Adventures in Philosophy

I

A LITTLE HOMILY ON THE TRUTH

WE sorely need a clearer conception of the truth. We need it in the business of living; especially as a means of avoiding misunderstandings. If we have an abstract idea of what the truth is, we are less likely to err in the belief that we are right before we know the truth. In adventuring upon a theory which for the past few years has seemed to me to hold, we shall hardly be charged with applying new meanings to old words if we say that facts and the truth are not the same. Facts are parts of the truth, just as wheels, rods, levers, and the like, are parts of a machine. If we say ‘the whole truth ’ every time we refer to the truth, it might make the idea more clear, but let us agree to consider it so, without the need of saying two words where one will do.

If you strike me, that becomes a fact as soon as you have done it. Whether you have struck me or not is a question of fact and not a question of truth. The truth may be that you struck me to call my attention to impending danger, or you may have struck me in anger, or the blow may be an unimportant episode in a long fight between us.

The truth, as I conceive it, is all the facts in their right or correct relation; the relation which they must bear to each other when the truth is attained. Thus the truth becomes an abstract thing, because we know what it is, although we may not know it. Rarely, indeed, are wre able to gather all the facts in relation to a subject, on the one hand, or to correlate them, on the other; nevertheless we must do this if we would know the truth.

If this definition is unfamiliar, if we are not accustomed to consider the truth in this sense, I think it will do us no harm to bear it in mind. In courts of law, according to current practice, it might not hold, but we are fortunately under no obligation to order our thinking according to processes of law.

If we exalt the truth and reverence it, the glib and hysterical brothers and sisters who, grasping a single fact, proceed to preach that and that only as the truth, will cause us less annoyance. We may acknowledge their facts as facts, —which is all they can ask of us. If we still remain unconvinced of the truth of their preachments we shall be contradicting no one. The truth is very great, very large, and when Lessing prayed that to him be given the privilege to seek the truth rather than to know it, because to know it he was not worthy, he spoke as one of the wisest of men. To seek it, to get nearer to it, sometimes perhaps to get a glimpse of it, is all that we may hope for; it is the best that we can do.

Suppose you and I look at a tree on a hillside. We see only the leaves, and we observe that the tree is green. The tree is green; that is a fact. Let us make a note of it. Then suppose we go a distance away and look at it again. The tree is blue. It is idle for us to say, ‘It seems blue but it really is green,’ because our very organs which gave the reaction of green a while ago now give the reaction of blue. By the same token that the tree was green when we saw it near by, it is blue when we see it from afar. So let us make a second note: the tree is blue. Here we have two contradictory statements of fact, neither false, and yet neither the whole truth. The truth about the color of the tree involves a great range of subjects, including the physics of light, the anatomy and physiology of the human eye, photo-chemistry, — in short, a vast store of learning and understanding.

Many facts which seem irreconcilable become harmonious parts of the trut h when all the facts are arranged in their right order. So the truth should make us humble, and patient with one another. None of us has faculties of universal coördination, and our blind spots, instead of being little delinquencies of perception, are in reality vast areas. The most we can claim is that we have a few sighted spots. To see all the facts in their right relation is what we might call The Olympian Vision.

II

THE GREEN TREE

The first time I visited Charlotte, North Carolina, I had some business to transact with a charming, soft-spoken old gentleman who wore a broadbrimmed felt hat. When our business was completed for the day, we walked leisurely about the town. ‘Charlotte,’ said the gentleman of the sombrero, ‘is all to’ up over a dispute which is ragin’ amongst our people.’ ‘What is the cause of it?’ I asked. ‘Free Grace and Fo’-ordination,’ he answered.

