48
THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
uncouth part of his philosophy, but only to illustrate the character-
istic of human nature which we are considering, by an example
so classical in its exaggeration. The sentiment of reality can indeed
attach itself so strongly to our object of belief that our whole life
is polarized through and through, so to speak, by its sense of the
existence of the thing believed in, and yet that thing, for purpose
of definite description, can hardly be said to be present to our
mind at all. It is as if a bar of iron, without touch or sight, with no
representative faculty whatever, might nevertheless be strongly
endowed with an inner capacity for magnetic feeling; and as if,
through the various arousals of its magnetism by magnets coming
and going in its neighborhood, it might be consciously determined
to different attitudes and tendencies. Such a bar of iron could
never give you an outward description of the agencies that had the
power of stirring it so strongly; yet of their presence, and of their
significance for its life, it would be intensely aware through every
fibre of its being.
It is not only the Ideas of pure Reason, as Kant styled them, that
have this power of making us vitally feel presences that we are
impotent articulately to describe. All sorts of higher abstractions
bring with them the same kind of impalpable appeal. Remem-
ber those passages from Emerson which I read at my last lecture.
The whole universe of concrete objects, as we know them, swims,
not only for such a transcendentalist writer, but for all of us, in a
wider and higher universe of abstract ideas, that lend it its sig-
nificance. As time, space, and the ether soak through all things,
so (we feel) do abstract and essential goodness, beauty, strength, sig-
nificance, justice, soak through all things good, strong, significant,
and just.
Such ideas, and others equally abstract, form the background
for all our facts, the fountain-head of all the possibilities we con-
ceive of. They give its “nature,” as we call it, to every special thing.
Everything we know is “what” it is by sharing in the nature of
one of these abstractions. We can never look directly at them, for
they are bodiless and featureless and footless, but we grasp all other
things by their means, and in handling the real world we should
be stricken with helplessness in just so far forth as we might lose
these mental objects, these adjectives and adverbs and predicates
and heads of classification and conception.
THE REALITY OF THE UNSEEN
49
This absolute determinability of our mind by abstractions is one
of the cardinal facts in our human constitution. Polarizing and
magnetizing us as they do, we turn towards them and from them,
we seek them, hold them, hate them, bless them, just as if they
were so many concrete beings. And beings they are, beings as real
in the realm which they inhabit as the changing things of sense are
in the realm of space.
Plato gave so brilliant and impressive a defense of this common
human feeling, that the doctrine of the reality of abstract objects
has been known as the platonic theory of ideas ever since. Abstract
Beauty, for example, is for Plato a perfectly definite individual being,
of which the intellect is aware as of something additional to all the
perishing beauties of the earth. “The true order of going,” he says, in
the often quoted passage in his “Banquet,” “is to use the beauties of
earth as steps along which one mounts upwards for the sake of that
other Beauty, going from one to two, and from two to all fair forms,
and from fair forms to fair actions, and from fair actions to fair
notions, until from fair notions he arrives at the notion of absolute
Beauty, and at last knows what the essence of Beauty is.”
1
In our
last lecture we had a glimpse of the way in which a platonizing
writer like Emerson may treat the abstract divineness of things, the
moral structure of the universe, as a fact worthy of worship. In those
various churches without a God which to-day are spreading through
the world under the name of ethical societies, we have a similar
worship of the abstract divine, the moral law believed in as an
ultimate object. “Science” in many minds is genuinely taking the
place of a religion. Where this is so, the scientist treats the “Laws of
Nature” as objective facts to be revered. A brilliant school of inter-
pretation of Greek mythology would have it that in their origin the
Greek gods were only half-metaphoric personifications of those great
spheres of abstract law and order into which the natural world falls
apart — the sky-sphere, the ocean-sphere, the earth-sphere, and the
like; just as even now we may speak of the smile of the morning,
the kiss of the breeze, or the bite of the cold, without really meaning
that these phenomena of nature actually wear a human face.
2
1
Symposium, Jowett, 1871, i. 527.
2
Example: “Nature is always so interesting, under whatever aspect she shows herself, that
when it rains, I seem to see a beautiful woman weeping. She appears the more beautiful, the
more afflicted she is.” B. de St. Pierre.