ENVIRONMENT.
"When I talked with an ardent missionary and
pointed out to him that his creed found no support in my experience, he
replied: `It is not so in your experience, but is so in the other world.' I
answer: `Other world! There is no other world. God is one and omnipresent; here
or nowhere is the whole fact.' "
EMERSON.
" Ye are complete in Him."--Paul.
"Whatever amount of power an organism expends in
any shape is the correlate and equivalent of a power that was taken into it
from without."--Herbert Spencer.
STUDENTS of Biography will observe that in all
well written Lives attention is concentrated for the first few chapters upon
two points. We are first introduced to the family to which the subject of
memoir belonged. The grandparents, or even the more remote ancestors, are
briefly sketched and their chief characteristics brought prominently into view.
Then the parents themselves are photographed in detail. Their appearance and
physique, their character, their disposition, their mental qualities, are set
before us in a critical analysis. And finally we are asked to observe how much
the father and the mother respectively have transmitted of their peculiar
nature to their offspring. How faithfully the ancestral lines have met in the
latest product, how mysteriously the joint characteristics of body and mind
have blended, and how unexpected yet how entirely natural a recombination is
the result--these points are elaborated with cumulative effect until we realize
at last how little we are dealing with an independent unit, how much with a
survival and reorganization of what seemed buried in the grave.
In the second place, we are invited to consider
more external influences--schools and schoolmasters, neighbours, home,
pecuniary circumstances, scenery, and, by-and-by, the religious and political
atmosphere of the time. These also we are assured have played their part in
making the individual what he is. We can estimate these early influences in any
particular case with but small imagination if we fail to see how powerfully
they also have moulded mind and character, and in what subtle ways they have
determined the course of the future life.
This twofold relation of the individual, first,
to his parents, and second, to his circumstances, is not peculiar to human
beings. These two factors are responsible for making all living organisms what
they are. When a naturalist attempts to unfold the life-history of any animal,
he proceeds precisely on these same lines. Biography is really a branch of
Natural History; and the biographer, who discusses his hero as the resultant of
these two tendencies, follows the scientific method as rigidly as Mr. Darwin in
studying "Animals and Plants under Domestication."
Mr. Darwin, following Weismann, long ago pointed
out that there are two main factors in all Evolution--the nature of the
organism and the nature of the conditions. We have chosen our illustration from
the highest or human species in order to define the meaning of these factors in
the clearest way; but it must be remembered that the development of man under
these directive influences is essentially the same as that of any other
organism in the hands of Nature. We are dealing therefore with universal Law.
It will still further serve to complete the conception of the general principle
if we now substitute for the casual phrases by which the factors have been
described the more accurate terminology of Science. Thus what Biography
describes as parental influences, Biology would speak of as Heredity; and all
that is involved in the second factor--the action of external circumstances and
surroundings--the naturalist would include under the single term Environment.
These two, Heredity and Environment, are the master-influences of the organic
world. These have made all of us what we are. These forces are still
ceaselessly playing upon all our lives. And he who truly understands these
influences; he who has decided how much to allow to each: he who can regulate
new forces as they arise, or adjust them to the old, so directing them as at
one moment to make them co-operate, at another to counteract one another,
understands the rationale of personal development. To seize continuously the
opportunity of more and more perfect adjustment to better and higher
conditions, to balance some inward evil with some purer influence acting from
without, in a word to make our Environment at the same time that it is making
us,--these are the secrets of a well-ordered and successful life.
In the spiritual world, also, the subtle
influences which form and transform the soul are Heredity and Environment. And
here especially where all is invisible, where much that we feel to be real is
yet so ill-defined, it becomes of vital practical moment to clarify the
atmosphere as far as possible with conceptions borrowed from the natural life.
