The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy
holding up to the light of day certain considerations calculated to let
loose these springs in a normal, natural way. Pessimism is essentially
a religious disease. In the form of it to which you are most liable,
it consists in nothing but a religious demand to which there comes no
normal religious reply.
Now, there are two stages of recovery from this disease, two different
levels upon which one may emerge from the midnight view to the daylight
view of things, and I must treat of them in turn. The second stage is
the more complete and joyous, and it corresponds to the freer exercise
of religious {40} trust and fancy. There are, as is well known,
persons who are naturally very free in this regard, others who are not
at all so. There are persons, for instance, whom we find indulging to
their heart's content in prospects of immortality; and there are others
who experience the greatest difficulty in making such a notion seem
real to themselves at all. These latter persons are tied to their
senses, restricted to their natural experience; and many of them,
moreover, feel a sort of intellectual loyalty to what they call 'hard
facts,' which is positively shocked by the easy excursions into the
unseen that other people make at the bare call of sentiment. Minds of
either class may, however, be intensely religious. They may equally
desire atonement and reconciliation, and crave acquiescence and
communion with the total soul of things. But the craving, when the
mind is pent in to the hard facts, especially as science now reveals
them, can breed pessimism, quite as easily as it breeds optimism when
it inspires religious trust and fancy to wing their way to another and
a better world.
That is why I call pessimism an essentially religious disease. The
nightmare view of life has plenty of organic sources; but its great
reflective source has at all times been the contradiction between the
phenomena of nature and the craving of the heart to believe that behind
nature there is a spirit whose expression nature is. What philosophers
call 'natural theology' has been one way of appeasing this craving;
that poetry of nature in which our English literature is so rich has
been another way. Now, suppose a mind of the latter of our two
classes, whose imagination is pent in consequently, and who takes its
{41} facts 'hard;' suppose it, moreover, to feel strongly the craving
for communion, and yet to realize how desperately difficult it is to
construe the scientific order of nature either theologically or
poetically,--and what result can there be but inner discord and
contradiction? Now, this inner discord (merely as discord) can be
relieved in either of two ways: The longing to read the facts
religiously may cease, and leave the bare facts by themselves; or,
supplementary facts may be discovered or believed-in, which permit the
religious reading to go on. These two ways of relief are the two
stages of recovery, the two levels of escape from pessimism, to which I
made allusion a moment ago, and which the sequel will, I trust, make
more clear.
III.
Starting then with nature, we naturally tend, if we have the religious
craving, to say with Marcus Aurelius, "O Universe! what thou wishest I
wish." Our sacred books and traditions tell us of one God who made
heaven and earth, and, looking on them, saw that they were good. Yet,
on more intimate acquaintance, the visible surfaces of heaven and earth
refuse to be brought by us into any intelligible unity at all. Every
phenomenon that we would praise there exists cheek by jowl with some
contrary phenomenon that cancels all its religious effect upon the
mind. Beauty and hideousness, love and cruelty, life and death keep
house together in indissoluble partnership; and there gradually steals
over us, instead of the old warm notion of a man-loving Deity, that of
an awful power that neither hates nor loves, but rolls all things {42}
together meaninglessly to a common doom. This is an uncanny, a
sinister, a nightmare view of life, and its peculiar _unheimlichkeit_,
or poisonousness, lies expressly in our holding two things together
which cannot possibly agree,--in our clinging, on the one hand, to the
demand that there shall be a living spirit of the whole; and, on the
other, to the belief that the course of nature must be such a spirit's
adequate manifestation and expression. It is in the contradiction
between the supposed being of a spirit that encompasses and owns us,
and with which we ought to have some communion, and the character of
such a spirit as revealed by the visible world's course, that this
particular death-in-life paradox and this melancholy-breeding puzzle
reside, Carlyle expresses the result in that chapter of his immortal
'Sartor Resartus' entitled 'The Everlasting No.' "I lived," writes
poor Teufelsdröckh, "in a continual, indefinite, pining fear;
tremulous, pusillanimous, apprehensive of I knew not what: it seemed as
if all things in the heavens above and the earth beneath would hurt me;
as if the heavens and the earth were but boundless jaws of a devouring
monster, wherein I, palpitating, lay waiting to be devoured."
This is the first stage of speculative melancholy. No brute can have
this sort of melancholy; no man who is irreligious can become its prey.
It is the sick shudder of the frustrated religious demand, and not the
mere necessary outcome of animal experience. Teufelsdröckh himself
could have made shift to face the general chaos and bedevilment of this
world's experiences very well, were he not the victim of an originally
unlimited trust and affection towards them. If he might meet them
piecemeal, with no suspicion {43} of any whole expressing itself in
them, shunning the bitter parts and husbanding the sweet ones, as the
occasion served, and as the day was foul or fair, he could have
zigzagged toward an easy end, and felt no obligation to make the air
vocal with his lamentations. The mood of levity, of 'I don't care,' is
for this world's ills a sovereign and practical anaesthetic. But, no!
something deep down in Teufelsdröckh and in the rest of us tells us
that there _is_ a Spirit in things to which we owe allegiance, and for
whose sake we must keep up the serious mood. And so the inner fever
and discord also are kept up; for nature taken on her visible surface
reveals no such Spirit, and beyond the facts of nature we are at the
present stage of our inquiry not supposing ourselves to look.
