UC-NRLF liHii 1 H lilililllilp m mm ..MM ! Hi mm mm V-V !: iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii I i ililSi ■,||iiB lii 11 lliliii"-- till iiiliiM LIBRARY THE SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY THE SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY BY JOHN HERMAN RANDALL Author of *A New Philosophy oftife," *'The Culture of Personality," "Humanity at the Cross-Roads,*' **The Life of Reality," "The Philosophy of Power," etc. LONDON! WILLIAM RIDER & SON, LIMITED, 8, PATERNOSTER ROW, E.C, IRAR1 EDUC. PSYCh LIBRARy Copyright, 1919, by BRENTANO'S All rights reserved Wm. Rider & Son, Ltd., Printers, 8 Paternoster Row, London, E.C,4 TO ALL WHO LABOR ANYWHERE IN THE BUILDING OF THE NBW WORLD 470574 FOREWORD We have often been told that in the critical periods of history it is the soul of the people that really counts; that "where there is no vision the people perish." In this most criti- cal hour of the world's evolution when, in the turning and overturning of the very founda- tions of civilization, all familiar landmarks have been obliterated, all old ideals have been either dimmed or forgotten, and everything we once held necessary to the stability and progress of human hfe seems to be in the crucible, was there ever greater need for clear vision, and the faith and courage to translate the vision we see into living terms? It is inconceivable that the world should ever go back to what it was in 1914. It is im- possible that it should remain in its present disordered and chaotic state. There is only one way left open, — it must go forward to higher and better things. vii FOREWORD It is the law of life that nothing new ever comes into being in this world except through suffering and pain. Surely something new and wonderful is even now in the birth-process in the life of humanity, forced into being through all the suffering and pain that afflicts mankind to-day. Countless books by expert and able writers are coming constantly from the press, dealing with all phases of the great and complex prob- lems that immediately confront the world to- day, — political, social, economic, moral and re- ligious. In this book, the author makes no pretense as an expert in the solution of any of these specific problems. He is, rather, seeking to translate an old, and yet, ever new vision of life into living terms, to transmute an old, but as yet unrealized, ideal into practical inspira- tion for the mighty tasks before us. He cannot escape the deep conviction that greater than all other needs in men and in na- tions is the need of a new and transforming spirit, if this generation is to prove equal to its supreme opportunity. Of what avail viii FOREWORD would it be to change men, if institutions and systems remained the same, or to change in^ stitutions and systems, if men remained the same? It is the inmost life of both institutions and men that must be transformed. It is the new spirit in all beings and all things that must be brought to birth. In his previous books, the author has dealt with various phases of the new philosophy of life, based on a living experience, that is grad- ually assuming more definite form and is com- ing to hold a vital place in many thoughtful minds that have outgrown the older theologies. In this book the spirit of the new philosophy is set forth as the basic spirit for the new age, in terms of a spiritual unity that may become a vital experience in the growing consciousness of mankind, and thus serve as the sure founda- tion upon which can be reared with confidence the superstructure of the new world. As he pens these lines, the sun is setting be- hind the distant hills that bound the waters of the picturesque lake, across which his gaze is directed. The sky is dark overhead and the rays of the declining sun are throwing strange ix FOREWORD shadows athwart the landscape. A few mo- ments more and the sun will have disappeared, and then, — darkness, the night and the quiet shining of the stars. But he knows full well that the morrow will surely bring the sun again, when all the darkness and the shadows will be dispelled. The world of human life is filled with strange shadows to-day. The sun of an age that is past and forever gone is surely dis- appearing from view. Its passing seems to leave the world in gloom and darkness. But all the shadows and the gloom are only for a time. We know that the rising sun of a new day must shortly make its appearance. Even now its sure approach is heralded upon the distant horizon. By faith, and in quiet con- fidence we await the coming of that new day. John Herman Randall. Belgrade Lakes, Maine. August 15th, 1919. CONTENTS CHAPTER ^^^« I An Age of Revolt l II The Causes of Revolt 26 III The Demand for Unity 50 IV The Meaning of Unity 70 V Unity Within Oneself 94 VI Man's Unity with Nature US VII Man's Unity with His Fellows ... 140 VIII Man's Unity with God ^^^ IX The Spirit of Unity in Society . . .190 X Unity in Religion 215 XI . Unity and Democracy 238 XII The Coming World Unity 261 XIII The Pathway of Realization .... 285 THE SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY CHAPTER I AN AGE OF REVOLT **We are living, we are dwelling In a grand and awful time; 'Tis an age on ages telling, To be living is sublime." — Anon, IT is extremely difficult to characterize witH any degree of accuracy the present age. The field to be considered is so vast, and the forces aroused and at work are so numerous and so complex, that any generalization is sure to be misleading. To many it is an age of splendid idealism, while to others the forces of materialism are clearly in the ascendency; to some altruism is the keynote of the age, while others see only rampant selfishness on every side; to many the age is radiant with 1 , . ^.^riRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY hope for the future, while to others the years that he before us are dark and threatening for all that is of most value in the life of human- ity. But whether one holds the hopeful or the fearful attitude, there is no question but that we are living in an age characterized through- out by widespread confusion of thought, in which conflicting ideals, antagonistic theories and contradictory opinions are strugghng for the mastery. When even the accredited teachers of the race find it impossible to agree as to the solution of the gigantic problems con- fronting civilization, it is little wonder that the average man feels himself helpless and utterly lost in the intricate complexities of the present world situation. "Who indeed is sufficient for these things?'' is the well-nigh despairing cry that goes up from many a heart ; while still others of more confident spirit are earnestly inquiring: "Who will show us the pathway that leads to the new and better future for humanity?" For, despite all appearances to the contrary, there is an instinctive feeling that the building 2 AN AGE OF REVOLT of the new world awaits no sign from the heavens, no influx of miraculous power from above, no manifestation of any supernatural wisdom, but only the willingness of man him- self to rise to the present critical emergency and prove himself equal to the mighty tasks the age has thrust upon him. In earlier times it was the naive belief that the gods who dwelt outside man, in the dis- tan]^ heavens, would step in, as it were, in times of crises and do for him what he could not do for himself; it was by the aid of super- natural Powers that he was supposed to be able to solve all his knotty problems. But to- day, humanity has reached the point in its evolution where man knows, more or less clearly, that he holds in his own hands the forces by means of which he may make the future whatsoever he will. He is beginning to realize that he does not, and need not, de- pend on supernatural assistance from without ; he needs only to cooperate freely and fully with the God who dwells within himself, and all things will be made possible. It is in this conviction, as it emerges grad- SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY ually in the consciousness of the rank and file of mankind, that we glimpse both the glorious hopes and the solemn responsibihties for the future. Man need wait no longer for God to act, as in former ages; for the simple reason that God is always ready to act, waiting only man's willingness to act with Him and through Him. The present moment in human history is indeed God's great hour, — and man's; or better still, it may become God's great hour through man, if man is only ready at last to live out the divinest that is in him and thus realize his true Selfhood here on earth. The one self-evident fact that stands forth unmistakably clear, above the universal con- fusion of contending minds and chaotic opin- ions, is that all the turmoil and strife, all the various expressions of force and violence that menace the stability of existing institutions, all the uncertainty that broods over the future, go back for their ultimate source to the spirit of revolt that fills the world to-day. Never before in human history has the revolution- ary spirit been so widespread that it could be regarded as practically universal. Con- 7 AN AGE OF REVOLT sciously or unconsciously, all men are in- fluenced by it, and, to a greater extent than many realize, all men are slowly but surely be- ing transformed by it. Even the most con- servative to-day are conservative only by com- parison with the radicals; their conservatism is far in advance of what it was yesterday, and it is moving steadily toward something still more advanced to-morrow. The most stereotyped and conventional newspapers of the country are discovered to have changed their opinions over night; while the mental and moral agility with which some of them alter their editorial policy, in the in- terpretation of current events or immediate problems, is highly edifying as well as often most amusing. In every civilized land the crowds are being constantly harangued to overthrow the existing order so that something better may be ushered in, while great mass- meetings are being just as earnestly urged to maintain the existing order at any cost so that anarchy may not engulf the world. And the irony of the whole situation lies in the fact that the only existing "order" in the world is frank 6 B SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY and open disorder, and that in all countries, under whatever semblance of order may seem to exist, there is actually chaos and confusion worse confounded. Behold! a thousand voices crying to the multitudes, but how few that speak with any genuine authority; and even these few fail to command the hearing or the respect of any considerable number. If there ever was a time demanding the strongest and sanest lead- ership, it is surely to-day; but where are the truly commanding figures in whom the people have confidence and whom they will instinc- tively follow? It is by no means essential that the spirit of revolt should find expression in forms of violence, though these are its spectacular mani-» f estations that we dread the most, not realizing that they are the least powerful of all the forces of revolt and inevitably tend to recoil upon themselves. The most intense spirit of revolt often burns in the breasts of men and women who would never dream of lifting their hands in any way against their fellows. The most revolutionary forces in the world, now 6 AN AGE OF REVOLT and always, are ideas, convictions, enthusiasm for certain ideals that have become dynamic in the souls of men; and it is to these original sources that the spirit of revolt that fills the world to-day must ultimately be traced. For he utterly misreads the age who fails to see that the revolt characterizing the life of man to- day is essentially a revolt of the spirit in man against things-as-they-have-been in the past. And so if it were possible for the hand of authority to silence all criticism and suppress all objectors and repress every form of out- ward disorder, — a course that is fortunately quite impossible, — the age would still be char- acterized by the spirit of revolt within the hearts and minds of people everywhere. And, sooner or later, it would be bound to make itself heard, in spite of all methods of repres- sion or suppression that might be employed for a season. We have only to recall the conditions that prevail in the world to-day, to realize the truth of the foregoing statements. Politically, old and famihar forms of government have either already been swept away or else are trembling 7 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY in the balance. Czars and Emperors, Kings and Queens, hereditary rulers of all types, the vested nobility in all lands have been swept into the discard by the hundreds, while plain men of the people, with neither birth nor breeding, are holding the reins of governments and guiding the destinies of millions toward a more truly democratic state. The nations that fought to make the world "safe for democracy" little knew how terribly unsafe they were making it for anything short of a genuine democracy, whose real implica- tions few statesmen have as yet dared to frankly face. Whatever else the war may have accomplished, one thing is daylight plain at last: It has unleashed the mighty forces of democracy that, from the beginning, have lain potential in the breasts of all men, to such a degree that no form of autocracy, no kind of tyranny, no sort of human oppression can ever again be very long-lived on this planet. Sooner or later, government of the people, by the people, and for the people must surely be established in all the earth. For the People are awake at last, and the war has made them 8 AN AGE OF REVOLT conscious as never before, not only of their rights, but of their power to secure those rights. For five years now, we have been making the constant appeal to the rank and file of all lands as to those upon whom depended the preservation of the priceless liberties of hu- manity; and this, regardless of whether they fought in the trenches or toiled in the factories. All the world knows how nobly they responded to our appeals. It should not cause any sur- prise that now, with the ending of the war, these in every nation whose devotion and loyalty we have both witnessed and praised, should expect and even demand a larger share in the affairs of government than has ever yet been actually accorded them. But the revolt that fills the air is not directed alone against old or obsolete political institu- tions. It finds even more intense and bitter expression against old and outworn social and economic systems that have clearly revealed their utter inadequacy to cope with the prob- lems of the new age. However clearly the historian and the economist have realized the 9 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY fundamental place held by the great economic forces in modern civilization, the mass of men have had but a dim and vague perception of the part played by these forces, either in the life of nations or of individuals. The veil of ignorance, however, has at last been torn away, and men everywhere realize to-day that the fierce competitions, the deadly rivalries, the bitter frictions that breed wars between nations and bring hunger and want to count- less men, women and childi-en in every land, are at bottom due to economic causes that can be removed or changed just as soon as nations and men are ready to reorganize their forces on a different basis and live their lives in a new spirit. The Reconstruction Program, recently put forth by the British Labor Party, in its wise, constructive and statesmanlike treatment of the economic problems that immediately con- front the world, is one of the noblest and most significant human documents that the world has yet seen. It is clear that the demands of intelligent labor are no longer concerned only with higher wages or shorter hours; they go 10 AN AGE OF REVOLT far deeper than these things. As voiced by labor's most representative spokesmen, they involve nothing less than a larger share of the product of labor and a larger control of the means of production. It is extremely significant that many of the representative employers of labor are already admitting publicly the justice of these primary demands, and through some form of profit- sharing or plan of co-partnership are seeking to bridge the gulf between the old industrial system and the one that is to be. That changes are coming in our economic systems, no intelligent man can doubt any longer. The very tenseness of the industrial situation in all countries is the sure sign that things cannot remain as they have been. This revolt against the injustices of the old system, so deep-seated and widespread, together with the awakening sense of justice among a steadily increasing number of the employing class in England and the United States, gives promise of hope for a peaceful solution of the problems involved, at least in the more progressive countries. In the realm of Religion, the same spirit of 11 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY either active or passive revolt is increasingly in evidence. Long before the coming of the war, the drift away from the accredited churches had become clearly apparent, occa- sioning grave alarm among religious leaders in all countries. We are not thinking now of the intellectual revolt of the scholars from the historic institutions of religion, which became so marked about the middle of the nineteenth century and has steadily increased since that time. The discoveries of modern science, the historical criticism of the Bible, the compara- tive study of religions, the rise and rapid growth of the new social spirit, — all these ex- plain easily enough the scholar's natural im- patience with religious institutions that were content to jog along in the same old way with their eyes forever on the past, seemingly blind to all the new truth that had dawned upon the world, and unwilling to make the slightest ef- fort to translate the eternal element in religion into terms of the thought and life of the new day. Many such scholars bravely elected to re- main v/ithin the churches of their fathers where AN AGE OF REVOLT they have continued to struggle most earnestly for the re-vitahzing of religion, often in the face of unjust criticism and even bitter per- secutions. It is not strange, however, that many more have felt themselves debarred or driven out of the churches by their antagonistic attitude toward all who would not repeat verbatim the old shibboleths. And these have felt themselves obliged to live their own re- ligious lives alone and apart from all churches. As most of these represented the finest mental and moral life of the age, it has meant a tre- mendous loss of power and leadership to the churches. It is significant, however, that during the last generation, the spirit of revolt in religion has extended to the rank and file of the people themselves, who, hov/ever vaguely they may have grasped the intellectual view-point of the scholars, have nevertheless, in steadily increas- ing numbers, become convinced of the inad- equacy of the existing churches to satisfy their religious needs. The most intelligent leaders in all churches have viewed with serious appre- hension the falling away in church attendance, 13 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY the loss of valued members to the various new cults that have sprung up so rapidly, and the growing indifference of so many who still re- main nominally attached to the church. Each year the numerical statistics of church member- ship are published as the cause for self -con- gratulations, but the other side of the statisti- cal table is rarely mentioned. What of the nearly sixty per cent, of the people of this country who rarely, if ever, darken the doors of any church? These figures become all the more significant when we remember that they \ stand, in large measure, for the intelligence and the moral enthusiasm of the age ; and what is still more serious, they include the great pro- portion of the so-called laboring classes who have come to feel, as they say very frankly, that the church has nothing for them and is not interested in their problems. When the war first broke out, the hope was expressed in many quarters that it would lead to such a revival of interest in religion as would surely serve to stem the tide turning away from the historic institutions. But the war is over and the revival has not materialized AN AGE OF REVOLT as yet. As a matter of fact, the result of the war on the churches has been to accentuate the spirit of criticism within and the spirit of in- difference or open hostihty without the church. A careful and dispassionate survey of the many statements which have appeared in print from prominent religious leaders as to the in- fluence of the war on religion gives the follow- ing as a summary: Our dogmas of all kinds are at a discount, our sectarianism has been riddled to pieces, our particular forms and rites and rituals are matters of indifference, and the demand everywhere is for a simplifica- tion both of the theology and the machinery of ecclesiasticism. The boys who come back, we are told constantly, with any vital interest in f religion, are going to demand a different kind of a church. Within the church, the war has awakened multitudes of people from their smug self- complacency and forced them to think as they never have thought before, with the result that many have frankly abandoned beliefs that were only nominal before, and are utterly at sea as to what they do believe. Others have 15 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY come out openly against religion, repudiating all its institutions as having proved themselves bankrupt, both morally and spiritually, in the world's greatest crisis. And a still larger number are turning to New Thought, or to some other of the modern cults, in the wistful hope of finding what the regular churches have failed to furnish. A professional reader for one of the largest publishing houses of this country and Eng- land recently told the author that among the religious manuscripts submitted during the last six months, more than a score came from well-known clergymen of all denominations and that every one of them dealt with some phase of the religious revolt that is now on within the churches themselves. This is only one publishing house, however, and it is safe to assume that all publishers are receiving similar manuscripts by religious leaders, in which breathes the same spirit of revolt. But by far the most serious indictment of the churches is that they have failed the world in that moral and spiritual leadership which is their peculiar function, and of which the world 16 AN AGE OF REVOLT has stood most in need during the last few years. There have been, to be sure, a few prophetic voices, but these have been the ex- ception; they have been hke voices crying in the wilderness, to which has come little re- sponse save that of slander and misrepre- sentation from their fellow churchmen. The Church as a whole, both Catholic and Protes- tant, has failed to voice clearly and unmistak- ably, in this critical hour for the world, the Gospel it professes to believe; and no amount of specious argument or sophistical statement can justify its failure to the minds of thinking men, or to the conscience of the common peo- ple. This is not to deny that the Church has done many good works and assisted most generously many worthy causes; but as an organization, it has voiced no vital, clean-cut, moral message for the troubled times through which humanity has been and is still passing. It is for this message that the people everywhere have been listening, but listening in vain. "Where there is no vision the people perish." And it has ever been the instinctive faith of men that 17 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY the one institution in society that should be spiritually capable of catching the vision needed in times of crisis, and translating it into moral and living terms, is the Church. Is it any wonder that multitudes in all lands have lost faith in the leadership of the Church for to-day, and, as a natural result, are turning elsewhere for light? The Church really leads, not because it claims to lead, but only when it does actually lead. If the Church were in- deed leading the mighty moral and spiritual forces to-day, it would certainly need no apolo- gists. In the re-construction age that now lies be- fore us, where are the indications that the Churches are preparing to assume the place of moral leadership amid the many intricate problems that confront the world? Since the signing of the armistice, the leading denomina- tions have all been making extensive plans for huge financial campaigns, or already centering their machinery on the actual raising of vast sums of money, running up into the hundreds of millions, with the primary object of push- ing more vigorously their own denominational 18 AN AGE OF REVOLT enterprises both at home and abroad. But we have heard comparatively httle from any of the great denominations, with the notable ex- ception of the recent program put forth by the Roman Catholic Church, as to any real, con- structive social program, or as to the part they propose to play in ushering in the new social order. We admit that money is necessary even for churches, but we deny that it is the first or most important necessity, or that the amount of money raised, however huge, is any criterion of the Church's true power. Its source of power is always and only in its moral and spiritual leadership; and this is what the churches must regain before their money can accomplish real and lasting benefit. The revolt against the institutions of religion to-day may mean much for the religion of tlie future, and may tend, as nothing else, to bring the Church to itself, and thus empower it for its true mission in the world. A prominent Englishman, writing recently in the Atlantic Monthly, calls attention to the fact that there is a profound desire for religion in England that no church or sect is satisfying at present. 19 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY He closes his article with these significant words: **The question remains which no one yet can answer, whether any existing church has the energy to grasp the full-orbed concep- tion of the Kingdom of Heaven, both as an inner and an outer thing, to free itself from its own past, to proclaim the truth that Christian- ity is yet to be discovered bj^ all the powers of man's mind, and to be practised by all the energy of his will. If not, we may dare to predict that a new Church will arise and de- stroy the old ones." It takes no prophet to see that a church that identifies religion with narrow patriotism, whose doctrines belong, in their phrasing, to an age that is gone, whose organization is undemocratic and whose spirit is exclusive, for which there has dawned no social vision and which is blind to the revolu- tionary character of its message, — for such a church there can be no possible future. If the limits of space did not forbid, it would be interesting to trace the same spirit of revolt in the intellectual and moral life of to-day. Nothing is more strikingly significant than the new emergence of the spiritual sense, or the 20 AN AGE OF REVOLT mystical spirit, in quarters where we would be least likely to look for it. It is true, wonder- fully true, that "the moon is rising again and the tide of dreams once more floods the naked shingles of the world." The old star-lit mystery of things is coming back, and life is "Jn^.^ filled once more with meaning and signifi- cance. The very science that since the time of Darwin has seemed to be taking all the glory out of the sky and all of the divineness out of life, is to-day becoming more and more mystical, or in other words, less and less hostile toward the things of the spirit. Every day this science is confirming more clearly man's intuitive faith that he is spirit, that he does not live by bread alone, and that the meaning of his life is something mysteriously sacred, ra- diant and exalted beyond all mortal telling. The new interest in the history of mysticism, in its philosophy and in the lives of the great mystics, as evidenced by the surprising number of volumes recently published on such sub- jects, would seem to indicate that the spirit in y^ man is in revolt against the dogmatic material- ism of so much of modern science, of its n g SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY mechanistic theory of the universe, of its ab- sorption in physical phenomena merely, and its unwillingness to accept or even to investi- gate the empirical evidence of the inner life of man. The tragic history of modern Ger- many reveals the fact that a science and a philosophy, blinded to the things of the spirit and dedicated to the ideal of power merely, is doomed to certain downfall. The fault, of course, is not due to science and philosophy as such, but rather to the arbitrary hmitations imposed upon them, to the inadequacy of their methods and the superficiality of their treat- ment. It is against these limitations that the revolt is on in the intellectual realm, demand- ing a truer science and a completer philosophy for the future. In the same way, the revolt in the moral realm is directed against the merely conven- tional morality that has proved so helpless in this time of stress and strain. The morality of expediency, that may pass unquestioned in times of peace, reveals its utter inadequacy when civilization is trembling in the balance. AN AGE OF REVOLT The leaders in every land who seem so power- less to even point the way out of the present chaos to some higher order, stand self-con- demned, as lacking the knowledge of those fundamental principles of morality, and as faihng to possess that clear moral idealism, w^hich alone are capable of ushering in the bet- ter day for humanity. It is the rank and file of the people who see this weakness most keenly, — the unsophisticated men and women, — and it is they who are demanding a higher type of morality both in private and public life. It is clear that the revolt is against the con- ventional limiting of morals to the individual life, while the worlds of politics, of business, of industry are practically regarded as being above or beyond the reach of all moral law. What is becoming increasingly plain to all reflecting minds is that the spirit of revolt that is finding expression in the political, the social, the economic, the intellectual, the religious and the moral worlds is, in the last analysis, a re- volt within oneself; or better still, a revolt against oneself, — against the imperfect self, as SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY and the only self that most of us know as yet. All thoughtful minds realize more or less clearly to-day that both sin and salvation are social as well as individual facts. Whatever limitations or weaknesses or shortcomings may characterize our age, it is clear that we are all of us in some actual degree responsible. We must either all go up together or else go down together ; there is no such thing as being saved or lost alone. We are all members one of an- other, organically related in one living Whole ; so that in a real sense, what we are, all are. Whatever our age may prove to be, depends at bottom on what we, the individual men and women living in this age, actually are in our deepest selves. For this reason, the widespread revolt against things-as-they-are is really nothing else than a revolt against ourselves as we are; for it is we who make the age what it is. If the age is blind or materialistic or selfish or lacking in moral idealism, it is because these weak- nesses are present in us, for the age is but the reflection of ourselves. We shall never be- come equal to ushering in any better age until, 24. AN AGE OF REVOLT first of all, we ourselves become better men and women. "The fault lies not in our stars, but in ourselves, dear Brutus, that we are underlings." ^ CHAPTER II THE CAUSES OF REVOLT "New occasions teach new duties, Time makes ancient good uncouth; We must upward be and onward Who would keep abreast of Truth." — Lowell. ALL human progress involves change, but it by no means follows that all change registers progress. To determine whether the spirit of revolt that is so insistently opposing the institutions and systems under which man- kind has been living its life, is demanding changes that will mean real progress for hu- manity, depends upon the causes out of which the revolt actually springs, and the ends to- ward which it is definitely moving. It must be kept in mind that this spirit of revolt is not confined to any one nation or race ; it is literally world wide. It is not limited to any particular phase of man's life, but includes the entire range of his thought, activity and ^6 THE CAUSES OF REVOLT aspiration. The whole world has been passing through a convulsion that has shaken it to its very depths. It is not the superstructure of civilization that is being threatened, but the deep foundations themselves, upon which must be based everything that is of worth and mean- ing to man. There are many clergymen, of the pre-mil- lennial school of thought, who would have us believe that the turning and overturning that is taking place signifies nothing else than the literal end of the world. We need not share their gloomy and childish apprehensions; but one thing is sure : The spirit of revolt, so uni- versal, so profound and so all-inclusive of the different realms in which man lives and moves and has his being, can mean nothing less than the dawning of a new epoch in the life of hu- - manity. All exercise of the strong hand of authority, every use of drastic measures of repression, all insistence upon the necessity of preserving the "existing order" may succeed in postponing, but it can never permanently halt the com-^" ing of the new day. For the hour has struck 27 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY at last, on the great dial of human history, when things-as-they-are must give place to things-as-they-are-to-be. Only the most superficial observer comforts himself any longer with the thought that the social upheaval we are witnessing throughout the world is "the mere inevitable result of the war"; and that, with the ratification of the Peace Treaty and the starting up again of the wheels of industry in the war-stricken coun- tries, all social unrest will gradually quiet down; so that, before the lapse of many months, the world will have settled back into "normal conditions." Such prophets of Peace utterly fail to understand either the nature or the extent of the revolt that sweeps the world to-day. It is indeed the inevitable result of the war, but in a vastly deeper sense than most people imagine as yet. The war has left fields untilled, industry crippled, business paralyzed, homes desolated, hearts sorrowing, and hun- dreds of millions burdened with grievous taxa- tion for generations to come. But, in some large degree, this is the tragic fruitage of all wars. If these were the only, or even the ^8 THE CAUSES OF REVOLT chief, results of the great war, we might in- deed look forward with the assurance that in the near future, the unrest and disorder and revolt that mark these post-war days would surely pass away. The most significant results of this war, however, lie much deeper than the present hunger and want and sorrow that fill the world. As yet we can only glimpse them in their gen- eral outlines; it remains for the future to re- veal them in all their potent details. This war, in contradistinction to all other wars of history, has aroused the people everywhere to think for themselves, it has set free the deep and powerful forces that have always been latent in the breast of humanity but that have only now begun to function in their universal aspects, it has served to formulate ideals and crystallize convictions and awaken determina- tions; in a word, it has loosed everywhere the dynamic forces of humanity that the spirit of autocracy in all ages has sought to keep in chains of subjection. But the chains are broken to-day, for the People have awakened to self -consciousness at last. ^9 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY That this has been the great achievement of this war is due, not only to the number of countries involved or the millions of men en- gaged or the terrific losses incurred or the un- precedented cost in money or the bitterness with which the struggle has been waged, but, more than all else, to the fact that the time was ripe in human history, as never before, for the awakening of the people as a whole to their real place, their just rights and their true power in the world. All the events of all the past have been preparing, the people for this momentous hour of their emancipation from the bonds of every sort of tyranny. Xever before in history could a war, even had it been as great as this war, have found the people so ready to learn its tragic lessons and profit by its profound sufferings. All previous wars, excepting of course civil uprisings, have been wars of rulers and po- tentates, in which the people have been merely the pawns to do their masters' bidding. They gave their lives unthinkingly, in the spirit of a blind sense of duty; and after the war was over, they settled back again into a more or 30 THE CAUSES OF REVOLT less uneasy slumber. But, regardless of its beginnings, this has been the peoples' war. The rank and file, both in the field and at home, have fought and suffered and sacrificed in the firm conviction that this was to be the war that should end wars. To that great end, the people have realized that a reorganization of the world-life was imperative, that a new basis must be found for civilization and a new spirit achieved in the collective life of human- ity. The extent to which this was believed and the degree to which it has furnished the motive power for the enthusiasm and courage of the men engaged, is revealed by all who have come into personal contact with the armies of the various nations. This is the absolutely unique feature of the war just ended that has created the lofty moral idealism in the hearts of men. It has been due to the wider diffusion of educa- tion, the larger development of the moral sense, the deeper growth of the social spirit,, the keener realization that, in every war, the people must pay the tragic costs while the real war-makers either profit or go free, and above 31 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY all, to the consciousness, never before so clearly ^ aroused, that the people themselves hold it in M their own hands to decide the future destiny of mankind. The longer the war continued, the more pronounced became this conviction. Multitudes who had only thought in terms of their little villages before, have been learning to think in terms of the nation, and in many cases, even in world-terms. In spite of all the fierce nationalisms that have been aroused, some conception of a coming Internationalism has begun to emerge, more or less clearly, in countless minds. Because of these unique, and hitherto un- heard of, spiritual forces which the war has called forth, not only in its fighting men but also in a large proportion of the populations back at home, it has made little difference to the people how old-fashioned might be the terms of any Peace Treaty decided upon at Paris. For the people have long since deter- mined that the final Peace must be a Peace of justice, involving such a reorganization of in- ternational relations as should ensure a per- manent Peace for the world. And the people 32 THE CAUSES OF REVOLT know to-day that they possess the power to secure eventually just such a Peace, and that it was only for such a Peace that they have made all the great sacrifices. It is to these deeper sources that the spirit of revolt must be traced, rather than to any mere unsettling process of the surface of man's life, occasioned by the war. And we shall fail ut- terly in our interpretation of this most charac- teristic spirit of the times, unless we view it from the deeper source whence it springs. In other words, the war has only brought to the surface and awakened to fulness of life what has long been slumbering beneath the surface in all lands. The war is the immediate cause of a revolt, whose predisposing causes lie far behind us in the past. In "Sartor Resartus," one of the great books of the nineteenth century, Carlyle sug- i/"' gests the real cause of the revolt that so clearly marks the first quarter of the twentieth cen- tury. In his quaint philosophy of clothes, he points out that just as all the garments we wear are, sooner or later, outgrown or become threadbare, and have to be patched or dis- SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY carded for new and more fitting garments, even so it is with all the institutions, systems, laws, customs, behefs and ideals in which man has from time to time arrayed himself. Even the best of them are at length outgrown and become old-fashioned and obsolete; they cease to fulfil the original purpose for which they were intended. So that the time inevitably comes w'hen man must discard these outworn or outgrown institutions, systems, laws and beliefs, and fashion for himself garments more fitting to his present-day needs. Carlyle, and other prophetic souls like him, only saw fifty years and more ago what most intelligent men have come to see clearly to- day. And since Carlyle's time, these nonde- script garments of civilization have steadily been becoming more threadbare and dilapi- dated than when he wrote. The simple fact is that humanity has been fast outgrowing the % forms and institutions and beliefs that have been handed down from the past. The gar- m.ents of a nineteenth-century civilization are no longer suitable to, nor do they, fit the man of THE CAUSES OF REVOLT to-day. For man himself has been constantly- growing, and growing far more rapidly than have the forms of the civilization under which he lives his life. He has been growing in his knowledge, in his moral ideals, in his social consciousness and in his spiritual powers of perception. All forms of life depend upon the harmony of the living organism with its environment ; ><^ when that harmony is interrupted, death en- sues. We know that this law holds true of iman's physical life, but we have not always perceived that it holds just as true of his higher moral and spiritual being. The politi- cal institutions, economic systems, religious be- liefs and moral ideals that have held sway over man's life for the last century and more, grew naturally out of certain needs in human life at the time when they came into existence. The particular forms they took at that time de- pended upon man's knowledge of himself and of his fellows, of the laws of nature, of the principles making for social control, and es- pecially, upon how far along he had come in 85 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY his perception of those fundamental moral laws that underlie the harmonious collective life of man. But while all institutions, systems, laws, be- hefs