Few thinkers are less understood than the conditions of the spiritual life. The
distressing incompetence of which most of us are conscious in trying to work
out our spiritual experience is due perhaps less to the diseased will which we
commonly blame for it than to imperfect knowledge of the right conditions. It
does not occur to us how natural the spiritual is. We still strive for some
strange transcendent thing; we seek to promote life by methods as unnatural as
they prove unsuccessful; and only the utter incomprehensibility of the whole
region prevents us seeing fully--what we already half suspect--how completely
we are missing the road. Living in the spiritual world, nevertheless, is just
as simple as living in the natural world; and it is the same kind of
simplicity. It is the same kind of simplicity for it is the same kind of
world--there are not two kinds of worlds. The conditions of life in the one are
the conditions of life in the other. And till these conditions are sensibly
grasped, as the conditions of all life, it is impossible that the personal
effort after the highest life should be other than a blind struggle carried on
in fruitless sorrow and humiliation.
Of these two universal factors, Heredity and
Environment, it is unnecessary to balance the relative importance here. The
main influence, unquestionably, must be assigned to the former. In practice,
however, and for an obvious reason, we are chiefly concerned with the latter.
What Heredity has to do for us is determined outside ourselves. No man can
select his own parents. But every man to some extent can choose his own
Environment. His relation to it, however largely determined by Heredity in the
first instance, is always open to alteration. And so great is his control over
Environment and so radical its influence over him, that he can so direct it as
either to undo modify, perpetuate or intensify the earlier hereditary
influences within certain limits. But the aspects of Environment which we have
now to consider do not involve us in questions of such complexity. In what high
and mystical sense, also, Heredity applies to the spiritual organism we need
not just now inquire. In the simpler relations of the more external factor we
shall find a large and fruitful field for study.
The Influence of Environment may be investigated
in two main aspects. First, one might discuss the modern and very interesting
question as to the power of Environment to induce what is known to recent
science as Variation. A change in the surroundings of any animal, it is now
well-known, can so react upon it as to cause it to change. By the attempt,
conscious or unconscious, to adjust itself to the new conditions, a true
physiological change is gradually wrought within the organism. Hunter, for
example, in a classical experiment, so changed the Environment of a sea-gull by
keeping it in captivity that it could only secure a grain diet. The effect was
to modify the stomach of the bird, normally adapted to a fish diet, until in
time it came to resemble in structure the gizzard of an ordinary grain-feeder
such as the pigeon. Holmgren again reversed this experiment by feeding pigeons
for a lengthened period on a meat-diet, with the result that the gizzard became
transformed into the carnivorous stomach. Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace mentions
the case of a Brazilian parrot which changes its colour from green to red or
yellow when fed on the fat of certain fishes. Not only changes of food,
however, but changes of climate and of temperature, changes in surrounding
organisms, in the case of marine animals even changes of pressure, of ocean
currents, of light, and of many other circumstances, are known to exert a
powerful modifying influence upon living organisms. These relations are still
being worked out in many directions, but the influence of Environment as a
prime factor in Variation is now a recognised doctrine of science.[81]
Even the popular mind has been struck with the
curious adaptation of nearly all animals to their habitat, for example
in the matter of colour. The sandy hue of the sole and flounder, the white of
the polar bear with its suggestion of Arctic snows, the stripes of the Bengal
tiger--as if the actual reeds of its native jungle had nature-printed
themselves on its hide;--these, and a hundred others which will occur to every
one, are marked instances of adaptation to Environment induced, by Natural
Selection or otherwise, for the purpose, obviously in these cases at least, of
protection.
To continue the investigation of the modifying
action of Environment into the moral and spiritual spheres, would be to open a
fascinating and suggestive inquiry. One might show how the moral man is acted
upon and changed continuously by the influences, secret and open, of his
surroundings, by the tone of society, by the company he keeps, by his
occupation, by the books he reads, by Nature, by all, in short, that
constitutes the habitual atmosphere of his thoughts and the little world of his
daily choice. Or one might go deeper still and prove how the spiritual life
also is modified from outside sources-- its health or disease, its growth or
decay, all its changes for better or for worse being determined by the varying
and successive circumstances in which the religious habits are cultivated. But
we must rather transfer our attention to a second aspect of environment, not
perhaps so fascinating but yet more important.
So much of the modern discussion of Environment
revolves round the mere question of Variation that one is apt to overlook a
previous question. Environment as a factor in life is not exhausted when we
have realized its modifying influence. Its significance is scarcely touched.
