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CYCLES OF PERSONAL BELIEF 
 
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 <aL 
 
CYCLES 
 OF PERSONAL BELIEF 
 
 BY 
 
 WALDO EMERSON FORBES 
 
 BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
 
 HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
 1917 
 
h 
 
 COFYRXGHT, I917, BY WALDO BMBRSON FORBBS 
 ALL RIGHTS RBSERVBD 
 
 Published March tqrf 
 
FOREWORD 
 
 A FRESH wind blows out of the dawn. In infancy 
 the world itself is a paradise. But when after- 
 wards we look back upon the auroral splendor of 
 early childhood, we wonder how far to credit our 
 memory. In the freshness of morning that radi- 
 ance reappears now and then. The early light 
 recalls to the heart the condition of original purity 
 from which our consciousness has sprung. The 
 course of the spring is full of fragrance and music, 
 from the time when the crocuses bloom, and the 
 bluebirds begin singing, till the sea-wind comes 
 across the hay-fields gathering the scent of the 
 first opening wild roses. The earth is stored with 
 recollections, but there dwells in these an alien 
 sweetness. Natural objects which gave us our 
 first impressions must have reflected the light of 
 some celestial sphere, as occasionally upon smooth 
 surfaces we see with surprise a far-off view super- 
 imposed upon the outline of the surface itself. 
 
 Within the enchantment of childhood's happi- 
 ness the heart rested in complete confidence. It 
 was a condition of peace which left no trace of 
 death or evil within the horizon, and if the soul 
 could find itself therein once more, its question- 
 ings and wanderings would cease. But even with 
 
 358030 
 
FOREWORD 
 
 the evanescence of its augury, even with all its 
 rarity, the dream feeling which clings to the 
 earliest memories of life is but a hint of what the 
 heart would claim as its natural birthright. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 Part I. Illusion 
 
 3 
 
 I. INTRODUCTORY . . • • 
 
 BELIEF . . • g 
 
 THE WORLD 
 
 Part II. Disillusion 
 
 17 
 
 II. DISILLUSION . • • • 
 
 Part III. Reillusion 
 
 . ... 37 
 
 III. CONSCIOUSNESS 
 
 AXIOMATIC PROPOSITIONS 
 
 THE will: good and evil 
 
 THE will: NECESSITY AND FATE 54 
 
 IV. IDEAS jQ 
 
 TIME -^ 
 
 LAW **.*.. 78 
 
 UNITY \ \ \ , %Z 
 
 SELECTION ..•••••* gg 
 
 V. REILLUSION * ^^^ 
 
 VI. immortality 
 
 Part IV. Conclusion 
 
 125 
 
 VII. CONCLUSION . . • • • 
 
 151 
 
 POSTSCRIPT 
 
CYCLES OF PERSONAL BELIEF 
 
 PART I 
 
 ILLUSION 
 
CYCLES 
 OF PERSONAL BELIEF 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 INTRODUCTORY 
 
 Philosophy Is the yearning for vision, the effort 
 of the soul toward light. But In the quest to which 
 these cravings give rise there are endless perplex- 
 ities. The definitions themselves are wayward 
 and illusive as if instinct with a mischievous spirit 
 of life. The study of truth is not merely a matter 
 of map-making. Especially in logic and meta- 
 physics, the surveying process wearies us. We 
 compile a cold system of diagrams, while living 
 thought is ringing In the world outside. Life has 
 a terrible inevitable forward movement. It goes 
 whether we manage to name It or not; and the life 
 of thought moves with the rest. The writer cannot 
 afford to crowd truth Into barren formulas. It can 
 never be understood by analysis. Moreover, the 
 corpses of thought are apt to be repulsive. How- 
 ever valuable the results of mental anatomical 
 study may be, they are trivial beside the living 
 truth. It is better to live among crude sensations 
 than to study a lifeless philosophy. The vision of 
 ideas banishes the thought of definitions. 
 
CYCLES OF PERSONAL BELIEF 
 
 All the genius, all the knowledge, all the art in 
 the world has but sketched fragments of the 
 mighty portrait of truth. However clear certain 
 outlines may stand forth, they are but partial, 
 giving a hint of something beyond; and all for- 
 mulas and definitions are less than the idea they 
 seek to express. 
 
 For this reason I am not attempting in the fol- 
 lowing chapters to outline a systematic philos- 
 ophy, but rather to sketch in simple terms cer- 
 tain significant aspects in the development of 
 human thought, and to make a confession of faith 
 which shall as nearly as possible conform to the 
 demands of my own reason. 
 
 BELIEF 
 
 Man wakes from the sleep of infancy into a 
 condition of belief, and presently, finding a great 
 many transformations going on in and around 
 himself, he finds an imperative need of investi- 
 gating the beliefs which have formed the specific 
 components of the believing state of mind. This 
 spirit of investigation is nothing else than the 
 thirst for truth. All the substance or potency 
 which a belief can have must be given to it by its 
 truth, so that a false belief has lost its savor as 
 soon as we are really convinced that it is false. 
 
 Now belief is a sort of matrix from which our 
 activities arise. It is the substance of the child's 
 happy confidence in his first impressions. It is 
 this which gives the world its seeming stability. 
 
BELIEF 
 
 Instinctively man believes in the reality of the 
 immediate facts and forms with which he is deal- 
 ing, and perhaps he clings the more tenaciously 
 to this habit the less ground he has for doing so. 
 A child wonders continually. He is half prepared 
 to see the world dissolve, but a man who has 
 already seen much of it dissolve, doggedly sticks 
 to what he has left. However dreamlike and illu- 
 sory phenomena may prove, the solid substance 
 of the world before us, here and now, is real, and 
 in its reality we believe. 
 
 Youth is the period of belief, and as the hopes 
 and infatuations of youth interest us most, so it 
 is the fresh, untamed innocence and force of their 
 illusions which give primitive peoples so much 
 charm. But as we look upon these believers acting 
 out their lives in good faith, as we perceive that 
 in most cases the strength of a man's belief 
 measures the extent of his activity^ we may well 
 pause in wonder at the potency of belief as such. 
 It is strange to see a man fervently acting his part 
 in the world, while his scientific neighbor sees at a 
 glance how insubstantial are his realities, how com- 
 plete his delusion; as if a child looked upon the 
 painted scenery of the stage and thought to climb 
 its trees or smell its roses. Crude superstitions or 
 specious tenets alike command us. I suppose 
 Machiavelli believed in the efficiency, wisdom, 
 and even right of his doctrines. Do not even the 
 German people believe whatever the Kaiser and 
 his ministers tell them.'* History abounds with 
 
CYCLES OF PERSONAL BELIEF 
 
 wars carried on in behalf of cults and doctrines 
 which soon proved themselves wrong. 
 
 It is not easy to understand the rights and 
 powers of belief. Santa Claus retreated early from 
 our lives. We assume, perhaps, that when the 
 child discovers the parents by the chimney late 
 at night the fiction evaporates into nothing. But 
 have we really solved the problem of the elfish 
 power over the child's imagination .f* Somehow a 
 spirit dwelt in the chimney in those first Christ- 
 mas mornings. You may call him subjective if 
 you like, but to what avail? Thereby the mystery 
 \ only becomes the greater, for how could a child's 
 ^mind create such a being .^ The grown-ups were 
 but unwitting agents, for they understand no 
 longer the quality of that influence and person- 
 ality. It is the child who gives or discovers in 
 Santa Claus his character and actuality. 
 
 If an atheist maintains that there is no God, 
 so long as a man is religious it will have no more 
 effect upon him than if some one tells us, when 
 we are warming our hands at a good fire, that 
 there is no such thing as fire, or, when we are 
 made happy by a kindness, that there is no such 
 thing as kindness. Thus in every belief, whether 
 N it appears to be rooted in nature, or only in itself, 
 we are dealing with an actuality. 
 
 Europe bears the weight of countless churches, 
 a testimony to this, for why, in a world so strictly 
 governed by biological and economic laws, why, 
 in the struggle for existence, did the impoverished 
 
 6 
 
BELIEF 
 
 Catholic communities spend their substance upon 
 \ such unproductive work as building vast cathe- 
 drals? Some people like to account for the reli- 
 gious impulse by explaining that it is good for 
 people to believe in a God whether there is one or 
 not. A clear-headed child would repudiate this, 
 would instinctively rebel against the flippancy 
 which supposes God a figment of the imagination, 
 created by man for the sake of the glow of belief. 
 Neither religious belief, nor any constructive 
 state of mind has such shallow foundations, nor 
 can they be fostered by any such folly. Wherever 
 belief has vitality there is a tap-root sucking at 
 truth itself; and however much our beliefs are 
 mixed up with follies, errors, and confusions, they 
 derive nourishment from reality. And if the belief 
 seems to have no real foundation whatever, we 
 must still be careful not to dismiss it hastily, for 
 like an air plant it may subsist upon an invisible 
 but real aliment. We may well be cautious in 
 challenging the springs of action of persons whom 
 we do not understand. There is no more occasion 
 to quarrel with the great extent of religious forms 
 and usages than with the expanses of lichens, 
 mos6es, and grass which cover the earth. 
 
 Thought, however, can never rest contented 
 with belief alone. We are continually striving to 
 pass that borderland between belief and knowl- 
 edge where most of our intellectual life is spent. 
 yThe thirst for truth can never be satisfied while 
 error of any sort is suspected. The quest carries 
 
CYCLES OF PERSONAL BELIEF 
 
 us far beyond the pleasant havens of faith. Doubt 
 ^ and criticism attack everything. They must at 
 least have a hearing. If to winnow out the illusory 
 element of facts appears a superhuman task, if 
 almost all our results remain within the realm of 
 greater or less probability, if the positive principles 
 of life are at best but dimly appreciated, still we 
 cherish the knowledge of a simple, heavenly light 
 which leads us toward divine and absolute truth. 
 
 THE WORLD 
 
 The first product of belief is the world; that is, 
 the world as we perceive it. This would seem to 
 arise naturally enough from our first impressions, 
 and our interpretations of them. We believe in a 
 consistent whole, and at first we do not trouble 
 ourselves with the question of how much our im- 
 pressions are necessitated from without, and how 
 far they are colored or modified from within. Yet 
 how strangely compounded is even the familiar 
 ground of everyday civilized life. Education and 
 culture soon teach us that much of our established 
 views upon the nature of the world are of com- 
 paratively recent date. An intelligent child while 
 growing up absorbs without knowing it the Coper- 
 nican astronomy, the atomic theory, the theory of 
 the conservation of energy, the law of gravity, 
 the law of evolution, as well as countless earlier 
 explanations which rendered the world more in- 
 telligible. It is an intricate study to ascertain the 
 origin of our beliefs — to show, besides our debt 
 
 a 
 
THE WORLD 
 
 to European civilized thought, what we owe to 
 the Greeks, what to the Hebrews, and what to 
 the Norsemen. How the world would appear were 
 these and similar elements in our belief eliminated 
 we could not tell; but the simpler states of mind 
 can be partly recalled from childish experiences. 
 
 The world at first sight appears to be a fixed, 
 unchanging reality, or rather a reality with certain 
 definite methods of change constantly recurring. 
 Our early simple point of view takes for granted 
 the stability of facts. We do not expect to find 
 mystery and magic. If there are fairies they are 
 supernatural, or one might say, they are read 
 between the lines, and there is nothing strange in 
 this. They do not upset nature by their presence. 
 If they are not expected, neither do they occasion 
 surprise. That the world, the geologic world, pro- 
 duced us, is not a troublesome proposition. There 
 is nature more substantial than we. We die; it 
 does not. We are subject to its agencies, while it, 
 except to a trifling extent is uninfluenced by our- 
 selves. Our sensations are caused by the elements 
 external to ourselves. We are simply adapted to 
 receive impressions from what is going on outside 
 of us anyway, regardless of our perception of it. 
 
 In early life what innocent, irresponsible crea- 
 tures we are, humble, unassuming dependencies 
 upon the back of a more or less friendly round 
 animal. What a joyous spirit reigns, where every- 
 thing is possible, everything unquestioned. Na- 
 ture is resonant and echoing, thronged with per- 
 
CYCLES OF PERSONAL BELIEF 
 
 sonalities. The vestiges of mythology with hints 
 of depth and beauty are with us still. Our own 
 childish folklore and mythology tell us how it was 
 with primitive peoples. It must come about nat- 
 urally and inevitably that man imagines he de- 
 tects the presence of unseen powers behind nat- 
 ural phenomena, and a conscious active will 
 appears to direct some at least of the natural 
 events. A stricter use of the intellect gradually 
 dispels the mists which must at all times float in 
 the minds of primitive people. Outlines thought 
 to be supernatural and shifting simply because 
 these mists envelop them, now partially, and 
 again completely, appear at last, when the mists 
 have cleared away, sharply defined, and continu- 
 ous with the foreground. An explanation clear 
 and explicit accounts for the behavior of a comet, 
 for instance, and it is a portent no longer. 
 
 When the methods by which the processes of 
 nature take place are understood, and it is sug- 
 gested that tide, wind, cloud, and rain proceed 
 mechanically, the belief in a conscious will in 
 nature becomes correspondingly harder. The 
 view, once hazy and changeable, relatively dream- 
 like, fragmentary, subject to inconsequent and 
 rapid shifting, becomes orderly and predictable. 
 What need of a will or intelligence to explain the 
 existence of the facts ? 
 
 Presently, however, we realize that the clear- 
 ness which has been introduced into nature, is the 
 work of the mind; and then, with the realization 
 
 10 
 
THE WORLD 
 
 of the power of the mind, comes the question, 
 Since the mind has drawn the portrait, what else 
 can there be besides the mind ? Is nature in itself 
 simply a blank sheet on which thought has 
 sketched a world? With the emphasis laid thus 
 on mind the thinking process tends to assert itself 
 to an extreme, until one day the thinker wonders 
 if he is alone in the universe, his surroundings, 
 friends, family, and all, his own dream. There 
 has never been any denial of this solipsism except 
 by playing out the dream for what it is worth. 
 If in this mood, the dreamer punches one of the 
 dream figures on the nose, metaphysical specula- 
 tion will have to be suspended, and the laws ac- 
 cording to which these figures appear to act 
 become more interesting than the estimate of the 
 foundation upon which they rest. 
 
 Upon this and similar considerations rests the 
 study of nature. The intellectual world to-day 
 has largely reverted to the condition of believing 
 in the absolute reality of an order external to the 
 mind, of which the mind is the interpreter. The 
 more tyrannous the mind, the more absolute its 
 authority, the more it subdues phenomena, the 
 less conscious it becomes of its own ascendancy. 
 Keen thinkers like Huxley give us a vigorous 
 realistic outline of the world, to a great extent 
 * ignoring how much this is the result of the power 
 of their own assertive intellects. Then like all 
 original thinkers they are followed by a host of 
 bigots — scientific bigots who unlike their mas- 
 
 II 
 
CYCLES OF PERSONAL BELIEF 
 
 ters have failed to perceive the restless infinity 
 beating against the sea walls of form. Industri- 
 ously they have attacked the world and under- 
 taken its description down to the minutest detail. 
 Indeed, observing with what thoroughness the 
 accumulation of knowledge has been carried on 
 we ask, Can or cannot there exist an encyclo- 
 paedic description of the world? Do physics and 
 chemistry embrace just so many known factors 
 already catalogued, and so many unknown fac- 
 tors which will one day be tamed, photographed, 
 and listed? 
 
 But attention alike to the interpreter and to the 
 interpretation shows us how the nature of the 
 world presents insoluble problems to the enquirer. 
 The terms of space present the question of infin- 
 ^ite extent and infinite divisibility. Astronomy is 
 a science of what we can see, but all that it can 
 tell us terminates at inevitable encircling limita- 
 tions. Chemistry can tell us certain practical 
 properties of matter, but of its ultimate constitu- 
 tion, nothing. Time allows us to understand the 
 ways and means of forces up to a certain point; 
 but time if we reflect upon it long unsettles our 
 theories. Infinity permeates everything. 
 
 Reflection only deepens the need for reflection. 
 With the intellect our only interpreter, how faith- 
 ful has it been in its interpretation of this chang- 
 ing nature outside ourselves? Did the intellect 
 construct the whole fabric of our beliefs? Is reli- 
 gion only a matter of personal dogma, and even 
 
 iz 
 
THE WORLD 
 
 the whole world a piece of architectural fiction; 
 religion after all but a prescription to please the 
 dramatic sense, science a more convenient though 
 less entertaining set of dogmas, and life quite 
 nameless and inexplicable, running its own course 
 independent of the two? Is all belief a matter of 
 dogmas taken up out of the nameless flowing 
 essence of the soul, because we feared to trust 
 ourselves unsupported on the waves? 
 
PART II 
 
 DISILLUSION 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 DISILLUSION 
 
 Criticism, Analysis, Scepticism are the work of 
 the Destroyer. The spirit of doubt withers the 
 outward aspect of belief; but it penetrates, chills 
 and transforms the inner nature of the man as 
 well. For the growing boy, when the picture that 
 once was charming has lost its charm, when the 
 mysterious woodshed and cow-barn have been 
 thoroughly explored and all the darkest corners 
 penetrated, when he has climbed the highest hill 
 in the familiar distant landscape, and still more, 
 when for the first time his liking for a friend has 
 cooled, the quality of his belief has changed, a 
 certain innocence and freshness are lost. Doubt 
 comes, like the east wind rifling the beauty of the 
 orchard, as the petals of the apple blossoms fall, 
 and scatters our childish confidence along with 
 our specific beliefs. 
 
 But the Destroyer cannot by any possibility be 
 eliminated or exorcised. He is here together with 
 life, and he must be reckoned with. If the fact of 
 implicit belief was once real, the fact of question- 
 ing that belief is real also. In the quest of truth 
 the analytical process is inevitable. 
 
 Now there are many forms of scepticism, but 
 the action of doubt is alike in the disintegration 
 of any one belief or any group of beliefs. The 
 
 17 
 
CYCLES OF PERSONAL BELIEF 
 
 typical and familiar example is the action of 
 scientific investigation upon religious theory. 
 Science is one thing, scepticism is another, but 
 the sceptic tendency was the first effect of a new 
 impulse toward the enquiry into truth. The main 
 tendency of scientific thought at first induced a 
 great wave of negation in a field where the posi- 
 tive state of mind had ruled before. Again scien- 
 tific thought is one thing, the influence of science, 
 or the layman's view of science, is another. The 
 progress of thought proceeds at difl'erent rates 
 -in difl'erent individuals and difl'erent societies. 
 Scientists also have taken a variety of stands 
 upon fundamental questions. I suppose there are 
 plenty of men to-day still clinging to a crude 
 deterministic philosophy; while on the other 
 hand, there are thinkers of the objective type, 
 who yet have so far modified or abandoned their 
 mechanistic conceptions as to be far beyond what 
 might have been considered scientifically ortho- 
 dox a few years ago. But after all there have 
 always been idealists, there have always been 
 1^ materialists. It is only a question of who has the 
 * floor. We may take certain trends of opinion as 
 . typical of the age. We shall find, then, that the 
 intellectual warfare through which the process of 
 thought has swept us, left the layman in posses- 
 sion of a negative portrait of the world in place 
 of earlier religious beliefs. In respect to these, 
 this portrait typified the condition of disillusion. 
 It was a portrait of a materialistic universe with- 
 
 l8 
 
DISILLUSION 
 
 out spirit, a mechanism determined by exact, un- 
 alterable physical laws. 
 
 Strictly considered, this mechanism left no 
 room for a conscious will which can actuate the 
 motions of the earth and planets. We think and 
 speak rather of the developments by gravity, by 
 centrifugal force, by the principles which are 
 associated with such expressions as the nebular 
 hypothesis. 
 
 Our own world developed in the universal 
 natural process which astronomy has fragmen- 
 tarily portrayed. Enormous numbers of stars or 
 suns, which by their distribution suggest, or at 
 least do not preclude, the probability of an infin- 
 ite number beyond our powers of observation, 
 surround us, all evolving with a temporal history 
 analogous to that of our own sun with its planets, 
 comets, and asteroids. Our earth was thrown from 
 the sun, cooled, and following immutable laws its 
 surface geology brought about conditions favor- 
 able to the dawn of life. Life grew up by an inevit- 
 able process which it could not have done other 
 than follow. A law of variation governed each 
 change, each onward step. A law of inheritance 
 governed the furtherance and preservation of all 
 that was established and fit to survive. A bit of 
 life pushes unconsciously this way, then another 
 way, then a third, till it finds a way in which it 
 can move and grow. This way becomes the way. 
 It is the only way. Life experiments uncon- 
 sciously. All life thus experimenting which hits 
 
 19 
 
CYCLES OF PERSONAL BELIEF 
 
 upon a way that proves advantageous for the 
 preservation of this life is more apt to be pre- 
 served, and that which experiments in less advan- 
 tageous ways is less apt to be preserved. In the 
 long run the more advantageous will supersede 
 the less advantageous. This is how we came here; 
 this also is how our forms of expression, our in- 
 stitutions, our thoughts even, developed. Any 
 ethical doctrine which assumes us to be free 
 agents, with a choice between right and wrong, 
 is merely a story which evolved because it helped 
 us while immature — even though false: for what 
 possible value could a choice have — why talk 
 about good and bad, or the virtue of sacrifice, or 
 any other virtue, if every action, every thought, 
 every so-called act of will is a product of the past.^ 
 
 Every form in the natural order, says this view, 
 must be a product which cannot be other than 
 what it is. The lifeless geologic elements pro- 
 duced at last life. The unconscious vegetative life 
 produced at last a consciousness. Consciousness 
 proved useful to life and came thus to be pre- 
 served. Yet still there was always an unknown 
 term, namely, the motive force which actuated 
 these lawful processes. Again life when it was 
 produced proved to some extent incalculable. The 
 germ, the spark, that which has evolved, that 
 which will continue to evolve, has not been 
 wholly appraised. For convenience it is called 
 vital energy. 
 
 So much of the mechanism has been explained, 
 20 
 
DISILLUSION 
 
 so much of the organic law has been harmonized 
 with inorganic law, that the body has come to 
 seem almost machine-like to the understanding. 
 Some of its component substances have been 
 made in the chemical laboratory. It is all a subtle 
 combination of known elements. The gulf, to be 
 sure, between consciousness and objectiveness is 
 inviolable; but one hope of science has been to 
 attain a complete description of every conscious 
 state in terms of chemistry and physics. Even the 
 sense of conscience is to be expressed by the rela- 
 ^ tive position of atoms in the brain, of their heat, 
 tension, etc., etc. Enthusiasm will be rated and 
 catalogued. 
 
 Man is simply a tree of nerves. All that can be 
 said about intellect, heart, and body is repre- 
 sented in this tree. The higher life, or intellectual 
 sense and feeling, is carried by nerves to which 
 others are subordinate. The brain is a storage- 
 room from which impression-carrying currents 
 can be renewed after the external stimuli have 
 ceased. The care of this tree of nerves is to be 
 studied by learning its composition and reactions, 
 involving thus its relations to the muscles and 
 bones which it controls, and to the external ob- 
 jects by which it preserves itself. Its sensations 
 are found to have arisen for the purpose of its 
 preservation. The inferior nerves, or at any rate 
 the inferior sensations, are arranged to warn of 
 heat or cold which cannot be endured, to feel 
 for that which is desired, to enable all action 
 
 21 
 
CYCLES OF PERSONAL BELIEF 
 
 which will preserve the system or reproduce its 
 kind. 
 
