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THE SPIRITUAL NATURE 
 
 OF MAN 
 
 By 
 
 STANTON COIT, Ph.D. 
 
 'I 
 
 The West London Ethical Society 
 The Ethical Church, Queen's Road, Bayswater 
 1910 
 
''-^ 3 5 / 
 
 V? 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 Chapter fagb 
 
 I. Are We Spirits ? - - - 3 
 
 II. The Reality of Our Mental Life - 18 
 
 III. The Mystery of Spirit Communication 30 
 
 IV. "Ourself, not Ourselves" - - 45 
 V. Spiritual Communion - - 53 
 
 VI. TheFchXper of THE .Gjrqup-Spirit - 70 
 
 VII. Sf!ritt:/l ENViRONMEbiT' As a Factor in 
 
 Race-Development - ' - - 86 
 
 VIII. The Environmental Origin of Moral 
 
 Life - - - - 100 
 
CHAPTER I. 
 
 Are we Spirits ? 
 
 IT is not customary to think of human beings, 
 from the moment of their birth to that of 
 their death, as spirits, nor of human society as a 
 spirit world. On the contrary, human society 
 and the beings who constitute it are set over 
 against spirits and the spirit world, as if here were 
 two orders of existence that mutually excluded 
 each other. If the question arises as to what 
 agency, as distinct from a mechanical force, has 
 been the cause of any given phenomenon, like the 
 tipping of a table, ordinary language and thought 
 divide all possible agencies into human beings 
 and spirits. This reasoning implies that if a 
 man tipped a table, it was not a spirit that did 
 it, and vice versa. But if when a human agent 
 produces an effect it is not a spirit that produces 
 it, we are forced to classify the human being 
 under the only other kind of reality which remains. 
 If everything is either spirit or matter, and a 
 human being is not spirit, he must be matter. And, 
 
 221390 
 
4 ARE WE SPIRITS? 
 
 indeed, this is the ordinary assumption and 
 conclusion. 
 
 Of course, one might contend that man is not 
 spirit alone nor matter alone, but a mysterious 
 amalgam of the two. It might be said that we 
 mean by a spirit, a person that has no body, 
 and by a man a person that has one and 
 acts through it. But my contention is that 
 in man it is either his body that originates 
 the tipping of the table, or else it is his spirit 
 acting through his body; and if the latter, 
 then, despite the mediumship of the body, it is 
 a spirit that has acted. What is more, it is not 
 true even to the ordinary conceptions of persons 
 who believe in disembodied spirits, to say that 
 they regard such agencies as altogether without 
 bodies. So-called disembodied spirits are be- 
 lieved not to be purely incorporeal, but to inhabit 
 and operate through bodies impalpable to our 
 senses, but nevertheless material — some rare 
 substance, which yet operates in space and time 
 according to the law of cause and effect. We 
 find that persons who refuse to call human beings 
 spirits because they inhabit bodies, nevertheless 
 believe that personal agencies who are not in 
 human bodies, are yet '' disembodied " only rela- 
 tively to our senses. It seems, then, the more 
 
ARE WE SPIRITS? 5 
 
 justifiable and in accordance with general use to 
 speak of a human being as a spirit. We find, 
 also, that the refusal to do so inevitably and 
 actually makes men reason as if the substance 
 of a human being were material. And this, I 
 shall show, causes dire confusion of thought and 
 most pernicious practical results in the realm of 
 religion and of moral conduct. It is essential 
 to clear thinking and to the triumph of ideals 
 and principles of social justice, that we should 
 discipline ourselves to think of human beings as 
 spirits, and not as matter, and that we should 
 speak of them accordingly. 
 
 Readers are apt to be repelled by any such 
 attempt on the part of a writer to observe a 
 greater precision in the use of words than is 
 exacted by current speech. Yet there never has 
 been a thinker whose insight was due to a closer 
 discrimination than that of thegeneral pubHc,who 
 has not found himself compelled to manipulate 
 words with greater delicacy than is the common 
 habit. A recent writer declares that philosophic 
 originality consists largely in seeing facts that 
 ordinary learned people have no names for. If 
 this be the case, the original thinker is con- 
 strained to find a name, and make it point the 
 attention of his readers to the newly discerned 
 
6 ARE WE SPIRITS? 
 
 fact. That it may render this service, he must 
 dissociate some term of everyday speech from 
 its habitual setting, and attach it in the reader's 
 mind to new moorings. If in this process he 
 does not tear away from it anything of its 
 substantial meaning, he will have proved a 
 benefactor to the pubHc ; for, while doing no 
 violence to language, he will have rendered a 
 term closer to fact and more efficient as a 
 medium of communication between mind and 
 mind. 
 