The great function of Environment is not to modify but to sustain. In
sustaining life, it is true, it modifies. But the latter influence is
incidental, the former essential. Our Environment is that in which we live and
move and have our being. Without it we should neither live nor move nor have
any being. In the organism lies the principle of life; in the Environment are
the conditions of life. Without the fulfilment of these conditions, which are
wholly supplied by Environment, there can be no life. An organism in itself is
but a part; Nature is its complement. Alone, cut off from its surroundings, it
is not. Alone, cut off from my surroundings, I am not--physically I am not. I
am, only as I am sustained. I continue only as I receive. My Environment may
modify me, but it has first to keep me. And all the time its secret
transforming power is indirectly moulding body and mind it is directly active
in the more open task of ministering to my myriad wants and from hour to hour
sustaining life itself.
To understand the sustaining influence of
Environment in the animal world, one has only to recall what the biologist
terms the extrinsic or subsidiary conditions of vitality. Every living thing
normally requires for its development an Environment containing air, light,
heat, and water. In addition to these, if vitality is to be prolonged for any
length of time, and if it is to be accompanied with growth and the expenditure
of energy, there must be a constant supply of food. When we simply remember how
indispensable food is to growth and work, and when we further bear in mind that
the food-supply is solely contributed by the Environment, we shall realize at
once the meaning and the truth of the proposition that without Environment
there can be no life. Seventy per cent. at least of the human body is made of
pure water, the rest of gases and earths. These have all come from Environment.
Through the secret pores of the skin two pounds of water are exhaled daily from
every healthy adult. The supply is kept up by Environment. The Environment is
really an unappropriated part of ourselves. Definite portions are continuously
abstracted from it and added to the organism. And so long as the organism
continues to grow, act, think, speak, work, or perform any other function
demanding a supply of energy, there is a constant, simultaneous, and
proportionate drain upon its surroundings.
This is a truth in the physical, and therefore in
the spiritual, world of so great importance that we shall not mis-spend time if
we follow it, for further confirmation, into another department of nature. Its
significance in Biology is self-evident; let us appeal to Chemistry.
When a piece of coal is thrown on the fire, we
say that it will radiate into the room a certain quantity of heat. This heat,
in the popular conception, is supposed to reside in the coal and to be set free
during the process of combustion. In reality, however, the heat energy is only
in part contained in the coal. It is contained just as truly in the coal's
Environment--that is to say, in the oxygen of the air. The atoms of carbon
which compose the coal have a powerful affinity for the oxygen of the air.
Whenever they are made to approach within a certain distance of one another, by
the initial application of heat, they rush together with inconceivable
velocity. The heat which appears at this moment, comes neither from the carbon
alone, nor from the oxygen alone. These two substances are really inconsumable,
and continue to exist, after they meet in a combined form, as carbonic acid
gas. The heat is due to the energy developed by the chemical embrace, the
precipitate rushing together of the molecules of carbon and the molecules of
oxygen. It comes, therefore, partly from the coal and partly from the
Environment. Coal alone never could produce heat, neither alone could
Environment. The two are mutually dependent. And although in nearly all the
arts we credit everything to the substance which we can weigh and handle, it is
certain that in most cases the larger debt is due to an invisible
Environment.
This is one of those great commonplaces which
slip out of general reckoning by reason of their very largeness and simplicity.
How profound, nevertheless, are the issues which hang on this elementary truth,
we shall discover immediately. Nothing in this age is more needed in every
department of knowledge than the rejuvenescence of the commonplace. In the
spiritual world especially, he will be wise who courts acquaintance with the
most ordinary and transparent facts of Nature; and in laying the foundations
for a religious life he will make no unworthy beginning who carries with him an
impressive sense of so obvious a truth as that without Environment there can be
no life.
For what does this amount to in the spiritual
world? Is it not merely the scientific re-statement of the reiterated aphorism
of Christ, "Without Me ye can do nothing"? There is in the spiritual organism a
principle of life; but that is not self-existent. It requires a second factor,
a something in which to live and move and have its being, an Environment.