I was delighted, and wrote a long letter home about it that night. Charlotte seemed so very archaic! This was many years ago, and since then Charlotte has grown to be a great manufacturing town with a grand hotel and clubs and all the things that modern industry and wealth bring about. In those days there were the Presbyterians and Baptists on the one side and the Methodists and Lutherans on the other, and the adherents of the little Episcopal church, who were divided on the question. These included substantially the whole white population. Now, unless I am sorely mistaken, Charlotte has ceased to worry over ‘Free Grace and Fo’-ordination’; she is modern and up-to-date. But if my surmise be correct, she has gone backward intellectually; she only thinks herself modern; she has become commercial and has ceased to participate in the intellectual life of the day. For the old question whereby Charlotte was ‘all to’ up’ abides in philosophy. Turn whichever way we will, we meet that same old nagging problem, teasing us on the one hand with what seems to be proof that we have no free will at all, and insisting on the other that a very good reason why we have free will is because we know we have it.

Many of us have ceased to be Presbyterians or Baptists or Methodists or Episcopalians, but as soon as we venture into biology we find ourselves urged to join either the Mechanist or the Vitalist denomination, and there we find the same old dispute, raging again among our biological people.

This is, indeed, the comedy domain of philosophy. The Greeks used to dispute over it. St. Paul appeared to have the problem solved, and so did St. Augustine. Pelagius differed from them and so did his followers, — with some warmth. The harmony between Luther and John Calvin over the matter was not striking, Servetus had an opinion which went up in smoke, the savants of Charlotte, North Carolina, talked themselves out over it, — and now behold the biologists in battle array! If it were given to us to live to a prodigious number of years and to observe the earth from afar, we should see the philosophers in dispute over this problem throughout the ages, never agreeing and never persuading each other. It is a very enduring subject.

But is not this dispute over the question whether we have free will or not very like a dispute that we might engage in over the color of a tree: whether it be green or blue? It hardly seems worth while to boast or to grow angry in protesting that we have absolute free will, when a little surgical operation of one sort or another, or a shock, or a blow upon the head, may change our nature entirely. Why not proceed along the mechanistic way, seeking the mechanical, physical, and chemical causes of every act, and thus gather as many facts as we can? If every act seems to be a response to a stimulus, why deny it? We shall not have achieved the truth when we have learned the exact process of every act, but we shall be much wiser than we are now. We shall advance toward the truth when we learn the relation to each other of those processes of which we are now so ignorant. And if from the study of the facts at hand, we reach the conclusion that we have no free will at all, but are mere automata, with no power of choice or selection throughout our lives, is it not time to pause and admit that we may not have all the facts, yet? Also that such as we have may not be in their right order before our vision?

There are some verses by John Godfrey Saxe, called ‘The Blind Men and the Elephant,’ which are very instructive. According to Saxe, six wise men of Indoostan, all of them very wise, but all of them blind, went to see the elephant. One examined its side and declared the elephant was very like a wall; another, feeling its trunk, was sure the elephant was very like a snake; another concluded from its leg that it was very like a tree; another, examining one of its tusks, knew that the elephant was very like a spear; the expert who examined its ear found it to resemble a fan; and the authority who grasped its tail was equally certain that the elephant was very like a rope. According to the legend they are still disputing over it.

Now the truth is bigger than an elephant, and our vision of it is narrower than the observations of each of the blind men. And we should bear in mind that they were right, every one of them. Each had a fact; none knew the truth. None had a theory of the truth; each knew what he knew, and that was enough for him. We can well imagine one of them saying, ‘If a thing is so, it’s so, and you can’t get around it; my senses bear me witness; the elephant is very like a snake.’

If we have a good working method of dealing with facts, it is a good thing to hold to it, just as we do well to hold fast to the fact that the tree is green when we look at it from near by. It seems to be a part of the truth. And the mechanistic theory, which will have nothing to do with spooks or ghosts, or with vital sparks with qualities that are not material, is helpful, wholesome, and illuminating. It makes for clean thinking. It will not countenance the Pickwickian point of view, which is very popular and current in this our day. It provides that facts be gathered by observation and the study of cause and effect. It also seems to lead to the conclusion that every act is the only one possible under conditions as they exist. Now, if this reasoning appears sound, let us, instead of frothing at the mouth and denouncing the sincere men who have reached these conclusions, admit it— as a part of the truth.