 It is such an application of the word ** spirit" 
 that I find it necessary to attempt ; for except 
 by so doing, I know no way by which I can 
 convey to the minds of readers a message which 
 in my judgment is essential to the cause of 
 religious advancement. 
 
 Let us approach our theme from another 
 point of view. If you ask men whether they 
 believe in a spirit world they will not think 
 you refer to human society and the beings who 
 constitute it. The man who answers yes, 
 means that he believes in the existence of 
 personal intelligences who are not in human 
 bodies and are not responsible members of our 
 political and economic organisations. He who 
 answers no, means to deny the existence of such 
 
ARE WE SPIRITS? 7 
 
 beings. Neither intends to assert anything in 
 reference to the reaUty of human society. 
 No one, of course, would deny that human 
 beings are intelUgent moral agencies ; why, 
 then, should we think of such agencies as spirits 
 only when they do not inhabit human bodies 
 and only when they cannot be brought under 
 the laws of the State ? Why are they not 
 equally spirits when they are thus discernible 
 and amenable ? 
 
 If we were accustomed to think and speak of 
 one another while alive here on earth as spirits — 
 that is, as intelligent moral agencies whose 
 whole essence is thought, volition and emotion, 
 and who, despite our bodies, are in our real 
 nature invisible, intangible, inaudible, and there- 
 fore not material — we should gradually learn to 
 concentrate our attention and interest upon our 
 mentality, and to cast into proper subjection, 
 subordination and proportion the bodily aspect 
 of our existence. 
 
 The confusion in the popular mind which 
 needs to be corrected is the same as that which 
 distressed Socrates, if we may trust the report 
 of Plato in the Phaedo, When Crito asked, 
 ^' In what way shall we bury you ? " the reply 
 of Socrates was, '' In any way that you like ; 
 
8 ARE WE SPIRITS? 
 
 but you must get hold of me, and take care that 
 I do not run away from you." Then, says 
 Plato, he turned to the others who were present, 
 and added, with a smile, " I cannot make Crito 
 believe that I am the same Socrates who has 
 been talking and conducting the argument. He 
 fancies that I am the other Socrates whom he 
 will soon see, a dead body — and he asks how 
 shall he bury me." 
 
 According to Plato, therefore, the man who 
 talks and conducts an argument has none of the 
 characteristics of matter. He cannot be buried ; 
 he has no length, breadth, thickness, or weight. 
 The man who is loved by his friends is just as 
 invisible, he is just as exclusively spirit, as if he 
 had no body. If he is to be a spirit after his 
 death, it must be because he is one before. 
 But there are to-day as many persons who fall 
 into Crito's error as there were 2,400 years ago ; 
 and probably the company of those who have 
 disciplined their habitual thought to the dis- 
 crimination which Socrates made is as small and 
 select now as then. It is, in my judgment, in 
 part a consequence of this condition of things 
 that the public in general have made almost no 
 advance in religion and in moral thought and 
 practice upon the Athenian public. God is a 
 
ARE WE SPIRITS? 9 
 
 spirit, we say ; but we do not say, because we do 
 not see, that man is. Some believe that after 
 a man's death he is a spirit ; but, were they to 
 realise that he is just as much so before, they 
 might possibly invest him during his life-time 
 with something of the mystery, sanctity and 
 dignity which they ascribe to the dead. 
 
 These current associations with the idea of a 
 spirit world, and this protest which I am making 
 against them as pernicious to real insight into 
 the nature of man, are to be found presented 
 vividly and majestically, although humorously, 
 by Carlyle in his Sartor Resarhis. 
 