 The pleasures are, roughly speaking, the guide 
 to its benefit. Even though the life it leads has 
 become so complicated that the pleasures often 
 lead to its destruction, pleasure is nevertheless 
 like an oscillating compass needle — a variable 
 from whose pointings we can by reasonable ob- 
 servation and calculation discover what is truly 
 advantageous. 
 
 The nervous energy, by proper care of the tree, 
 can be husbanded or restored. Then too, this 
 same energy seems to be transformable, much as 
 currency is transformable, from copper to silver 
 or gold. The concentrated exertion of the mind is 
 equivalent to large quantities of bodily employ- 
 ment. The energy of the mind is slowly accumu- 
 lated by proper use of the resources of the body. 
 The accounting and balance sheets of our nervous 
 energy are still most difficult for the best physi- 
 cians to audit. In fact a difficulty has been en- 
 countered in finding a unit of value. But when 
 this difficulty is overcome, when the unit of value 
 is found, all life should come under control of 
 the understanding, and every mystery should be 
 explained. 
 
 Or, if we look at life subjectively instead of 
 objectively, we should say it is for the quest of 
 the greatest amount of good sensations that ner- 
 vous energy is active. The perception of pleasing 
 sensations leads the nerves to seek their repeti- 
 
 22 
 
DISILLUSION 
 
 tion, and the continued opportunity of enjoying 
 them. This governs in a measure the direction 
 of the attention. Among the sensations, the at- 
 tention picks and chooses that which will give 
 the greatest pleasure — sensations have evolved 
 something as the forms and habits have evolved, 
 interacting one upon the other, by a process sim- 
 ilar to, if not identical with, natural selection. 
 That which was useful or preservative became 
 pleasant. That was sought and found again and 
 again, and became established. It was a mere 
 incident when circumstances changed, and what 
 had become pleasant was rendered detrimental. 
 
 Energy, however, influenced in this way, was 
 that which lay at the basis of all life, energy 
 obeying immutable physical law — energy run- 
 ning in fatal periods. The tides rise and fall. The 
 moods run in seasons. We are critical or believing 
 according to the distribution and behavior of this 
 energy in the nerves. In a period when we carry 
 a high charge of this electrical-seeming influence 
 we hope and believe. Visions lure us. Belief in 
 the power to control our surroundings arises. This 
 bears fruit for our good, indeed, but fades away 
 as the current is spent, and the more torpid con- 
 ditions prevail. Then we doubt our morning 
 hopes. We realize the cold truth, and perceive 
 that our course is determined by the past from 
 now to eternity. There is no need to say, "Best 
 take what comes"; we must take what comes. 
 
 The social phenomena must be explained upon 
 
CYCLES OF PERSONAL BELIEF 
 
 the same basis. Social virtues are simply the vehi- 
 cle for the expression of collective needs; and the 
 laws which men enact to regulate their conduct 
 and aifairs are simply a necessitated expression, 
 part of the tribal man, as the convolutions of its 
 shell are a part of a snail. 
 
 In this view all beliefs, being determined by 
 physical conditions, would resemble electrical or 
 magnetic phenomena. Wine, ether, disease, and 
 other known chemical or mechanical agencies in- 
 duce emotions of an inappropriate nature, as 
 weeping spells when there is nothing to weep 
 about, effusions of affection when there is no 
 especial occasion for being demonstrative, and 
 the like. So also all states of mind whatsoever 
 fall in the physical series of events, relentlessly 
 determined by external law, and the personal life 
 of the individual becomes a mere shadow per- 
 formance. Belief and emotion wither together 
 and hence the flippancy and cynicism of eras of 
 doubt. You can only regard a belief as baseless 
 which you no longer hold ; and thus also with an 
 emotion, if we suspect it has no cause worthy of 
 its influence upon us, it has already gone. If we 
 do not have some belief in our emotions, they are 
 not such. 
 
 We may have held a fair ideal of living, asso- 
 ciated perhaps with the belief in a kind and per- 
 sonal God watching over us, and ready to stretch 
 out a helping hand if we try to realize our ideal. 
 Such notions must go with the rest of our positive 
 
 24 
 
DISILLUSION 
 
 beliefs. The world is cold and hard and fashion- 
 able. 
 
 It is hard to find anything in the mechanistic 
 universe but cold, exact law, a material or basic 
 substance upon which it works, and a cold, more 
 or less imperfect, reflection of these laws in the 
 human brain. Yet this view of the situation is not 
 conclusive even from an intellectual point of view. 
 
 The methods of life, in the very nature of the 
 case, preclude the possibility of discovering a com- 
 plete correspondence between the subjective men- 
 tal states and the objective history of the brain. 
 I say complete correspondence, because, while it 
 is true that for every thought there may be a 
 change in the brain, those changes do not repre- 
 sent the total content of the thought. They can- 
 not tally with every shade and quality in the 
 thought because these depend upon non-physical 
 elements. The attempt to find such a correspond- 
 ence would be like trying to explain the law of 
 the image which greets the eye as one looks upon 
 a mirror, by a chemical analysis of the mercury on 
 the back. The explanation simply is n't there. 
 One cannot find an explanation of thought by an 
 examination of the brain. You can point out a 
 number of conditions without which there will be 
 no thought, but you can never point to the cause 
 of a particular thought in the structure of the 
 brain. You can, of course, find a book in a library, 
 you can describe its physical position and the 
 
 25 
 
CYCLES OF PERSONAL BELIEF 
 
 dynamics of the shelf which holds it up, but you 
 cannot imagine that book to be in the library for 
 \ any reason disassociated from the meaning of the 
 book itself. 
 
 It would seem, therefore, that the thought in 
 the brain must be, to some extent at least, consid- 
 ered in its own right. There is an apparent dis- 
 continuity in the series of physical causes in 
 which certain phases of mental activity intervene. 
 Now why should the supposition that the inter- 
 vention of non-physical mental elements modifies 
 the physical world offend the sense of propriety 
 of the mechanistic philosopher.? It offends him 
 because of his faith in law; for in reality he too 
 has a faith. He reasons by the analogy of what he 
 finds in the laboratory. Law is his infallible God. 
 
 The man who is sceptical about religion is not 
 so sceptical about the version of the laws which 
 he happens to be studying. But the process of 
 doubt need not stop anywhere. What can any 
 man prove about law beyond the experiments 
 which he has performed himself.'* 
 
 We should probably find upon cross-examina- 
 tion that the most thoroughgoing sceptic uncon- 
 sciously treasures a hidden belief. He has a reser- 
 vation in his doctrine which has not been thor- 
 oughly probed. Moreover, no man is really will- 
 ing to consider his soul a by-product — a sort of 
 aroma from off the surface of facts. If the me- 
 chanical theory were logically carried out, there 
 would be no room for the soul at all, certainly 
 
 26 
 
DISILLUSION 
 
 none for the will; and there could be no validity 
 in the feelings. A spectator cannot feel, if he is 
 not implicated in any way in the plot. On the 
 part of the mechanistic philosopher, disowning his 
 belief in himself is something of an affectation; 
 and there is a large element of faith in his view of 
 a law-abiding material world. 
 
 It is only here and there in some physical crisis 
 that a man doubts everything. Yet each belief he 
 harbors may in its turn be assailed. And as scep- 
 ticism lays hold of us, we feel the urgent need of 
 knowing what, if anything, is solid in life. In the 
 end doubt eats up doubt, but the winnowing of 
 beliefs by analysis and criticism teaches us how 
 uncertain are the foundations of our everyday 
 knowledge, how frail is the structure which sup- 
 ports our most persistent beliefs. 
 
 One may realize how slight is our knowledge of 
 material things by reflecting upon light. Conceive 
 it as a vibration of the aether, then we must have 
 
 ^ a definition of aether, as well as a definition of 
 vibration. If we take the simplest conception of 
 vibration, it is the motion of something back- 
 
 ^ wards and forwards. But until that which vibrates 
 is defined, our definition of vibration must remain 
 incomplete, for we are dealing with two mutually 
 dependent conceptions. To describe a vibrating 
 
 ^object we must have geometry to deal with its 
 shape, and physical chemistry to deal with its 
 inner attributes and external relations. A moving 
 
 27 
 
CYCLES OF PERSONAL BELIEF 
 
 atom, for instance, must be influenced in its 
 X course by its shape, size, and composition, as well 
 as by the nature of the medium in which it moves. 
 But the aether presumably is not made up of a 
 series of objects which could be so described, but 
 is itself the medium in which objects, such as 
 atoms, exist. If the medium itself vibrates, the 
 ^vibrating aether must be conceived as moving in 
 relation to something other than itself, or its 
 motion is meaningless. Moreover, the medium 
 must be defined so as to account for the lapse of 
 time during the passage of light through it. If we 
 imagine it jelly-like or elastic, we are merely call- 
 ing in analogies which may or may not mean 
 anything. 
 
 Finally, if we conceive the waves of light to be 
 a series of changes travelling in a continuous and 
 otherwise uniform medium, we frankly abandon 
 the attempt to describe the medium as such. 
 What lies behind light and the objects by which 
 it is manifested is indescribable, except as we 
 conjecture this or that as a basis for certain 
 observed manifestations. Indeed, each element 
 ^ of each science if we subdivide far enough be- 
 comes a matter of conjecture. 
 
 We perceive certain visible phenomena, and in 
 seeking to find their ultimate nature we come 
 everywhere to some element only to be inter- 
 preted by the mind. We get along fairly well as 
 long as we deal in pure mathematics. But the 
 application of our mathematics is a convenience, 
 
 28 
 
DISILLUSION 
 
 not a necessity. Every mathematic truth when 
 applied to facts becomes only an approximation. 
 Apply the mathematical fact that two plus two 
 equals four, to four objects. It is simply directing 
 the attention toward a portion of nature, signaliz- 
 ing by a convenient thought a part, which is not 
 
 * made up of four objects any more essentially 
 than of billions of objects. The same truth will 
 apply to any four centres of attention. It is con- 
 venient to describe objects in this and that way, 
 but it is not essential. That is to say, looking at 
 objects with a view to determining their consti- 
 
 > tution, there is no necessity for designating them 
 mathematically, or as following any particular law. 
 \ Your law is simply the habit of your mind in de- 
 scribing what you find happening in the universe. 
 Our habits of mind throw us into inevitable 
 dilemmas. Returning to the problem presented 
 by the aether: it is in reality a question as to the 
 nature of space. We must choose between a 
 something which is continuous, or a something 
 made up of units, side by side, but if we choose 
 units we must define in some way what happens 
 when one unit leaves off and another begins; and 
 
 s_ furthermore, we have only driven the cat into 
 the corner, for the space within the extent of the 
 unit is still to be dealt with; and if we reach a unit 
 which has no extent, an infinity of them will fail 
 to describe space at all, for they take up none. 
 If, on the other hand, we choose continuity for the 
 nature of space, it is hard to see that space has 
 
 29 
 
CYCLES OF PERSONAL BELIEF 
 
 any meaning whatever apart from the things 
 which occupy it, for if it is continuous and self- 
 similar, a small amount of it and a large have no 
 essential difference. However, if space is contin- 
 uous and only describable by the objects which 
 occupy it, it implies there is something between 
 the substances which we perceive. Yet how could 
 this something be continuous and still allow 
 bodies to pass through it? 
 
 With such difficulties the quest of knowledge is 
 beset. Matter, or the ideas by which matter is 
 interpreted, alike leave us in perplexity. Ideal 
 beings, universal beings, or spiritual beings, if 
 there be such, cannot avoid similar paradoxes. 
 , What kind of an existence has an ideal, the ideal 
 of universal happiness for instance.'* Since there 
 is plenty of unhappiness known to us, universal 
 happiness cannot now exist; but if it does not 
 exist what do we mean by saying it is our goal.** 
 You may answer that it exists in hope or aspira- 
 tion, which means that it is imaginary. Is it then 
 real or unreal ^ If real, what can reality mean in 
 this sense? If unreal, what good is it? If unreal, 
 what could distinguish it from one wild revel of 
 unholy pleasure lasting forever? Is it not as futile 
 to hope for one as for the other? 
 
 Those things which we know are slight and un- 
 certain; but the attributes which the mind can 
 find for that which we do not know are bewilder- 
 ing, and seem to preclude a reasonable theology. 
 For example, there are the old problems of omni- 
 
 30 
 
DISILLUSION 
 
 potence and omniscience. If there is a conscious- 
 ness greater than the collective consciousness of 
 all animal life, the| consciousness of a power 
 which loves and wills, if it is omnipotent and loves 
 goodness, why is there any evil in the world? 
 Again, if a power is all-knowing and has no limit 
 to its power, it cannot err, because unlimited 
 power cannot do otherwise than choose the best, 
 if it knows what the best is. But we err, since we 
 do not have the best even that we know. There- 
 fore, those laws by which we live are not unalter- 
 able, or else no laws emanate from an all-knowing, 
 all-powerful being. 
 
 If, moreover, this power is omniscient in respect 
 to the future, then all future events must be 
 predetermined, and all willing, all valid, conscious 
 activity is a thing of the past; your efforts are not 
 virtues of the moment, but were arranged for you 
 beforehand; and since it is all decided, prayer is 
 valueless. If, on the other hand, our freedom is a 
 real freedom, God does not know everything, for 
 
 ^ He does not know what any one of us may decide 
 to do in the next moment. Then also there is 
 the difficulty of reconciling the absolute goodness 
 of divinity with the universality of divinity. If 
 God is in every atom, alike in man, in rattle- 
 snake, and in mosquito, in filth and disease, while 
 at the same time He is the author of the abhor- 
 
 ^ rence of evil within man. He appears to be in the 
 position of hating Himself. It is simply taking 
 the direct road to absurdity to apply any particu- 
 
 31 
 
CYCLES OF PERSONAL BELIEF 
 
 larization whatsoever to God. Similar difficulties 
 cling to any universal proposition. 
 
 The world is full of pests. For us the sting of 
 the mosquito is a particular diabolical incident. 
 Whatever advantage in the way of discipline may 
 come to us from his existence, he does not enter 
 into our notions of a universal ideal. For us he is 
 an objective evil; but he has exactly as much right 
 to consider himself created by God as we have. 
 He carries on his blood-sucking activities in the 
 \ same innocent spirit of good faith as we our para- 
 sitism upon cows and sheep. The same is true of 
 lice, typhoid fever, and the germs of worse dis- 
 eases. It was no demon who invented or created 
 these things. There Is a terrible equality of right 
 in the whole universe. 
 
 These considerations, which apply alike to con- 
 ceptions of the world and conceptions of spiritual 
 things, have led to a new method in dealing with 
 truth. There seems to be no fixed criterion in the 
 universe; both matter and idea alike seem to 
 yield to the sceptical process by virtue of the 
 inherent nature of reason. Let us, therefore, 
 embark on our raft of ideas, and float along as 
 far as we can before it breaks up. An idea is a 
 relative thing. Use it as long as it applies and 
 then try another. Idealism and materialism are 
 both true. One type of mind finds one more con- 
 venient for its purposes, another the other. Each 
 is true in its own sphere. In other words, use is the 
 criterion. 
 
 32 
 
DISILLUSION 
 
 This cheery solution reminds one of the award- 
 ing of prizes by the dodo in "Alice in Wonder- 
 land," or perhaps of the crocodile who holding 
 the child in his mouth bargained with the mother 
 by promising to give back the child, if she an- 
 ^ swered his question right, and then asked, "Am I 
 going to eat the child ? " 
 
 For the absolute, it is everything or nothing. 
 The subtle relative has won all if the absolute 
 yields the most infinitesimal mite. If we believe 
 in ideas at all, we believe in them as absolute 
 criteria. If they are historical only, if they exist 
 only by the sufferance of use, they have lost their 
 inherent virtue. They are no longer tests, they 
 are checks and balances. They have only the 
 authority of commentaries or annotations on the 
 living stream. 
 
 Yet all this while the living stream is here, and 
 our confusion arises, not from the depths of 
 existence, but from our attempts to give an 
 account of our existence. These are ultimately 
 problems of expression. The ultimate goal of 
 analysis is to show its own futility, except as a 
 preparation for positive things. The vigor and 
 reality of the beliefs we once held make us wish 
 them back again, wish at least a believing state 
 of mind. 
 
 Truth is. It is undeniable, unchangeable, in- 
 evitable. There is no escape from it, and no appeal 
 from it. Other things change for it or yield to it. 
 It yields to nothing and changes for nothing. Our 
 
 33 
 
CYCLES OF PERSONAL BELIEF 
 
 speculations are simply a quest for truth, and 
 having believed blindly and seen the stuff of our 
 belief fade away, having doubted honestly, and 
 found all doubting left us »till living, we begin to 
 perceive once more a genuine reality in the sur- 
 faces of facts, and we suspect that perhaps they 
 mean something after all. 
 
PART III 
 
 REILLUSION 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 CONSCIOUSNESS 
 
 The soul craves positive elements; and thought, 
 phoenix-like, begins perpetually to create new 
 beliefs, to build, to affirm, and to renew the world. 
 In the first result of complete disillusion we are 
 left without solid elements on which to found 
 anything; but the thirst of the desert, the sense of 
 lack which makes our doubting so potent and 
 revolutionary, is but an indication of the method 
 of travail, is indeed the cause of our advance. 
 
 The fact that we are alive, in so far as life 
 involves consciousness, is enough to give us a 
 positive beginning for absolute truth. Not only 
 cogito, ergo sum, but consciousness and existence 
 are, in their deeper aspects, identical: and feeling 
 or perception of any sort is absolutely real. The 
 landscape may be taken as the type of the abso- 
 lute. When the landscape looks beautiful, there is 
 during the moment of this appreciation an abso- 
 lute reality. But this absoluteness belongs to the 
 consciousness which perceives, not to the change- 
 able outward appearance of nature. If I think, 
 I know I think. What I think, or what I see, I may 
 not know; but that I think, or that I see, I do 
 know. It is the same with all conscious states; 
 what they are we may not know, but while they 
 are, we know they are. But since all particular 
 
 37 
 
CYCLES OF PERSONAL BELIEF 
 
 consciousness is at the mercy of the temporal 
 transiency of the external universe, we habitu- 
 ally ignore this absolute quality in the original 
 perceptions. 
 
 Now reason lives at the point where conscious- 
 ness meets with truth. It is that which marries 
 the soul to nature. It is the necessary or divine 
 part of consciousness, that which cannot be other 
 than what it is. Reason is itself a simple, un- 
 quenchable light. The understanding, however, 
 which is reason applied to certain actualities, 
 operating in the individual thinker to interpret 
 the external universe, and finding that the natural 
 elements obey its own laws, tends to attribute a 
 greater permanency to the external or objective 
 universe than to any individual bit of conscious- 
 ness. The understanding thus indicates to the 
 individual that this universe has a universal and 
 inevitable existence external to and independent 
 of himself, is in fact an evolving natural system 
 from which and by which he himself was produced 
 — a system in which substance bears forms which 
 change according to exact, unalterable laws. From 
 these conclusions came that theory examined in 
 the previous chapter, that all consciousness arose 
 from an inorganic or originally lifeless system. 
 To some minds this is the ultimate significance 
 of the doctrine of evolution. As opposed to this, 
 reason insists on the universal aspect of conscious- 
 ness itself. 
 
 It is the consciousness I say which contains the 
 
 38 
 
CONSCIOUSNESS 
 
 absolute, not any particular group of the objects 
 of consciousness, no matter how universal their 
 existence may appear to be. 
 
 To obtain further light upon this truth let us 
 consider the relation of consciousness to this sup- 
 posed inorganic earth, or rather let us consider 
 the relation of the first consciousness in the uni- 
 verse to inorganic matter in general. For if the 
 consciousness upon our planet was not the first 
 in the universe, then there was, at the time of the 
 dawn of consciousness here, some other conscious- 
 ness, the problem of whose origin was the same 
 as would be the problem for us, had we been the 
 first. Imagine, then, the dawn of consciousness in 
 the universe. Supposing there had been abso- 
 lutely no consciousness whatever before the mo- 
 ment it first awakes, or becomes, it is manifestly 
 a matter of indifference whether there has been 
 previous to that moment a dead astronomical and 
 geological history for a billion years or for one 
 day, except in so far as consciousness needs one 
 hypothesis or the other in order to explain what 
 it has found since awaking. To illustrate, if the 
 first consciousness were seated in a man who 
 awoke in a stalactite cave, and found that an 
 appreciable time had to elapse before even a small 
 stalactite could be formed, and yet knew that at 
 his birth many and large stalactites had been 
 about him, he could reasonably conclude that 
 inorganic processes had been at work before the 
 awakening of his own consciousness. 
 
 39 
 
CYCLES OF PERSONAL BELIEF 
 
 If, however, we imagine a universe totally de- 
 void of consciousness, that is, if we imagine the 
 condition of absolute unconsciousness throughout 
 the universe for all time, — ourselves and no 
 other consciousness ever having existed or ever 
 to exist, — there is no reality left. The universe 
 would be utterly dead. In such a universe spheres 
 may roll, may swing in circles or jumble together, 
 be lawless or law-abiding, it is all exactly the same. 
 If it were all absolutely dead unconsciousness, 
 and relating to no consciousness past or to come, 
 there could be no distinctions, no differences, no 
 identities, except the identity of one dead nothing- 
 ness. Again, if we suppose the case of conscious- 
 ness beginning at a certain point in time, and a 
 span of time preceding that point, it is not really 
 conceivable that duration which has no meaning 
 while it is lasting, but is only to gain a meaning 
 later, with the arrival of something new, should 
 have any existence at all. Spheres may roll, or 
 swing, or jumble, it is all the same as nothingness, 
 except that consciousness when it comes, by a 
 retroactive law, will ordain that things were thus 
 and so. Or still again, if we imagine the last mo- 
 ment of all life coming, and consciousness ending 
 forever, again there is an utter indifferency and 
 lack of meaning in all that may follow. To think 
 otherwise is to objectify one's own ideas to such 
 an extent that one cannot recognize them as 
 ideas. It is only with the fact of a consciousness 
 to be born that a lifeless, unconscious astronomy 
 
 40 
 
CONSCIOUSNESS 
 
 begins to have the possibility of reality. There- 
 fore, if we imagine the first consciousness in the 
 universe resulting from some combination of 
 hitherto dead facts, in fact from any unconscious 
 chemical, physical, or geologic process whatso- 
 ever, we have the absurd proposition that that 
 which gave the combination its reality came after, 
 and as a result of, that which could not be real 
 alone. Hence, if reason demands the admission 
 of a real external universe preceding the dawn of 
 any particular consciousness seated as ours is 
 seated in animal life, it demands equally a uni- 
 versal consciousness by virtue of which that ex- 
 ternal universe exists, and a geologic, unconscious 
 world, if it bears in itself the seeds of life, must be 
 to that greater consciousness as the egg to its 
 parent. 
 
 The imagination of mankind has loved to pic- 
 ture "chaos and old night," to fear the "outer 
 dark." We tend to imagine a dead origin even as 
 we imagine a dead future for ourselves. Now in 
 reality these are simply projections of conscious- 
 ness upon the wall of the unknown. There was in 
 truth no such state of nothingness preceding our 
 own life. 
 
