Part 12 (1/2)

_”The Rediscovery of the Inner Life”_

Josiah Royce dismisses the whole of philosophy from Spinoza to Kant in one single pregnant phrase. He calls it ”the rediscovery of the inner life.” It is along this line that modern philosophy and religion approach each other. Religion has always been the setting forth of the inner life in terms of its relations.h.i.+p to G.o.d and the proofs of the reality of religion have always been found in the experiences of the soul. The mystic particularly made everything of the inner life; he lived only in its realities. For the sake of its enrichment and its empowerment he subjected himself to rigorous disciplines. Its revelations were to him all sufficient, for having found G.o.d therein he asked for nothing beside.

Wherein, then, is this new mysticism, or better, this new cult of the inner life different from the old? It is not easy to answer that question in a paragraph, though it is easy to feel the answer in any comparison of the great cla.s.sics of mysticism--which are mostly spiritual autobiographies--and New Thought literature. To turn from St.

Augustine to Dresser, or from St. Theresa to Trine is to change spiritual and intellectual climates. There is in the modern literature little reflection of such spiritual struggle as fills the great Confessions with the agony of embattled souls, nor any resolution of such struggle into the peace of a soul ”fully awake as regards G.o.d but wholly asleep as regards things of this world and in respect of herself.” This testimony of St. Theresa is illuminating as a contrasting background for New Thought. There the soul is very much awake, both as regards things of this world and in respect of herself.

These new cults of the inner life are far more self-conscious than the old and far more self-a.n.a.lytical. They seek to discern the laws in answer to which they act and utilize those laws in the practical conduct of life. They are always either appealing to underlying philosophies or else trying to make a philosophy of their own. Mysticism made everything of G.o.d and nothing of itself. It plotted its mystic way but knew nothing of psychology. New Thought seeks to discover in psychology a road to G.o.d. The centers of mysticism were emotional; the centers of New Thought are intellectual. All these cults are far more akin to Gnosticism than mysticism, though they are saved, yet not wholly, from the lawlessness of Gnosticism by a pretty constant return to the outstanding conclusions of science and philosophy.

_Spinoza's Quest_

Now if we seek to discover the real genesis of the movement and trace its development we would better begin, so deep are the roots of things, with Spinoza rather than Quimby. Here the deeper currents, upon the surface of which New Thought moves, take their rise and here also we return to Royce's phrase--”the rediscovery of the inner life”--and the philosopher who inaugurated the philosophic quest for just this discovery.

Spinoza was one of the last of the mystics and the first of the modern philosophers. He shared with the mystics of an earlier time a consuming sense of the futility of life save as life perfected itself in contemplations of an eternal excellency and communion with something far greater than itself. ”After experience had taught me,” he says (and this is quoted from Royce's ”Spirit of Modern Philosophy”), ”that all the usual surroundings of social life are vain and futile, seeing that none of the objects of my fears contained in themselves anything either good or bad except in so far as the mind is affected by them, I finally resolved to inquire whether there might be some real good which would affect the mind singly, to the exclusion of all else, whether there might be anything of which the discovery and attainment would enable me to enjoy continuous, supreme and unending happiness.”

Now there is in all this a strangely modern note--dissatisfaction with what is offered by the commonplace and the accepted, a great emphasis upon the mind as the key to the readjustments of life, a quest for some single formula which would offer ”continuous, supreme and unending happiness.” This is exactly what Mary Baker Eddy and all the other perplexed and bodily broken ”seekers” who gathered about Quimby were really wanting and this is what, for one reason or another, the proffered religious experiences of their time failed to secure them.

”This was, then,” to quote Royce, ”the beginning of Spinoza's Pilgrim's Progress.” (As indeed it is the beginning of every Pilgrim's Progress.) ”But now, for what distinguishes him from other mystics and makes him a philosopher and not a mere exhorter, he has his religious pa.s.sion, he must reflect upon it ... the philosopher must justify his faith.”

We have no need here to follow Spinoza along all the way, difficult and misty enough, by which he sought to justify his faith. The outstanding fact is enough. He is a mystic who reasons his way through where the elder mystic has felt his way through, and the goal which he finally reaches, though it be the goal which the earlier mystics had found by other roads,--the loss of self in G.o.d--is none the less such an achievement of reason as Spinoza was able to compa.s.s.

_Kant Reaffirms the Creative Power of Mind_

So this polisher of lenses bequeathed to the century which followed him its greatest inheritance and set for it its greatest task: the inner life as the supreme concern of the philosopher and the discovery of its laws and the interpretations of its realities the supreme task of philosophy. Those who continued his work began far enough, apparently, from the point where he left off and went a road strangely remote from his. Having taken the inner life for their study they sought to lay bare its very foundations. Nowadays, if we are so minded, we dictate to machines which write our words curiously enough in shallow lines upon wax cylinders and when the cylinders are full shave off the fragile record and begin again.

This is what the eighteenth century did for the mind. It reduced it to a virgin surface, it affirmed the reality of nothing except the impressions thereupon registered by what sense supplied. We owe to experience and to experience only ”all that vast store which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it [the white paper of the mind] with an almost endless variety.” We have nothing with which to begin but sensation; we have nothing to go on with but reflection.

”These two, namely external, material things as the objects of sensation, and the operations of our own minds within as the objects of reflection, are the only originals from whence all our ideas take their beginnings.”[60] Such things as these are perhaps enough to begin with, but they are not enough to go on with as our thinkers soon enough discover. Some way must be found to relate the material thus supplied and to build it up into a glowing, continuous, reasonable and conscious inner life.

[Footnote 60: Locke, ”Essay Concerning the Human Understanding.”]