and ideals inevitably tend to become static, man is forever a dynamic being. In the nature of things, he can never become sat- isfied with things-as-they-are. In just the measure that he does become content, he ceases to aspire and so ceases truly to live. It is this inborn capacity for divine discontent that ex- plains the spirit of revolt in man, whenever it appears, that proves man's real divinity and that lifts him immeasurably above the brute creation. It is this that makes the present age of world-wide revolt such a wonderful age in which to be alive. It is not its chaotic con- fusion of mind, its vacillating uncertainty, its apparent lack of moral leadership or its mighty problems, but rather, its deep-seated capacity -f -4- for protest against the world as it is and its ability to visuahze an ideal Kingdom of Heaven here on earth, that should give to the present generation its real zest for living, its 36 THE CAUSES OF REVOLT vital faith in the future and its unflagging in- spiration to solve the problems that imme- diately confront it. The political ideals for the state, as set forth by the liberal school of economists in France, England and the United States at the begin- ning of the nineteenth century, were based on an optimistic conception of human nature. They held that, if man was only given perfect freedom to follow his own self-interest, it would eventually work out for the best inter- ests of all. They sought, therefore, to mini- mize the authority of the State and its exercise over the individual, with the result that the theory underlying the authority of the State became the theory of the "passive policeman." The State should keep all hands off the actions of the individual, stepping in to interfere only in case of an emergency or when some special trouble arose. Meantime the industrial revolution, made possible by the invention of machinery, had been ushered in, bringing to industrial coun- tries a tremendously rapid development of manufacturing interests. The "passive police- 37 p ^ SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY ^ man" theory of government fitted in very com- ' fortably with the self-interest of the manufac- turers; but instead of justifying the optimism of the economists as to the v^orking out of free self-interest, we find factory conditions reach- ing a most deplorable state, even in so enlight- ened a country as England. The unjust con- ditions that have continued to prevail between capital and labor in all industrial countries, while they have been vastly changed for the better through the force of public sentiment, are to-day still the cause of the industrial un- -. rest and grow out, primarily, of the lack of ^ proper regulation by an enlightened State. It has been for some time a commonplace that the conventional nineteenth-century doc- trine of the State is breaking down beneath the pressure of facts and events; but it has been far from clear whither the new movement was tending and whether it had constructive elements within itself. Both in theory and practise, the State is in the melting pot, though it may be said that the outlines of the new con- ception are beginning to appear. This much, at least, is daily becoming more 38 THE CAUSES OF REVOLT apparent, that the truly democratic State is not the State that leaves all people free to do as they please, but one that is so organized that all its people are made free from the encroach- ments of selfishness and greed in any form; that sees to it that all individuals, even the weakest and lowest in the social scale, secure^ nothing but the square deal. It is thus that humanity has outgrown the older political in- stitutions and is demanding to-day a more ad- equate conception of the functions of Govern- ment to meet the demands of justice for all. Thus the economic system that gained its first foothold in society at the time of the in- dustrial revolution and that has steadily grown in scope and power, until to-day it almost seems to have superseded the State in the range of its influence, can no longer be tol- erated in its present autocratic form if liberty t^ and freedom are to be anything more than empty words in modern life. It is not within the province of this work to consider the var- ious solutions of the economic problems that present themselves to us to-day. It is enough to say, in this connection, that a system that ^9 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY ^,^ literally gives to the employing class the power of life and death over the employed, that creates class antagonism and bitterness, that /.results in the massing of wealth in the hands of the few while the many live only from hand to mouth, that produces the grave inequalities so apparent in modern society and that fosters inevitably the spirit of hatred in the commun- ity, — that such a system is radically wrong in principle and must be changed. All the protests, all the revolts and often- times the violence that find expression in all social classes against the fundamental in- justice of such a system, are simply the visible proof that humanity has outgrown the present .. form of the economic system under which it has been hving for the last hundred years, and is demanding that a more just and righteous system take its place. The intellectual revolt, difficult as it may be to interpret it aright, is also, in its deepest as- pects, a revolt against the inadequacy of the present-day philosophy that would make man a prisoner in a world of time and sense. The older philosophy was fundamentally idealistic; 40 THE CAUSES OF REVOLT it presupposed a universe, significant for hu- man life, which was there to be accepted or rejected; it recognized the spirit in man as one with the Universal Spirit; it believed in end- less progression for the human spirit. But for a generation or so, our philosophy- has tended to become more and more prag- matic, scientific, economic, democratic, while the eternal phenomena of man's inner life have been relegated to the background as unim- portant. The result is that man's inner nature has been starved. He has become spiritually anemic, not because the problems dealt with by modern philosophy are not vitally im- portant, but because they do not comprise the whole of life. They leave out the realm where the spiritual man must always live his deepest life, — the realm of intuition, of faith and as- piration. Man must know what to do and how to act, but he craves yet more the knowl- edge of who he really is, and why he is here at all, and what he is here for. He needs to un- derstand himself in all the complexities of his being. He seeks to discover the hidden and latent powers of mind and heart and will. He 41 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY longs to awaken and develop all that he vaguely feels is potential within him. He wants to become clearly, profoundly conscious of himself, of his true Self which he knows lies vastly deeper than any mere surface self. It is because so much of our present-day philosophy is practical but not deep, clever but not profound, exact but not comprehensive, dealing with earth but forgetting heaven, touching the near but leaving out the stars, concerned with what is called real but blind to ideals, — for these reasons man, in the totality of his being, turns away from it all unsatisfied. He knows within himself that he is too big for its littlenesses, too broad for its limitations, too ideal for its realities, too spiritual for its materiahsm. It is far too inadequate to in- terpret for him his infinite universe, his own limitless life and the ideal Kingdom of Heaven which he sees in his loftiest dreams. He is confident that there is far more of meaning, even if it be mysterious meaning, in his life than is dreamt of in current philosophies. What is to be the outcome? The philo- THE CAUSES OF REVOLT sophic task for to-day does not consist merely in a defiant reaffirmation of old faiths; that would be to ignore utterly the law of progress. But it must be a reconstruction of old faiths in terms of the new forces that are shaping our lives. If the old philosophic ideahsm is in- adequate to the new conditions, that does not mean that an arbitrary "will to power," a pragmatic self-assertiveness, is to take its place. If we are to create effectively, it will only be because and in so far as we meet the authentic conditions of our larger world, spiritual as well as material. This means that deeper than our "will to create" is our will to appropriate and to possess the world of ideal values. It means that, however changed in form it may be, idealism, the conviction of a significant reality that conditions all our in- terpretations, will still remain fundamental. The pragmatic reaction against the idealisms of the past has done its effective and needed work. But the intellectual revolt to-day sug- gests, at least, that the time is ripe for the ex- pression, in a new way, of the immanent ideal- 46 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY ism of our modern life; For such a true and more adequate philosophy, the world expect- antly waits. In a similar way, the religious revolt is not directed against rehgion as such, but against both its theological and ecclesiastical expres- sions. Man feels instinctively that true re- ligion must be bigger than its organizations, better than its adherents, more vital than its creeds and rituals. There never was a time when there was more religion in the world than to-day, but most of it is to be found outside ■^^of all accredited organizations. For the most part, real religion is inarticulate, unformu- lated, unorganized, and therefore, ineffective in working the transformation it seeks. As Sabatier so truly says: "^'Man is incurably religious," and never more so than when he has outgrown the old creeds and is reaching beyond old forms for moral and spiritual val- ues that the old no longer furnish. The future is bright indeed with promise for religion; but whether it will find its home in the old churches, or will be forced to fashion for itself new chan- nels through which it can more adequately find 44 THE CAUSES OF REVOLT expression, depends upon the churches them- selves, — whether they possess the faith and the courage to adjust themselves to the new order. The religious doubts and questionings that fill men's minds to-day are the sure indications of a living faith in the things of religion, when once men have worked their way through to a positive, constructive behef. The serious doubts of to-day are a far more healthful sign than would be mere blind, unthinking acquies- cence in the beliefs that have been. For, "there is more faith in honest doubt than half the creeds." Even the large numbers who have aban- doned the churches and formed no new relig- ious affihations of any kind, are not for that reason to be condemned as being irreligious, for many of them have honestly felt obliged to leave the churches as they are, in order to become Christians. The religious revolt, in its deeper aspects, is clearly a revolt against Christianity-the-system, for the sake of the universal, moral and spiritual religion that was voiced by Jesus. This is illustrated by the title of a recent article by one of the most 45 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY thoughtfully religious men in the country: "Can Christianity any longer tolerate the Church?" It is thus that the religious spirit of to-day has outgrown religion as expressed by the churches. In international relations, it is self-evident that humanity has consciously outgrown the old conditions that have always held between nations. As G. Lowes Dickinson clearly points out, these relations have meant inter- national anarchy. The only wonder is that the world has tolerated them for so long. Each nation has considered that it was a law unto itself, and that any course of action was justified if only it had the power to pursue it successfully. The war has demonstrated that our boasted international law was nothing but ^"a scrap of paper." But it is not until now that the world has demanded that the old in- ternational anarchy be replaced by an inter- national order, without which no civihzation can ever hope to be stable or permanent. Thus far we have sought to show that the age into which we have come is characterized throughout by the spirit of revolt, that it is 46 THE CAUSES OF REVOLT practically universal and that it involves all the realms of mind and spirit in which man lives his life. We have tried to prove that the significance of this revolt lies in the fact that it proceeds not from superficial causes, but from deep -lying sources in the being of man himself. It is to be found everywhere in the world to-day simply because man has out- grown the institutions, systems, laws, behefs and ideals under which he has been living his life hitherto. He had long been outgrowing them before the war came; and what the war has done has been to call into clear conscious- ness this fact, and to crystallize man's deter- mination to fashion for himself and for the world, new institutions, systems, laws, behefs and ideals that will be more adequate to his needs and more truly expressive of his new spirit. For this reason it must be clear that no mere patchwork methods can succeed ; the time is far too late for that. Nothing but a resolute and courageous facing of all the problems involved and the persistent determination not to rest until they have been solved right, that is, in 47 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY accordance with the principles of justice and fairness to all, can ever hope to satisfy the spirit of revolt in the world to-day. We must dare to accustom ourselves to the thought that things-as-they-have-been must give place to things-as-they-are-to-be. We must come to confidently rejoice that to us of this generation has been entrusted the solemn responsibility of preserving all that is good in the old order, at the same time that we help to usher in the new day for humanity. Because of the deeper meaning of the spirit of revolt, in revealing man's divine capacity for making real the Kingdom of Heaven here on earth, there is no ground for fear or pes- simism, but only for the strongest confidence and the loftiest hopes. The great ages are never the easj^ ages in which to live. Just be- cause of its unique greatness, our age is pecu- liarly hard and difi^cult, calhng for the very highest qualities of manhood and womanhood. But as Phillips Brooks has counseled: "Do not pray for easy lives; pray rather to be stronger men and women." There are many to-day who feel a deep 4S THE CAUSES OF REVOLT sympathy with the waihng complaint of Ham- let: **The times are out of joint. O cursed spite That ever I was born to set them right." These are the words of a coward, however, never of the brave man. The spirit we need in such an age comes to us like a challenge, in those ringing words of Rupert Brooke, the gifted English poet who lost his life in the Mediterranean campaign : "Now, God be thanked, who has matched me with His hour." 49 CHAPTER III THE DEMAND FOR UNITY "Nothing in the world is single. All things by a Law Divine In one another's being mingle." — Shelley, IT is not within the province of this work to consider in detail the problems confronting the world to-day, to describe the paths that may lead to the new order for humanity, or even to suggest the methods by means of which the needed changes may be brought about. This is the task for the experts and specialists. What we are seeking, rather, is to indicate the spirit that animates the mass of men every- where, to outline its essential nature, to inter- pret its deeper meaning and to suggest the great goal which, either consciously or uncon- sciously, it is earnestly striving to attain. We have defined the spirit of the age as the spirit of revolt against things-as-they-are, a spirit born out of the deep conviction that man 50 THE DEMAND FOR UNITY has outgrown the older civiHzation which has finally culminated in the most bitter and tragic war of history, and is ready at last for such a reorganization of society and of the world as shall be more nearly adequate to his -" needs and more truly representative of his ideals. But if the spirit in man is in revolt from things that have been, it must, in just the degree that it is an intelligent revolt, have some actual goal in sight. It must be positive as vrell as negative, constructive as well as de- structive; in displacing what has been it must be prepared to replace the old with something new ; and it needs to be very sure that its some- thing new is better than the old. It is this that makes the present age so ex- tremely critical for the future of humanity, and it is at just this point that the world is confronting the gravest dangers. There is no denying the fact that for multitudes the revolt is a bUnd revolt, unthinking and unseeing be- yond the immediate present of injustice and wrong under which so many suffer. Men are striking out, hterally and figuratively, against conditions that exist, w^ithout any very clear dl SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY idea of the conditions that should take their place. While their conscious motives may not be wholly destructive, the sum total of their revolt would prove to be so in the end, and its success would result in pulling down the good rather than in building up a better. It may easily be questioned how many of the leaders of revolt to-day, both in its passive and violent aspects, are far-sighted, broad-visioned, deep-thinking men, who thoroughly under- stand their age, who realize the significance of the mighty forces at work and who see clearly the goal for which they are striving. Un- fortunately, there are too many leaders in all countries who are, at heart, mere demagogues or clever opportunists who have seized upon the general unrest of the people and are prosti- tuting it to their own selfish ends, and many more whose zeal, however sincere, far outstrips their knowledge. But this only makes all the more imperative the appearance of the truly great leaders, the big, broad, intelligent, un- selfish men and women who are willing to dedi- cate all their gifts and knowledge to the wise and dispassionate guidance and control of the 52 THE DEMAND FOR UNITY powerful forces operating to-day in the life of humanity. But, however blind or unthinking or selfish many may be, what is the goal we are really seeking? If we think we know what we are revolting from, do we know what we are re- volting to? What is the actual end we need to gain if we are to truly discover the right solution of our many complex problems? What is the guiding principle or ideal that alone will enable us to direct the spirit of re- volt through all the dangers that threaten, to- ward a new age that shall be unmistakably bet- ter than the old, and that shall mark, as we trust, the next step forward for humanity? Once again, let us repeat, we are not at- tempting any detailed description in this con- nection of the forms the new civilization will present. No man is wise enough to predict that future with any degree of certainty. What we seek is some fundamental principle upon which the new civilization may hope to build permanently and effectively in the inter- est of the progress of all humanity. And we find that principle, which is at the same time 53 E SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY an ideal, contained in the great word, — Unity, It matters not to which school of political thought we may belong, — Tory or Liberal, Re- publican or Democrat, Anarchist or Com- munist, Socialist or Guild Socialist, — nor to what philosophical or religious creed we give adherence, we venture to affirm that, underly- ing all our differing ideals as to what the world needs, and must find, in order to solve its great problems, the fundamental and primary need is for a fuller realization of some conception of unity. We shall deal in the next chapter with the meaning of unity; for the present, let us confine our thought to the imperative de- mand of the age for some kind of a closer unity in the life of mankind. If the spirit of revolt is the striking feature of our age, its demand for unity is even more significant. At a time when the entire world has been rent asunder, when, with few excep- tions, all the nations have been pitting their maximum of strength and resources against one another, when, within the nation, society is divided against itself in a bitter class strug- gle, when hatred and prejudice have dug 54 THE DEMAND FOR UNITY deeper gulfs and erected more tragic barriers between men than ever existed before, when, even with the coming of Peace, we seem to be witnessing fiercer national rivalries and more bitter internal struggles and controversies than before the war, it seems strange, and yet not so strange, that from the heart of mankind should go forth the mighty longing for a unity that does not exist as yet, save in our ideals. In such an age of inconceivably destructive disunity, the heart of humanity is funda- mentally sound in its imperious demand for unity. In spite of the conditions produced by the war, however, we remember that the real be- ginnings, at least, of an international organiza- tion had taken place in the nineteenth century. The postal service and, later, the cable and radio services between different countries were the sure signs of a growing sense of unity among nations. The adoption, toward the close of the century, of a common system of weights and measures, together with interna- tional federations of all kinds, had served to bind the various peoples into a closer fellow- 65 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY ship. International congresses, devoted to all varieties of interests, had been multiplying every year. Even a World's Parliament of Religions had been most successfully held in connection with the World's Fair in Chicago in 1892. Plans had been broached for a Federa- tion of the Chambers of Commerce of the lead- ing cities of all lands, with a view of eventually organizing a World's Chamber of Commerce. In addition to these public international organ- izations, it has been estimated by a recent writer that more than 400 private international federations or societies had come into being be- fore the breaking out of the war. The tremendously rapid increase of travel between different lands during the last genera- tion, with the resulting mutual acquaintance between various peoples and the better under- standing of institutions, languages, laws, cus- toms, etc., of different countries, the wide- spread study of the modern sciences of com- parative literatures and comparative religions, the countless ties formed through personal friendships as well as through commercial re- lationships, — all this had tended to awaken an 56 THE DEMAND FOR UNITY intelligent appreciation of the life and achieve- ments of other peoples, out of which had grown inevitably a new and deeper interna- tional sympathy. When we recall these facts and the many other indications of the growing sense of unity that have characterized the last fifty years, it is not surprising that the coming of the war which, on the surface, seemed to be the com- plete denial of any unity, should suggest at once to the progressive minds of all nations the idea of some sort of world organization that should make such costly wars impossible in the future. As a matter of fact, the soil had long been in preparation, through these preliminary attempts at international organization and the steadily increasing intercourse between differ- ent peoples, for an international organization that should take in all the political states of the world. Such a plan was bound to come, sooner or later. The war simply hastened its coming. When men awoke to the consciousness that, in the supposedly enlightened twentieth cen- tury, the nations of the world were still living 67 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY in a state of international anarchy, and that international law was such a travesty on the name that the peace and progress of the world was in constant danger, it was inevitable that the idea of a League of Nations should take strong hold of the imagination and will of man- kind with compelling force. That the League at its birth was far from perfect does not change the fact that it stands for a real step forward in the direction of actual unity in the world's political organization; and the way lies open for the people in the respective coun- tries to make it, in time, a genuine World League, not of Governments but of Peoples, — a veritable family of nations on earth. The thing to emphasize is that all efforts to achieve an actual League of Nations are really di- rected toward the realization in fuller measure of World-Unity. The international socialists, while limiting their efforts to uniting the workers of the world into one organization, regardless of na- tionality, are also inspired by the ideal of unity, — the unity of their class. And while the disunity which the socialists would create 58 THE DEMAND FOR UNITY through the fostering of class consciousness would seem to be opposed to the idea of any general unity, yet we must give them credit for believing that the present disunity is only the means to a higher unity, when the workers of the world will comprise the whole of so- cietj^ in what they conceive as the socialistic state. While, in a truly tragic sense, the war has served to destroy for a time the large measure of unity that had gradually come to exist, in another sense it has brought men and nations together in new bonds of fellowship and co- operation. On one hand we have witnessed separations, divisions, alienations ; on the other, we have seen new alliances, combinations and unions of hearts and hands in the common cause. If the first results of the war have em- phasized the absence of unity, the second have equally emphasized its presence, in places and to a degree never experienced before. Among the Allied nations, we have seen peo- ples banded together in the struggle for com- mon ends who in former wars have been ranged against each other. In this war they 59 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY have fought as loyally for one another as at previous times they have fought to defeat each other. The twenty and more nations, great and small, that have been alhed against the Central Powers have at least achieved a new sense of unity among themselves ; and it is not difficult to imagine this sense of unity extended in time so as to include all nations. This cer- tainly is the demand that the people are mak- ing for the League of Nations that eventually shall come into being. Within each nation, the problem of prob- lems has been how to achieve, amid all the op- posing parties, conflicting opinions and an- tagonistic interests, that sense of unity of interest and aspiration that shall lift men above the plane of mere partisanship or indi- vidual self-interest and bind them over in service to the common good of the Whole. Difficult as the task may seem, no one can deny that this is the fundamental need of the hour in every land. We can never hope to solve successfully our internal problems until we have achieved a degree of unity such as now does not exist. So long as we are satisfied 60 THE DEMAND FOR UNITY to be forever working at cross-purposes with one another, we need not expect to see much improvement in present social conditions. During the war, however, a degree of unity has been reahzed that would have seemed well- nigh impossible before the breaking out of hostilities. Facing what was deemed a com- mon danger and with a high sense of duty to one's country, all classes in society, — the rich and poor, the high and low, employers and em- ployees, — all sorts and conditions of men, women and even children have united, with singular devotion, to do their utmost for the sake of winning the war and bringing in the era of peace. The spirit of loyal cooperation that has found expression in every walk of life, — between capital and labor, among native born and aliens, with comparatively few ex- ceptions, — has been little less than remarkable when one considers the various elements from all lands that go to make up the one hundred millions of our population. The greatest lesson that the war has taught thus far is the possibihty of fellowship and co- operation between diverse and seemingly alien 61 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY elements of the population, that have been hitherto undreamed of. The loyal generosity shown by the foreign laborers in this country toward the various Liberty Loans, the Red Cross, Y. M. C. A. and numerous other drives, have revealed even their ability to cooperate in a common cause in which they believed. In other words, the war has made clear the unsuspected capacities of even a polyglot pop- ulation like ours for achieving unity of purpose and action, at least in time of a great national emergency such as we have just passed through. Growing out of this encouraging experience in our life has been born the hope, more or less vague as yet, that it may be pos- sible so to foster and cultivate this new spirit of cooperation, called into being by the war, as to perpetuate it into the reconstruction period that now lies before us, thus developing a deeper and more intelligent spirit of national unity than our country has known in the past. There is no true American, nor true patriot in any land, but realizes that the fundamental need of his country, if it is to play its rightful part in building the new world, is to achieve 6^ THE DEMAND FOR UNITY within itself a new and deeper unity of pur- pose and of ideal. It is also significant that the same great word has become the watchword of the hour in religion. Long before the war, it had become apparent to many religious leaders that the great crime of Christendom, as it was the source of the weakness and ineffectiveness of organized religion, lay in the unchristian sectarianism of the churches. Various com- missions on Christian Unity had been formed, and an International Congress had been planed to meet in 1916, to consider all matters of Faith and Order, making for a closer union of the various sects. Whatever may prove to be the ultimate influence of the war on religion, one thing has already been clearly demon- strated, viz., that all forms of sectarianism are doomed if the Church is to remain a vital in- stitution in the new age. In the work carried on in the name of religion, both in the camps at home and on the battle-fields of Europe, all sectarian distinctions and even names have practically been forgotten. And the millions who return to their respective homes will care 6S SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY less than ever before for all our denominational differences. In an age when the whole world is slowly but surely setting its face in the direction of some sort of unity, of what possible assistance can the Church expect to be, until first of all it has proved its ability to achieve a deeper unity than now exists within itself ? The hope- ful sign is that so many leaders in all denomi- nations do reahze that this is the pressing duty of the hour. They are speaking out more and more frankly, in spite of the fact that they are bound to meet the strenuous opposition of the more conservative element that always seek to perpetuate the old organizations just as they have been, in no wise altered or changed, even in the presence of the profound changes that are taking place in every other department of human life. In its deeper aspects, however, the striving toward religious unity is vastly more than the effort to bring about a closer federation of church organizations. It seeks the substratum of religious philosophy, the common denomi- nator of all religions, the essence of all creeds, 64 THE DEMAND FOR UNITY the soul of all forms, where alone true unity is to be found. By minimizing the importance of the externals of religion, it would place the true emphasis on its inner heart ; by letting go its fringe, it would discover its real center where truth is one. The unity sought would demonstrate to all that while religions are many, religion is always one. The intellectual revolt is, at heart, animated by the same motive. There is the instinctive feeling that somewhere, beneath all our dis- cordant and contradictory thinking to-day, there must lie a common residuum of truth. Science, in the nature of things, is analytic and must be the work of highly trained specialists who concentrate their attention on some par- ticular field of investigation. Philosophy, on the other hand, is both analytic and synthetic. It gleans its data from all fields of scientific investigation, it gathers together all the loose threads of fact, and then, on these as the foundation, its builds its philosophical super- structure. But for fifty years we have been living in an atmosphere that has been increasingly 65 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY scientific, in which philosophy, as such, has been more and more neglected. Even the philosophy that has continued to hold its place has been predominatingly pragmatic. The inevitable result has been confusion and chaos in human thinking, growing out of the lack of any clear understanding of the fundamental principles of thought, and the almost utter ab- sence of any comprehensive view of either the universe or of life. No philosophy can ever be final, but every philosophy should at least make some attempt to be comprehensive in its interpretation of the deeper significance of the whole of life to man. It is only in a larger, completer philosophy that the real unity un- derlying human thinking can be found. The possibilities of such a war as the twentieth century has just witnessed, and the conditions in which it leaves the world both materially and spiritually, have forced the ideal of some sort of unity into the very fore- ground of man's thought and aspiration. It is no longer a question of choice but an im- perative duty, solemnly placed upon humanity, to achieve a unity that has never yet had its 66 THE DEMAND FOR UNITY place in the world, unless we are to sink back to the plane of barbarism out of which man has come. If we are to continue to live our life as nations and men on the old individualistic basis, with all the fierce competitions and deadly rivalries and bitter antagonisms that such selfishness inevitably entails, the future of civilization is clearly doomed. The world must either move forward to higher ground or it will most assuredly move backwards to lower planes. In the light of the tragic revelations of the past five years, there is no other alternative. It is either a closer unity between nations, classes and in- dividuals, or else increasing. separations and divisions, with wars multiplying, each one more deadly than the last, ending eventually in race suicide. It is this alternative that the true leaders of mankind see so clearly to-day. Leagues of Nations, changes in govern- ments, drastic legislation, revision of systems, revitalizing of morals and religion, — all these are necessary and must come; but more pro- foundly necessary than all else is a new sense of unity, binding all men and all nations into 67 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY one great Whole, if the impending changes are to carry mankind toward higher planes of life and infuse all civiKzation with a new and nobler spirit. The spirit of revolt, which so distinguishes our age from all others, both in the breadth of its influence and the depth of its sources, is the spirit of rebellion against the confusion and uncertainty, the struggle and strife, the fric- tion and antagonism, the divisions and separa- tions, the misunderstandings and bitterness, the prejudice and hatred with which our modern age is so rife. In a word, it is the determined revolt against the tragic disunity which is destroying the very foundations of civilization, blighting the most priceless treas- ures in human life and delaying the realization of the Kingdom of Heaven here on earth. So long as rulers plan in the old spirit, and statesmen chatter in the old jargon, and di- plomacy follows the old rules, and public teachers preach the old ideals, and employers are absorbed in their own interests, and the few who have are content that the many should not have, and churches care more for them- 68 THE DEMAND FOR UNITY selve than for the Kingdom of Heaven, — just so long will simple justice fail of realization; the disunity in modern life will multiply in- creasingly, while the spirit of revolt will steadily gi-ow more bitter and intense until, finally, the breaking point is reached. If that time should ever come, owing to the blindness and selfishness of those who should be the real leaders, but are not, the sufferings of the Great War would fade into insignificance as com- pared with the experiences upon which human- ity would then be forced to enter. We do not and need not take so pessimistic a view of the situation, however, for there are many signs of hope upon the horizon. The spirit of revolt fills the world, the protests against things-as-they-are multiply among all classes and conditions of men, the ideal of a new and all-inclusive unity is emerging more clearly, the new spirit is certainly awakening, and the new and nobler leaders will surely appear when the time is fully ripe. 69 CHAPTER IV THE MEANING OF UNITY "Go, sweep out the chamber of your heart, Make it ready to be the dwelling-place of the Beloved. When you depart out, he will enter in, In you, void of your self, will he display his beauty." — Anon. IT is not enough, however, merely to name an ideal; we must be able to define it clearly, before it can become a dynamic power in life. It is not the word, but its actual con- tent, that must be fully grasped and under- stood before the ideal stands any chance of realization. Unity, like the words, democracy, freedom, equality, is a word that has come to enshrine certain great ideals of humanity. As such, it is being used to-day more widely than ever. But the danger in any word that thus becomes popular in current speech is that so many are apt to use it glibly enough without stopping to inquire seriously as to its true meaning. 70 THE MEANING OF UNITY And there is something wonderfully alluring in just the sound of the word, — Unity, — to an age so sadly rent asunder by divisions of every kind. As a matter of fact, the word is by no means new to this age. Great philosophers in the past have discussed the essential unity of hu- manity. Great statesmen have worked earn- estly for a world organization that should en- sure the permanent peace of mankind. Great souls have dreamed of a closer social unity and dedicated their lives to its achievement. Great prophets have prayed and toiled for the com- ing of religious unity, and in every age there have always been the elect souls who have not only believed in but actually practised such unity. But while none of these have lived to see their lofty dreams realized, we can in no sense regard their lives as failures, for they have bravely held up the torch of the ideal to their respective generations; and we can see now that they have only been the divinely sent forerunners of a mighty movement that is rapidly becoming world-wide to-day. That these ideals have never received the 71 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY , attention they deserved is, primarily, due to the fact that the world has never before been prepared to consider them seriously. From the time of Jesus of Nazareth, whose message was couched only in terms of the universals of life, and whose great purpose was to awaken in the hearts of men the sense of unity with All-that-is, these ideals have always been in the world. But men were blind to the mean- ing of his real message then, even as so many who profess his name are still blind or indif- ferent to-day. But the heart of the people, who always heard him gladly, is interpreting his message afresh, not in theological or ec- clesiastical terms, but in his own terms of life and unity and power. So that it is no longer the select few who are reading his message aright, but the rank and file of earnest, truth- seeking men and women everywhere. Still another reason why the ideals enshrined in the conception of unity are claiming more serious attention than ever before, is because there have never been such all-compelling in- centives, forcing men to achieve a closer unity lest a worse fate befall them. Man's greatest THE MEANING OF UNITY strides in moral and spiritual development have always been made under the driving com- pulsions of suffering and sacrifice. The race, like the individual, learns its deepest lessons in the school of pain; this is one of the laws of progress; we must always pay the price for^^ what we gain. It is not strange, then, that all the sacrifices of the past few years should have opened men's eyes to the truth, as the great messages of prophet and sage have failed to do, compelling them now to seek that unity in life without which they feel instinctively life will not be worth the hving. It must also be admitted that, many times in the past, the ideals of unity have been pre- sented in such a way that thoughtful men have felt obliged to regard them as impractical and visionary. Those who have voiced them, in perfect sincerity, have not always clearly per- ceived their meaning, and too often they have deserved the name of being "mere sentiment- alists." Ideals often suffer most at the hands of their friends and exponents. It is enlight- ening, however, to remember that ideals, re- garded as utterly impractical and visionary by 73 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY one age, come to be accepted as the only ideals worth having by a later generation. History reveals more than once that the "impractical visionary" has eventually proved to be the most practical of guides. Jesus of Nazareth has suffered the fate of all "visionary dream- ers" until to-day, when he seems to be coming into his own at last. The term "practical" is purely a relative term after all. Anything may be practical when men are ready to re- gard it as such and willing to put it to the actual test; and an5i:hing may be impractical, so long as men are unwilling to test it out in actual experience. Can we formulate in general terms the meaning that we put into the ideal of unity for the new age? Our conception of the prin- ciple of unity is an organic rather than an individualistic conception. It means union, — the union of individuals who know themselves to be vital and necessary parts of a larger Whole, in the loyal service of that Whole, and this, without the surrender of their uniqueness as individuals. It involves the highest and fullest development of each individual, not for U THE MEANING OF UNITY his sake alone, but because only through his highest development can he perform his true function as a member of the Whole, and render the largest possible service to the good of the Whole. It is the union of all, in the service of all, for the sake of all. Before proceeding to consider in detail the positive content of this ideal of unity, there are certain things with which unity is often confused that can be ruled out at once. Unity, for example, does not mean sa/menes^ It is not a mathematical unity that we seek. When we speak of the oneness that unites in- dividuals or binds nations or races together, we do not imply that individuals or nations or races are each, in any sense, the "double" of other individuals or nations or races. People or nations are not one, in the sense that two bricks may be equal in measurement, weight or quality, simply for the reason that society is a living organism, not a heap of sand. Neither is the ideal, of which we conceive, a mechanical unity. In the elaboration of organization in modern times and in our striv- ing to perfect what we call "efficiency," there 75 iV- SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY ^^ is a strong tendency to produce a kind of ^5i machine-made man. We are standardizing everything to-day, even human individuals. In our educational systems we have become so mechanical oftentimes as to think we have reached the highest goal when we have /successfully standardized our curricula, our textbooks, our methods of instruction and even the ideas of the pupils. A curious at- tempt was recently made in the New York City schools, actually to standardize the thinking of the boys and girls in the interpre- tation of history and current events as given to them by their instructors. We classify men and women as commodities and approxi- mate them to mere items in an industrial mechanism; so that if anything happens to a worker, one may quickly be substituted for an- other, as if they were screws in a machine. It is this mechanical conception of unity that so many resent, and most rightfully, for such an unity is profoundly contradictory and utterly subversive of manhood and of life. Unity, once again, is not uniformity, as so many infer. It is not something produced by 76 THE MEANING OF UNITY any leveling process, either up or down. All levels are, of necessity, "dead levels,'' from which the life element has vanished. A tree may be pruned to a certain shape easily enough, but if it is alive, in a week's time the artificial outline will have disappeared. It is not possible to "level" a living thing. Uni- formity implies the use of a mold under pres- sure; it always involves to some extent, com- mensurate with the pressure, the crushing out of individuality. No true vision of life offers such a view as this. No sane reformer is working for such a unity as this. As Emerson said, every man who is worthy of the name is a non-conformist. He will not be coerced into any pattern. There is a boundary to the dominion of organization; there is a limit to sufferance. When that limit is reached, the situation becomes intolerable, and the most^ docile of men finds himself a revolutionary. All of which, obviously, is healthful and tends lifeward. Unity is not to be found in any externals, nor yet in those internal qualities which are more immediately manifested and perceived. 