 Consciousness Is primary. Its objects are sec- 
 ondary. Consciousness governs its objects. But 
 this of course does not mean that consciousness 
 can happen without objects. Expression is essen- 
 tial. Much confusion has arisen from the attempt 
 to conceive of consciousness without objects, or 
 
 41 
 
CYCLES OF PERSONAL BELIEF 
 
 mind without experience. Even the " Critique of 
 Pure Reason" bewilders us at times with this very- 
 attempt. Thought apart from experience is dis- 
 cussed ks though the possibiHty of thought with- 
 out experience were worth discussing. Thought 
 is self-evidently an experience. All consciousness 
 is a unity of many aspects which, though referred 
 to separately for the sake of clearness, are phases 
 of one whole. Subjectiveness involves objective- 
 ness, but it does not follow from this that all con- 
 sciousness is committed to a particular series of 
 objects or forms of expression. 
 
 The externality of phenomena, the solidity of 
 solids, and all other attributes are interpretations 
 of the mind. How far they are rooted in necessity 
 and hence absolute and independent of any par- 
 ticular consciousness, we can judge only by the 
 reasonableness of the interpretations, and what 
 reason postulates of them. Whichever road we 
 travel in the interpretation of the material world, 
 we come inevitably back to the consciousness; for 
 if we trace any fact to its inception in our experi- 
 ence, it brings us to pure sensations; or if we 
 follow the analysis of the fact to its constituent 
 elements, we come to mathematical and other 
 concepts which obey primarily the law of reason. 
 But this does not mean that there is no material 
 universe. It means simply that the material uni- 
 verse is the field in which or upon which conscious- 
 ness operates. i 
 
 We may thus assert the rights of absolute con- 
 
CONSCIOUSNESS 
 
 sciousness as self-evident; but the problematical 
 character which always proves inherent in univer- 
 sal propositions haunts the questions which arise 
 in regard to the relation of universal to particular 
 consciousness. The difficulty is simply this. Man 
 perpetually wonders what there can be of the 
 universe independent of his thought of it. Do 
 we not give all the facts the color of our own 
 thoughts .f* Will not whatever we think be subject 
 ^ to the peculiar conditions of an individual mind.^ 
 What conception can we have of what a universal 
 consciousness can be.'* Our answer is that one 
 peculiarity of the individual consciousness is the 
 positive affirmation of universals. It may be 
 difficult to distinguish between our particular 
 notions and our universal judgments; but our 
 reason nevertheless clearly affirms that such a 
 distinction exists. 
 
 The mind, moreover, unhesitatingly postulates 
 universality of material elements. It is the result 
 of a drowsiness when the mind fails to postulate 
 the same universality of itself. The body is taken 
 up out of the perpetual cycles of earthly substance, 
 and held in the human form for the lifetime of a 
 man. So also the individual consciousness arises 
 from a deeper consciousness, and must attribute 
 its existence to the parental existence of that 
 greater self. 
 
 We are led then to explore the universal ele- 
 ments of our own particular minds. Now the 
 process of thought does not naturally proceed by 
 
 43 
 
CYCLES OF PERSONAL BELIEF 
 
 formulas. To systematize in some fields, even 
 were it possible, would be undesirable. In others 
 we may, for the sake of letting light into the mind, 
 adopt, as in geometry, this stepping-stone method. 
 But the poetic or deeper truths have always come 
 as fragments; we must take them and be thankful 
 for them, trusting that the cumulative intellectual 
 effort of mankind will gradually outline and por- 
 tray the great unity of truth. 
 
 Meanwhile each of us sees some few aspects as 
 more fundamental than others. These he wishes 
 to emphasize. Beginning then with the most 
 general data which the reason presents there are 
 certain axiomatic propositions of consciousness 
 back of which we cannot go. 
 
 AXIOMATIC PROPOSITIONS 
 
 1. Good is the most primary of all things. It 
 is the test of everything else. 
 
 2. I, an individual consciousness, a being which 
 lives, must be recognized in the expression of 
 that which is. 
 
 Note, The soul is the universal part of self. 
 I and the soul are identical or not according 
 to my purity or impurity. 
 
 3. The soul loves good. Love is the soul's atti- 
 tude toward the good. 
 
 4. Happiness is an aspect of the good. Happi- 
 ness applies to consciousness and attends the 
 soul's attitude of love. Whatever is good 
 must be happy or it is not really good; what- 
 
 44 
 
AXIOMATIC PROPOSITIONS 
 
 ever is happy must be good or it is not really 
 happy. 
 
 5. Truth is an aspect of the good. Truth ap- 
 plies to objects. Whatever is good is true, 
 whatever is true is good. 
 
 Note, Whenever we speak of happiness 
 objectively we mean such as produces hap- 
 piness in the consciousness concerned with 
 this object. Whenever we speak of truth 
 subjectively we mean such consciousness as 
 is concerned with true objects. 
 
 6. These are the fundamentals of life, but life 
 / itself is undefinable because of its infinity. 
 
 7. Life demands that consciousness have ob- 
 jects, that goodness must be exemplified. 
 
 8. Life when particularized, i.e., immersed in 
 time and space, is loving the exemplifica- 
 tions of goodness. 
 
 9. Love is in itself and always the direct ex- 
 emplification of happiness. Gladness, rap- 
 ture, and ecstasy are particular phases. 
 
 10. Truth finds exemplification by expression. 
 
 11. Mind is the faculty of consciousness which 
 reasons or uses reason. 
 
 12. The language of reason is ideas. These are 
 the component parts of truth. 
 
 In practice our expressions seem far away from 
 the absolute truth. However we strive the actu- 
 ality of ideas remains remote, or dim to each par- 
 ticular consciousness. It is hard to believe that 
 
 4S 
 
CYCLES OF PERSONAL BELIEF 
 
 they are real and burning now. Rarely we see 
 dazzling flashes that convince us. Propositions 
 couched in words are crude approximations to 
 our thoughts. Thoughts in turn are faint and 
 shadowy replicas of ideas. If you seek to analyze 
 these fundamental concepts, they die. They are 
 like the popular notion of an idea, a shifting 
 mental phenomenon. Yet these copies which we 
 have are all the language we possess for the defini- 
 tion of our existence. 
 
 We may make these further definitions. Life, 
 involved as it must be in exemplifications, is 
 experience. Action is the result of the love of the 
 good in the conscious individual, and the dynamic 
 force thus individualized and working in particu- 
 lar instances is will. Experience is the history of 
 will. The actual is the result of the will's actions. 
 Facts are isolated instances of the continuous 
 actual. Sensation is the crude original substratum 
 of consciousness out of which the facts are quar- 
 ried by the attention. Facts may or may not be 
 built into structures, may or may not be inter- 
 preted by ideas. But sensation or some awareness 
 of objects is always present in the waking condi- 
 tion, and thought presupposes elements which 
 tide the individual between any particular cogni- 
 tions or reasonings. When the mind is awake, the 
 soul loves the good by necessity. Faith is the pre- 
 servation of the attitude of love when we are not 
 directly conscious of mind. It is a spiritual mo- 
 mentum. When the mind is awake the perception 
 
 46 
 
AXIOMATIC PROPOSITIONS 
 
 of truth leads the individual will into actions pro- 
 ductive of good. Right feeling attends such ac- 
 tions. Conscience is the result of faith bridging 
 from one right feeling to another. 
 
 - These propositions and definitions are imper- 
 sonal as is all general truth. Yet as knowledge 
 such general truth is accessible to each individual 
 consciousness. 
 
 But we must clearly recognize the limitations 
 of our personal thought, which, even while it 
 recognizes the necessity of such propositions, is 
 unable to explain fully their relationship to itself. 
 Analysis shows plainly enough that our under- 
 standing is unable to cope with universals. Any 
 idea or conception of goodness which we may con- 
 template loses itself behind a veil of particular 
 imperfections and tragedy. It seems inevitably 
 to become a non-existent goal, a production of the 
 imagination, an object only of hope. 
 
 This, however, should not lead to negative 
 results, but rather throw us into communion with 
 the diverse aspects of existence. It is hard, indeed, 
 to understand how there can be consciousness 
 of a permanent, unchanging idea, for how could 
 such a consciousness last? It is hard to conceive 
 of any consciousness independent of the striving 
 individuals of this or some other world. Strife 
 seems essential to wakefulness. The friction of 
 multiplicity seems to characterize existence. Yet 
 a consciousness which was simply the aggregate 
 of many individuals would not account for the 
 
 47 
 
CYCLES OF PERSONAL BELIEF 
 
 absolute reliability of ideas. Nor can we dismiss 
 our instinct to believe in an ultimate, real, un- 
 clouded happiness — a union with an actual 
 divinity. 
 
 The truth is we do not understand infinity; the 
 elements of thought which discount time inevit- 
 ably perplex us. The past itself is strangely quick ; 
 the objects of hope are most assuredly real. And 
 the imagination deals with something which is 
 incomprehensibly actual. So also our dreams, 
 with their mysterious comings and goings, their 
 vanishing existence, and all the wayward, sub- 
 conscious influences of our life as well, must have 
 some place in the scheme of reality, must exem- 
 plify some type of being. Universals do not con- 
 form to temporal limitations and we must remem- 
 ber that we have not got to conceive of a universal 
 soul in order that it should exist. 
 
 What we call our ideas are not original, but 
 take their actuality from a more fundamental 
 source than our particular experience. The truth 
 overarches us like the sky, while our thoughts flow 
 along beneath, taking its color, and affecting it as 
 little as a brook aff"ects the stars which are bro- 
 kenly reflected therefrom. We are transient, the 
 ideal is not. The permanence and stability of that 
 which leads the soul to love has more right to be 
 called real than we have. The existence of that 
 without which our life would be meaningless is 
 more sure than our own. It is by virtue of the 
 reality of an idea that we know anything. It is 
 
 48 
 
THE WILL 
 
 by virtue of the universal nature that we are in 
 essence superior to time, absolute even in our 
 seeming transiency. 
 
 THE will: good and evil 
 
 At the basis of thought lies a distinction be- 
 tween Necessity and Fate, and this distinction 
 corresponds with the distinction between Love 
 and Will. All the absolute necessities are rooted 
 in Love. All the fatal elements of life are the 
 result of Will. The necessities are expressed by 
 ideas; the fatalities by events. 
 . The inner life of consciousness, its germ and 
 kernel, is love. Love implies motive force. The 
 attitude of the loving soul in itself creates motion, 
 and in our particular history where consciousness 
 is centred in the individual self, the life which 
 love generates is the life of will. 
 
 The fundamental problem of the will is the 
 problem of Good and Evil. Now, of course, good- 
 ness is far beyond the reach of formulas and 
 propositions. Its nature is but dimly suggested 
 by metaphysical considerations. Its portrait can 
 scarcely be begun until we come upon the thresh- 
 old of the beautiful. Our hints and presentiments 
 of true goodness are almost too precious to name. 
 Nature seems so indifferent at times, so empty of 
 the spirit of life; and yet here on this little world, 
 with its innumerable series of natural processes, 
 culminating in the struggles of humanity, is our 
 only portal to the Temple. 
 
 49 
 
CYCLES OF PERSONAL BELIEF 
 
 Reason finds goodness at war with its opposite, 
 evil; finds thus an inevitable and universal con- 
 flict at the heart of life. The conflict is in itself an 
 evil or at least a half good. Are we not cast, 
 therefore, into utter confusion, as we attempt the 
 quest of a pure and absolute good ? 
 
 Let us further estimate the nature of this prob- 
 lem. The will is the child of love. It is the crea- 
 tive impulse individualized. But consciousness 
 itself appears to depend for its existence upon the 
 will. For if there were nothing for consciousness 
 to act upon, there would be no cause of motion 
 or change. If there were no motion or change, our 
 awareness of objects would die out, as happens 
 in sleep. It follows that the conflict which love 
 produces against inertia, evil, difficulty, and all 
 other negatives is an essential character of con- 
 sciousness. The strife toward beauty and right 
 is life. If, however, there is in consciousness an 
 essential conflict, if a structural component of 
 existence is evil, and the contradiction between 
 positive and negative a sine qua non of our living, 
 has not the pessimist a metaphysical basis foi* 
 his despondency which cannot be gainsaid 1 And 
 is not the cheerfulness and exhilaration with 
 which the robust heart greets the vision of truth 
 but the dream of a fool's paradise? 
 
 Philosophers who penetrate into this problem 
 too often fall into despondency. Much of the 
 philosophic thought which has deeply influenced 
 our era has been tinged with a profound gloom. 
 
 SO 
 
THE WILL 
 
 The pessimist has an inveterate habit of saying 
 to the optimist, "You have not known." If any 
 one asserts that evil is not essential, or describes 
 a particular terror, a pain, a fear, a sin with any 
 mitigation of the characteristic features which its 
 victim attributes to it, he is set down as a trifler. 
 It is idle and useless to deny a terrible reality to 
 evil, or to fail to see an inexorable necessity in 
 conflict. 
 
 In answer to these difficulties, we must keep 
 one great distinction always in view. It has 
 already been noted that the nature of existence 
 and reality is not simple; but rather there are 
 difl'erent kinds of being. There are the absolute 
 positive realities with which love deals, and there 
 is, on th^ other hand, the wilFs particular history. 
 We cannot understand absolute good, but we 
 need not confuse our inability to portray it, with 
 the particular problem of the will's struggle with 
 existing evil. The negatives, evil, difiiculty, and 
 the rest, have a kind of existence. Evil must be 
 dealt with. It is real in that sense. In our concrete 
 life, in our experience, it is a real factor with the 
 same kind of absoluteness that the landscape 
 possesses, but it is not real in the sense in which 
 an idea is real. It is not positive, it is not irre- 
 sistible, it is not permanent. Goodness, I say, is 
 positive; evil is negative. Goodness by its mani- 
 fest, self-evident nature cannot die leaving evil in 
 the universe. For to think of such a thing reveals 
 to us instantly that goodness which could so die 
 
 SI 
 
CYCLES OF PERSONAL BELIEF 
 
 would be inferior to what we recognize would be 
 good. It was Plato's profound argument that 
 goodness is self-productive, while evil is self- 
 destructive. Goodness here strengthens goodness 
 there. Goodness in particular furthers goodness 
 in general. But the more evil the weaker evil 
 becomes; for when evils are tenacious, when there 
 is honor among thieves, evil has borrowed a virtue 
 from goodness. In reality evil is the enemy of 
 evil as well as the enemy of good. There would, of 
 course, be no reason for existence if there was no 
 goodness and no hope of goodness in the universe. 
 Then again, whenever unhappiness increases, the 
 reason for existence grows less and less, while 
 whenever happiness increases, the reason for 
 existence grows stronger and stronger; hence the 
 power of happiness has a cumulative strength, 
 while the power of evil grows by its own effects 
 weaker and weaker. 
 
 The type of existence which belongs to evil is 
 more the nature of a dream existence, its essence 
 is transiency; but the existence of goodness is of 
 the nature of a waking reality. Yet the most 
 profound, insistent illusion clings to our conscious- 
 ness, namely, that goodness and its expressive 
 ideals are transient, while evil and its weighty 
 inertias are solid, inevitable realities. 
 
 The whole essence of intellectual progress is 
 the banishing of this illusion; the realization of 
 the waking actuality of eternal truth. This is the 
 only way to overcome the influence of the major 
 
 52 
 
THE WILL 
 
 evils of life. How great the difficulty of this prog- 
 ress is, is made known to us whenever we suffer 
 or see suffering. In the struggle of human life the 
 passions flare up. Your life and mine burn more 
 brightly in the swirling currents of pain and diffi- 
 culty. The consciousness glows more and more 
 fiercely as the passions are thwarted. Again and 
 again we ask, Is not life one with this elemental 
 struggle by which alone we seem to express our- 
 selves f It takes a high kind of courage to believe 
 that evil is only imaginary. 
 
 Always we must recur to that distinction be- 
 tween the universal and the particular which 
 permeates the smallest elements of our life. The 
 universal part, or the soul of man, escapes the 
 limitations of the particular will and ever main- 
 tains its unity with the deeper self. But the 
 particular will must encounter evil, face it and 
 conquer it. Life as we live it is made up of this 
 paradox. The self as we know it combines these 
 seemingly irreconcilable elements. 
 
 The relation which exists between good and 
 evil has no meaning without progress. All pains 
 are growing-pains. The necessity of goodness 
 casts a phantom reality upon evil. Goodness 
 gets its body and weight from evil, but evil exists 
 for no other purpose. If goodness derives a value 
 from evil, this value is only a value in the over- 
 coming of evil. Creating an absence of evil, its 
 abnegation and denial is the method of success. 
 Evil is convertible into something not evil. The 
 
 53 
 
CYCLES OF PERSONAL BELIEF 
 
 nature of progress is to make that which appar- 
 ently had a solid reality unreal; to cause an evil, 
 which had been given rank among the fixed fac- 
 tors of life, to become as if it had never existed. 
 Evil is a preliminary, and so far as we can under- 
 stand as we look up and down the stairway of 
 progress, evil is simply the name of the pull to- 
 ward a direction which leads to nothingness, while 
 goodness is the creative push which carries us in 
 the direction leading to greater and greater degrees 
 of existence. 
 
 THE will: necessity and fate 
 
 The fundamental agency within us is the will. 
 The feeling that you are free to decide between 
 two alternatives is your sacred and inviolable 
 right, and the content or meaning of that feeling 
 is real. Each decision is not determined by the 
 past. It is a creative act. The facts, the events 
 of the world, stream away from this core of exist- 
 ence in all directions. Your fate is built upon 
 your past decisions, or we may say, fate exists 
 only in so far as we have already decided. 
 
 Now the wolf or the child never doubts the 
 validity of his native will. It is only after the 
 sceptical method of thinking has torn up our be- 
 liefs that we become conscious of any problem of 
 free will. The normal attitude of mind is to be- 
 lieve entirely in our right of choice. At first sight 
 we find the results of simple decisions are clear. 
 We modify nature by our activity, we chop down 
 
 54 
 
THE WILL 
 
 a tree, set waves In motion by throwing a stone 
 into a pond, build a road, or burn a forest. 
 
 On the other hand, a man is an utterly impo- 
 tent spectator in the presence of a thunderstorm. 
 Supposing for the sake of illustration that the 
 will's activity as it affects objects is wholly neces- 
 sitated, its freedom of choice purely illusory, that 
 our whole physical life in nature with all our 
 motions is part of a series governed rigidly by 
 natural laws, there is still opportunity for choice 
 in our response to these laws, and what they bring 
 forth. If my house is struck by lightning it rests 
 with me whether to be cheerful or despondent. So 
 also if I become ill, I may be patient or angry 
 according to my choice. In this view our will may 
 be acting while the stuff upon which it acts is 
 wholly unmodified by it. Thus the response of 
 the conscious self to the natural processes can be 
 like the audience at a concert which may subjec- 
 tively interpret what it likes from the music, 
 without influencing the programme. But this 
 meagre appraisal of the power of the will, this 
 feeling that the will has no relation to the power 
 that chose the programme, is really irrational. 
 To imagine a complete insulation between the 
 interpreting will and the natural facts requires a 
 stretch of the imagination quite unwarranted. 
 An interaction must exist between the conscious 
 response to the natural facts and the facts them- 
 selves. The notion of a purely spectator con- 
 sciousness imagining itself to be making effective 
 
 55 
 
CYCLES OF PERSONAL BELIEF 
 
 decisions, when it is not doing so, is nonsense. 
 Therefore this interaction is not mechanically- 
 automatic, but consciousness gives something 
 with its response; and if the will modifies na- 
 ture at all, it must be in itself a spontaneous 
 cause. 
 
 Choice has been at work like the madrepores of 
 the coral reef, building, building, building the 
 solid structure of circumstances. That is to say, 
 circumstance is the accumulation of past decisions, 
 for every petty decision assumes the character of 
 an unalterable fatal element in the past. It is 
 thus also that innumerable little decisions make 
 the character; innumerable little decisions print- 
 ing themselves either in the material structure of 
 the individual or in the external structure of the 
 world. Indeed, circumstance is but the imprint 
 of character on various forms of inertia. Yet, 
 when we reflect upon the momentum of habit, 
 the onward sweep of events already set under way, 
 the encircling influence of tribal or national deci- 
 sions which surround us and shape our destiny, 
 to doubt the efficacy of our own choice seems more 
 natural than to believe in it. For once the decid- 
 ing impulse has cooled, and in the world there lies 
 behind us the series of irrevocable facts, the mind 
 tends to doubt its own power. There comes a 
 paralysis from the written record of what we 
 have done, a borrowing from ideas belonging to 
 the past to lend terror to the future. Moreover, 
 subtle necessities brood over the will, at first little 
 
 56 
 
THE WILL 
 
 recognized, but later seen to unite each little life 
 with the processes of the ages. 
 
 Back through the generations extends the 
 series of choice-wrought fatalities. We can trace 
 the origins of man's condition in individual or 
 racial choices as far back as history goes. One 
 series of choices produced the lion, one the wolf, 
 and one the man. The circumstances have vary- 
 ing histories, some old, some new. We are en- 
 thralled among customs of greater or less strength. 
 To ascertain their rights and enduring power is 
 an endless enquiry. They constitute alike the 
 resistance to our progress and the field in which 
 the struggle of the will takes place. But in search- 
 ing for the origins we come in the end to a border- 
 land where decisions cannot properly be called 
 such, and our development rested upon instinct. 
 It is true we can see the process going on about us 
 of decisions crystallizing into instincts, and per- 
 haps most of what we call instincts are decisions 
 which crystallized at a more remote date. 
 
 But the consideration of instincts brings us 
 directly to the problem of vegetative life. Here 
 the plants have been hemming us in, growing and 
 developing parallel with animals. The plants 
 have a life as a cause, back of their complex net- 
 work of limitations just as we have life; but inas- 
 much as they are unconscious we cannot imagine 
 them as having by an infinite progression of deci- 
 sions shaped their histories. On the contrary, we 
 consider them the result of unvarying, impersonal 
 
 57 
 
CYCLES OF PERSONAL BELIEF 
 
 laws. Thus their fate was identical with necessity, 
 and took shape in law. Similarly our instincts 
 and much of what we superficially take to be our 
 decisions are so saturated with necessity that the 
 will is unrecognizable. Indeed, the vegetative 
 part of our own development seems to be gov- 
 erned by the same laws as that of the plants. The 
 instincts evolved in harmony with these. Thus 
 biological analysis appears to invalidate the series 
 of our decisions. The discovery that a large por- 
 tion of our activities could not be other than what 
 they are for mechanical reasons, suggests anew 
 that all seemingly wilful acts are illusory and that 
 the mechanistic philosophy is right after all. 
 
 Yet the will in its operation in everyday life is 
 absolutely real. If we wish to lift a stone we may 
 lift a stone. There is no absolutely determining 
 factor before the choice is made. The biological 
 interpretations must adjust themselves as best 
 they can to this primitive truth. 
 
 The vegetative law nevertheless penetrates 
 deep into our inner nature. The study of heredity 
 has shown how limited in many directions is the 
 sphere of our personal choice. Here, however, we 
 must be careful to distinguish between the bio- 
 logical heredity which is a matter of physical law, 
 and philosophic, or practical heredity. It does 
 not matter to the parent whether the child inher- 
 its a love of the sea through germ-plasm or through 
 his environment. In the philosophic sense every- 
 thing is heredity — the physical environment is 
 
 58 
 
THE WILL 
 
 simply its outer fringes. The yearnings, aspira- 
 tions, and efforts of the parent constitute a series 
 of factors bearing upon the future life of the par- 
 ents, and upon the fate of the children. The 
 biologist must tell us whether or not any of these 
 factors are lodged within his precincts. He seeks 
 to discover how much or how little the stream of 
 conscious influences has passed into the physically 
 transmitting medium. But the factors as mani- 
 festations of will are a real part of life, indeed, the 
 most real part of life, no matter what the student 
 of heredity reports. 
 