Without this it cannot live or move or have any being. Without Environment the
soul is as the carbon without the oxygen, as the fish without the water, as the
animal frame without the extrinsic conditions of vitality.
And what is the spiritual Environment? It is God.
Without this, therefore, there is no life, no thought, no energy,
nothing--"without Me ye can do nothing."
The cardinal error in the religious life is to
attempt to live without an Environment. Spiritual experience occupies itself,
not too much, but too exclusively, with one factor--the soul. We delight in
dissecting this much tortured faculty, from time to time, in search of a
certain something which we call our faith--forgetting that faith is but an
attitude, an empty hand for grasping an environing Presence. And when we feel
the need of a power by which to overcome the world, how often do we not seek to
generate it within ourselves by some forced process, some fresh girding of the
will, some strained activity which only leaves the soul in further exhaustion?
To examine ourselves is good; but useless unless we also examine Environment.
To bewail our weakness is right, but not remedial. The cause must be
investigated as well as the result. And yet, because we never see the other
half of the problem, our failures even fail to instruct us. After each new
collapse we begin our life anew, but on the old conditions; and the attempt
ends as usual in the repetition--in the circumstances the inevitable
repetition--of the old disaster. Not that at times we do not obtain glimpses of
the true state of the case. After seasons of much discouragement, with the sore
sense upon us of our abject feebleness, we do confer with ourselves, insisting
for the thousandth time, "My soul, wait thou only upon God." But, the lesson is
soon forgotten. The strength supplied we speedily credit to our own
achievement; and even the temporary success is mistaken for a symptom of
improved inward vitality. Once more we become self-existent. Once more we go on
living without an Environment. And once more, after days of wasting without
repairing, of spending without replenishing, we begin to perish with hunger,
only returning to God again, as a last resort, when we have reached starvation
point.
Now why do we do this? Why do we seek to breathe
without an atmosphere, to drink without a well? Why this unscientific attempt
to sustain life for weeks at a time without an Environment? It is because we
have never truly seen the necessity for an Environment. We have not been
working with a principle. We are told to "wait only upon God," but we do not
know why. It has never been as clear to us that without God the soul will die
as that without food the body will perish. In short, we have never comprehended
the doctrine of the Persistence of Force. Instead of being content to transform
energy we have tried to create it.
The Law of Nature here is as clear as Science can
make it. In the words of Mr. Herbert Spencer, "It is a corollary from that
primordial truth which, as we have seen, underlies all other truths, that
whatever amount of power an organism expends in any shape is the correlate and
equivalent of a power that was taken into it from without."[82] We are dealing here with a simple question of dynamics.
Whatever energy the soul expends must first be "taken into it from without." We
are not Creators, but creatures; God is our refuge and strength. Communion with
God, therefore, is a scientific necessity; and nothing will more help the
defeated spirit which is struggling in the wreck of its religious life than a
common-sense hold of this plain biological principle that without Environment
he can do nothing. What he wants is not an occasional view, but a principle-- a
basal principle like this, broad as the universe, solid as nature. In the
natural world we act upon this law unconsciously. We absorb heat, breathe air,
draw on Environment all but automatically for meat and drink, for the
nourishment of the senses, for mental stimulus, for all that, penetrating us
from without, can prolong, enrich, and elevate life. But in the spiritual world
we have all this to learn. We are new creatures, and even the bare living has
to be acquired.
Now the great point in learning to live is to
live naturally. As closely as possible we must follow the broad, clear lines of
the natural life. And there are three things especially which it is necessary
for us to keep continually in view. The first is that the organism contains
within itself only one-half of what is essential to life; the second is that
the other half is contained in the Environment; the third, that the condition
of receptivity is simple union between the organism and the Environment.
Translated into the language of religion these
propositions yield, and place on a scientific basis, truths of immense
practical interest. To say, first, that the organism contains within itself
only one-half of what is essential to life, is to repeat the evangelical
confession, so worn and yet so true to universal experience, of the utter
helplessness of man. Who has not come to the conclusion that he is but a part,
a fraction of some larger whole? Who does not miss at every turn of his life an
absent God? That man is but a part, he knows, for there is room in him for
more. That God is the other part, he feels, because at times He satisfies his
need. Who does not tremble often under that sicklier symptom of his
incompleteness, his want of spiritual energy, his helplessness with sin? But
now he understands both-- the void in his life, the powerlessness of his will.
