The Spiritual Ascent of Man

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Preface

My object in this volume has been to present some of the main problems of science, philosophy, and religion as these are dealt with by a number of the most prominent writers of our day. It is no longer possible to keep science, philosophy, and theology in different compartments, and probably the greatest weakness of the Church in the past has been the failure to give due heed to the various branches of knowledge in their bearings on religion. A religious synthesis which is obtained at the expense of the conclusions of these various branches is without a doubt destined more and more in the future to be of less and less avail and finally to pass away. The time has arrived for a reconstruction of religion on its intellectual side, and the signs of the coming of such a synthesis are already in our midst. This volume will have served its purpose if it satisfies, in some degree, the

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pressing need for a fresh consideration of the problem of religion, if it succeeds in setting forth the chief features of the religion of the future, and, above all, if it guides to a safe spiritual anchorage those who are ceaselessly tossed about on the tempestuous sea of knowledge. That such an anchorage is needed by our young people to-day no one can deny, and that it is all-important in the conduct of life all will agree. This has been at least my aim — to show how the various branches of human knowledge if carried far enough, and brought into direct relationship with life, are subsidiary stages to Religion in general and to Christianity in particular.

I wish to thank my wife, also my friend, Mr. J. T. Walley, M.A., late Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, for several valuable suggestions and for much kind help in the reading of proofs.

W. Tudor Jones.

Clifton, Bristol, October 20, 1916.

Chapter I

We axe living, at the present moment, in the very mid-stream of the most colossal struggle the world has ever seen. Throughout the preceding fifty years, in every civilised state, the arts and the sciences, the social and economic conditions of life, the spread of all the branches of human knowledge, had passed through a period of uninterrupted development. This period has been one of the most remarkable in the whole history

of mankind. All the old foundations have

i been critically examined in the light of modern science, and have had to be reconstructed and revised in order to meet the new demands made upon them by the widening progress of human thought. Within a single generation our conceptions of the universe, man, and religion have suffered fundamental changes — changes which can never again give place to the old conceptions which had hitherto prevailed. This truth, within the domain of natural science, has passed from the realm of controversy to the realm of certainty. And even within the domains of philosophy and religion all the problems of life and the universe have undergone changes quite as important as have occurred within natural science. And though the process here is not so tangible, this is simply because it deals with material which largely arises from thought and not from the things of the external world. To take a leading representative of the religious thought of this generation — Rudolf Eucken — the fact of the enormous changes just referred to is clearly seen. 1 Many writers on philosophy and religion show very clearly how two courses of thought have been in antagonism to each other during the last and the present centuries. Natural science and traditional theology have failed to come to an understanding with each other, and to-day the breach has so widened that practically all the leaders of modern religious thought have at last become conscious of the fact. They feel it is entirely hopeless to affirm that a thing must be so because it has been so during no matter how long a past. The all-important verifications of the claims of science are now so self-evident that it is simply futile for any person to attempt to contradict them in their basal principles and far-reaching results.

If, further, we look at any object of History, we are there confronted with the same conditions as within the province of science. The historical conceptions of traditional theo-

* Cf . The Truth of Religion, by Rudolf Eucken (Eng. trans., 2nd ed., pp. 24-48).

logy have, in our own day, been largely relegated to a subsidiary place. There is hardly any great religious teacher contending for them now in their entirety. Every leading thinker sees that the ideas of the past are insufficient for an interpretation of the present. The failure to grasp this truth by so many of the religious leaders of the past has done incalculable injury to religion as a civilising and moralising factor in the progress of mankind. The enemies — the greatest enemies — of religion have often been the truest friends of religion. So many religious teachers have been fighting so long for the "letter" of religion — for its "clothing"— that they have utterly failed to distinguish between its "clothing" and its substance. As we shall see at a later stage in this volume, until the eyes of religious teachers are opened wide to the meaning, value, and significance of all the knowledge that has been won during these latter years, the true pathway to religious progress will inevitably remain blocked.