 The tendency of recent research has been to 
 find variations in off"spring somewhat aloof from, 
 and independent of, specific influences in the life 
 of the parent: variations launched out of the in- 
 finite, but whose behavior once launched follows 
 vegetative laws, the law of Mendel and the like, 
 rather than personal influences. Let this teach 
 us that we have not been trusted by the universal 
 will so far as we had begun to suppose. And yet 
 the individual and collective will of man and 
 animals has an activity parallel to all vegetative 
 evolution, and the total effects of this activity 
 are never adequately gauged or known. If we 
 again consider the illustration of the concert and 
 its audience, we shall find that the relation of the 
 conductor to the performance, the conductor who 
 leads the musicians but does not produce the 
 music, more fitly than the audience, represents 
 the relation between the will and the natural facts. 
 
 59 
 
CYCLES OF PERSONAL BELIEF 
 
 The vegetative laws, the laws of Mendel and 
 all that biology can disclose are no more and no 
 less formidable than the laws of thunderstorms, of 
 astronomy, or the laws of the universe. The 
 problem comes to this, what is the relation of our 
 volition to necessity? Necessity alone is utterly 
 inexorable. But as we attempt to further appre- 
 hend what we mean by this, we find that our 
 whole knowledge of necessity arises from the 
 character of the mind. Necessity is the unalter- 
 able basis of thought. The biologist, in order to 
 describe the limitations which law imposed upon 
 life, comes at length to mathematical truth. 
 
 We are governed primarily by ideal necessities. 
 It was by the constant application of unchallenge- 
 able ideas that the biologist as well as the physi- 
 cist and chemist made progress toward expressing 
 the natural laws. The study of heredity teaches 
 that the germ-plasm reflects the laws of the uni- 
 verse more directly, and the personal influences 
 more obscurely than we previously believed. The 
 personal influence, the more recent changes in the 
 nature of each animal are more outwardly re- 
 flected in the offspring; and the characters "in 
 the blood" are of more ancient, if not of quite 
 impersonal, origin. 
 
 The biological problem is of the utmost prac- 
 tical significance, for it concerns us deeply to 
 know in what part of the environment, seen or 
 unseen, is seated the result of our own particular 
 push : in what direction from the encircling physi- 
 
 60 
 
THE WILL 
 
 cal medium is the reaction which shall affect our 
 children to come from. But the will has inner 
 laws of its own which are equally practical. The 
 whole life of the parent is radiating influences 
 into the universe, and these are charged with a 
 spiritual magnetism which we may trust to carry 
 them where they belong. The deeper problem is 
 metaphysical. 
 
 Necessity in its operation is law. A part of 
 necessity is the existence of will. The will is 
 necessitated to act, but the essence of its activity 
 IS to exercise a real choice. This makes it valid 
 and creative. A little reflection will show that 
 since the will is a spontaneous cause in each case 
 where it acts and modifies nature, it has the same 
 kind of power as the laws themselves. The two 
 act jointly in producing results. It is thus that 
 Divinity, which is the author of necessity, reaches 
 even to the heart of particular or individual life. 
 
 It follows from this that necessity leaves a 
 scope for that which is not necessary. The present 
 is the home of freedom. As soon as a decision is 
 past it freezes. Our fatal activities, free while 
 they last, receive the clamp of necessity as they 
 end. The past is all inexorable. But the past as 
 we know it is alive, for we know it only through 
 the present, in which we remember or forget. The 
 past is taken up into the present by the potency of 
 our freedom. Among the laws we still pursue an 
 illimitable happiness: not by struggling against 
 
 6i 
 
CYCLESJ OF PERSONAL BELIEF 
 
 the unalterable, but by greater and greater degrees 
 of obedience. 
 
 Divinity itself cannot change the necessities. 
 These simply are. The will cannot change the 
 factors of life emanating directly therefrom. The 
 soul cannot will unhappiness. It cannot prefer 
 evil to good, nor will unreasonable things. If we 
 think otherwise the particular self has fallen 
 among errors and confusions. But there is a uni- 
 versal will which influences our own particular 
 choices, but is not influenced by them, a will 
 which wills only good, which is errorless, and in 
 one sense omnipotent, that is, that in its sphere 
 is irresistible; so that when we understand its 
 tendency — the tendency toward real goodness 
 — we become successful. On the other hand, we 
 must recognize that the incarnation of self is far 
 from complete in its identification with this uni- 
 versal will. The particular self wishes, desires, 
 chooses unreasonably, and creates a strange 
 particular history resulting now in pain and dis- 
 tress, now in solaces and pleasures. 
 
 The parent or universal will is the spirit of love. 
 Love is in its nature universal. Particular acts of 
 will bud forth from the permanent attitude of 
 love, which varies in strength within us according 
 to our circumstantial histories. The particular 
 will may err, but its errors are not essential to it. 
 Consciousness, though inevitably characterized 
 by the struggle of the soul toward goodness, 
 though it demands that a struggle shall have heeriy 
 
 62 
 
THE WILL 
 
 can know neither evil nor death when the conflict 
 is won. 
 
 Difliculty of conceiving of heaven arises be- 
 cause the consummation of our life implies the 
 arrival at infinity, in view of which the under- 
 standing fails. There are passages in opera music 
 in which a voice or instrument holds one note 
 while the rest of the chorus or orchestra runs 
 through a long series of changing harmonies. The 
 single note remains true and unvarying, but it 
 continues to give a fresh impression deriving 
 variety from the variety going on about it. Thus 
 the absolute may be still, yet alive in the mind. 
 We know even here and now of happy activities 
 without taint of evil. Life has its painless changes, 
 and love knows of variety with no shadow but 
 the shadow of repose. A spiritual sunlight casts 
 its happiness even into the simple activities of 
 this transient life. 
 
 But let us not mistake the nature of this light. 
 It is a perpetual temptation to confuse the good 
 with the pleasurable, the easy, a state of mind of 
 peaceable enjoyment. Dreams of beauty allure 
 us earned by earlier endeavors, lighted by inher- 
 ited tradition or waked by the monuments of 
 great accomplishments. But the fulfilment of our 
 dreams we could not and would not accept un- 
 earned. They are not fulfilments if they are not 
 won — if they are not attained by the overcom- 
 ing of those difficulties or confusions which they 
 are a departure from. Throughout this life love 
 
 63- 
 
CYCLES OF PERSONAL BELIEF 
 
 may at any moment lead us into pain and sacri- 
 fice. 
 
 In reality all the delights of experience get their 
 virtue from the overflowing of the inscrutable 
 inner nature toward which religion is groping. 
 The virtues are the merest stepping-stones, 
 blocks quarried out of an infinite mountain. True 
 goodness is above, beyond, yet permeating all 
 else. Its essence can only be found in acts of over- 
 coming. It is measured by eff'ort. It is not for us 
 to calculate the reward. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 IDEAS 
 
 Reason is a permanent subjective realization of 
 the essence of truth, whose different aspects thus 
 realized are like the different parts of a spectrum, 
 the personal consciousness being as a prism. The 
 ideas of reason are its nouns. They demand their 
 own authority and coherence, nothing more. By 
 them the sensations which come flooding upon 
 the conscious centre are lighted. Our perceptions 
 fall rapidly into a scheme. Points, lines, planes, 
 triangles, and spheres; measure, number, perma- 
 nence, time, momentum, all unite to construct a 
 world. There is a hierarchy of ideas beginning in 
 the simple utilitarian concepts and formulas, and 
 leading up to the ethical elements of reason. . 
 
 All that Is known of space and time is derived 
 from some aspect of our consciousness. Your 
 house and the tree across the field are connected, 
 so far as any thought of yours is concerned, only 
 by space; and space, as we think of It as a contin- 
 uous medium, is a component, or feature of con- 
 sciousness. The house and the tree alike are 
 transient, and to your shifting perceptions the 
 space which unites them has no reality except as 
 it is marked and characterized by such shifting 
 evanescent phenomena, as the gravel and loam, 
 
 6S 
 
CYCLES OF PERSONAL BELIEF 
 
 the grass and flowers which intervene. And yet 
 the mind recognizes a necessity and a law in these 
 connections. The idea of a continuous space is 
 beyond the reach of these changing phenomena 
 by virtue of its being an idea. Thus also all that 
 is a necessity in the objective world is ideal. The 
 newsboys go to the news office, take up a sheaf of 
 papers, all bearing the same print, and carry them 
 in different directions selling and selling till all 
 are gone. The facts emerge loaded with the bur- 
 den or print of one or more ideas, live a short and 
 eventful life as carriers, pass on their meaning or 
 value, and disappear. 
 
 Our thought proceeds by arresting aspects of 
 truth — the attention rests ever so slightly upon 
 a part of the natural flow of consciousness, stamps 
 it, and thus utilizes principles, concepts, and the 
 like. This is our experience of ideas, but the reali- 
 ties back of such experience are not to be rested 
 upon. Take, for instance, the idea of a point. If 
 we try to conceive of it, it retreats at once into 
 its uses, and as a primitive concept has evapo- 
 rated. For a point fills no space and therefore 
 cannot be described by any Inherent character or 
 quality. .It is dependent upon position, that is to 
 say, upon its relation to things outside itself; but 
 all things outside itself are changing. Thus it is 
 describable only by relative terms which deal 
 with variable phenomena. 
 
 Yet ideas reappear after every analysis with 
 their original significance. In the history of our 
 
 66 
 
IDEAS 
 
 personal thought we discover constants, recurring 
 thoughts whose meaning is always the same, or if 
 there is any variation in the meaning, it is because 
 of new relations in which the idea is found or new 
 uses to which it is put, and not from any inherent 
 changeableness. These constants are absolute in 
 themselves no matter how changeable or relative 
 may be the intellectual experience by which we 
 become aware of them. Two plus two always was 
 and always will be four. We may appear to create 
 the concepts we use, for we gradually institute 
 them as habits of thought; but concepts, princi- 
 ples, or ideas are always ready to hand. Being 
 invariable, being capable of the same use in the 
 same circumstances for all time, they are not sub- 
 ject to our own historical development. It is only 
 the expression we give to them which we create. 
 There would be no meaning in relativity if there 
 were not something which was not relative. In 
 our experience there may be no fixed inch; all 
 examples of inches are shifting; all thought of 
 inches, as of everything, is in process of change. 
 There is, nevertheless, an absoluteness in the 
 difference between one arbitrary inch and a 
 length twice as great, or between one inaccurate 
 material measure and another. If there is any 
 inaccuracy in a measure it is inaccurate by virtue 
 of the fact of an ideal exactitude. There would be 
 no possible method of discounting error, devia- 
 tion, and modification if there were not a standard 
 which does not change. The existence of the rela- 
 
 67 
 
CYCLES OF PERSONAL BELIEF 
 
 tive implies the existence of the absolute. The 
 existence of error implies the existence of that 
 which is not an error, and so on. 
 
 It is with difficulty that we escape the limita- 
 tions of relativity, and of finite appearances. We 
 marvel that a sperm-cell should transmit the 
 character of a man. But why is it more marvel- 
 lous that the germ should carry character than 
 that the man should possess character? The scale 
 of magnitudes stretches to infinite maximums 
 and infinite minimums. If the cell were magnified 
 to the size of a man, it would not astonish us that 
 it should have as much variety as the man. Why, 
 because it is smaller than the objects which our 
 eyes are gauged to see, should it not be infinitely 
 complex in structure, even as the world of which 
 it is a part is infinitely complex? Or supposing it 
 to be comparatively simple, one part like another 
 in substance; dependent for its nature upon its 
 relation to things outside itself; it would remind 
 us that the form and structure of the human body 
 is in one sense completely dependent on things 
 outside the body. It has hands to reach food, 
 eyes to see, ears to hear, etc. Thus the complete 
 description of any one thing involves the com- 
 plete description of every other thing. 
 
 It is impossible for the understanding to cope 
 with an idea. An idea has no more proof of its 
 own existence than has a pure sensation. Either 
 you apprehend or you do not apprehend. Nor 
 does your seeing or not seeing have the slightest 
 
 68 
 
IDEAS 
 
 influence upon the necessitated or ideal element 
 in your experience. 
 
 The universe is a structure of concepts. Ideas 
 give us our world. The stamp goes on each thing 
 automatically by the act of thinking of it. Con- 
 versely we must explore into the nature of every- 
 thing to get at the nature of ideas. Our version 
 of truth to be of any real value must go around 
 to all the departments of knowledge and be 
 checked up as containing the data of all. We shall 
 find a thoroughgoing, hard-headed materialist 
 will quite unconsciously make a better portrait 
 of an idea than many a so-called idealist. Materi- 
 alistic notions are merely misnamed ideas. 
 
 We must look for something absolute and inex- 
 orable to which the human mind is the key. But 
 we must recognize also that thought, our only 
 means of apprehending truth, is in motion, is 
 alive. (You accept some formula or explanation, 
 the nebular hypothesis, the atomic theory, feeling 
 like one who has got into a clubroom where all is 
 quiet and settled, only to find that you are not in 
 a clubroom at all, but in a railroad car which, 
 moves along after you have got on board of it.y 
 Insoluble problems arise from the relationship 
 between ideas and change. The whirling facts 
 draw the ideas into obscure mazes, and irrational 
 or capricious distortions. Yet once we escape 
 from the region of personal choice, there is no 
 caprice whatever. We may hope in time to learn 
 by culture of the intellect the beauty and rhythm/ 
 
 69 
 
 /^ 
 
r 
 
 CYCLES OF PERSONAL BELIEF 
 
 the reaction and cycle in all that is chaotic, to see 
 the dance and fugue of reason, its mystery and 
 song, not only its still, icy mountain peaks. 
 
 The absolute plunges into the relative and the 
 ideas ride upon the waves of change. They appear 
 to swallow the whole universe, and yet remain 
 but points of view. Inasmuch as they are known 
 as integral parts of a historic consciousness, they 
 look out of time. They cannot escape their re- 
 latedness. It is in vain to conceive them pure and 
 lonely. 
 
 The mind demands the existence of a pure 
 independent idea, but it fulfils this demand by 
 disregarding the relatedness of ideas. These 
 archetypes, the point, the line, the triangle, the 
 idea of a plane, of a solid, of mass, of motion, of 
 externality, are all related. Yet in the measure of 
 their meaning and extent they are wholly inde- 
 pendent of particulars. In this sense the ideas are 
 real, unchanging, and absolute. 
 
 TIME 
 
 It never troubles the idea that we appreciate it 
 only through experience. The temporal element 
 of experience is itself grounded upon an idea. 
 
 The will is immersed in Time. The will could 
 have no sphere of activity without Time. Motion 
 of any sort presupposes Time. Time and Space 
 together are part of Necessity. Yet Time like 
 Space is lighted into reality only by ideas; having 
 no more right than other absolute realities, per- 
 
 70 
 
TIME 
 
 manence for instance. If we ask ourselves how it 
 happens that we conceive the idea of permanence 
 while Time exists, and renders any experience of 
 permanence impossible; for reply we may find in 
 the idea of permanence itself a proof of the per- 
 manence of ideas. In any case a mathematical 
 formula such as 2 + 2 = 4 is sufficient proof of the 
 validity of the idea of permanence. 
 
 In thinking we simply trust ourselves to truths 
 which cannot change. Thought in its particular 
 history continually attaches itself to eternal ideas. 
 It is like the long streamers of kelp waving in a 
 tide-way, rooted in fundamentals and trailing 
 into the stream of time. But this figure and all 
 figures are but the shifting drapery of illusion in 
 which the temporal idea is veiled. The sense that 
 time is streaming by, or. that we are moving 
 through time, alike are illusions; for all truth, all 
 reality, is seated in the present. The past is given 
 off from the present as the sparks are given forth 
 from a rocket. Because when once it is given oiF 
 we can fix our attention on any point in the series 
 the present has created, and affirm that that point 
 was once coincident with the present, we imagine 
 we are at a point in a series going on into the 
 future in advance of us; but in reality no such 
 advance exists. There is no such series until it is 
 past. There is no future at all. The present is 
 perpetually modified by its own activity, or 
 rather the immediate conscious self of the uni- 
 verse, which is what fills the present, is perpetu- 
 
 .71 
 
CYCLES OF PERSONAL BELIEF 
 
 ally changing, and this is the origin of a continu- 
 ally renewing present. But all that we project 
 into the future is imaginary. It is the painting on 
 a blank wall, of notions, phobias, pictures, or 
 dreams gleaned from the past. The past is his- 
 torical, the future is imaginary, the present is 
 personal. 
 
 We must, however, distinguish between the 
 personal experience of time and the historical 
 necessity of time. Imagine a man passing through 
 an agony: an accident has happened, and those 
 who are dearest to him hover between life and 
 death. He is waiting or acting throughout the 
 night. His activities are feverish and concen- 
 trated, his waiting is crowded with hope and fear, 
 innumerable memories return to him, he is swayed 
 by dreadful anticipations; and curious moments 
 of philosophic speculation come like annotations 
 to a printed page. Into these passing hours years 
 of experience are condensed. Suppose in the same 
 street three doors away there is a laborer tired 
 with an honest day's work, who, at the moment 
 the accident befell, sank into a dreamless sleep, 
 and all night long parallel with that agony, he 
 lies unconscious as the walls of his house, and 
 waking in the morning knows no experience of 
 time. For one ten hours meant nothing. He shut 
 his eyes and opened them again, the world tells 
 him ten of its hours are gone; for the other the 
 greatest moments of his life have been passing. 
 But what measures the conscious passage of time ? 
 
 72 
 
LAW 
 
 Surely nothing In the external nature of the 
 world. Time is indeed infinitely elastic. And yet 
 by some temporal element in life, the experiences 
 of these two men will fit exactly together. The 
 present moment is a unity for the universe, and 
 out from this unity personal experience cannot by 
 any means escape. 
 
 There is also an unerring reality, so far as we 
 can observe, in the principle by virtue of which a 
 chronometer, or the more permanent periods of 
 astronomy, can be made to measure the changes 
 of the natural world. This principle is the his- 
 torical necessity of time and is derived from our 
 investigation of the past. In this investigation 
 mechanistic ideas are necessary because the past 
 is absolutely fixed, and it cannot be described 
 without ideas which express that fixity. The pres- 
 ent, to be sure, includes this description of the 
 past as one of its factors, but is only in part limited 
 by it. The whole question of the influence of the 
 past upon the present resolves itself into a ques- 
 tion of dynamics, or more specifically of momen- 
 tum. This leads us to the consideration of Law. 
 
 LAW 
 
 It is a natural error in the progress of thought 
 to suppose that ideas interpret the world rather 
 than that the world interprets ideas. In this 
 confusion lies the root of a large part of philo- 
 sophic controversy. It is true that the ideas of a 
 given group of men interpret the world as a child 
 
 73 
 
CYCLES OF PERSONAL BELIEF 
 
 interprets his father's book by reading it. The 
 child may read and reverence the book, but the 
 book is the product of the father. It has no origi- 
 nal growth of its own. The world is the product 
 of the spirit and illustrates the laws of the spirit. 
 
 The study of force, of motion, of momentum is, 
 in reality, the study of life. The vast momentums 
 of astronomy are proof of the antiquity of the 
 spirit. The universal symbol of love is gravity, 
 and similarly we may find the life of the human 
 heart portrayed in a thousand ways in the natural 
 processes, ^the recognition of which we call 
 symbolism. 
 
 Now in the discussion of will, there appeared a 
 distinction between necessity and fate, corre- 
 sponding to the distinction between love and will, 
 and again between reason and understanding, 
 and ideas and thoughts. This distinction divides 
 a higher from a lower sphere. Activities corre- 
 sponding to the higher sphere, that is, the sphere 
 of reason and necessity, are absolute, unalterable 
 laws, but the wilful activities, activities which 
 might be other than what they are, operate in the 
 subordinate sphere, and are obviously not neces- 
 sitated. 
 
 In the sphere of particulars, that is, in the world 
 of everyday life, where we see plainly that things 
 may be one way or the other, where there is wrong 
 as well as right, the understanding is baffled in its 
 attempt to reconcile the conception of universal 
 law with the existence of lawlessness and error. If 
 
 74 
 
LAW 
 
 laws are universal and necessary, how Is it they 
 can be broken? 
 
 At first sight we might conceive that mechan- 
 ical aggregations should by law make mistakes. 
 There might be a law which led to destruction if 
 the facts were thus, to evolution if the facts were 
 so, and the activity of law might constantly pro- 
 duce both sets of conditions, and consciousness 
 be a spectator at its own lawful evolution in the 
 one case and destruction in the other. In this way 
 there could be unswerving, inexorable laws, and 
 yet errors. But what a foolish way to look at the 
 world, how utterly irrelevant to our interests and 
 destinies. 
 
 If we push home the distinction between uni- 
 versal and particular, the difficulty will in part 
 be cleared away. In the first place, universal laws 
 are not incompatible with error and confusion; 
 indeed, to be universal, law must be in some way 
 related to the apparently lawless or chaotic phases 
 of existence. Such laws, however, are not mechan- 
 ical nor can they be comprehensible to the under- 
 standing, emerging as they do out of infinity. It 
 is only as they become particularized by applica- 
 tion to given sets of facts that the understanding 
 can grapple with them. The particular aspect of 
 law applies to particular facts, and is not irre- 
 fragable. 
 
 Consider the case of a man laying out a garden 
 bed which is meant to be an exact circle. The 
 course of his spade is governed by the geometric 
 
 75; 
 
CYCLES OF PERSONAL BELIEF 
 
 nature of a circle, but In point of fact he deviates 
 from the true circle which serves in his mind as 
 his guide. He is in error with respect to a circle, 
 but that does not mean his spade has escaped into 
 a lawless region. Particular laws are of account 
 only in the exact course of their influence, but we 
 may break away from any particular application. 
 Lawlessness always means lawlessness with re- 
 spect to particular laws. On the other hand, uni- 
 versal law exists regardless of all breaks of par- 
 ticular law and has no reciprocal relation to 
 phenomena; it governs, but is not influenced by 
 the facts which it governs. 
 
 In their own line particular laws reflect the in- 
 evitableness of the universal laws. Thus, if we 
 find here and there what appear superficially to 
 be breaches in the law of gravity, such as the 
 action of a magnet, we do not for a moment sup- 
 pose that the law of gravity has been suspended. 
 By experiment we can give practical proof that 
 gravity Is acting on the magnetized body, and the 
 activity of the body is always a joint product of 
 the two forces; then we unhesitatingly attribute 
 universality to the operation of gravity. Never- 
 theless, the phenomena of the comet's tail, and 
 the theory for explaining it, — namely, that the 
 force of light acting on the atoms of matter in 
 their separated state is greater than the force of 
 gravity, — shows how conditions might e^Ist for 
 a consciousness In which the force of gravity was 
 not known, or if known, would be negligible. 
 
 76 
 
LAW 
 
 We may always, at some point In an investiga- 
 tion, reach the limits of application of any physi- 
 cal law. At such a point the law becomes partic- 
 ular and not universal. There is no evidence in 
 nature — other than such as is based upon prob- 
 ability ^ — of the universality of gravity or of any 
 other physical or chemical law. The assumption 
 of this universality arises from the necessity of 
 such universality in ideal sciences like mathe- 
 matics. That which gives universality to law is 
 mind. Thus, whenever an absolute character is 
 found in the physical laws, it is because the mind 
 stamps the facts as it finds them. 
 
