Part 15

While he thus preferred to withdraw, without rancour and without contempt, from the ancient fellowship of the church, he assumed an attitude hardly less cool and deprecatory toward the enthusiasms of the new era. The national ideal of democracy and freedom had his entire sympathy; he allowed himself to be drawn into the movement against slavery; he took a curious and smiling interest in the discoveries of natural science and in the material progress of the age. But he could go no farther. His contemplative nature, his religious training, his dispersed reading, made him stand aside from the life of the world, even while he studied it with benevolent attention. His heart was fixed on eternal things, and he was in no sense a prophet for his age or country. He belonged by nature to that mystical company of devout souls that recognize no particular home and are dispersed throughout history, although not without intercommunication. He felt his affinity to the Hindoos and the Persians, to the Platonists and the Stoics. Like them he remains "a friend and aider of those who would live in the spirit." If not a star of the first magnitude, he is certainly a fixed star in the firmament of philosophy. Alone as yet among Americans, he may be said to have won a place there, if not by the originality of his thought, at least by the originality and beauty of the expression he gave to thoughts that are old and imperishable.

IX

A RELIGION OF DISILLUSION

_Man has henceforth this cause of pride: that he has bethought himself of justice in a universe without justice, and has put justice there_.--JEAN LAHOR.

The break-up of traditional systems and the disappearance of a recognized authority from the religious world have naturally led to many attempts at philosophic reconstruction. Most of these are timid compromises, which leave first principles untouched and contain in a veiled form all the old contradictions. Others are advertisements of some personal notion, some fresh discovery, proposed as a panacea and as an equivalent for all the heritage of human wisdom. A few thinkers, however, inspired by more comprehensive sympathies, and at the same time free from preconceptions, have come nearer to the fundamental elements of the problem and have given out suggestions which, even if not satisfactory in their actual form, are helpful and interesting in their tendency. Such a thinker is the contemporary French poet, Jean Lahor, who, in a volume of thoughts entitled "La gloire du néant," has gathered together three philosophical points of view, we might almost say three religions, and combined their issues in a way which may now seem again new, but which in reality is as old as wisdom.

The form is literary and the outcome in a sense negative; there is no attempt to put new wine into old bottles, no apologetic tone, no unction. Experience is consulted afresh, without preoccupation as to the results of reflection; and if these results are religious, it is because any reasoned appreciation of life is bound to be a religion, even if no conventionally religious elements are imported into the problem. In fact, those prophets who have said that the Sabbath was made for man and who have given moral functions to historical religion, as well as those philosophers who have best understood its nature, have seemed irreligious to their contemporaries, because they have looked upon religion as an interpretation of reality, not as a quasi-reality existing by itself and vouched for merely by tradition and miracle. Religion is an imaginative echo of things natural and moral: and if this echo is to be well attuned, our ear must first be attentive to the natural sounds of which, in religion, we are to develop the harmony.

It is, therefore, not an objection to Jean Lahor's competence to gather for us the elements of a religion that he is a poet rather than a theologian and an observer rather than a philosopher, or that he presents his intuitions without technical apparatus in a series of highly coloured epigrams and little pictures. On the contrary such simplicity and directness are an advantage when, as in this case, the guiding inspiration is religious. It is religious because, on the one hand, it is imaginative; we are asking ourselves everywhere what Nature says to us and what we are to say in reply; and on the other hand, because it is rational, and these messages and reactions are to be unified into a single science and a single morality. The logical scheme of the system is not made explicit: there is no argumentation and no answers are offered to the objections that might naturally suggest themselves. But the sayings are so arranged and made so to progress in tone and subject that a system of philosophy is clearly implied in them; and the essence of this system is at times briefly expressed.

All, as it behooves a poet, is the transcript of personal experience. We must not look for the inclusion of elements, however important in themselves, which the author has not found in his own life. The omissions are in this case as characteristic as the inclusions. We look in vain, for instance, for any appreciation of Christianity or of all that side of human nature and experience on which faith in Christianity rests; we hear nothing of love and its ideal suggestions, nothing of the aspiration to immortality, nothing of the whole transcendental attitude toward experience. These are grave omissions. They may seem to condemn Jean Lahor, if not as a general philosopher, at least as a representative of an age in which religious thought has so largely centred about these very questions. But our century has been an age of confusion; and a man who at its end wishes to attain some coherence of life and mind, must begin by letting drop much that the age has held in solution. It is by not being an average that a man may become a guide. Only by manifesting the direction of change and embodying that change in his own person can he be a sign of progress. It remains for time to show whether what survives in a given man has fortune on its side and contains the inward elements of vitality. The presumption in this case, when we abstract from our personal prejudices, will seem to be wholly in favour of our author.