But, on the other hand, we must not forget that science, though it has revealed to us many new truths in the realms of nature, history, and man, is still not capable of explaining everything in this wide universe. It, too, has been fighting against what does not belong to its own proper domain, and what is of a totally different nature from the physical things of the universe or the mere record and description of the events of history. During the latter half of the nineteenth century, intoxicated by the sweeping victories which attended its inductive method of procedure, it subjected man's mind and spirit to the same tests as had been used in connection with fossils and animals. It shouted on the housetops that the "riddle of the universe" had been solved, and that everything had been reduced to mechanical and chemical processes and laws. The 41 soul " was banished from the whole universe, and a belief in it or in God was looked upon as belonging to a stage of superstition which, unfortunately, had to be passed through in order that the "new gospel" of materialism might " redeem " the world. The history of the later half of the nineteenth century and of the first decade of the present will be looked upon by the thinkers of the future with a smile of strange surprise. Haeckel and his fellow-monists will be remembered as those who could not conceive of any kind of reality which did not lend itself to the senses — as those on whom it did not dawn that Thought is necessary in order to propound any theory, however childish it may be, and in order to bring each and every branch of science into existence and to promote its future development. But who asserts to-day that mind and thought are wholly physical things, or the products of things purely mechanical? No one, except a very few who are obliged to make assumptions as vast as those propounded in any traditional theology, and of far less real value than these.

It will be shown in the succeeding chapters that the death of materialism has actually taken place, especially in so far as it is no longer a sufficient explanation of the origin of life, mind, and spirit.

In the best scientific and philosophic thought of our own day the following conclusion has been reached. On the one hand, human knowledge — scientific, historical, and philosophical — has changed our conceptions of the universe and of life, and has rendered the old theological notions untenable. Much has gone — much that served as a prop for religion in the past, but was, in reality, not the inner nucleus of religion itself. Religious people must courageously face this truth, and an enormous responsibility rests on those teachers who know the situation and yet are too timid to put it boldly before the people. There is no solution to the religious problem until this fact of the enormous changes that have actually taken place has been forced upon the attention of the world. This is by no means all that must be taught; but if there is ignorance or fear on this one point, there will constantly be entanglements which will prevent religion from having the influence it otherwise could or should have upon the deepest mind of man.

On the other hand, the situation of science has to be presented not only with regard to its undisputed results, but also with regard to its failure to deal adequately with man from the side of his intellectual, moral, social, and religious needs. In fact, science can present the history of these needs and define them by means of abstractions only in the form of laws. Even the very laws which form the ideal of science do not correspond to any objects in the external world, but constitute mental constructions, or models, framed by thought after an observation of some of the qualities of objects in the external world.

Further, the scientific treatment of the meaning of Life, of the connection of Body and Mind, has undergone a profound change during the past decade, and seems destined to change even greater in the coming years.

We ought, then, to be made aware of the truths of the natural sciences, and, at the same time, to be made aware of their limits. But as it is impossible for us to leave the mind and spirit of man without investigation, we shall have to turn elsewhere than to science for the explanation of the phenomena of consciousness and the results which flow from such phenomena. It is for this reason that emphasis should be laid on the two aspects which have already been noticed, viz. the attitude of traditional theology, and the attitude of science towards religion. The former offers too much which has not been proved true, and offers it at the risk of contradicting the results of ages of human thought and scientific inquiry. It has been, on the whole, the main cause of the alienation of a large portion of mankind from religious organisations, and has helped to form in the minds of great numbers of people an empirical and agnostic bias and temper. I say, on the whole, because the other factor which has helped to produce the partial decay of religion in our generation has io The Spiritual Ascent of Man

come from the side of science. Empirical science, until the last few years, had endeavoured to reduce the highest things to their lowest common factor. But very many of the leaders of science, none the less, came to the conclusion that this method of treating the reality of mind and spirit could not yield a final explanation of that reality. Unfortunately, the empirical portions of their teaching got into the hands of lesser men — men who were blind to every kind of reality which was not sensuous in its nature. It is, indeed, difficult to determine with any precision the proportion of blame which belongs to traditional theology and to science for leading the modern world on paths of negation and sterility concerning man's spiritual potencies.