 " Could anything," he asks, *' be more miraculous than 
 an actual, authentic ghost ? The English Johnson longed 
 all his life to see one ; but could not, though he went to 
 Cock Lane, and thence to the church-vaults, and tapped 
 on coffins. Foolish Doctor ! Did he never, with the 
 mind's eye as well as with the body's, look round him into 
 that full tide of human life which he so loved ; did he never 
 so much as look into himself ? The good Doctor was a 
 ghost, as actual and authentic as heart could wish ; well- 
 nigh a million of ghosts were travelling the streets by his 
 side. Once more I say, . . . what else was he, what 
 else are we ? Are we not spirits, shaped into a body, into 
 an appearance ; and that fade away again into air, and 
 invisibility ? This is no metaphor, it is a simple scientific 
 fact: . . . Do we not squeak and gibber . . . and 
 glide bodeful, and feeble, and fearful ; or uproar and revel 
 
10 ARE WE SPIRITS? 
 
 in our mad Dance of the Dead, till the scent of the morning 
 air summons us to our still home ; and dreamy night 
 becomes awake, and day ? . . . Ghosts ! There are 
 nigh a thousand million walking the earth openly at 
 noontide ; some half-hundred have vanished from it, some 
 half-hundred have arisen in it, ere thy watch ticks once. 
 . . . These limbs, whence had we them ; this stormy 
 force; this life-blood with its burning passion ? They are 
 dust and shadow ; a shadow-system gathered round our 
 Me. . . . Can the earth, which is but dead and a 
 vision, resist spirits which have reality and are alive ? " 
 
 The substance of Carlyle's contention is that 
 this is a spirit world, and that the material 
 universe, our bodily life, is for us the other world. 
 
 All must agree that for human beings, human 
 society is the world in which they live and move 
 and have their being. For them, it is this world. 
 But if at the same time we are of opinion that 
 the life of the senses and the material universe 
 which we perceive, and our bodies, are the real 
 universe in which we live, it follows that this 
 world is not in its nature spiritual, and that if 
 there be any spirit world it is a remote and alien 
 order of things. Now, ordinary speech and 
 thought, as well as conventional religious 
 teaching, assumes this point of view. *^ This 
 world " means the world of physical sensations, 
 of bodily appetites and desires, of outward show 
 
ARE WE SPIRITS? 11 
 
 and pomp. The idea of unworldliness pre- 
 supposes that only by withdrawing from the 
 real universe of which we are part, and entering 
 into an alien sphere of existence, can we become 
 unselfish and joyously love truth and goodness 
 for their own sake. Now, if we and the world 
 we live in are essentially material, and the most 
 real part of our mental life, so far as we have 
 any, consists in thoughts and desires that are 
 distinctly dependent upon sensations of the 
 bodily life, then let us by all means confess 
 boldly that "this world" is the world of the 
 senses. But if such be the fact, it is almost 
 hopeless for us to try to live a disinterested 
 and rational life here on earth, and those systems 
 of religion must be right which turn our attention 
 to another world and a personal existence after 
 death. On the other hand, however, if human 
 beings and human society are essentially of the 
 nature of spirit, it will be an enormous mental 
 and moral uplift to any nation for its people to 
 be drilled from earliest childhood to see and to 
 assert that this world, here and now — not 
 despite, but by and in and through, the body — 
 is a spirit realm. 
 
 It is true that we should then still continue to 
 speak of another world ; but we should mean by 
 
12 ARE WE SPIRITS? 
 
 it the material universe. Such was the point of 
 view of Socrates, in the passage which I have 
 quoted from Plato. The bodily Socrates was 
 the ** other Socrates." He whom they loved, 
 the one nearest to them, whom they knew and 
 were inspired by — this Socrates was a spirit. 
 
 It is a principle of practical psychology that 
 whatever we assert to be real and present, whether 
 it be so or not, by the mere assertion in great 
 part becomes so. Now, undoubtedly the domi- 
 nation of the life of the senses over us is largely 
 due to the constant belief and assertion that it 
 is real, that it is not another, but is for us this 
 world. If, however, deeper reflection shows 
 that the purely mental side of our being is that 
 with which we are most intimately acquainted, 
 indeed, is the only aspect which has nothing of 
 the nature of shadow or dream or mere appear- 
 ance, and if we assert this discovery, until it 
 becomes an accepted commonplace of everyday 
 thought and action, our wider sympathies and 
 ideas will begin to possess a new dominance, 
 authority and power. Principles and ideals will 
 become the most real things in our experience, 
 and they will on that account tend to be- 
 come the supreme interests, claiming our chief 
 attention and pursuit. 
 