The three influences to which he has yielded and which have moulded his mind are the pantheism of the Hindoos, our contemporary natural science, and the ideal of Greek civilization. These three elements might at first sight seem incongruous, and the principle of selection by which they are preferred above all others might seem as hard to find as the principle of union by which they are to be welded into one philosophy. But a little study of these maxims and of the autobiographical sketch which precedes them will, I think, enable us to discover both the principles we miss. The selection of the three influences in question is due to the poetical temperament and scientific tastes of the author, to an individual disposition and to studies which drew him successively to these different sources of instruction. The principle of synthesis, or rather, we should perhaps say, of subordination, by which these various habits of thought are combined in one philosophy, is a moral principle. It is a native power to conceive the ideal and a native loyalty to the ideal when once conceived. This moral enthusiasm is in no sense vapid or sentimental; it hardly comes to the surface in any direct or enthusiastic expression; but it is betrayed and proved to be sincere, now by a passionate pessimism about the natural world, now in detailed and practical demands for a better state of society. A genial individuality and a well-reasoned form of pessimism are, then, the two factors in the development of this interesting thinker, the two keys to the apparently contradictory affinities of his mind.

Our author, as we have said, is a poet, and even if his verses seem at times a little thin and rhetorical, they prove abundantly what is evident also in his prose, namely, that he has keen sensations, that images impress themselves upon him with force, and that any scene whose elements are gorgeous and picturesque or which is weighted with tragic emotion, holds his attention and awakens in him the impulse to literary expression. But this plastic impulse is not powerful, or finds in the environment insufficient support. Great art and great creative achievements are rare in the world, and come for the most part only in those moments and in those places where an unusual concentration of mental energy and the friction of many kindred minds allow the scattered sparks of inspiration to merge and to leap into flame. We need not wonder, therefore, that the æsthetic sensibility of our author is greater than his artistic success. Of which of our contemporaries might we not say the same thing? Jean Lahor's attention is analytic; he is absorbed by his model, he does not absorb it and master it by his art. He has not enough vigour and determination of thought to create eternal forms out of the swift hints of perception. He watches rather passively the flight of his ideas, conscious of their vivacity, of their beauty, but most of all, alas! of their flight. His last word as an observer, his message as a poet, is that all things are illusion. They fade, they pass into one another, the place thereof knows them no more. Nothing of them remains, absolutely nothing, save the universal indeterminate force that breeds and devours them perpetually.

A mind thus gifted and thus limited would naturally feel its affinity to Oriental pantheism as soon as that phase of thought and feeling came within the radius of its vision. Jean Lahor seems early to have felt an attraction toward the speculation of the East, and his prolonged study of that literature could of course only intensify the natural bent of his mind, and give his thought a more pronounced pantheistic colouring. Had he been wholly absorbed, however, in such mystical contemplation, we should have had little to study in him that was new; only one more case of sensibility and fancy overpowering a timid intellect, one more gifted nature arrested at the stage of bewilderment.

But as Jean Lahor is only a pseudonym for the man, so the sympathy with India which that name indicates is only one phase of the thinker. Our poet pursued the study of medicine; he realized in the concrete the orderly complexities of natural law and the sordid realities of human life. The vague, sensuous enthusiasm with which he had followed the flux of images in his fancy was now sobered by an accurate knowledge of the miseries, the defeats, the shames that lie beneath. His poetic sense of illusion was deepened into a moral sense of wrong. The same keenness of perception, the same power of graphic expression, which had made him dwell on the luxuriance of Nature now made him paint the irony and brutality of life. There is here and there a touch of bitterness and exaggeration in the satire, as if the man of science felt a personal resentment against a world that had so cheated the poet.