To-day, these two aspects are giving place to a third mode of conceiving the universe and life. It is now generally recognised that no single branch of human knowledge is capable of deciding every issue involved in these two questions of life

The Scope and Limits of Science n

and the universe. The fact is, that the two are so vast that it is impossible any longer for any one observer to view the whole field of knowledge, and far less is it possible for him to become a master in all the branches of knowledge. But it is possible, in departments outside our own special one, to study and to utilise the results of others; it is possible to benefit from these and to have our views of life and the universe constantly enlarged and deepened by them. Each science, of course, has the whole of the universe and of life in one sense as its subject-matter, for we cannot say that there are any portions of reality to be lopped off from the rest as useless. If we knew the "flower in the crannied wall ... we should know what God and man is." That may be true, as we shall presently see, in metaphysics and religion, but there is also another kind of knowledge of the flower, where it is sufficient and even necessary merely to take it and its surrounding "crannied wall" into account.

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Each science deals with certain pieces of reality, and attempts to interpret them; it leaves an unexplained residuum to other sciences, and each of these sciences, in its turn, passes some of its problems over to other sciences. When we arrive at the work proper of the mental sciences, especially in the spheres of Logic, Metaphysics, and Religion, we are dealing with the results and the fundamental conceptions of the various sciences, and are trying to interpret them within a new world of thought and | value. It will thus be noticed that when we

pass from the natural to the mental sciences we pass to a second kind of world which grows out of the world of nature. A great many of the present day leaders of philosophical and religious thought are so convinced of this truth that they look upon it as the only pathway to religion and to God. We must begin at the very bottom, dealing with the solid earth and all its manifestations, and, step by step, pass upward, following all the demands of thought as well as all the demands of our own nature. It is agreed by practically all the great thinkers of our day that thus and only thus can we pass beyond the boundaries of sense to a transcendent world of thought and goodness and holiness.

The object of this volume is to show this truth, to set it forth as the only foundation upon which the religion of the future can be built and rendered secure against all attacks made upon it by any branch of science. In fact, proceeding in this manner, we shall leave behind us the conflicts of religion and science; for science will have passed over to religion its best results as factors for a partial interpretation of life and the universe; and religion will take up such factors and fit them into the true places which the constructions of Logic, Ethics, and Metaphysics have made.

We shall now turn to some of these fundamental problems, and see their bearing on religion, constantly remembering that our pathway is first of all inductive-

— leading from the simple to the complex, and thus yielding a general result which, in its turn, explains all the particular facts which present themselves to the mind. In other words, there is no breach between the "flower in the crannied wall" and God, but between the "flower" and God there is a continuous passage from one to the other, though each is found on a different level. We are bound to conceive of reality in all its aspects in exactly the same way as we conceive of different portions, of physical reality as being up or down, right or left, here or there, and so forth. The evolution of reality within the soul includes reality from its lowest and empirical to its highest and eternal level.

Chapter II

In considering the course of human thought, we discover that a persistent attempt has been made to reach an interpretation of the whole universe. Men have never, for the most part, been satisfied with fragments of existence, but have felt the need of an allembracing view of the universe and man's place within it. The history of this attempt is interesting and astonishing. We see how numerous and how varied have been the efforts to obtain and present a complete picture of the universe — a picture in which everything could be seen in its relation to everything else, and in which all the parts could be viewed in their relation to the whole, and the whole viewed as one, and including within itself all the parts. Now, it is at once evident that to no individual is given the power to view all the objects of the universe. The parts when minutel^ investigated have revealed so many comprehensive meanings that each part has sufficed to take up the whole of the investigator's life. The universe, in other words, is too vast to be examined as a whole: a single comer of the field has had to be examined, and incessant labour expended on this for any real gain to knowledge to accrue. And this has consistently been the method of science. It has proceeded on the lines of a "division of labour/ 9 and all its greatest successes have been achieved in this manner.

