The Infinite Presence

KANT said that two things were sublime: the starry heavens above, and the moral law within. Upon reflection, the stars suggest to “the natural man” but a crude, vague, and far from infinite idea of infinity, and many experts have “explained” the moral law as a utilitarian and evolutionary product. The philosopher’s reverence serves, nevertheless, to divide the infinities into two classes, like all other phenomena, those without and those within, objective and subjective, or macrocosmic and microcosmic. It will be found that a third class must be added which will comprise a number that belong to neither world exclusively, but are the joint product of both. In a rigid Berkeleian or Hegelian analysis all would be subjective; in a looser one all equally more or less composite; and especially if one accepts language at its par value, and common sense at its own rating.

The eye of the mind that does not infer sees the starry firmament simply as lightpoints in a dark blue setting. Distant these points are indeed, but any very great distance is a teaching of hearsay, or inference, and only the astronomer, or one he has taught, has more than a vague and extremely finite conception of their immeasurable distance. The shepherds thought the guiding-star of Bethlehem moved and stood over the manger in which lay the wonderful child. They had no hint of the amazing distance, even of the nearest star, and possibly even Kant’s thought of it was vague as compared with that we now hold. How many Americans and Europeans to-day suppose that a meteor is truly a “falling star” ? That a star could not move, or point out a locality upon the earth, or the earth itself, is not to be understood by the shepherd mind. If a newspaper reader has seen a long string of figures expressing a guess at the distances of stars, they of course express to him no idea more definite than if the numbers were one tenth or ten times as many. It becomes at once the something non-finite, as do all such things not cognizable by his assumed finiteness. The infinite is thus to most a mere negative, whatever its nature, an impatient naming of the unexplored and unnamable. If one attempts to bring to the ordinary mind a somewhat more adequate thought or picture of the infinite, trying to replace its negative by a positive idea, he is met by a smile of incredulity or of shrinking wonder, confessing renunciation and the inability to follow. Should one bravely persist and endeavor to show that the so-called “light” of the stars exists only, and is created, in a tiny, wholly dark space six inches or more behind his own eye, there is a risk of a not flattering answer. Add that not only light, but color also, sound, hardness, heat, cold, odors, etc., — all the “things” our senses tell us of, are sensations, mind creations, unknown products of unknown things by unknown methods and mechanisms. That would be unkind to him, and worse than useless.

Our language demonstrates the purely negative and renouncing action of mind as regards infinity. We have no word for expressing it positively. “ Endless,” “ immeasurable,” “ infinite,” etc., give no desired positiveness, and even the quasiaffirmation in the word “ eternal ” means only that which endures for an age, the latter meaning originally a lifetime. The seeming positive notation of the word “ omnipotence ” is no less essentially negative, because men have never thought of it as anything but subjective, — an attribute of God. But God himself, the idea of him held by the careless believer, is only that of an unknown, unknowable, non-finite, into which vast unknown are indiscriminately flung all tormenting mysteries. He thus becomes philosophically the reserve of inexplainables awaiting our leisure and ability. One by one we must take out and at least seek to solve our problems. God must be made cognizable. We can hardly be as perfect as He, which is commanded, if we cannot even know and understand His characteristics; surely not, if we do not even attempt the least of such knowing and understanding.

It is not an advanced psychology that demonstrates the mental creation of finite sensations, and it is also as early shown that the larger makings of infinities are from the materials furnished by the mind rather than from the outside world. It is a truism that seeing is slowly learned, and that, whatever hints reflected etherwaves bring the eye, vision — accurate, useful vision — is a product of the brain and mind. In the same way, evidently, one can readily determine that the thing actually seen, the blue sky with its dots of light, beyond the reach of his flung pebble, does not even suggest infinite space or universe to the shepherd. Nor does the objective give any positive idea of any kind concerning the non-finite. An unknown something out there in some incomprehensible way started some vibrations which somehow or other were transformed, and at last got to the proper brain cells. From numberless results of the kind the mind made inferences and reasoned of the outside sources of the sensations. One need not proceed to the Berkeleian extreme of denying all objective reality in order to take from that outside cause such vast quantities of attributes as must be done to be just to the spirit co-partner. Even the newest physics resulting from radium discoveries may, according to Professor Lodge, leave some hard nucleus of materiality at the centre of the many-guised, cunningly concealed, ionic molecule. If at last that is dissipated into ions, empty centres of vibrational forces, the vibrations at least exist, and with them all that is essentially objective. The atomic theory is by no means destroyed with the destruction of all “atoms.”

