The gift of mind to spirit

Front matter

Class Book

^-.5.17

H~tj

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I THE CONFLICT: MYSTICISM VS.

REALISM 1

Chapter I The Conflict: Mysticism Vs

REALISM

When, in the process of his evolution, man's consciousness, memory and intellect developed sufficiently to enable him to comprehend, to a certain extent, his own nature and the position which he occupied in the universe, he found himself a great puzzle. The same is true of every individual : he goes through a similar experience when his mind arrives at a similar stage in its growth. He has to cope with the everyday problems of life and to exert all his efforts in his struggle for existence. He feels that he ought to be happy and yet he meets with difficulties and disappointments, with persecutions and injustice; perhaps he suffers hunger and pains, endures sorrows ; or his body is racked with illness until he is ready to exclaim with Hamlet :

" Oh, that this too, too solid flesh would melt, Thaw, and resolve itself into dew; Or that the Everlasting had not fixed His canon 'gainst self-slaughter. O God ! O God ! How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable Seem to me all the uses of this world.

That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature

Possess it merely."

He sees millions of other beings with the same capacity for happiness (for which they seem to have been created) in similar plight without any apparent reason for it, while there are others, the minority, who are supplied with everything and who to all appearances are fulfilling their destiny. He sees about him a beautiful world, full of mystery, of which he seems to be a part and 3'et separated from. He sees the unworthy prosper while the deserving are suffering want ; he sees men belonging to the same race oppressing each other. Injustice seems to triumph and honesty suffer defeat. He sees the mad scramble for wealth only to end in a grave, whither it cannot be taken and beyond which his gaze cannot penetrate. He sees new life coming into the world in travail, and he stands at the bedside of the dying, passing out in agony. He sees pomp and wealth, and degradation and poverty. He sees noble men and women, and abject wretches wallowing in the mire of viciousness. In his own soul there is a continual struggle between a desire for ease and leisure at any price, and the prospect of hard but honest toil ; between an overpowering ambition to ride to self-exaltation over the bodies and souls of others, and the faithful performance of the tasks that each day brings in obscurity ; between doing what is right in expectation of a reward only, and following ideals because they constitute the natural revelations of the perfection of the Infinite. These problems present themselves to every one : What am I? Whence am I? Why am I? Whither am I tending? To some these questions present themselves clearly and are defined sharply ; to others, but vaguely and indefinitely. With some they are insistent for an answer; others put them aside carelessly, allowing the little affairs of life to drown their voices. Whether a man applies himself seriously to their solution or passes them up unanswered depends upon many circumstances, — the surroundings amid which he lives, his condition in life, his everyday needs and his natural capacity. And yet, notwithstanding all this, it is the duty of every one to solve these problems as best he can. Ordinarily, those feeling the pinch of want, the pangs of bodily pain or the hard facts of life, unless their minds have been completely dulled, give more attention to them than those differently situated. A satisfied animal is not given to speculation, and a full stomach is an enemy to serious thought. And the solution of these problems is important and not merely an idle speculation, because it is necessary for the proper regulation of man's daily conduct. Upon their answer depends not only the quieting of his mind, but also the proper harmonizing of his every act to the requirements of the world of which he is a part. Upon the proper understanding of his own position and nature depends his comprehension of his relations to others with whom he comes into daily contact.

I. THE TWO FACTIONS

There were always men who devoted themselves almost exclusively to the solution of these problems, and at present there are two groups of serious thinkers, and a horde of charlatans, who are exerting themselves to arrive at some satisfactory conclusion. On the one side we have the religionists, believers or spiritists, — that is, all those who believe in the existence of a spiritual world ; and on the other side we have the scientists, rationalists, materialists, who do not go beyond what can be deduced from knowledge acquired through the senses. The former take the everyday experiences of man and the problems of life, — his acts and their qualifications, his desires, aspirations, ideals and evil inclinations, — and give them a substance. They personify these and even extend them into the Infinite. These personifications they call spirits ; the supreme and infinite personification of all the good experiences is their God. Of old there were many gods ; now they are united into one.