77 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY Unity does not mean, then, oneness in natural gifts or ability. If individuals were to be stripped clean of all things externally attached, — titles, fame, home, lands, possessions and even bodies — they would not appear precisely one in size, capacity, quahty, or texture of mind or heart or soul. In these deeper areas we still find differences. From any external view-point, there are great souls and little souls, noble souls and mean souls, souls of fine texture and souls of coarse texture. There are men of extraordinary spiritual vision, and men of practically no spiritual vision what- ever ; men who are expansive, dynamic centers of moral force, and others who are passive and inert. So there are bright minds and dull minds, quick minds and slow minds, broad minds and narrow minds. The simple fact is that individuals are not one in physical strength, in mental ability, in heart power, in soul force, — that is, viewed from without. The same thing is true of races and of na- tions; and, in a less noticeable degree, of dif- ferent communities within the nation. There are racial gifts, and characteristic peculiarities 78 THE MEANING OF UNITY belonging to certain peoples and not possessed by other peoples. We contrast the Orient with the Occident, and the mind visualizes at once two very different kinds of civilizations. Or we emphasize the distinctive characteristics of the Slavic, the Teutonic, the Latin or the Anglo-Saxon peoples. Still, in spite of all that can be truly said of racial distinctions, national traits and in- dividual differences, there can be no question but that some kind of unity does lie at the basis of the life of humanity, and that it binds all races, nations and individuals into one great Whole, if we could only clearly perceive it. In what sense can unity be predicated of men and women, of nations and races, so different in place, in function, in gift, in capacity, in ability, in development, in experience, in at- tainment? Let us examine more in detail the organic conception of unity which we have al- ready outlined, and inquire as to its deeper meaning and the method of its realization. At the very outset, let it clearly be under- stood that the unity which all the world is, con- sciously or unconsciously, seeking can never 79 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY be learned in colleges, or found in sermons, or discovered in books. It cannot be found any- where without, but only in a man's own inner life. It cannot be imparted by another, but must be discovered, each for himself. It is not an acquirement, but an achievement. It is not found at the end of a syllogism or in the conclusion of any argument, but only through an inner experience. It is not a fact of science merely, or of history, or philosophy, though all these may constitute helpful aids in its dis- covery. It is, rather, a fact of consciousness, a feeling, a realization that has been experi- enced by many in the past and can be experi- enced by all. Unity does not become real for any one, simply because he talks about it, or professes to believe in it, or even sincerely de- sires it. It is a reality only when one comes to know it in actual experience, is conscious of \ it daily and hourly, and has learned to love it as one loves life itself. The experiences of the truly great souls of the race throw a flood of light on the true mean- ing of that unity that has become an actual ex- perience and is a living fact in the inner con- 90 THE MEANING OF UNITY sciousness. Buddha, Socrates, Paul, Plot- inus, St. Francis of Assisi, Bruno, Tolstoi, Emerson, Walt Whitman, Abraham Lincoln, and above them all, because his consciousness was clearer and more profound than all, Jesus of Nazareth, — these have been the world's great path-finders in the realization of the true ideal of unity. From such lives we learn that the sense of unity that has become a fact in consciousness grows out of the reahzation, so profound that it has become habitual, that "all-that-is'' flows forth from the same great source of Life ; that, in their origin, all who live, move and have be- ing proceed from the One Parent- Source. It makes little difference whether we call that Source, Life, or Force, or Mind, or First Cause, or Universal Substance, or by the more familiar name of God. The fact remains that the same life flows in all our veins and, in the last analysis, the same infinite Energy has found individualized expression in all races, all nations, all men and women. It was be- cause of this habitual consciousness that, for Jesus wholly, and nineteen centuries later, for 81 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY Walt Whitman in a striking degree, there was no Jew nor Gentile, no Greek nor Barbarian, no bond nor free, no privileged ones nor out- easts, no good nor bad, but only the children of the Universal Father. While this has been the professed belief of Christendom for centuries, conditions prevail- ing in the world to-day only prove that its pro- found truth has never yet been experienced save by the very few. Like so many mere be- liefs, it has been an idea to argue and discuss, but not an ideal to be realized. It has had its place in man's intellectual life, but it has never yet become a dynamic power in his volitional life. It has been a theoretical, not an experi- enced, truth of consciousness. When men come really to know, not simply beUeve, the truth of the Universal Fatherhood of God, with all that those words imply, hu- manity will have taken a long step toward the realization of that unity the world craves so earnestly to-day. If Religion could but suc- ceed in translating this one truth, which is the fundamental truth in all the great World- Faiths, into actual terms of experience, it THE MEANING OF UNITY would have achieved its real purpose in the world. The Gospel of God's Fatherhood ^s the Universal Source of all-that-is, the Eternal Energy in all men, the Soul of all souls, fully grasped and clearly proclaimed, would be the only Gospel needed to save the world from the disunity that now divides it so sadly. But again, the sense of unity that has be- come a fact of consciousness grows out of a profound realization that humanity is a living organism, in which all races, all nations, all communities and all individuals are but the in- tegral and necessary parts, organs or members, "for we are all members one of another." We are all one, in the sense that we each have a place and a function within the Whole; and each of us, functioning in his place, is neces- sary to the complete and harmonious working of the Whole. Our unity, then, is the unity of service to, or function within, the living body of humanity. Let us take the analogy of the human body. There is no external unity between the great muscle which flexes the fighting arm and the tiny muscle which moves the eyelid or com- 83 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY presses the tear-gland; yet, on the basis of serv- ice rendered, each is made one with the other by the body's imperative need of each. The fighting arm would not be of much service, if the due compression of the tear-gland did not keep the eye cleansed and clear. In the same way, the pieces on a chess-board are not one in value as they stand ; but for the purpose of the combination by which the player makes a bid for victory, each piece, from lowest to highest, is bound in closest unity to all the rest, in the sense that the combination works equally through each, and apart from the exercise of the position and capacity of each at its fullest, the combination will break down and the player will lose the game. These illustrations will serve to make clear what we mean by the modern conception of humanity as a living organism. This organic conception of society is held by all our fore- most social philosophers and writers. It con- stitutes the greatest gain for modern thought, and has furnished the new social view-point from which we approach every problem to-day. It has created the new motive that is inspiring S4i THE MEANING OF UNITY all leaders in their efforts to bring about a more complete socialization of the life of man- kind, in all the ranges of its activity. It is the dynamic power behind every new social pro- gram proposed, however crude and imperfect it may prove to be. The so-called social move- ment, that constitutes the real heart of the age, in all its many different expressions, is simply ^ the outgrowth of this new social view-point that we are all members together in the living body of humanity, that we all play a necessary part and discharge an indispensable function; and that, therefore, the living body would be left incomplete and imperfect if any of its members should be subtracted there- from, or if any of them should fail to function in the highest degree commensurate with their place and abihty. The human body is well and strong and healthful only when every organ, muscle, member, and part is strong and healthful, and when all of these are working together in truest harmony for the perfect symmetry of the body as a whole. The brain must be the best kind of a brain, the heart the 85 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY best kind of a heart, the stomach the best kind of a stomach, the eye, the hand and the foot must be the best kind of eye, hand and foot, if there is to be complete health and unity in the body. The brain, heart, stomach, eye, etc., must be, each one itself, not another. The unity of the body does not exist when all these organs, members, parts are one in shape, size, function or capacity, but only when all, in spite of every difference, are one in serving the liv- ing organism of which they are all necessary parts. So with the body of humanity. The unity that underlies all racial, national and indi- vidual differences is a unity, not of place or function or ability or language or institutions or customs or morals or religion or degree of development, but a unity of service, rising out of the fact that we are all literally members one of another, all necessary and indispensable parts of the living organism we call humanity. This is not to say, however, that our true unity depends on the fact that all forms of service rendered by different races, nations or individuals are the same; neither if one form 86 THE MEANING OF UNITY of service is compared externally with another in range and effect, is all service equal. Com- monsense forbids of our thinking of the plow- man, when viewed as such, as equal to the great poet, or the office-boy as equal to the statesman. But as Browning reminds us: "All service ranks the same with God." Our true spiritual unity grows out of the fact that all types of service "rank the same" from the view-point of the Whole, that is, it is all , necessary to the Whole, and therefore "one"/^ with all forms of service rendered. It is self-evident that this unity is not an external or visible thing, but an inner, invisi- ble, spiritual fact, to be perceived, if at all, by the spiritual consciousness in man. It is rec- ognized by all that there is a physical unity binding men together; but this unity on the physical plane also binds man to the animals and even to inanimate nature, for all bodies, from stones to man, are formed of the same material stuff. The physical unity of all- that-is has been bequeathed to all alike; it is in no sense an achievement on our part, neither 87 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY does it ever make, in and of itself, for that higher spiritual unity the world is seeking to- day. This higher unity has been left for man to achieve in the great school of experience, unaided by nature. For this reason it repre- sents the supremest achievement of which man is capable. To enter into the realization of this spiritual unity of all-that-is and of all who live, is, therefore, the summum bonum of life, the goal of all man's age-long striving. The fundamental thing in religion, of what- soever name, is this consciousness of one's unity with All-that-is, in which all sense of separate- ness and division from God or man has van- ished forever. This has been the experience of all the great spiritual seers of the race, and to this inner knowledge have they sought to summon their fellows. The awakening to this consciousness constitutes the "new birth" of religion. "Ye must be born again," said Jesus, in order to realize your oneness with God and your fellows everywhere. The es- sence of salvation consists, not in being saved from some future punishment, but in being saved here and now to this sense of one's unity 88 THE MEANING OF UNITY with All. If this conception of salvation had been the burden of the Churches' message in the past, Christendom would not be facing the conditions it does to-day. There are many people throughout the world who are earnestly seeking this experi- ence, — the consciousness of their spiritual unity with All ; there are many others who are more or less blindly feehng after it, and there are still multitudes to whom it is, as yet, quite meaningless. But the experience will come in response to the intense desire, when once it has been awakened. The evidence is increas- ing daily that men and women in all lands are catching the vision of what lies before them in the way of spiritual development, and are be- ginning to reach forth earnestly toward the great experience. It is this that makes us dare to believe that humanity is even now on the threshold of a new awakening in the realm of consciousness that will make inevitable the coming of the new age for the world. Because of the criticalness of the present hour, it would seem that there could be no other purpose in the pursuit of science, or 89 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY philosophy, or rehgion, or business, or any- thing else that appeals to man, save the attain- ment of this higher consciousness. But it must needs be remembered that the unceasing practise of rites and ceremonies, of contempla- tion, renunciation, prayers, fasting, penance, devotion, adoration, abstemiousness or isola- tion to which many have had recourse, will not in and of themselves ensure the attainment of this state of consciousness. It is not a matter of bartering; there is no assurance that it will come as a reward for good conduct. *'The wind bloweth where it listeth, and ye know not whence it cometh or whither it goeth. So is every one who is born of the Spirit." No golden promises of speedy entrance into this experience may be given the earnest seeker ; nor any exact rules, or laws of equation by virtue of which the goal may be reached. Nor yet may any time be specifically named in which the awakening may come either to the individual or the race. "The Son of Man cometh as a thief in the night. Therefore be ye ready." The "new birth" means nothing else than the rising of the Son of Man into 90 THE MEANING OF UNITY being within, as one awakens to this higher con- sciousness. Many, very many on earth to-day, are living so close to the borderland of the new birth that they frequently catch fleeting glimpses of the longed for freedom, but the full import of its meaning is withheld as yet. There is another veil, however thin, between them and the full- orbed Light. Buddha spent seven years in an intense longing and desire to attain that libera- tion which brought him at last to this conscious- ness. Jesus became a Christ only after pass- ing through the agonies of Gethsemane. The essential thing needed is patient desire and the expectant mood. Certainly the world's heart is filled to-day with an intense longing for something better, even though so many know not what it is they seek. If the inarticulate longings and un- formulated desires that fill so many minds and hearts, could but be centered, in the cahn, con- fident and expectant mood, on the attainment of that sense of unity which is a realized fact in human consciousness, there is no question but that the new day would speedily dawn. 91 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY In all spiritual writings we find the con- clusion that there is no one way by which the seeker may enter into this consciousness. But with singular unanimity, the seers of all ages agree, that while the form of the experience may differ, the pathway to the experience is ever and always the pathway of love, through contemplation of and desire for a more un- selfish, disinterested love. Whether this love be expressed in the awakening of the creative life, as in nature's spring time, or as the love of lover for his bride, or of mother for her child, or of the humanitarian for the suffering outcasts, or the love for an ideal forever in- accessible, or the love for some great Cause, the key that seemingly unlocks the door to the coming of the consciousness of spiritual one- ness with All, is Love, "the maker and mon- arch and saviour of all." This explains the supreme place given to Love by Jesus, in all his teachings, and his summing up of all the law and the prophets in the one new commandment of Love. He understood more clearly than all others that it is Love that breaks down all barriers, destroys 92 THE MEANING OF UNITY all partition walls, fills in all gulfs, wipes out all sense of separateness and isolation and that, therefore, makes possible as nothing else the awakening of the higher consciousness in man. 4^ It is this that makes him the Saviour Supreme of human life. 96 CHAPTER V UNITY WITHIN ONESELF **I sought for God But God eluded me; I sought my brother But I found him not; I found my Self And, finding, found all three." — Anon, THE spirit of the new philosophy that is in process of formulation, in response to the imperative demand of the new age, is, then, the spirit of unity, finding expression in obedi- ence to its great ideal and seeking the applica- tion of its principle to all the relationships of life. It must be borne in mind constantly, however, that this is not a mere theoretical philosophy imposed from without, so much as it is an actual experience welling up from within, thus justifying the lofty dreams of all the prophetic souls of the past. More than twenty-five centuries ago the 9^ UNITY WITHIN ONESELF Greek philosopher, Pythagoras, uttered the great truth that "man is a microcosm of God." In other words, what the universe is in the large, man is in the small. "Man is an epitome of the universe; he is a God in embryo." As we attempt the interpretation of this experi- ence of unity and seek the application of its principle to the various relations of life, it is most fitting, therefore, that we should begin with the inner hfe of the individual; for it is clear that we shall never find that true unity in outer relations, until first of all we have achieved it within ourselves. Some years ago one of the well-known writ- ers of to-day contributed a series of articles to a leading publication, with the striking title, "The Girl with the Hundred Selves." With a keen knowledge of personal psychology, the writer portrayed most graphically the differ- ent, and oftentimes, contradictory selves that from time to time assumed the ascendency in her heroine's life. But the girl described inwX^N(^ these articles is only typical of human nature as it is. We are, all of us, men or women of a "hundred selves," and to this more than to any 95 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY other one cause is due the fact that our lives, for the most part, are so generally superficial, aimless and ineffective. In each one of us there is a strong self and a weak self, a brave self and a cowardly self, a thoughtful self and a careless self, an unselfish self and a selfish self, an aspiring self and a despairing self, a spiritual self and an animal self, and the list could be extended indefinitely. Now the simple fact is that most people, while they may be thoroughly familiar with all these various "selves" that at different times seem to be in control of their lives, have prac- tically no knowledge of their true self, which is never to be confused with these lesser "selves" they know so well. The first thing to . be said of Personality, is that it is self-con- \ scious; and the strongest personalities are always those most truly and deeply self-con- scious. But what do we mean by "self-con- sciousness"? Certainly we do not mean the mere consciousness of these fleeting, surface "selves" that are in evidence one moment and gone the next. /S'^Z/-consciousness does not mean "selves" consciousness only. There is in 96 UNITY WITHIN ONESELF every one of us a deeper Self, lying beneath these "hundred selves" we know so well, and the true or complete Personality is the one who has become clearly and habitually conscious of this deeper Self. Let us attempt to do a little real thinking about ourselves. We all know well enough what a "person" is until we begin seriously to think about the matter, and then we discover that it is not so easy to define a person as we thought; and when we make the attempt we are not quite sure as to what we mean by our definition. Let us, then, perform a simple act of introspection, for although the process of introspection, especially when it leads to the very roots of being, is not easy, still we need to remember that the Self is nearer and more penetrable than any other object of knowl- edge. Let us suppose ourselves viewing mentally any immediate feeling of which we may chance to be conscious. It may be some phys- ical pain like the tooth-ache, or some taste of sweetness, or a flash of light, or some emotion like love or fear, hope or despondency. In 97 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY every such act of reflection, it is clearly evi- dent that the immediate feeling, whatever it may be, is not only an experience, it is also ex- perienc-^df; it is not merely a feeling, but it is a feeling that is also felt. In other words, it is owned or possessed by something or some one. Now the owner is not another feeling, as some have contended, for then, that other feeling would in its turn need an owner, or some one who feels it. Hence, we must con- clude that there is the "I" that feels; and this "I," this "Ego," this "Owner," who is the true Self, can be distinguished, though not sepa- rated, from its various states and processes. Let us put this distinction in another way. The first essential in every form of mental activity is that there shall be the individual consciousness of the "I," who is always the Thinker of the thought, the Feeler of the feel- ing, the Doer of the act. We cannot perform any mental operation without the consciousness of this "I." All forms of thinking, feeling or willing depend upon the "I." You cannot es- cape, if you try, the "I am." It is always, "I think," or "I feel," or "I will." There is al- 98 UNITY WITHIN ONESELF ways the "I" behind every mental state, to which everything is referred^ which partici- pates in every thought and feehng, and from which proceeds every effort of the will. But as soon as we begin to ask what this **I" is, that is always present in every form of mental activity and from which we can never escape, we seem to find ourselves baffled. All attempts to explain or define the nature of this '*I" seemingly fail. It is a Something that cannot be explained by mental processes and is known only by its presence in consciousness. Think as we will, we are inevitably brought back to our starting point, — "I am." The "I" is, like God; perhaps we shall come to see that it is God individualized in us. We are only sure now, that the "I" which is, is the Knower, the Thinker, the Doer, the Seer; it is the deepest essence of every mental state. The next fact to be noted in all forms of mental activity, is the presence in conscious- ness of the "secondary I," the alter-ego, or the "Me," as Professor James called it. This distinction may seem somewhat subtle, but a little consideration will make it plain. The es- 99 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY sential difference is that the "I" is the Some- thing that knows, feels and wills, while the "Me" is that part of the self that is known to the "I," as mental states, feelings, thoughts and will-impulses. A man's body with its physical sensations is a part of his "Me," which may be examined, analyzed and ruled by his "I." His feelings, pains, pleasures, opinions, prejudices, inclinations, and all the rest of the mental things that he considers as a part of himself, are all portions of the "Me" ; for all of them may be considered, examined, changed and ruled by the "I." The "Me," in all its parts and phases, is always the "object" of contemplation by the "I"; and the "I" is al- ways the "subject" that contemplates the things of the "Me." You can never abso- lutely separate the two. We have found, then, a final, ultimate Something within ourselves that defies our powers of analysis. This "I" is what has been called the "pure ego." It is Something that is always present in consciousness, as that which is conscious, while the "Me" is simply a bundle of states of consciousness or things of 100 UNITY WITHIN ONESELF ' ' which the "I" is conscious. The "I" is always the same, — always the *'I," for other than it- self it cannot be. The "Me" is constantly changing and never the same. You can never think of your "I" as not being. You can never say, "I am not," nor can you even imagine your Self as not being. So long as you think of your Self, — the "I," — at all, you must ac- company the thought with the consciousness of being. Nor can you ever imagine your Self as being any other "I" than it is. You can think of it being surrounded with other "Me" aspects or objects, but you can never think of your "I" as being another "I." It may be objected that it makes no ma- terial difference to the individual whether he is able thus to distinguish between the "I" and the "Me," or not, — ^that he must live his life according to his nature in either case. It is just here that the whole crux of the problem lies for each individual. It is perfectly true he may live a kind of a life without ever stop- ping to distinguish between his real Ego and his lesser "selves," for this is the life that most people are living every day. But he can never 101^ H • ^, -•■•-' ♦. ., ' SPIRIT '63^ f HE NEW PHILOSOPHY live his truest life, that is, the hfe that is the actual expression of his true, deep, inner Self, until he reaches the point in his development where he does make this distinction, clearly and habitually. This is the secret of the comparative failure of most lives to measure up to their full pos- sibilities in mental achievements, in moral character or in spiritual development. How few are the men and women who are not haunted continually by the feeling of how far short they come of what, in their inmost be- ings, they know they ought to be, and of what they know they might accomplish! How many a person realizes that his weakness and shortcomings are due to the fact that he seems to be forever working at cross-purposes within himself, struggling with conflicting impulses, contradictory desires or antagonistic aims ! If life involves the struggle without, how much more does it mean the constant struggle within, until one cries out with Paul, again and again : "The thing I do, I would not, and what I would not, that I do. Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" 102 UNITY WITHIN ONESELF Surely, this all too-common experience in most lives need not continue year after year, as the constant source of sorrow and regrets and the cause of barriers in the way of one's true growth. There ought to be some way by means of which it can be transcended and passed beyond and left behind. What, then, is the trouble? In a word, it is because most men and women have never yet achieved that unity within themselves without which no life can ever be truly effective. And this lack of inner unity grows out of one's ignorance of his true Self, the real Ego, who stands back of all moods and impulses and conflicting de- sires. There is no gainsaying the fact that the only "self" with which most of us are acquainted is the "hundred selves" of our passing, fleeting moods, that are never the same from moment ^ to moment, that possess no stability, no per- manency and, therefore, no reality We have scarcely ever even glimpsed the true Self, ex- cept in some occasional, crucial moment of life, and such glimpses have been so rare and imperfect that we would hardly recognize it 103 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY again. The result is, that we actually live our daily lives, in all our thinking, feeling and actions, from these impermanent, surface "selves,'' instead of from the deep, imperisha- ble, unchanging Self within. Lacking this unity, the individual fails to stand before others as the true, consistent, steadfast, unified Self he might be, but appears to be a different self at different times, depend- ing on moods, impulses, times and seasons. ^ He never impresses his fellows as a strong, ^'^^ clean-cut personality; and his life, of necessity, lacks influence and power. And all because the only "self" he knows is the myriad "selves" of the "Me," the constantly changing states of consciousness; his true Ego he has never yet discovered. The realization of this true Ego in one's life, at once causes the individual to know that he is not merely what he thinks or feels or wills at the moment, but is rather the Something that thinks and feels and wills and, therefore, he may govern and control these mental ac- tivities, instead of being mastered or controlled by them. According to the popular concep- 104 UNITY WITHIN ONESELF tion, a man is the creature and slave of his mental states ; but we have learned to-day that man may assume his rightful place on the mental throne, and make his own choice as to what feelings he may wish to feel, what thoughts he may wish to think and what things he may wish to do. The true Personality has attained to inner unity, through the realization of the "I," to such a degree that he has become the Master, not the slave. He knows that the sovereign will of the individual resides in the Ego, and that all his mental states must obe}^ its man- dates. Gradually he comes to know that the "I," his real Self, has at its command a won- derful array of mental powers which, if prop- erly used, may create for him any kind of a personality he desires. He reaches the sublime consciousness at length that his Ego is indeed the Master Workman, who can make of his life whatsoever he wills. But before one can reach this consciousness, he must enter into a deeper recognition of this wonderful Ego that he actually is. Remember, you are more than body, senses or mind. You are that mysteri- 105 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY ous Something, the Master of all your inner powers and forces of every kind, of which the prof oundest thing you can say is, ''I am/' This consciousness is the only sure basis of that self-confidence and self-reliance which alone make a personality strong and powerful and influential in the world. And it invar- iably leads to these desired results simply be- cause it alone brings about that unification of man's inner life for which he is always striving, and without which his life remains a super- ficial, divided, distracted and ineffective life. Sometimes this consciousness flashes into be- ing as the result of some great, crucial experi- ence; more often it is a gradual development. But, however it may come, it always involves the clear recognition of the distinction between the "I" and the "Me" in consciousness, the reahzation that behind all the changing "Me" states, there dwells the true Ego, the real Self, unchanging and permanent. When this ex- perience has been won, all things are possible in self-development. It needs to be clearly understood, however, that the rising into consciousness of the true 106 UNITY WITHIN ONESELF Self, and the perception of its real nature and function, does not necessitate the obliteration of all the curious, individual selves that find expression at the surface of one's life; ob- viously, it does not mean that all our various moods are reduced to one standard mood, and that all our impulses are invariably methodical or our desires are always mathematically cor- rect. For that would be to reduce life to one drab, neutral shade. It would destroy all spontaneity, which is life's greatest charm, and ]^^ take away its brightness and its surprises. It would tend to do away with the mysterious element in personahty, without which life would lose its chief interest and zest. What it would mean, however, is that life would be lived consciously from its deep, true center rather than from its superficial surface; that whatever kind of a self one might appear to be from outside, one would always know himself to be the true Self, finding expression for the moment in the vagrant self at the sur- face; that however varying the moods or im- pulses through which he might allow himself to wander, he would always come back to his 107 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY true Self; in a word, that he would never lose his true Self in the "hundred selves" at the surface of life. The personal problem for every one is how to attain the clear consciousness of this true Self, and thus achieve actual unity in one's inner life. Let us make a few practical sug- gestions as to the method to pursue. In the first place, we must resolutely accustom our- selves to making this distinction between the *'I" and the "Me" in our daily thinking. There are only two ways in which a theoretical fact can become a fact of consciousness: It can break into consciousness, as it were, sud- denly, as the result of some startling, crucial experience, in whose coming we have had noth- ing directly to do. But such experiences do not come to all of us and, fortunately, we do not have to wait for their appearance. The other way, is by our earnest, persistent think- ing the fact. By the law of suggestion, what we habitually think comes at length to take its actual place in consciousness. We may test this principle in everyday experience, and no 108 UNITY WITHIN ONESELF mental exercise is more helpful in bringing the true Self into clearer consciousness. Take the body first, for example. Think of all the many despotic tyrannies exercised by our bodies over ourselves constantly. How can the Self be freed from these bod II v tyran- nies? Remember your true relation to your body. The body is not you, but only your instrument for self-expression. You do not need to be its daily victim, for you can and should be its master. Remember also, that when you walk away from it and leave it be- hind, as it were, it will have to follow you, for it could have no existence apart from you; and in following you, it will gradually grow more obedient to your will, more harmonious to your thoughts, more responsive to your desires. The tyranny of the body over us is so strong, chiefly because we are always following it, in- stead of commanding it to follow us. So, quite deliberately and decisively, again and again during the day, leave your body a little behind, let it drop out of your throughts com--i pletely. Forget for a while all about its im- 109 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY perious demands for attention, its passions and appetites, its hungers and thirsts, its aches and pains, its fatigue and weariness, its funny httle needs and vanities. And as you thus go on ahead, paying no attention to the body what- ever, it will learn the truth and gradually catch up to you again, recognizing in you the true and dominant master. We have never yet be- gun to realize the extent to which the true Self can thus educate the body to do its will. It may be hard at first, because we have let our bodies rule us for so long; but by persistent practise we can attain to a new and joy-giving sense of freedom and become, in very truth, the masters of our bodies, through the recogni- tion in consciousness of the true nature of the Self. Similarly with our intellectual life. How many and varied are the tyrannies constantly exercised over us by our intellects! No man knows less about real freedom than the man who lives his life merely on the intellectual plane, for, as Bergson says, there is a deeper than intellect in man. Therefore, quite de- cisively and intentionally, day by day, leave 110 UNITY WITHIN ONESELF your intellect for a time in abeyance. Forget all about its tyrannous thoughts and demands, its prejudices and superstitions, its strange lit- tle fears and fancies, its truths and errors, — the long legacy of ages of evolution. Leave them all behind and, slipping away from the only guide to truth that you, perhaps, have ever known as yet, dare to go your own way into the Unseen alone, feeling for the pathway by intuition and trusting the deepest instincts of your being. And some day, your slower and more conventional intellect will follow you through the shadows of half-truths, and catch up with you in that clearer light to which your intuition has led you. Only determine never to be bound absolutely by any of the con- clusions of your intellect, or be held back in your search for truth by any of the systems it may invent. For thus to bow down slav- ishly before your intellect, is to abdicate the true kingdom of your Self, and to miss forever the divine leadership of "the deeper than intel- lect in man." Thus it is with all external things, — ^money, clothes, comforts, luxuries, — harmless though 111 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY they be in themselves; so with all objects of desire, — ambition, fame, applause, — good and satisfying as they may be; we must be free of them all. We must even learn to be free of X I persons whom we love, for even love must be possessed by the Self as master, if one's inner life is to know unity. The aim of such mental practise is not that we may become free from all these things or persons, and never have anything to do with them again; that would be asceticism, one of the most dreary and useless tyrannies that man has ever known; but rather, that we may be free of them, that they may not get in our way or impede our progress, — as the master work- ^, man is free of his tools, — and so really possess them all for use and enjoyment. This habit of detachment and withdrawal from the things of life is the practical side of the process of deepening the true life center and bringing it more clearly into one's habitual consciousness. It is the old paradox of Jesus : the losing of life that we may find it; losing the shallow, feverish life at the surface that we may find the deeper, richer life within ; los- UNITY WITHIN ONESELF ing the divided, superficial ^'selves" at the cir- cumference that we may find the true Self at the center in union with All. The discovery of this richer life within must, however, in- evitably tend to enrich the surface manifesta- tions as they appear to others without. J That which we let go and leave behind is not lost, but found again in a new and more satisfying discovery. It is as if a man sat on a spur of the foot-hills, enjoying the scene spread out before him. The horizon may be narrow, but the landscape, dotted with stream and meadow and woods, is lovely and intimate and so captivating in its beauty that he feels well content to remain where he is and cannot imagine any scene more desirable. But after a time there comes the strange mystical de- sire, — so natural to human hearts, — ^to climb higher. So he rises, turns his back reluctantly on the dear familiar scene, and begins the fur- ther ascent. He lets all the beautiful' scenery go and, literally, it drops away from him as he climbs; in a few moments it is lost to sight and sound. But when the new resting place on the heights is once attained, he finds to his iia SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY delight that all he seemed to lose at first is given back to him, and in grander perspective, mightier setting and more sublime beauty. If we are to attain to inner unity, the self or "selves" to which we must die