In the same way there remains at least the assured residue of objective infinities, but when the mind gets her proper share of its endowments, they are not so rich as supposed. Infinity dwells less without than within, and mental coöperation is required for the creation of even the crudest objective infinity. Summarize all the racial sense-impressions, condense a hundred kinds to the quintessential instincts, still they would be finite in origin and number. The multiplication of finitenesses by any finite number leaves the product still as far from infinite as the first unit. Were the mind a product of materiality and finite experiences, the word “ infinite,” even with the negative connotation, would not have been formed. That it has positive significance is indubitable, hence the iron law of causality demands that it come from no finite source without. We do, in fact, endow that without with our own self-grown infinities. The analyses of reality, the progress of psychology, all show that our new science is largely a transplanting or taking back to our own minds the rich qualities with which we had too generously endowed matter. In our generosity we lent the old actor our own wardrobe of the spirit. He thereby acted the cosmic rôle assigned to him with better grace and seemliness, but he was in honor bound to return the gold-embroidered cloak and gem-decked crown. He could not wear them in the street. Nor did he need them there, for in the highways of materiality is no cold or warmth, nakedness or garment, beauty or grace. It is only personality and sensation that need, or know, or can own these things. When the intellectual part of personality grows beyond the charm of played amusements, it smiles in pity upon the child’s need and the time when it found so much pleasure in imagining into the sticks and wires of its marionettes (world, space, and time) its own greater, more infinite, personal comedies and tragedies.

And yet the wealth and power which materiality pays back bring their own responsibilities. Unused gold without interest is of no more value than so much iron, and to yield interest or profit, work must be done. By no unimproved or unearned endowment do we come to the grasp and enjoyment even of metaphysical things. The possibility lies in our nature, it is true, and in the nature of mind; but it does not spontaneously exercise itself. We gain the heaven, not only of feeling and duty, but of intellect and imagination, by hardened muscles and tireless climbing. Metaphysical athletics is the most strenuous of all, but these scalers of the Alps of the Spirit have seen views unknown to others, and so superb, so indescribable, that the rare light in their eyes is almost the sole hint of the supernatural glory. The philosophies and religions, the poesies, literatures, and sciences, of the few climbers, are only fainter suggestions; and yet these have made the civilization which we find so miraculous. If humanity itself should attempt the great ascent, whence the stars are seen, not as discrete light-spots sown in the overhead blue, but as the beaconfires of the soul calling Life to victory over the world!

The two infinities of Kant did not chill or hurt him, but his fearlessness is shared by few. Only for a short instant, at best, will most persons consent to look openeyed at any clear image of fate or of infinity. Scarcely a friend of mine will look steadily at the clear midnight sky for a minute in silence. The freezing of the heart that follows, the appalling shudder at the dread contemplation of infinity, which may be called cosmic horror, is more than can be endured. If those stars are absolutely and positively infinite, then there is no up or down, and they knew no beginning, will have no ending. With any such staring gorgon of fatalism the surcharged attention is shaken, and the chemistry of common life seizes upon the liquid crystals with avid hunger.

