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Page 51
Now, if this is all, if there is for us only the physical might of
nature and the world is only what it seems to be; if there is no other
God except such as can be found within this sort of cosmic process,
then human life is a sardonic mockery, and self-respect a silly
farce, and all the heroism of the heart and the valor of the mind the
unmeaning activities of an insignificant atom. The very men who will
naturally enter your churches are the ones who have always found that
theory of life intolerable. It doesn't take in all the facts. They
could not live by it and the soul of the race, looking out upon this
universe of immeasurable material bulk, has challenged it and dared to
assert its own superiority.
So by this road these men come back to the transcendent God without
whom they cannot guard that integrity of personality which we are all
set to keep. For here there is no way of believing in oneself, no
way of enduring this world or our place in it and no tolerable way of
understanding it except we look beneath this cosmic hostility and
find our self-respect and a satisfying cosmic meaning in perceiving
spiritual force, a conscious ethical purpose, which interpenetrates
the thunder and the lightning, which lies behind the stars as they
move in their perpetual courses. "Through it the most ancient heavens
are fresh and strong." Integrity of personality in such a world as
this, belief in self, without which life is dust and ashes in the
mouth, rest on the sublime assumption that suffusing material force
is ethical spirit, more like unto us than it, controlling force in the
interest of moral and eternal purposes. In these purposes living, not
mechanical, forces play a major part.
Of course, to all such reasoning the Kantians and humanists reply that
these notions of an objective and eternal beauty, of a transcendent
and actual Cosmic Being exist within the mind. They are purely
subjective ideas, they are bounded by the inexorable circle of our
experience, hence they offer no proof of any objective reality which
may in greater or less degree correspond to them.
However, there must be a "source" of these ideas. To which the
philosophers reply, Yes, they are "primitive and necessary," produced
by reason only, without borrowing anything from the senses or the
understanding. Yet there is no sufficient evidence that the idea of
God is thus produced by any faculty of mind acting in entire freedom
from external influence. On the contrary, the idea appears to owe much
to the operation of external things upon the mind; it is not then the
wholly unaffected product of reason. It is a response no less than
an intuition. Like all knowledge a discovery, but the discovery of
something there which could be discovered, hence, in that sense, a
revelation.
It is not necessary, then, for men to meet their situation in the
cosmos by saying with Kant: We will act as though there were a God,
although we are always conscious that we have no real knowledge of
Him as an external being. In the light of the tragic circumstances of
humanity, this is demanding the impossible. No sane body of men will
ever get sufficient inspiration for life or find an adequate solution
for the problem of life by resting upon mere value judgments which
they propose, by an effort of will, to put in the place of genuine
reality judgments. Indeed, there is a truly scholastic na�vet�, a
sort of solemn and unconscious humor, in seriously proposing that
men should vitalize and consecrate their deepest purposes and most
difficult experiences by hypothesizing mere appearances and illusions.
Nor are we willing either to say with Santayana that all our sense of
the beauty of the world is merely pleasure objectified and that we can
infer no eternal Beauty from it. We are aware that there cannot be an
immediate knowledge of a reality distinct from ourselves, that all
our knowledge must be, in the nature of the case, an idea, a mental
representation, that we can never know the Thing Itself. But if we
believe, as we logically and reasonably may, that our subjective ideas
are formed under the influence of objects unknown but without us,
produced by stimuli, real, if not perceived apart from our own
consciousness, then we may say that what we have is a mediate or
representative knowledge not only of an Eternal Being but formed under
the influence of that Being. Nor does the believer ask for more. He
does not expect to see the King in His beauty; he only needs to know
that He is, that He is there.
How self-verifying and moving, then, are the appeals ready to our
hands. As long as man with the power to question, to strive, to
aspire, to endure, to suffer, lives in a universe of ruthless and
overwhelming might, so long, if he is to understand it or maintain
his reason and his dignity, he will believe it to be controlled by a
Spirit beyond no less than within, from whom his spirit is derived. It
is out of the struggle to revere and conserve human personality, out
of the belief in the indefectible worth and honor of selfhood that
our race has fronted a universe in arms, and pitting its soul against
nature has cried, "God is my refuge: underneath me, at the very moment
when I am engulfed in earthquake shock or shattered in the battle's
roar, there are everlasting arms!" There is something which is too
deep for tears in the unconquerable idealism, the utter magnanimity
of the faith of the human spirit in that which will answer to itself,
as evidenced in this forlorn and glorious adventure of the soul.
Sometimes we are constrained to ask ourselves, How can the heart of
man go so undismayed through the waste places of the world?
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