The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy
worry about their derivation from the 'one and only Power.'
Here, then, on this stage of mere emancipation from monistic
superstition, the would-be suicide may already get encouraging answers
to his question about the worth of life. There are in most men
instinctive springs of vitality that respond healthily when the burden
of metaphysical and infinite responsibility rolls off. The certainty
that you now _may_ step out of life whenever you please, and that to do
so is not blasphemous or monstrous, is itself an immense relief. The
thought of suicide is now no longer a guilty challenge and obsession.
"This little life is all we must endure;
The grave's most holy peace is ever sure,"--
says Thomson; adding, "I ponder these thoughts, and they comfort me."
Meanwhile we can always {47} stand it for twenty-four hours longer, if
only to see what to-morrow's newspaper will contain, or what the next
postman will bring.
But far deeper forces than this mere vital curiosity are arousable,
even in the pessimistically-tending mind; for where the loving and
admiring impulses are dead, the hating and fighting impulses will still
respond to fit appeals. This evil which we feel so deeply is something
that we can also help to overthrow; for its sources, now that no
'Substance' or 'Spirit' is behind them, are finite, and we can deal
with each of them in turn. It is, indeed, a remarkable fact that
sufferings and hardships do not, as a rule, abate the love of life;
they seem, on the contrary, usually to give it a keener zest. The
sovereign source of melancholy is repletion. Need and struggle are
what excite and inspire us; our hour of triumph is what brings the
void. Not the Jews of the captivity, but those of the days of
Solomon's glory are those from whom the pessimistic utterances in our
Bible come. Germany, when she lay trampled beneath the hoofs of
Bonaparte's troopers, produced perhaps the most optimistic and
idealistic literature that the world has seen; and not till the French
'milliards' were distributed after 1871 did pessimism overrun the
country in the shape in which we see it there to-day. The history of
our own race is one long commentary on the cheerfulness that comes with
fighting ills. Or take the Waldenses, of whom I lately have been
reading, as examples of what strong men will endure. In 1483 a papal
bull of Innocent VIII. enjoined their extermination. It absolved those
who should take up the crusade against them from all ecclesiastical
pains and penalties, released them from {48} any oath, legitimized
their title to all property which they might have illegally acquired,
and promised remission of sins to all who should kill the heretics.
"There is no town in Piedmont," says a Vaudois writer, "where some of
our brethren have not been put to death. Jordan Terbano was burnt
alive at Susa; Hippolite Rossiero at Turin, Michael Goneto, an
octogenarian, at Sarcena; Vilermin Ambrosio hanged on the Col di Meano;
Hugo Chiambs, of Fenestrelle, had his entrails torn from his living
body at Turin; Peter Geymarali of Bobbio in like manner had his
entrails taken out in Lucerna, and a fierce cat thrust in their place
to torture him further; Maria Romano was buried alive at Rocca Patia;
Magdalena Fauno underwent the same fate at San Giovanni; Susanna
Michelini was bound hand and foot, and left to perish of cold and
hunger on the snow at Sarcena; Bartolomeo Fache, gashed with sabres,
had the wounds filled up with quicklime, and perished thus in agony at
Penile; Daniel Michelini had his tongue torn out at Bobbo for having
praised God; James Baridari perished covered with sulphurous matches
which had been forced into his flesh under the nails, between the
fingers, in the nostrils, in the lips, and all over the body, and then
lighted; Daniel Rovelli had his mouth filled with gunpowder, which,
being lighted, blew his head to pieces;... Sara Rostignol was slit
open from the legs to the bosom, and left so to perish on the road
between Eyral and Lucerna; Anna Charbonnier was impaled, and carried
thus on a pike from San Giovanni to La Torre."[2]
_Und dergleicken mehr_! In 1630 the plague swept away one-half of the
Vaudois population, including fifteen of their seventeen pastors. The
places of these were supplied from Geneva and Dauphiny, and {49} the
whole Vaudois people learned French in order to follow their services.
More than once their number fell, by unremitting persecution, from the
normal standard of twenty-five thousand to about four thousand. In
1686 the Duke of Savoy ordered the three thousand that remained to give
up their faith or leave the country. Refusing, they fought the French
and Piedmontese armies till only eighty of their fighting men remained
alive or uncaptured, when they gave up, and were sent in a body to
Switzerland. But in 1689, encouraged by William of Orange and led by
one of their pastor-captains, between eight hundred and nine hundred of
them returned to conquer their old homes again. They fought their way
to Bobi, reduced to four hundred men in the first half year, and met
every force sent against them, until at last the Duke of Savoy, giving
up his alliance with that abomination of desolation, Louis XIV.,
restored them to comparative freedom,--since which time they have
increased and multiplied in their barren Alpine valleys to this day.