But why may not this cosmic horror be turned to cosmic pleasure ? It is at best not bravery or athletic prowess, and at worst it is a psychic want of equilibrium, a morbid metaphysics. When one has health, strength, and expertness to do a thing there is pleasure in doing it. In a word, the horror is from disuse of the innate power, and the sublimest pleasure may be found in excursions into the infinite. For not the least of the astronomer’s delight springs from the grand distances and incommensurables with which he deals, the limitlessness of the pictures nightly spread before him. And is not the historian’s similar pleasure in the sweep of eye from age to age and from nation to nation, correlating to unity millions of individualities and events hidden from those who dwell in valleys and in singlenesses ? In his analyses and syntheses the philosopher learns of another kind of grave charm, whereby the apparent disorder and fortuity of the world are systematized and coördinated into order and unity by some fair and far harmonizing principle. Such, in truth, are athletes; but their endowment and ability differ in no way from that of the shepherd following his star.

However modern and civilized the shepherd may be, should one rally him to an attack upon the infinite (God’s infinities having been first set aside), he would answer that there are at best but two infinities: space and time. And he would see but one childish method — the stretching of the imagination. With perfect plausibility may not one contend that there are as many ways of “feeling after God,” as many routes of excursion into infinity, as there are personalities ? Every one differs from all others, even from his brother, in some quality, aptitude, or ability. The poorest soul has at least one window opening upon the beyond-thelimited. Most are richer in windows than they know. And richer in roads, too, for these lead out and subdivide, the last being but well-blazed trails, perhaps, — and follow them at your peril and pleasure ! — conducting to great outlooking peaks. The window-gazers, — well, they can at least see their fellows yonder on the summit. But the infinite is not to be observed alone; it is not only observation, it is action as well.

Even the infinite of space may be sought by different routes and methods. Many are common, — by images of trains of cars en route for the moon, the sun, or the nearest star; by written figures giving the lowest comprehensible unit and its cumulated multiplications to a tottering incomprehensibility; by light-years;¹ by thought-spannings of standards derived from time-exposures of plates in photographing nebulas; by spectrum analyses of stars approaching or receding. Are such helps not often great hindrances ? More resolute imaginations find them so. One may readapt an old likeness, devised before spectrum analysis (and curiously fore-feeling it), and imagine an eye poised upon a beam of light shot into infinite space from the satellite of a planet of some sun of a great solar system. If the eye travels slower than the rays that left after it, the unrolling process seems hastened beyond the actual; if it travels at the same rate of speed as all the other rays, then the moon and the system are seen as if stationary; but if it travels faster than the light that left before it, then there is to it an inversion of the process, and the satellite will be seen to draw back into its planet, this return to its sun, and finally the sun fade to the primitive invisible nebula.

By such fancies the mind may conquer its own weakness; but it must not be forgotten that materiality not only does not suggest, but that it even disallows them. Better methods are without images, by sheer intellectual muscle, generally with helpful suggestion of materiality, but not by mirroring alone, and always with vitalizing feeling. One arrives sometimes by means of straight contemplation from mountain-tops, or even by gazing, by day and upon one’s back, at the cloud-flecked and apertured zenith. At night a help is got by piercing beyond the easily visible stars to fainter and for long invisible deeper-lying ones, — and then the stretch of endless blue depths still below; the dizzying sight through a telescope of the jagged crater-tops of the moon jutting against the cold deep. Many such experiences widen and vivify thought, and leave enduring memories, psychic recuperating stations against more resolute mounting. It should not be forgotten that if there is a really and positively infinite number of stars, then at every conceivable point of the firmament there is located a star. Hence, if light were stronger or eyes more sensitive, there would be no discrete light - spots and star - points, but only a sheen of slightly variant intensity everywhere. A qualification of this image is required by the fact that about every star are, probably, circling black planetary bodies, which, rhythmically intercepting and revealing the starlight, would cause the diffused glitter or sheen of the sky to quiver with an intense stippling.