In the pre-scientific period the world was viewed as far as possible in its entirety. This, of course, was not, as already suggested, quite possible; but by leaving the parts on one side and constantly contemplating the universe as far as possible as a whole, a more embracing picture of the universe was obtained than could ever have been gained by working entirely in the field of one of the parts, and ignoring all the other parts which were not closely connected therewith. Besides this, wider views of the universe, obtained at the expense of the meaning which the parts gave to the whole, were brought in by fancy and imagination to complete the picture. Man saw many things happening in the universe which bore a close resemblance to what takes place in the human body and mind in the course of their activities. All these suggestions were carried over into the endeavour to give a meaning of the universe, and led at last to the ascription of a Creator and Sustainer to all that is. It is not held in this volume that such a construction, and the conviction from which it flows, is without value. Indeed, it still makes its appeal to a large portion of the human race, and, since it arrives at a conclusion which is similar to the one arrived at by the best religious metaphysic of the present day, it is thoroughly justified. But from an intellectual standpoint the conclusions of the pre-scientific period cannot claim the same force as the conclusions which investigators have reached in regard to the nature of the particular part they are examining. The part that is being examined often contradicts the pre-scientific conclusion, and there are no means possible by which the pre-scientific observer can answer the man of science. Often the man of science is in the wrong, because what is true of a part as a part may be quite false when the part is taken as exhausting the meaning of the whole of the boundless universe. If the pre-scientific observer is beset by the danger of building a totality, or whole, at the expense of the multiplicity of parts which go to form the whole, the scientific observer is just as much beset by the danger of ignoring the whole in his enthusiasm for the meaning which is continually found in the parts in

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Up to the present day, there have been combatants on each side — on the side of the whole and on the side of the parts — with the disastrous result that no intelligent, satisfying view of the universe could be obtained from either of them. The combatants could never come to an agreement because one combatant viewed the universe at the expense of the parts, and the other at the expense of the whole.

Nearly all men of science are aware of this fact, and they admit the difficulty making headway towards a truer view of the universe than is presented either by traditional theology with its easy smugness, or by natural science with its mere examination of fragments of the universe. Consequently, men of science have seen the necessity of probing the general presuppositions and results of natural science itself. They perceive that the very methods employed by the natural scientist, although he may be unaware of it in examining his facts, constitute a region quite distinct from that of the isolated facts in the external world. Natural science has to examine its own presuppositions, frame its own hypotheses, test its results, establish the meaning ao The Spiritual Ascent of Man

of its fundamental conceptions. All this belongs to the realm of Logic and Meta-

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physics, and therefore includes something more than the mere object under investigation or the mere description of the nature of that object in its immediate surroundings. On the one hand, the object connects itself with the whole universe; and, on the other, its meaning and interpretation are based upon the character of the object in its relation to complexes of thought which have grown up in the mind from its prior experiences, and which are considered valid because they have worked. This, and much more than this, has compelled most natural scientists to recognise the need for a Philosophy of Science or a Metaphysic of Nature for the interpretation of facts and for obtaining Standards which give different valuations to the facts. Such a Philosophy of Science is further able to give a meaning to the separate results of the various sciences in their interrelation. This it is capable of doing in terms of logical thought, and one of the main characteristics of logical thought is that in viewing the meaning of the parts it is able, as it were, to pack them together into one parcel, and thus to regard the various domains, however different they may be, as constituting one world. What we have to bear in mind here is that such a meaning of the world as one has been obtained by taking all the fragments into account, bringing them home to the mind, and allowing that mind to reflect over them in their relations. The conclusion which is thus formed is the meaning of the world and the conception of it as one.

Of course such a meaning is never final, and it is on account of this that science contains a perpetually Heal element. This meaning is not something purely material, for it could never have arisen without the mind and its logical activity. And neither is the meaning purely subjective — a mere projection of human imagination into the universe — for the meaning could never have arisen without taking the facts of the external world into account. We conclude, therefore, that the meaning of the universe is partially true, because it includes both the elements of mind and the facts of the world. There could be no world for us without our minds, and there could be no minds without the world. This truth is accepted in some form or other by those philosophers of nature who, at the same time, are natural scientists. It is impossible here . to enter into the metaphysical implications which arise from the short sketch already given, for it is practically impossible to show the place of Metaphysics in Science in a few words. The subject would require a volume by itself. But it is to be hoped that scientific and religious teachers are becoming more and more aware of the importance of the r61e of Metaphysics which has been outlined here. By this means we become aware of the truth that the meaning of the universe and life is to be obtained through the union of thought and external fact. In other words, we cannot view the universe without ourselves, and we cannot view ourselves without the universe.