He understands that, like all other energy, spiritual power is contained in
Environment. He finds here at last the true root of all human frailty,
emptiness, nothingness, sin. This is why "without Me ye can do nothing."
Powerlessness is the normal state not only of this but of every organism--of
every organism apart from its Environment.
The entire dependence of the soul upon God is not
an exceptional mystery, nor is man's helplessness an arbitrary and
unprecedented phenomenon. It is the law of all Nature. The spiritual man is not
taxed beyond the natural. He is not purposely handicapped by singular
limitations or unusual incapacities. God has not designedly made the religious
Life as hard as possible. The arrangements for the spiritual life are the same
as for the natural life. When in their hours of unbelief men challenge their
Creator for placing the obstacle of human frailty in the way of their highest
development, their protest is against the order of nature. They object to the
sun for being the source of energy and not the engine, to the carbonic acid
being in the air and not in the plant. They would equip each organism with a
personal atmosphere, each brain with a private store of energy; they would grow
corn in the interior of the body, and make bread by a special apparatus in the
digestive organs. They must, in short, have the creature transformed into a
Creator. The organism must either depend on his environment, or be
self-sufficient. But who will not rather approve the arrangement by which man
in his creatural life may have unbroken access to an Infinite Power? What soul
will seek to remain self-luminous when it knows that "The Lord God is a
Sun"? Who will not willingly exchange his shallow vessel for Christ's
well of living water? Even if the organism, launched into being like a ship
putting out to sea, possessed a full equipment, its little store must soon come
to an end. But in contact with a large and bounteous Environment its supply is
limitless. In every direction its resources are infinite.
There is a modern school which protests against
the doctrine of man's inability as the heartless fiction of a past theology.
While some forms of that dogma, to any one who knows man, are incapable of
defence, there are others which, to any one who knows Nature, are incapable of
denial. Those who oppose it, in their jealousy for humanity, credit the
organism with the properties of Environment. All true theology, on the other
hand, has remained loyal to at least the root-idea in this truth. The New
Testament is nowhere more impressive than where it insists on the fact of man's
dependence. In its view the first step in religion is for man to feel his
helplessness. Christ's first beatitude is to the poor in spirit. The condition
of entrance into the spiritual kingdom is to possess the child-spirit--that
state of mind combining at once the profoundest helplessness with the most
artless feeling of dependence. Substantially the same idea underlies the
countless passages in which Christ affirms that He has not come to call the
righteous, but sinners to repentance. And in that farewell discourse into which
the Great Teacher poured the most burning convictions of His life, He gives to
this doctrine an ever increasing emphasis. No words could be more solemn or
arresting than the sentence in the last great allegory devoted to this theme,
"As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself except it abide in the vine, no more
can ye except ye abide in Me." The word here, it will be observed again, is
cannot. It is the imperative of natural law. Fruit-bearing without
Christ is not an improbability, but an impossibility. As well expect the
natural fruit to flourish without air and heat, without soil and sunshine. How
thoroughly also Paul grasped this truth is apparent from a hundred pregnant
passages in which he echoes his Master's teaching. To him life was hid with
Christ in God. And that he embraced this not as a theory but as an experimental
truth we gather from his constant confession, " When I am weak, then am I
strong."
This leads by a natural transition to the second
of the three points we are seeking to illustrate. We have seen that the
organism contains within itself only one half of what is essential to life. We
have next to observe, as the complement of this, how the second half is
contained in the Environment.
One result of the due apprehension of our
personal helplessness will be that we shall no longer waste our time over the
impossible task of manufacturing energy for ourselves. Our science will bring
to an abrupt end the long series of severe experiments in which we have
indulged in the hope of finding a perpetual motion. And having decided upon
this once for all, our first step in seeking a more satisfactory state of
things must be to find a new source of energy. Following Nature, only one
course is open to us. We must refer to Environment. The natural life owes all
to Environment, so must the spiritual. Now the Environment of the spiritual
life is God. As Nature therefore forms the complement of the natural life, God
is the complement of the spiritual.