Yet the two descriptions are far from inconsistent; we have merely learned to understand as a process and to conceive as an inner experience what before we had admired as a spectacle. A scientific view has come to give definition and coherence to phenomena which a poetical pantheism merely saluted as they passed and disappeared into the primordial darkness, or, if you like, into the primordial light. The two systems differ in tone and in method, but not in result. Natural science, like pantheism, presents us with a universal flux, in which something, we known not what, moves, we know not why, we know not whither. The method of this transformation may be more or less accurately described, the general sense of continuity and necessity may find a more or less specific expression in the various fields of experience; yet the outcome is still the same whirligig. We find ourselves in either case confronted by the same _gloire du néant_, by a nothing that lives and that is beautiful in its nothingness.

These two elements in Jean Lahor's philosophy, the Oriental and the scientific, would thus tend alike to represent man with his intelligence as the product and the captive of an irrational engine called the universe. Many a man accepts this solution and reconciles himself as best he can to the truth as it appears to him. What is there, he may say, so dreadful in mutability? What so intolerable in ultimate ignorance? We know what we need to know, and things last, perhaps, as long as they deserve to last. So, once convinced that his naturalistic philosophy is final, a man will silence the demands of his own reason and call them chimerical. There is nothing to which men, while they have food and drink, cannot reconcile themselves. They will put up with present suffering, with the certainty of death, with solitude, with shame, with wrong, with the expectation of eternal damnation. In the face of such things, they can not only be happy for the moment, but solemnly thank God for having brought them into existence. Habit is stronger than reason, and the respect for fact stronger than the respect for the ideal; nor would the ideal and reason ever prevail did they not make up in persistence what they lack in momentary energy.

It would have been easy, therefore, for Jean Lahor, as for the rest of us, to remain in the naturalistic world, had he had only poetical intuition, or only scientific training, or only both. But there was also in him a third and a moral element, an impulse toward ideal creation, a spark of Promethean fire. He felt a genuine admiration for that humane courage which made the Greeks, for all their clear consciousness of fate, hopeful without illusions and independent without rebellion. In the bosom of the intractable infinite he still distinguished the work of human reason--the cosmos of society, character, and art--like a Noah's ark floating in the Deluge. His imagination had succumbed to the dream of sense; his art had not attempted the task of imposing a meaning or an immortal form upon Nature: but his conscience and his political instinct had held out against the fascinations of Maya. The Greek asserted himself here against the barbarian, the moralist against the naturalist. Nor was this a merely accidental addition or an inconsistency. It was the explicit expression of that creative reason which had all along chafed under the dominion of brute fact and of perpetual illusion. The same moral energy which had made him a pessimist in the presence of Nature made him an idealist at the threshold of life.

For why should the natural world ever come to be called a world of illusion? To call the vivid objects of sense illusory is to compare them to their disadvantage with something else which we conceive as more worthy of the title of reality. This deeper reality must be something ideal, something permanent, something conceived by the intellect, and which only a man having faith in the intellect could prefer to the objects of sense or fancy. The Hindoos that our author thinks so much akin to himself would hardly understand this rational bias of his thought, this foregone dissatisfaction with a world of infinite change and indefinite structure. They would accept as a natural fact that perpetual flux which he emphasizes as a paradox and laments as a calamity. In spite of his studied immersion in sensuous illusion, he is still a native of the sphere of intelligible things, and it is only the difficulty of finding the permanent beings which he is inclined to look for and in the presence of which he could alone rest, that makes him linger with tragic self-consciousness in the region of fleeting shadows. Accordingly we need not be surprised by the somewhat forced and pessimistic note of a pantheism which is really exotic, and we may be prepared to find the plastic mind asserting itself ultimately against that system. So Jean Lahor, after the groups of thoughts which he puts under the title of "L'orient" and "Le ciel du Nord," adds another group under the title of "Cosmos."

It would require a philosophical treatise of greater pretentions than the little book before us to explain fully how this cosmos can arise out of the chaos of mechanical forces, and how the life and the work of reason can be superposed upon the life of sense and imagination. Our author's vision, fixed as it is on concrete images and expressed in detached epigrams, does not always extend to the philosophical relations of his thoughts. Yet he offers, perhaps unconsciously, an admirable variation of that revolution of thought which is associated with the name of Kant. He proposes to us as the work of human intelligence what is commonly believed to be the work of God. The universe, apart from us, is a chaos, but it may be made a cosmos by our efforts and in our own minds. The laws of events, apart from us, are inhuman and irrational, but in the sphere of human activity they may be dominated by reason. We are a part of the blind energy behind Nature, but by virtue of that energy we impose our purposes on the part of Nature which we constitute or control. We can turn from the stupefying contemplation of an alien universe to the building of our own house, knowing that, alien as it is, that universe has chanced to blow its energy also into our will and to allow itself to be partially dominated by our intelligence. Our mere existence and the modicum of success we have attained in society, science, and art are the living proofs of this human power. The exercise of this power is the task appointed for us by the indomitable promptings of our own spirit, a task in which we need not labour without hope.