If through another chain of reasoning, or through consciousness, or by any other means, we come to a conclusion opposed to this, there is no occasion to boast that the first conclusion is disproved. If we reach both conclusions, we may know that we have not yet achieved the truth, but for aught we know both may be right. That we have free will and that we have not free will may be, both of them, parts of the truth, just as the opposed statements that the tree is green and that it is blue are parts of the truth.

We may say that the whole organization of human conduct is based upon the free will of the individual; but the organization of human conduct, like many another good thing, is based in large part upon fancy. When we consider acts from a-near we might as well admit that free will seems to play very little if any part in them. Here is the human machine with its equipment, the consciousness including a part of that group of records and nerve-centres which are ‘connected up,’ the connecting up occurring automatically along the line of least resistance; and then, given the stimulus, the one and only reaction which can occur, does occur. There would need to be a difference in the equipment or the stimulus to bring about a different reaction. The conclusion, you observe, is precisely the same as that reached by the late and occasionally lamented John Calvin, except that he maintained that every current through the colloidal content of every nerve was a special, volitional act of the Deity, ‘for his own glory.’

This view, that every act is automatic if considered by itself, has great merit. If we consider it to be a part of the truth, we are likely to have far more abundant charity for one another. By it we enlarge our sympathy. For instance, we may say that everybody always does his best at the time he acts. If he does evil, there is a reason for it, a structural reason. His sympathetic equipment may be atrophied. Or he may be angry. In either case we are dealing with facts close at hand and our business is with his condition. The cause of it may be due to his grandfather, or to a false leading in his early childhood. We should diagnose his case and determine what part of his equipment is atrophied or what part so congested that his way was the path of crime. And if he is angry we should regard him as a nervous invalid until his attack is over and the anger bodies are eliminated from his system, or until his injured brain-cells are restored.

There is a wonderful book by Dr. Crile, lately published, on The Origin and Nature of the Emotions,¹ that is very illuminating about anger. He postulates that by evolution we have developed what he calls ‘nociceptors,’ which give the warning of pain in the presence of danger, and that these warnings are given according to the experience of the race. The equipment provides against such external injuries as the goring and tearing of an animal’s teeth in far greater measure than against the more modern devices of swift-moving bullets and very sharp instrum ents, because the experience of the race against teeth is so much greater than with bullets and swords. It is imaginable that if a sword were sharp enough and thin enough and swung with sufficient speed, the old Chinese legend of the master headsman might almost escape fiction. In this, it may be recalled, the executioner graciously gave a pinch of snuff to each of his victims, who remained comfortably unaware that his head had been severed from his body. By the sneezes which followed the perfect swordsmanship was revealed; the heads rolled off, and the surprised offenders proceeded to die with all haste and propriety.

Another interesting warning is found in the fact that we are ticklish in our ears and nostrils and on the soles of our feet, where buzzing insects are likely to sting.

Now in danger these warnings elicit the response either of flight or of turning and facing it, and so we become either afraid or angry. Dr. Crile notes two features in connection with these emotions which are interesting in regard to what we are discussing: he finds that during the processes of anger and fear we suffer inhibitions of all other faculties than those which are of value in fighting or running away. We are useless, inefficient, incompetent, in every other respect. When we are angry we have not our normal equipment because t he greater part is blocked off, and we are no more our complete selves than when, if ever, we are very drunk. The second observation is that under anger or fear there occurs a destruction of brain-cells that are but slowly repaired, and, under stress of severe and prolonged emotion, the brain is permanently injured. These notes have been vastly illuminating to me in regard to the dreadful war which now rages, and I think we may well pause to consider how difficult the recovery will be after it is over, when so many minds that are crippled by passion must attempt the work that calls for entire men.