The proof of this? That Nature is not more
natural to my body than God is to my soul. Every animal and plant has its own
Environment. And the further one inquires into the relations of the one to the
other, the more one sees the marvellous intricacy and beauty of the
adjustments. These wonderful adaptations of each organism to its
surroundings--of the fish to the water, of the eagle to the air, of the insect
to the forest-bed; and of each part of every organism--the fish's swim-bladder,
the eagle's eye, the insect's breathing tubes--which the old argument from
design brought home to us with such enthusiasm, inspire us still with a sense
of the boundless resource and skill of Nature in perfecting her arrangements
for each single life. Down to the last detail the world is made for what is in
it; and by whatever process things are as they are, all organisms find in
surrounding Nature the ample complement of themselves. Man, too, finds in his
Environment provision for all capacities, scope for the exercise of every
faculty, room for the indulgence of each appetite, a just supply for every
want. So the spiritual man at the apex of the pyramid of life finds in the
vaster range of his Environment a provision, as much higher, it is true, as he
is higher, but as delicately adjusted to his varying needs. And all this is
supplied to him just as the lower organisms are ministered to by the lower
environment, in the same simple ways, in the same constant sequence, as
appropriately and as lavishly. We fail to praise the ceaseless ministry of the
great inanimate world around us only because its kindness is unobtrusive.
Nature is always noiseless. All her greatest gifts are given in secret. And we
forget how truly every good and perfect gift comes from without, and from
above, because no pause in her changeless beneficence teaches us the sad
lessons of deprivation.
It is not a strange thing, then, for the soul to
find its life in God. This is its native air. God as the Environment of the
soul has been from the remotest age the doctrine of all the deepest thinkers in
religion. How profoundly Hebrew poetry is saturated with this high thought will
appear when we try to conceive of it with this left out. True poetry is only
science in another form. And long before it was possible for religion to give
scientific expression to its greatest truths, men of insight uttered themselves
in psalms which could not have been truer to Nature had the most modern light
controlled the inspiration. "As the hart panteth after the water-brooks, so
panteth my soul after Thee, O God." What fine sense of the analogy of the
natural and the spiritual does not underlie these words. As the hart after its
Environment, so man after his; as the water-brooks are fitly designed to meet
the natural wants, so fitly does God implement the spiritual need of man. It
will be noticed that in the Hebrew poets the longing for God never strikes one
as morbid, or unnatural to the men who uttered it. It is as natural to them to
long for God as for the swallow to seek her nest. Throughout all their images
no suspicion rises within us that they are exaggerating. We feel how truly they
are reading themselves, their deepest selves. No false note occurs in all their
aspiration. There is no weariness even in their ceaseless sighing except the
lover's weariness for the absent--if they would fly away, it is only to be at
rest. Men who have no soul can only wonder at this. Men who have a soul, but
with little faith, can only envy it. How joyous a thing it was to the Hebrews
to seek their God! How artlessly they call upon Him to entertain them in His
pavilion, to cover them with His feathers, to hide them in His secret place, to
hold them in the hollow of His hand or stretch around them the everlasting
arms! These men were true children of Nature. As the humming-bird among its own
palm-trees, as the ephemera in the sunshine of a summer evening, so they lived
their joyous lives. And even the full share of the sadder experiences of life
which came to all of them but drove them the further into the Secret Place, and
led them with more consecration to make, as they expressed it, "the Lord their
portion." All that has been said since from Marcus Aurelius to Swedenborg, from
Augustine to Schleiermacher of a besetting God as the final complement of
humanity is but a repetition of the Hebrew poets' faith. And even the New
Testament has nothing higher to offer man than this. The psalmist's "God is our
refuge and strength" is only the earlier form, less defined, less practicable,
but not less noble, of Christ's "Come unto Me, and I will give you rest."