ARE WE SPIRITS? 13 
 
 Involved in the notion that the bodily life is 
 for us this world, and a spirit realm, if there be 
 such, is another world, is the popular belief that 
 if there be an unseen universe, it is not the 
 universe in which we live. It is supposed to be 
 a majestic act of faith, as distinct from reason 
 and knowledge, to believe in the existence of an 
 unseen universe. The current view of things is 
 that the world we know is the one that can be 
 seen with the eye, touched with the hand, and 
 the like ; consisting, in short, of matter or blind 
 mechanical force. If, however, Socrates and 
 Carlyle and some others be right in their 
 interpretation of the nature of men and of 
 human society — we being essentially thought, 
 feeling and desire, and a nation of men being 
 nothing but an organic unity of many wills — it 
 follows that the only world with which we are 
 acquainted from the inside is an unseen order of 
 being : the world of human loves and hates, 
 hopes and despairs. 
 
 I am not here attempting to enter into philo- 
 sophical criticism so far as to deny reality to the 
 material world. I am only contending that the 
 material universe — whether it be an indepen- 
 dent reality or a manifestation of something 
 itself unknown to us, such manifestation being 
 
14 ARE WE SPIRITS? 
 
 in part a product of the human mind itself— has 
 in it an element that is alien to us. It is, so to 
 speak, for us opaque. Our own mind, however, 
 as contrasted with our body, is a thing to us 
 transparent. We see in it and through it and 
 around it. We ourselves are in our nature what 
 we think we are. And all mind is of like 
 substance with ourselves. We are, in ultimate 
 essence, thought and desire and the conscious- 
 ness of these in the unity of our selfhood. Our 
 inner life is not an appearance of something else, 
 but is itself the ultimate reality and the supreme 
 guarantee of the knowledge of all else. 
 
 Unhappily, there never has yet been a whole 
 nation or race of men who have been taught 
 this simple doctrine that we and our world are 
 invisible and spiritual. Even the Oriental nations 
 who have accepted Vedantic or Buddhistic 
 teachings, in denying the reality of the life of 
 the senses, have unhappily extended their 
 nihilism to the reality and worth of finite moral 
 individuality. Instead of asserting the absolute- 
 ness and dignity of our thoughts, desires and 
 sentiments, and of human society and its efforts 
 towards social justice, they have obliterated and 
 discouraged all individualised existence as par- 
 taking of the illusion of the sense-world ; indeed, 
 
ARE WE SPIRITS? 15 
 
 while the Vedantic philosophy asserts the truth 
 of the Absolute Ego, and enjoins the merging of 
 the finite self into that, Buddhism, according to 
 some of its best interpreters, extends its nihilistic 
 blight even to the Infinite. The affirmation 
 which, in my judgment, the nations wait for, is 
 that finite human intelligences, co-operating for 
 the common ends of mundane existence, are 
 themselves of infinite worth and of ultimate and 
 absolute reality, in the same sense in which such 
 assertions have been made concerning an Infinite 
 Ego or Creator. 
 
 The plea I am advancing is but a part of a 
 widespread effort now being made to establish in 
 the popular mind a predominance of the claims 
 of mental science as compared with physical. 
 For more than a century, the physical sciences 
 have so pre-occupied precise and critical thinkers, 
 and have gained so large a place in secondary 
 and university education, that for most educated 
 men the will-world has faded into a shadowy 
 unreality, while atoms, molecules, electrons, 
 elements, masses of matter, ether, vibrations, 
 motion of matter through space, have, so to 
 speak, brow-beaten, if not bullied, the human 
 spirit into a sense that it is itself at best a mere 
 by-product of matter. Psychology, however, as 
 
16 ARE WE SPIRITS? 
 
 the experimental science of thought, emotion and 
 desire, has been making rapid strides during the 
 last two decades. The result is that the boldest 
 and best-equipped appliers of rigorous scientific 
 method are beginning to resent the unjustifiable 
 arrogance of the champions of materialism. In 
 Germany, America, France and England, there 
 are influential, although small, schools of experi- 
 mental psychologists ; and these are unanimously 
 asserting that psychology is by no means a 
 branch even of physiology. With one accord, 
 they maintain that the events which they study 
 are purely mental, however intimately and 
 universally correlated with physical processes ; 
 and that these mental events are by no means, 
 although correlated, merely secondary or derived 
 functions of physical phenomena. 
 