What are our woes and sufferance compared with these? Does not the
recital of such a fight so obstinately waged against such odds fill us
with resolution against our petty powers of darkness,--machine
politicians, spoilsmen, and the rest? Life is worth living, no matter
what it bring, if only such combats may be carried to successful
terminations and one's heel set on the tyrant's throat. To the
suicide, then, in his supposed world of multifarious and immoral
nature, you can appeal--and appeal in the name of the very evils that
make his heart sick there--to wait and see his part of the battle out.
And the consent to live on, which you ask of him under these {50}
circumstances, is not the sophistical 'resignation' which devotees of
cowering religions preach: it is not resignation in the sense of
licking a despotic Deity's hand. It is, on the contrary, a resignation
based on manliness and pride. So long as your would-be suicide leaves
an evil of his own unremedied, so long he has strictly no concern with
evil in the abstract and at large. The submission which you demand of
yourself to the general fact of evil in the world, your apparent
acquiescence in it, is here nothing but the conviction that evil at
large is _none of your business_ until your business with your private
particular evils is liquidated and settled up. A challenge of this
sort, with proper designation of detail, is one that need only be made
to be accepted by men whose normal instincts are not decayed; and your
reflective would-be suicide may easily be moved by it to face life with
a certain interest again. The sentiment of honor is a very penetrating
thing. When you and I, for instance, realize how many innocent beasts
have had to suffer in cattle-cars and slaughter-pens and lay down their
lives that we might grow up, all fattened and clad, to sit together
here in comfort and carry on this discourse, it does, indeed, put our
relation to the universe in a more solemn light. "Does not," as a
young Amherst philosopher (Xenos Clark, now dead) once wrote, "the
acceptance of a happy life upon such terms involve a point of honor?"
Are we not bound to take some suffering upon ourselves, to do some
self-denying service with our lives, in return for all those lives upon
which ours are built? To hear this question is to answer it in but one
possible way, if one have a normally constituted heart.
{51}
Thus, then, we see that mere instinctive curiosity, pugnacity, and
honor may make life on a purely naturalistic basis seem worth living
from day to day to men who have cast away all metaphysics in order to
get rid of hypochondria, but who are resolved to owe nothing as yet to
religion and its more positive gifts. A poor half-way stage, some of
you may be inclined to say; but at least you must grant it to be an
honest stage; and no man should dare to speak meanly of these instincts
which are our nature's best equipment, and to which religion herself
must in the last resort address her own peculiar appeals.
IV.
And now, in turning to what religion may have to say to the question, I
come to what is the soul of my discourse. Religion has meant many
things in human history; but when from now onward I use the word I mean
to use it in the supernaturalist sense, as declaring that the so-called
order of nature, which constitutes this world's experience, is only one
portion of the total universe, and that there stretches beyond this
visible world an unseen world of which we now know nothing positive,
but in its relation to which the true significance of our present
mundane life consists. A man's religious faith (whatever more special
items of doctrine it may involve) means for me essentially his faith in
the existence of an unseen order of some kind in which the riddles of
the natural order may be found explained. In the more developed
religions the natural world has always been regarded as the mere
scaffolding or vestibule of a truer, more eternal world, and affirmed
to be a sphere of {52} education, trial, or redemption. In these
religions, one must in some fashion die to the natural life before one
can enter into life eternal. The notion that this physical world of
wind and water, where the sun rises and the moon sets, is absolutely
and ultimately the divinely aimed-at and established thing, is one
which we find only in very early religions, such as that of the most
primitive Jews. It is this natural religion (primitive still, in spite
of the fact that poets and men of science whose good-will exceeds their
perspicacity keep publishing it in new editions tuned to our
contemporary ears) that, as I said a while ago, has suffered definitive
bankruptcy in the opinion of a circle of persons, among whom I must
count myself, and who are growing more numerous every day. For such
persons the physical order of nature, taken simply as science knows it,
cannot be held to reveal any one harmonious spiritual intent. It is
mere _weather_, as Chauncey Wright called it, doing and undoing without
end.
Now, I wish to make you feel, if I can in the short remainder of this
hour, that we have a right to believe the physical order to be only a
partial order; that we have a right to supplement it by an unseen
spiritual order which we assume on trust, if only thereby life may seem
to us better worth living again. But as such a trust will seem to some
of you sadly mystical and execrably unscientific, I must first say a
word or two to weaken the veto which you may consider that science
opposes to our act.
There is included in human nature an ingrained naturalism and
materialism of mind which can only admit facts that are actually
tangible. Of this sort of mind the entity called 'science' is the
idol. {53} Fondness for the word 'scientist' is one of the notes by
which you may know its votaries; and its short way of killing any
opinion that it disbelieves in is to call it 'unscientific.' It must
be granted that there is no slight excuse for this. Science has made
such glorious leaps in the last three hundred years, and extended our
knowledge of nature so enormously both in general and in detail; men of
science, moreover, have as a class displayed such admirable
virtues,--that it is no wonder if the worshippers of science lose their
head. In this very University, accordingly, I have heard more than one