Finally, to grasp within the mental holding an adequate idea of the infinity of the spatial universe, recourse must be had to the scientifically educated imagination. Stretch the images and plays of fancy as one will, multiply conceivables with all the expertness of the best metaphysical prestidigitator, and yet if a limit is assigned beyond which stars and matter do not extend, then one inevitable consequence results; if finite, it must somewhere have a centre of attraction. To that centre, in an infinite time past, must have drawn the entire matter of the universe into one huge central sun. If planetization must follow, then the central sun must still be large enough to dominate all satellites as revolving servants. There is not only no proof, there is perfect disproof, that such a central body exists, and that there is any such revolutionary order of the visible stars. Hence the matter and the suns of the universe extend, positively and limitlessly, and eternally endure. Touch the logic with emotion, and one has realized the infinite of space.

There is a comforting corollary to this, one that reëstablishes the stability that seemed to be slipping, and which tended to arouse the old cosmic horror. Our own solar-system home cannot swing beyond the set limits of unreturn — cannot be “lost” — because it is held within infallible topographic bounds by the pull of the infinity of matter upon every side. The nearer it approaches any perihelion, the more the opposed infinite calls its return.

One may play with the thought (rather, the words) of infinite vacuity or emptiness, pure space; but the imagination balks; and the inevitable extension of the ether into all unoccupied space renders the thought resultless and useless. Moreover, the idea of motion or velocity of a discrete point or world in otherwise unoccupied and limitless space is impossible and self-contradictory. There can be no up or down or direction of such a body. Even in a sun-filled infinity there is no direction in any final sense. Lastly, that final and all-dominating fatalism of the objective world, gravitation, precludes any limit to that world.

The mystery and the infinity of matter seem now fast disappearing into ideas of force. But one may rest secure that all the essentials of an objective world will remain. There is to be no utter deliquescence of externals into subjectivities. Neither physics nor metaphysics can kill the other in the duel of eternity. Periodic vibrations and rhythms become no less objective or real by the death of all the atoms, and the essential of materiality remains, possibly even more stable and unchangeable, with these clotted swirls of ions and ethers, than with the crude lumps called atoms.

And, with all material resolutions and Protean disguises, there remains gravitation, that most unexceptional, inexplicable, and primal of all the fatalisms of the material universe. Only spirit is freed from its dominance, and even that only when it is freed from its bound body. In the alembic of thought the old idea of the material of the universe may, and probably will, disappear; but only to rise again as motion, which will endure as essentially objective. There is an ill-defined borderline between spirit and body somewhere along the track marked “sensation,” in which motion seems both subjective and objective; but when one actually gets well across it, supposed mentality on the one side is clearly only motility, and on the other it is as surely only immotile mind. On the outside (as we look at it) the entire product passing as the old conception of “matter” is perfectly represented by the word “gravitation.” Hence, transfixed by our thought, it becomes the consummate and convincing exhibit of omnipotence, or the infinite of power. How absolutely it fuses the mysteries and controls the facts of matter is seen in any attempt to think ungravitation. The result would be the homogeneity and motionlessness of the universe reduced to uniform nebulosity. One atom could not vary in distance or size from any other, and none could be in motion. Thus, gravitation is the sole source of quality and motion. Antigravitation, the unlimited sway of centrifugalism, would be followed by a more striking extension of the component matter of the universe into infinite space, and this would be simply an eternal thinning process, wherein the increasing nebularization would never quite become an impossible nothing. On its positive side gravitation thus becomes the best and most easily grasped demonstration of the infinite of power. And as no human intelligence has caught sight of even a hint of an explanation of this strange force, it stands before us as truly supernatural, and all the more amazing to the trained mind, because (unlike most thought of the supernatural) it is uniform and exceptionless. No atom ever escaped its control. It was the first born of all fates and fatalisms. The condition of true philosophy and mental power is to realize and explain that which is the most common. The poor mind concerns itself least with that to which it is most habited. To the other the oldest and most invariable stimulates the most curious inquiry. If gravitation is ever explained, the oldest source of awe and the greatest sense of mystery will pass out of human life, and both peasant and philosopher will have lost the splendid example of sublime and omnipotent power. The charm of its mystery will, at least, have been lost, and the god of matter, gorgon to the at first startled observer, restful to the resolved mind, will have been dethroned by a mathematical and mechanical formula. Other methods, of course, remain of reaching toward the conception of omnipotence, but none is comparable to this. Herbert Spencer has given us the look of it in his First Principles, when he sketches the congelation of the solar system out of the supposed primal nebula. In measureless years he says the icicles are revaporized, and thus the cold eternal heart of fate proceeds in rhythmic systole and diastole, each beat a universe repeated every billion years. One may forget that this is a corollary, a method of action, of the wonder of gravitation.