 Now, it must be clear to every reader that 
 if mental science has suffered through the 
 predominance of materialistic hypotheses, the 
 normative sciences of logic, aesthetics and ethics, 
 and the arts derived from them, must have been 
 involved in its fate. In order that these may 
 assume again their supreme and directive 
 station, mental science must be assigned its 
 rightful place. Its due recognition requires 
 that the atomic theory shall be seen to be 
 
ARE WE SPIRITS? 17 
 
 entirely inapplicable and irrelevant where mental 
 events are the subject of investigation. The 
 atomic theory can only be accepted as a working 
 hypothesis where the world of the senses is the 
 subject-matter; and we must remember that 
 even there it ought not to be regarded as the 
 theoretical counterpart of a universe existing 
 independently of mental perception. 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 The Reality of our Mental Life. 
 
 MY motive for asserting that men in human 
 bodies are spirits, is to make it felt that 
 mental activities are not a mere subordinate 
 accompaniment of brain-processes ; and my 
 incentive in saying that human society is a 
 spiritual organism, is the desire to call attention 
 to the truth that physical conditions are not the 
 ultimate factors and forces with which sociology 
 is to deal. Psychic factors are the real subject- 
 matter of social science. 
 
 When men are seen to constitute a spirit 
 world, and this is felt to be the real universe of 
 our experience, the positive religions of the 
 world will be tested by their social and psychic 
 service to mankind. Religions will be judged 
 as schemes of ethical edification, and will begin 
 to be subjected to such modifications in doctrine 
 and form as the life of nations needs. 
 
 Some writers, who have approached the 
 problems of ethics and religion along a very 
 
 18 
 
MENTAL LIFE 19 
 
 different road from that which I have travelled, 
 have come to the same deep conviction that 
 human society must be declared to be the real 
 spirit world. An instance is seen in the case of 
 the late Father Tyrrell, the Roman Catholic 
 leader of Modernism. Probably until he set the 
 example, no Romanist ever dreamed of speaking 
 of human society as a spirit world. For ages, 
 Roman Catholics have been pre-eminently the 
 perpetuators of the notion of a realm of 
 disembodied spirits ; such a realm plays a far 
 more prominent role in their scheme of redemp- 
 tion than in the Protestant discipline. Yet 
 Father Tyrrell, being keenly awake to the needs 
 of modern men and nations, abreast of the time 
 in psychology and theology, was never weary of 
 reiterating that human society itself is not only 
 a spirit world, but is the spirit world, so far as re- 
 ligion and the perfecting of man are concerned. 
 Typical of his thought is the following passage 
 in his chapter on '' The Life of Religion " in Lex 
 Or audi : — '* It is the spirit world, the will-world, 
 that is real to us beyond every other. In it our 
 soul lives its inmost life, and finds its deepest 
 rest and unrest, according as it succeeds or fails 
 in adjusting itself to its laws. It is in willing 
 and acting, that our reality is revealed to us ; 
 
20 MENTAL LIFE 
 
 and we count other things real in so far as they 
 seem to oppose a will to ours." Another passage 
 indicates still more forcibly his sense that human 
 society is the true invisible, spiritual order. He 
 says, *' Through that world to which our body 
 belongs, and of which our senses, memory and 
 understanding take account, we are made aware 
 of other wills which' express themselves therein 
 as we ourselves do, by the sensibly evident 
 results of their action. // is in our felt relation 
 to these other wills that our spiritual life and reality 
 consists y 
 
 Father Tyrrell goes so far in asserting the iden- 
 tity of our social life with the deepest spiritual 
 reality, that he even declares the common adage, 
 ** Two heads are better than one," and Christ's 
 promise that *' Where two or three are gathered 
 together in my name, there am I in the midst of 
 them," to be " but different utterances of the same 
 truth." In his Lex Credendi, he says that we 
 are superstitious if, when religion speaks of an 
 unclean spirit going out of a man as out of a 
 house, we give philosophic truth to such images. 
 Their only truth, he maintains, is the mental 
 fact that some vice or passion usurps the throne 
 of a man's reason, and divides the house of his 
 soul against itself. This, however, is not all. 
 