are the nar- row, delusive selves which are constantly com- ing into friction or antagonism with others, and becoming so entangled with the things of the external world that we lose the true perspec- tive of life, seeing it only in divided and sep- arate fragments, never in its wholeness. All that we lose in awakening to the true Self is this delusiveness and the perpetual slavery to outward circumstances that cause disunity among the surface selves. The view from the higher point includes all the views from the lower points. The happiness of the true Self includes, not excludes, all other possible de- lights. True unity embraces the lower as well as the higher kingdoms. The realization of this true unity within oneself gives to one for the first time the real possession of his body, the true mastery of his intellect and the actual knowledge of his essential being. The first steps, then, in the pathway to unity, 114 UNITY WITHIN ONESELF in all its various aspects, lead inward toward the deeper regions of one's true Selfhood. On the outer side, this unity involves withdrawal from the circumference fretting and friction, the indifference to surface circumstances, the disentanglement from desires and things as such; and yet, it results in the leaving behind of nothing worth while, for all things follow the one who has found himself. On the inner side, the end of the pathway is the union of all one's various "selves" in one's true Self, result- ing in inward harmony and peace, the effective realization of the wholeness of one's personal- ity, with the inevitable increase of power and influence with others. To realize this unity within yourself is the great end for which the universe has rolled hitherto. For this end, your hfe, possibly yet many lives, are lived; for this, death, perhaps many deaths may be necessary. Towards this, all your experiences, — desires, fears, struggles, failures, disappointments, successes, joys, sorrows, bewilderments, sufferings, re- grets, hopes, — must one day surely lead. To thus find one's true Self and so achieve unity 115 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY within, one must be positive, not negative, ac- tive, not passive, optimist, not pessimist. The unified Self does not seek a dehverance out of life, but rather, a fuller deliverance into life; he does not disentangle himself from objects of desire in order to escape them, but rather that he may use and enjoy them with dignity and mastery. He seeks only to be free from \ the wheel of life that he may become the charioteer in the car. There is, therefore, no need for feverish hurry. All we require is strong faith, that is, patience combined with sure expectancy that "all is provided for," and that one day we shall surely find the Self we seek. Haste and ex- haustion belong to the surface life, not to the depths within. "The higher the velocity, the deeper the weariness ; but the tempo of the true X life is ahvays leisurely." Whether we shall define this "I," or Ego, or true Self, as the *'soul," or as "a center of con- scious energy in the World-Soul," or with Carlyle, as "a spark of the Divine," or with John Fiske, as "an emanation from the In- finite," or with Jesus, as "the child of God," 116 UNITY WITHIN ONESELF we shall consider in a subsequent chapter. It is sufficient now to know that this true Self may be discovered, realized and manifested to a degree undreamed of as yet by most of us. 117 CHAPTER VI man's unity with nature "One undivided Soul of many a soul Whose nature is its own Divine Control Where all things flow to all As rivers to the sea." — Shelley. FROM the time that man first began to think, he has constantly been seeking to relate himself more intelligently to the uni- verse in which he lives. In part, this has been forced upon him because of his dependence upon nature for life and sustenance; in part, because of his instinctive desire to explore all mysteries and find out the hidden meaning of things for himself. Out of this instinctive striving has grown all mythologies, theologies, philosophies and sciences, from earliest times down to the pres- ent. His interpretations of the universe have run the gamut from the first crude and childish 118 MAN'S UNITY WITH NATURE attempts, based on illusion and assumption, to the latest conclusions of modern science which we declare to be based only upon facts. The fascinating story of man's reading of the universe reveals how implicitly he has trusted his senses, and how many times his senses have deceived him. At the outset, primitive man regarded nature, on the whole, as hostile to his best interests; he saw it as filled with spirits both good and evil, though the evil forces seemed to be more numerous and more powerful than the good; therefore he lived in constant dread and fear of his uni- verse. To-day we know that nature is friendly, and that all her mighty forces are good when once we have learned how to obey and use them aright. Man has believed that nature stood over, as it were, separate and apart from man; and that man was a higher order of creation, brought into being by a special fiat of the Creator, distinctly different from all about him. We know to-day that man is but the last product in the stupendous process of evolution which has been at work from the beginning, 119 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY and that he carries in his body, mind and char- acter the vestiges of that lower life out of which he has come; that his moral struggles grow out of the animalhood that still remains in him, and that even many of his "higher qualities," that mark him off as human, go back for their first faint beginnings to that which hes beneath him in the scale of ascend- ing life. Man once imagined that the earth was as flat as a table; but science proved that it was as round as an orange. He thought it w^as perfectly motionless; science proved that it spun around like a top, and swung around the sun at the rate of 67,000 miles an hour. The ancients believed that the world was a com- paratively small, compact affair, a sort of band-box universe; they thought the sun was a little body, several acres in extent, that circled around the big earth ; but science proved that the sun was a million times larger than the earth and 93,000,000 of miles distant, and that it was the earth that revolved around the sun once in every year. They thought that ours was the only solar system, but science dis- MAN'S UNITY WITH NATURE covered millions of other such systems, most of them vastly larger than our own. These are only cases typical of many others, where science has dispelled the illusions of man's uneducated and uncritical mind and senses; and not merely corrected, but practi- cally and often diametrically contradicted the notions and inferences of his mind. Man has discovered, with the passing of time, that the reality was often the very reverse of what his uninstructed and uncritical mind and senses seemed to tell him. And what has been true of man's ideas about the universe, has been equally true of his ideas about hfe, about him- self, his fellows, his God, and the relations that bind all together. The plain fact is that il- lusion is written large over all man's past thinking along every hne; and future discov- eries will correct and qualify and, in many in- stances, reverse both his past and present ideas of what is true. Before going any further, let us seek the reason why man's senses and superficial im- pressions, — ^his eyes, ears and feelings in gen- eral, — deceive him, as they certainly do, and 121 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY render such deceptive and inadequate reports of the real nature of things around him as well as within him. One good reason is this : Man as a living organism is placed in an environ- ment filled with other organisms and things which, like himself, are of a highly compound and re-compounded character. Man, phe- nomenally considered, is not a simple, but a compound and complex being; and all the be- ings and things in the material environment to which he must adapt and adjust himself and his actions, — which he must see, handle, strug- gle and interact with in numberless ways, are like himself, compound and complex beings and things also. As Prof. R. K. Duncan says : "Everything in the universe is a swarm of atoms, and every action in the universe is the action of one swarm of atoms upon another." Now man's senses and intelligence have been developed in response to the active demands of his environment that he, as a living, striving and struggling organism, must adapt himself to, or else die in the attempt. Man as a mas- sive and compound being must learn to adapt and adjust himself to other massive and in MAN'S UNITY WITH NATURE compound beings and things. His eyes, in their construction, are massive eyes instead of microscopic, and so are all his other sense organs. He is, therefore, obliged to see and hear and feel things in the mass, in the large; and to get collective impressions and synthetic perceptions of things, instead of cellular, molecular, atomic, ionic or analytic visions and views of things. In other words, he is obliged to see everjrthing, even himself, from the out- side, roughly and in the large; and so he can- not, by these massive, instead of dehcate, senses, perceive the inner truth of things that lies beneath the surface. Thus, he is also obliged to handle and adjust himself to these things in the same rough, large and collective ways, rather than in any really fine or accurate way. Man needs to see his enemies, food, tools, weapons, etc., not as swarms of atoms and ions as they really are, but as collective and com- pact bodies and wholes; and so it necessarily happens that man's everyday knowledge, de- veloped as it has been for practical use and ad- justment and not primarily for theoretical US SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY truth, is wholly a knowledge of the collective impressions, composite pictures and synthetic perceptions of things. Such knowledge is not and cannot be perfectly true, even as regards the external, material and objective character and appearance of things ; while as regards the internal, spiritual and subjective nature of things, our senses are totally blind and give us no direct knowledge whatever. Even our per- ceptual knowledge is only a half -knowledge, at best. It is very incorrect, imperfect and il- lusionary in character, as we are constantly discovering; and when men infer, as originally and naively they must, that things are actually what they seem to our practical but uncritical senses, they are woefully mistaken. Thus it is that the world of nature, as it has been perceived by man's senses, is a world of appearances and is filled with the greatest il- lusions. Man clearly needs, therefore, to sup- plement and correct his sensuous and per- ceptual knowledge by that profounder knowl- edge which is to be acquired only by scientific, philosophic and critical means, aided and in- spired also by his own intuitive faculty. Thus, MAN'S UNITY WITH NATURE as the disillusioning of man's mind gradually goes on, the evolution of real knowledge slowly but surely proceeds. It may seem to the reader as if the forego- ing were only a useless digression; but if it serves to make somewhat clearer why it has always been man's tendency to see things and people in their seeming outer disunity, rather than in their true inner unity, it will have ful- filled its purpose. To enter into the conscious- ness of the unity that exists in nature and that binds man to nature, man must learn to use other faculties than those of his senses merely. Let it first be noted that the whole tendency and effort of modern science is a unifying one. Science is rapidly succeeding in demonstrating the unbroken oneness and perfect internal unity of the entire, all-inclusive being of the world, although it is true that the world is manifested to us in a multitude of infinitely varied and seemingly separate, individual forms. The universe is a perfect organic unity in an infinite variety of organic parts, including man; it is a unity in diversity. It is not a mere totality of many separate beings U5 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY and things ; it is not a mere external union, nor a mere organization; but it is, instead, an in- tegrality, a perfect whole and an indivisible organism of Being. The discovery of the law of gravitation by Sir Isaac Newton, of the heliocentric astron- omy by Copernicus, of the laws of cosmic, solar and biological evolution by Darwin and Spencer, together with many other discoveries, have all gone to prove the perfect internal imity of the world and to show that it is in reality a true universe and not a duiverse, pluriverse or multiverse of any kind. It was named "a universe," and the name has turned out to fit the fact, as an earlier age could not imagine. It has never been seriously chal- lenged, even by the pluralists. Thus Profes- sor James says, in "The Pluralistic Universe,'* that his plurahstic world is a real universe, partly if not perfectly, connected into a uni- tary whole. "Our 'multiverse' still makes a 'universe,' " he says. The whole tendency of science from the beginning has been to discover and demonstrate the perfect internal unities, continuities and interconnections of things, in U6 MAN'S UNITY WITH NATURE place of their seeming and superficial disuni- ties, disconnections and discontinuities. Within the last few years a profoundly sig- nificant discovery has been made in the fields of chemistry and physics. It is that of the corpuscular, electrical and ethereal constitu- tion of all matter and energy. Up to quite recently it had seemed that there were about 80 ultimate and basic elements; and that the world, so far as science could prove, had been made out of these 80 or more different kinds of fundamental matter. Philosophical think- ers, as far back as ancient India and Greece, down through Spinoza and Goethe to Spencer and Haeckel, had believed, however, that there must be in the last analysis but one kind of matter and but one body of matter. This was a purely logical and metaphysical idea; it had never been experimently proved by exact science. But now many of the leading scien- tists believe that it has been so proven, and that there are not 80 odd different kinds of ulti- mate matter in the world, but one, and only one. As Professor Duncan again says: *'The need felt by men of science, of reducing the physical 1«7 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY universe to a condition of oneness, of finding some one thing out of whose properties or qualities might proceed all that is," has seem- ingly been reahzed at last. To quote a recent writer: "What happens to the universe during the stupendous process of cosmic evolution is not a loss of its original ethereal oneness, but the gain of a higher, nobler and more organic oneness. It ex- changes and transforms its simple, featureless and monotonous unity for a complex, f eature- ful and infinitely rich and varied unity. It transforms its sleepy, subconscious and dreamy state of being for its wide-awake, self-conscious and self-critical state, in which its spiritual potentiaUties are expressed and manifested in a multitude of highly individualized and per- sonahzed forms, like the human beings of this earth. As the roses are to the rose-bush, as the eyes, ears and brain are to the organism, so the human intelHgences on this earth, and the other similar intelligences on other planets, are to the whole cosmic organism of the world. They are its eyes with which it sees itself, and they are its minds with which it knows itself, — 1^8 MAN'S UNITY WITH NATURE and knows itself to be divine, or else nothing, no matter how great or tragic it may be to be divine." It is to some such sublime conception of the unity that pervades all nature, including man, that science is bringing us to-day. And when we turn to modern philosophy, we find that it, too, is moving in the same direction. Building on these recent discoveries of science it helps us to see that the human mind is a function not merely of the human organism; it is, with equal and even greater truth, a function of the whole cosmic organism. As man's brain and mind have been developed out of his bodily and mental organism as a whole, and in es- sential correspondence with it, so in the same way, man as a whole and his mind have been developed out of the body and mind of nature, and in essential correspondence with it. In man, the universe as a vast cosmic organ- ism becomes self-conscious and aware of itself. Our human consciousness is nature's cosmic consciousness, individualized in us. Our hu- man intelligence is nature's cosmic intelligence, expressing and manifesting itself through us 1^9 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY as through its brains and minds. Our minds are not our minds only ; they are in a real and deeper sense the minds of the Cosmos, and as such, they must be in essential unity with it. As Professor Hoffding says: *'In the prin-" ciple of unity we have a thought which is con- clusive for us. . . . Philosophy accepts the unity as a necessary presupposition of the in- terconnection of the manifold. . . . The prin- ciple of unity is a necessary presupposition, if we are to understand Being.'* It may rightly be urged, however, that this conception of man's unity with all-that-is, as set forth by modern science and philosophy, is purely an intellectual conception, and does not necessarily lead to a genuine consciousness of one's inner unity with nature, which is the end really sought. This is perfectly true. The scientist who devotes his entire Ufe to discover- ing the facts that make for the conception of unity, may never have entered into the con- sciousness itself ; while on the other hand, many an unscholarly man or woman, in perfect' ignorance of the scientific facts, may be liv- ing daily in the deep consciousness of the 130 MAN'S UNITY WITH NATURE unity existing between themselves and nature. Nevertheless, we must remember that it is by persistently thinking a fact that we event- ually take it out of the realm of mere intel- lectual theory and make it a fact of conscious- ness. This is why we have devoted the space to setting forth the conception of our unity with nature that is held by thoughtful minds, in order that we may begin to think correctly of the closeness of the relation existing between nature and ourselves; and in time, we shall come to experience the unity that now, per- haps, we simply hold in our minds as a the- oretical truth. The great poets of all ages are our real guides into this experience, even more truly than the scientists and philosophers, as they seek to express through their art the things they have seen and heard and felt in the world of nature. Through intuition, rather than through any reasoning process, they have pierced to the real secrets of nature and felt their oneness with the All. How many souls there are that have responded instinctively to the truth in Shelley's beautiful lines : 131 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY "The One remains, the many change and pass; Heaven's light forever shines, Earth's shadows fly." Or who, that has learned to love Words- worth, has not quoted many times softly to himself, when alone with nature, the well- known lines: "And I have felt A Presence that disturbs me with a joy Of elevated thoughts, a sense sublime Of something far more subtly interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns And the round ocean, and the living air. And the blue sky, and, in the mind of man, A motion and a spirit that impels A.11 thinking things, all objects of all thoughts And rolls through all things." The friends of Walt Whitman tell us that one of his favorite pastimes was to stroll leisurely out of doors, through the fields or under the trees or along the beach, looking in- tently at the grass or flowers, or at the rustling leaves overhead, or at the waves as they rolled in and broke at his feet. They say that he al- ways seemed to see and hear far more in na- ture than the rest of us. He used to say himself that he "loved to hear the grass grow." 13g MAN'S UNITY WITH NATURE Thoreau, who lived alone in his little hut on the shores of Walden Pond, through his patient observance and his deep sympathy with nature in all her varying moods, became so familiar with times and seasons that he was able to tell almost to a day when the leaves of the different trees would begin to turn in the autumntide. So the lifelong study of John Burroughs, both as a scientist and as a lover of nature, has enriched the world immeasurably by a wealth of insights into nature's deeper meaning. Few have walked through nature with clearer eyes or greater powers of accurate ob- servation than did John Ruskin. And he has enabled us to see in the cloud formations over- head, in the mountain stream and in tree and flower, beauties and meanings that our duller powers of perception have never even glimpsed. Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his httle but weighty volume entitled "Nature," has re- vealed with true poetic insight the deeper laws of nature's unity to all who have eyes to see and hearts to understand. And Richard Jef- SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY fries, true rhapsodist that he was, in his unique volume, "The Story of My Heart," makes us feel something of the deep and wondrous mean- ing that nature possessed for him. As we see him lying prone upon the grass, trying in vain to give expression to the greatness of the pas- sion he feels for his mother earth, we cannot fail to envy his capacity for entering into such complete and perfect unity with the world of nature, of which he knows himself to be such a vital part. But apart from the aid that we may derive from these who, through love and insight, have penetrated so deeply into nature's heart and found themselves one with her, there is one's own personal experience with nature. There is scarcely any one who does not stand in awe and reverence before the calm majesty of a sunrise or the exquisite beauty of the sunset, the mystery of the starry night or the never ending fascination of the restless sea, the sublimity of the mountains or the delicate grace of the violet. It is not only the aesthetic sense in man that is thus appealed to; it is something more than just the sense of beauty 134 MAN'S UNITY WITH NATURE that is so deeply stirred by these wonders in nature. The depths that are stirred by such sights, in even the least educated soul, is the clear proof of a something within, recognizing and responding to a kindred something with- out. If it is true that Truth is Beauty and Beauty is Truth, then the sense of beauty that so uplifts the soul in man is also the sense of truth, — that deeper truth of his fellowship and unity with nature that he always experiences at such times, even though he may not be able to put into speech all he feels and knows. Among contemporary writers, there is no one who expresses so subtly and yet so power- fully this sense of unity with nature as Al- \gernon Blackwood. It is evident that he has accepted Fechner's theory of the "earth spirit," and testing it out in his own remarkable ex- perience has made it the basis of many of his most striking stories. To many people these stories are quite meaningless, but to a large number of thoughtful readers they make a tremendously strong appeal. With all due al- lowance for the story-teller's instinct, they are profoundly suggestive of the inner psychic and 130 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY spiritual forces that, for all we know to-day, may be operating in the various forms of na- ture, and exerting upon us humans far more influence than we have as yet realized. His stories of the spirit in the trees, the wind, the fire, the water, the sand; his weird interpretations of many ancient rites that pos- sess little or no significance for modern minds ; his suggestions of the psychic powers of cer- tain animals, like the dog and cat; and, above all, the sense of reality with which the stories are infused — all tend to create the impression in the reader's mind that the author is writing out of experiences that have made him feel and know a vastly closer connection between nature and man than most of us know anything about. He also makes one feel that, by close and patient observation, through quiet brooding and sympathetic communion, and especially, through loving insight, any one may discover for himself that closer fellowship with nature, that sense of unity with all-that-is. It is significant that those who have been bom and bred close to nature's heart, or those who have spent much time in the solitudes of 186 MAN'S UNITY WITH NATURE nature, seem often to possess an almost mysti- cal sense of the close ties and intimate relations binding them to nature, such as is rarely found among city dwellers. It would seem as though our conventional rows of houses and lofty sky- scrapers and paved thoroughfares and clang- ing cars shut civilized man away from that closer sympathy with nature which was so char- acteristic of earlier man. But perhaps some reader will say: Why should we seek this sense of unity with nature? What is the practical value of this conscious- ness of our oneness with the world of things about us? Why not be content with seeking what unity we may among our fellows? Why not get all the enjoyment we can out of the nature we perceive through our senses, without seeking to penetrate to any deeper inner mean- ings? Our answer to these questions is first : That all the great souls who stand forth as having entered profoundly into the consciousness of the meaning of the principle of unity and who have realized the ideal most fully in their own lives, have given expression to their sense of 137 \ SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY oneness with the world of nature. To them it has been the evident source of fresh courage and new inspiration for life's tasks. It has poured streams of healing into their souls, when weary or discouraged. It has furnished vital illumination for their problems. But, deeper still, it has seemed to be the inseparable accompaniment of the experience of oneness with their fellows and with God. It is safe to say that no one has ever become profoundly conscious of his unity with God, without ex- periencing his oneness with the world that he knows to be God's world. But beyond this, the one who has attained to unity within himself, instinctively reaches out after a similar unity with that which is without. One of the sure evidences that he has found unity within is that he is seeking it without. For the true Self that he has discov- ered, and upon the finding of which depends his inner unity, is always one with the World- ^ Self, that thrills and throbs and pulsates in all of nature's manifestations. Therefore, the true Self must press on to experience its unity with the world in which it dwells. 138 MAN'S UNITY WITH NATURE Finally, the experience of one's unity with nature makes possible the sense of "being at home in the universe," which, as no words can fully describe, gives to the inner life the feel- ing of calm confidence, of quiet peace, of rest- ful power. Such an one knows himself to be in his own place. Time and space make little difference, for he knows that all things belong to him by right and that, sooner or later, his own will surely come to him. All fear and distrust, all hesitancy or timidity vanish into the background forever, and he faces all out- ward conditions with perfect trust and habit- ual courage. He has learned that the entire universe is his own vast domain, even as he belongs to nature as one of her vital and in- dispensable parts. To thus find one's true Self, and to know that Self as being at home in a universe that is eternal, is to conquer time and sense, and to transcend even death itself. 169 CHAPTER VII man's unity with his fellows "The heart and soul of all men being one, this bitterness of his and mine ceases. He Is mine, I am my brother, and my brother is me." — Emerson. IF the new psychologj^ is helping man to ex- plore the hidden depths of his own being, and achieve inner unity by the discovery of the true Self that stands back of all his kaleido- scopic selves, the new social movement is just as surely turning his attention outward toward his fellows everywhere, and forcing him to study seriously the relations he sustains to them. Just as earnestly as he is seeking real- ity within, is he seeking reality in these social relations without. As all men are striving, more or less clearly, to attain a unity within themselves, even so they are endeavoring to find a unity with their fellows that does not now exist. The social movement in all its various phases, which, on the surface, is seeking to 140 MAN'S UNITY WITH HIS FELLOWS bring a larger measure of justice into all our social life, is nevertheless, at bottom, a striving to find and establish a deeper unity in the life^ of mankind. Any new social order that may come to have its place in the world, if it is to register genuine progress, must be based upon, and must steadily seek to foster and develop, a larger measure of social unity. We shall consider later the application of the principle of unity to the larger life of society as a whole ; for the present, let us think of it as it binds individual men and women to other individuals throughout the world. At first glance, the thing that impresses us is the many differences that exist between in- dividuals in the race, in the nation, in the com- munity and even in the same household. Men are divided politically, by wide divergencies of conviction and by party affiliation, and the tendency is for each to see little good in the other's views. In religion, men are separated by different faiths, diverse creeds, and many rival sects. "So many gods, so many creeds. So many paths that wind and wind. . 141 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY Socially, men are widely divided by class con- sciousness, never so intense as to-day, — by \ wealth, clothes, manners and all that goes to make up one's social standing in the commun- ity. Intellectually, men are at all stages of developmeint and are possessed of all degrees of education and training, from the "ignorant foreigner" to the cultivated and polished uni- versity scholar. Differences in moral ideals and attainments separate people into all phases of the so-called good and bad. In ad- dition, there are all the innumerable differences in individual tastes, peculiarities, dispositions, temperaments, that tend to divide men and women from one another. Out of all these differences that exist be- tween people grow the mutual animosities and antagonisms, the prejudices and dislikes, the envies and jealousies, the bitternesses and hatreds that inevitably destroy even the sem- blance of unity that might seem to exist. Nearness in space does not seem to overcome these differences, for oftentimes those living under the same roof are most widely separated from each other. The relation of husband and MAN'S UNITY WITH HIS FELLOWS wife that, in its ideal sense, symbolizes the highest type of unity, often only serves to fur- ther accentuate the differences that divide ; for there are no separations so deep or wide as the separations in spirit. One of the most solemnly mysterious facts of life is that every individual in this world stands alone; he lives his life alone and at last he must die alone. Just as no two atoms ever really touch each other, even in the most com- pact of substances, so no two individuals ever completely touch each other, no matter how closely they may be thrown together. Even in the most nearly perfect union of man and woman, there are always some reserves, some barriers, something withheld. How many times have devoted parents suffered over the reserves that seemed to come between them and their children ; how many a friendship has been shadowed for the same reason! Let any one reflect upon his circle of friends and then ask himself the question : With how many of these friends do I find myself in complete unity? In every friendship there must be some com- mon points of contact, but there are also great 14>3 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY differences ; and while it is true that the differ- ences often help to form and preserve the friendship, their presence, nevertheless, proves the absence of real unity, at least on the sur- face. No true conception of unity between people can ignore this fundamental character- istic of the individual, — that in his deepest life he seems to stand alone ; this is what constitutes his individuality. Upon more careful reflection, however, we come to perceive that these differences, in spite of all the friction and heart-ache, the strife and bitterness which they engender, are, after all, more superficial than deep, and grow out of accidental rather than essential features in human nature. Underneath all these many differences which we allow to separate us so sadly, there is a unity that binds all individuals into one great Whole, a oneness in which ra- cial, national and individual differences exist and always will exist, but which may serve not to separate and divide, but to unite all in the larger service of the good of the Whole. Is this deeper unity grounded in fact, or is it, as might well appear to-day, only a beautiful MAN'S UNITY WITH HIS FELLOWS theory? Let us look more deeply beneath the surface of our divided life. The essential fact in human history as we read it to-day is the slow awakening of the sense of unity, the gradual unfolding of a feel- ing of community between men, nations and races, the dawning possibility of cooperation, of undreamed of collective powers, of a com- ing synthesis of the human species, of the eventual development of a conmion general ideal, a common universal purpose for human- ity as a whole, out of all the present chaotic confusion. The struggles and bloodshed of all the past have proved the duty and also the right of every individual to be not another, but himself. But at last we are beginning to realize that one's individual existence is not so entirely cut off as it seemed at first, that one's entire separate individuality is but one of the many subtle illusions of the human mind. * 'Between you and me as we bring our minds together, and between us and the rest of man- kind there is something, something real, some- thing that rises through us and is neither you ^ nor me, that comprehends us, that is thinking 145 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY here, and is using us to play against each other in that thinking." This is no mere poetical statement; it is literal truth. We, you and I and every one, are not only parts in a thought process, but parts of one universal flow of life and blood. From the biological view-point, the unity of mankind is scientifically true. The scholars are agreed to-day that the human race, with all its various differentiations, goes back ulti- mately to one common source. The cradle of the race is now supposed to have been in the ancient land of India, somewhere in the vicin- ity of the Himalaya Mountains. From that source, through prehistoric times, early peo- ples wandered to and fro, extending their migrations ever farther and farther, and reach- ing even the western world, — as witness the ancient ruins in Central America. The differences that exist to-day between the various races of men, — differences in language, in government, in religion, in dress, in manners and customs, grew up gradually through a long period of time, and are due primarily to differences in environment, cli-^ 146 MAN'S UNITY WITH HIS FELLOWS mate, soil, food, etc., as these primitive peoples became separated farther and farther from each other. But, in spite of all these differ- ences, developed through thousands and thou- sands of years, the biological basis of humanity- is one ; the same blood flows in all our veins. With the evidence that we have of the wide wanderings of prehistoric tribes, and remem- bering the ceaseless movements of peoples to and fro on the earth's surface during historic times, with the inevitable intermarriage of in- dividuals from different tribes and races con- stantly taking place, we realize how baseless is the idea that there is to-day any such thing as an essentially distinct or separate race. As one of America's foremost anthropologists said in a recent address: "The world has nothing to fear, biologically, from the inter- marriage of the races, for the simple reason that the races have long since become hope- lessly mixed." The longer one lets his imagination play upon the incalculable drift and soak of the world's population, the more clearly one real- izes the tremendous fact of the biological one^ 147 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY ness of humanity as a whole, regardless of all racial and national names which we still em- ploy to separate peoples from one another. Thus, from this strictly scientific point of view, our individualities, our states and nations and races are but "bubbles and clusters of foam upon the great stream of the blood of the hu- man species, incidental experiments in the growing knowledge and consciousness of the race." When we study the intellectual achieve- ments of the various races and nations, we are profoundly impressed with the essential like- mindedness of all men. So long as there were no easy means of communication between dif- ferent portions of the globe and men and na- tions lived, of necessity, separated lives, each group naturally worked out its particular problems in its own way. It is thus that the ideals of government, of social and economic systems, of sciences and philosophies and the arts, of morals and religions, were originally developed ; each separate nation or race slowly working out its ideals, theories and general systems of knowledge independently, as if X4a MAN'S UNITY WITH HIS FELLOWS there were no other races or nations in the world. To-day, with our modern transportation facihties, our cable and radio service, the tremendous growth of travel between different countries, however widely separated, the in- terchange of literatures and the vast extension of commerce and trade, we realize how this old barrier of simple ignorance of one another has been torn away; and we have discovered that, all unconsciously, these different races and na- tions of men have been working out their separate destinies along essentially the same lines and toward practically the same great ends. Some, to be sure, for obvious reasons have been moving more rapidly, some have made greater progress and approached more nearly their ideals than have others; but all have been moving along the same general lines of development. All men, however isolated, have confronted the same universe of mystery, have faced the same problems of human existence, have re- flected upon the same experiences of the inner consciousness; and whatever the differences in 149 i SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY the forms of the conclusions at which they have arrived, the content of those conclusions has been the same for all men. The human mind, the whole world round, is one; its activities everywhere conform to the same laws of mind ; its powers, given the same opportunities and an equal time for development, are practically the same for all. Politically, the world is moving rapidly to- day toward democracy, and mankind is pretty well convinced that some form of self-govern- ment is the ideal government to be attained by all nations, just as soon as the people are capa- ble of self-government. If Science be "the systematized body of ascertained knowledge,'* then there can be, in the nature of the case, but one scientific system for the world. We cannot conceive of a Chinese science, or a German science, or a Russian science, or an American science. Science, in just so far as it is science, must be one, — a World Science. While the external forms of the art of dif- ferent peoples have varied widely, in poetry, in music, in painting, in sculpture, — still we UO MAN'S UNITY WITH HIS FELLOWS recognize that the fundamental principles out of which true art always springs are the same for the world. In the same way, though perhaps more grad- ually, we are beginning to see that all the past systems of philosophy have but been preparing the way for the coming of a world philosophy, in which the truths of the many various sys- tems of thought may be comprised in a new and universal synthesis, — even a World Phil- osophy. The comparative study of the world's great literature reveals the same like-mindedness, — the same outreachings toward truth and beauty, the same heart-hungerings for love and goodness. Even the forms of these different literatures, — poetry and prose, drama and fic- tion, — are essentially similar. The recent science of Comparative Relig- ions also reveals the same underlying unity in morals and religion of all peoples, as we shall see more at length in a subsequent chapter. It is this recognition that in the realm of the intellectual, moral and spiritual achievements of men there is an essential oneness, a world- 151 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY life, in which all mankind participates and to which all men have contributed and must con- tribute, that not only constitutes the psycho- logical basis of unity between men, but is rapidly drawing all nations into an ever closer unity that must lead eventually to an actual fellowship of humanity. Still another phase of the psychological basis for the oneness of humanity is found in the fact that all men, regardless of race or nation, seem to be capable of indefinite development, and along the same lines, both mental and moral. John G. Paton, the Apostle to the New Hebrides, demonstrated in a lifetime of singular devotion, the possibility of transform- ing the cannibal natives of the South Sea Is- lands into civilized beings, with not only all the capacities of, but the ambitions for, intellectual and moral development. Bishop Hannington revealed the same possibilities among the sav- ages of Africa. We watch the children of the immigi'ants as they stream from the steerage of the vessels at Ellis Island. They come from every land under the sun; they represent the most back- 15^ MAN'S UNITY WITH fflS FELLOWS ward as well as the most advanced races ; their language is strange, their dress is peculiar, the color of their skin is different. They come from countries where for centuries their an- cestors have lived in ignorance, perhaps ground down beneath the heel of tyranny. But give these same children five or ten years in our pubhc schools, and then note the change. They not only catch up to and keep pace with our American-born boys and girls, but in many instances they outstrip them, carrying off the honors in college and uni- versity, and filling positions of usefulness, re- sponsibihty and leadership in all walks of life as they reach years of maturity. The brilliant students from India, China, Japan, Syria and other lands, who