The Man of Wrath with a great lust to kill ceases to inspire us. We know that he is of value in hand-to-hand combats, but he is a nuisance, and even worse, in a fight where cool heads and steady hands are needed for machine guns. He is potential in instigating war but he is incompetent to end it. He is a drum-major of anarchy.

We also learn that the emotional hurrah of the man in high authority is evidence that he is unfit for his job, because under emotion his qualities of judgment are paralyzed and his sense of coördination is atrophied.

While confining ourselves to the mechanistic point of view, we may describe judgment as the operation of selecting the best thing available to do at the time, — just as the tree reaches out toward the light, — and we may regard it as mechanical. As in a Jacquard loom the woof is run through those openings that are there, so the judgment, the determining bobbin as we might call it, passes through those channels of the mind that are open to it, and determines the act which we mechanically perform.

We may regard impulse as somet hing different from reason if we want to, but to me the difference seems to be in name rather than in fact. If judgment is automatic it may operate so rapidly that it skips consciousness, but that is no ground for calling it a thing apart. Under impulse we act rapidly, so that consciousness is often skipped in the process, and usually there is an emotional drive to it. An impulse seems to me to be a quick, emotional leading or drive to an act, and as much of an automatic response to stimulus as to eat when we are hungry or to drink when we are thirsty. In doing many things we skip consciousness after we are used to doing them, alt hough at first, when we are learning how, they involve great effort.

There are also automatic vanities which we have discussed elsewhere, of which a notable example is our disposition to justify ourselves, any time and all the time. We are apt to think that we thought, when we were acting so rapidly that the act skipped consciousness. And in explaining afterward, our sense of veracity is under the greatest strain. We fool ourselves into the belief that we deliberated over every possibility, when in fact we were following blindly the drive within us to do that which was the only possible thing that we could do under existing conditions.

III

THE BLUE TREE

Free will is a long way from our acts, yet we have a constructive faculty. Although often within a very narrow range, we have the ordering of our lives in our hands. This constructive faculty is in use when we are conjuring up our ideals. We can of our own volition say, ‘I shall plan my life to do this thing.’ We can of our own will select a picture in our minds and hold it in our consciousness as a stimulus. More likely than not we get the idea from some one else; but such ideas, as they are given to us, become our property, to do with as we will, to adopt as ideals or to reject. Many things influence us in this; we are not as free as we think we are; we generate our own energy, and some of us are equipped with very low-power dynamos; but the process of selecting those purposes and ways of life which we project into our consciousness by our own will is the occasion of our greatest freedom.

As we grow older we become either more firm of purpose or more obedient to any stimulus; what we have made of our lives becomes more fixed; but at no time are we complete. We may change our whole nature at fifty as well as at thirty, or fifteen, — but we are less likely to. This business of combining impressions and setting them up as ideals is the substance of our free will. We may fall short of our ideals, we may be entirely different from what we meant to be, and yet be following them as nearly as we can. The question of responsibility is: With what earnestness do we select our ideals, and with what effort do we project them into our consciousness?

The difference between achieving an ideal and performing an act is rather hazy, I’ll admit; but I imagine the one to be the little push we give of our own desire and choice when a picture comes into consciousness that we want to have represent us. ‘That is mine!’ we say, and we proceed to conform to the picture, to drive it into consciousness, to recall it, to urge it upon ourselves until in the end we act that way, and this because we want to. The picture is the stimulus, but the process of selection seems super-mechanical. Although I cannot imagine how we can think without our thinking machines, it seems that somewhere in the process freedom has entered in and we thus become, let us say, the navigating officers of our lives. On the other hand, the direct performance of an act seems an automatic response to the strongest stimulus in the mind at the time.