Now, I do not hesitate frankly and sincerely to confess to you that
this real and genuine discord seems to me to carry with it the
inevitable bankruptcy of natural religion naïvely and simply taken.
There were times when Leibnitzes with their heads buried in monstrous
wigs could compose Theodicies, and when stall-fed officials of an
established church could prove by the valves in the heart and the round
ligament of the hip-joint the existence of a "Moral and Intelligent
Contriver of the World." But those times are past; and we of the
nineteenth century, with our evolutionary theories and our mechanical
philosophies, already know nature too impartially and too well to
worship unreservedly any God of whose character she can be an adequate
expression. Truly, all we know of good and duty proceeds from nature;
but none the less so all we know of evil. Visible nature is all
plasticity and indifference,--a moral multiverse, as one might call it,
and not a moral {44} universe. To such a harlot we owe no allegiance;
with her as a whole we can establish no moral communion; and we are
free in our dealings with her several parts to obey or destroy, and to
follow no law but that of prudence in coming to terms with such other
particular features as will help us to our private ends. If there be a
divine Spirit of the universe, nature, such as we know her, cannot
possibly be its _ultimate word_ to man. Either there is no Spirit
revealed in nature, or else it is inadequately revealed there; and (as
all the higher religions have assumed) what we call visible nature, or
_this_ world, must be but a veil and surface-show whose full meaning
resides in a supplementary unseen or _other_ world.
I cannot help, therefore, accounting it on the whole a gain (though it
may seem for certain poetic constitutions a very sad loss) that the
naturalistic superstition, the worship of the God of nature, simply
taken as such, should have begun to loosen its hold upon the educated
mind. In fact, if I am to express my personal opinion unreservedly, I
should say (in spite of its sounding blasphemous at first to certain
ears) that the initial step towards getting into healthy ultimate
relations with the universe is the act of rebellion against the idea
that such a God exists. Such rebellion essentially is that which in
the chapter I have quoted from Carlyle goes on to describe:--
"'Wherefore, like a coward, dost thou forever pip and whimper, and go
cowering and trembling? Despicable biped!... Hast thou not a heart;
canst thou not suffer whatsoever it be; and, as a Child of Freedom,
though outcast, trample Tophet itself under thy feet, while it consumes
thee? Let it come, then, I will meet it and defy it!' And as I so
thought, there rushed like a stream of fire {45} over my whole soul;
and I shook base Fear away from me forever....
"Thus had the Everlasting No pealed authoritatively through all the
recesses of my being, of my Me, and then was it that my whole Me stood
up, in native God-created majesty, and recorded its Protest. Such a
Protest, the most important transaction in life, may that same
Indignation and Defiance, in a psychological point of view, be fitly
called. The Everlasting No had said: 'Behold, thou art fatherless,
outcast, and the Universe is mine;' to which my whole Me now made
answer: 'I am not thine, but Free, and forever hate thee!' From that
hour," Teufelsdröckh-Carlyle adds, "I began to be a man."
And our poor friend, James Thomson, similarly writes:--
"Who is most wretched in this dolorous place?
I think myself, yet I would rather be
My miserable self than He, than He
Who formed such creatures to his own disgrace.
The vilest thing must be less vile than Thou
From whom it had its being, God and Lord!
Creator of all woe and sin! abhorred,
Malignant and implacable! I vow
That not for all Thy power furled and unfurled,
For all the temples to Thy glory built,
Would I assume the ignominious guilt
Of having made such men in such a world."
We are familiar enough in this community with the spectacle of persons
exulting in their emancipation from belief in the God of their
ancestral Calvinism,--him who made the garden and the serpent, and
pre-appointed the eternal fires of hell. Some of them have found
humaner gods to worship, others are simply converts from all theology;
but, both alike, they {46} assure us that to have got rid of the
sophistication of thinking they could feel any reverence or duty toward
that impossible idol gave a tremendous happiness to their souls. Now,
to make an idol of the spirit of nature, and worship it, also leads to
sophistication; and in souls that are religious and would also be
scientific the sophistication breeds a philosophical melancholy, from
which the first natural step of escape is the denial of the idol; and
with the downfall of the idol, whatever lack of positive joyousness may
remain, there comes also the downfall of the whimpering and cowering
mood. With evil simply taken as such, men can make short work, for
their relations with it then are only practical. It looms up no longer
so spectrally, it loses all its haunting and perplexing significance,
as soon as the mind attacks the instances of it singly, and ceases to