in recent years have distin- guished themselves at Harvard, Yale, Colum- bia, Cornell and other American and Englislf universities, prove the same possibilties for de- velopment among these oriental races. Or, take the so-called incorrigible bad boys who seem to many to stand outside the pale of normal human nature, until one day there comes along a Judge Ben Lindsey who, with 153 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY sympathetic insight and love, takes these "bad boys" to his home, becomes their counselor and friend, and proves the possibility of upright, useful citizenship in even the "bad boy." The confirmed criminal, apparently hope- less, turns out to be no exception when a Thomas Mott Osborne begins to treat him as a man, worthy of confidence and respect; or a Madeleine Doty does the same for the female offender. From the psychological view-point, all men are far more alike than they are different, if only one can see beneath the surface differences of their lives. And all, even the apparent ex- ceptions, are susceptible of indefinite develop- ment and along the same general lines. It is here indeed that we find profound evidence for the idea of unity, of human oneness, of the solidarity of mankind. But it may justly be claimed that these facts, while frankly admitted by all intelligent peo- ple, leave one cold and unmoved ; they may im- press the intellect, but they fail to grip the heart; they do not, in and of themselves, induce in us the consciousness of unity with our fel- 164 MAN'S UNITY WITH HIS FELLOWS lows that we really seek. It is the old dis- tinction once again between a theoretical fact and one that has become a fact of conscious- ness. If our sense of unity with other in- dividuals is to become not only an intellectual fact to be discussed, but an experience to be felt and lived and loved, then something more is needed. Where shall we find it? Let us recall our previous discussion of the nature of the true Self. If it be true that back of the "hundred selves" that find expression at the surface of my life, changing, fleeting, im- permanent, there is a deeper Self that consti- tutes the real "I" in me, unchanging and per- manent, then the same great fact is equally true of all men. The disunity exists in my personal life only because I have never yet discovered this true Self within, to which all the other lesser "selves" should be subordinated and which they all may obey. In just the same way, the disunity, or the "differences" that I see in my fellows, dividing them from one another and separating them from me, arise from their "hundred selves" at the surface, and not from the real Selves that 165 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY lie deep within them all. The differences that divide belong to human surfaces, not to hu- man centers. And the fact that all these dif- ferences seem to be in evidence most of the time, causing all the myriad forms of friction and strife between men and nations, only goes to show that most men are as yet living their lives from the surface rather than from the true center. We have seen that unity cannot mean same- ness or identity; it cannot ignore the unique- ness of each Self. We can conceive of two Selves going through exactly the same experi- ences, looked at from without, and yet we know that these same experiences would never mean just the same to these different Selves. I can- not only say, "I am I, and no one else"; but there is a deep sense in which I can say, "I am , I and like no one else." Each Self, then, may ' with truth be said to be a center of unique in- terest. We are like spectators in a theater. Each of us views the same universe; but each gazes on the wonderful spectacle from his own par- ^ ticular seat in the theater, as it were ; and there- 150 MAN'S UNITY WITH HIS FELLOWS fore, each sees it from his own unique point of view; and consequently, to none of us does it appear exactly the same as it does to the rest. This uniqueness of the individual must be kept clearly in mind. But this is not to predicate of the Self any absolute or essential difference in nature from all other Selves. The uniqueness exists, but in a deeper lying unity which by some means we must learn to grasp. As we probe still deeper the mystery of the Self, while we admit that, on the surface, finite selves do appear to stand to each other in this relation of mutual exclusiveness, we find that the experience of every Self is included in a larger experience, that each Self is a part of a Greater Self. This brings us to the very heart of the truth. No other view is possible than that the true Self in each individual is a form under which Reality, or the Life-Prin- ciple, or God, finds expression; then, each Self is not only unique in itself, but is also, on this very account, a unique appearance in a finite center of the underlying Reality that "rolls through all things." Thus we are forced to 157 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY admit that, in their deepest essence, all beings are One Being, and all individual Selves are One Self; and there are no such things as private, separate, exclusive, individual beings or selves, save in our false and illusory think- ing. The ignorance of this one fact, that in our true Selfhood we are one with all others, and that only on the surface of our lives are we in any sense divided, is no trivial or unimportant distinction; on the contrary, it is of the pro- foundest importance, as any one can see by reading the past and present history of the race. It is the fountain-head of all forms of cold-blooded selfishness,— envy, anger and hate ; of all pride, vanity, conceit and contempt for others; of all injustice, greed, cruelty and crime; of all beliefs in the superiority of one- self and the inferiority of others. "Man's inhumanity to man makes countless millions mourn." And the clear and simple reason is because men have always imagined that they were private, separate selves ; that they lived private, separate lives; had private, separate exist- 168 MAN'S UNITY WITH HIS FELLOWS ences; and would have private, separate fates and destinies. This is the great illusion, the monstrous superstition that has created all the disunity in the world since time began, and that will yet make a veritable hell of earth, unless it can be banished forever by man himself. Men are not private, separate beings; they do not and cannot live private and separate lives, however they may deceive themselves ; and they have no private, separate fates or destinies. Both science and philosophy to-day, not to mention religion, whose message of unity has always been lost to all save the few, are pre- pared to destroy this egotistical illusion, and to prove that men in their true Selves are noth- ing more or less than dynamic differentiations of Being in a unitary cosmic organism, under phenomenally individualized and personalized forms. And, as such, all our individual lives are One Life, all our interests of every kind are absolutely mutual, and the purpose of all our existences is forever the same, to serve, each in his own way, the highest good of the living body of humanity. 159 4 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY The personal problem, then, for every one is how to look beneath the externals and rec- ognize clearly the true Self in our fellows rather than the surface selves with which we are constantly coming into conflict; and also, how to realize habitually that in all our rela- tions with others, we are actually dealing with "others" who, in their essential beings, are one with ourselves. We must remember that to make any fact a fact of consciousness, we must accustom ourselves to the persistent thinking of the fact. When tempted, as we constantly are, to see in others only the things that sepa- rate us, we must turn resolutely away from all these surface expressions, realizing that they do not express the real man or woman ; and we must hold that real Self in them constantly be- fore us. But some one may say: "If I should hold that attitude toward other people, I leave them free to take all manner of advantage of me, since they are still living their lives from the surface, and not from their true centers." This is only another phase of the old fear thought that is constantly keeping people from 160 MAN'S UNITY WITH HIS FELLOWS living out their highest and best. As a matter of fact, if we would only dare frankly to treat men and women, not as they appear to us or even to themselves, but as they really are in their deeper Selfhood, it would do more to help them discover their true Selves than all the preaching or writing in the world ; for it would be our deepest life calUng their deepest life into being, and in time, their deepest Selves could not fail to respond to the call. It must be self-evident, however, that no one can ever discover the deeper Self in another until he has first of all found it within himself. The sense of human unity comes not from with- out but ever and onty from within. It is a consciousness, not a theory, even though the theory may be based on scientific facts or philosophical reasoning. It is only as one comes actually to experience the true Self within that he comes to see the same essential Self in all others. It is only as he himself has ceased to live the divided and distracted life at the surface, that he can see beneath the surface life of those about him, and discern in them what he has already found in himself. 161 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY Jesus could call all men brothers, and treat them as such, simply because he had become supremely Self-conscious. St. Francis of As- sisi could live the brotherly life with all, even with birds and animals, only because he had found within himself the true life that is always and everywhere one life. Walt Whitman could say, "I am one with the highest and I am one with the lowest," only because he had entered into the same great experience within himself. All going forth to my brother, in any real sense, is a going in to my Self. True Self-knowledge alone leads to true knowledge of others. This is the great achievement we seek to- day, and it is clear that it must be an achieve- ment of the spirit in man. Slowly, and yet surely, it is dawning upon minds everywhere that the unity we seek, and that we must as- suredly find unless life is to descend to lower levels, is a feeling more than a belief; it is a consciousness more than it is a theory; it must be born in the inner lives of men first, if it is to have any outward existence worthy the name. If the unity we are striving to attain 162 MAN'S UNITY WITH HIS FELLOWS in human life is to be worth all the prodigious sacrifices men have made, then it must possess such a profound moral and spiritual content as shall give birth to a new spirit in man, revital- izing, all-compelling and universal. 108 CHAPTER VIII man's unity with god "A man who doubts his own Godhood is an infidel, for in us God lives and moves and has His being, just as *ln Him we lire and move and have our being.' " "Here in the Light, I am I, and Thou art Thou; but out there in the surrounding dark, you and I and God are One." — Professor Carpenter. IT may seem strange that we have delayed the consideration of man's relations to God to this point in our discussion, but there is a reason for it that we hope to make clear. The old and time-honored method is to begin with God first. After attempting to prove His ex- istence by the cosmological, the ontological, the moral and all the other conventional lines of argument, the older theologians assumed cer- tain things to be true of His nature, and then they inferred from these assumptions the char- acter of the Godliead. Having thus deter- mined, through abstract reasoning and logical 164 MAN'S UNITY WITH GOD processes, the kind of God that exists, they then proceeded to describe how this God at length drew near to man and made Himself known by means of special revelations and through various mediating channels. The final act in the process was one of faith on man's part, by which he threw open the door of his heart and admitted the God who had thus approached him from the outside. This con- ception in its general outlines has had all the advantage of being a logical system of closely reasoned thought about God and His relations to man ; and, while it was based on assumptions and its logic was not always flawless, still, it is no wonder that for so many centuries it has largely dominated the mind of man in his thought about God. But, as man has been forced to learn all along the way, so he is beginning to realize again to-day that "Our little systems have their day, They have their day and cease to be; They are but broken lights of Thee, And Thou, O Lord, art more than they." And men of late have been turning away from 165 H SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY these familiar logical processes, these hard and fast systems of thought about God, with their rigid statements as to who God was, and what He thought, and how He acted, and have been reaching out in earnestness of spirit for a God who was close and near and immediate, a real God who should more truly satisfy the deepest cravings of their beings. The unmistakable fact is that in his own life, in his experience and in his thought, man has been outgrowing the God of these older theological systems, and has come to feel their utter inadequacy for to-day. Just as Emer- son asked the question in his Divinity School Address in 1838: "^Vhy should we not have a first-hand and immediate experience of God?" so men everywhere to-day are crying out for an original, first-hand experience of God. Earnest souls are asking why, if God indeed be the living God, it should be neces- sary for men of to-day to derive all their knowl- edge of Him from ancient prophets who lived and died thousands of years ago? Do we not stand as close to the original sources of knowl- edge of God as did the ancients, — ^the world of 166 MAN'S UNITY WITH GOD consciousness within and the world of nature without? Why cannot we have our own ex- perience with God, instead of depending so wholly on second-hand experiences of others? Great as is the knowledge of God that has come to the world through the consciousness of Jesus and the other true seers of the race, we realize that Jesus taught that men might at- tain to knowledge of God, not alone through him, but each one for himself, through his own inner consciousness. Jesus did not come to take the place of God, but rather to show men how they might find God for themselves, even as he had found Him, and then live their lives daily in Him and with Him. He little understands the religious unrest of these times who does not see that, deeper than all else, is this well-nigh universal thirst for a real God, that is, a God who is real, who lives, moves and has His actual being in one's own personal experience. Towards the close of his life, Tennyson once said to a friend: "My chief desire is to have a new vision of God." In these words, the great poet has voiced the deepest desire of all seriously minded men 167 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY and women. If we are ever to regain "the lost sense of God," which Tolstoi declared to be the fundamental need of our age, it will only be as in some way we do succeed in catching a fresh vision of God. The hopeful sign for religion is that such a fresh vision is actually dawning on the world, bringing to countless souls a liv- ing, first-hand experience with God. The modern approach to God, however, is not from without but from within. We do not begin first with God, but with man. Chrono- logically, God undoubtedly comes first, but it is not the chronological God whom we seek ; it is the living God of the present who alone can satisfy man's hunger and thirst. So that we do not seek God through logical processes, and then argue from our conclusions as to God's relations to man. But we discover Him, if at all, in our own inner consciousness; and not until then are we truly able to understand any- thing of His relations to His world and to hu- manity as a whole. We do not begin by defining Him; in fact we care less and less about any definitions of God, for we realize that every definition al- 168 MAN'S UNITY WITH GOD ways leaves out more than it puts in. But we are intensely concerned with knowing, feeling, experiencing for ourselves the immediate con- sciousness of God. We are learning at last that the pathway to God lies ever and always through man's own inner being. This is by no means to disparage the paths that lead through nature to God, especially in view of the tremendous light that science is throwing on these paths ; but it is to confess that no one sees clearly the paths that lead through nature, until, he has first learned to walk in the path- way that lies through human nature. Without recalling the various definitions that have been given of religion, there is no question but that the essence of religion, what- ever outward forms it may take, is the con- sciousness of God; and the ultimate goal of religion has always been to secure union with God. This is by no means all that constitutes religion, but it most certainly is its true heart and soul. Organized religion has always tended to lay the chief stress on other things, like the sacraments, the creed, baptism, the manner of worship, etc., but the truly great re- 169 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY ligious leaders in every age have recognized clearly that the only salvation worthy the name was the life that resulted from union with the Divine. To them, all dogmas and every ec- clesiastical rite or ceremony were only the means to that great end. They might help to- ward such union, in which case they were to be employed gratefully; or again, they might stand as actual hindrances, in which case they were frankly to be rejected. The end of re- ligion to all true Saviours, and the end never to be lost sight of, has been the finding of God and living one's hfe in union with Him. This was just what religion meant to Jesus. The divinity of Jesus does not depend on the historicity of the birth-stories, or on any so- called miracle, but alone on his unique God- consciousness. He felt himself to be one with God. To him, God was not a! formula to be explained, or a dogma to be believed, least of all a name to conjure by. He was the won- drous life welling up in him as consciousness, and constituting in him his true essential Self- hood. "The works that I do are not mine, but the Father's who sent me." 170 MAN'S UNITY WITH GOD And what was to him an actual experience in consciousness, he knew was an experience possible to all men and women, when once they had awakened to the meaning of their true Selfhood. When he said: **I am come that ye may have life, and may have it more abundantly," he was speaking of the more abundant life that issues forth from a man's consciousness of his vital union with God. His last prayer for his disciples reveals this: "That ye all may be one, as I and my Father are one. . . . That they may be one, even as Thou, Father, art in me, and I in Thee, so may they also be in us. ... I in them and Thou in me, that they may be perfected into One." The mystic's "way of life," in every age, has been "the way" that led eventually, after the "darkness" and the "illumination" had been passed through, to the beatific vision, the ineffable bliss of union with God. When we use the word "mystic" as applied to religion, we need to explain just what is meant by the term, especially to-day with the new awaken- ing of interest in the subject. To many peo- 171 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY pie the word carries little or no meaning; to others it has an ominous and forbidding sound, as though the safe and beaten track were be- ing forsaken for mere will-o'-the-wisps. By mysticism we mean that type of religion which puts the emphasis on immediate aware- ness of one's relation to God, on direct and intimate consciousness of the Divine Presence within as well as without. In other words, it is religion in its most intense, living and spir- itual stage. Just because mysticism, then, means religion grounded primarily in experi- ence, rather than based on church or creed, it has pecuhar interest for an age that demands as the bisis of truth the testimony of experi- ence. This type of religion is by no means confined to Christianity but belongs in some real degree to all faiths; for first-hand experiences of a Divine and Higher Presence are as old as hu- man personality; in fact, they constitute the beginnings of all religions. Dr. Brinton, in "Religions of Primitive Peoples," says that "all religions depend for their origin and con- tinuance directly upon inspiration," that is, m MAN'S UNITY WITH GOD upon direct and immediate experiences, not on books or institutions or creeds. All sacred writings, all creeds and rituals, all institutions of every religion are the prod- uct, not the cause, of these first-hand experi- ences in the inner lives of men. The men who have made religion a vital power for any peo- ple or any age, have always been the men who believed they stood face to face with God, and heard His voice and felt His presence in their souls. Whence came the sacred writings of all religious faiths? They were not miracu- lously prepared and let down from the skies. They are simply the written experiences of men in all ages who beheved they heard the voice of God, that in their own inner conscious- ness His truth or His will had been revealed. This direct consciousness of God, this inner experience of the Great Reality, is, however, not confined to a few chosen spirits, or the rare "geniuses" in religion. "There are multitudes of men and women in out of the way places, in backwoods towns and on uneventful farms, who are the salt of the earth and the light of the world in their respective communities, 173 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY simply because they have had experiences which revealed to them realities which their neighbors missed, and powers to live by which the mere church-goers failed to find." Many such have been looked upon with suspicion by their conventional neighbors; they have been misunderstood, they have often been called "free-thinkers," or even *'infidels," because they could not conform to the traditional theo- logical tests. The mystic has been the martyr of every age. But he has ever been the true conservator of real religion none-the-less ; and without him, religion would have long since vanished from the world. For the soul of re- ligion is ever and always — ^mysticism, — the im- mediate consciousness of God within the soul of man. But what we have discovered to be the soul of religion proves also to be the deepest soul of life. In every individual there is something of the mystical from which no one can escape. When we stop to reflect, we find that in addi- tion to the outer life we live, there is a deep inner life, however indifferent we may be to its true significance. Even though we may 174 MAN'S UNITY WITH GOD not yet have attained to unity within our true Self, there are times for all of us when our finite selves do open out on the Infinite; our particular and limited consciousness does realize occasionally that it is but a part of a Universal Consciousness. Even the most con- firmed rationalist cannot escape his mystical moments, however rare they may be, for the experience belongs in some measure to every life ; only most of us do not recognize it as such or appreciate its real meaning. History also discloses the fact that the mystic has been the true saviour, not only of spiritual rehgion, but of all that is highest and best in the life of humanity. He has been the leaven in the lump, the flame within the smoke, the vital spark in the otherwise dead body. He has saved humanity again and again from being utterly submerged under scholastic formalism, blind selfishness or stupefying in- difference that were stifling to man's true spirit. Far from being the unpractical dreamers they are too often conceived to have been, they have braved storms, endured conflicts, and gone 176 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY through fiery afflictions that would have over- whelmed the one whose "anchor did not reach within the veil." They have led great reforms and championed movements of vital signifi- cance to the people. They have been prophets of truth who have blazed the way to new and higher view-points. They have been the spiritual leaders who have inspired the dis- pirited hosts and led them on to higher levels of life. They have ever been the God-sent men and women who have saved mankind from stagnation and marshaled the race along lines of truer progress. And they have been able to render these high services, because they felt themselves allied inwardly with a Power larger than themselves, who was working with them and through them. There is no question that there are "mystical experiences" which are abnormal and patho- logical, but there is no more reason to narrow the word to cover this type alone, than there is for limiting the word "love" to pathological love alone. Mystical experience may stretch over all the degrees, from the most perfect sanity to utter disorganization of the self; it is 176 MAN'S UNITY WITH GOD the sane and normal mysticism that alone con- cerns us now. It is President King of Ober- lin College who says: "The truly mystical may be summed up as simply a protest in favor of the whole man, — the entire personality. It says that men can experience and live and feel and do much more than they can formulate, define, explain or even fully express. Living is more than thinking." This is only another way of saying that all life, in its deepest as- pects, proceeds from mystical sources. The clear conclusion from all man's age- long searching, is that there is no direct path- way to God through the intellect solely; the existence of God never has been, and never can be, proved by purely intellectual processes, as one would demonstrate a problem in mathema- tics. If we are limited in our search for truth to the outer world only, our knowledge, great and wonderful and suggestive as it is, must forever fall far short of reality. All who have sought reality with the scientist in the external world merely, or with the hedonist in the world of the senses merely, or with the philosopher in the world of pure ideas merely, or with the 177 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY historian in the past merely, have been doomed to bitter disappointment. All who have ever actually found Reality, since the world began, have found it in the same way, — by looking within. All who have ever come truly to know God, whatever form their religion may have taken, have always found Him in the same place, — ^within. The inner door alone swings open to Reality; and religious certainty has always and ever been found only within; not in book or church or creed, but in the whisper of the still, small voice. For as Jesus said: "The kingdom of God is within you/' Only after all outward search is abandoned and one turns at last to the world within, will man find what he seeks, and what every soul, when it awakens, will desire above everything else. For all knowledge and dis- covery of God is, in the last analysis. Self- discovery and Self-knowledge. The con- sciousness of unity with God can only be at- tained through true Self -consciousness. The pathway to God is the pathwav of the inner lif^, 179 MAN'S UNITY WITH GOD Why this should be so, becomes self-evident when we recall the conclusions to which we have already come. We have seen that the ultimate in man, the real Self that lies back of all the "hundred selves" on the surface of his life, is his true being, unchanged and per- manent. This true Self dwells in all men, though but few as yet have become conscious of it. We have also found in nature, the outer world, a something, — a larger Self, a World- spirit, — call it what you will, with which we seem to be able to enter into communion, at least in our highest moments. We have also seen that the consciousness of unity within, with nature or with our fellows, comes to us not through our surface ''selves" but only through our deeper Self. We experience our oneness with nature, not when we contemplate its outer aspects merely, but when we penetrate to its inner meaning; we realize our unity with our fellows only when we pierce beneath their surface selves to the deeper beings within. The one aspect of life, then, of which we may predicate unity, is this true Self in us, in others and in all things, X79 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY What is this true Self, the consciousness of which alone brings us into union with nature, with our fellows and with God? It is nothing less than the God in us, who also in-dwells all things. This duality in unity which we have found to be the essence of the Self in us, has also been regarded by the profoundest think- ers as constituting the essential nature of Re- ality or God. The ego in man, or his true Self, is then, literally, the microcosm of God in its most fundamental aspect. Let us put this great truth in another way. 1. There is but one substance, being, life- force; and that substance, being, life-force is Reality or God. 2. All phenomena of every kind, since all that is has come forth from be- ing or substance, are manifestations, differen- tiations, expressions of God. 3. Of all these manifestations, humanity is the highest at- tained in the evolutionary process as yet. 4. The most highly developed men and women, then, are the fullest and clearest manifesta- tions of God of which we know anything, at least on this planet. Or, as the old statement of Divine imma- 180 MAN'S UNITY WITH GOD nency puts it: God sleeping in the stone, awakening in the plant, coming to conscious- ness in the animal, coming to self-conscious- ness in human life, and coming to fullest self- consciousness in the great souls, the seers and saviours of the race. Once these propositions are admitted, it becomes clear that the truest way to arrive at the knowledge of God is through the study of man; and that if man is ever to find his real unity with God, it must be through the discovery of the Self which is the highest manifestation of God within him. The problem of God, then, becomes the prob- lem of man; and the quest for God becomes man's search for his true Self. From the beginning man has been rediscov- ering God constantly, and in his latest discov- ery he finds that God is that supreme cosmic and social organism of which he himself is a constituent part and a most significant organ and function. He is one of God's minds, and through this human mind which is at the same time the mind of God, he has discovered his true Self, which is one with the true Self in every other individual and one with the Greater 181 N SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY Self of the universe. "Thus has God, the whole, found Himself in man, the part, as man becomes conscious of his true being; and thus has man, the part, found himself in God and of God, the whole. At last God knows Him- self as God in man. At last man knows him- self as man in God." As Elmer T. Gates, the eminent psycholo- gist, says: "The individual self is part of the Total Self. You trace your pedigree back to the beginningless Totality, — the All. You have the Universehood in you. Whatever God is, that thou art also." This true Self, then, is the essential reality in man, and is not only from God, as all things must be from God, but is a hteral part of God and therefore, one with Him. That this is the clear and unmistakable conclusion to which modern philosophy has come, the following quotations will illustrate. Professor Carpen- ter says: "The long passion of our humanity is borne in all its multitudinous variety by God." "God's life is simply all life," says Professor Royce of Harvard. "It is this thought of the suffering God who is just our 182 MAN'S UNITY WITH GOD own true Self, who actually and in our flesh bears the sins of the world, and whose natural body is pierced by the wounds which hateful fools inflict upon Him. . . . God is not in His ultimate essence another being than yourself. . . . You are truly one with God and part of His very life. He is the self of your self, the soul of your soul, the life of your life." Fichte, the great German philosopher, says : "An insight into the absolute unity of the hu- man existence with the divine, is certainly the profoundest knowledge that man can attain. When he realizes that the divine life and en- ergy actually live in him, then, whatever comes to pass around him, nothing will appear strange or unaccountable. He knows that he is in God's world and that nothing can be, that does not directly tend to good. His whole outward existence flows forth softly and gently from his inner being, and issues out into reality without difficulty or hindrance." It is clear, then, that our most modern science and philosophy is practically at one with the deepest spiritual teachings of all re- ligions as to the relation between God and 18S SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY man. It is the Universal Being, the Cosmic Mind, which alone is permanent, which alone is identical, which alone constitutes the im- mortal Self; and the real being, the true Self in each individual, is only this Universal Being differentiated in us. "It passes and repasses like an electric stream of energy; and through the perfect, unbroken and indivisible unity of its own cosmic body and spirit, it binds and holds all its transitory and ephemeral forms into a perfect cosmic and organic oneness." Our minds are its mind, as our bodies are its body. Our memories too are, in reality, its memories. In the partial and personal mean- ing of the word, the *'I" of to-day is a dis- tinctly different "I" from that of yesterday; but in the integral or cosmic sense, the ''I" of to-day is the self-same and continuous "I" as that of yesterday. We retain our human in- dividuality only through the universal and di- vine individuahty of God. The "Know thyself" of the old Oracle has become a catch-phrase to-day, but its real significance is lost for most men. Self-knowl- edge to the old philosophers implied, not a 184 MAN'S UNITY WITH GOD cursory knowledge of our mental states or our personal traits, but it meant the perception of the true Self, and the recognition of the one- ness of this Self in man with the reality of God, rather than with the phenomenal world. If, standing on the bank of a stream, you should imagine yourself to be moving onward with the current, now tossed in air, now drawn under the waters, your condition would illus- trate the usual state of mind for most people. For just so we observe the passing stream of the phenomenal and identify ourselves with it, oblivious of the fact that the true Self, the real man, the Knower, is himself unmoved, un- changed, the actual Observer of the stream. This, then, in brief is the newer conception of God that is at the same time the oldest con- ception, and that is making God real to count- less lives throughout the world, for whom the old theology had lost its meaning. It is the idea of a Being who is not apart from us, but a very part of us, who need not be approached with hesitancy through a number of mediators, but who can be found immediately deep within one's own life, the One in whom we all live and 185 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY move and have our being, even as He lives and moves and has His being in us. And we find our unity in Him as we become conscious that our true Self is indeed the God-in-us. As a recent writer has most beautifully and truly expressed it: "God, then, using the familiar, traditional, religious name for the Universal Self, in reality is our Home, our great Companion, our enfolding Lover, the deepest Self within the self, the Larger Self which embraces all our narrower selves. He is the all-flooding Light within which we are the rays; He is the creative Fire within which we are as sparks and flames. Language is all too-feeble to describe the closeness and in- timacy with which He enfolds us and enthuses us; penetrative as light, pervasive as air; in subtler contact with us than is the ether to the inflow and throughflow of which the solidest material offers no bar or hindrance; more in- timate in His embrace of our spirits than that wherewith the ocean gathers the drops of water within it, or the earth-crust enfolds indistin- guishably the mountain roots ; Life of our life. Breath of our breath. Soul of our soul; all- 186 MAN'S UNITY WITH GOD shadowing, all-indwelling; *the fulness that filleth all things.' " Something at which these words but feebly hint, is what God is to us in reality. But the old, false feeling of separateness has seemed to put Him far away from most lives ; it has fash- ioned Him as a mighty individual set over in opposition to us, to be in some way won over to our side, or else forever feared. But this superficial, childish and illusory idea of God is altogether false. It creates a gulf between God and man which never existed; and in the train of this false thinking come all the errors, false doctrines, competitive theologies which have only increased the disunity in man's life, instead of forever banishing it. The whole problem of finding God and real- izing one's unity with Him is exactly similar to that of finding one's true Self. It is altogether a problem of consciousness, that is, of the widening and deepening of one's consciousness so as to include in it facts that have not yet become an actual part of one's experience. And it rests with each individual to decide just what facts he shall take into his experience and 187 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY thus make a part of his conscious being. The law that applies is the old simple law of At- tention. The things to which I give persistent attention are inevitably the things that become a part of my consciousness. When a man earnestly and sincerely desires to find God, he will succeed, and he will find the real God within himself first of all. The new light that is shining for us to-day is helping to dispel the doubts from many minds, and is clearly proving that the limita- tions resting upon our lives are mostly self- imposed; that, in the main, we can make our lives whatsoever we will ; that the fundamental thing in our personal development is the un- folding of consciousness, and that we can take into consciousness whatever experiences and knowledge we choose by simply centering our attention along those lines. We shall have found our unity with God, when we have discovered the divineness of our true Selves and know ourselves to be one with the divine Self in all others. **If thou wouldst name the Nameless, and descend Into the Temple-cave of thine own self, 188 MAN'S UNITY WITH GOD There, brooding by the central altar, thou Mayst haply learn the Nameless hath a voice By which thou wilt abide, if thou be wise; For knowledge is the swallow on the lake. That sees and stirs the surface-shadow there, But never yet hath dipt into the Abysm." 189 CHAPTER IX THE SPIRIT OF UNITY IN SOCIETY "Eager ye cling to shadows, dote on dreams; A false self in the midst ye plant, and make A world around which seems Blind to the heights beyond, deaf to the sound Of sweet airs breathed from far past Indra's sky; Dumb to the summons of the true life kept For him who puts the false life by. So grow the strifes and lusts which make earth's woe; So grieve poor cheated hearts and flow salt tears; So wax the passions, envies, angers, hates; So years chase blood-stained years With wild, red feeV*—Edwin Arnold. IT may have appeared to some that the fore- going presentation of the principle of unity as a fact to be reahzed first in the inner spirit- ual consciousness of man may be practical for individual relations, but that it is utterly im- practical when we seek to apply it to a complex whole like human society. Far from this be- ing true, it will now be our endeavor to show that it is the only principle upon which a truly 190 THE SPIRIT OF UNITY IN SOCIETY great and progressive society can ever be based. We may be willing to admit that there is a true ego in ourselves and in all other individual men and women; we may even be able to con- ceive of a cosmic ego that manifests itself through all the phenomena of nature, includ- ing man. But how is it possible even to im- agine a social ego, standing back of all the various and diverse types of individuals that constitute society; and even if there were such an ego, how could society ever become con- scious of it, as being its true social Self? As we look out upon society to-day, we dis- cern everywhere deep cleavages separating class from class, and wide gulfs dividing in- dividual from individual ; and all of these grow- ing out of deep-seated political, economic, social, intellectual, moral and religious differ- ences. How is any kind of genuine unity possible amid such wide-spread and deep- seated divisions? If society and the individ- uals who compose it are indeed just as they appear to be, then our quest for social unity would seem to be well-nigh hopeless. But 191 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY suppose the society we see is itself based upon illusion, and that this illusion, so generally ac- cepted, is the cause of our social disunity, might there not then be ground for hope? Let us examine the facts more carefully. A clear and impartial review of the toilsome and tragic path over which mankind has come since the beginning, is most encouraging to the idea of human progress, in spite of all the pes- simists; for it reveals the fact that man has struggled upward most heroically, from the blindness of the brute to the imperfect vision of to-day. All along the way he has been sup- planting his old illusions with the truth. Many forms of cruelty and injustice and wrong have been banished from the world. In various striking respects, man has been slowly learning to master himself, — his passions, his desires, his appetites. He has grown, on the whole, much more humane, and has developed the spirit of altruism to an undreamed of de- gree. But, in spite of every improvement that has been made in the conditions of human life, the question forces itself upon us: Have we 192 THE SPIRIT OF UNITY IN SOCIETY reached the end of our tragic illusions? Have we destroyed and banished them all, as yet? Have we conquered all wrongs, or have we completely mastered ourselves? Are we jus- tified in the blind optimism that we are prac- tically "out of the woods"? Simply to ask such questions is to answer them. If any fur- ther proof were needed, the experiences of the Great War through which the world has just passed would be conclusive. As we peer backward into the past of his- tory, we can plainly see to-day that many, per- haps almost all, of the greatest horrors and tragedies of human life have been due entirely to human ignorance and blindness. But this old and gi'oaning world of ours is still a world of tragedies, despite all our boasted progress. There are the tragedies of war between nations and races; the curse of constant conflicts be- tween social and economic classes, between the inheriting and privileged rich and the disin- herited and unprivileged poor; the poverty and ignorance and degradation of the great masses of mankind ; the crime, drunkenness, prostitu- tion and disease; the selfishness, greed, hatred, 193 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY anger and contempt which is almost universal; the personal ill-will, malice, envy, jealousy, quarrels, murder, which we meet with every- where. Is all this tragedy, horror and misery normal and natural, and to be forever perma- nent and incurable? Must we forever explain and apologize for and even attempt to justify such conditions on the old ground that human nature is as it is, and you cannot change it? Does man act in this way and produce these fearful results in his life and conduct, knowing clearly and seeing exactly just what the nature of his actions really is, conscious all the time of just what the nature of this world is, what his own true nature is, and what is the true re- lationship between himself and his fellows? Or, are the tragedies and sins of this age and of our present civilization like so many of the minor tragedies and wrongs of the past which have now been ended, due entirely, or at least essentially, to some bhnd belief, some hideous falsehood, some fearful illusion which has always possessed and still possesses the human mind, thus continuing to curse human 194 THE SPIRIT OF UNITY IN SOCIETY life, to poison the cup of enjoyment and de- stroy the beauty of the world? For himself, the author believes most sin- cerely that the last is the true explanation. It is clear that the mass of men to-day, with few, rare exceptions, are as certainly bhnd and superstitious and are dominated by as tremen- dous an illusion concerning one thing at least, as were ever man's barbarous and less enlight- ened ancestors; and this too, the most central and vitally important thing to him and his fellows, his own selfhood, individuality and personality. To what source are due all the crimes and sins, all the sufferings and miseries that afflict the life of mankind? The older theologies would have ascribed them all to the malign in- fluence of a personal Devil, but we know to- day that the root source out of which they all spring is human selfishness, and man no longer escapes the responsibility of evil in human life by any recourse to an hypothetical Devil; he must assume the responsibility himself, for all forms of evil proceed from something within himself. 