THE GREAT PUZZLES AND THEIR SOLUTION BY THE SPIRITISTS

There are three great puzzling facts in man's life: his birth in pain, his bodily sufferings and his death. For these he has been trying to find reasons. His mind has been groping in darkness ever since he began to think. Even to-day, with our advanced knowledge of life, we cannot explain why birth should be the source of anguish to the mother, why it is fraught with danger, why some other method could not have been devised by the Omnipotent to usher a new life into this world. It is the highest function of a living being, the end for which it exists. We can only guess at the reason for the existence of pain and illness, — why man, the most efficient form of life, for the production of which untold ages of selection have been spent, should still be subject to attacks from very inferior forms of life. It would seem like a failure. Why should an individual man die.^^ In the long past, man grasped at the simplest explanation he could find, drawn from his everyday experiences and the relations among which he then lived, which was that all these evils were the punishment for some transgression. The transgression, disobedience of an arbitrary command, was represented in a concrete form in the tales of all the nations of the past. The natural struggle for existence was represented as a conflict between the opposing spirits of good and evil, and even this conflict was an actual fight. A similar simple explanation sufficed for the coming into being of the universe itself: man's theories about these things never rise higher than his general knowledge.

Man knew that he was able to fashion useful articles out of crude materials ; the world was such a handicraft of an all powerful Being, or spirit, who did not need any crude materials out of which to fashion this world ; he made it out of nothing. This omnipotent mechanic ultimately became the personification and the acme of all the good attributes of human acts, the component of all the older gods. Essentially there is no difference between the evil gods of the pagans and the Christian devils, of the demigods and the angels, whose very names stand but for some good or bad that is in man. The fall of Lucifer and the fall of Adam do but represent a step in man's evolution. The pagans wove their mythology around different persons. Christianity unites all the different problems in one personality. The pagans distributed the work of the creation of the universe among their several gods ; each human passion, desire and virtue had its godly counterpart. The Christians say that God created the world and that he is a spirit with the attributes of infinite love, mercy, justice and all the other good human acts; he became the objective realization of these man's ideals. The spiritists rest their inquiry here without even attempting to define the term spirit. They assert the existence of these spirit substances upon the authority of persons who, by virtue of their greater capacities, have sounded the very depths of these human experiences, who saw clearer into their own natures, but who could not express in words their own comprehension of them, and for that reason resorted to symbols. The powerful instinct of self-preservation, the very essence of life, gave rise in their breasts, more strongly than in the breasts of others, to the hope of immortality, of an individual life after this. They, more than others, felt that life is perpetual, and with their limited knowledge of it they gave this feeling a concrete representation. They knew man as one simple individual, and not as a composite of millions of ordinarily invisible individuals, and to that one being, the individual as they knew it, they attributed immortality. But there was the one incontrovertible fact staring them in the face, the destruction of that individual which they knew; hence they attributed immortality to the soul, or spirit, or the life-giving principle which animated the destructible body. The grave ended the material existence, but there remained an immaterial existence, which was but a representation of the persistence of universal life. Of its nature they knew nothing, so that it was left to the imagination to form such a picture as man's knowledge of life, its purposes and values, could induce.

Unable to explain all the misery, disappointments, troubles, pain and sufferings of this life, and yet feeling that man was destined for happiness, they postponed the realization of all his desires and aspirations, the fulfillment of his ideals, to after life, when this one great desire of life immortal would be realized also. It is the instinct of self-preservation that lends courage to a living being to struggle against unfavorable outside conditions, and its concrete expression, the hope of a life after death, has the same influence on man. Upon these real experiences of life and upon their hoped for realization, upon the symbolism with which these experiences and hopes were clothed, these great dreamers built up a system of rules of human conduct, evoked the sought for consolations, supplied motives to life otherwise apparently empty, in a way which satisfied their minds and the minds and hearts of their disciples. Because of the use of symbols, some radical rationalists are inclined to question the sincerity of these men, and even to call them deceivers. But they are wrong ; for the rules of our conduct, our social and moral laws, ought to be based upon our knowledge of our natures and the relations under which we live ; and it is immaterial whether this knowledge is presented in simple words or in symbols, so long as these approximate the truth. Imperfect knowledge was, in a measure, supplied by these symbols, and upon them it was proper to build the moral and civil codes. As long as they believed in these symbols, why could they not apply them to the solution of their everyday problems.'' And after all, man's moral responsibility never rises above his knowledge of himself and of his relations to others. If this knowledge must be represented in symbols, if sincere, no harm is done. There is little doubt that the absolute monarchial system of government developed out of the ancient patriarchal form, under which first the father ruled absolutely, and natural filial obedience was the bond, and later, the tribal chief by brute force, and blood relationship was the bond of union. This form was extended to the rule of the world and the Supreme Mechanic became also the Supreme Lawgiver. This, too, was but an application of human attributes to God. He became the heavenly king and the arbiter of human acts : the father and the judge. As such He was infinite love, mercy and justice.

