The New Spirit

e shape. It is strange: men seek to be, or to seem, atheists, agnostics, cynics, pessimists; at the core of all these things lurks religion. We may find it

rations of every Socialist who looks for the return of those barbarous times in which all men equally were fed and clothed and housed. T

lies, and manifests itself in, that sun-worship, nature-worship, fetich-worship, ghost-worship, to which, with occasional appeal to the vast reservoir of sexual and filial love, we may succeed in reducing religious phenomena? On the one hand, this impulse must begin to develop at least as early as the earliest appearance of worship; on the other hand, we cannot ascertain its distinctive characters unless we also examine and compare its more specialized forms. What is there in common between the religious attitude of the

tical infinite, and in the centre a certain limited number of souls, souls like the theoretical atoms of the physicist,

ed, salt, es

re co-extensive. When we speak of the “spirit” as ruling the body, or as yielding to it, we are, it must be remembered, using a traditional method of speech which had its origin in a more primitive theory, just as we still speak of sun-rise. In the soul the spiritual can no

mpossible. Ex nihilo nihil fit. It is clear that both the elements that make up the soul must be, under some form, equally eternal. By a marvellous cosmic incident, our little planet has broken forth into a strange and beautiful efflorescence. We rise from the

r system, the rougher daily contacts of life, which contract though they strengthen the soul with their legacy of strong desires and griefs, and the incomparably rarer contacts at which the soul for a while and in varying degrees expands with a glad sense of freedom. As every bodily change in the compacted soul is correlated with a men[232]tal cha

some divine ideal word. Yet the field of the soul’s liberation is a large one, whether we look at it on the physical or on the mental side. The simplest functions of physiological life may be its ministers. Everyone who is at all acquainted with the Persian mystics, knows how wine may be re[233]garded as an instrument of religion. Indeed, in all countries and in all ages, some form of physical enlargement—singing, dancing, drinking, sexual excitement—has been intimately associated with worship. Even the momentary expansion of the soul in laughter is, to however slight an extent, a religious exercise. I do not fear to make this assertion; the expansions of the soul differ indefinitely in volume and quality. If this

nveniently divided into four classes:—(1.) Those caused by the liberation of impulses stored up in the soul. (2.) Those caused by impulses fro

at we are in[235] the presence of the infinite. No art has ever succeeded in embodying those visions of the infinite which are commonly regarded as specifically religious—so that even to-day we respond with a thrill of dilatation—as the old fragmentary art of Egypt in the ruined temples of the Thebaid. Greek art, also, is a manifestation of the infinite; we may lose ourselves among those subtle curves of man’s or woman’s body. A Gothic cathedral of the thirteenth century is an embodiment of the infinite world itself. The soul responds expansively to all these things. When that response is wanting, and the art therefore, however interesting, is not religious—as in the art of Pompeii an

2

s that knows th

the primitive sexual traditions of the ra

hion. The same process was carried on into human life. The primitive potter who took clay and wrought with her hands, and dinted with her nails, the cup or pot or jar, wrought it through long ages ever more lovely and perfect, embodying therein all that she knew of the earth’s uses and saw of its be

ur and song and strength and skill—such are the impressions that male and female have graved on each other’s hearts in their moments of most intense emotional exaltation. Their reflections have been thrown on the whole world. When the youth awakes to find a woman is beautiful, he finds, to his amazement, that the world also is beautiful. Who can say in what lowly organism was stored the first of those impressions of beauty, the reflections of sexual emotion, to which all creators of beauty—whether in the form of the Venus of Milo,

