and clothing itself in continually changing material forms ... the Will to Be" (pp. 15-16). As we have also seen, Mr. Wells refuses to define the relation of his God, this "spirit," this "single spirit and single person," to either of these inscrutable entities. "God," he says, "comes to us neither out of the stars nor out of the pride of life, but as a still small voice within" (p. 18). It is by "faith" that we "find" him (p. 13); but Mr. Wells "doubts if faith can be complete and enduring if it is not secured by the definite knowledge of the true God" (p. 135). What, then, is "faith" in this context? It would be too much to say, with the legendary schoolboy, that it is "believing what you know isn't true." The implication seems rather to be that if you begin by believing on inadequate grounds, you will presently attain to belief on adequate grounds, or, in other words, knowledge. Thus, when you go to a spiritual séance in a sceptical frame of mind, the chill of your aura frightens the spirits away, and you obtain no manifestations; but if you go in a mood of faith, which practically means confident expectation, the phenomena follow, and you depart a convert. I use this illustration in no scoffing spirit. The presupposition is not irrational. It amounts, in effect, to saying that you must go some way to meet God before God can or will come to you. This seems a curious coyness; but as God is finite and conditioned, a bit of a character ("a strongly marked and knowable personality," p. 5), there is nothing contradictory in it. Even when we read that "the true God goes through the world like fifes and drums and flags, calling for recruits along the street" (p. 40), we must not seize upon the letter of a similitude, and talk about inconsistency. You must go out to meet even the Salvation Army. It offers you salvation in vain if you obstinately bolt your door, and insist that an Englishman's house is his castle.

The finding of this God is very like what revivalists call "conversion" (p. 21). You are oppressed by "the futility of the individual life"; you fall into "a state of helpless self-disgust" (p. 21); you are, in short, in the condition described by Hamlet when he says: "It goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame the earth seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why it appears no other thing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors." The condition may result, as in Hamlet's case, from an untoward conjunction of outward circumstances; or it may be of physiological (liverish) origin. The methods of treatment are many--some of them (such as the administration of alcohol in large doses) disastrously unwise. In some states of society and periods of history, religion is the popular specific; and there have been, and are, forms of religion to which alcohol would be preferable. Fortunately, one can say without a shadow of hesitancy that "the modern religion" lies under no such suspicion. As dispensed by Mr. Wells, it is entirely wholesome. If it is found to cheer, it will certainly not inebriate. Indeed, the doubt one feels as to its popular success lies in the very fact that it contains but an innocuous proportion of alcohol.