II. THE CONFLICT

Dogmatism is the main fault of symbolism. It asserts its theories to be absolute truths and thereby suppresses the activities of the human mind and prevents investigation. In this lies both its strength and its weakness. It could dominate the human mind only for a time, until willingly or unwillingly it discovered the many discrepancies which existed between dogmatic assertions and the gradually acquired irrefutable facts about nature and its laws. The anathemas and excommunications of dogmatism lost their terrors in the ever growing light of scientific discoveries. Dogmas sufficed the untutored mind, but the force of scientific discoveries finally broke through the fetters which bound it for many centuries. The knowledge which mankind acquired by means of the telescope, microscope and spectroscope gave it a better insight into the laws which govern material things and into the nature of living beings. And herein were found the greatest inconsistencies in the spiritists' theories. The personifications of the qualities of human acts, of the immaterial or mental experiences, did not involve the spiritists in many inconsistencies, even after modern science has made its discoveries ; but the making of the life principle, or the soul of man, a spirit also opened up a breach through which scientifically inspired doubt entered and is now threatening the whole system. While men knew living beings only as large, visible individuals they could safely assume that, because of man's superior intellectual abilities, he was a different being ; but now that we know that the large individuals consist but of a great number of cell individuals whose attributes, whether in man or in other inferior forms of life, are the same, there is not the same reason for supposing that the life giving principle of man, or the soul, is a spiritual substance which can exist independent of the body and forever. This is the great conflict between symbolism and reality, between spiritism and science. We can take a portion of the skin of an animal and graft it on man and it will continue to live: and this is only the beginning. This is the great stumbling block of spiritism ; the scientific discoveries about the nature of life, imperfect though they be. These discoveries must, they finally shall, overcome the thousands of years old mysticism. It is inevitable. Dogma, no matter how old, no matter what powerful organization is backing it, if false, must give way to truth ; powerful organization may prolong the struggle, but it cannot avert its ultimate downfall.

PERSISTENCE OF DOGM\TISM

We are wont to call the Eastern nations dreamers and mystics, and attribute it to a peculiar trait or cast of their minds. We forget that the East is the cradle of human knowledge and not of the human race. They were the first to attempt the solution of these vital everyday problems. All nature is full of mysteries, and, therefore, their undeveloped minds reveled in mysticism and dreams and shadowy forms. They are mystics to-day more on account of their conservatism than any peculiar mental trait ; on account of their strong faith and the tenacity with which they hold to their old solutions. They have acquired this tendency to mystic interpretations because of the dogmatism of faith. All faith is essentially reactionary if its object is some dogma, because it ties the mind to its absolute assertion of truth. If the dogmas which faith teaches are absolute truths, as it is claimed, then the mind has reached its limits. A man must halt when he has reached his goal. But the intellect is not built that way ; it does not want rest ; it wants to delve and to inquire. It did inquire and did find out many things which were irreconcilable with the assertions of faith. Social institutions bound the Eastern nations to their faiths and they remained stationary for thousands of years. Plato's separation of religion from politics, possible because of the liberal political institutions prevailing in Greece, was the first entering wedge into this solid faith, which made possible the scientific researches of Western Europe. Were it not for the seed of discontent with established forms sowed by him and the other Greek philosophers, we would be mystics and dreamers as the Easterners are. Of course, this ancient protestantism had to come, as the mind cannot be chained down forever any more than a stream can be dammed up completely and permanently. But at that, if we study carefully the Eastern symbolism by the light of our present knowledge, we must acknowledge that they were not very far from the position which we ought to take on these matters if we want to be consistent. Their theories clothed in symbolic garments were but attempts by their undeveloped intellects and their crude knowledge to explain the universality of life. The doctrine of the transmigration of souls, for example, is but such a symbolic representation of the universality of life adapted to the existing social needs in order to formulate rules of human conduct for the restraint of men in their daily intercourse with others. Take the Hebrew theory of immortality, elaborated by Christianity ;

it is nothing but a symbolical representation of the same truth adapted to their habit of thought and social necessities. After death man's soul becomes united with God in the kingdom of heaven. This was but their unattainable ideal of re-establishing their earthly kingdom, and another form of expressing the Brahmanistic theory of the return of the spark of life to the eternal flame. Religious beliefs always represent the ideal of existing social conditions ; the after life, the materialization of prevalent earthly desires.