MENTAL LIFE 21 
 
 His impiety — if such a psychological interpreta- 
 tion of religious language be impiety — knows no 
 limits; for he says, '' If, then, we speak of the 
 spirit of holiness rather than of the Holy Spirit 
 as guiding the Church into all knowledge, we 
 are only tittering the same religious truth with 
 greater precision.'' After illuminating his meaning 
 here by calling the reader's attention to the 
 guiding influence in art which the spirit of Fra 
 Angelico has exercised, he says that that artist's 
 spirit is identical with its manifestation in certain 
 effects and productions. He adds, " This 
 points to the spirit as being primarily a sense, 
 feeling, sentiment, or instinct." 
 
 If this thought of Father Tyrrell's gains 
 ascendency in the Church of Rome, it will prove 
 the death-blow to the old-fashioned spiritism of 
 the Church, but it will make of that great 
 historic institution a city that hath foundations 
 eternal in the inner life of men and of states. 
 It will end for ever the clash of science against 
 religion and the alarm even of priests at the 
 advance of private judgment and freedom of 
 thought. 
 
 It will be observed upon reflection that the 
 point of view here presented does not constrain 
 us to accept two of the commonest implications 
 
22 MENTAL LIFE 
 
 of the ordinary belief in spirits. That belief 
 looks upon a spirit, in the first place, as a 
 substance, the attributes of which are volition, 
 feeling and intellect, and conceives of it as exist- 
 ing even when all its thought, its pleasure-pain 
 and desire, are suspended or inactive. The 
 savage notion of the soul also regards it as a sub- 
 stance of this sort. But, from the point of view 
 of modern psychology, a personal agency is 
 accepted as a real being although it is not counted 
 as a substance. On the contrary, it is rather 
 looked upon as a being whose reality consists in 
 its activities. A personal agent is the functional 
 unity of its own operations. A man regarded as 
 a spirit is, from the point of view of modern 
 psychology, nothing more nor less than a unified 
 system of interests. He as a spirit, his ** I," his 
 ** me," his ego, is not so much a substance in 
 which his spiritual attributes inhere, or a first 
 cause from which his activities emanate, as the 
 unity of his attributes and functions. At least, 
 for the purpose of asserting the reality of the 
 mental world, as distinguished from the material, 
 and in order to maintain that the world which 
 man knows and lives in is mental, there is no 
 occasion for our committing ourselves to any 
 idea of the soul or spirit as a substance or entity, 
 
MENTAL LIFE 23 
 
 which exists when mental operations are not 
 taking place. 
 
 Men, let us say, are so many unique systems 
 of interests ; but interests are not qualities or 
 relations of which chemistry or any other 
 physical science takes cognisance. Likewise, a 
 society of men, a group dominated by one 
 idea and moving to one end, is an entity which 
 physical science does not perceive, and yet on 
 the other hand is one to which mental science 
 does not count itself justified in attributing 
 existence or reality, except when the idea or end 
 is actually operating. If we keep to this 
 interpretation, and do not affirm any other 
 substantiality to spirit than is involved in saying 
 that it consists of its attributes and activities, 
 we escape the charge of making an unscientific 
 or unverifiable affirmation. 
 
 A second peculiarity in which the popular 
 belief in spirits differs from the psychological 
 view is that the former commits one to the 
 notion of personal immortality. The latter, in 
 affirming that human beings in this life are spirits, 
 does not commit us to the notion that a spirit 
 is indestructible or even that it can survive the 
 disintegration of that phenomenon which we call 
 its body. We may not be justified in giving the 
 