The infinity of time is sooner dispensed with or mastered, because time is merely the measure of vibrational motion. One thus comes near reducing it to an attribute of mind, a registering of revolutions, a method of mnemonics. Quicker or slower become very relative gaugings, and to the eye on the ray of light, meaningless and self-contradictory. In a static, motionless, or non-revolving universe, there could be no time, and plainly none in vacuous space. It therefore becomes the name for periodicity of motion, begot of physical recurrence and of mentality, non-existent without both parents. How necessary is the subjective parent is illustrated by the Dc Quincey opium dream. If the dream would always result from the hashish as it did in that instance, if the test were not dangerous, if it were not morbid, and if the tester were surely strong enough, a single daring trial would be educative. But pathologists and experimenters do not advise it, and it is unnecessary because the results are to be secured by normal methods and are more satisfying. The normal dream of sleep furnishes an abundance of data, too frequently undervalued, as we know. Freed from the bindings of the body, the dreampersonality plays recklessly with the stupidities of the waking sense of space and time. Our daytime efforts to condense or stretch time out can never equal that dainty ease. We live so fast or so slow then, we focus long stretches to an instant, or find the dragging moment never passes, or the trivial deed is never done. We stride from mountain-top to mountain-top with miraculous ease and fearlessness, slide down clouds or along the edges of the world with such fine unconsciousness of impossibilities! The subjectivity of time is illustrated, too, by sleep itself, especially if dreamless. Where has time been since, eight hours ago, we stopped thinking ? The sleep of anæsthesia is no more, nor less, striking. There are also pathologic and traumatic lapses of time in which, with the loss of memory, there is also a loss of personality, the finding of another self, entirely alien, with as sudden a resumption of the old self after weeks or months. Under such circumstances the puzzle becomes, not what is time, and where, but what is the ego itself ? Indeed, how large a portion of what we call individuality, in a last analysis, disappears in the mystery of memory ?

In our best and most revelatory experiences with the infinite, there is a subtile fusion of objective and subjective, each illuminating the other, and each crying “Brother!” The influence of rare combinations of mental sensitiveness and rarer circumstances with almost unique composites of fact, may, once or twice in life, bring an experience of incomparable stimulation and rebirth. Such moments come at some time to most of us. Once in our life a sunset may occur, a perfect silence, a sickness and a flower, a vision from a still mountain-top, a billow-breaking rock and a far, fine, sunshot horizon line, a divine music moment, a terrible line of poetry, a bird singing in storm and shine, some tale of heroism with its swift reflex on our own failure or success, — how many are the incidents that reveal the world — and ourselves — to ourselves. Many infinities may thus meet and blossom in the soul to a marvelous flower. Here is one: a becalmed boat, silent, upon a silent and unrippled sea; a soft veil of enwrapping fog blotting out all things of sky, ocean, or horizon. By some lightening of the fog, suddenly there gleamed out of the east the full moon, a huge globe of silver glory. With a glance to the other side there was seen the setting sun glaring through the mist with crimson intensity. How infinitesimal the bit of human life poised in nothingness between those two awful eyes of Eternity!