 Chaos and confusion surround the will In Its 
 particular history, fon the moral laws or laws of 
 love presuppose all forms of opportunity. The 
 law of our being is primarily spiritual. Nothing 
 can be spiritual which is not free. The necessity 
 of freedom is the keynote of universal law. 
 
 The will is necessitated to choose. What we 
 think of as freedom is the exhilaration we feel 
 upon abandoning a lower, and coming into obedi- 
 ence to higher, law, into harmony with deeper 
 necessities. When for instance a man chooses 
 self-denial, in place of selfish desire, there is after 
 the abnegation an unpredictable unfettering of 
 his nature. Yet the opportunity to deny the 
 higher impulse is what makes volition real. The 
 soul is Godlike. It lives among laws which are 
 unlimited, laws incomprehensible but to itself. 
 It is itself absolute, carrying the eternal truth in 
 
 77 
 
CYCLES OF PERSONAL BELIEF 
 
 its eye. It creates with complete authority. 
 Necessity receives its creations as the cradle re- 
 ceives the baby. 
 
 UNITY 
 
 We are children of one spirit, we need have no 
 fear of universal laws, nor shyness in the presence 
 of ideas. As we come into unison with the uni- 
 versal elements, as we apprehend ideas in their 
 purity, we find the necessities are beneficent. We 
 do not chafe at law, because the utmost freedom 
 could not induce us to set our will in opposition 
 to the law of love. We perceive the vision of an 
 ideal sphere, a realm of truth bewilderingly bril- 
 liant and joyous. Our difficulty is in seeing the 
 truth clearly enough to be convinced of its cer- 
 tainty. There is a beauty and perfection about 
 ideas which we do not dare to think in any way 
 appertains to ourselves. It is not easy to own our 
 inheritance. We doggedly persist in a disconti- 
 nuity between ourselves and God. The ideas so 
 resplendent before the intellectual gaze seem alien 
 and unreal because not personal. 
 
 Yet if we ask ourselves where the self leaves off 
 and the external begins, we find at once that the 
 seat of consciousness is unknown. Without a 
 cortex, no consciousness. But we may say with 
 equal truth of an electric lighting plant, without a 
 bulb, no light. The dynamo may be going, the 
 current running in the wires, and yet, if no bulb 
 or similar device is introduced in the circuit, no 
 
 78 
 
UNITY 
 
 light will be visible. Our self is associated with 
 the resistance by which the current illuminates. 
 We know only our own cast of thought. We 
 attribute the idea of self to the particular limita- 
 tions against which the light of life is projected. 
 Thus, the child knowing nothing of dynamos and 
 wires will think that the bulb is the source of the 
 light. We similarly think of the brain as the 
 source of consciousness. Yet the supposition 
 that each conscious self is inevitably associated 
 with the particular brain it uses, has no basis in 
 necessity. 
 
 Every bit of consciousness is identical in certain 
 respects with every other bit of consciousness. 
 The manner in which fishes lose their little indi- 
 vidualities by the constant, devouring process of 
 marine life, is suggestive. Where does the aware- 
 ness of the clam leave off in favor of the satisfac- 
 tion in the crab who eats him.'* Has the victim 
 a divine intuition that his million cousins live 
 placidly on and on.f* There is no distinct line 
 where one consciousness leaves off and another 
 begins. On the other hand, every moment of time 
 gives, in each consciousness, some distinction 
 between itself and every other moment. Thus the 
 ideas of differentiation and unity are blended in 
 everything. The character of the unities is ex- 
 pressed in variety. But the unity of things is the 
 more fundamental element in their nature. 
 
 In the physical world the seat of consciousness 
 is not necessarily anywhere, whatever its special 
 
 79 
 
CYCLES OF PERSONAL BELIEF 
 
 manifestations may be. As the body is but a 
 sponge maintained by the liquids it absorbs, a 
 sponge perpetually fraying away at the edges, 
 and renewed many times within the lifetime of a 
 man, so also the thoughts of the individual are at 
 all times passing in and out of him, and all his 
 principles and concepts are built out of the com- 
 mon stock of humanity, and his own proprietor- 
 ship is an illusion. The self is deeper still. 
 
 If the stronger vibrations or currents in the 
 universe were annulled, we might perceive other 
 vibrations or currents as we perceive the starlight 
 when the nearer light of the sun becomes dim. 
 Thus we might find the remoter parts of nature, 
 the vegetation, and the rocks and sea, were linked 
 with our own being by intimate sympathies, more 
 exact and inevitable than our present poetic 
 fancies even give a hint of. Then our instinctive 
 repugnance to pantheism would seem trivial. 
 
 I recall the picture of a lily pond in a wood of 
 sassafras and tupelo. Over the flowers dragon- 
 flies are darting. On the margin are mosses and 
 ferns, sedges and reeds, and low arching loose- 
 strife, above which a bank of blueberry, clethra, 
 and other swamp bushes forms an encircling wall 
 of leaves. What has all this life in common, each 
 part with each.'' This picture lies in my mind a 
 unity. A unity it was when I came upon it, a 
 little gem in nature, complete in itself. It has its 
 own individual character shared by all its parts, 
 but deeper than that, it has the universal spirit of 
 
 80 
 
UNITY 
 
 life; and we may wonder as much at the varia- 
 tions between sedge and sedge, lily and lily, as at 
 the brooding unity of the whole. These flowers, 
 one much like another, reveal a single character, 
 exemplified many times, as a note or chord in 
 music may be repeated over and over again. 
 
 If one watches blackbirds wheeling over a 
 marsh, one may see thirty or forty individuals 
 change the direction of their flight apparently 
 upon a single impulse. Perhaps all react simul- 
 taneously to the same outward event, perhaps 
 one is leader, and all the rest follow him; but so 
 instantaneously is the signal obeyed that you will 
 fail to distinguish which the leader is. In either 
 case here is a single response linking these birds 
 together. The individual, as the spatial, differ- 
 ences are superficial. The birds feel alike and act 
 alike; essentially they are identical. It is but little 
 different with man. People often become nearly 
 identical in their sympathies, or with respect to 
 certain aspects of life they become completely 
 identical, the differences branching apart as they 
 meet a different set of conditions. Our differences 
 are annulled or held in abeyance by strong patri- 
 otic passions or similar influences; and like the 
 blackbirds, many men will act as one. 
 
 We are more or less remote from one another, 
 as one part of a man's body is more or less remote 
 from some other part. Personality is continuous. 
 Nowhere does your own personality leave off and 
 the external world begin. There is something for- 
 
 8i 
 
CYCLES OF PERSONAL BELIEF 
 
 eign in every particle of your body — something 
 which may be cast off, and the conscious self 
 remain the same, and there is something apper- 
 taining to you throughout the whole extent of 
 nature. Intimate sympathies lie in store for us 
 among alien surroundings, or remote corners of 
 nature, and even peculiar and strange forms con- 
 vey an echo of familiarity. The unity which the 
 eye gives the pond is not arbitrary or fanciful. 
 It is a necessity in the mind to find nature thus. 
 All is a hierarchy of unities branching from deeper 
 unities. Our particular self as we ordinarily think 
 of it is but a trifling part of our whole nature. The 
 self even in its particular history dates back into 
 the obscurity of the generation which preceded us. 
 The blood-line has a strange and shifting identity 
 throughout its length. The self as a private indi- 
 vidual is lost among its limitations only to reap- 
 pear in deeper more far-reaching relationships. 
 
 Personality itself has an incalculable scope. 
 Our astronomical so-called universe is particular 
 and individual, albeit shafts of universal thought 
 illuminate its vastness. We constantly attribute 
 universality where it does not belong, trusting 
 too far our particular notions; and shut out the 
 influence of wild or wayward instincts which 
 could lead us to an outlook on a higher sphere. 
 
 SELECTION 
 
 Each human soul is born with an instinct which 
 teaches him there exists a reality better than his 
 
 82 
 
SELECTION 
 
 present condition. The ideals express a spiritual 
 necessity. The light of ideas shining upon what is 
 wrong leads us to strive toward what is right. 
 Consciousness evolves by its own choices. 
 
 Among the flavors and aromas of our particular 
 occasional sensations we pick and choose. We 
 pursue, childlike, whatever is attractive. This 
 instinct is innocent and strong. For, after all, it is 
 not among severe moral restrictions that happi- 
 ness is to be found; it is rather in the quest of the 
 beautiful. We need not court difficulty, for if 
 once we perceive flashes and gleams of the ideal 
 beauty, our road is rugged enough. Love is utterly 
 imperative. The operation of its law compels; 
 if we have ever seen or even dreamed of the better 
 we can never be content with the worse. This law 
 applies to everything, sensation, thought, and 
 affection alike. We do not seek discipline, we 
 seek a finer and ever finer happiness. Discipline, 
 by love's own necessities, governs our seeking. 
 And as we realize more and more fully the nature 
 of true happiness, we take discipline the more 
 cheerfully, and shirk it less and less. 
 
 Beauty is the immediate and intelligible goal of 
 our particular progress. We would not ordain 
 virtue for others. We would give them beauty. 
 For ourselves we cultivate beauty by pursuing 
 virtue. We value the immediate objects with 
 which we deal for their beauty, and virtue is the 
 soil or nourishment upon which they live. 
 
 Now an object is but a temporary crystalliza- 
 83 
 
CYCLES OF PERSONAL BELIEF 
 
 tion of an impulse in its course through the mysti- 
 cally uniform substance. Our attention takes the 
 impression of objects and becomes a propagator 
 of selected pieces in the web of impulses. You 
 look into a garden. Your eye roves around among 
 the flowers and presently the attention rests upon 
 some flower, and instantly the mind makes a men- 
 tal note of the pleasure it has just experienced. 
 Again and again the eye reverts to that one speci- 
 men, and later, — months, it may be years, later, 
 — the memory comes back sweet and fresh. Then 
 perhaps in time you make your own garden. You 
 seek that flower, find its name, obtain and culti- 
 vate it, and thus your cherished impression is 
 propagated in the physical world. The home and 
 family exist by virtue of the same law. 
 
 The world progresses by a process of selection 
 and emphasis. Every word and action is a carving 
 out of a plastic material some exemplification of 
 what the speaker or doer prefers. 
 
 The potency in the eye itself is illustrated by 
 an experience related to me by a friend. He had 
 spent several days at cow-punching, — an employ- 
 ment with which he was unfamiliar, — and in the 
 evening, while riding away from the herd through 
 the woods, discovered that he saw the forms of 
 cows continually appearing among the trees. On 
 closer examination he would find no cow in sight. 
 He explained the phenomena thus: in the lines 
 on the retina of his eye, presented by the trees 
 and rocks as he passed through the woods, an 
 
 84 
 
SELECTION 
 
 almost infinite number of combinations exists. 
 The cows being, therefore, abnormally prominent 
 to his mind, he sees them continually, though 
 there are none in sight, unconsciously choosing 
 their forms out of the labyrinth of lines presented 
 to the eye. 
 
 How easy to conceive through the same influ- 
 ence the forms of satyrs and nymphs in a miscel- 
 laneous woodland scene, the expectant eye sup- 
 plying the art, which for the painter signalizes or 
 groups the lines which present these forms. Even 
 so it is with omens. Among the vast and intricate 
 data before our eyes and ears, he who has a pre- 
 monitory instinct within him, places his attention 
 upon the significant fact or combination of lines. 
 We speak of something arresting our attention. 
 Our attention arrests the something. That which 
 we give our attention to, carries the expression of 
 our meaning or feeling or state of mind. A rein- 
 terpretation is a redistribution of attention. A 
 new account of a fact in history is often different 
 from the old merely because the emphasis or 
 stress is arranged difl"erently. When materialist 
 and idealist thrash out their differences, it comes 
 in the end to a question of emphasis. Any sen- 
 tence means a slightly different thing according 
 to where it is accented. Nature looks wholly 
 different according to what it is called. 
 
 In manners, in customs, in conversation, in all 
 human intercourse, this selective habit marks the 
 domestic life of the creative impulse. It is not by 
 
 8s 
 
CYCLES OF PERSONAL BELIEF 
 
 idle repetitions that we advance. Thoroughness 
 alone is vain. It is a greater test of character to 
 be discriminating than to be complete. The ency- 
 clopaedic method of appreciating truth is utterly- 
 fallacious. Our function as living beings is to 
 choose. As Burbank throws away countless 
 plants, after selecting a handful which carry the 
 one character he values, so our records are shuffled 
 into oblivion but for a gleam or spark here and 
 there saved from the dross. So also all the labori- 
 ous efforts of our lives are subordinate to a few 
 golden impulses, a few hours of inspiration, a few 
 communions of love. 
 
 Thus our world cannot by any means be taken 
 at its face value. There is a meaning back of 
 every impression. The illusive joy of childhood is 
 rooted deep in nature. The strange feeling that 
 awakes at the cry of certain birds, a blue jay in 
 the swamp, a wood pewee in deep woods, or a 
 hawk over the marsh, proves that these sounds 
 are for us, even if we cannot interpret the mean- 
 ing. Within you lurks a predestined monition 
 which calls to your notice those things which 
 shall become the food of your existence. 
 
 Often our progress comes from the reinterpre- 
 tation of facts which we cannot change. Our 
 words are just as fatal as our deeds. Our names, 
 our whole vocabulary, are constructive or destruc- 
 tive, much more our thoughts. How the thought 
 of home sings in the heart of an American when 
 he first sees the Stars and Stripes floating in a 
 
 86 
 
SELECTION 
 
 foreign harbor. Then for the first time perhaps 
 he becomes a citizen of this country. It is largely 
 by the recognition of greater relationships in 
 commonplace things that we grow. There is no 
 experience so revolutionary as the act of "un- 
 masking the disguised Gods." 
 
 You cannot escape the influence of names, of 
 words, of suggestions and associations in yourself 
 and your companions. All society is built upon 
 them. The fashion is as much a part of the stream 
 of time as the bubbles are a part of the river. 
 Everything has its sign and symbol. Everything 
 has its word to give. You too must say something. 
 The bluebird and the song sparrow sing and must 
 sing. In the South the cardinal sits on a tree 
 pouring into the soft air a stream of liquid beauty. 
 He is but obeying the simplest natural law. Like 
 him you are impelled by an internal necessity to 
 express yourself. But more consciously than he 
 you are dedicated, and cannot content yourself 
 until you have rendered your best. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 REILLUSION 
 
 At a certain stage of life a man discovers that 
 criticism and analysis are self-destructive, that 
 scepticism as a permanent attitude of mind is 
 profitless, and with this discovery he begins to 
 feel a new respect for his early impressions. If 
 you have seen a beautiful picture, even if it van- 
 ish in the next instant, that one moment was 
 absolutely real. Thus it is : the spirit of life forever 
 welling up within the universe after long periods 
 of dearth brings us fairy gold once more. It is 
 comparatively unimportant by what name we 
 call the spirit so long as we commune with it in 
 some manner. It may be saints or fairies, or birds 
 or flowers, commonplace or dream, intimacies or 
 festivals. Our eyes are opened to vital truths, 
 indiscriminately, by a variety of means. 
 
 As we begin to treat our own consciousness with 
 the reverence which is its due, romance begins to 
 steal into the world, now here and now there, 
 until one day we discover that the poetic element 
 which we thought we had analyzed and explained, 
 had in reality eluded us, had retreated out of our 
 experience long before our clumsy thoughts could 
 
 88 
 
REILLUSION 
 
 grapple with it. And here are our illusions back 
 again, or new ones more potent to make us 
 wonder. 
 
 There is a wayward element in nature. We 
 only half trust the laws. Here is a field of grain 
 upon a hill — a high wind sweeps across it, the 
 light and shadow in constant rhythm play over 
 the surface as the gusts follow one another. Once 
 it was the Rye-mother or the Rye-wolf in the 
 crop. Now, though no one has ever examined or 
 computed these motions, yet, because of analogy 
 derived from other discoveries, it is law. There 
 was a time when man dealt with these things by 
 a fantastic imagery. Perhaps he became gradu- 
 ally conscious that his mind was creative as well 
 as nature; but his own fancies were grafted upon 
 an interpretation of what he thought was real. 
 As the long filaments of algae might have been 
 taken for an actual mermaid's hair, so here in the 
 grain a moving, conscious, wilful spirit was seen. 
 And still the actual relation of these living mo- 
 tions to the law is unknown. Here is vegetative 
 life, here a sleeping spirit responding to the touch 
 of the wind. And you wonder if this is really gov- 
 erned by law, or if governed by law what is this 
 mysterious personality in the grain, which an- 
 swers to your own heart. Ah, the law has nothing 
 to say. The spirit of romance has touched your 
 heart, some hint reflected to you, whence you 
 know not, but you recognized it. You should 
 kneel down and thank God, and pray that your 
 
 89 
 
CYCLES OF PERSONAL BELIEF 
 
 intellect may at some other point thaw into 
 fluidity. 
 
 Those people who tell us they have no illusions 
 might well be asked to tell us what the exact 
 truth is, for the assertion that one has no illusions 
 is a covert claim to infallibility. But happiness 
 lies in the other direction. Give us the people 
 who swim in a sea of illusions; and if there is a 
 law within their joys it cannot be expressed but 
 by music and song. Who could ever name the 
 law of enthusiasm or of abandon.'* — an infinitely 
 subtle law put into the mind of the poet gratis. 
 He is a king in his sphere, the laws must dance or 
 sing for him if he wishes, and the light of his mind 
 pierces the remotest corners of nature, and makes 
 all physics and chemistry irrelevant. He cares 
 not a whit whether or not there is a mathematics 
 for the verities with which he deals. 
 
 What possible explanation could any physical 
 science give for the color and form in our paint- 
 ings, for the shapes of our monuments and sculp- 
 ture? What natural law accounts for the Elgin 
 marbles.'^ There they are in contrast to all the 
 rocks and stones upon the earth. Manifestly they 
 pleased some consciousness, and there was a 
 genius with an intuitive knowledge that just these 
 shapes would please. And if some one suggests 
 that these marbles were made in imitation of liv- 
 ing forms, we may reply that it is not the imita- 
 tive part that interests us, but that excellence, 
 that beauty, be it ever so little, which surpasses 
 
 90 
 
REILLUSION 
 
 the models which the artist may have used; and 
 that selective power which made him choose just 
 those models from amid a thousand other avail- 
 able ones. 
 
 That which governs the production of works of 
 art is a potency inherent in consciousness, a 
 selecting power which must act. We choose what 
 to us is desirable, we judge by what pleases. The 
 working of this law, if law is the right word, we 
 cannot trace. There is an unknown, unaccount- 
 able element in pleasure directly influencing our 
 choices. Since also the sources and elements of 
 pleasure are in one sense primary and elemental 
 in themselves; we cannot calculate the original 
 causes of life, of growth, of progress toward the 
 beautiful, by any science whatever. And as every 
 atom of matter is embedded in an aether whose 
 nature and properties are inexplicable, so every 
 event, every experience, every thought is em- 
 bedded in an absolute mysticism. 
 
 II 
 
 Now when one finds that his beliefs, his im- 
 pressions, his contact with the shifting phenomena 
 of the world have yet a reality and potency which 
 during his periods of doubt seemed lost, he begins 
 to enquire with a keen appetite for the richness 
 in nature which he thought was gone forever. 
 He begins to question how the belief in the super- 
 natural came to possess its wonder, its flavor, its 
 profound significance. There is always something 
 
 91 
 
CYCLES OF PERSONAL BELIEF 
 
 in the totality of a belief which its elemental 
 factors fail to explain. 
 
 There is a sea captain in the New England 
 coasting trade, a man of chequered career, who 
 once told me about a haunted ship which he 
 used to take to sea. There were uncanny noises 
 in the hold, which greatly disturbed the crew. He 
 stuttered as he said, "I told them it w-w-w-was 
 r-r-r-rats " ; then he added, " But it w-w-w-was n't 
 r-r-r-rats." Apparently his was the type of mind 
 which believed in these things, believed in the 
 actual presence of supernatural elements. Well, 
 what was actually there.? The captain will prob- 
 ably die in the belief that the cause of these 
 noises was spirits; the crew will perhaps die in 
 the belief that "it was rats"; and you and I may 
 believe it was the creaking of the ship herself. It 
 may be assumed that there was a physical basis 
 for the noises; that is to say, there were sound 
 vibrations, even if they were actuated in the first 
 place by spirits. There is then a physical basis, 
 and three diverse interpretations of the actuating 
 cause. Three beliefs exist side by side profoundly 
 modifying the mental impressions derived from 
 an identical phenomenon. Now the interesting 
 question is, and always has been in such cases, 
 whence came the sense of supernatural power 
 which gave rise to the supposition that spirits 
 haunted the ship.^* Supposing that rats did cause 
 the noises, then how came the captain to imagine 
 spirits; how account for the awe in the captain's 
 
 92 
 
REILLUSION 
 
 mind ? Is it not more remarkable that he should 
 conceive of spirits if there are none, than if they 
 actually exist? It is true the superstition may 
 have been imported from another mind; but that 
 simply transfers the problem to the other mind. 
 Where does the superstition originally come from ? 
 It cannot matter much what the data of the senses 
 may be if the mind is free to read that data in its 
 own way. 
 
 That which makes you and me discard the 
 crude superstition is its unreasonableness in the 
 light of other facts which have led to more 
 comprehensive interpretations. We prefer more 
 refined superstitions that we have not yet recog- 
 nized as such. The old mythologies were not 
 gratuitous falsehoods, not capricious fabrications. 
 They were necessitated outbursts toward truth. 
 They recognized an inner actuality in nature lost 
 sight of in more recent sceptical processes of 
 reasoning. Our picture of nature is in process of 
 evolution. But the passing bloom of early im- 
 pressions, the glamour that vanishes as we make 
 the outlines more clear-cut and strong, has not 
 gone forever. Whatever added richness or charm 
 to the beliefs that have been superseded may yet 
 be harmonized with our present conceptions by 
 knowledge yet to come. 
 
 The fairies are not dead; they have only been 
 driven from their former homes. When men pro- 
 fessed to have discovered the truth, when they 
 claimed for their own imaginations the authorship 
 
 93 
 
CYCLES OF PERSONAL BELIEF 
 
 of the fairy forms which they perceived, the fairies 
 withdrew. The forms of trees, of ferns, of flowers, 
 and of animals were already preoccupied. Man- 
 kind gave himself over to scientific investigation, 
 to minute examination, to the exploring of the 
 whole length and breadth of the natural world. 
 Now and then some illusory charm flashed 
 through his brain, some lure which had little or 
 no relation to the work in hand. He plodded on, 
 until on the confines of science he found the 
 whole journey left him where it found him. This 
 world was of his own choosing. That one celestial 
 hint discredited it all. The fairies are not dead; 
 they have but retreated to a more congenial 
 sphere. 
 
 Why has the blindness of materialism clung so 
 persistently to modern life.'* You hear music that 
 revolutionizes your mood, recalls long-forgotten 
 emotions or stirs every fibre in your body with 
 a fire of activity. Afterwards you think all this 
 was the physical efl'ect of material agencies. Wine 
 or opium has done as much for some men. As if 
 these agencies were not the merest common car- 
 riers, as if opium could produce a vision, where 
 there was no vision to be produced. As if you 
 created the landscape by opening the window 
 shutters. The tones of flute or violin or voice of 
 man or woman have little or no existence but as 
 they rise to meet a living need, but as they carry 
 an extra-material meaning, — a meaning known 
 only by the heart, understood only by being alive. 
 