Kant, finds it in philosophy. Such men, indeed, are few, but by force of intelligence they have been enabled to thrust their pictures of the world on inferior minds; their arts have become articles. But every man who has reached the stage of development in which he can truly experience the joy of the philosophic

r seeks to be absorbed altogether in the heaven of the lov

e salivas oris et inspirant pres

oy, a kingdom in which slave and harlot took precedence of priest and king. To the men for whom that new emotional world was fresh and living, torture and shame and death counted as nothing beside so large a possession of inward gladness. The weakest and lowest became heroes and saints in the effort to guard a pearl of so great price. There are few more inspiring figures in the history of man than the white body of the slave-girl Blandina, that hung from the stake day after day with the beasts in the amphitheatre at Lyons, torn and bleeding, yet, instar generosi cujusdam ath

ligious significance of Walt Whitman lies in his revelation of the emotional value of the entire common human personality and all that belongs to it. The later Athenians (as also Goethe) placed above all things th

2

Herbert Spencer’s attitude towards the Unknowable is a distinct though faint approximation to the religious relationship. Positivism, with its quasi-scientific notions, was founded on a curiously narrow conception of the nature of[242] religion, and its religious sterility is probably inevitable. The man of science has little to do with magnificent generaliz

ike to poets and peasants. Some sight or sound of nature, either habitually, or under some special conditions in the percipient, may strike upon the soul and liberate it at once from the bonds of commonplace actuality. Perhaps no modern man has better expressed the religious aspects of nature than Thoreau. Of the American wood-thrush[243] Thoreau can rarely speak without using the language of religion. “All that was ripest and fairest in the wilderness and the wild man is preserved and transmitted to us in the strain of the wood-thrus

l w

y places; w

of believin

as we wish our

That is why, at the appearance of another human being, I sink back immediately into the limits of my own normal individuality. I am no longer conterminous with the world

the torrent of expansive emotion that impelled it. It is this intuition which is the “emptiness” of Lao-tsze, the freedom from all aims that centre in self: “It is only by doing nothing that the kingdom can be made one’s own.” This is the great good news of the Upanishads: the atman, the soul, may attain to a state of yoga, of union, with the supreme atman; free, henceforth, from doubts and desires which pass over it as water passes over the leaf of the lotus without wetting it; acting, henceforth, only as acts the potter’s wheel when the potter has ceased to turn it: “If I know that my own body is not mine, and yet that the whole earth is mine, and[245]

olontade è

ial Stoic becomes lyrical as this intuition comes to him: “Everything is harmonious with me which is harmonious to thee, O Universe!” As far back as we

t to remember that they are but an individual mode of representation. I can only say that I am conscious of myself in varying attitudes or relations. The terms of t

ound saying of the old mystic, lies that unutterable sigh which we call God—is resolved into a momentary focus of ever-shifting rays of force; it is but an incident in a huge evolution of shifting forces which we may, if we like, personify

ing, in a sense of adhesiveness, from the family and resulting relationships, and thence growing into a consciousness of the oneness of all human interests, the individuals finding themselves to be, according to that Stoic conception which has moulded European laws and is still a leavening influence in European ethics, members one with another in the same natural body of humanity. In any case, as a moral b

ligious impulse[248] will sometimes have an ethical element; morals will sometimes find an ally in religion. But religion with its internal criterion and morals with its more external criterion remain essentially distinct, sometimes antagonistic: “to reject religion,” Thoreau said, “is the first step towards moral excellence.” That is but a puny religion

enuous devotion to science, by a perpetual reference to the moral structure of life,

usurp this

hom the miseri

nd will not l

ts, among all English

er.[249] But for a little while we are allowed to enter the house of life and to gather around its fire. Why pull each other’s hair and pinch each other’s arms like naughty children

nderlay the crude imaginings of the primitive man who first created a spiritual world out of the stuff of his dreams and his primitive delight in the most marvellous object he saw, the sun, that as he truly divined is the source not only of light but of life; jus

they are so imperative. The rest is what we will, play, art, consolation—in one word, religion. If religion is not science or morals, it is the sum of the unfettered expansive impulses of our being. Life has been defined as, even physically and chemically, a tension. All our lives long we a

TT PRESS, NEWC

nd