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Page 31
[Footnote 22: "Agnosticism," the _Nineteenth Century_, February,
1889.]
And no less does the artist, the man of high and correct feeling,
perceive the immeasurable distance between uncaring nature and
suffering men and women. There is, for instance, the passage in _The
Education of Henry Adams_, in which Adams speaks of the death of
his sister at Bagni di Lucca. "In the singular color of the Tuscan
atmosphere, the hills and vineyards of the Apennines seemed bursting
with midsummer blood. The sick room itself glowed with the Italian joy
of life; friends filled it; no harsh northern lights pierced the soft
shadows; even the dying woman shared the sense of the Italian summer,
the soft velvet air, the humor, the courage, the sensual fullness of
Nature and man. She faced death, as women mostly do, bravely and even
gayly, racked slowly to unconsciousness but yielding only to violence,
as a soldier sabred in battle. For many thousands of years, on these
hills and plains, Nature had gone on sabring men and women with the
same air of sensual pleasure.
"Impressions like these are not reasoned or catalogued in the mind;
they are felt as a part of violent emotion; and the mind that feels
them is a different one from that which reasons; it is thought
of a different power and a different person. The first serious
consciousness of Nature's gesture--her attitude toward life--took form
then as a phantasm, a nightmare, an insanity of force. For the first
time the stage scenery of the senses collapsed; the human mind felt
itself stripped naked, vibrating in a void of shapeless energies,
with resistless mass, colliding, crushing, wasting and destroying what
these same energies had created and labored from eternity to perfect."
Here is a vivid interpretation of a universal human experience.
Might not any one of us who had endured it turn upon the pagan and
sentimentalist, crying in the mood of a Swift or a Voltaire, "_Ca vous
amuse, la vie_"? The abstract natural rights of the eighteenth century
smack of academic complacency before this. The indignation we feel
against the insolent individualism of a Louis XIV who cried "_L'�tat
c'est moi_!" or against the industrial overlord who spills the tears
of women for his ambition, the sweat of the children for his greed,
is as nothing beside the indignation with the natural order which any
biological study would arouse except as the scientist perceives that
indignation is, for him, beside the point and the religionist believes
that it proceeds from not seeing far enough into the process. This
is why there is an essential absurdity in any naturalistic system of
ethics. Even the clown can say,
"Here's a night that pities
Neither wise men nor fools."
This common attitude of the religionist toward nature as a remote
and cruel world, alien to our spirits, is abundantly reflected in
literature. It finds a sort of final consummation in the intuitive
insight, the bright understanding of the creative spirits of our race.
What Aristotle defines as the tragic emotions, the sense of the terror
and the pity of human life, arise partly from this perception of the
isolation always and keenly felt by dramatist and prophet and poet.
They know well that Nature does not exist by our law; that we neither
control nor understand it; is it not our friend?
There is, then, the law of identity between man and nature, found in
their common physical origin; there is also the law of difference. It
is on that aspect of reality that religion places its emphasis. It
is with this approach to understanding ourselves that preachers, as
distinguished from scientists, deal. Our present society is traveling
farther and farther away from reality in so far as it turns either to
the outside world of fact, or to the domain of natural law, expecting
to find in these the elements of insight for the fresh guidance of
the human spirit. Not there resides the secret of the beings of whom
Shelley said,
"We look before and after
And pine for what is not,
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught."
Instinct is a base, a prime factor, part of the matrix of personality.
But personality is not instinct; it is instinct plus a different
force; instinct transformed by spiritual insight and controlled by
moral discipline. The man of religion, therefore, finds himself not
in one but two worlds, not indeed mutually exclusive, having a common
origin, but nevertheless significantly distinct. Each is incomplete
without the other, each in a true sense non-existent without the
other. But that which is most vital to man's world is unknown in the
domain of nature. Already the perception of a dualism is here.
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