 94 
 
REILLUSION 
 
 Whatever is beautiful the earth strives for. 
 Here and there the cadence of some song — the 
 tones perhaps of a great soprano — floats us 
 toward the shore of paradise. What would we 
 not do to reproduce these moments ! What would 
 we not do to have them perpetually renew them- 
 selves in our experience! The forms we love best 
 enjoy already a s.ort of immortality. The Greek 
 pillar rises in countless villages and cities the 
 world over. Our study and art is to combine and 
 preserve the finer essence in outward things. 
 
 But we must be cautious in our conclusions, for 
 beauty thrives in evanescent forms. It would not 
 be so potent if it were not so rare. The rosebud 
 or wave crest whose beauty is loveliest in its most 
 transient stage reminds us that the happier life is 
 short and pure. Life need not be secure. What 
 care we for its pompous stabilities. Immortality 
 exists only by an escape from Time. 
 
 All the potency of imagination, all the dream 
 mystery of joy, all the richness in the universe 
 is contained within the spirit; and our varying 
 shades of emotion, our awe and wonder, our hopes 
 and aspirations are inflowings of something real. 
 The natural universe is a series of responses to 
 the pulses of who knows what fathomless soul. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Scholars may well have learned by this time, 
 such emphasis has been laid upon the point, that 
 persons who live subjectively, who recognize the 
 
 95 
 
CYCLES OF PERSONAL BELIEF 
 
 authority of the human mind as primary, and the 
 objects about which the mind thinks as secondary, 
 tend to disregard those factors in experience which 
 are determined in and by the external world. The 
 thinker, the philosopher, is always regarded with 
 a certain degree of distrust, connoted by such 
 characterizations as theorist, visionary, and the 
 like. Any one suspected of belonging in this cate- 
 gory is frequently urged to look into the world to 
 find what the facts actually are. But if the phil- 
 osopher looks into the world and finds every- 
 where, even from the remotest corners of nature, 
 reflected the light of some mind, he soon wishes 
 to get his knowledge first hand. If the scientist 
 takes his readings from the face of nature by the 
 light of his mind, the primary elements of the 
 interpretation exist in the nature of conscious- 
 ness, and are available for the philosopher too. 
 But also he yearns for a union with the deeper 
 or universal mind which unites these interpreta- 
 tions and makes them real. 
 
 While much of our experience is capable of a 
 tolerably exact interpretation, we cannot aff"ord 
 to ignore the unknown or mystic side of facts. As 
 we become more strict in our judgments we be- 
 come more and more aware of the pervasive mys- 
 tery, the infinite unknown close behind all that is 
 known. But more than this, because of the posi- 
 tive nature of our own ideas, our own activities 
 and decisions, we recognize behind each concrete 
 fact is lurking something intimately associated 
 
 96 
 
REILLUSION 
 
 with our happiness. A gift Is a gift by virtue of a 
 spiritual element. No physical law explains the 
 value of deference. Our calls, our congratula- 
 tions, our condolences, all our amenities are 
 charged with a non-physical magnetism. Hence 
 there comes a time when the enquirer gives over 
 studying the history of matter, and interests him- 
 self in the history of the soul. Matter thenceforth 
 becomes a language only. 
 
 Life, as we know It, at best is fragmentary. 
 The transiency of personal happiness gives all 
 life a visionary tinge. The physical continuity, 
 the temporal continuity, Is subject to savage 
 breaches. Accidents and catastrophes make no 
 account of the visible objects we love. The mind 
 has envisaged the world in cold, impersonal 
 abstractions, frozen Ideas, mathematical and ex- 
 act; but the heart prefers an irrational dream, 
 if only it is warm. It has no interest in the per- 
 fection of the physical law which brought it sor- 
 row. Not only Is the soul expressed in what we 
 call waking states, but also in dreams. 
 
 We find that dreams have space and time as 
 much as the waking state. In fact a dream has all 
 the factors of a waking state. The difference Is 
 that waking states have been more completely 
 unified by the mind, and the breaks between one 
 set of phenomena and another have been subor- 
 dinated to those universal elements with which 
 consciousness has found that facts conform. The 
 unity which connects dreams with one another or 
 
 97 
 
CYCLES OF PERSONAL BELIEF 
 
 with waking moments is a spiritual unity, its 
 most definite ties are matters of sentiment. 
 Beautiful faces recur in sleep usually with the 
 utmost truth, at times with artistic perfection. 
 There is no break in the objects or associations 
 of love. These things ride at ease upon the turbu- 
 lent waves of dreams, which completely upset the 
 formality or continuity of space and time. 
 
 Suppose that the apostles dreamed so vividly 
 that Christ walked upon the water that there was 
 no difference in distinctness between the dream- 
 ing and waking state. Suppose, for instance, that 
 Simon Peter's consciousness passes from one con- 
 dition to the other and back again. It would soon 
 become apparent that the laws which governed 
 the activity of phenomena in one state did not 
 govern the activity of phenomena in the other. 
 But if each were equally real seeming during its 
 presence, we could not call one any more actual 
 than the other. 
 
 In experience, however, a series of states of 
 mind clings together with many universal ele- 
 ments in common, and these states are broken at 
 regular intervals by states of partial conscious- 
 ness in which come the dream states, for the most 
 part unrelated to one another, and lacking any 
 rational principles for their order and behavior. 
 Hence we call those states which cohere, real or 
 actual, and those fragmentary bits of experience 
 which come in sleep, or float detached and incon- 
 sequent around the edges of waking life, unreal, 
 
 98 
 
REILLUSION 
 
 insubstantial, or Imaginary. But these states as 
 I have said are often permeated by a spiritual 
 unity. There is no reason to condemn even the 
 wildest, most chaotic dream as unmeaning simply 
 because it is a dream. It must influence us or not 
 like a waking state according to its merits. There 
 are delicate and essential hints which the mind 
 seems incapable of grasping when broad awake, 
 and day dreams are a sort of ante-chamber where 
 much of our progress is originated. In our fancies 
 we dream out the drops of balm, from our crude, 
 distressing experience. At night, after the day's 
 attempts have all been made, and the results 
 have become an irrevocable part of our life, hope 
 gathers the golden meanings and washes them 
 till they again reflect the sky. 
 
 The whole series of waking states in the light of 
 higher ideals are fragmentary and irrational. But 
 more than this our particular lives are prepara- 
 tory and provisional. The prophetic vision of the 
 future, which is simply the lead the soul must 
 follow in its growth, is always visionary. The 
 highest aims of mankind must necessarily be dim 
 while at a distance. 
 
 We cannot afford to scorn dreams. It is their 
 agency often which brings us to the verge of the 
 promised land; where we look once more upon 
 the splendor of childhood. But howsoever we 
 yearn, our mortality confronts us at the gateway 
 of realization. As distance must forever be dis- 
 tant from the human eye nor can ever. become 
 
 99 
 
CYCLES OF PERSONAL BELIEF 
 
 near, however much we travel over the earth's 
 surface and approach objects which were once 
 distant, so also the essence of beauty is always 
 beyond our reach. The distance itself is sacred 
 and inviolable. It is a permanent mystery, born 
 of the union of permanence and beauty. We may 
 gaze at it as at a lovely child, but the parent is 
 immeasurably more distant. Our own heart tells 
 us as we grasp at each happy realization, if it is 
 attainable it cannot be my original imperious 
 dream. 
 
 Yet there are deep satisfactions and rich joys. 
 Nature is always leading us on; and we forget 
 that abject adoration with which we lay before 
 the altar of Beauty. You step out into the soft 
 breezes of a warm autumn day; walk where the 
 leaves are brightest; there is a sensuous pleasure 
 in the woodland smells and the colors of autumn 
 foliage. But something beyond the simple pleas- 
 ure came with the pleasure. At times the deep 
 richness of early associations is found among the 
 twilight tones and shadows. Sometimes we hear 
 over the crest of the next hill the echoes of a fairy 
 festival, on the next instant lost to the wistful 
 ear. The subtle spirit is ever stealing about 
 through nature peeping at us here and there. 
 
 All these natural impressions have a greater 
 hold upon us as we recognize the potency with 
 which each personal glimpse of consciousness is 
 thrown. The intellectual sphere is a region of 
 extreme joys. We find paths that lead on and on. 
 
 lOO 
 
REILLUSION 
 
 Sometimes it is a familiar memory, sometimes an 
 alien gleam. The brain is stored with recollections 
 which group themselves by inexplicable affini- 
 ties. Certain eyes suggest the distant mountains. 
 Early dreams relate themselves to travels into 
 remote countries. Vivid chance impressions, a 
 tree, a painting, an entry, a bit of blue sea become 
 associated with stimulating or fascinating persons 
 and always touch the same chord. 
 
 All these experiences suggest the infinite relat- 
 edness of the mind. Those impressions which 
 strike a deeper note may perhaps be a deeper 
 part of our experience, shared with other persons, 
 sympathies which reinforce one another. Those 
 dreams which startle and rouse us, often pro- 
 phetic, at least in the light of sentiment, are so 
 because they are part of an ideal ritual, habits of 
 long standing, in the intellectual world. And the 
 shock of recognition comes because we are simply 
 verifying what we have known before. 
 
 There comes at last a time when the most exact 
 truth appears like a fairy story, gives us the same 
 simple wonder that a miracle would have given 
 us before. And as the daylight of ideas shines 
 brighter the witchery is not dispelled, but rather 
 we recognize that it also is reasonable. The state* 
 of reillusion is not the fostering of old illusions, 
 but the return of fulness and wonder to every 
 sight, sound, smell, or taste, to every impression, 
 fiction, and dream. It is not that the fairies come 
 back. The fairies were never seen, that was their 
 
 lOI 
 
CYCLES OF PERSONAL BELIEF 
 
 charm. Realities they were which did not appear. 
 It is that the fairy quality returns to nature, the 
 fairy feeling to the heart. 
 
 Every too material age will crumble away be- 
 fore the believers in witchery, in spirits, and in 
 Gods. But when clearer light pours in, these in 
 turn prove crude gropings, ministers to ideas 
 which have been familiar to the simplest child. 
 Still comes the morning freshness to teach us the 
 immortality of youth. Nature is utterly impera- 
 tive. Life surges on, and while it flows full and 
 strong what care we for Greece and Rome. The 
 world has its Parthenons and Shakespeares but 
 monumental as they are, they are but monu- 
 ments. We thirst for what is immediate. We sus- 
 pect Nature has let slip her secret somewhere 
 and hunt industriously for the lost clue. But hers 
 is an open secret published to all the world. It is 
 the universe riding here before our eyes, and sing- 
 ing in our ears. We blink before its dazzling light, 
 we falter as we speak its impulses. We never 
 know that we always know. 
 
 The life we see breaks on the crest of an illim- 
 itable ocean. We are embarked in a shallow san- 
 ity upon this sea. Those formulas, those codes, 
 reasonings, rules, names, all the expressions which 
 we use are severed in our experience by lapses of 
 oblivion and unconsciousness. They are almost 
 accidental in the flow of life, like the little swirling 
 eddies of a vast, sleek tide. We take up such 
 
 102 
 
REILLUSION 
 
 reason as we need-but it melts as ice melts, it is 
 gone as the mist is gone. Banker and broker, 
 student and artisan, even among the actions 
 which they understand best sink momently to 
 an exhaustless cause. The stabilities of fact give 
 way to deeper heavings ; and the geology of intel- 
 lect from time to time reveals cycles of whose arc 
 we had no surmise. At last some hint tells us 
 the slow combustion of mortality was lighted, 
 even as the gleams of heaven are lighted, at Love's 
 original fire, and the whole Universe burns. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 IMMORTALITY 
 
 Go to a headland where a deep current sweeps 
 into a deeper sea. Beyond its eddies is one un- 
 swerving trend. Even so the waters of life, mix- 
 ing, merging, in mist and darkness, or lined with 
 sunlit ripples, seek the open ocean. 
 
 Life breaks up periodically, and with each 
 break, large tracts of our being die. From the 
 home influences we go to school, and childhood's 
 folklore is given up. From school to college, from 
 college to the world, each is a form of death. 
 Habits and customs contain us, hem in our vital- 
 ity, and become deeply associated with what we 
 mean by self. When these habits and customs are 
 gone, much of what we felt to be self is stripped 
 away. But for a healthy soul all these transitions 
 are as the smaller current flowing into the larger, 
 not a loss but a gain. 
 
 Death is a phantom. What can we know of an 
 absolute end? In its nature it is unknowable, an 
 unbroken, dreamless rest. If consciousness lingers 
 after what we call death, that consciousness has 
 not suffered death. All that we think of in or near 
 the fading hours lies in a twilight, the facts 
 shrouded by approaching darkness. The objec- 
 
 104 
 
IMMORTALITY 
 
 live manifestation, the disintegration of the body, 
 absorbs the powers of imagination. We are alarmed 
 by the break in nature, or the pain attendant 
 upon so many forms of dissolution. 
 
 We have a vast weight of superstition to over- 
 come. But all these fearful imaginings are the 
 work of the mind. The skull and cross-bones, the 
 spectre, the gruesome or hypnotic conceptions, 
 as in the picture of Dead Island, or in Homer's 
 strange and beautiful narrative of Odysseus' 
 journey to the other world, and all the imagery 
 and symbolism are a product of life — life as it 
 faces the mighty phantom, as it yields itself to 
 fear, or struggles in pain and grief. Nothing posi- 
 tive can be said of death. For there is nothing 
 positive about it. We can only assure ourselves 
 of what death is not. We can but prune away 
 false notions. 
 
 Yet the fact that this nothingness cuts athwart 
 our whole temporal life brings the problem of im- 
 mortality home to every living thing. Is there 
 an inevitable negative which cuts off the individ- 
 ual self from the deathless, universal truth .f* 
 
 The problem of death brings all mankind into 
 sympathy. We build and build, in the family, in 
 society, in nationality, structures which we vainly 
 hope will last. The human elements are so pre- 
 cious. Friendship and affection are all in all. How 
 can these be at the mercy of poison and chance 
 or accident, of decease and age.'* Yet the laws of 
 
 105 
 
CYCLES OF PERSONAL BELIEF 
 
 termination are utterly inexorable. The heart is 
 ever crying to know more. 
 
 For this reason those who have suffered, unless 
 withheld by rigid scepticism, are ever wishing to 
 grope into futurity. The same tendency which 
 leads us to evoke a spectre in the name of death, 
 leads us to imagine a continuation of our own 
 temporal or mortal history beyond the temporal 
 event of death. Literature is full of projections 
 of this life upon the curtain of the unknown. 
 Some of us have our own ghosts. And can there 
 be any one who has not felt the influence of the 
 spirit world? If only in literature, we yet know of 
 such vivid realities as Hamlet's ghost. We have 
 half believed or wholly believed in a personal 
 actuality communicating with us from the twi- 
 light zone. Yet only to the power of the imagina- 
 tion is this a testimony. Could we look behind the 
 curtain, we should not find even the scurrying 
 of rats. 
 
 There may be communication with the dead, 
 but if there is, we have no way of distinguishing 
 it from the activities of memory. If a friend who 
 has died appears to you, you have no way to be 
 sure it is he but by memory. If he appears in new 
 surroundings, he has not returned to this earth. 
 If he tells of events unknown to you which you 
 later verify, it is rather evidence of thought 
 transference from some living mind attributed 
 by your dream-thought to him, than evidence of 
 any new activity on his part. Indeed, suppose a 
 
 io6 
 
IMMORTALITY 
 
 dream so vivid and continuous that you have all 
 the reality of a new set of experiences with your 
 dead friend, a new and fresh intercourse, it can 
 still be the work of your memory. Upon awaking 
 and finding that his body is no longer of this earth, 
 you can have no possible way of appraising the 
 event or naming its cause. 
 
 It is not that there is any prohibitive reason 
 why we should not receive impressions from per- 
 sonalities which are actually living, after they 
 have passed the point of death. It is simply that 
 such manifestations appear to be unprovable and 
 also unimportant. The dead do not guide us 
 ihrough revolutions, or if they do it Is by the 
 influence of their intelligible imprint left In the 
 world before they died. They do not write epics 
 or paint pictures or solve scientific problems. 
 They do none of the characteristic things which 
 make them what they are to us while living. 
 Obviously, except In cases whose causes are 
 already determined, they could not foretell future 
 events, because we are ourselves free to make 
 future events. 
 
 The Influence of each personality Is printed on 
 the world as the tones of a voice are printed on a 
 graphophone record. And as the echo Is released 
 at times and takes eff"ect In the world, so from 
 the face of the world or from the impressions in 
 the memory the personal influences of bygone 
 days again and again are set reechoing. 
 
 Whether or not, among the many unexplained 
 107 
 
CYCLES OF PERSONAL BELIEF 
 
 influences upon our lives there are some which 
 emanate from new activities in the life of those 
 who have gone, we cannot tell. Nor is it easy to 
 believe the question concerns us deeply. The 
 dead never come back and appeal directly to the 
 reason with new arguments for their continued 
 existence. The life which they have already lived 
 is sacred. We do not wish it desecrated by one 
 false word. May we not suppose the soul has in a 
 lifetime enough use of this mortal mode of ex- 
 pression, and that is why we die.'* All that we love 
 comes through this medium; all that we love can 
 come through it no longer. Is not the memory 
 the holiest link that later on will ever connect us 
 with this vision of each other which now is all 
 that an earthly life can give^ 
 
 Earthly life — but what do we mean by this-f* 
 We know too well the provisional and fragmen- 
 tary nature of our little existence here, to believe 
 there is no larger sphere impermeated by a more 
 wakeful life. Why, the very sense of its inade- 
 quacy subordinates this visible world to the cry 
 of the soul. Indeed our discontent could only 
 come from an innate knowledge of a brighter 
 reality. He is a poor student of his own conscious- 
 ness who cannot see that life is immortal. The 
 immortal nouns of thought imply an immortal 
 thinker. The life of ideas goes ringing on through 
 the universe forever. They are utterly beyond the 
 reach of death. 
 
 io8 
 
IMMORTALITY 
 
 But the immortality which the intellect admits 
 seems, at first sight anyway, cold and impersonal. 
 The little self within has other and nearer inter- 
 ests. What intimacy have you or I with the 
 heaven of ideas ? If these great truths were beauti- 
 ful, if they enraptured us in our finer moments, 
 we received no promise from them as to hearth 
 and home. 
 
 The ideas have many forms of continuity. In 
 the first place they have given their own immor- 
 tality to the material essences of this world. The 
 circulation of the elements about the planet 
 exhibits an equilibrium which we translate as an 
 endless system of cycles. Even if the world is 
 cooling down we believe the astronomical cycles 
 follow self-similar laws forever. The chemical 
 atoms persist through successive transformations. 
 Thus the material of the body is never annihi- 
 lated. 
 
 But this cold permanence in matter gives slight 
 consolation to the individual self. The cycles 
 interest us only as they afi"ect consciousness. The 
 perpetually renewing seasons, which give the 
 return of spring after the deathlike phase of 
 winter, come closer to the personal problem. The 
 cycles of nature reflect the cycles of mental states. 
 
 Now a life, to be life, must change or at any rate 
 know change. Yet how can things change forever 
 or change at all and yet be immortal? Evidently 
 an element of change belongs to all particular 
 things, and this element of change is an evidence 
 
 109 
 
CYCLES OF PERSONAL BELIEF 
 
 of mortality in them. If, however, a change is 
 but a cycle or period, the relation of a part of the 
 cycle to its recurrence may explain our difficulty. 
 The circulation of material elements suggests the 
 periodicity of moods. Our memories will not come 
 back to us on some days, whereas on others they 
 return with startling freshness. We pass through 
 cycles of experience and frequently find ourselves 
 traversing familiar ground. 
 
 An element of sameness, an element of change, 
 go together to make up all life. Yet the element 
 of change itself has a sort of immortality, for in 
 its application to particular life it is universal. 
 This thought suggests that the whole of life is 
 immortal when viewed from the standpoint of 
 ideas, and mortal only when viewed from the 
 standpoint of particulars. We can see how in the 
 infinite activity of change exists the possibility 
 that everything which ever has been or ever can 
 be in the universe shall recur. 
 
 The theory, however, of an absolute recurrence 
 due to a complete cycle in which experience begins 
 to relive itself when the cycle is ended, and repro- 
 duces each successive passage of the cycle exactly 
 point for point, means nothing. For if two cycles 
 were identical in every particular they could have 
 no knowledge of each other, they must coincide ab- 
 solutely, and two, ten, or an infinity of them would 
 be no different from one. Imagining them end to 
 end means no more than imagining them all going 
 on at once. 
 
 no 
 
IMMORTALITY 
 
 The desirability of the recurrence of an experi- 
 ence rests upon the need that each recurrence 
 shall be under at least slightly altered circum- 
 stances. We have no wish for an absolute recur- 
 rence. Even when we imagine that we wish an 
 identical reproduction of a sensation, we are 
 deluded ; we wish that sensation enhanced by the 
 after knowledge that it was worthy to be repeated. 
 We never really want back the ignorance which 
 a state of innocence would imply. The love of 
 innocence is really the love of health. If our 
 receptive organs are healthy, it is a gain to have 
 our memory alive. 
 
 The theory of recurrence gains vitality from 
 the spiral tendency of our progress. We come 
 back over the same part of the field, but higher 
 up. And as the course of the earth through the 
 aether is a spiral by virtue of the progress of the 
 solar system toward the constellation Hercules, 
 so the sweep of a man's personal thought is car- 
 ried on by the progress of the society to which he 
 belongs. 
 
 There is another side to this question which the 
 continuity of matter suggests. This is the immor- 
 tality or approximation to immortality of the 
 race line. Riding on the impersonal flux of ma- 
 terial elements is the continuity of the self through 
 children. The self goes on and on. The terrific 
 power of the reproductive impulse would lead us 
 to believe that nature holds all continuity cheap 
 beside this. Yet the nobler souls among us plough 
 
 III 
 
CYCLES OF PERSONAL BELIEF 
 
 themselves Into their work, and their sympathies 
 and influence spread and grow; carrying the seeds 
 of their personality far beyond the range of their 
 immediate contact. The character of a man is 
 lost among his descendants in a few generations; 
 but the character of a genius, his behavior and 
 deeds, are reproduced for centuries. 
 
 We may be certain that life is immortal. It 
 cannot be so mad and irrational a dream as that 
 all this hot reality be subject to the accidents, 
 the destruction, the mortality which we perceive. 
 The ideas give us a perfect assurance of immor- 
 tality. Yet however sure may be our confidence, 
 the question which haunts us is. What stake does 
 the self have in this? What is our relation to the 
 immortal ideal? 
 
 That which keeps us wondering, that which 
 keeps alive the restless questioning is the /. What 
 am I ? Where do I come from ? Where shall / go ? 
 
 If we take the analogy of incandescent lamps 
 in an electric circuit, we may see the difficulty of 
 delimiting the self. Where is the self of the elec- 
 tric light? If you smash a bulb, the combination 
 of current, wire, and vacuum which gave that 
 particular light is annihilated, but the potential 
 current is still alive. With a new bulb virtually 
 the exact circumstances could be reproduced. 
 
 Thus also the self derives its vitality from some- 
 thing far deeper than the body can explain; but 
 at what point and how this vitality dips into the 
 
 112 
 
IMMORTALITY 
 
 physical medium we cannot by any means ascer- 
 tain. We understand the self best by its own 
 experiences. We are impotent spectators by the 
 deathbed of another, understanding what we do 
 understand only through our hearts. The self 
 finds itself immersed in the moving current of 
 time, but time as an experience varies always 
 with what it contains. 
 