But the main idea which has alreadybeen set forth in this chapter is the view of the universe as Many (as parts) and the need of passing beyond the parts in order to view it as One (as a whole). The scale of the various natural and mental sciences leads us from the Many to the One in the form of meaning. Each science has its Many (its parts) and its One (its whole). The Ones of the various sciences, as we mount up the scale, are several, are many: these consequently are treated as parts on the plane above their own oneness and wholeness, and they finally merge into a totality that is formed within the conclusions of a more comprehensive domain of knowledge and life. And it is thus that we rise from science to philosophy, from philosophy to religion, and from religion to ultimate Reality. This ultimate Reality is not anything that has been brought forth by mere fancy. The Reality has been brought forth by the world and its meaning as these gradually reveal themselves in human consciousness. The meaning of consciousness and, indeed, of the whole of life, is found in climbing these stairs which start in a world of sense and pass into the ultimate Reality that is in all and above all. The whole of the result we have arrived at is a demand of thought ; the nature of the result is nothing other than the nature of thought at its fullest expansion and depth. Of course we are able to take snapshot views of the universe in our ordinary daily life, and it is necessary for us to do so. We cannot be solving problems of metaphysics or experiencing the fulness of ultimate Reality when we have to balance our accounts and pay our debts. But there is at the back of every figure that we add a metaphysic whose depth cannot be fathomed. One thing lies beneath another in this world so that we can never reach the bottom and understand in its entirety the deepest "ground" of things. But man can go deeper and deeper, and it is in this constant attempt, when time allows freedom from the details of life, that the fullest meaning, value, and significance of life consist. It is safe for us to go farther and say that in the degree in which penetration beneath the surface-level of the daily vocation takes place, in that degree alone can man hope to find an actual evolution of his deeper nature.

This truth has impressed itself so much upon men of science at the present day that most of them are endeavouring to place before us theories of the universe and of life. These theories deal, in the main, with matter and life. In other words, we may designate the two opposing theories which are generally presented as mechanistic and dynamic.

In spite of the fact that the parts get their meaning in a whole, it must not be supposed that there is but one whole on the levels of science and philosophy. There are at least the two opposing ones of mechanistic and dynamic. The former has lost its old superiority. It is very old — at least it is present in some of the speculations of the early Greek thinkers — and it has been resuscitated time after time in the history of thought. No doubt the idealism of Plato and the various forms of Neo-platonism at various periods in our Christian era accomplished much, but they were on the whole constructions which had been reached at the expense of the facts of nature, and were consequently bound to undergo serious modifications. And the disappearance of speculation as well as the rise of induction in modern times necessitated a break with the old idealism and gave rise to a materialism which has exercised an enormous influence for good in the history of scientific and philosophic thought. The quantitative way of conceiving the universe was emphasised, and the mechanical processes of inorganic and organic things received their full share of attention alongside of the psychical processes. But during the latter half of the nineteenth century some scientific men were not satisfied with the reduction of all processes to two — a physical and a psychical — and their endeavour was to resolve every psychical process into a mechanical process. Few of these were men of eminence, and increasing investigation has relegated their teaching, especially in so far as the psychical manifests itself in the highest experiences of mind, to the realm of oblivion. Haeckel and Loeb are the only two scientists of note who stand for a thoroughgoing materialism. x Haeckel's Law of Substance and Loeb's "chemical mechanisms," "tropisms," and "instincts" are supposed by them to explain everything. Personally, I acquiesce in much that Haeckel and Loeb say, but they say nothing with regard to human consciousness and its capacity to read the world and to progress in its interpretation of life and the universe. Both are blind to the reality of thought. Reality for them is the sensuous, the tangible, and nothing more, unless they smuggle in general mental notions under a physical garb. It