195 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY This is why Jesus had comparatively little to say about specific sins, but was always talk- ing about selfishness, or else its opposite. He knew that the spirit of selfishness in man was the cause of all evil, whatever might be its par- ticular form. And it was the root-source of evil that he sought to disclose and utterly de- stroy; he knew that if only that could be ex- tirpated, all evils would vanish. The only devil we recognize to-day is the old devil that is present wherever human selfishness is found. Back of every crime and sin, of every deep- est pang and heart-ache, of every foul and ugly blot on the fair face of human life, will be found, in the last analysis, some form of in- dividual or social selfishness, which always separates one from life and joy and the sense of unity with his fellows, and shuts him up and off in his little, cramped cell of self which is to him a kind of "holy of hohes," the sacrosanct tabernacle of his private ego. No one who reflects can doubt that selfishness is the root- cause of practically every sin and misery and ugliness in human life, and that if only selfish- ness could be utterly and completely destroyed 196 THE SPIRIT OF UNITY IN SOCIETY as Jesus hoped to destroy it, the Kingdom of Heaven would indeed come on earth, as he declared it would come some day. But can human selfishness ever be destroyed, — not diminished but destroyed completely, root and branch? We must believe that it can, or else Jesus and all the other moral and spiritual leaders of the race were self-deceived, — nothing more than blind, impractical vision- aries, made harmlessly insane by a mere beau- tiful dream that in the nature of things never can be realized. But if it is to be, and can be destroyed, what is the method by which this great end can be accomplished? This is the crucial question. Most great teachers, both past and present, have sincerely taught that selfishness might be overcome by cultivating sympathy and love for others, or by developing the altruistic senti- ments in oneself and others, toward all man- kind. And yet selfishness seems to be as strongly entrenched in human hearts as ever, and is working as serious havoc to-day in human society as formerly. Think of the sermons preached every Sunday from the 197 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY countless pulpits of Christendom, in which un- selfishness and sympathy, kindliness and love find so large an expression, and have been finding such expression for centuries, ever since the gentle Nazarene trod the earth; and then look about you and remember the inde- scribable sufferings of every kind through which Christendom has just passed, all of which have been occasioned by human selfish- ness. What is the trouble? Why has all our preaching and teaching of love and the altruis- tic sentiments fallen so far short of achieving their end? It certainly suggests that there is something wrong or defective in our method of combat- ing selfishness in human life. A moment's serious reflection will convince any one that selfishness never can be destroyed merely by preaching love and sympathy or cultivating the altruistic sentiments, good and necessary as these things are, simply because this method does not touch the roots of selfishness and will never tear them out of the soil in which they are so firmly planted. 198 THE SPIRIT OF UNITY IN SOCIETY Love, sympathy, altruism, — these undoubt- edly tend to diminish or soften the influences of selfishness, but they never eradicate the deadly thing itself ; and so the root evil lives on in spite of all our beautiful teaching and preaching. This cure for selfishness is not nearly radical enough ; it only touches the sur- face of the trouble, for it assimies the reality and permanency of that which is the very spring and source of all the emotions and senti- ments of selfishness, the separate and in- dividual self. For, in the last analysis, just what do we mean by selfishness ? In a word, we mean the self making demands for itself as for an in- dividual being who is separate and apart from all other individual beings. The demands of selfishness may be almost infinite in character, but, in essence, this is what we always mean by the selfish spirit. Now, if there is in reality such an individual self, who does stand sepa- rate and distinct in essence from all other in- dividuals, then it is a basic and ultimate reality in itself and, of necessity, all the primary emo- 199 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY tions, sentiments and loyalties will be, and ought to be, selfish, egotistic, private and ex- clusive. There is no question but that the generally accepted view is that the innermost love and loyalty ought to be given to oneself, — ^this separate individual, this private and exclusive self. We constantly affirm this in all our teachings as to self -duty, self-love, self-respect coming before everything else in life. Hold- ing this view, as most people do, the only love and sympathy which can be given or ought to be given to others, in loyalty to the self, is the surplusage, as it were, which overflows and radiates from the surcharged realm of the self. Love and loyalty, we say, must begin at home, in the heart of this private and exclusive self, and from thence spread outwards, if there should chance to be any excess left. As a matter of fact, is not this the essential weakness of most of our teaching of love and the altruistic sentiments? If we do not actu- ally say it in words, do we not mean, neverthe- less, and are we not understood to mean, that we should so seek to increase our fund of love 200 THE SPIRIT OF UNITY IN SOCIETY and sympathy as to have enough left over to spread around on others, without actually de- priving ourselves of the normal supply we are accustomed to bestow on the self? This view and policy naturally leaves the real source of selfishness unmolested. While it may tend to diminish one's expression of selfishness, it can never eradicate it wholly, so long as the private and exclusive self still remains in conscious- ness. The practical result, as any one can discover for himself, is that there are always fixed limi- tations in the expression of love and sympathy, beyond which even the most unselfish person will not go, since this consciousness of the pri- vate self always holds one back from giving to the uttermost. Besides, one can detect for himself the tinge and taint of selfishness even in one's most unselfish acts ; and true unselfish- ness must be totally unconscious of the pres-^ ence of any self whatever. So we are forced to admit that the love, sympathy, and altruism which leave the pri- vate and exclusive self intact, as a distinct and essentially different individual, separate and 201 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY isolated in its inner shrine and holy of hohes, will never completely and utterly destroy self- ishness as it ought to be destroyed. Selfish- ness can never be eradicated in this indirect way, by attacking it from the outside or in the rear. The best that can be done in this wa}" will be to diminish it; but its vital and con- tagious source will still remain in the center of one's being to taint and poison all of life. It is to the supreme credit of Jesus's pro- found spiritual insight that he recognized this fact so clearly, though he lived centuries before the age of the new psychology. In that strange and paradoxical statement of his, "If any man would save his life (himself) , let him lose it; and he that loseth his life (himself), shall save it," he is dealing specifically with this very subject, — the complete destruction of selfishness that he knew to be the source of all forms of evil. It is one of his most radical and revolutionary sayings and, rightly under- stood and honestly accepted, would in and of itself completely transform human life. To paraphrase his great words: If any man would find his true Self that is one with God 202 THE SPIRIT OF UNITY IN SOCIETY and with all men, he must absolutely lose, that is, destroy, eradicate, die to, wipe out of con- sciousness, his superficial, unreal and selfish self. And he who thus dies to this separate, private and selfish self (in his own conscious- ness), has indeed found or awakened to (in his consciousness) his real and permanent and divine Self. It is not that love and sympathy are wrong and useless when expressed by the private self, but rather, that they fall short of being as ef- fective as they might, and they never succeed in destroying the root evil of selfishness. The mistake we make is to think of them as causes, whereas, from the view-point of the private self, they are only weak and ineffective results. They only become the dynamic causal forces they are intended to be in human life when they proceed directly, spontaneously and uncon- sciously from the true Self that knows itself to be one with all, and so gives itself freely and utterly in love to all, just because it is its own^ divine nature so to do, and it can do no other. The question naturally arises: How is it possible to destroy this private and exclusive ^03 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY self that has dominated one for years, perhaps, and been the constant cause of all forms of selfishness in one's life? The first step in the process is to disprove completely, that is, to one's entire satisfaction, the existence of this exclusive and separate self, to prove to oneself that it is only one, though the greatest and most deadly, of all the illusions that have dark- ened men's minds and held humanity back in the path of true progress; and thus to wipe out utterly one's belief in this separate self. This is the great task that is being performed to-day by modern science and philosophy, and that is corroborated by true religion wherever it finds expression. And to these sources one must look for the aid he seeks in dispelling from his mind the old false illusion. When the mind of man has once satisfied itself of the falsity of this age-old belief, the next step is to turn resolutely away from every suggestion of this illusion and concentrate one's thought constantly on the true Self at the center of one's being that one knows to be one with the true Self in all others. It will re- quire patience and persistent thinking of the ^04 THE SPIRIT OF UNITY IN SOCIETY Self in this way, but eventually this profound- est of all truths, admitted by the mind only at first, will enter the domain of consciousness and become an actual truth of one's daily ex- perience. This is the law of growth and of true spiritual development which any one can test for himself. It all depends upon how earnestly one desires to lose his fictitious self in order to find his true Self and thus experi- ence his spiritual unity with All. But to return now to the questions with which this chapter opened: Is there such a thing as a social ego, and if so, is it possible for society to become conscious of its true ego? The social ego exists as yet only in the ideal sense. Society is only gradually becoming conscious of its real Self through the gradual coming to consciousness in its individual mem- bers of their true Selves. When all men shall have awakened to the knowledge that the Self in each one of them is really One Self, then, and not till then, will society have found it- self. For the disunity, the divisions, the separa- / tions, the antagonisms that vex society so ^05 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY sorely to-day are due primarily to the fact that society, like most of its individual members, is living its life as yet on the surface, and not from the true center within. Society is what its members are, no better and no worse. With our modern conception of society as a living organism, we need not be surprised at all the strife and conflict that afflict the organism of society ; for we reaUze that its individual parts and members are strenuously living their sepa- rate lives in the spirit of self-interest, utterly unconscious that they are integral parts of the living social body, and that this body is suf- fering constantly because its various members fail to work together for the best good of the whole body. Let a very simple illustration suffice to ex- plain the ultimate source of all the evils of dis- unity in society. Here are two children play- ing with their toys. So long as they regard their toys as "our toys," to be enjoyed mutu- ally together, as if they were joint possessions, there is nothing but peace and harmony in their play. It is only when one cries out, "this is my doll," or ''my train of cars," or "my £06 THE SPIRIT OF UNITY IN SOCIETY woolly dog," that the disunity enters into their play. And this undue emphasis upon tiie "my" and "mine," which begins in childhood, proceeds from the false idea that my Self is an essentially different Self from the Self in my playmate. Thus it is in the maturer experiences of man- hood and womanhood. The continual empha- sis upon the "my" and "mine," — ^^vhether it be my money, or my clothes, or my position, or my privileges, or my business, — is constantly introducing into human relationships the dis- ruptive principle of disunity. And this is equally true of a broken friendship, of a great industrial strike or of a war between nations. True unity will only come to have its place in society when all, — rich and poor, educated and ignorant, capital and labor, employer and em- ployee, — have learned to substitute the word "our" for those divisive words, "my" and "mine." This time will come when men shall have entered into the spiritual consciousness that the Self in all individuals is actually One Self, so that what I do for my true Self I am doing for all other Selves, and what I do for SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY Others I am doing for my Self. Ileal brother- hood, when it comes, will be based on this deep consciousness. We call this the age of the new social con- sciousness, but what do we mean by this fa- miliar expression? We mean that we are liv- ing in an age that is fast becoming socialized from top to bottom, a process that the war has only tremendously accelerated. Our psy- chology, as we have seen, is becoming social- ized. Man does not live his life alone but in relationships, complex and far-reaching. There are no isolated individuals complete in themselves. Personality is recognized as a social product and is impossible apart from so- cial relationships. Education is being transformed in the same way, both as to its ideals and its methods. And religion must be socialized throughout, or it will be left hopelessly behind the age. So, our estimate of human character has been so- cialized. We realize that both virtue and vice are social products; that no man is solely re- sponsible for his own sins any more than for his own goodness. Bound together in this liv- WS THE SPIRIT OF UNITY IN SOCIETY ing organism of society, as we all are inex- tricably, we are all in some sense responsible for whatever crime is committed, for whatever wrong is perpetrated, for whatever injustice exists. But if we recognize the corporate character of sin and wrong, we must equally recognize the social character of salvation. The old doc- trine held that all were sinners ; some only are saved; there is oneness in sin but not in salva- tion. This artificial distinction is overcome by the modern social way of looking at things. There is unity and close association in the one case as well as in the other. If one is a social product, the other is also. Xo one can be saved alone. If there cannot be an isolated personality or character, there cannot be an isolated salvation. As a matter of fact, no one can be saved from society; he must be saved with it, if at all. As Herbert Spencer pro- foundly said: "No one can be perfectly moral till all are moral; no one can be perfectly free till all are free ; no one can be perfectly happy till all are happy." It is this striking tendency towards a more ^09 oo SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY complete socialization of all phases of modem life that reveals the development in our age of the true social consciousness. It is from this newly awakened consciousness that there is rising the insistent demand for social and eco- nomic justice for all classes and for each in- dividual in society, even the lowest and weak- est; and this demand for simple, fundamental justice proceeds from nothing else than the true ego of society that is gradually finding itself through the awakening consciousness of its individual members. Let it be remembered that the unity we seek in society, like the unity we seek elsewhere, does not imply sameness or uniformity. It does not mean that we shall all think alike on all questions, or all belong to the same political party and vote the same ticket, or all hold the same ideas for the coming social order that is to supplant the old, or all agree on the same theology. Such a condition, even if it were possible, would be fatal to truth and progress ; and such an imaginary society would have ceased to be a living body; it could only be a dead and useless thing. 210 THE SPIRIT OF UNITY IN SOCIETY The unity we seek is ever and always a spiritual thing, and therefore a thing of life and power. It is the deep sure consciousness that we are indeed all members one of another; that what hurts one, hurts all, and what helps one, helps all ; that we must either all progress together, or else all go backwards together; that we are all, — rich and poor, high and low, wise and ignorant, capital and labor, employer and employee, — we are all bound up inextric- ably in this social organism that needs us all and depends upon us all, and that can never realize its highest and best unless each one of us, its members, is living at his highest and best. We find this spiritual unity realized in its fulness in the ideal family, the true unit of society. There may and do exist many dif- ferences between the various members of the household ; but in spite of every difference, fa- ther and mother, brothers and sisters are all united in love and loyalty to the largest pros- perity and highest good of the family as a whole. There are also many ideal communi- ties in which the community spirit has fostered 211 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY and developed to a high degree this same sort of unity between its various and different members. Why should it not be possible to further extend this spirit so as to include all of society, which is made up of such families and contains many such communities ? We believe that it is possible, and more, that it is being gradually done to-day as the social conscious- ness steadily widens and deepens, and as men and women everywhere awaken to the sense of their true oneness with all who live and aspire. The unity we see in the family or commun- ity exists simply because the individuals con- cerned have ceased to be governed primarily by motives of self-interest; they have sub- ordinated themselves as individuals to the good of the family or community ; they have learned to diminish, at least, their own selfishness, even if they have not succeeded in wholly destroy- ing it. The same thing must come to take place in the larger relationships of society if any real social unity is ever to exist. No drastic legis- lation merely will suffice, no fresh organiza- tions will meet the need, no new economic sys- ai2 THE SPIRIT OF UNITY IN SOCIETY tern or changed industrial order, in and of themselves, will create the unity desired. We recognize that the mere transfer of social con- trol from a self-seeking few to a self-seeking many, would in itself be of no real benefit to the world, and would not banish the tragic dis- unity that now vexes society. It is a new spirit that is needed, even before new forms of organization. And unless this new spirit precedes the new forms, and infuses and inspires them with a new consciousness of the spiritual unity that underlies all our social life, despite every difference, we need not ex- pect to see conditions changed for the better. To all thoughtful minds it must be clear that this is no academic question that we have been discussing. The need is imperative and im- mediate. There is no time to be lost. In some way we must achieve a new and deeper social unity in this country and in all lands, or the future is dark indeed with menace for those things that are indeed most worth while in the life of mankind. Mighty forces have been loosed by the war, both good and evil. It is for us to guide these forces into the right 213 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY channels that shall lead to better things for humanity. But whence will the needed guidance come, if as individuals we are so wrapped up in our own concerns, our private plans and personal ambitions, so content to continue to be merely our private, separate, exclusive selves, so blind to our essential unity with all other members in society, so utterly oblivious to our vital place and function in the living body of society, whose condition is just now so extremely criti- cal, that we shall miss the greatest of all ex- periences possible to man, — that of achieving the consciousness of our true oneness with the common life about us? n4f CHAPTER X UNITY IN RELIGION **And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free. . . . "He that hath seen me, hath seen the Father," for "I and the Father are One." . . . "In that day ye shall know that I am in my Father, and ye in me, and I in you." . . . "Whatso- ever ye do to the least of these my little ones, ye do it also unto me." . . . "That they may be one, even as Thou, Father, art in me and I in Thee, may they also be in us." ... "I in them, and Thou in me, that they may be perfected into One." . . . — Jesus. IT is in our modern study of Religion that we have been forced to reaHze, in a still deeper sense, the profoundly essential unity of all mankind. Religion is as old as the human race, and in its fundamental purpose should have proved to be the great unifying principle in the life of men. The word itself, coming from "religio," means, etymologically, "a bind- ing together." But the tragedy of every great religion from the beginning lies in this: 215 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY that what began as a universal or purely spiritual movement has, in a short time, de- generated into a sect; and while true religion is always unifying and all-inclusive, sectarian religion is always divisive and exclusive. To this, perhaps, inevitable tendency in the development of religions, Christianity has been no exception. As early as Paul's own times we find this tendency at work, as we discover him upbraiding the early disciples for claiming "I am of Paul," or "I am of Apollos," or "I am of Cephas." From that time down to the present, this divisive influence has been in evi- dence until to-day when we are informed that in this country alone there are 180 odd \ Christian sects, all basing their faith on the same Bible, professing to believe in the same God, accepting as Saviour or Master the same Christ and looking forward to the same Heaven in the future. It is clear to-day as it never has been before that it is due to its sectarianism that Christian- ity has lost its universal character, and failed thus far of becoming the world-power that it might become, and that Jesus believed it surely ^16 UNITY IN RELIGION would become. For centuries the Christian world has believed and taught that God made the Jews the peculiar channel of His revela- tion of Himself. The Egyptians, the Phoe- nicians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Chinese, the people of India, — all these worked out a purely human destiny in a purely human way. They had no inspiration from the Divine Spirit, and their life expressed no revelation of the Divine Nature. The history of the Jews, therefore, has been believed to be sacred history, while the history of all other peoples has been regarded as purely secular, or profane history. Think of what this view involves. It is as if one should attempt to discriminate between the children of the same family, and declare that one son bore the image of his father, reflected his char- acter, and was the recipient of his love, while all the other children, regardless of their na- tures or characters, were aliens and strangers, absolutely shut off from any participation in the nature or the love which was a common in- heritance. Multitudes of Christians still believe in a ^17 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY little current of divine influence flowing through a vast sea of corruption, in a chosen people saved, arbitrarily, out of a vast host of peoples disinherited and rejected by God. But to a truly religious nature, such a behef is to-day simply incredible. This view has made of the universal and spiritual movement inaugurated by Jesus, a mere sect among other sects. It is worse than a partial view; it is the worst kind of atheism, for it sets about the Divine Love the narrow limits of the insight, intelligence and capacity which restrict human affection, and is absolutely inconsistent with the conception of a Universal Father. Nothing has so broadened our ideas of Re- ligion and forced us to see that while "religions are many. Religion is always one," as has the discovery of the Sacred Books of the East. /-. In 1754 a Frenchman came across an old man- uscript in the Royal Library of Paris, which proved to be a portion of the "Avesta." This led to further discoveries, and to-day we have 183 manuscripts representing the sacred books of the Parsees or Zoroastrians. In 1787 the "Rig- Veda," part of the oldest Bible in the 818 UNITY IN RELIGION world, was discovered in India. This, with subsequent discoveries, has given to us a total of sacred Hindu literature that is over four times the size of the Christian Bible. A little later the "Pitakas," the sacred literature of the Buddhists, were discovered, which are eight times the size of our New Testament. From these discoveries of the sacred litera- tures of the Orient, which have now been trans- lated into some fifty volumes, accessible to all who care to read them, has come the modern "Science of Comparative Religion." This science has proved, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that all such moral sentiments as jus- tice, temperance, truthfulness, patience, love, mercy, — far from being the peculiar property of any one religion, were found inculcated in the Bibles of all religions. It has also found that the great spiritual sentiments out of which all religions have sprung, — such as awe, rever- ence, wonder, aspiration, worship, the capacity for faith, hope and love, have found rich ex- pression in all the varied systems of faith. It has also proved that the Ten Command- ments of the Old Testament and the Golden 219 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY Rule of the New Testament, are more or less, and in slightly varying forms, to be found in these other sacred scriptures. Some one at a great meeting in Boston once declared that certain passages which he quoted could not be paralleled anywhere outside our Bible. Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was present, rose and in that serene, dignified manner so char- acteristic of him, said: "The gentleman's re- mark only proves how narrowly he has read." Let us illustrate how the moral and religious sentiment of Catholicity has found expression in these different Bibles of the race. The Hindu Bible: "Altar flowers are of many species, but all worship is one. Systems of Faith differ, but God is one. The object of all religions is alike; all seek the object of their love, and all the world is love's dwelling place." The Buddhist Bible: "The root of religion is to reverence one's own faith, and never to revile the faith of others. My doctrine makes no distinction between high and low, rich and poor. It is like the sky; it has room for all and, like water, it washes all alike." 220 UNITY IN RELIGION The Zoroastrian Bible; "Have the relig- ions of mankind no common ground ? Is there not everywhere the same enrapturing beauty? Broad indeed is the carpet which God has spread, and many are the colors which He has given it. Whatever road I take joins the highway that leads to Thee." The Chinese Bible: "Religions are many and different, but reason is one. Humanity is the heart of man, and justice is the path of man. The broad-minded see the truth in dif- ferent rehgions, the narrow-minded see only the differences." The Jewish Scriptures: "Wisdom in all ages entering into holy souls maketh them friends of God and the Prophets. Behold how good and pleasant a thing it is for brethren to dwell together in unity." The Christian Scriptures : "Are we not all children of one Father? Hath not one God created us? . . . Who hath made of one, all nations of men to dwell on the face of the earth." Or, let us compare the seven different ver- sions, from these same seven Bibles, of the SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY Golden Rule, which has been regarded as the climax of the ethical ideal of Christian teach- ing. The Hindu: "The true rule is to guard and do by the things of others as they do by their own." The Buddhist : *'One should seek for others the happiness one desires for oneself." The Zoroastrian: "Do as you would be done by." The Chinese: "What you do not wish done to yourself, do not unto others." The Mohammedan : "Let none of you treat your brother in a way he himself would dislike to be treated." The Jewish: "Whatever you do not wish your neighbor to do to you, do not unto him." The Christian: "All things whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, do ye even so unto them." As Alfred W. Martin has truly said: "If we listen to a Hindu chant, we shall think we have lighted upon some missing psalm of the Old Testament, so ahke are they in spiritual content. Hear the Parsee as he offers his UNITY IN RELIGION prayer for purity, and how slight a change in the language should we have to make in order that it should suit our spiritual need. We may not believe in 'Nirvana,' but we aU must walk 'the noble eight-fold path' of Gautama, the Buddha, if complete character is to be ours. Open the 'Koran' of the Mohammedans, the 'Analects' of the Confucians, the 'Kings' of the Chinese before Confucius, and in each case we shall find ourselves face to face with a religion that speaks to us in accents strong, beautiful and oftentimes sublime." One of the greatest concrete results of the translation of these sacred books of the Orient, was the ''World's Parliament of Religions," held in Chicago in 1893. Never since the world began was any such general meeting of representatives of all the World's Faiths on the same platform, even deemed possible. The Parliament was conceived and carried out by a Presbyterian minister of Chicago, the Reverend John Henry Barrows. The clos- ing address was by a Swedenborgian, the final prayer by a Jewish Rabbi, and the benediction by a Roman Cathohc Bishop. SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY At the opening session there walked out on the platform, Roman Catholic and Protestant, Greek and Jew, Confucian and Buddhist, Mohammedan and Par see, Baptist missionary and Hindu monk, — one hundred and twenty- eight couples, — all marching in one grand triumphal procession of human brotherhood. The effect of the Parliament was singularly profound upon all who attended any of the meetings. To the non-Christian, it meant a better and truer conception of Christianity, that had sent them the missionary and the Bible, but had also brought them the battle- ship, opium and rum. The effect on the Christian delegates was still more striking. The spiritual conceit that had formerly prayed : "O Lord, we thank Thee that we are not as these pagan idolators," was removed forever from the hearts of all who watched and lis- tened. They discerned heights of spirituality reached by these "foreigners," of which most of them had never dreamed. They heard prayers to the "Father in Heaven" of which they had formerly thought these "heathen" ut- terly incapable. They found among all these 2^4 UNITY IN RELIGION various delegates from different and opposing religions, the same expression of worship, of spiritual development, of ethical teachings and religious ideals that exist, under different forms, in Christianity; and their hearts cried out irresistibly "Are we not indeed all children of one Father?'' Never again, since the disclosures of the Science of Comparative Religion, can any in- telligent person make the old classification of religions, according to which Christianity is put by itself in one class as the only one, true, di- vine religion, while all the other reUgions of the world are grouped in another class and labeled "pagan," or "heathen," or "false" re- ligions; for the elements common to all Faiths are clearly seen to be too numerous and too fundamental to allow of any such superficial and ignorant distinctions. The simple conclusion to which we are forced to-day is, that there has never been but one true religion in the world, and that is the uni- versal, spiritual and ethical religion as voiced in its simplicity and clearness by Jesus, but as also voiced, more or less clearly, by all the n5 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY great founders and leaders of religion. All religions, of whatever name, are but the more or less imperfect representations of this one, true religion. All religion, in whatever age or country, is in its essential truth, good and not evil. It has always sprung from the same vital source, the same religious impulse in man. It has al- ways had the same great goal, — the knowledge of God, under whatever name He has been worshiped. It has always pointed out more or less clearly the true pathway of spiritual de- velopment. It has been at the root of all morality that ever made society possible, and has been the uplifting force of whatever prog- ress the world or any part of the world has ever made. Held in connection with whatever amount of error or falsehood you like, it is nevertheless the beginning of all truth. Bur- dened with whatever superstitions or cruelty or lust or hate the religion of a people may be, those people are always better off than they would be without any religion. The one obstacle that prevents so many good people from seeing this, is the almost ineradica- ble UNITY IN RELIGION ble tendency to ascribe to the religious beliefs of those we call heathen, all the abuses we find in heathen society. No religion, Christianity any more than others, can stand that test. Apply it fairly and you must make a clean sweep of every religion. On that basis, all the wrongs and injustices, the greed and lust, the selfishness and cruel warfare of Christian na- tions, are the results of Christian beliefs. All the divine ideals which Jesus gave the world would go by the board. Not many of us would be willing to admit such a claim. The impartial student of the working of be- liefs on the human mind cannot help seeing that the gigantic evils of society, which exist in Christendom and heathendom alike, are due solely to the selfishness in human nature, against which religion, whatever may be its form, is always, in a degree which is the real test of its value, a sincere and solemn protest. This is not to claim that all forms of religion are equally true or equally good. The purely ethical and spiritual religion of Jesus, since it is the youngest of all the great World Faiths, with the single exception of Mohammedism, 227 \y ^ SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY appeals to us of this western world, and rightly, as being the best and highest form of religion that the world has yet known; but this is not to deny the essential unity of all re- ligions and the insistent demand for a real and intelligent sympathy between all Faiths. Our foremost missionaries are telling us to- day that the attitude of Christianity toward non-Christian systems should not be one of condemnation, but of insight and of sympa- thetic interpretation, that while we have much to teach them, they also have much to teach us. One cannot listen to these prophetic messages on the one hand, or note the financial straits into which the great Foreign Missionary So- cieties are constantly falling, without realizing that everything is calling loudly to-day for a radical change of attitude and of methods on the part of Christendom toward non-Christian peoples. The fact is, and the war has made it day- light plain, our old denominational distinctions have for the most part become absurd an- achronisms. They rest on certain hopeless arguments which can never be settled decisively UNITY IN RELIGION one way or another. Our numerous divisions are strangling us. Our denominational names no longer define. Our labels have become libels. The^ most hopeful sign, amid all the theological and ecclesiastical disunity that so sorely afflicts, and so constantly saps the real power of Christianity to-day, is the new move- ment toward Christian unity. But still, our attitude toward the non- Christian world is stiff and unsympathetic in the extreme. Christian unity is not the end, but only a stepping-stone to a still broader rehgious unity that shall em- brace all mankind with all their various faiths. As we have already pointed out, the race flows through us. Humanity is the great Drama in which we, as individuals or nations, are the incidents. In so far as we are merely individuals, as we seek to follow merely indi- vidual ends, we are accidental, disconnected, without significance, the sport of chance. In so far as we realize ourselves to be experiments of the species for the sake of the species, in just so far do we escape from the accidental and chaotic. We all live our lives in a Greater Life. Our personal experiences are episodes SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY in an Experience greater than ourselves. Even the particular consciousness in us wells up from the deeps of the Universal Conscious- ness upon whose bosom we rest like wavelets on the sea. This does not make for the sup- pression of one's individual differences, but it does make for their correlation. We must get everything possible out of ourselves for the very reason that we do not stand separate and alone. Our separate Selves are our charges, our talents of which we must make the very utmost; but our true significance lies in the fact that we are all parts of a universal and immortal development. The same principle holds true of religions. Any religion that keeps itself in its external forms separate and apart and exclusive, that refuses to merge itself in the deeper stream of universal religion, is accidental and doomed to extinction. Only as the great extant religions are willing to die a sectarian death, can they hope to survive in spiritual reality. The religions in the past have been the '*great dividers," but religion in its true es- sence is, in fact^ the only adequate and per- »30 UNITY IN RELIGION manent uniting power in human life. All Christian churches believe it is their duty to "preach the Gospel to every creature." But what is the real Gospel of Jesus? All too- often it has been construed in terms of some particular theology or ritual, and always in terms of sectarianism, for the purpose of build- ing up some particular one of the many branches of the Christian Church. How foreign all this is to the spirit of Jesus ! He taught that God is the All-Father, with whom are no distinctions of race or color or creed, and that therefore all men, irrespective of every accidental difference, are truly broth- ers. He taught that God's true dwelling- place was in every individual born into the world, and that salvation consisted in coming into conscious oneness with God and with one's fellows everywhere. The result of this con- scious unity with the Whole would be, he said, love to God and love to man, which was his summing up of both the law and the prophets. If we beheve the author of the Fourth Gos- pel, the Christ, or the Divine life that dwelt in Jesus in such conscious fulness, is "the light ^1 X-, SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY that lighteth every man coming into the world." Then, the Christ was in Laotzse, in Confucius, in Zoroaster, in Buddha, in Plato, in Marcus Aurelius and in all the great souls of the race; and, in some degree, in every in- dividual who has ever existed or who ever