This may seem like arguing in a circle, because the mechanism that we employ when we are selecting our ideals is substantially the same as that which we use when we perform an act. But the stimulus comes from within. Responsibility is a quality that we recognize, and to consider it a fiction seems premature; as though we had not yet a clear vision of the truth of the matter.

In the late Christian Herter’s remarkable and, in many respects, illuminating book called Biologic Aspects of Human Problems² he develops consciousness as ‘awareness of self’ that arises in a certain complexity of organism under certain conditions. This awareness of self becomes more abundant as what we might call the harmonious complexity of the organism increases. Now, responsibility, or the capacity to choose of our own accord, like consciousness, is a quality that seems to be present in us. It would be futile to deny consciousness because we do not understand just how and where it begins. And it seems equally idle to deny responsibility. It seems to me to be a late accompaniment of this awareness of self which we know we have, and to my way of thinking it functions when we order our lives.

So we may conceive these two statements as being parts of the truth: that whatever any one does, it is the best that he can do at the time, and also that whatever any one does, is qualified by the manner in which he has ordered his life. This idealizing ego, then, is as much a part of ourselves as are our fingers and toes. It is selective. Now, if it seems that we have no free will when we commit an act, but have free will when we order our lives, we surely have not the whole truth in hand, but the theory may lead us nearer to it.

IV

THE GOD IN THE MACHINE

Here I respectfully ask your pardon. Despite my protestations I have already burdened you with a definition of the truth that is not in the dictionaries, and now I am about to ask you to consider religion from a point of view that does not seem to be current. I admit frankly that it is not only distressing to the reader but also that it makes for confusion, to frame new definitions for old words as one proceeds; but, ‘ Gott hilf mir, ich kann nicht anders !’

It seems to me that so far as our civilization is concerned, the concept of religion per se is modern. There is no Germanic word for it; in English, German, Dutch, and Scandinavian, the Latin word has been imported and substituted for faith, belief, and even dogma and theology. In the sense in which I want to use the word there is no plural. Christianity, Buddhism, Brahmanism, Judaism, Mohammedanism are not so many religions (although I must admit that the Latins, who gave us the word, would have used it in this sense): they are, let us say, faiths or beliefs or confessions. At all events, if we agree to call them such, it will leave us free to use the word religion without thinking of the minister, the Sunday-school, or the choir in which we used to sing. Of course, the minister and the Sunday-school and the church choir may have functioned as parts of religion, but to think of them as the substance of it might get them out of their right relation to the idea which I am trying to express.

In the chapter called ‘The Blue Tree’ we considered how we may, of our own free will, select impressions or ideas, and by making ideals of them drive them into consciousness so that they shall serve as both stimuli and inhibitions to our actions. We called this the ordering of life. In the process we are open to impressions, although we determine within ourselves, subject of course to our limitations, which of these impressions we shall select. Now, the function of providing ideals and offering them, teaching them, so that we may order our lives aright and thus approach the truth, seems to me to be the great province of religion. We may practice religion either with or without dogma. The man of faith may have great religious value, and again he may have no religious value at all. There are, for example, religious Christians, and, on the other hand, Christians of great piety who are not religious. The anchorite who whips and distresses himself to save his own soul is not practicing religion; he is exercising his faith. The Samaritan, who picks up the fallen wanderer by the wayside and by his act also enlarges the vision of the man he helps so that the stimulus of sympathy enters into him, is doing a religious act. Faith may be a stimulus to religious acts, and we know that it often is; but since often it is not, we may as well address ourselves to that aspect of religion which we can understand, regarding it as having to do with the ordering of our lives, and not as related to dogma or faith save as dogma or faith may induce it. Then we find that everybody has the religious equipment, just as he has a sympathetic equipment, although both may be greatly atrophied. With this in mind, although we cannot fail to recognize a conflict between science and the Bible and science and dogma, there is no conflict between science and religion.