 We know not what our experience may be in 
 the gradual slowing-up of time. If death is a 
 sleep, it is the last moments before death wherein 
 the glimpse of immortality may come. The fatal 
 fact approaches the awaiting consciousness. It is 
 the moment of complete annihilation for the self 
 — beyond the moment, eternal life. If time or the 
 experience of time ceases altogether, the soul 
 rests. Has it then merged with God? Has the 
 individual at some moment in the running cur- 
 rent, which the rest of the world perceives, 
 stepped out of time: even in that moment before 
 the sense of self has gone forever.^ 
 
 So far as we can conceive the nature of dura- 
 tion, there is infinite possibility in the millionth 
 of a second, or in any fraction of time however 
 small. Heaven may float into individual life upon 
 any infinitesimal scrap of time; but of these last 
 seconds, until one passes through them he cannot 
 know. 
 
 Speculation as to the last experience of indi- 
 vidual consciousness is utterly futile. As sickness 
 and torpor crowd into the body, the self retreats. 
 
 "3 
 
CYCLES OF PERSONAL BELIEF 
 
 Sitting beside a deathbed, watching the last hours 
 of unconsciousness before death actually arrives, 
 it may appear that something momentous is go- 
 ing on, some great experience, something utterly 
 beyond our comprehension, yet real and actual 
 for the soul that we love. But if this is so, the 
 body can but dimly reflect the truth. We have 
 in that deathlike sleep no clue. It is the hours of 
 most vivid life which teach us more. It is in the 
 exaltation of striving, it is in the wakefulness of 
 perfect health, that we understand best the ir- 
 repressible onward sweep of an existence which 
 cannot end. 
 
 If death is a sleep, what is the significance of the 
 analogy of dreams.^ Do we wake at death .^ 
 
 When unconsciousness becomes complete, time 
 ceases. If the self shares the indestructibility of 
 life, enormous stretches of time mean nothing to 
 it so long as its sleep is absolute. The passage of 
 time, as measured by the law-abiding cycles of 
 the world, or by the waking experience of indi- 
 viduals, means nothing to the sleeper. If you die 
 and sink to an absolute rest, the duration of your 
 sleep is irrelevant to you. If you are to maintain 
 your identity in a future waking state, there can 
 be no difl'erence for you between beginning to live 
 instantly upon death or waiting till time has 
 passed away, and then finding yourself alive. The 
 experience is instantaneous in either case. If at 
 death our experience continues temporal, then 
 
 114 
 
IMMORTALITY 
 
 the length of our sleep matters only if the terms 
 and conditions of this life have any reality which 
 will persist after death. 
 
 If this be a dream from which we wake, and 
 these but dream figures among whom we live, 
 wife, child, and friends insubstantial shadows 
 even like the creations of our night dreams, and 
 our whole circumstance, our bodies, our world 
 unreal, we must rest equally assured that these 
 same dream figures are based on real figures, 
 these insubstantial shadows are cast by real 
 beings, and the wife and child whom we love in 
 the dream, are based upon the actualities of the 
 beyond, even as our night dreams are simply 
 fragments of the life of day. There would be no 
 waiting for the dream figure of this life to die 
 before we could meet again. 
 
 This analogy, however, should not mislead us, 
 for there are realities in our lives which will 
 always be real. There Is an element in our love 
 which would lead us back to earth, if life went on 
 without it after death. 
 
 But prejudices from near-sightedness have 
 great tenacity. We are so presumptuous in our 
 scanty world. How little thought we take of time. 
 Conceive the period of man's evolution from the 
 cave-dweller till now, say two hundred thousand 
 years more or less. What is this. ^ How long has 
 Arcturus been evolving planets, and what of the 
 illimitable space beyond.? Are we earth-born 
 creatures alone in this gigantic universe? In all 
 
 IIS 
 
CYCLES OF PERSONAL BELIEF 
 
 the infinity of time, are we the trifling result? 
 How faint the possibility that we are without an 
 audience of superior beings, an audience to our 
 secret thoughts and deeds. How little chance 
 that vibrations unknown to us are not interpreted 
 elsewhere, or in a sphere we cannot appreciate 
 whether far or near. 
 
 If the ants reasoned, they might learn to under- 
 stand the natural laws, just as we understand 
 them, and yet not be able to perceive the activi- 
 ties of human will as distinct from other manifesr 
 tations obeying natural law. We do not break 
 the law of gravity when we move. Ants might 
 conclude that we were as unconscious as we con- 
 sider the moon or the clouds. We may not yet 
 have learned to distinguish the agency of person- 
 alities which we do not understand and their 
 influence upon us, from the agency of more 
 remote and more divine natural law. We are 
 wholly incompetent to pronounce upon these 
 questions either one way or the other. 
 
 It is narrow and unreasonable to suppose there 
 is necessarily no intervention in our lives by a 
 will or wills superior to our own. As we watch 
 over a sleeping child, and if he is restless and 
 uncomfortable, perhaps move him or shift his 
 covering, so our own mortal sleep may be watched 
 over. And of these things at death we may or 
 may not know. 
 
 If there is a guardian consciousness, we err 
 greatly in seeking to understand its nature by 
 
 ii6 
 
IMMORTALITY 
 
 projecting the circumstances and conditions of 
 this world into the beyond. The other world can 
 scarcely be what we almost invariably try to 
 conceive it, an extension of this; but rather this 
 world is an extension of that. The realities here 
 derive their cogency from something greater than 
 we now appreciate. Certainly with all our petty 
 idolatries, our abnegation of holier sentiments, 
 our wavering hold upon ideas, we may be sure 
 that what is sterling and genuine in this earthly 
 experience gets its character and worth from some 
 more universal source than what we call the world. 
 
 Impersonal immortality inevitably seems cold. 
 Those elements of which alone the understanding 
 can be sure, give little promise of warmth. In the 
 presence of the deathless truth the heart covertly 
 pictures a heaven of particular objects where it 
 may again find what is most dear. 
 
 Then beauty is so commanding: little melodies 
 that in some hour of unusual susceptibility be- 
 witched and yet emancipated the heart, what has 
 become of them when the tones are gone.^ Little 
 incidents link our days together by some secret 
 bond. On a winter's day a door swinging, by 
 chance, complains in just the tone of a catbird. 
 Even the suggestion of that swamp-note recalls 
 warm bushes, woody fragrance, and little rustling 
 evidences of life. It is the immortal voice of 
 Nature. Beauty lives on and on, and rides like a 
 fairy queen on all these transient vehicles. Yet 
 
 117 
 
CYCLES OF PERSONAL BELIEF 
 
 within the natural sounds is a cry. Rifts in nature 
 let through the glimpse of a foreign sphere. The 
 soul yearns toward the beyond. The world shrinks 
 before this instinct. All we know is not enough. 
 Ah, if we could be aetherized by the ozone of the 
 summer night! If we could die thus, and dying 
 pass oif into that mysterious direction toward 
 which the wild sympathy of nature draws, how 
 rich a fulfilment were death. 
 
 But we are always at the mercy of instincts 
 which may refer to future episodes in our life 
 here. All premonition is bound by this condi- 
 tion; and as a personal problem we do not know 
 whether the unknown term in the equation of life 
 is reached by an evolution of the known terms, or 
 whether the alien spirit is to be wooed and won 
 in a newness hidden from us by the veil of death. 
 
 Love is so tenacious of evanescent particulars. 
 In the brilliant hall where near a thousand men 
 and women are dancing, will the lover find the 
 girl whose eyes, near him but some hours since, 
 reflected the firelight? Here in the larger sphere, 
 the grander unity, each particular personality 
 seems lost, swallowed in the maze and whirl. Yet 
 all the occasion can off"er him of real life is that 
 he should see one face : the tide of life too full for 
 questioning when she is near. 
 
 The problem for the personal consciousness, for 
 that thing we call self, has no conclusion. Such 
 considerations as are pertinent teach only the dis- 
 
 ii8 
 
IMMORTALITY 
 
 cipline of the wishes. If we must have a solution 
 for the individual, it is that he should entrust 
 himself to the great power known as Love. The 
 self is but a wandering spark. Particulars are 
 constantly winnowed away. Progress may come 
 through the sleep of all that may be called self, 
 and all our life be the evolution of universal tend- 
 encies, riding upon a series of shifting and renew- 
 ing selves. 
 
 What if this thought is all the immortality you 
 have! Only as you have sent this thought into the 
 ages, perhaps, shall your life continue. Does it 
 so much matter, if you truly love.^* We are pre- 
 paring our immortality by our words and deeds, 
 here and now. We abandon self gradually by our 
 sympathy and understanding; transfer our indi- 
 viduality to others by the fusing devotion of the 
 heart. 
 
 Throwing self outward awakens the everlasting 
 life within. The swallows that we love are not the 
 symbol and metaphor of thought but our thought 
 itself. We share one life. The criminals and out- 
 casts are ourselves, and by this they are recog- 
 nized and understood and finally metamorphosed. 
 There is no altogether foreign soul, nor can there 
 be such, in the universe. 
 
 There may at last come a time when we feel the 
 unity of self with what is universal, and say, not 
 * Where did I come from.^ Where shall I go?' 
 but, *How came I here? Why am I not at home? 
 How came I to be divided into fragments, and 
 
 119 
 
CYCLES OF PERSONAL BELIEF 
 
 harassed and embarrassed with strange particu- 
 lars?' This deeper understanding, this deeper 
 sympathy would still the insistent murmur that 
 immortality without love were nothing, mortality 
 with love were all. The universal spirit is not 
 heartless. It is the author of heat. It has thrown 
 the ideas out to conquer the cold. They are not 
 cold themselves. 
 
 Immortality is the continuance of life, not over 
 a particular span of time, but as something which 
 is perpetually renewing itself as a permanent 
 force, or an inexhaustible fountain. With death 
 we have nothing to do. For the conscious self 
 death is always in the future, and as the future 
 is imaginary, so also is death. 
 
 The aspirations which even in their inception 
 enrich our lives, begetting visions of happiness, 
 are included in one illimitable present moment; 
 one present moment which also contains, in its 
 copious actuality, all of those elements of the 
 past which we have loved. Our habit of trans- 
 lating change by reference to our linear percep- 
 tions obscures the truth that the present moment 
 is one divine, transcendent Unity. Change is 
 simply the metre of our efforts to reach out into 
 it, and grasp its abundant truth. 
 
 Success may come by hardship, by genuine 
 effort, by sacrifice. Nature responds with unex- 
 pected transformations. Our sterile activities 
 bud with roses, the murky doubts are flooded 
 with an incalculable sunrise. The most potent 
 
 1 20 
 
IMMORTALITY 
 
 magic is in the faces we love. Hope comes not 
 from exploring into that which is alien, but by 
 a return nearer home. The act of giving brings 
 us hither. Every flush of beauty is a test, every 
 danger an opportunity. 
 
 The soul needs no assurances in the beyond, 
 needs no justification of its existence. It is care- 
 less of immortality, it is too happy to care. For 
 the soul is in its nature noble and sacrificial, it 
 exists to be spent. "He that loses his life for my 
 sake shall find it." It is not that the soul goes 
 through a pretense of death knowing that life is 
 on the other side. The soul does not know. It 
 knows only God, and the internal law of its na- 
 ture, which is to give, give and always give. Were 
 it not for human weakness, were the soul pure, it 
 would work in the dark, unknown and unrecog- 
 nized forever; or it would die an utter and abso- 
 lute death, if by so doing it could give a perma- 
 nent happiness to another which it loved. 
 
 If one is not prepared to enter an absolute 
 sleep, to end, to cease to be; or if one is not prei 
 pared to forego all recognition, all praise, all 
 fame, his soul is not pure. Therefore it is that 
 mortality within us is purged by self-denial. To 
 face death and dissolution is life. To seek the 
 elimination of all death by cultivating one's com- 
 fort and security is itself a kind of death. There- 
 fore it is that the soul knows no death. 
 
PART IV 
 
 CONCLUSION 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 CONCLUSION 
 
 Life is a play of light and shadow, following 
 nameless and unpredictable sequences. We know 
 little enough what our words mean. The truth 
 when we think we have expressed it most nearly 
 turns out to be but the outpouring of a mood. 
 The mood is all. The day, the hour, the second's 
 flash of vision rules, and when the passion has 
 gone, life is idle like a ship becalmed at sea. 
 
 "Everything in the universe goes by indirec- 
 tion" — a fact which gradually teaches the writer 
 a certain wariness of assertion. All words have a 
 kick to them. A man criticises only that which is 
 in his own nature. If I am selfish, I see selfishness. 
 If I am impure, I see impurity; and so on. A man's 
 true opinion faithfully represents himself. The 
 strict analysis of the present day arises, of course, 
 from a strictly analytic turn of mind in the race. 
 A prurient and mechanical description of biology, 
 of conduct, of the human brain, are the exact 
 description of him who thus describes. His view 
 of nature and account of it faithfully portray the 
 man. So with our friends, we cannot see the mote 
 in our brother's eye without there be a mote in 
 our own. Our criticism of the world is the world's 
 criticism of us. You tend to quarrel with your 
 
 125 
 
CYCLES OF PERSONAL BELIEF 
 
 friend just to the extent of your own pride and 
 selfishness, not to the extent of his. With a saint 
 you will magnify all his faults to the proportion 
 of your own. With a sinner you will tend to ignore 
 or make light of his faults to the measure of your 
 own innocence. 
 
 Thus experience is equivocal. We are praised 
 for facing difficulties after they have ceased to be 
 difficulties and we begin to take credit for our 
 sloth. One never knows his own virtue. He who is 
 conscious of his own merit loses it, and paradoxi- 
 cally we talk about those things which we do not 
 possess. The man who has ideals in his heart 
 talks materialism. And he who is a materialist 
 at heart is usually talking ideals; but ideas shine 
 in the materialistic symbolism; the materialist 
 heart cannot make the talk of ideals ring true. 
 Similarly the less a man thinks of himself, the 
 more proof that the scope of his vision is wide; 
 the more he thinks of self, the smaller the scope 
 of what he sees outside himself; for each one of us 
 is iniinitesimally small in the eye of the universe. 
 
 If one is asked what ethical conclusion, what 
 practical result his beliefs or speculations as to 
 the foundation of belief lead to, this equivocal 
 aspect of life gives him pause. The cynicisms and 
 insincerities of society have some justification, 
 and the man who attempts to outline his ethics 
 finds himself like some wayfarer caught in a 
 quagmire lifting one foot out only by sinking 
 the other deeper in. 
 
 126 
 
CONCLUSION 
 
 Our ethical beliefs are immersed in historical 
 particulars. As every story needs its own setting, 
 so every problem has its individual peculiarities. 
 We set our swirling hieroglyphics upon the stream 
 of life. Only a little path in the current bears our 
 imprint. The response we make to a few calls 
 or challenges stamps us for what we are. From 
 what we do the principles which govern us are 
 interpreted. 
 
 The cycle in our beliefs which is indicated by 
 Illusion, Disillusion, and Reillusion, is followed 
 in our experience by another which might be 
 designated as Generation, Degeneration, and 
 Regeneration. We come out of the intellectual 
 crisis which renewed within us the spirit of belief, 
 endowed with a philosophy of life. Upon this we 
 found a code of morals. We believe we know how 
 to meet the world, but we soon find that the per- 
 ception of truth does not guarantee obedience to 
 truth. The whole stuff of our belief so far has 
 been a matter of expression. To live according 
 to our aspirations has been a dream, not a practice. 
 Our ideals being thus far only intellectual have 
 but a single dimension, needing performance to 
 add a second, and discipline for a third. But as 
 we enter upon this new cycle we find our problems 
 are not a question of words but of experience. 
 They must be lived to be understood. Words 
 cannot serve us further. Then too the stream of 
 life is so complex and tumultuous that the cycle 
 or rhythm is broken into a hundred billows, cross- 
 
 127 
 
CYCLES OF PERSONAL BELIEF 
 
 currents, and eddies. These are accentuated by 
 our novel-reading and our study of history, as 
 well as by contact with maturer persons. The 
 course of one's own development is lost among 
 one's sympathies. Hence the attempt to follow 
 the historical trend of the cycle of experience 
 seems profitless. And though the influence of this 
 cycle upon the nature of our beliefs is far more 
 profound than is our intellectual history taken by 
 itself, nevertheless, unlike the process of reillusion 
 which leads us to greater and greater expressive- 
 ness, the process of regeneration leads to greater 
 and greater reticence because it is a recognition 
 of realities which become progressively more and 
 more difficult to describe. 
 
 A few reflections must suffice to intimate the 
 new meaning which experience brings to belief. 
 
 Our own code of morals arises from our meta- 
 physics. Those propositions which we find funda- 
 mentally to be so, form an absolute basis for our 
 rules of conduct stern and inexorable. Conscious- 
 ness is primary and governs its objects. Conscious- 
 ness gives to objects all the character which they 
 have. In other words nature is parallel to our 
 minds because nature is such as we think it. 
 Every part of consciousness is in some measure 
 sacred because our attitude of mind takes eff"ect 
 instantaneously in the world around us. We are 
 creating at all hours, that is, at all hours when 
 we make any choice or decision. Each one of these 
 
 128 
 
CONCLUSION 
 
 decisions has the same potency, the same validity 
 as geologic law. Hence the thirst for improve- 
 ment, or the tendency to seek some condition 
 better than our present condition, acting at all 
 times as a loadstone for consciousness, is real 
 and trustworthy. 
 
 Ethically mankind seems to have advanced by 
 a series of stepping-stones. These are the rules or 
 standards which he has learned to adopt. Thus 
 the Ten Commandments express a standard or 
 way of life which lies in the line or direction of 
 progress. So also in all branches of social activity 
 the need of a code leads to the establishment of 
 rules of conduct. These are simply the modus 
 vivendi of the practical ideal. 
 
 The expression idealism has become weakened 
 by the preposterous uses to which it has been put. 
 The world is full of ideal-mongers who wish to 
 claim the full rights of ideas for whatever nostrum 
 or palliative their fancy may have suggested. 
 Better than the hazy dreams and theories in 
 which we too often clothe our thirst for pleasure, 
 the clear outlines of science portray ideas. Each 
 hypothesis, or formula, astronomical, chemical, 
 physical, biological, in its place and for its use, 
 carries the stamp of truth. The ideas are an abso- 
 lute test as to each group of facts because basic- 
 ally the facts themselves are ideas, but the physi- 
 cal world must be studied for the particular facts 
 with which any particular intellect must deal. 
 A man cannot seek into his mind regardless of the 
 
 129 
 
CYCLES OF PERSONAL BELIEF 
 
 outside world without the danger of losing all 
 relation between those ideas which he uses, and 
 those facts among which he is historically thrown. 
 Such a course is contrary to the mandates of the 
 ideas themselves. The faithful investigation of 
 the external world is unequivocally prescribed by 
 the human mind. But the intellect must exercise 
 great caution in judging those outlines which 
 appear dim; for all the facts which we cannot see 
 or do not notice we shall be tempted to call 
 visionary. They may be the decisive feature of 
 the landscape yet we shall at times doubt their 
 reality. But it is by a perpetual idealization of 
 our problems that we gain the surest guidance for 
 true progress. 
 
 It is part of the miracle of life that the prin- 
 ciples which govern it are so simple. In truth, all 
 principles come from one root, namely, the love 
 of right. Religion itself is no more than this. 
 Validity of choice, or the actuality of the will, is 
 axiomatic. The will finds in life the free oppor- 
 tunity to choose between a better and a worse 
 alternative. The choice of the better promotes 
 happiness, the choice of the worse promotes un- 
 happiness. Fundamentally there is but one ethics, 
 one philosophy of conduct, namely, to prefer al- 
 ways and everywhere the better over the worse. 
 
 The will works by effort. When the heart 
 chooses right without effort, it has come into 
 harmony with the universal spirit because of the 
 momentum of its past decisions, decisions where 
 
 130 
 
CONCLUSION 
 
 effort was necessary to the choice of the right 
 alternative. Yet even the freedom of choice itself 
 owes half its parentage to necessity. The thirst 
 for the better is tyrannical once it has been felt. 
 There is no escape from its persistence. Having 
 known a better life than the one we are now living, 
 we cannot contentedly pursue our present course 
 further, unless it furnishes us the power to evolve 
 into that better condition which we have known 
 or seen. 
 
 Now whatever a man most wants is defended 
 from his desire by an insulation of difficulty. This 
 must always be so initially. The higher good must 
 be more difficult of attainment than the lower 
 good — that is to say, more good is guarded by 
 more difficulty because human nature cannot help 
 prizing more highly that over which it has ex- 
 pended effort than that over which it has not; 
 and the measure of the effort, or some equivalent 
 of effort, is the measure of the value. 
 
 It might seem from this that if the most good is 
 the most difficult, we should find a dilemma in 
 that a life of straight difficulty would be a life of 
 pure unhappiness. But this appearance is char- 
 acteristic of diflniculty; and it is this very fact 
 which gives so deep a value to sacrifice. For sacri- 
 fice is after all only an appearance. If your sac- 
 rifice be genuine you cannot escape its reward. 
 Similarly difficulty cannot remain perpetual in 
 the face of effort. In the light of reason sacrifice 
 is impossible in its literal sense; for it is the giving- 
 
 131 
 
CYCLES OF PERSONAL BELIEF 
 
 up of the obvious for the underlying advantage. 
 It is lopping off inferior branches. True sacrifice 
 is discipline of the will, the abandonment of cher- 
 ished wishes which do not strengthen us. But 
 before the act one cannot know, at least cannot 
 appreciate its reward. It is an act of utter courage, 
 a complete unselfishness. 
 
 Difficulty is an objective test. We do not seek 
 it. We seek a palpable good, and pursue it, 
 whether or not the way be difficult. If we blindly 
 pursue difficulties for their own sake, thirsting for 
 some reward, like enough our pains will prove 
 barren. Yet normally in the honest pursuit of 
 duty and human benefit, the overcoming diffi- 
 culty proves in itself and for its own sake a cause 
 of happiness. Progress built upon pain is ulti- 
 mately founded upon a basis of joy. Difficulty is 
 but a partial and negative test of what is good, 
 and it is against the law of the spirit to remember 
 a difficulty once it is past. 
 
 Nothing can exempt us from the duty of choos- 
 ing as our own the highest ideal we have known. 
 Nothing can exempt us from the duty of attempt- 
 ing to realize that ideal in life. Difficult that reali- 
 zation must be; but the ideal itself is something 
 positive which in the end knows nothing of diffi- 
 culty. If difficulty were the only test life would be 
 simple, morality would be cold, narrow, and 
 severe; but that which leads us forward is not 
 thus. The positive elements of life are beautiful, 
 involving many forms of excellence. 
 
 132 
 
CONCLUSION 
 
 Thus, when we come to seek the better way of 
 life, and in so doing reflect upon our standard of 
 conduct, we are struck with the superiority of the 
 unconscious virtues. If we could only be guided 
 unconsciously by right instincts! Spontaneous 
 activity is so much lovelier than conscious effort. 
 Spontaneity is joyous and regal. Thus at times 
 we become identified with our surroundings, and 
 follow luminous methods of behavior which merge 
 personal satisfactions into social and sometimes 
 wholly unselfish benefits. At times also we seem 
 to be swept along by inevitable meliorations. 
 Things grow better and better with an impetus 
 out of all proportion to the apparent energy in- 
 volved. It is the fruitage of old endeavors long 
 forgotten. If the spirit floats us along, independ- 
 ent action of the will mars all. But when the 
 golden tide is ebbing, it then becomes our duty 
 to strive for the light. The intellect must explore 
 the causes of success, and the heart search itself 
 in meekness. The foster nurse of effort is humil- 
 ity. Without conscious struggle spiritual impulses 
 will not come, and spontaneity is a heavenly gift, 
 not easily to be won. 
 