will exist. If this be true, then to preach the real Gospel of Jesus does not mean to preach our theological or ritualistic or ecclesiastical differ- ences, but rather, to proclaim man's spiritual unity in God, who in-dwells all men, and there- fore, man's practical brotherhood here on earth; and to help men everywhere to realize that unity and live their lives in the spirit of true brotherliness. The religious unity, however, toward which the forward-looking men and women in all the churches have to-day set their faces will not be a unity of sameness or uniformity. It will not find expression in one big church only, or through one common form of worship, or in one common creed, however simple. So long as men differ in temperament as they always will, they will prefer and choose different forms of worship. So long as they differ in UNITY IN RELIGION mind, in education, in experience, they will ap- proach Truth from different view-points and interpret their experiences of truth in different terms. It would mean a tragic loss to relig- ion, to truth, to hfe itself, if it should ever be possible to force aU men to feel and think and act alike in matters of religion. Nothing could be farther than this from our conception of religious unity. There is nothing that is so peculiarly one's own as his religion, because nothing proceeds so directly from his deepest divinest Self. But when one's religion is thus real, a first- hand experience within one's Self, for that very reason it becomes a universal thing, and instead of separating one from his fellows in some exclusive sect or church, it binds him to all others of whatever creed or sect they may be. For such an one has found the deep sub- stratum of religion, beneath all theological or ecclesiastical differences whatsoever, where true religious unity alone abides. Let us repeat it. We need never expect to find reHgious unity in our theology or in our rituals or in our ecclesiasticism, for the simple SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY reason that unity does not belong to these realms. These things constitute the externals of religion, not its inner life. And unity, which is not an intellectual or formal, but a spiritual thing, belongs ever and always to that which lies deepest within. It is this profound fact that all Commissions on Religious Unity must take into account, or their sincere efforts will be all unavailing. We shall find that true unity in religion only when we begin to realize that there is a some- thing in rehgion, beyond theology or any form of ecclesiasticism, and that is, a living spiritual consciousness welling up in man's being. When that time comes we will recognize that the only authoritative creed is the creed every man makes for himself, and that he keeps con- stantly open to revision with the coming of every fresh ray of new light; the only com- pelling form of worship will be that to which a man's whole being responds instinctively and spontaneously; and the only church to which he will give his allegiance will be the church to whose spiritual life and message he is drawn irresistibly. For all such spiritually awakened UNITY IN RELIGION men and women there will be the consciousness of true spiritual unity with all other religious individuals the whole world round, regardless of all theological or other differences that may- seem to divide on the surface of religion; for these will have entered into the profound truth that while religions are many, Religion is one. The world has never before been so ready or so eager for this real message of religion as to-day. In all lands, as we have seen, the con- viction is growing apace that the next step for- ward in the progress of humanity must be to- ward a higher Internationalism, in which all distinctions of separate race and nation must be subordinated to a World-life, a universal humanity. To achieve this is clearly the high task of the twentieth century. President Woodrow Wilson, in a recent address, made the significant statement that "wars would never have an ending until men ceased to hate one another, ceased to be jealous of one an- other, and achieved that feeling of reality in the brotherhood of mankind which is the only bond that can make us think justly of one an- other, and act righteously before God." 235 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY What an opportunity, then, is presented to- day for Religion to reahze at last its true mis- sion in the world and, minimizing all differ- ences, begin to magnify those things common to all religions. If Christianity, catching the great vision of its Founder, and rising to his plane of a spiritual and universal religion, were willing literally to die to all its petty sectarianisms, its outgrown theologies, its un- democratic ecclesiasticism, and begin to pro- claim the Unity of the race, the Universal Fatherhood of God, and the real Brotherhood of all Humanity, it would indeed become the mighty instrument in laying the foundations sure and deep for that new World-life, in which we should see reahzed at last the dream of the ages, "the parhament of man, the Federation of the world." Is this only a vain ideal? Let us remember that it has ever been the peculiar mission of re- ligion to furnish those illuminating and inspir- ing ambitions which have been as "songs in the night" of humanity's upward march. Relig- ion, once purified and made a vital and spirit- ual power, can indeed become the mightiest of ^S6 UNITY IN RELIGION forces in bringing in the new World-conscious- ness that must be attained, because rehgion has always enlisted imagination, faith and dar- ing courage in its service. But religious unity will never come about by any mechanical process. It cannot be manu- factured by Commissions or produced by reso- lutions. The lofty ideals of religion which Jesus announced will only be realized as men and women everywhere come to feel that spirit- ual freedom means more than any slavish ad- herence to any tradition or creed, as men and women everywhere come to care more for the victory of Truth than they do for the triumph of their little sect. Only then will "the world hasten the advent of that universal religion that shall lift mankind above all differences of caste, color, creed and race, into that sublime religious fellowship which has been the dream of every age and every race." 237 CHAPTER XI UNITY AND DEMOCRACY "Where bides Brotherhood, Where, but within? So never shall charity avail me, And never kind words nor the urging of excellent laws. Nor warring for weighty politics, nor voting with the op- pressed — Only the going to Self, is a going to my brother — Only walking deep in to the heart of love is walking Out to the darkened cities of men." — James Oppenheim. DEMOCRACY is one of the great words that has come to enshrine the ideals of humanity in this modern age. To many it is merely a word to conjure by; to others it is like some Frankenstein monster, to be dreaded and feared; to thoughtful men it means the next step forward in civilization; while to the vast majority it is vague and nebulous, though wonderfully alluring, as it seems to promise a greater degree of liberty and a larger meas- ure of happiness for mankind. 238 UNITY AND DEMOCRACY Never before has this great word dominated so largely the world's thinking, never has it been heard so frequently on human lips, nor appeared so often in print, — in editorial, in sermon, in lecture. When, in April 1917, President Wilson set forth the reasons for the entrance of the United States into the Great Conflict, summing it all up in that now classic phrase, — "to make the world safe for democ- racy," he took the gi-eat word once and for all out of the realm of academic theory and politi- cal opinion and established it forever as the practical ideal for human striving the whole world round. From that hour all the prodigious sacrifice of men and money involved in the world-war took on a new and higher significance, and in countless hearts there was born the conviction that at last, in the ideals of Democracy for the whole world, we had discovered something worthy of the very best we had to give. But what is the great thing for which we have professed wilhngness to give our all, if need be? What do we mean by Democracy? What is the true content of the word that ^39 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY towers above all other words in our speech to- day ? The answers run the gamut from the crass statement of the pohtician, "Democracy- is every man's right to do as he d — n pleases," to the vague reply of the reformer who tells us that Democracy is nothing less than Human Brotherhood. The fact is, that for most peo- ple the conception of Democracy is vague, in- definite and superficial. The time has gone by, however, when any intelligent person can longer afford to be con- tent with high-sounding phrases, while he re- mains in practical ignorance of the real mean- ing of Democracy and all that it involves for the world. Our sacrifices to make the world safe for democracy will have been glorious or inglorious according to the content we put into the great word. The actual progress of hu- manity, now that the war is over, depends upon the depth and breadth of our insight into the true meaning of Democracy now. Let us confess it frankly, at the outset, if Democracy means nothing more than the pol- iticians say it means, then it is a futile thing and our sacrifices will have been in vain. It 240 UNITY AND DEMOCRACY is a vastly larger, broader, deeper and more universal conception of Democracy, for which the world expectantly waits to-day. Before proceeding to consider the inner es- sentials of democracy, let us think briefly of some of the outward manifestations with which it is identified in many minds. Democracy may find expression as a theory of govern- ment, which declares that the real sovereignty is vested in the People (spelled with a capital P ) . There is no question but that democracy does involve a theory of government, but it is vastly more than mere theories of government. Or, it may be conceived of as a definite form of political organization, a particular kind of government as opposed to an oligarchy, a mon- archy, etc., in which the people possess the right to elect their own representatives in city, state and nation. It is inevitable that any democracy must find outward expression in a popular form of government, but democracy itself is vastly deeper than any mere external organization. Or, yet again, it may be regarded as a method of social expediency, a sop thrown 5241 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY to the restless and discontented "masses," whereby they are led to imagine that they possess more power in the affairs of govern- ment than they actually do possess, and thus the more turbulent spirits among them are held in check — for a time. This is the base and un- worthy use that is made of the great word by so many self-seeking politicians to-day. While it is true that some form of outward organization, together with all the necessary external machinery, is obviously imphed in the word democracy, its actual and vital meaning is contained in the great Idea which ever tends to externalize itself in some form, and in the great Spirit which always creates its own body. If democracy consists of nothing more than a theory of government or a particular kind of political organization, it would be an entirely hopeless enterprise, — the climax of unreason, the consummate delusion of history. The comparative failure, — or shall we say, the limited success of Democracy in the world thus far, considered as an outward form of Government, is due not to the Idea or Spirit that lie at its heart, but rather, to the primary UNITY AND DEMOCRACY emphasis having been placed upon external manifestations instead of upon their inner soui'ces. Real democracy is not a thing of mechanical forms, it is a thing of life. And the life must come first and create its own ap- propriate forms, or else we have an imperfect and dead machine instead of a living, growing reality. There is another conception of Democracy, well-nigh universal to-day, that is wholly in- adequate and misleading. It is contained in the statement so often made that Democracy means "the rule of the common people." Now, if we mean that the "common people" are entitled to the rights and privilege* of all other people, this is certainly true; but if we mean, as usually is meant by these words, the rule of a particular class of people as opposed to some other class, our conception is utterly false to the root idea in Democracy. For Demos is "the people," — all the people, irrespective of any other distinctions that may be made. The slogan so often heard to-day, "Down with the plutocrats, or the aristocrats, and elect the people to office," is not the t^" ^43 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY pression of the democratic idea, though the soap-box agitator who uses such language would doubtless be surprised if you told him he was not only intemperate in speech but un- democratic in spirit. He imagines he is voic- ing genuine democracy in thus shouting up "the people" and shouting down "the pluto- crats." But nothing can be more undemo- cratic, for real democracy recognizes, believes in and works for the good of all of the people^ — rich and poor, high and low, wise and ignorant, — all of the time. Democracy takes in the last individual, no matter to what "class" in society he may belong; if it leaves out a single one, the highest or the lowest, it ceases to be a genuine democracy. No one will deny that the organizations in modern society that are really based upon class-consciousness, regardless of which class it is, while they may be rendering genuine service to the coming democracy in seeking rights and privileges for the people they represent and who deserve equal rights and privileges with all others in society, are actually guilty of di- viding Demos, of destroying the basic unity 2U UNITY AND DEMOCRACY that should bind all people together, of making distinctions in a society to which all classes are essential; and in just so far as this idea and spirit are expressed, they are hindering, not helping, the coming of the real democracy. We are now ready for the positive question : What then constitutes the inner meaning and true essence of democracy? No student of the subject, as he traces the idea of democracy down through history, can fail to be convinced that back of all theories and opinions about democracy there lies some kind of a conception of equality. Let us take the classic statement in our own Declaration of Independence, — "All men are created free and equal," and ask ourselves, not what did the framers of the Declaration mean by these words, but what do they mean for us of to-day? We know from experience that no man is ever born free in the absolute sense. Every life comes into this world under a lien of all manner of obligations. Not even a Nero or a Napoleon or a Kaiser is ever free to do as he pleases. Freedom never means license, though it is often interpreted as such. No M6 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY right-minded man ever wishes to be free in this sense. He is glad to own the bond of human solidarity whereby he suffers and enjoys with all other men. What is this freedom, then, which we are all said to inherit as a natural birthright? It is simply a man's freedom to grow and become every inch a man. It does not yet fairly exist, for it cannot be realized fully in a brutal or selfish society. It is still an ideal to be attained outwardly, though there are many who have discovered that deeper freedom which does not consist in escaping out- ward limitations, but rather, in achieving free- dom within, through the finding one's true Self. What do we mean by the "equality of all men"? Equality is a common but elusive word ; it is not easily defined, and most people fight shy of the idea of it. Many think of it as a strange outburst of idealistic enthusiasm which was flung up from the depths in the tragic disturbances of the French Revolution; or else, as a somewhat sinister claim made by those who have not, upon those who have. It is here that our organic conception of so- g46 UNITY AND DEMOCRACY ciety throws light on the problem. We are all equal in the sense that we have each a place and a function within the Whole, and each of us functioning in his place is necessary to the Whole. Our equality, then, is the equality of service to, or function within, the living body of humanity. And this sense of equality with all, is only possible as we come to realize the unity that binds us all together as individual members of the social organism. Before we can become fully conscious, then, of the root- idea in democracy, which is equality, we must have entered into the actual experience of the spiritual unity that binds us all into One. With the organic conception of society there has come a deep and steadily growing convic- tion that everj'- individual should have the equal opportunity to develop his inner capaci- ties and latent potentialities to the very high- est; in other words, he should have the equal chance to become, not another, but his own best possible Self. This right to the oppor- tunity of self-development, however, is not for his own sake alone, not that he may live the fullest possible life apart in the individualistic Ml SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY sense, but rather, that he may contribute his very utmost to the society of which he is an integral and necessary member. Therefore, it follows that a real democracy would make possible for every individual an equal opportunity with all other individuals to attain his or her highest and best, not alone be- cause of any intrinsic "right" in the individual apart from society, but also, because a real democracy would regard every individual, even the least, as an essential part of itself, and would recognize that only as each individual did attain his highest possible development, physically, mentally and morally, could it ex- pect to become a complete and harmoniously working Whole. Almost from the dawn of civilization, some ideal of democracy has been gradually form- ing, slowly growing and expanding, until to- day it has become the all-compelling ideal of the age. From Plato's "Republic" down to Bellamy's "Looking Backward," there has scarcely been an age when some prophetic soul has not given the world his dream of an ideal state, a democratic society, either in poetry or 248 UNITY AND DEMOCRACY prose. But all men have never yet perceived clearly the ideal, and few even as yet have grasped its deeper meaning or come to appre- ciate its profound possibilities for human ad- vancement. Henry George, as Professor Brooks points out, did not give his life merely for a system of taxation. For thirty years he worked with high and rare devotion to convert the world to his "single tax," but beyond this lay the thing he cared for most, the larger equahty which he believed the single tax would usher in. This has been the great end for which all true re- formers have toiled, regardless of the differ- ent means to which they have given their noblest efforts. Those who have written most powerfully in favor of equality have been moved to expres- sion by the violent and flaunting inequaUties amidst which they hved. Rousseau and God- win, the aristocrat St. Simon and the demo- cratic Fourier, down to recent writers like Zola and Tolstoi, are impatient and even bitter before the fact that those who have too little and those who have too much so constantly ry^ leads SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY jostle each other along the highway of a com- mon life. It was Godwin who wrote, "The hmnan mind is incredibly subtle in inventing an apology for that to which its inclination All down through human history, this mas- ter passion has found expression again and again in the attempt to establish the ideal com- munity, the Utopian state, where men and women might live and work together as com- mon equals. Sometimes these communities have been founded purely on the religious basis, sometimes on the social basis ; and while in one sense they have all failed, in that they have never succeeded in transforming society and bringing the world to their way of life, in a deeper sense no one of them has been a com- plete failure, however short-lived, because they have all served to keep the ideal of a demo- cratic community before the eyes of the world. They have been sincere experiments in the small of what will one day be realized in the large. All that has gone before in the age-old movement towards democracy, all the strug- ^50 UNITY AND DEMOCRACY gles for individual rights, all the earnest search for a truer equality, finds its culmina- tion in this modern age, in the vital conception of Humanity as a living organism, in which all nations, as well as individuals, are essential members one of another, where individual rights still exist, not for the sake of the in- dividual, but in order that the individual may better discharge his duties in the service of hu- manity, where the spirit of sincere and self- sacrificing cooperation for the good of the Whole displaces the old spirit of selfish indi- vidualism. We perceive, then, that real democracy, in the nature of things, cannot come from without where we have been accustomed to seek it; it is a gradual growth from within society. Ed- ward Carpenter calls it a "body within a body.'* The figure is that of the perfect insect being preformed in the larva. Underneath the larval covering, the normal life of the larva is proceeding, the form of the perfect insect dimly appearing; so that the body of the in- sect seems to lie slumbering there, enfolded in a thin, half -transparent birth-shroutl. In due 251 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY time this protective sac bursts and falls away and the insect is liberated, unfolds its wings and rises into the life for which it has been pre- pared. From all that science has revealed there is little doubt that the human order issued from the sub-human in some such fashion as this. The human order rose out of the sub-human by a process inconceivably slow and inappre- ciably gradual. While the animal kingdom went on its usual way the new kingdom was forming within it, "a body within a body." "Nothing but the patience of an Infinite God could have watched with joy the first faint beginnings of human things, — the dawn of reason, flicker after flicker, with long intervals ; the first faint pulses of w^hat was to become conscience, so faint, so easily quenched, but always returning, strangely reenforced; the breaking light of self -consciousness emerging out of a group consciousness; the seemingly interminable stretches of half-light, the age- long twilight of the coming race; not to be hurried, for the ascending hfe must have a fit- ting organism through which to express itself, 252 UNITY AND DEMOCRACY and the requisite physical and psychical changes could only be accomplished by infin- itesimal steps." Something of this same kind is surely tak- ing place within the structure of modern so- ciety. We need not blind our eyes to the evils that still exist. It is like a ghastly panorama, passing before the eye of the Spirit, to look forth upon society to-day. We cannot deny these things nor do we try to explain them away ; but still, we dare to affirm that they are after all the larval, surface things ; they do not reveal the hidden depths where the true de- mocracy is forming. All the good work that has been done through the ages by individuals and groups finds here its true significance. All the saints, heroes, martyrs, reformers, prophets, saviours, lovers, nurses, quiet kindly folk, and all ministering spirits ; all the religious organi- zations of whatsoever name, the philanthropic societies, scientific movements, legislative en- actments, hospitals, reformatories, care of in- fants, protection of children, old-age pensions, etc., etc., all these activities are not fragmen- £53 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY tary and unrelated spasms of love, dependent entirely upon the enthusiasm of the individual heart; they are simply the more obviously pro- truding points of the more perfect society that is being preformed within the less perfect ; and the greater part of that inner body — the true democracy — is invisible, deeply lying, subtly pervasive, ready to appear at unexpected places, and slowly being strengthened and fashioned from within. Just as surely as the insect must at last ascend out of the shattered and discarded cerements of the larva, so the inward, spiritual Kingdom — ^the true human- ity — must liberate itself and triumph glori- ously over the world-kingdoms, whatsoever they may be. The final emergence of the true Democracy will not be without a struggle — ^many strug- gles — for the crust is thick and we must not underrate the obstacles. Organized society is full of self-deceit, smooth-faced respectabihty, smug self-complacency, cowardice, infidelity, soul-stifling mechanism, rule-of-thumb moral- ity, formal rehgion, mutual distrust, alienation from nature, greed, selfishness, envy, slavery, 254 UNITY AND DEMOCRACY conventionalism, the puppet-dance of gentility, condescension, patronizing charity, — all these and much more that might be named are ap- parently enough to stifle, choke and strangle any pulse of spiritual idealistic life; and it is not strange that so many hearts of men and women are exhausted, prostrated, bruised and broken beneath it. But the living spirit of democracy is present underneath it all, touch- ing all, forgetting none, understanding every- thing, despising nobody, accepting all, waiting its own time for full deliverance. The realization of democracy, then, must be- gin in the individual. It consists in the awak- ening of the inner consciousness to the sense of the oneness of the Self with the Whole. It is then, in essence, one with the unity that we seek. In fact, it is only another name for that spiritual unity which we have found to be the essence of all of life, even as it is the funda- mental truth in real religion. Like unity, de- mocracy is not a theory only, but a feeling; not an ideal merely, but an inner consciousness. All men are not brothers simply because they belong to some church, or have joined some 255 SPiaiT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY fraternal order, or are accustomed to applaud sentiments of brotherhood, whenever ex- pressed. We are only brothers when we feel brotherliness. Brotherhood, or the equality that underlies democracy, is always a thing of the inner life ; it must not only be a belief, but an actual experience; it must be known and felt and loved as the life of our lives. There are three prophets in this modern age who stand forth preeminently, as having been habitually and instinctively aware that democ- racy is neither a form of government only, nor a mere social expediency, but a realized ex- perience of the inner mind and heart of man: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman and Maurice Maeterlinck. These are in truth the great "poets and prophets of democracy," but in what sense? To these it has been given as, perhaps, to none others, to possess the invincible sense of the democracy of all life and its manifold ex- periences, to see that all the experiences of all men are equally penetrated by the genuine and infinite energies of nature, to discern the di- vine as everywhere present, to realize the un- ^56 UNITY AND DEMOCRACY fathomable and equable character of our im- mediate, ordinary and so-called insignificant experiences, to glorify the commonplace, to regard as sacred and as possessing absolute and intrinsic value, all persons and everything that is. True democracy, therefore, awakens in the individual consciousness, but it cannot remain passive. It is something tremendously urgent in the heart of the individual and of society. It is the ever-ascending life, which is always One Life. It is a living power which forms, grows, expands within, and ever and anon bursts forth and breaks through, bringing dis- organization and destruction to traditional ex- isting forms, as we see it doing to-day, but only that it may create the new and higher form. It is the perpetual Will to incarnate the new humanity. Thus it follows that there is just as much real democracy in the world to-day as there are men and women possessed by the spirit of democracy, no more, no less. If there is to be more of democracy in the nation to-morrow, it will only come because a larger number of 257 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY individuals have caught the spirit of democ- racy. If there is to come into the Hfe of the world a fuller measure of democracy, and that is the end for which we strive, it can only come as the nations of the world begin to grasp more and more the true spirit of democracy. And that spirit is ever and always the spirit of mutual cooperation of all for the highest good of all. It is the spirit of unselfishness displac- ing selfishness. It is the emphasis on duties rather than the insistence on rights. It is the supreme achievement of the true Self in men and women, in gaining the victory over all the lesser selves. The primary emphasis, however, must be placed continually on the priority of the in- wardness of democracy. All proceeds from within. All social watchwords are, first of all, spiritual facts; and nothing can ever become organized in society which was not first in the heart. Structure follows desire, as desire fol- lows vision. Revelation precedes reforma- tion. The seer comes before the doer. The practical man, whom we have made our idol in this modern age, would be impotent were it 258 UNITY AND DEMOCRACY not for the dreamer. The philosopher ration- alizes the intuition of the prophet ; the scientist formulates the imagination of the poet; the reformer institutionalizes the vision of the mystic. We forget, therefore, that the man who generates and spreads abroad from his own vital center, sincere, true, profound broth- erly feeling, has a more important place in building up the true democracy than the man who endows a college or establishes an institu- tion. Even more important than making the world safe for democracy, by the overthrow of political autocracies wherever they still exist, is the still more primary duty of making de- mocracy real for the world by the utter de- struction of that deadliest of all autocracies, — the autocracj^ of the self in nations and in men. The German militaristic system was simply the final, tragic flowering forth of the hideous autocracy of selfishness, that lies in the heart of all men and nations. This, then, is the true democracy: a body within the body, the slow ascending Kingdom of good-will and unselfish service, the ultimate 259 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY truth of human society; not waiting our arrival at the end of a long history of social experi- ment and reform, but itself determining from within each revolution, each rearrangement of parts, each readjustment of function. From outside we appear to be forever seeking, through antagonisms and failures, to discover the perfect political and social organization. From within, which is the truth side, the ideal and perfect humanity is seeking to express itself amid all the intractableness of human minds and wills. But the ultimate issue is pre-determined — even now it is finding a broader, fuller expres- sion than ever before. And with its coming ..r shall emerge faithfulness, self-reliance, pas- ^ ' sionate comradeship, loyal cooperation, true freedom. The coming democracy is indeed the true coming of the Son of Man in the life of humanity. It is one with real religion. And the time of its coming is only conditioned by the awakening to consciousness, first in the individual, then in the nation and the world, of the true Self which is democracy, the one Son of Man in all men. 260 CHAPTER XII THE COMING WORLD UNITY "When the war-drums throb no longer, and the battle-flags are furled. In the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World." — Tennyson. IT is clearly evident to-day that the intel- hgent and progressive people of all nations have set their faces steadfastly toward some sort of a World-Unity that has never yet had an existence in the life of mankind. The lead- ers are keenly aware that the goal cannot be reached in a decade or even, perhaps, in a cen- tury of time, but the great thing is that so many have already caught the vision and are beginning to plan and work for its realization. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said as yet of the Governments of the world, as evi- denced by some of the transactions that took place at the Peace Conference at Paris; but this is only because the existing Governments 261 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY do not yet truly represent all the people, as they surely must in the new democracy that is one day coming. The greatest revelation of the war, unreal- ized before by most men, has been the state of practical anarchy under which the nations of the world have been attempting to live their separate lives, together with the utter absence of any true law or order binding the nations to one another. Intense nationalisms, narrow \ patriotisms, fierce competitions, bitter rivalries, secret diplomacy, constant frictions of every kind, — all these conditions that have character- ized the relations of nations in what we have called a civilized age, have been laid bare by the pitiless search-light of war, and men have been shocked into the realization that the peace and progress and prosperity of the world have been constantly subject to the secret plans of the Foreign War Offices of the respective na- tions, backed by the Junker class, and that, all unconsciously, the peoples of the world have been living daily on the verge of a volcano. Ever since that fatal day in 1914, when the seething eruption broke forth, destroying at 262 THE COMING WORLD UNITY length millions of human lives and billions of property and literally tearing the world of hu- man relationships asunder, the people of all lands have determined that the old irresponsi- ble and immoral system of relations between nations must give place to a new and higher international order, if life on this planet is to be worth the living. The most significant result of the war is the beginnings, at least, of such a new World- Order. The League of Nations that came into being at Paris was forced upon the representa- tives of the Governments there assembled by the imperious pressure of public opinion back at home. It came in direct response to the imperative demand of the people that no mem- ber of the Peace Conference dared ignore. That the League in its inception was far from perfect was, perhaps, to be expected when we remember the conservative make-up, with a few notable exceptions, of the personnel of the Conference. As it stood originally, it was not a League of Nations, but of Governments; and in its first form, it was in no sense a World League, ^63 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY ^ but merely an Alliance of the Great Powers. But it is at least a beginning, however disap- pointing to all forward-looking minds, of what may lead to a veritable World League of the peoples of all nations. The Covenant leaves the way open for revisions and changes which must be made, and which the people themselves in all lands can bring about when they choose. That they will so choose, there can be not the slightest doubt. For it is clear that the hour has struck at last in human history when the international anarchy that has existed between nations in the past must give way to a new order that shall include and safeguard the in- terests of all mankind. If the present Gov- ernments are not ready for this new interna- tional order, then the people will change their governments, which is always their inalienable prerogative. The thing that must be constantly kept in mind, however, is that any League, or form of World organization that may be brought into being is, after all, onl}^ a new kind of machinery whose real effectiveness will depend not on the machinery itself, but upon the spirit and pur- ^64 THE COMING WORLD UNITY pose behind it. Any organization, to be truly- successful, must have within itself a soul to in- form and infuse it with life, or else it is only a question of time when it will be cast on the junk-pile with all other mechanical failures. That such a fate might befall any new World Order is easily conceivable, unless the new life can be developed and the new soul be evolved in the consciousness of nations and races. It is our finii conviction that the new life and soul, the necessary preliminaries to a successful new World Order, are even now in the process of evolution; and there are many indications that the creative impulse in the heart of humanity is indeed at work to-day, fashioning the more worthy and adequate body for its new soul. The first thing necessary for the full emer- gence of this new soul in the consciousness of humanity is the cultivation and development in ourselves of the real international mind; it is this alone that can bring into actual existence any genuine internationalism. Let us at- tempt, then, to analyze in outhne what we mean by the international mind. ^65 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY In the international anarchy that has hitherto prevailed between nations, it is clear that the absence of any real unity has been due to the fact that the basic attitude of nations toward one another has been the same as the attitude of individuals toward each other in society. Each nation has been living its in- dependent life and formulating its own pohcy as if it were a distinct entity, private, separate and apart from all other nations. The funda- mental conception of the state since the time of Macchiavelh, who framed it, has been that of an independent, sovereign entity, private, separate and distinct from all other states, that had the right to do anything it had the power to do, that owed allegiance to no higher moral law than its own sovereign will, and that, there- fore, was essentially unmoral. This conception has continued to dominate governments and statesmen from the fifteenth down to the twentieth century; and while its frankest expression in modern times, both in theory and practise, has been given to the world by Imperial Germany, nevertheless it has been the practical and implicit conception 263 THE COMING WORLD UNITY upon which all nations have based their lives and shaped their policies. It is this old, medi- eval theory underlying our idea of the state and its rights that has utterly broken down and gone to pieces in modern times; and the great war was simply the tragic climax of its final downfall. Now, the international mind is the mind that has come to see the utter inadequacy and the flagrant immorality of all such old conceptions of the state, and that has clearly grasped the organic conception of humanity. It realizes profoundly that states do not stand inde- pendently and alone, any more than do indi- viduals; that the national self is no more a private, distinct and separate entity than is the individual self; that this self-seeking, surface self in the state is, like the superficial, surface self in the individual, only an illusion that has blinded men's eyes hitherto to the truth. Just as the individual must become conscious of his deeper, truer Self within, that is one with the deeper Self in all others, if he would experience real unity, even so the state must become con- scious that it too has a deeper Self that is es- 267 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY sentially one with the deeper Self in all other states. Disunity between individuals exists because most people as yet are living their lives from the surface, selfish self, rather than from the deeper center within; and just so, intense na- tionahsms, bitter rivalries and fierce competi- tions serve to separate nations and races of men, plunging them repeatedly into tragic strife and costly wars, because nations are still living their lives from the surface, selfish, na- tional selves, and have not yet learned to live from the deeper center where all nations and races are seen to be essentially one. It is only through the profound realization of the truth of the organic conception of hu- manity that this monstrous illusion can be per- ceived and finally banished from the world. When we come to see that aU races and nations and peoples, the smallest and weakest as well as the largest and strongest, are but integral members and parts of the living body of hu- manity, and as such, they are all equally nec- essary to the full and complete and harmonious working of that body; that the living body ^68 THE COMING WORLD UNITY falls short of being in a truly healthful condi- tion unless all its various members and parts are fulfilling their respective functions to the highest degree of efficiency, that is, when each part and member is itself in a true condition of health, then and not until then, can we be said to have arrived at the view-point of the inter- national mind. An ignorant or superstitious people, an op- pressed people, an exploited people, a people that is being treated unjustly anywhere, simply means that a member of the living body of hu- manity is in a diseased or abnormal condition; and just as the health of the physical organism is always endangered if one of its members, even the smallest, becomes diseased, just so surely is the health and progress of the body of humanity endangered when any of its mem- bers, even the weakest, is forced to suffer un- justly. Such conditions, allowed to continue in the life of any people, are like slow blood- poisoning that taints and at last destroys the living organism. The international mind also realizes that there is a higher patriotism than is to be found S69 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY in the narrow nationalisms of the past. It recognizes that above all races and nations stands Humanity, just because the Whole is greater than any or all of its parts; and that to the interests of Humanity as a whole we should give our love and loyalty. This does not involve, in any sense, that one should love his own country any less, but rather, vastly more. It means that the old, narrow, selfish and exclusive love which a man gives to his country as an end in itself, is replaced by a broad, unselfish and all-inclusive love for his country because of the place it fills, the ideals it furnishes and the function it performs in the growing, developing life of the Whole of hu- manity. The more deeply and intensely a man loves his wife, the more deep and genuine is his reverence and affection for all woman- hood, whom his wife represents. Just so, the more intense and intelligent is a man's love for his own country, the greater will be his respect and affection for all other peoples, of whom his country is so vital a part. The true and intelligent patriot sees all races and nations so inextricably bound to- THE COMING WORLD UNITY gether in the living body of humanity, he real- izes so keenly that all their separate interests are, after all, mutual interests, he knows so well that what helps one helps all and that what hurts one hurts all, that he enters grad- ually into the profound sense of the essential oneness of the life humanity lives through all of its various members. This vast planet be- comes to him, as it were, one neighborhood in which there are no real dividing walls, no true boundary lines. The different races and na- tions and peoples become for him simply so many branches of one great family; and the great end of life becomes for him the achieve- ment, first in the consciousness of his own coim- try and through that, in the consciousness of humanity, of that sense of unity with all that he has come to experience in his own inner life. The international mind has also learned to discern the many likenesses that underlie all the surface differences among peoples; it sees that these hkenesses are far more numerous and more fundamental than any differences, and so it is inclined to stress these common points of contact and minimize the differences. 