The best and richest of our infinities are of the spirit’s own creating. One said of a certain rhapsodist that his gravitation was upward. The unstruggling ease of the bird’s flight seems natural to us, but in truth our thought is not subject to gravitation; it goes up or down with equal willingness. There is even no direction in its spaceless universe. Kant felt the moral law within as sublime, as convincing, a demonstration as the starry firmament. Matter, space, time, and power, these words express the whole of externality. The rest is spirit-land. And how rich it is, how much richer than that poor outthereness! If the real and greater infinite is self, why not navigate that universe ? We may do so as successfully, more so, one would surmise, as by any lift or push or reflex of materiality, any thrust through space or time. How few have thought of discovering themselves! It seems a strange perversion that moved humanity to set out upon its world voyage of discovery. The journey of knowledge began in quest of the farthest and least useful wealth of good. Leaving the home Lares and Penates the voyager sailed to discover stars; the world of astronomy and geography he would first know. When he found his own earth, its nature, geology, next moved his curiosity; then its animals. Finally, coming ever nearer, he discovered his own body, and busied himself for long with its least important bones and muscles. At last he saw the mirrored picture of his own face, and that of his brother. The acquaintance should ripen into amity, for all his knowledges and acquirements are epitomized and reclassified, revivified in the ego, to study which he now returns to the home. The household gods are found in a sad state of neglect, and in their place is the new altar of Science, with the motto, Spiritus mortuus est. The father, he finds, has also died. In his voyaging he had heard that spirit does not die. The priest at the altar of Science assures him that all force may be transmuted, but not extinguished. Is not mind, then, also a force ? Is it not as indubitable that the “mental” of humanity is being increasingly worked into the very warp and woof of the material world ? Ah, but the weaver, man, at “the roaring loom of time ?” His spirit cannot be localizable, as his body was, and the old cosmic horror of infinity breaks or threatens once more. The tragedy of broken faith recurs forever new, until one learns that spirit is not here nor there, and is as real, though not bound by the realities of space, time, matter, or gravitation. All previous studies of the outthere were preliminary and preparatory muscular play before the trust of the spirit wings in an air finer than the luminiferous ether.

How is it with the others, his brother voyagers ? The majority have remained “common sailors,” the tools of a superior directive will. They have felt no need, nor essayed any power, of knowing the infinite. In their natural bodies (these sad feeders and workers, not for themselves, but for others) psychism may sometimes nest. Promises and possibilities may from the first be suggested, the beginnings of the tool-making faculty of true mentality; but they are themselves the pathetic tools of the struggle for existence, the methods of making secure the incarnation process. Theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die. The second great class take their infinities on faith, trusting to the reports of others as to the existence of such things, — the routine accepters of unstudied creeds. Allied to these are those who follow little less blindly the school of prepared philosophic or historical thought into which their minds drop with the least friction and hurt.

But the number of the returning Captains of Thought, of the original discoverers of the infinite, constantly increases, and they come to greet and to know one another, from afar in either space or time. For they are themselves normally spaceless and timeless, and hence true citizens of a genuine Fourth Dimension. And they are one, a united people. Each, by predilection, may have, indeed must have, a special method of realizing the infinite, but all have the same ultimate ideal. They are students, lovers, brothers of the Infinite Presence. The universality of matter, the infinity of filled space, the rhythms of time and motion, the omnipotence of gravitation, all have prepared the student to see, to feel, and to know the Infinite Presence.