This view of religion takes the subject out of the domain of metaphysics and mysteries, and recognizes it as a specific department of human life. By it we reach the conclusion that it is a necessary function, in which we are all interested. The truly religious man is he who helps you and me to be of positive value to the world in which we live and, in one way or another, to approach the truth. Whether he be a Christian or a Jew or anything else, is his affair, — his faith, his profession. His religion is in his ideals and his use of them.

We must have ideals. We can do nothing without them. And this essay is written in the sincere belief that as we approach the truth with understanding, one human problem after another will be solved. Only, we must order our lives aright or else we cannot approach the truth. We cannot, otherwise, get the facts into focus. So all the world needs religion, — to-day, it would seem, more than ever before. Dogmas that we cannot believe will not answer the purpose. Apologetics often offend more than they aid. Religion is bigger than any church or any creed or any faith, and its business is the development of a wiser and a better humanity.

V

INTO THE UNKNOWN

We have discussed the problem of free will and found it not very free, and yet I have tried to develop the idea that we have the ordering of our lives in our own hands. Now let us adventure further, and this time into the unknown, with analogy as our guide.

We have seen how facts are parts of the truth and that we reap confusion if we consider them as substitutes for it. We might postulate a law of arrangement, a law of order, that holds good in regard to the truth and applies also to animate and inanimate things. We see this ordering of the composite parts into their right relation in the formation of a crystal. We need not question now why the molecules join according to a mathematical scale to form a symmetrical body; suffice it for the present to observe that they do. The molecules are individual, but they group themselves into something that is not a molecule: into a crystal. We may compare a crystal to the truth, and the molecules to the facts which constitute it. Until the molecules are in their right order there is no crystal. Until the facts are in their right order there is no truth.

We, as men and women, are composed of innumerable particles of many different kinds. Their good condition and orderly arrangement are necessary to our being. Let us consider, for example, our white blood corpuscles or leucocytes. They work with what almost appears to be intelligence in overcoming disease. They are not simple little things by any means; they are marvelously complex. They respond to a stimulus and go to work, just as we do. Sometimes they are weak, inefficient, and sick; and then we languish or die because they do not do their work. They are mechanical entities, and are subject to physical and chemical laws.

Now, we are mechanical entities and we constitute something greater than ourselves. We group ourselves artificially into nations which a congress has power to change by moving a boundary line from one side of us to the other. We divide humanity into other groups, as into families, because of immediate consanguinity, and into races, based on what appears to be a remoter consanguinity. We divide ourselves again into long-headed and broad-headed classes. The facts upon which these groupings are based do not accord with each other, nor do they tell us much about what humanity means. They are desirable facts and, in a way, it is worth knowing that some of us are of one nation and some of another; some long-headed and some broad; some one thing and others something else; but a new and greater meaning might be applied to us by a master mind, the greater anthropologist who could explain the human family as it has not been explained before.

The news of battles does not tell us what is really happening to us all; and there are problems ahead even graver and more important than who shall win. Is not victory itself a curse to the winner who lacks the character to meet his obligations? Some day, let us hope, a wiser generation will follow that will refuse to accept the wrath and hate that we cherish, and will work diligently to repair the havoc of this war. Then perhaps the greater anthropologist will come.

Collective humanity is, indeed, a strange phenomenon. Constantly destroying itself, it is at war with half of nature and cultivates as richly as it can the other half. It has a marvelous faculty for helping itself, and then, when a part of it has achieved a high order of living and gathered in those things of the earth which it desires, there is usually a great fall, and as the years roll on, the dull, stupid toiler guides his plough over the land that once was Carthage and Nineveh. What is it that makes collective humanity sick? What was the disease of Babylon and of the forgotten city that underlies it? After all the analyses, what was the sickness of Rome? Why did Europe go to sleep for a thousand years, and what was it that killed the intellect of the Saracens? Why did Persia die?