For as the various plants and animals have found foothold and room to grow, maintaining for long periods the life congenial to them, so the human race may be able to achieve something like its perfection and its ideal, maintaining for an indefinite time all that it values, not by virtue of an alleged intentional protection of Providence, but by its own watchful art and exceptional good fortune. The ideal is itself a function of the reality and cannot therefore be altogether out of harmony with the conditions of its own birth and persistence. Civilization is precarious, but it need not be short-lived. Its inception is already a proof that there exists an equilibrium of forces which is favourable to its existence; and there is no reason to suppose this equilibrium to be less stable than that which keeps the planets revolving in their orbits. There is no impossibility, therefore, in the hope that the human will may have time to understand itself, and, having understood itself, to realize the objects of its rational desire.

We see that the "Cosmos" here invoked is not inconsistent with the "Nothingness" before described. It is a triumph amid illusions, an order within chaos, _la gloire du néant_. This hint of a reconciliation between the practical optimism natural to an active being, and the speculative pessimism inevitable to an intelligent one, is happier than the muddled solutions of the same problem with which current philosophies have made us familiar. The philosophy suggested by Jean Lahor is that of Spinoza, if we subtract from the latter its mystical optimism, and add a broad appreciation of human culture. Man cannot attain his happiness by conforming to that which is hostile to himself; he can thus attain only his dissolution. But by using what is hostile to himself for his own ends, as far as his energy extends, he can make an oasis for himself in Nature, and being at peace with himself, be at peace also with her.

Such a view has some relation to the real conditions of human life and progress. What is called the higher optimism, on the contrary, commonly consists in recounting all the evils of existence with a radiant countenance, and telling us that they are all divine ministers of some glorious consummation; but what this consummation is never appears, and we are reduced in practice to a mere glorification of impulse. We are simply invited to accept the conditions of life as they are, and to find in incidental successes a compensation for incidental or--as we should say if we were sincere--for essential failures. Such an optimism impairs by a kind of philosophic Nature-worship that moral loyalty which consists in giving the highest honour to the highest, not to the strongest, things. It substitutes, as pantheism must, the study of tendencies for the study of ends, and the dignity of success for the dignity of justice.

This moral confusion our author avoids by his greater sincerity. He has understood how fundamentally that man is a dupe who does not begin by settling his accounts with Despair. There is no safety in lies; there is no safety even in "postulates." Let the worst of the truth appear, and when it has once seen the light, let it not be immediately wrapped up again in the swaddling clothes of an equivocal rhetoric. In such a disingenuous course there is both temerity and cowardice: temerity in throwing away the opportunity, always afforded by the recognition of fact, of cultivating the real faculties of human nature; cowardice in not being willing to face with patience and dignity the situation in which fate appears to have put us. That Nature is immense, that her laws are mechanical, that the existence and well-being of man upon earth are, from the point of view of the universe, an indifferent incident,--all this is in the first place to be clearly recognized. It is the lesson which both poetic contemplation and practical science had taught Jean Lahor.

Had he stopped to subject his opinion to metaphysical criticism, he would not, I think, have found reason to change it. To subjectify the universe is not to improve it, much less to dissolve it. The space I call my idea has all the properties of the space I called my environment; it has the same inevitable presence and the same fundamental validity. Because it is a law of our intelligence that two and two make four, and the implications of that law may be traced by abstract thought, the world which is subject to that arithmetical principle is not made more amenable to our higher demands than if it had been arithmetical of its own sweet will. It is not made docile by being called our creature. Indeed, what is less docile to us than ourselves? what less subject to our correction than the foundations of our own being? So when the Kantian philosophy teaches us to look upon the enveloping universe as a figment of the understanding and on its laws as results of mental synthesis and inference, we are still pursued by the inevitable presence of that figment and confronted involuntarily by that result. Nay, the conditions of our thought, like the predispositions of our characters, are the most fatal and inexorable of our limitations.