So in turn the philosophers laboured at their problem. They made much not only of reflection but of a.s.sociation; they found a place for memory and imagination; they discovered that we may as truly define experience in terms of ideas as of sensation; they discovered finally that by no possible process even of the most ingenious reasoning can you get the full wealth of life out of a mind which was nothing more to begin with than a piece of white paper, any more than you can get Hamlet (if we may suppose Shakespeare to have used a dictaphone) out of a wax cylinder, a needle and a diaphragm.

So Kant ended what Spinoza began, by reaffirming the creative power of the mind itself. It does far more than pa.s.sively receive, it interprets, organizes, contributes, creates. True enough, it is not an unconditioned creator, it has laws of its own in obedience to which it finds both its freedom and its power. It must take the material which experience supplies and yet, in its higher ranges, in the regions of conduct and faith, that is, where conscience has become the guide and the necessities of the soul the law, we do possess the power in enfranchising obediences and splendid adventures of faith to make a world rich in goodness, power and peace. And here, once more, there is a strangely modern note. Life is a pilgrim's progress. We are set out to discover ”whether there might be some real good, the discovery and attainment of which would enable us to enjoy continuous, supreme and unending happiness.” And we do possess the power within ourselves, if only we may discover the controlling laws and release effective forces, to come at least a stage nearer our goal. All this makes for that exaltation of the creative self which is so marked a characteristic of present-day att.i.tudes and which is perhaps the distinctive affirmation of New Thought.

_Utilitarianism, Deism and Individualism the Practical Outcome of a Great Movement_

But it needed time for all this to work itself out. The philosophic basis for it had been supplied but it is a far cry from philosophy to the practical conduct of life. Kant's transcendental philosophy needed a deal of working over before it became practicable for the man in the street. And to begin with what was deepest in the philosophy of the Enlightenment led in unexpected directions. ”While the practical tendencies of all speculative thought inevitably appear in the opinions and customs of a general public far removed from their sources, it is particularly true of the philosophy of the Enlightenment, that its influences had no small part in shaping the popular point of view concerning the moral, religious and political convictions of that age.”[61] Utilitarianism, Deism and Individualism were, says Hibben, the popular and practical outcome of the whole movement,--Utilitarianism in Ethics, Deism in Religion, Individualism in Politics. These three growths--and they have borne a deal of bitter fruit in the last one hundred years--grow out of one soil. In general they are due to Locke's sensationalism, Hume's skepticism, a new emphasis upon reason as opposed to revelation and the self-sufficiency of the individual. If conscious life is nothing but sensation worked over and built up, then pleasurable sensations are the best we can aspire to, happiness is the end of the quest. So Utilitarianism defined goodness in terms of happiness and gave to conduct generally a grasping, greedy quality for which we have paid over and over again in the disappointments and disillusionments of an age, which, supposing itself to have discovered the true secret of well-being, found too much of its seeming happiness only Dead Sea fruit.

[Footnote 61: Hibben, ”The Philosophy of the Enlightenment,” p. 253.]

_They Bear a Bitter Fruit: the Reactions Against Them_

Deism in its reaction against Religion as merely revelation and in its endeavour to find a rational basis for faith set G.o.d apart from His world, detached, unheeding and offering no real recourse to a travailing humanity between whom and Himself it built a rigid fabric of impersonal law. The Individualism of the eighteenth century was partly a reaction against old despotisms of Church and State--and a Declaration of Independence. It was in part a pride of accomplishment and a new affirmation of the self-sufficiency of the questing reason. There was in it also a sound recognition of the worth of personality of which the world then stood in need and which has since supplied a foundation for a saving pa.s.sion for education and human well-being. But Individualism as practically applied by the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century--unexpectedly reinforced as it was by aspects of Darwinism--stressed the right of the strong and the doom of the weak. It made compet.i.tion the law of economic development, the survival of the fittest the goal of a life of struggle.

Consciously or unconsciously the politics, industry and religion of the nineteenth century were greatly influenced by these outstanding conceptions. No need to say how utterly they have broken down. They have made for the deepening strife of cla.s.ses and of nations, they have essentially defeated the bright promise of a time which seemed to have more to hope for than almost any other great period of history.

And yet they were never unchallenged. They were challenged by the essential spirit of Christianity; they were challenged by the poets who found that they could shape no songs out of such stuff as this; they were challenged by philosophers who sought to build for themselves and for us a world more free and true; they were challenged by a group of great novelists who created out of the wealth of their imagination characters and situations in which love and human worth had their way in spite of a thousand obstacles. They were challenged by prophets of a better world, the Ruskins and Carlyles who soundly rated the ethics of selfishness and the political economies of compet.i.tion and the politics of self-a.s.sertion and who stirred deeply the more sensitive of their time. And finally they were challenged, and here we begin to approach again the genesis of New Thought, by a philosophic movement which found its point of departure in certain great aspects of earlier thinking which had been much obscured by the difficult forms in which it had been stated: the supremacy, that is, of the soul over all its surroundings.

Now this return to what we may call the creative and controlling power of spiritual forces is the key to the modern approach to life. We do not understand, it may be, the meaning of our own terms. Spirit is a vague enough word but we do know that the initiative is with desire and purpose and understanding. These are positive and masterful; they are by no means free; they are conditioned by the vaster order of which they are a part, none the less our human world is plastic to their touch and our material world as well. Carlyle has chanted all this gustily enough but there is kindling truth in his stormy music. ”Thus, like some wild flaming, wild thundering train of heaven's artillery does this mysterious mankind thunder and flame in long-drawn, quick succeeding grandeur through the unknown deep. Earth's mountains are levelled and her seas filled up in our pa.s.sage. Can the earth which is but dead in a vision resist spirits which have reality and are alive?”