Collective humanity is a thing, a being that grows well and is strong and valiant and that becomes godlike, and then again sickens and becomes foolish, and the spirit of it fades away until slavery under a benign master would be an advantage. Collective humanity as we see it is a great jumble of parts, related, unrelated, and in dire confusion. What is it doing? Not one of us can tell.

Now let us imagine leucocytes to have consciousness and vision, and let us consider a single one of them. Its abode is in the blood of somebody, — of you, let us say; and its life is very exciting for it because it never knows what its path will be. Sometimes it is driven into one of your fingers, again into one of your toes; it may be busy on a little scratch well covered up, or it may suddenly have to do battle with a tetanus bacillus. Ask a leucocyte what it knows of life and it might well answer that it is a continuous problem; it would tell you all sorts of interesting things about your interior — which is its whole world — but it could not tell anything about you. Even so simple a detail as that, for instance, you do not like parsnips, could not occur to this leucocyte, — because you do not eat them, and so it has no experience with parsnips. Really, the leucocytes with consciousness, which I am imagining, are very like us; they are in their world and we are in ours. And we may be very like them: parts of a Great intelligence as much beyond us as we are beyond the leucocytes which form parts of us.

Humanity has always been speculating about this Greater Intelligence, and yet speculation has always been discouraged on the ground that the matter is all settled. This conservatism is what gives us such amazing dicta as the Westminster Shorter Catechism and the Thirty-nine Articles. The usual human concept of the Greater Intelligence is as of one apart from us and appearing in all manifestations of power. It has been proposed that we may come into sight and communication with it after death; and the fear of it, described as the beginning of wisdom, has also been used to make us do strange things in accordance with traditions and myths, older than history.

Even analogy will only help us occasionally here, and otherwise we have nothing to guide us in these vaster regions but the imagination. And yet, if we can imagine some relation between human beings and a possible Greater Intelligence, a relation which does not seem false or impossible, we may be taking steps in advance. If we imagine this and imagine that and then something else, it may be that some day somebody will imagine a working hypothesis which does not seem to offend against the truth.

Now, suppose the working hypothesis should involve the conception of human beings as minute particles of the Greater Intelligence, citing the analogy of the leucocytes or any other swarm of microscopic units. We need not then restrict ourselves to their reactions in the human body. We are different, are differently constructed, and this remarkable quality of consciousness is at all events far greater in the human being than it is, for instance, in a leucocyte. Without doubt it reaches further. Nor need we restrict the Greater Intelligence to our own limitations. We are not conscious of our blood corpuscles, but that is no reason why the Greater Intelligence may not be conscious of us. We know, as we have said, that if our white blood corpuscles are weak, inefficient, or sick, we languish, and that our welfare requires that they be in health. So, if we consider collective humanity and observe that it advances in knowledge, in understanding, in order, and in righteousness, we may then feel that it is well with the Greater Intelligence of which we are a part. But if we live in idleness and waste and hatred and cruelty and malice, and cause misery and degradation, it would seem that we are offending and injuring the Greater Intelligence, the God of all of us. This makes the Greater Intelligence in a way dependent upon us, so that it loses health and welfare and power when we undermine the health and welfare of one another.

Sometime when we know more than we do now, there may be available a working hypothesis along these lines and in accord with familiar facts. It is interesting to speculate upon what the results may be. Hebrew poetry has given us a tradition and a conception of a deity apart from ourselves and pregnant with the greatest conceivable measure of power. The Christian, Jewish, and Mohammedan peoples worship a kinetic divinity that rules the stars and the uttermost heavens, the nebulæ as well as the sun and its planets, including the earth. The thought of any other Greater Intelligence is condemned. Beginning with a tribal deity inspired by selfishness,lust, and wrath, humanity has magnified its conception of its god until it has driven him from the earth and projected him through the ether into a million other worlds. It may be that we shall be guided back again to a god of all men and women, exercising vast powers of the spirit when in health and when its particles are doing their work as they should, but losing power to lead or guide if mankind is wayward and corrupt.