The definings of the name “God,” even by the most intelligent of its users, and even by a sect, or by one person, make it impossible to use the word longer so that it shall have any definite significance. Close analysis of a single attribute soon lands us in contradictions, if not absurdities. Mankind has so persistently accustomed itself to make God the indiscriminate holder of its indiscriminations that the term has become a mere receptacle for humanity’s unsolved problems, a sort of universal question-box of antitheses and puzzles. Instead of adding to the conglomerate, it is our duty to withdraw the slips and answer the questions, if possible. There is no valid reason against, and every reason in favor of, the scientific study of God, a rational theology. If there is anything corresponding in the least to the reality designated by the name, let us learn carefully and accurately what it is. Even the self-supposed atheists and materialists are, to a degree, theists and believers in spirit. It is incumbent on them to determine how far they must go and how little they can believe. The jumble of inconsistencies and of moral and intellectual cowardices that the weak have made of God by no means excuses or warrants wholesale denial and impatient cynicism. When the tragicomedian Heine would relieve his own suffering by a sad laugh at the world, he said, “Oh, He’ll forgive me, it’s His business.” The amazing extent to which sin has dictated the conception of God is a terrible revelation of how little men have lived up to their light. “Jesus died and paid it all, all the debt I owe,” — whole theologies of such horrors do not lessen the truth that vicarious atonements are the commonest tragedies of our every-day life. “God is Love,” “He is Goodness itself,” sings the devout believer, and he believes as fervently, or did once, in the hell pictured by Adam de Ros and Dante. St. Francis, Calvin, the burners of the Albigenses, all used the same word for their divinity. “He is Beauty” to the Artist, “but, first, Truth,” cautions the scientist; and to the poet, the union of Truth, Goodness, Love, and Beauty. It grows plain that the old way made of him the impossible alembic of all contradictions, a sorry makeshift of dialectic difficulty and ethical failure. The fundamental error of all the definers was that of making him responsible for the inorganic universe, or cause of the material world. Ultimate origins, they did not see, are insoluble and inexplainable, and no help was to be got in our intellectual trials or practical woes by the absurd supposition of an uncaused omnipotent person as the cause of the physical universe. There is no proof or suggestion of proof that the inorganic universe came into being by any such help. With the modern study of life, however, came the recognition that, so far as its incarnations are concerned, it is a creation. We see its miracles, its millions of organisms created by means of effort, purpose, and ingenuity, every day; we see a common endeavor and approximated ideal in and behind all of them; a guiding purpose is evident, converging through all biologic history to a plain and clear, and not so “far off,” “ divine event.” In a word, there is manifest in all living things the Infinite Presence. We endow it with no other infinity but this of presence, for to the derived user of the word “I,” it must be forever present. In every other derived ego, it is as manifest, whether flower, tree, animal, bird, or man. All are plainly of supernatural origin, physical forces their utilized tools. No purely physical thing has an ego. It is utterly undesigned and purposeless. To this a consistent and earnest science is driven, or softly comes, by the inevitability which Lord Kelvin, in his way, has recently admitted. How much or how little of the attributes formerly crowded upon “God” may be possessed by our “Biologos,” none may say. None may with impunity transfer the old to him, or bring new. He is not to be unloaded upon. The old god is dead with the accumulated sorrows of the ages. The new one is not the resolver of our mysteries and forgiver of our sins. His own world difficulties are enough, and he demands of each of us to aid, not oppress, him.

And quietly grows the perception that, when as person and spirit we do thus feel and know it, we recognize it as like ourselves, as one with us, as the Father of us, we the Sons. He has no eyes and yet is looking at us, no ears and yet He hears us, no face and yet His smile greets us. He is not here nor there, and yet both here and there; not then nor now, but both, and continuously, — this Divinity of Biology, Father of Life.

It remains for the modern cultivated mind and sensitive heart to fuse into living personality the antitheses of religion and science, æsthetics and morality. As the outcome of ages of specialized effort, such a synthesis is at last possible. The intellectual mirroring or coördinating faculty, viewed in the most superb of its philosophies or sciences or material civilizations, viewed in all of them combined , is, of course, but a part, a small part, of the living and feeling personality; it is but a part of life’s being and work here. Religion also caught one of the most vital and primal of the truths of existence; the Fatherhood of life, and the childhood of the living; but it ignored the beautiful too much, the ethical — the objectively ethical — far more, and the intellectual was to it almost the same as the devilish. But few artists have ever learned that beauty is only the smile and the benediction of gladness over the true and the good, the loved and loving real, and can in no way precede or ignore the three forerunning gods of life, religion, reality, and morality. Neither dare ethics do the same as to its own three elder brothers. But nothing now hinders the modern child of the ages from having the clear scientific grasp of the world of a Kelvin, and at the same time being as religious and as ethical as St. Thomas, as beautyloving as Ruskin. For the Infinite Presence is instantly recognized as being the living synthesis of all these characteristics of which we as partial incarnations present only facets. Religion is but the yearning toward Him, and actualizing Him in our own life, history the record of the progress we and the biologic process are making in this ideal-realism. Civilization is the tool He places in our hands for use toward that end, morality the method of using the tool, beauty and happiness the proofs that it has been used wisely and unselfishly. We now know that materialistic science is not scientific, that exclusive morality is immoral, immoral æsthetics not beautiful; and that a zealot’s religion is most irreligious. Let us have done with partialism!

