Part 3 (1/2)
There are no conditions of being that are not plastic to the potency of thought. As one learns to control his thought he controls the issues of life. He becomes increasingly clear in intuition, in perceptions, and in spiritual vision.
As the planets and the stars and the solar systems are evolved out of nebulae through attraction and motion and perpetual combination, so the present and the future is evolved for each individual out of his past, and he is perpetually creating it. Nothing is absolute, but relative,--”no truth so sublime but that it may become trivial to-morrow in the light of new thoughts.” There is no relations.h.i.+p, no casual meeting, no accident or incident of the moment, however trivial it may seem, but that is a sign, a hint, an ill.u.s.tration of the human drama, perpetually moving onward, and demanding from each and all insight, as well as outlook, and a consciousness of the absolute realities involved in the manifestation of the moment. ”The present moment is like an amba.s.sador which declares the will of G.o.d,” says the writer of a little Catholic book of devotions; ”the events of each moment are divine thoughts expressed by created objects,” and the one serious hindrance, it may be, to the acceptance of events in this spirit, lies in the fact of not being prepared for their acceptance. The problem of life, then, resolves itself into the question of so ordering one's course of living as to be prepared to receive the event of the moment; but the entire rush and ceaseless demands of the life of the present form the obstacle in the way of this harmonious recognition. One cannot accept the event of the moment because he is absorbed in the event of yesterday, or last week, and his life is not, thereby, ”up-to-date.” To be always behindhand is to be under a perpetual and ever-increasing burden.
Empedocles under Mt. Etna was no more imprisoned than is the life of to-day which is filled with the things of yesterday. Yet where does the remedy lie? It is the problem of the hour. ”In nature every moment is new,” says Emerson, and it is that sense of freshness and exhilaration that one needs in order successfully to enter into the experiences of the present hour.
The world of mechanism keeps pace in the most curiously interesting way with the world of thought. Inventions came as material correspondences to the immaterial growth and demand. When in the middle of the nineteenth century the human race had achieved a degree of development that made swift communication essential to the common life, the telegraph and the ocean cable were invented; or it might rather be said, the laws that make them possible were discerned, and were taken advantage of to utilize for this purpose. The constant developments in rapid transit, in the instantaneous conveniences of telephonic communication, and, latest of all, in wireless telegraphy, are all in the line of absolute correspondence with the advancing needs of humanity.
More than a decade ago Doctor Edward Everett Hale made the prediction in an article in ”The Forum” that writing (in the mechanical sense) would become a lost art, and that the people of future centuries would point to us as ”the ancients,” who communicated our ideas by means of this slow and clumsy process. According to Doctor Hale's vision, the writing of all this present period would come to be regarded in much the same light as that in which we look at the Egyptian hieroglyphics or the papyrus. At that time the phonograph, if invented, was not in any way brought to the practical perfection of the present, and telepathy was more a theory than an accepted fact; but Doctor Hale has the prophetic cast of mind, and already his theory is more in the light of probability than that of mere possibility. The demands of modern life absolutely require the development of some means of communication that shall obviate the necessity of the present laborious means of handwriting.
There is needed the mechanism that shall transfer the thought in the mind to some species of record without the intervention of the hand.
Whether the phonograph can be popularized to meet this need; whether some still finer means that photograph thought shall be evolved, remains to be seen. Thought is already photographed in the ether, but whether this image can be transferred to a material medium is the question.
That telepathy shall yet come to be so well understood; its laws formulated as to bring it within the range of the definite sciences, there can be no doubt; but this result can only attend a higher development of the spiritual power of humanity. In its present status telepathy is seen as a result of wholly unconscious and una.n.a.lyzed processes that open a new region of life and a new range of possibilities. It is the discovery of a new keyboard, so to speak, in the individual, enabling him to still more ”live in thought,” and to ”act with energies that are immortal.” Science is continually revealing the truth that the world, the solar system, the infinite universes are all created as the theatre of man's evolutionary development. As Emerson so truly says, ”the world is the perennial miracle which the soul worketh.”
”The Discovery of the Future” was the t.i.tle of an interesting lecture by Mr. H. G. Wells, given in London early in 1901, before the Royal Inst.i.tute, in which the subject was speculatively discussed, and in the course of his lecture Mr. Wells said:--
”Along certain lines, with certain limitations, he argued, a working knowledge of the things of the future was practicable and possible. As during the past century the amazing searchlights of inference had been pa.s.sed into the remoter past, so by seeking for operating causes instead of for fossils the searchlight of inference might be thrown into the future. The man of science would believe at last that events in A. D. 4000 were as fixed, settled, and unchangeable as those of A. D. 1600, with the exception of the affairs of man and his children. It is as simple and sure to work out the changing orbit of the earth in future until the tidal drag hauls one unchanging face at last toward the sun, as it is to work back to its blazing, molten past. We are at the beginning of the greatest change that humanity has ever undergone. There will be no shock, as there is no shock at a cloudy daybreak. We are creatures of twilight, but out of our minds and the lineage of our minds will spring minds that will reach forward fearlessly. A day will come--one day in the unending succession of days--when the beings now latent in our thoughts, hidden in our loins, shall stand on this earth as one stands on a footstool, and they shall laugh and reach out their hands among the stars.”
Mr. Wells is a disciple of Darwin, and he is applying to the life of humanity certain laws of evolution. In this lecture he argued that great men are merely ”the images and symbols and instruments taken at haphazard by the incessant, consistent forces behind them. They were the pen nibs which fate used in her writing, and the more one was inclined to trust these forces behind individuals, the more one could believe in the possibility of a reasoned inductive view of the future that would serve us in politics, morals, social contrivances, and in a thousand ways.”