 The lilt and song of life break into all formal- 
 ism. The self is in perpetual transference from 
 one thing to another. The soul is always migrat- 
 ing, always giving itself to something apparently 
 other than itself. It is careless of its form of life, 
 careless of the vehicle it uses, so only that while 
 in use the vehicle is sweet and clean. The soul 
 
 133 
 
CYCLES OF PERSONAL BELIEF 
 
 feeds on vision and must not be obstructed by 
 appetites, humors, and tempers. It is careful of 
 its own purity, its own constancy, careless of the 
 means it uses, and thus the body is subject to 
 any call which the generosity of the soul may 
 make. Hence comes the seeming paradox that 
 though principles are subordinate to life a man 
 must die for principles. The principle is above 
 the individual, not above the larger sympathy 
 and happiness for which his individual life is 
 spent. 
 
 But the frail human will at first finds the prac- 
 tice of ethics quite beyond its undeveloped powers. 
 A short acquaintance with experience intimates 
 that there is much to learn from life besides rules 
 of conduct. Our discipline by no means conforms 
 to our wishes or expectations. Facts not only 
 have dimensions, but mass. When they begin to 
 move, or when we begin to move among them, 
 we learn our relative strength or impotence. 
 
 In attempting to put ideals in practice, the 
 individual meets these difficulties: — 
 
 (i) The periodicity of his own temper and con- 
 dition running in apparently fatal courses upsets 
 his self-confidence and distorts his view of right 
 and wrong. Once in so many days the man grows 
 a crop of good resolutions. These have a life his- 
 tory of a limited number of hours, ten, twenty, 
 a hundred, quite independently of any carefully 
 reasoned wishes he may entertain, and then at the 
 
 134 
 
CONCLUSION 
 
 appropriate time the resolutions disappear, leav- 
 ing perhaps some trifling fruitage; but little more. 
 With due regularity the efforts slump, and he 
 becomes the victim of a shocking indifl'erence. 
 The habits and moods run in this tidal manner. 
 The temptations surge up about so often; yet the 
 weather changes of the heart and mind are as 
 whimsical and capricious as the meteorology of 
 the temperate zone, seeming to show little rela- 
 tion to principles and ideals. 
 
 But there are greater changes not readily ob- 
 served at first, changes which run over many 
 months or years, a sort of organic growth and 
 decomposition. A downward tendency takes 
 possession of the individual, a demon seems to 
 impersonate his ideals, in order to mock him. 
 
 "O misery on't! the wise gods seal our eyes. 
 In our own filth drop our clear judgments; make us 
 Adore our errors, laugh at us while we strut 
 To our confusion." 
 
 There are many symptoms of the downward 
 course. More and more frequently we submit to 
 the deadly experience of knowing an act is wrong 
 and yet doing it. We feel within us the option of 
 choice between right and wrong and deliberately 
 choose wrong. If we stop to think, the very fact 
 that this can be so mocks our reason. When 
 this experience happens often we become aware 
 of a more permanent indifference creeping over 
 the heart, like the advance of the glacial cap from 
 
 135 
 
CYCLES OF PERSONAL BELIEF 
 
 the pole. We see also that races and nations de- 
 cay; and from the influence of that process the 
 individual cannot escape. He cannot arrest the 
 laws of decomposition. There seems no escape 
 from that conclusion which reason has already 
 faced, conquered, and abandoned, namely, that 
 our apparent freedom of choice is an illusion, and 
 that the downward trend of our apparent deci- 
 sions is utterly inevitable. 
 
 (2) A second difficulty is that dynamic forces 
 in the world, whether they be right or wrong, 
 have a strength out of all proportion to our esti- 
 mate of that strength before we have come in 
 direct contact with them. The idealist to his dis- 
 may becomes magnetized by the world, dances 
 as it dances, sins as it sins. When he feels the 
 terrific pressure of social events his tongue begins 
 of itself to tell lies. He did not know before that 
 he was a coward. He has no thought of abandon- 
 ing his principles, but there he is, a puny fate- 
 ridden fact, a bit of iron filing surrounded by 
 powerful electric currents. Of what consequence 
 can his principles be? 
 
 Meanwhile fierce thirsts for pleasure assail the 
 soul. Emotions which have been repressed be- 
 cause inappropriate to the occasion on which they 
 arose, seek any and every outlet. With the faith 
 in personal initiative and spiritual law shaken, the 
 dams begin to crumble, and such personal power 
 as we have already stored begins to ebb away. 
 The devil has ever outwitted human beings. The 
 
 136 
 
CONCLUSION 
 
 self-indulgences quickly seize each upon some 
 virtue; as the guests of a fancy-dress ball pick 
 upon some costume, and thus skilfully adorned 
 play out their parts with marvellous facility. 
 Well for the boy if the habits of his bringing-up 
 are wholesome, and thoroughly stamped in his 
 nature. For no amount of instruction can save 
 him now. Visions of the fairest ideal avail not. 
 And with the bitterness of disappointment too 
 often our mortality asserts itself so far that we 
 conclude our own life to be wholly disparate from 
 the life of goodness and beauty. 
 
 At his strongest, man is not entirely his own 
 master; in certain relations, not at all. He is ever 
 a fragment only of larger unities, where his influ- 
 ence counts for little or nothing. He cannot easily 
 purge his native land of its corruptions. He can- 
 not, except in rare instances, ward off national 
 disasters. He and all that he loves most dearly 
 are at the mercy of the burglar or the mob — of 
 any group who choose to break certain simple 
 rules to which civilized people habitually trust. 
 The seeds of revolution lie within the state as the 
 seeds of disease lie within the individual. What- 
 ever the form of government, the vast common- 
 wealths of civilization are tunnelled with decay. 
 
 The point of view of the members in a com- 
 munity tends to degenerate with the accumula- 
 tion of wealth, of power, and of luxury. The will 
 which fought its way through difficulties to the 
 mastery of circumstances becomes wilful. The 
 
 137 
 
CYCLES OF PERSONAL BELIEF 
 
 weaker beneficiaries of a strong man's success 
 become envious. The intellect runs riot and al- 
 lows its estimate of moral values to fall into con- 
 fusion. The truth is held lightly, and the ameni- 
 ties themselves foster all manner of speciousness, 
 as when Philip II of Spain was described in the 
 period of the Inquisition as a prince "clement, 
 benign, and debonair," or when our Secretary of 
 State, addressing Germany in regard to the Lusi- 
 tania, wrote on May 14, 191 5, "Recalling the 
 humane and enlightened attitude hitherto as- 
 sumed by the Imperial German Government," 
 etc. The tendency which makes toward the abase- 
 ment of words, makes also toward the abasement 
 of customs and manners. People begin to measure 
 festivities by laughter and noise rather than by 
 real enjoyment. Instead of achievement display 
 is sought. Instead of the approval of conscience 
 the approval of the newspapers. Instead of a 
 strict adherence to facts, the scrutiny of opinions, 
 the influence of names and reputations; until the 
 community is reduced to a shadow of existence, 
 fed upon artifice and sham, and the spectacle of a 
 savagery which is real, and robber tactics put in 
 practice by a fellow community arouses slumber- 
 ing faculties, and men recognize with a sudden 
 shock how much weakness has been harbored in 
 complacency. 
 
 But the very dangers which startle us are dis- 
 guised friends. The soul is as much at home in 
 unstable conditions as in peace. The dissolution 
 
 138 
 
CONCLUSION 
 
 of bonds, the abrogation of conventions which 
 loyal persons keep as a matter of fairness, leaves 
 man free to build afresh. Emancipation is a direct 
 challenge to power. When King George's govern- 
 ment broke down in New England the people of 
 Massachusetts proved their ability to maintain 
 civil life without a government. When an honest 
 man is free to use drastic methods honesty usually 
 prevails. Corruptions are apt to work their own 
 cure in time through the reversion of the sufferers 
 to rugged first principles. In the. day of crisis any 
 institution may be challenged; and we may see 
 one wholesome effect of crises in the revelation 
 that most of our institutions are provisional, and 
 much in need of change. The fearless citizen as 
 he plunges into a turbulence wherein all stand- 
 ards are tested, pursues his ideal in foul weather 
 as in fair, loyal to his own sphere and what is 
 best within himself. 
 
 Thus a man looks beyond any code or principle ( 
 which his intellect can formulate for guidance in 
 life. He must rise by the force of a power within 
 him, he must rise toward the communion of a * 
 spirit above him. As every boat in the bay catches 
 the wind, therefrom deriving the power to move, 
 so every religious sect is actuated by the spirit, 
 nor is one more entitled to it than another. The 
 same devotion, the same faith, the same rever- 
 ence lives in all the great religions. Though the 
 thought of this unity seems unreal as we abstract 
 
 139 
 
CYCLES OF PERSONAL BELIEF 
 
 it from the ceremonial and pictured ritual in which 
 it is variously enshrined, that unity still is there. 
 
 How foolishly we seek for special manifesta- 
 tions. When the processes of the world are recog- 
 nized as lawful, the undisciplined heart begins to 
 crave for something extra-lawful. Men wish their 
 religion to do something for them which the nat- 
 ural laws as they conceive them cannot do. But 
 in no sense is religion a lawbreaker. Nor can you 
 have correctly interpreted your law, if it can be 
 broken. The controversy between faith and/ea- 
 son is due to a weak estimate of both faith and 
 reason. Reason is the language of faith. You 
 never have faith in what your reason disapproves. 
 Faith is the matrix of life as belief is the matrix 
 of thought; and faith departs from reason only in 
 so far as it acts as a sort of momentum which 
 carries us across unreasoned abysses; but faith is 
 always groping for a fresh hold upon reason. 
 Health presupposes a condition of trust between 
 the two as the heart and head are strong when 
 they work together. 
 
 No one is without faith. It is only a question 
 of what the faith of each man comprises. 
 
 "When me he flies I am the wings, 
 I am the doubter and the doubt." 
 
 The admission of the existence of God is of no 
 great consequence. It is only a question of how 
 many steps a man goes toward the unknown, 
 before he is forced to admit the existence of that 
 
 140 
 
CONCLUSION 
 
 which most people call God. How personal this 
 reality is, depends upon the individual character 
 of the worshipper. 
 
 Intellectual difficulties ever beset the attempt 
 to particularize God. That is because the attempt 
 is vain; but these difficulties arise from and end 
 with ourselves. So it is also with our worry over 
 the enormous profusion of life which seems to us 
 superfluous or distasteful. All life must have equal 
 rights. We are all striving for a way of life which 
 will work. The attempts of the rattlesnake and 
 mosquito are parallel with our own, and because 
 these and other features of our surroundings annoy 
 us it is no reason to see a lack of benevolence in 
 the universe or abandon or make light of our own 
 attempts to live well. Our objection to these alien 
 examples of the universal force is a peculiarity of 
 ourselves. 
 
 Universal goodness is utterly impartial. The 
 consciousness of this helps us in the discipline of 
 prayer. We cannot pray to a universal spirit for 
 particular benefits. We must earn particular 
 benefits by particular efforts. There is no other 
 way to get them. Only as we sink our peculiari- 
 ties and find the universal elements of self can we 
 receive religious help. Prayer is first a recognition \ 
 and a discipline and then an inflowing of magnet- \ 
 ism. The potency of an electric generator lies in 
 nature. We can avail ourselves of it if we will. 
 The act of prayer is an act of placing one's self 
 60 as to be magnetized by a deeper current, a 
 
 141 
 
CYCLES OF PERSONAL BELIEF 
 
 current always available, always motive, always 
 sure. By our faith we tap the universal stream. 
 
 But we have many subtle religious impulses 
 we scarcely ever think to recognize as such. The 
 nearness of nature, and the heart's response, the 
 wind in the oak trees and the fragrance of the 
 summer bushes, how utterly sincere and serene 
 are these. He that sings because his heart is over- 
 flowing from the beauty of God's temple is un- 
 conscious that his song reflects that beauty. He 
 is the true priest, the authentic minister of God. 
 The original religious sanctuary of all the races is 
 the great outdoors. The sunlight burns upon the 
 altar. The vegetation is the vestment of God. 
 The flowers give us incense. The waves in har- 
 mony with sky and cloud and shore give illustra- 
 tion of a perfect law, and these weather processes 
 passing over and around us unite the individual 
 immediately with transcendent things. 
 
 Yet man does not remove a stone out of nature 
 by raising it into a temple. The cathedrals with 
 their chimes, their stained-glass windows, their 
 mass of sculpture, belong as truly to nature as 
 the trees and flowers. They touch hidden sources 
 of emotion which having known we would not be 
 without. There is a place in the universal religion 
 for all the shrines. The deeper personality recog- 
 nizes the sanctuaries of all the races — Mosque, 
 Parthenon, or Cathedral. The universe is our 
 temple, the worship is our life; for a life which is 
 not acceptable to God is no life at all. 
 . 142 
 
CONCLUSION 
 
 Real life is worship, and each man's deepest 
 concern is his own conduct. There is no room for 
 mechanistic conceptions in his personal problems. 
 He is free; and for progress the original impulse 
 must come from within himself. At the lowest 
 ebb if one could only remember that this particu- 
 lar hour and minute is unprecedented, never had 
 its like before, how great the opportunity of that 
 realization. From the standpoint of ideas there is 
 no such thing as a defective will. All weakness 
 is due to mechanical obstructions from among 
 which the soul must emerge. We recognize the 
 lion impulse, monkey impulse, man impulse, 
 made such by habit; and again, the "eye for an 
 eye" impulse and the Christian impulse. All 
 these live by the same right of creation, but none 
 are final. Habit gradually creates a vessel appar- 
 ently irrefragable. It thus seems like a miracle 
 if the weak will becomes strong. A man must 
 accomplish the apparently impossible to advance 
 from the rut of evil habits; and yet he constantly 
 does so advance. There comes a time when the 
 old vessel is broken up, and life enlarges. The 
 least effort of the dynamic will may start some- 
 thing new. Looking back on periods of stagnation 
 we are sometimes struck with the nicety of bal- 
 ance between good and evil, perceiving too late 
 how very slight a push would have set our affairs 
 going in the right direction, and saved many 
 hours of squandered life. But there is no expres- 
 sible law which can explain in measurements of 
 
 143 
 
CYCLES OF PERSONAL BELIEF 
 
 nervous energy this increase of power in an indi- 
 vidual when he does right. We seldom know 
 which little effort is the true one, which act of 
 self-conquest has turned the tide of our affairs, 
 or which choice among the maze of paths we trod 
 led toward better things. We are subject to an 
 imperceptible guidance, a mysterious intelligence 
 as to our deserts; and it is good to be always 
 striving, always under discipline. We never know 
 beforehand the antecedents or instructions of the 
 simplest messenger who comes to the door. 
 
 Though the original push must come from in- 
 side one's self, progress involves a readjustment 
 to that which is outside of self. It is from among 
 relationships with things external that the means 
 of advance must be grasped. One is forced to 
 experiment and learn. At last after many false 
 tries a man finds that there is one thing which he 
 has got to do. Other things were ephemeral, this 
 is native to his abilities. Thus it comes about that 
 the discouraging aspects of life, the degenerative 
 process, the periods of wallowing and degrada- 
 tion are dispelled by the discovery of some need 
 in the world which matches one's natural apti- 
 tudes, so that one finds himself to have a special 
 use. And perhaps he may then find that all un- 
 happiness, all his floundering was but a part of his 
 development toward this one thing. Unpopular- 
 ity, moroseness, lustfulness, drunkenness, what- 
 ever may have been his special form of diflBiCulty 
 has taught him the things he needed to know. 
 
 144 
 
CONCLUSION 
 
 The world responds to us in the measure of our 
 love of men. It is thus our gauge. We adjust our- 
 selves gradually with the help of its indications. 
 The world is continually " knocking us into shape," 
 nor can we escape its din and roar. Even the 
 recluse finds the world batters against him in the 
 measure of his unused capacities. 
 
 Yet the man has within himself a moral force 
 which gives him sanction sometimes to stand 
 alone. By that same law of indirection the rela- 
 tive appearance of the man and the world may 
 vary with the shifting of the polarization of 
 thought. Galileo called the Copernican theory of 
 the earth's motion a "Mathematical Capriccio.^^ 
 In Rome at that day it was not suitable to call 
 it truth. But with the passing of centuries the 
 same thought becomes orthodox. That selfish- 
 ness which distresses one's friends may be due 
 to maladjustment. It may have a quite definite 
 cause in some occult injustice which the com- 
 munity does to the individual. The selfishness 
 may express a state of electric tension destined 
 to pull the world toward the man. 
 
 But the burden of proof is on the individual. 
 It is not for him to condemn the world. His func- 
 tion is to keep to his own aim, and if the world 
 ignores him, he must conclude not that the world 
 is wrong, or his ideal false, but that his workman- 
 ship in expressing his ideal was poor. 
 
 Howsoever these things be, a man must strike 
 out fearlessly on his own path. Success attends 
 
 145 
 
CYCLES OF PERSONAL BELIEF 
 
 those who speak directly and hit hard. Facts are 
 always deeper than the forms which describe 
 them; and success is interpreted in varying terms. 
 Its outward manifestations are relatively unim- 
 portant, and its highest test is the accomplish- 
 ment wrought by inward fire. 
 
 A man's relationships are sacred; his work 
 cannot be taken as something apart from these. 
 It is in and through these that his duties and 
 tasks get their pertinency. It is our human 
 bonds which carry on their unseen filaments the 
 original generative power of love. The love be- 
 tween man and woman is a profound revelation 
 into the heart of life, but even this overwhelming 
 influence does not escape from ethical necessities, 
 nor do the offices of love begin and end with 
 this one relationship. 
 
 Love is in every breast, uniting all mankind, 
 single or married, in one common understanding, 
 and as we grow, our sympathies extend into wider 
 circles; and the craving for particular circum- 
 stances which we once felt absolutely essential to 
 our well-being loses its poignancy. Nothing is so 
 misunderstood as Platonic love. If we read 
 Plato's poetry, it is the poetry of a mighty, all- 
 inclusive passion. It is an allegorical assertion of 
 the divinity of love. Were the poet to gratify his 
 lust, he has no more gratified the imperative de- 
 mand which haunted him than if he had drunk 
 water to satisfy his longing for the sea. For some 
 it is gratification enough to be near the beloved, 
 
 146 
 
CONCLUSION 
 
 for others to touch, for one to hear her speak, for 
 another to hear her sing, and each gratification 
 breeds yet another desire. But the poet can never 
 be satisfied, for he knows too well how inaccessible 
 is the beloved that he loves. All the beauty and 
 knowledge that intellect can give him cannot 
 suffice to bring the two together. He has seen the 
 nature of the light which shines on all the inci- 
 dents of life — a light accessible to all, but not 
 to be grasped, not to be appropriated, not to be 
 turned to a petty use. 
 
 The best in love is always pure. The path to 
 the temple is steep, the guardians of its treasures 
 are stern. There comes up the picture of a face 
 seared by thirty years of pain, a lowering sky, 
 raindrops driving among the pine trees, one of 
 New England's sacred sanctuaries. A lonely man 
 buries all that was left to him of life. In the retro- 
 spect is bitterness, in the future despair. This 
 was one who loved, and suffered unrecognized for 
 an ideal. Just an unknown incident in the life of 
 truth. Oh, you who live in comfortable homes, 
 and hear the laughter of children, enjoy the 
 warmth of a circle of cheerful friends, and the 
 performance of useful work, what do you know of 
 sorrow, what do you know of life.'^ Some kind 
 angel guided you among the pitfalls. But you are 
 surrounded by mourners and broken souls who 
 know no such contentment as you have known. 
 Faces which reflect the deep recesses of human 
 nature sanctify our own more thoughtless lives. 
 
 147 
 
CYCLES OF PERSONAL BELIEF 
 
 And there is he who will not break the marriage 
 vow. Is he reading problem novels? Is he han- 
 kering after an easier, more selfish standard 
 which might permit a wrench, a parting, and then 
 a surfeit of stifling roses, shutting out a past where 
 one must not look? Not so. He is a loyal, lonely 
 soul who bears his full measure of pain. He is 
 more man than a thousand pleasure-seekers who 
 affront the name of love with their talk of afiini- 
 ties. A simple stern sacrifice makes him real. 
 We are one stuff and substance throughout the 
 community. The word and deed of one is the 
 bread and meat of another, and no surgery can 
 cut apart our relatedness. You whom the years 
 are just revolving into the rose glow of love, you 
 little realize in your purity what you owe to those 
 who did not yield to great temptations, but main- 
 tained without recompense the^ unwritten laws 
 of home. 
 
 The world being what it is, the form of our 
 ethics is unessential, so long as we are loyal to 
 what we mean to be, so long as we are in duty 
 bound to the happiness of one another. We need 
 not fear that the maintenance of a standard is 
 going to work some injustice upon us. It is an 
 evidence of progress that standards of conduct 
 should be here, and that we should be committed 
 to them. We fear to lose our freedom, but we 
 need not fear. The happy life is not bought but 
 given. We do not need extravagant pleasures, 
 nor those effects and luxuries which are highly 
 
 148 
 
CONCLUSION 
 
 prized. Weedy impulses are good fertilizers if 
 ploughed back by self-denial into the soil of self; 
 and if we learn to cultivate those activities which 
 mean growth the harvest will not disappoint us. 
 As the heart quickens, the spirit of joy steals into 
 common activities. Our interests attach them- 
 selves to simpler and ever simpler objects, and 
 we feel more deference for all the manifestations 
 of life. We are not so dazzled as once by glory 
 and fame, and ignore or forget the scorn of society 
 that we do not seek its prizes. It is enough to 
 feel the heart of nature beating. The huckle- 
 berries in the wind-swept pasture have gained 
 an ambrosial taste, and the hint of paradise 
 floats upon the fragrance of the clethra blossoms. 
 But the soul thus finding a home in little 
 things, building its shrine by the roadside, soon 
 moves on. Our moments of peace are given for 
 the reception of new visions, and these, however 
 gently the hint at first is given, are each and all 
 incentive to action. Human life embosomed in 
 paradise at one pole, plunges into turmoil at the 
 other. The struggle is not over, the problems are 
 not solved. 
 
POSTSCRIPT 
 
 Cheerfulness is the seed-wheat of heaven. 
 When cheerfulness is the ruling habit for all man- 
 kind how rich will be the present, how tranquil 
 the passage of time. The truth is more beautiful 
 than our wildest dream. Hope is always right 
 and never wrong. A man blindly attaches his 
 hope to particular things erring in particulars, 
 but hope meant something else all along. Hope 
 in its purity knows only celestial objects, leads 
 only to them. It is to teach men that all phil- 
 osophy and all experience but play the part of 
 children soon outgrowing all the things they say. 
 At any moment the fresh morning world may 
 unveil the view of heaven, the sense of .beauty 
 quicken in the heart — all reasoning futile in the 
 light of new vision. Poetry, always magical, its 
 systems, forms and laws passing out to the infin- 
 ite in every direction, embarks us upon further 
 and yet further excursions toward the boundless 
 truth. 
 
CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS 
 U . 5 . A 
 
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY 
 BERKELEY 
 
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