There is a brief phrase of Paul's which defines
the relation with almost scientific accuracy,--"Ye are complete in Him." In
this is summed up the whole of the Bible anthropology--the completeness of man
in God, his incompleteness apart from God.
If it be asked, In what is man incomplete, or, In
what does God complete him? the question is a wide one. But it may serve to
show at least the direction in which the Divine Environment forms the
complement of human life if we ask ourselves once more what it is in life that
needs complementing. And to this question we receive the significant answer
that it is in the higher departments alone, or mainly, that the incompleteness
of our life appears. The lower departments of Nature are already complete
enough. The world itself is about as good a world as might be. It has been long
in the making, its furniture is all in, its laws are in perfect working order;
and although wise men at various times have suggested improvements, there is on
the whole a tolerably unanimous vote of confidence in things as they exist. The
Divine Environment has little more to do for this planet so far as we can see,
and so far as the existing generation is concerned. Then the lower organic life
of the world is also so far complete. God, through Evolution or otherwise, may
still have finishing touches to add here and there, but already it is "all very
good." It is difficult to conceive anything better of its kind than a lily or a
cedar, an ant or an ant-eater. These organisms, so far as we can judge, lack
nothing. It might be said of them, "they are complete in Nature." Of man also,
of man the animal, it may be affirmed that his Environment satisfies him. He
has food and drink, and good food and good drink. And there is in him no purely
animal want which is not really provided for, and that apparently in the
happiest possible way
But the moment we pass beyond the mere animal
life we begin to come upon an incompleteness. The symptoms at first are slight,
and betray themselves only by an unexplained restlessness or a dull sense of
want. Then the feverishness increases, becomes more defined, and passes slowly
into abiding pain. To some come darker moments when the unrest deepens into a
mental agony of which all the other woes of earth are mockeries--moments when
the forsaken soul can only cry in terror for the Living God. Up to a point the
natural Environment supplies man's wants, beyond that it only derides him. How
much in man lies beyond that point? Very much--almost all, all that makes man
man. The first suspicion of the terrible truth--so for the time let us call
it--wakens with the dawn of the intellectual life. It is a solemn moment when
the slow-moving mind reaches at length the verge of its mental horizon, and,
looking over, sees nothing more. Its straining makes the abyss but more
profound. Its cry comes back without an echo. Where is the Environment to
complete this rational soul? Men either find one,--One--or spend the
rest of their days in trying to shut their eyes. The alternatives of the
intellectual life are Christianity or Agnosticism. The Agnostic is right when
he trumpets his incompleteness. He who is not complete in Him must be for ever
incomplete. Still more grave becomes man's case when he begins further to
explore his moral and social nature. The problems of the heart and conscience
are infinitely more perplexing than those of the intellect. Has love no future?
Has right no triumph? Is the unfinished self to remain unfinished? Again, the
alternatives are two, Christianity or Pessimism. But when we ascend the further
height of the religious nature, the crisis comes. There, without Environment,
the darkness is unutterable. So maddening now becomes the mystery that men are
compelled to construct an Environment for themselves. No Environment here is
unthinkable. An altar of some sort men must have--God, or Nature, or Law. But
the anguish of Atheism is only a negative proof of man's incompleteness. A
witness more overwhelming is the prayer of the Christian. What a very strange
thing, is it not, for man to pray? It is the symbol at once of his littleness
and of his greatness. Here the sense of imperfection, controlled and silenced
in the narrower reaches of his being, becomes audible. Now he must utter
himself. The sense of need is so real, and the sense of Environment, that he
calls out to it, addressing it articulately, and imploring it to satisfy his
need. Surely there is nothing more touching in Nature than this? Man could
never so expose himself, so break through all constraint, except from a dire
necessity. It is the suddenness and unpremeditatedness of Prayer that gives it
a unique value as an apologetic.
Man has three questions to put to his
Environment, three symbols of his incompleteness. They come from three
different centres of his being. The first is the question of the intellect,
What is Truth? The natural Environment answers, "Increase of Knowledge
increaseth Sorrow," and "much study is a Weariness." Christ replies, "Learn of
Me, and ye shall find Rest." Contrast the world's word "Weariness" with
Christ's word "Rest." No other teacher since the world began has ever
associated "learn " with "Rest." Learn of me, says the philosopher, and you
shall find Restlessness. Learn of Me, says Christ, and ye shall find Rest.