271 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY It seeks to familiarize itself with the hves and achievements of the great heroes and leaders of other races and nations as well as of its own. It comes to appreciate all the beauty and truth that hes revealed in the great literature of all lands, and likewise in its art and music. It studies the laws and institutions, the languages and customs of other peoples, and also their moral and religious systems with a view of finding those fundamental elements that are common to all peoples. It is open and recep- tive to truth, from whatever source it may come, and it is not too proud to learn from all. The international mind does not believe that any one race or nation has all the best or all the truth of anything; neither does it set up its own particular brand of culture as the only, or exclusive, culture for the world. But it be- lieves that each race and nation, out of its own peculiar experience, has something of per- manent value to contribute to the sum total of truth and to the universal culture of mankind. It does not think that the highest ideals for life are the exclusive property of any single 212 THE COMING WORLD UNITY people, but it believes that the highest ideals for humanity as a whole will be made up of the blending of the highest ideals of all peoples who have aspired and struggled toward the heights through all the ages. Growing out of this international mind, as it evolves from the selfish and ignorant and ex- clusive national mind we have known, and con- stantly fostered by it, will come the new inter- national spirit that will, of necessity, breathe life and soul through all the machinery of the new World Order that the international mind will eventually call into being. This new spirit will be, first of all, the spirit of conscious unity permeating all that is thought and said, planned and done between nations. It will be a sense of unity that is vastly more than any mere intellectual theory or that depends on any mere form of organiza- tion, a unity that is a feeling, a conviction, an experience, an actual realization, weHing up in the hfe of the race, and holding a profound and abiding place in the consciousness of na- tions. This deep sense of the essential one- ness of all humanity will dictate all national ^73 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY policies, suggest all changes and inspire all re- forms, with a view primarily to the best and highest interests of the peoples of all lands. It alone will insure the justice and the per- manency of the new World Order when at last it shall be brought into being. This international spirit will also inevitably supplant the old spirit of international rivalry and competition with the spirit of international cooperation and good-will toward all. The fierce competition that has forced nations into the mad race for political supremacy in their lust for power, and that has inflamed them with inordinate economic ambitions in their greed for gain, will gradually give way to a political cooperation for mutual strength and safety, and an economic cooperation that shall distribute more equally among all peoples both the necessities and the luxuries of life. This spirit of cooperation, expressed by na- tions as well as by individuals, will ever be seek- ing the largest possible degree of prosperity and happiness for all peoples, not for a few powerful nations at the expense of the weaker ones. Its watchword will be: The coopera- THE COMING WORLD UNITY tion of all for the sake of the highest good of all. It cannot be manufactured to order, and it will not be realized in its fulness at once ; but it will steadily grow and develop as men and nations become more truly conscious of the es- sential oneness of all who share the common life of humanity. Thus the new international spirit will grad- ually displace the old selfish nationalism with a higher unselfish nationalism, in which all that is good and valuable in the old will be pre- served, while all that was bad and the cause of the tragic disunity among nations, will fall away and be forgotten. When that day comes, men will look back on these times of strife and wars between nations with the same amazement and abhorrence that we of to-day look back upon the cruel and barbarous glad- iatorial combats of ancient Rome. In the new World Order that is surely com- ing, that nation will exert the greatest influ- ence, not that embraces the widest territory or numbers the largest population or possesses the greatest wealth, but rather, that exempli- fies in both theory and practise the highest a76 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY ideals of service and helpfulness to the common cause of humanity as a whole. That nation will be the most respected and loved by all the peoples that gives most freely of its largess for the sake of enriching the life of the Whole. That nation will truly lead the world, not that possesses the largest army, or most powerful navy, or greatest merchant marine, but that has learned to honestly say to all the peoples,, both great and small, in everything that its national life and poUcy involves : I am among you as one who serveth. Let it not be thought that this is a World- ideal impossible of realization. It may not be realized in our life-time, but, in accordance with the great law of human evolution, it will surely become real some day, and our chil- dren's children will experience and enjoy what we as yet glimpse only from afar. The vision always precedes the reahty. It is by faith that we eventually reach the promised land. Our loftiest dreams, if only we dream them in- tensely and habitually enough, will some day come true. The world is young yet. Civili- zation is only in its infancy. Humanity is but SI76 THE COMING WORLD UNITY just learning to live its life in unity, for which all the past of struggle and bloodshed has only been preparing it. Besides, there is all eter- nity before us; so why should we grow dis- couraged? The most hopeful sign of the times is that the utter inadequacy and pitiable futility of the old order (or disorder) of things has at length been dragged into the open, so that all men can see its shameful nakedness. The greatness of any people, as of the individual, is always measured by the greatness of its ideals and the degree of their realization. Listen to the scathing indictment of the na- tions as they have been, in Paul Richard's mes- sage, "To the Nations." *'What was the ideal of the world that is dying? Judging by what it professed, never did more noble principles shine in the sky of humanity: Liberty, Justice, Science, Prog- ress, Civilization. . . . But judging by what it practised, never was the abyss deeper be- tween fact and ideal." "What have the people who call themselves great made of Liberty? A monopoly for ^77 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY '^ themselves. And those who have most use of its name are also those who grant it the least to others. They wish the hberty of reducing the world to slavery." "What have they made of Justice? A guarantee of their own interests. But the rights of others were only measured in their eyes by the measure of force." "What have they made of Science? A tool to serve their greed. History will say of them: They acquired much knowledge, but they put it to evil purposes." "What have they made of Progress? A soulless thing, an egotistical and material means of domination." "What have they made of Civilization? A privilege calculated on the number of their fire- arms. A hypocritical pretense covering their worst undertakings. A mask of fraud." "What have they made of Humanity? A field for profits, a business market. They have treated the nations as possessions to be bought and sold, as cattle to be reared for food." "And that is why the light of all these great ^78 THE COMING WORLD UNITY words is changed into the murky blood-red flame of this immense conflagration." At last it is beginning to be seen that na- tions live on earth in a vast complex of rela- tionships, even as do individuals ; each of them forms in humanity a real individuality, a col- lective being, living and acting. The same laws hold for nations as for individuals. Self- ish individualism, whatever form it takes, is as suicidal for a nation as for an individual. There is only one moral law for men and for peoples. Each nation must impose upon itself the same rules it imposes upon the individual. Whatever is a crime for the individual, is also a crime for his country. These truths are but just beginning to dawn on the world's mind. If selfishness, cupidity, robbery, violence and murder are looked upon as vile and de- grading acts for isolated men, how could the collective man, that is the nation, commit such acts without dishonor? In what does the honor of a nation differ from the honor of an individual? And of what use is it for a na- tion to assert this "honor" and defend it with her arms, if she herself continually violates it 279 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY in face of all, by her practises of plunder and acts of disloyalty? If we have come to see that the true great- ness of the individual consists not in his talents, his riches or his fame, but solely in the degree to which he dedicates all he is and all he has to the service of the common good, must the time not surely come when we shall also realize that the true greatness of a nation consists only in the degree to which it dedicates its powers to the service of humanity? "Until now, the highest duty was that of a man to his mother country. But we are begin- ning in all lands to see that there is a mother- country greater and nobler and more im- v4 mortal, more misknown too, possessing fifteen hundred million inhabitants, yet counting but few citizens ; a mother-country with, as yet, but few lovers. Henceforth, it is toward her that men everywhere will feel their highest duty. For she is the supreme mother-country, — Hu- manity. The higher patriotism demands, not that we shall love one country less, but human- ity more; a love for country, not for its own sake alone, but because of what it may con- ^80 THE COMING WORLD UNITY tribute to the advancement of humanity as a whole." "Nations, living members of a body which is ignorant of itself, members bleeding through one another, the hour is come to put an end to your mutual martyrdom, in becoming con- scious that yours is but one and the same flesh. Awake humanity." In his powerful and prophetic story, "In the Days of the Comet," Mr. Wells tells of a great change that comes over the world, following an atmospheric phenomenon in which a "green vapor" is generated in the clouds and falls upon the earth with instantaneous effect. As this peculiar vapor descends it has the effect of putting every one to sleep; this sleep con- tinues for three days; and when the people finally awake, their interior nature has under- gone a complete change. Where before they saw dimly, they now see clearly; all petty differences and quarrels are perceived at last in their ti'ue perspective. Instead of place and power and influence and wealth being the all-important goals of ambi- tion, as before the change, every one now 281 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY strives to be of service to the world. Love and kindness become greater factors than com- mercial expediency or business success. Hu- man brotherhood is realized at last. The per- fected society has come into its own in the world. In many respects, Wells's account of the great change and its effect upon people cor- responds with the effect of the dawning of the spiritual consciousness upon mankind, as we have sought to describe it in the foregoing chapters. Both religion and science point forward to a time when this earth will know freedom from strife and misery, and all the forms of suffering which its tragic disunity is constantly occasioning. Even the elements which have hitherto been regarded as beyond the boundaries of man's will, we see now, not may be, but most certainly will be completely controlled in time. All the factors and forces that make for social control are now seen to be in the hands of man himself. Every change, every improvement, every advance in the life of humanity awaits only the coming of the larger man, that is, the man of the broader, THE COMING WORLD UNITY deeper consciousness, who has found his true Self in union with the Whole. Since the race consciousness must gradually unfold through the slow unfolding conscious- ness in its individual members, how great and solemn a moment it is for the men and women who people the earth to-day! If the new World Order that is to replace the one that has been swept away in blood and sacrifice, is in- deed to grow out of the new race consciousness of the true and essential unity of all mankind, and thus make possible a new humanity, it will only be as men and women here and every- where enter into the actual experience of that unity for themselves first of all. Thus the re- sponsibility of hastening or delaying the com- ing of the new World Unity rests upon each one of us. In the stirring words of Edwin Markham : "We men of earth have here the stuff Of Paradise, — we have enough. We need no other thing to build The stairs into the unfulfilled, — No other ivory for the doors, — No other marble for the floors, — No other cedar for the beam And dome of man's immortal dream. 283 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY Here on the paths of every day, — Here on the common human way, — Is all the busy gods would take To build a Heaven, to mold and make New Edens. Ours the stuff sublime To build Eternity in Time." 284 CHAPTER XIII THE PATHWAY OF REALIZATION "Swiftly arose and spread around me, the peace and joy and knowledge that pass all the art and argument of earth; And I know that the hand of God is the elder hand of my own. And I know that the spirit of God is the eldest brother of my own. And that all the men ever born are also my brothers and the women my sisters and lovers, And that a kelson of creation is Love."— TFaZ« Whitman. THE practical problem for every one who has awakened to the meaning of the ideal, and who aspires to the realization of the prin- ciple of unity in his own inner consciousness, is the way of attainment. What is the method by which, as individuals, as nations or as hu- manity, we may translate the great ideal and principle into actual daily experience? In the foregoing chapters we have made a number of general suggestions as to methods to be em- ployed, but before closing let us consider more 285 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY specifically the supreme method for the attain- ment of the true consciousness of unity with All-that-is. In a word, the pathway to reali- zation is preeminently the pathway of love. But what do we mean by love, in this con- nection? It is a word we use with many dif- ferent shades of meaning; it is also a word we often use without very much of any meaning. A mother "loves" her child; a lover "loves" his sweetheart; one man "loves" horses and dogs; another "loves" nature or art or music. But what does love mean when apphed to human relationships outside of the family, or beyond the circle of "loved ones"? How can one love people that he does not know or, more par- ticularly, people that he does not like? What did the Great Teacher mean when he made Love the supreme law for human as well as divine relationships? Jesus repeatedly said: "Love is the fulfilling of the law." But of what law? The law of evolution and involution, of generation and regeneration. When the time comes that Love reigns on the planet earth as it does in the kingdoms above the earth, then the Kingdom that he foretold ^86 THE PATHWAY OF REALIZATION will be at hand. And the "law" will be ful- filled when Love comes completely and fully into its own in the life of humanity. There are two words in the Greek New Testament that are rendered in English by the one word, "love." And yet these two words are radically different. Phileo means to love, to feel affection for, to hold dear. It occurs frequently in classical Greek. The other word, agapaOj is rarely if ever used by classical writers. It seems almost like a new word, coined to express Jesus's conception of God's love for all men, and man's love for all his fel- lows. Agapao is always used in the 'New Testament when love is enjoined as a duty. As one writer says: "As a command, it en- joins a volitional, not an affectional, attitude of the mind and heart toward others. The word does not necessarily exclude affection and is often used to express it, but when it incul- cates love as a duty, what it requires of us is benevolence, kindliness, good-will/^ We prefer this word, good-will, then, to any other, as best expressing the meaning of love in our relations to people in general. For the 287 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY will is the foundation of our being. It is the will, governed and guided by the Self, that makes us human and divine. It is the dynamic power exerted by the Self. When we are en- joined to love all men, it is not intended that we should have an emotional love, a feeling of affection for all men, least of all, the kind of affection we feel for our "loved ones," but rather, that our mental and volitional attitude toward all men should be habitually one of good-will. To thus have good-will for all means to be kindly disposed toward all, to refuse to cherish hatred or bitterness or scorn, or to harbor feel- ings of envy or jealousy or revenge for any liv- ing being. It means taking interest in others and in their welfare, as opposed to the general spirit of indifference that rules most of our lives. It means to trust others and believe in them, to look always for the good in others rather than the bad, to see their elements of strength more than their weaknesses. It means confidence in their ability to become in time their highest and truest Selves, and the willing desire to help them in any possible way 288 THE PATHWAY OF REALIZATION to attain their highest and best, — and all this, regardless of any return they may make to us. While it is true that we cannot compel love in the emotional or affectional sense, it is pos- sible for every one of us to command the voli- tional love, which always finds expression in the attitude^ of good-will and friendliness. The one who says that he cannot feel this kind of love for all men and women is simply de- ceiving himself. What he really means is that he does not want to take the attitude of good- will toward all, or else that he has not yet dis- covered his true Self that knows itself to be one with all. This last explains the absence of good-will in the world to-day. For this true Self that commands the will, holds the attitude of friendliness and kindliness toward all, nat- urally and spontaneously, simply because it is its nature so to do. What we need to realize is that it was in no arbitrary sense that Jesus and the other great spiritual leaders of the race have made love the one great goal of man's unfolding moral and spiritual nature; it is, rather, because love is woven into the very warp and woof of the uni- 289 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY verse. If love is both the supreme essence of that ideal unity we seek and also the true method of its attainment, it is thus supreme not because the seers have said so; they said so simply because it is supreme, in the very nature of things. Love even in religion has usually been conceived as a beautiful poetic sentiment, or as one of the "fruits of the spirit"; but the sphere of love is far wider. Love is a universal principle, holding within its bounds all the cooperating energies of na- ture. It is the primal force which, existing be- tween two or more individuals, draws them into harmonious relations and establishes the foun- dations of happiness. All entities, of whatever character, which are subject to the law of mu- tual attraction, are the visible media of the foreshadowings of Love. "As much love ex- ists proportionately between two atoms as be- tween two human beings, between the elements that compose the chemical substance as be- tween hearts that beat in unison." When sev- eral atoms instinctively combine as constituent elements of any substance, science calls the uniting force, chemical affinity. Yet such af- 290 THE PATHWAY OF REALIZATION finity is but mutual attraction, the common force that holds all entities in harmony ; nor can we think of such harmonious relations but as a phase of the principle of love, the primary unitary force ever binding two or more into one. Love is a cosmic principle pervading the en- tire universe, and making possible the won- drous unity in diversity that we perceive everywhere. Mutual affinity inhering in the particles of primal star-dust or nebulse of the first fire-mist, as we believe, drew them into the original rings or nodules of varying temper- ature and density, and finally into the revolv- ing spheres and grouping constellations that make up the vast and infinite universe. Thus we may speak of the love of the original atoms without violating scientific verity. *'The Cosmos is primarily a drama of primitive atomic loves, unconsciously evincing the su- preme force that sustains the world." The Force to which Science leads us back as the ultimate power and source from which all- that-is has proceeded, is nothing less than the force of love. As such it reveals its cosmic ^91 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY nature; it passes beyond the limited plane of human relations and takes its place in the pro- cession of the stars. All the forces of nature are but the transmutations of a single energy, and that energy is the infinite and eternal self- giving of Original Being. So love is but the transmutation in human and vital experience, of gravitation and attraction in the material world. As we ascend from the vegetal to the animal world, we discover this ever present principle increasing in power and manifestly directed by individual intelligence. Side by side with the struggle for existence is the struggle for the existence of others, as expressed through the love of offspring. The mother-love in animals is the secret force that generates and ever preserves, protects and defends its off- spring. In nature's marvelous transmutation of forces, the very selfishness that compels the mother animal to fight for its own young, be- comes unconsciously altruistic, in that it re- sults in the preservation of the entire species. From a primitive force in the animal world, the love of offspring has become in human kind 89^ THE PATHWAY OF REALIZATION the strongest manifestation of the cosmic prin- ciple of love yet developed. It is at once the conserving force of civilization and the great dynamic of evolution. The experience of the race has finally proved that the family is the essential and indispensa- ble center and unit of society. But whence comes the family? The answer gives us an- other fascinating chapter in the unfolding love-story of the universe, and illustrates most beautifully the development of the principle of unity in human life. Although the mother- love primarily protected the young and thus preserved the species, it was not until mother- love, through the lengthened period of in- fancy, awoke the father-love, and the two united, developed into household love that it was possible for the family to come into being. The love of lover must become the love of hus- band, the love of husband and wife must be- come the love of father and mother, parental love must become household love, before the entire family is enrobed in love and the bond of unitv is made secure. For what is the true family but a "congregation of consanguineous 2dS SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY individuals, bound together in unity by the sacred ties of love, each living to serve the other that none may want"? But the family, ideally conceived, prefigures the ultimate ideal of the community, of the state, of the nation, of the world, when all members of humanity shall mutually function in harmonious relations, each performing his just and worthy duty toward all. Ideal so- ciety will but be approached when true family- hood becomes voluntary familyhood, founded only on the principle of mutual affection and mutual affinity. So the ideal nation will exist when all classes and individuals are bound together, not by coercion, but voluntarily, through conscious unity and mutual good-will. And thus the ideal World-state will come into being when all nations and races are voluntarily bound to- gether, not through fear or force, but mutual respect and good-will, growing out of the new consciousness of the essential oneness of hu- manity as a whole. Love, then, as a volitional expression of good-will, friendliness and kindliness, is the ^94i THE PATHWAY OF REALIZATION ultimate and perennial power in human life from which all others spring. All other forces are ephemeral, love alone is final and eternal. Love is life, and life is God, and God is love, and thus the circle is complete. To all who have grasped this identity of life and love, the experience of love becomes the experience of God, for God is love. Substi- tute the word love for the name God; then to know love is to know God. To love is to be conscious of Reality. Love is the universal, " realized in the particular. Love is the real and only Presence. Love is All. In its human expressions, love is not so much one passion among others; it is the immortal aspect of a man emerging from his hidden depths into consciousness ; it is man's true Self coming into being. When a man loves, and only then, he is living his life on the universal and eternal plane; and in just the degree that he surrenders his life to love's power, in just^^ that degree is he living out his true and divine Self, for the deepest essence of that Self is always love. The love-life is the eternal life, for it is literally God's life finding expression 295 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY through the individual. He who loves, there- fore, knows himself as one with God in that experience, and so is conscious of his true unity with All-that-is. Love is God coming to con- sciousness in man. In loving, man becomes most truly God. The love-consciousness is the "I am" con- sciousness. Love is the self-existent hfe in man. It is a kind of cosmic egoism. We catch hints of this truth when, in moments of love-rapture, whether for a person or a cause, we lose all consciousness of locality or of boundaries. We are not conscious in such mo- ments of here and there; we just are. It is not due to emptiness but to fulness. We are conscious of being neither here nor there, not because we are nowhere, but because we are everywhere, and all the star-peopled spaces seem to be within us. We say that we are "carried out of ourselves"; it would be more accurate to say that in such moments there is nothing that is outside of us, that we are car- ried deeper into our true or cosmic Selves; for all barriers and boundaries have been removed and we know ourselves as one with All. S96 THE PATHWAY OF REALIZATION Love, then, is the deepest essence and the ultimate meaning of everything. It is not a part of life, it is the only real life. It is not a mere sentiment, it is truth. It is not the source of joy, it is the only true joy. It is not something in consciousness, it is the perfection of consciousness. Love is the white light of pure consciousness that emanates in us from God. When we examine more closely some of the deep revelations that come through the love- experiences of human life, we realize that Love is indeed the mightiest power knocking at the door of the inner life, in order that the true Self may come forth in all its glory. Love has always been the greatest awaken- ing power in the life of man. In all the long years of his unfolding, and amid the multitude of voices that have called him to thought and feeling and action, no voice has ever had such potency as the voice of love ; nor has any other appeal sounded in his soul so all-compelling a note. He has been called to worship, to voice the language of beauty, to philosophize on life's mysteries, to investigate life's hidden ^97 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY secrets ; but the one voice in all these activities that has pierced his soul, and made him the master artist, scientist, philosopher or seeker after God, has ever been the voice of the mas- ter-passion of life. "For Love is the creative force in life, sum- moning the soul into earthly being from one knows not what incalculable distance of space ; cherishing it while it neither understands itself nor the body which houses it; surrounding it with all manner of influences which appeal to the highest in it; evoking its latent nobleness; teaching it the great lessons of life, the wisdom to know to what voices to respond and to what to turn a deaf ear." Love is also true insight. Among the an- cient maxims whose roots lie in confusion of thought, none is more misleading than the well- worn aphorism that love is bhnd. If love were blind, life would soon sink into chaos ; for love is the force that creates, the power that sus- tains, the principle that governs; for God is love. It is the love of his art that draws the painter, the poet, the musician into the very heart of his art and makes his passion one with 898 THE PATHWAY OF REALIZATION insight; so that he sees and hears where the rest of us are only blind and deaf. It is love for truth that leads the prophet to utter his message, unweariedly, in the face of hostile op- position or blank indifference ; but only a later age recognizes the truth and knows the prophet as such. It is love for righteousness that leads the reformer to hurl himself against the deep- seated traditional conventions of society; but only subsequent generations rise up to call him **blessed." To him only who loves with an all-consuming passion is the final veil lifted and the ultimate insight given; for at the heart of things, knowledge and love are one. In its profoundest aspect. Love is union. The fundamental aim of love is non-differen- tiation, — absolute union of being. Sex is the allegory of love in the physical world, and the aim of sex is always union, — but on the physi- cal plane. What is the meaning contained in love's effort toward union from lowest to high- est planes? To quote from Mr. H. G. Wells: "I think that the desire to partake, the desire to merge one's identity with another's remains a necessary element in all personal love. It ^99 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY is a way out of ourselves, a breaking down of our individual separation, just as hatred is an intensification of that. We cast aside our reserves, our secrecies, our defenses; we open ourselves; touches that would be intolerable from common people become a mystery of de- light; acts of self-abasement and self-sacrifice are charged with symbolical pleasure. We cannot tell which of us is me, which you. Our imprisoned egoism looks out through this win- dow, forgets its walls, and is for those brief moments released and universal." All religions, through the teachings of love by their great prophets and leaders, but es- pecially Christianity as construed by Jesus in terms of love alone, have thus made explicit in their ideals, what we find to be implicit in the universe and in life, — the principle of love as the great law of individual life and the ulti- mate foundation of a world-society. Religion has always been the strongest ideal force in the life of mankind, and yet, let us admit it frankly, it is just here that all relig- ions have most conspicuously failed : they have never yet either taught or practised their 300 THE PATHWAY OF REALIZATION supreme idekl so as to make love the dominat- ing social principle. The failure of Christian- ity is most marked because in no other religion has the Love-principle held so supreme or ex- clusively comprehensive a place as in the teach- ings of Jesus. It takes no particular insight to discover that the trouble with the world to-day, the pri- mary cause of all its tragic disunity, lies in the fact that we do not believe in love, the love that is friendhness and good-will toward all. Even the churches do not believe in love, as evidenced by the public utterances of promi- nent divines. We believe in almost everything else, but not in love. We believe in force and imprisonment, in fear and hate, in ill-will and persecution; but we are afraid to believe in love and in the Kingdom of love. We do not dare to treat men in a friendly spirit. We are filled with all manner of distrusts and sus- picions of our fellows. We are afraid to try the method of Jesus. We have no faith in his ideals. We make a mockery of his religion. We crucify him afresh. But we shall never find that unity we seek 301 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY until we learn how to love our fellows as our- selves, because they are ourselves. We shall never find unity in religion until we begin to love a little more those who differ from us. We shall never achieve a real unity in society until good-will for all classes and individuals comes to possess us utterly. We shall never build the new world until kindliness shall char- acterize our attitude toward all nations and races, even those whom we have called enemies, remembering that they are all one with us in the living body of humanity. It is on the love- plane of consciousness that unity alone can be found. In this great crisis of the world's history, all thoughtful men and women realize that in the reconstruction of human life that is now going on, there must be a broader, deeper recognition of love, not as a sentiment or a prophecy, but as the only true social principle that is at last capable of realization; that peace will never come upon earth until there appears a genera- tion of men of good-will and friendliness, who have risen above all narrow and selfish indi- vidualism, in their ov/n lives and also in their 302 THE PATHWAY OF REALIZATION lives as patriots, willing and ready to dedicate themselves to that higher internationalism that is to be. As Swami Vivekananda has truly said: **Hatred proceeds from imperfect knowledge, which makes us perceive objects as separate from one another. But when we see our true Self in others, how can we hate another with- out hating our self? It would be impossible for self to hate self. Where true Self-knowl- edge is, there can remain no feeling of hatred. He who realizes all beings in the Self never hates anything or any being. When hatred is gone, jealousy and all selfish feehngs which we call wicked disappear. What remains? The ordinary love which stands in opposition to hatred vanishes, but divine love begins to reign in the heart. True love means the expression of oneness. If we see our true Self in others, we cannot help loving them as we love our Self. Now we understand the meaning of, *Love thy neighbor as thyself.' " The oldest philosophy of man has always taught this truth. When all beings appear as parts of one Universal Self, there is no 303 SPIRIT OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY longer delusion, or fear, or sorrow. Sorrow and fear arise so long as there is the sense of duality and separateness. In Oneness, how- ever, there cannot remain fear, sorrow, suffer- ing, separation or self-delusion. This is the result of true Self-knowledge. "Know thyself," and the surface self van- ishes and all selfishness is destroyed. The deeper Self emerges and all unselfishness is at- tained. Herein lies both the ideal and also the explanation of true morality. Jesus says, "Love your neighbor as yourself"; and the reason for this supreme injunction is because your neighbor is yourself. Every love of our lives, whether it be love for persons, or for truth, or for righteousness, or for humanity, or for God, is the true saviour sent to lead us out of the narrow kingdom of self into the universal kingdom of love. God is love. To love God, then, is to love Love with a mighty all-consuming passion. Love is all, is life, is God. No man has ever had imagination enough to exaggerate the greatness of love. No one has ever yet begun to exhaust his powers of lov- 304 THE PATHWAY OF REALIZATION ing. No one has ever yet dreamed how great his love might become. If men would dare to believe in love and good-will as the mightiest forces in human life, in the presence of which armies and navies are insignificant and help- less, if they would begin at last to take Jesus seriously, and honestly attempt to translate his great ideals into living terms for all men, then indeed the new spirit of unity would come welling up in the consciousness of humanity in response to Love's imperious call, and the new world would be fashioned by the men and women who had found themselves in union with All. THE END 905 New Thought Library. Crown Svo. Crimson Cloth extra, 5s. net per vol. The " New Thought Library " has been designed to include only the best works in this class of literature. The following volumes are now available : — HAVE YOU A STRONG WELL ? How to Develop and Strengthen Will Power, Memory, or any other Faculty or Attribute of the Mind by the Easy Process of Self-Hypnotism. By Charles Godfrey Leland. Sixth Edition. THE GIFT OF THE SPIRIT. A Selection from the Essays of Prentice Mulford. Reprinted from the " White Cross Library." With an Introduction by Arthur Edward Waite. Third Edition. THE GIFT OF UNDERSTANDING. A further selection from the Works of Prentice Mulford. Reprinted from the " White Cross Library." With an Introduction by Arthur Edward Waite. ESSAYS OF PRENTICE MULFORD : 3rd Series. ESSAYS OF PRENTICE MULFORD : 4th Series. Completing the entire set of the Essays published in America under the title of " Your Forces and How to Use Them." THE MIRACLE OF RIGHT THOUGHT. By Orison Swett Marden. THE OPTIMISTIC LIFE. By Orison Swett Marden. HE CAN WHO THINKS HE CAN. By Orison Swett Marden. PSYCHIC CONTROL THROUGH SELF-KNOWLEDGE. By W. W. Kenilworth. PRENTICE MULFORD'S STORY ; or. Life by Land and Sea. By Himself. With an Introduction by A. E. Waite. EVERY MAN A KING ; or. Might in Mind Mastery. By Orison Swett Marden and Ernest Raymond Holmes. THE LAW OF THE RHYTHMIC BREATH. Teaching the Generation '' Conservation and Control of Vital Force. By Ella Adelia Fletcher. THE RELIGION OF TO-MORROW. By W. J. Colville, Author of " An Elementary Text Book of Mental Therapeutics," " Life and Power from Within," etc., etc. THE RATIONAL EDUCATION OF THE WELL. Translated from the French of Dr. Paul Emile Levy. THE MAN OF TO-MORROW. By Floyd B. Wilson, Author of " Paths to Power," etc. THE SECRET OF ACHIEVEMENT. By Orison Swett Marden, Authoi of " Every Man a King," etc. BE GOOD TO YOURSELF. By Orison Swett Marden, Author of " He Can who Thinks He Can," etc. LOVE'S WAY. By Orison Swett Marden. EVERYDAY EFFICIENCY. A Practical Guide to Efficient Living. By Forbes Lindsay. WILLIAM RIDER & SON, LIMITED, 8 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON, E.C.4. Works by H. ERNEST HUNT. JUST PUBLISHED. THE INFLUENCE OF THOUGHT ON HEALTH, WEALTH AND HAPPINESS. Crown 8vo, cloth, 55. net. Contents : I. — ^Thought and its influence on Habit, Character, Action, etc. II. — Thought and Health ; " Vis Medicatrix Naturae," etc. HI. — ^Thought and Wealth : What is Business ? Money and the Mine ; Production and Invention. IV. — Thought and Happiness : Life's many problems ; The Vital Principle. " If only you think rightly, you will live rightly, act rightly, be successful, and be happy — such is the argument, sustained with much force of suggestion and wealth of instance of ' The Influence of Thought.' . . . The book is a stimulating Essay in what may be called psychological dynamics." — Sheffield Daily Telegraph. " A new and compelling gospel." — Liverpool Weekly Post. A BOOK OF AUTO-SUGGESTIONS. 6x5 in. Paper Cover, is.net. A handy well-printed little book giving the method determining and controlling thoughts, for the guidance of those desirous of practising this method of self- training. " It should be as easy to expel an obnoxious thought from your mind as it is to shake a stone out of your shoe ; and till a man can do that it is just nonsense to talk about his ascendancy over nature, and all the rest of it." — Edward Carpenter. SELF- TRAINING : The Lines of Mental Progress. Crown 8vo, cloth, 250 pp., /[s.6d. net. Contents : — ^The Nature of Mind — ^Mind at Work — ^Thought and Health — Suggestion — ^Training the Senses — Memory — ^The Feelings — Will and Imagina- tion — ^The Machinery of Nerves — Extensions of Faculty — Self-Building — ^The Spiritual Basis. " There is not a chapter of ' Self -Training ' that is not of high interest ; and on such subjects as the Cultivation of the Memory and the Control of the Nervous System it contains much of great practical value."— 0;i;/ord Chronicle. NERVE CONTROL. The Cure of Nervousness and Stage-Fright. Crown 8vo, 136 pp., paper cover, 2s. net. " A very useful book. Many a reader will be taught how to control and develop the innate powers, by which he will gain self-command." — Methodist Times. A MANUAL OF HYPNOTISM. Crown 8vo, cloth, 136 pp., 2s. 6d. net. This volume is designed to serve as an up-to-date and practical guide to the study of Hypnotism and its application by means of suggestion and auto-suggestion. LONDON : WILLIAM RIDER & SON, LTD. 8 PATERNOSTER ROW, E.C.4. ^^* 14 DAY USE LJBRARV This book IS due on the last date stamped below, or on the date to which renewed. Renewed books are subjea to immediate recall. 7 DAY USt UUKIK/G" ^SDRflERSESSIONS" AUG 3 1*365 AUG 2 7 RECD -12 fi 1 =iAN 14 198C RFn-n :: ::! ?i'? ' ». LD 21-50m-6,'60 -, .General Library (B132l8l0)476 University of California Berkeley u.c. SlrtIilii«L,ai;'.?«AR.Es ^OB^L^lSs^ Mi!i; ^1! !|i I Hi 1 I, :! ^iJilHillll!! ,1 ! I i i iiiiiii m ! i! '-■'iiilil 'ii|;;!l jIl !lii I '■mm II I i