THE RELIGIOUS POSITION

To the spiritists society is a more or less divinely ordered institution to work out man's supernatural destiny rather than to promote his welfare on this earth. Man's desires have always outrun the possibility of being satisfied; religion undertakes to satisfy them. But as every one's experience demonstrates that this is not done in this life, religion holds out the hope of this satisfaction in after life. The tie of the society of the religionists is brotherly love, and the laws are divine revelations whose wisdom cannot be questioned. The trials and worries of life are divine visitations to try men's souls and thus to prepare them for their future state. The life on this earth is but a preparation for after life. They avoid the question why such a probationary period should be necessary especially in view of the apparent fact that a great many seem to miss this supernatural destiny altogether. Everything is clothed in mystic garments : life's realities and verities are presented in symbols ; and this is persisted in even though scientific discoveries present the most potent arguments against them. Thus it can be asserted with every reason for assurance that the story of the fall of Adam and Eve is but a myth, an allegorical representation of the development of the intellect in the course of evolution ; at any rate it cannot be supported by any argument that can stand the searchlight of logic ; and yet upon this fable rests the entire structure of Christian dogmas. If it were not for the fall in the garden of Eden, there would be no curses on mankind and there would be no need of atonement, no necessity for redemption, no Christ. Our scientific theory of the evolution of man takes us back to the time when he did not know good from evil ; that is, when he did not know his own nature, when he lived in herds from instinct and did not comprehend the relations which he thus established. Adam and Eve ate of the tree of knowledge and they knew good and evil ; that is, there was a period when this knowledge dawned upon man. The truth of the matter is that we are falling yet, because we are still learning concerning these things.

It may be that simple and unquestioning faith was necessary to work out man's destiny in days when his mind was not capable of comprehending the reasons for the necessity of restraints upon his acts. It may be that it was necessary to smooth over the hard facts of life with glittering promises of future rewards, and to set up the visions of dreamers and prophets as the guiding stars. But to what extent are these things necessary to-day? Are we bound to accept the same views and content ourselves with the same promises? Must we look upon our existence on this earth as only a transitory period of preparation for a life of which we know nothing, or as a reality, whose object here is the promotion of the plans of the Infinite? What is an individual man in the immensity of the universe? No doubt he is necessary, yet it is the height of vanity for him to imagine that the preservation of his individuality ever entered into the plans of the Almighty. It is the height of presumption to expect the Infinite to exert himself particularly in the interest of some Croesus in order to protect his unjustly gotten property. Social living being one of the ways of promoting the purpose of life, its preservation, its proper and just rules and laws are of divine origin, in so far as man's intellect, which is a faculty developed in man to devise or find out what is necessary and proper to attain this end, discovers them. In order to impress this truth upon the Israelites Moses, according to the Bible story, claimed to have received his code of laws while a thunder storm, a rare natural phenomenon in that region, raged around Mount Sinai. His exceptional capacity perceived what was needed and necessary. Because his capacity was a natural gift, he can be truly called a man inspired. But in the march of evolution such individuals are but incidents ; they appear because they are necessary to guide the rest. If it had not been Moses, it would have been some one else (always supposing that Moses is a historical personality) ; if it had not been Jesus of Nazareth, it would have been some one else ; if it had not been Confucius, it would have been some one else. When the time is ripe to make a new step, there is always a man to take it. Every great movement was necessary and proper and a step forward. Men of destiny always appear when needed. Why, even Bismarck with his militaristic policy and Nietzsche with his philosophy of brutality can be considered as such men, to show to mankind most strikingly the folly of rule by force. Each sickness requires its own treatment.

THE SCIENTIFIC POSITION

Ever since the times of the Greek philosophers, science and religion, knowledge and faith, pursued their divergent ways, the distance between them ever widening, although the goal was the same, until to-day there seems to be no possibility of ever bringing them together. Science takes the demonstrated, reasonably certain facts about the universe and out of them tries to formulate answers to those important questions, and to find solutions for everyday problems.