The lecturer argued that ”a deliberate direction of historical, economic, and social study toward the future, and a deliberate and courageous reference to the future in moral and religious discussion, would be enormously stimulating and profitable to the intellectual life.”
One incalculable aid in thus throwing a spiritual searchlight forward and discussing the future is the realization embodied by Dr. Lyman Abbott, that there is no death, and no dead; that the entire universe is life; and that we are encompa.s.sed round about by invisible companions and friends; sustained, guided, helped by forces that we see not.
To see the future as clearly as we see the past, what does it require?
Saint Paul tells us that ”spiritual things are spiritually discerned.”
The future is visible to the spiritual sight. No one doubts but that the future is known to G.o.d, for it is He who creates and controls it. And man is the child of G.o.d, and his true life is in co-operating with G.o.d in every form of the higher activity. So far as he may co-operate with G.o.d he becomes, himself, a creative force; making, shaping, and determining this future, and thus, to an increasing degree, he becomes aware of it, or sees it, before it is realized on the outward plane. The day is not, indeed, distant, when humanity will live far less blindly than now. As man develops his psychic self and lives the life of the spirit,--the life of intellect and thought and purpose and prayer, rather than the life of the senses, he will perceive his future. To just the degree that one lives in the energies which are immortal does he perceive the future. Knowledge penetrates into the unknown and the unseen. Leverrier postulated Neptune long before his ”long-distance”
theory was verified. The intelligent recognition of the unseen forces and unseen presences, the intelligent conception of the manner in which these unseen forces are working out the problems of destiny, alone enables one to consciously combine with them; to enter into the processes of evolution as an intelligent factor, and thus redeem his individual life to harmony, beauty, and happiness.
[Sidenote: A Determining Question.]
The question confronts one as a very determining problem in life,--can man control his circ.u.mstances? To go deeper still, can he create them?
Or is he the product of his environment? Is every life just that which it is made? Or does there work, under all our human will and endeavor, a force resistless as gravitation and as constant as attraction? A writer, considering this subject, thus expresses his own convictions:--
”I believe that every life is the exact and necessary outcome of its _environment_, and that there is in reality not one particle of actual freedom in this respect from the cradle to the grave. I cannot here go into any extended proof of my position. The syllogism may be stated as follows:
”Every phenomenon is the necessary result of pre-existing causes:
”Life is but a succession of phenomena.
”Therefore every life is necessarily determined by pre-existing causes.
”I do not see how the conclusion can be escaped that from the time we open our eyes upon the world and receive our first impressions, we are thrust forward between insurmountable walls of fate that leave no room for freedom. It is true that so far as external or objective forces are concerned we may be, as a rule, under no compulsion to follow one more than another; but _subjectively_ we are in no sense free, because the peculiar way in which the _will_ will act under given conditions must depend upon the preponderating _subjective_ force. To hold otherwise is to contend that a lesser force can overcome a greater,--which is absurd.”
Certainly the problem as to the degree to which environment determines life is an interesting one, but may it not be reversed and stand as the problem to what degree life controls and fas.h.i.+ons the environment? Does not the environment change with the life in a corresponding evolutionary process? ”Every spirit builds its house.” Then, too, the thing we call life is not composed exclusively of character and circ.u.mstances. There enters into it a third element,--that of the unknown.
The environment of Tennyson, for instance, in his early youth, was that of the limited, even though thoughtful and refined life of the son of a country clergyman of modest means; as his powers expanded and developed his environment kept pace with it in extension of breadth. Is it not, then, true that a life really belongs to the environment it creates for himself, rather than to that in which it is first nurtured? ”It doth not yet appear what we shall be” applies to the possibilities of life in the present as well as in that future which lies beyond the change we call death. The divine electric spark leaps through the atmosphere and communicates its kindling power. The inner force of the spirit works outward and begins to shape and fas.h.i.+on its own world. Environment is simply another name for that series ”of the more stately mansions” that each one may build according to the power that worketh in him. A great sorrow comes; or an overwhelming joy, on which one rises to heights of ecstasy, to the very Mount of Transfiguration itself, and thus transcends all former limits and creates his new environment, whose walls are transparent to the sunrise flame and through which the glory enters in. What has he to do with that far-away, opaque, limited environment into which he was born? No more than has the giant oak, tossing its branches under the stars, to do with the acorn cup out of which it sprang. Let one realize, ever so faintly, even, the miracle of possibilities that may unfold, and his life is uplifted into a richness and a peace, and a serene confidence that carries with it the essential essence of all that is best and n.o.blest in its past, and all that is potential in its infinite future. The problem evolves into a definite work to be fulfilled, and this work, in turn, leads to another problem involving its demonstration, in actual performance, as well; and by this alternation life progresses,--growing ever larger and deeper and more exalted with its increasing power. In this way man produces his circ.u.mstances--creates his outer conditions. His successive environments become the expressions of his inner life and energy in their series of development and growth.
But this growth, this development, may be stimulated or r.e.t.a.r.ded. It depends entirely upon the degree to which one may relate himself to the spiritual energy of the divine atmosphere, ever ready to pour itself, with unlimited power, through every receptive channel. And this energy is the Divine Will, and entering into it man does not lose his own free choice, but only enters into that which makes his conscious choice vital and magnetic with infinite power of achievement.