And how different the infinity of the Presence from the inorganic infinities! Purpose, intelligence, ideal, beauty, — these were the lendings of man to nature, so far as the lifeless infinities were concerned; but every cell, organ, organism, history, — the whole biologic process, — is instinct with them. There is everywhere increasing success dominating always-present and partial failure, personality without individuality, an eternally new phasing of the Infinite Presence. Because it is a genuine incarnation, his indivisible life deputed in each cell and in each mind, with its allotted duty and work. But the reins are held in one hand. We are free only as deputies, not absolutely, and never without the daily accounting, the night’s necessary repairing of sleep.

All history is revealed as experimentings and exercises in methods of gaining the consciousness of and unity with this single presence. Religions and religion first made the ideal clear, determined upon its actualization, and, despite a thousand failures, have always held the I-and-my-Father-are-one steadily before reluctantly obedient humanity. Each in his way, but none doubting, the religious leaders, the saints and the martyrs, heathen and Christian, forefelt, foreknew the unity that would come even when their own errors should have helped to bring it. They may have cursed the science necessary to bring it about, and their curse helped the bringing. Materialism and science may have denied the religious brother, but each was necessary to the other. Speculative philosophy and dialectic were but a training of expertness. The systems fail, but systematization succeeds in their failures. The art that should unite truth and beauty may have been untrue and unbeautiful, but it kept the vision, cheered the worker, and died for the new art coming or to come. The best and most serviceable tool of the Infinite Presence is civilization, and of its uses we are as yet only dreaming the most childish dreams.

For the one characterizing and dominant fact of the biologic process is the steady and measurable increase of its control of physical and chemical force. With every new and successful organism, — amœba, grass-blade, animal, man, — there is, by so much, a detachment of power from the inorganic, and an added gain of energy at the disposal of design and purpose. The clear pointing is to a vitalization of matter, at least a vital control of it and of its forces, a spiritualization of the mechanical. The inorganic, the infinities of space, time, matter, and force, in and of themselves are inconsequent, meaningless, have utterly no raison d’être. In the hands of spirit they may be of service, and their existence justified. The God of biology, the Infinite Presence, is patiently, increasingly, gaining such control by means of civilization.

“The moral law within” merits the grandeur of its office as seen by Kant, in that it is simply and solely the command of the Infinite Presence that we, his sons, must become his heirs, helpers, and copartners. That of old is the significance of all ethics; and of all religion, which is but duty vivified, obligation motived by love and graced by beauty. Morality is our obedience to the call; happiness, of the world or of any one of us, the proof that we have obeyed, the benediction of His “Well done!”

The commingling of transcendent ingenuity with mistakes, of plain comedy, and plainer tragedy, in the incarnation process, has its theoretical and its practical lessons. The Infinite Presence is made more familiar and lovable by them, despite the atheist’s scorn. They give proof of the spontaneous and indestructible primitive belief that, though omnipresent, He is not entirely omniscient, and far indeed from omnipotent. They convince us that He is both Father and Elder Brother (surely He is, although of whence and how we have no thought), who wrests from Fate a new world of design and freedom, and to whom the ancient fatalisms are yielding progressive obedience. The unsuccesses in the copartnership are those who theoretically or practically deny the kinship, seeking selfish instead of corporate advantage. They are the sinners, the disobedients by choice. Then there are the failures, his mistakes or ours, the defective classes, the parasites, the pessimists, the suicides, — the egotists of all sorts and kinds. Are there too few obedients left? Ours the fault, at least in part, and certainly ours the misfortune. To us most clear of all comes His call to help!