Biology and chemistry have discovered certain facts about life; and, while they do not positively answer the question, they give us a clearer insight into it, and go farther to disproving the accepted theories of the spiritists. In fact, the latter cannot consistently maintain their position in view of these discoveries. The ultimate life individual is the cell, and the cell is the same essentially whether living alone or in conjunction with others, forming the large complex individuals. Why should the cells composing a man be enlivened with a principle which is immortal and not those of a horse, for example.'' Chemically and biologically they show the same attributes. Symbolism is powerless in the presence of this fact. The whole cannot be greater than any or all of its parts : if the cells are not immortal how can the complex individual consisting of these cells be? And if the cells composing man are immortal why not those composing animals .?* Furthermore, how can the soul of a man be one individual indivisible in after life, when in this life he is composed of millions of cells, each one a separate individual ? We could say with just as much reason that the spirit of the American nation as one whole can go to heaven or hell after it ceases to be a nation on this earth, and that there it will meet the souls of ancient Babylon, Assyria, Greece, Rome, etc. It is on this question of the nature of life that the two camps differ : religion, although with great reluctance, gave way to science in questions relating to the outside world, but, so far as man himself is concerned, it has not yielded up its primitive conceptions concerning the spiritual world. It still clings to its traditional ideas, although it has modified them considerably. This primitiveness of its theories constitutes its weakness, which will bring on its ultimate downfall, for many open minded men would, if these primitive ideas were discarded, support religion wholeheartedly and enthusiastically. This uncompromising attitude on the part of religious leaders will be ever in the way of reconciling science with religion.

MATERIALISM

On the other hand, a certain school of scientists have swung to the other extreme, to materialism. But these, too, have to face certain facts which are indisputable and which weaken their position. We all know that man is not matter and material force alone. Every man has experiences which cannot be explained by the physicist, the chemist or the biologist. Man is not merely a machine, or a chemical compound or a sack of protoplasm. All his acts are not reducible to mathematical formulas, as are the laws of the lever or of a chemical reaction. He is not all heat, light, electricity or chemical affinity. He is first of all a complex being whose individuals develop under the apparent guidance of some controlling principle from one parent cell, during which process of evolution or growth selections are made, functions are assigned and organs are developed out of that simple parent cell. That cannot be attributed to light or electricity or chemical affinity. Then, each cell and the entire complex individual is capable of self-reproduction, something none of the other chemical and physical forces can do. Furthermore, men, and for that matter other animals too, feel certain passions, desires : they can perceive, they are conscious, they have memory and reason. These cannot be explained with material forces. You can say that the optic nerve but conveys the vibrations of the light waves from the retina to the brain cells, but that itself is not the perception of light; you may say that digestion is but a species of decomposition through the action of the gastric juices but that does not explain how the stomach came to be built so as to be able to secrete these juices; you may say that assimilation is but the absorption of food conveyed to the cell by the blood, but that does not explain why one cell will absorb only certain kinds of food and build up a compound of a certain chemical composition. Anger may show itself only as an unusual state of nervous excitation due to certain outside impressions, but that does not explain why this unusual excitation is produced, and why the same outside impressions will not produce the same unusual excitation in every individual. And there are all those other mental acts and experiences for which material science has not even attempted to find an explanation. True and sincere science is in doubt to-day, and materialism is untenable and narrow. Religion says " God " is everything ; materialism says there is no " God " ; science questions both. The truth, no doubt, lies somewhere between the two extremes. Religion says matter is corruption ; materialism answers matter is eternal; science says both of you seem to be right to some extent ; I do not know. Religion says the soul is immortal; materialism says death ends all; science here interposes a positive assertion and says all life is persistent.

THE MATERIALIST'S SOCIETY

The materialists, or the rationalists, look upon society as an aggregation of men formed into an organization by a tacit agreement for the purpose of advancing their individual welfare by cooperation. In order to accomplish this a government is established with powers to pass laws for the regulation of the conduct of the individuals and to transact the necessary business. Theoretically that is true, but there are several factors which enter into the social intercourse which this theory leaves out of consideration. Whatever the form of government, whether it be absolutism or democracy, it is both impractical and impossible to pass laws regulating man's every act whose consequences may affect others. The civil law must confine itself to mere prohibitions ; it cannot prescribe rules of conduct imposing positive duties upon all the individuals in their private intercourse with others. Any such attempts in the past proved futile. Then, the law cannot judge motives and intentions ; it can only pass upon the overt acts. There are innumerable acts harmful to others which, on that account, the law can neither prevent nor punish; on the other hand, it is powerless to force people to do acts beneficial to others, and yet the prevention of injurious acts alone cannot bring about the full fruition of the objects of co-operation. The enforcement of the law can produce only armed peace. But the main difficulty with which this theory has to contend is the impossibility of controlling and restraining the primordial passions by cold reasoning.