Thought, which the godless man has cursed, that eternally starved yet ever
living spectre, finds at last its imperishable glory; Thought is complete in
Him. The second question is sent up from the moral nature, Who will show us any
good? And again we have a contrast: the world's verdict, "There is none that
doeth good, no, not one;" and Christ's, "There is none good but God only." And,
finally, there is the lonely cry of the spirit, most pathetic and most deep of
all, Where is he whom my soul seeketh? And the yearning is met as before, "I
looked on my right hand, and beheld, but there was no man that would know me;
refuge failed me; no man cared for my soul. I cried unto Thee, O Lord: I said,
Thou art my refuge and my portion in the land of the living."[83]
Are these the directions in which men in these
days are seeking to complete their lives? The completion of Life is just now a
supreme question. It is important to observe how it is being answered. If we
ask Science or Philosophy they will refer us to Evolution. The struggle for
Life, they assure us, is steadily eliminating imperfect forms, and as the
fittest continue to survive we shall have a gradual perfecting of being. That
is to say, that completeness is to be sought for in the organism--we are to be
complete in Nature and in ourselves. To Evolution, certainly, all men will look
for a further perfecting of Life. But it must be an Evolution which includes
the factors. Civilization, it may be said, will deal with the second factor. It
will improve the Environment step by step as it improves the organism, or the
organism as it improves the Environment. This is well, and it will perfect Life
up to a point. But beyond that it cannot carry us. As the possibilities of the
natural Life become more defined, its impossibilities will become the more
appalling. The most perfect civilization would leave the best part of us still
incomplete. Men will have to give up the experiment of attempting to live in
half an Environment. Half an Environment will give but half a Life. Half an
Environment? He whose correspondences are with this world alone has only a
thousandth part, a fraction, the mere rim and shade of an Environment, and only
the fraction of a Life. How long will it take Science to believe its own creed,
that the material universe we see around us is only a fragment of the universe
we do not see? The very retention of the phrase "Material Universe," we are
told, is the confession of our unbelief and ignorance; since "matter is the
less important half of the material of the physical universe."[84]
The thing to be aimed at is not an organism
self-contained and self-sufficient, however high in the scale of being, but an
organism complete in the whole Environment. It is open to any one to aim at a
self-sufficient Life, but he will find no encouragement in Nature. The Life of
the body may complete itself in the physical world; that is its legitimate
Environment. The Life of the senses, high and low, may perfect itself in
Nature. Even the Life of thought may find a large complement in surrounding
things. But the higher thought, and the conscience, and the religious Life, can
only perfect themselves in God. To make the influence of Environment stop with
the natural world is to doom the spiritual nature to death. For the soul, like
the body, can never perfect itself in isolation. The law for both is to be
complete in the appropriate Environment. And the perfection to be sought in the
spiritual world is a perfection of relation, a perfect adjustment of that which
is becoming perfect to that which is perfect.
The third problem, now simplified to a point,
finally presents itself. Where do organism and Environment meet? How does that
which is becoming perfect avail itself of its perfecting Environment? And the
answer is, just as in Nature. The condition is simple receptivity. And yet this
is perhaps the least simple of all conditions. It is so simple that we will not
act upon it. But there is no other condition. Christ has condensed the whole
truth into one memorable sentence, "As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself
except it abide in the vine, no more can ye except ye abide in Me." And on the
positive side, "He that abideth in Me the same bringeth forth much fruit."
[81] Vide Karl Semper's "The Natural
Conditions of Existence as they affect Animal Life;" Wallace's "Tropical
Nature;" Weismann's "Studies in the Theory of Descent; "Darwin's "Animals and
Plants under Domestication."
[82] "Principles of Biology," p 57.
[83] Ps. cxlii. 4 ,5.
[84] The "Unseen Umverse," 6th Ed., p. 100.
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