24 MENTAL LIFE 
 
 slightest countenance to the notion that the 
 spirit ceases to exist when the body dies — the 
 fact that it no longer manifests itself to us may 
 be due only to its withdrawal from the order of 
 human society — but, whatever be the fate of a 
 man's spirit at death, the statement that human 
 society is a spirit world is in no wise invalidated. 
 So little familiar, however, is this thought, 
 that most persons who deny the continuance of 
 the human spirit after death, or declare that we 
 have no knowledge concerning personal immor- 
 tality, also deny the existence of spirit of any 
 kind. They are materialists, or at least agnostics, 
 and look upon all mental life which accompanies 
 physiological activity as a fleeting phenomenon, 
 and assign it a wholly subordinate place in any 
 systematic scheme of existence. When the 
 mental side of life, however, has received the 
 minute, systematic and widespread attention 
 which has been given to the so-called outer 
 world, it will loom up at last in its true pro- 
 portions ; it will be seen to comprehend that 
 selfsame outer world, and perhaps even to give 
 to it its very framework and constitution ; and 
 this although we may never again see sufficient 
 ground for attributing to the human mind 
 indestructibility, or the power to survive that 
 
MENTAL LIFE 25 
 
 point where we cease to manifest ourselves as 
 conscious and responsible factors in the life of 
 families, cities and nations. 
 
 I have thus far implied that the worth of 
 human life would be enhanced if men generally 
 insisted upon the mental, in contradistinction to 
 the physical, as the real essence of the world in 
 which we live. This implication, however, must 
 not be attributed to any identification of the 
 spiritual with the good, as if to be a spirit was 
 to be good. On the contrary, in matter, and also 
 in animal life in general, there is neither good 
 nor bad ; and any moral evil which permeates the 
 life of the senses must have at least its root in 
 the spiritual nature of man. Despite this fact, 
 however, there may be an enormous ethical gain 
 from the spiritual interpretation of existence. In 
 the first place, sin, or moral evil, however rooted in 
 spirit, may not be constitutional, or due to the 
 organic structure of man's being ; and therefore 
 we may be justified in implying that the spiritual 
 is at least the sane and the wholesome, — if not 
 the absolutely good, the relatively so. Moreover, 
 the insistence upon the ultimate reality of our 
 mental nature drives us inevitably to look to 
 ideas in the human mind, to human efforts, to 
 instincts, sentiments, purposes and passions, as 
 
26 MENTAL LIFE 
 
 the creative energy which is to redeem man. 
 It justifies us in having a rehgious faith in edu- 
 cation, liberty, free discussion, in trying again 
 and again, despite failures ; in making unceasingly 
 new experiments, in looking for and fostering 
 individuality and originality, bravery, insight and 
 moral trust. It weakens our confidence in mere 
 machinery of politics, in mechanical routine and 
 drill, and in suppression of popular unrest by 
 fear and physical coercion. 
 
 Before closing this chapter, let me call the 
 attention of my readers to the fact that the 
 association of the word " spirit " with the higher 
 and deeper life of men on earth is perhaps not 
 so remote from its general literary and religious 
 use as the phrase *'the spirit world" would 
 seem to suggest. 
 
 In the literature of religion and poetry, it is 
 not only in contrast to matter that spirit is 
 spoken of. Take the profound Bible sentence, 
 " The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life." 
 Plainly there is no reference here to a realm of 
 disembodied intelligences. On the contrary, 
 the pointing is clearly to the life of men in 
 human society. The antithesis is between the 
 inner life and the outer, the life of moral taste 
 and that under compulsion of public opinion; 
 
MENTAL LIFE 27 
 
 between insight and habit ; between the vital 
 and the mechanical or conventional. It is 
 true that the word " spiritual " is not one ot 
 the stock-in-trade expressions of professional 
 writers on ethics ; but all the greatest ethical 
 philosophers have emphasised the distinction 
 between the spirit and the letter, and all, without 
 exception, have given their sanction to the 
 spiritual in this sense, as the only truly ethical. 
 Indeed, moral philosophers are at one with 
 religious teachers in condemning the *' moral " 
 when by that is meant mere custom and tradition, 
 in contrast to the vital and spontaneous. 
 
 In the Bible there is still another use of the 
 word " spiritual " which is closely allied to that 
 in which it is contrasted to the material, and yet 
 which really points to a purely ethical distinction. 
 For instance, when in the New Testament it is 
 said that *' to be carnally minded is death, but 
 to be spiritually minded is life and peace," there 
 is indeed implied an association of the bodily life 
 with sin, but the real meaning is that for the 
 spirit to render itself a slave to bodily desire is a 
 degradation of its true nature. And always in 
 literature, to be spiritually minded means un- 
 equivocally to be swayed by a sense that ideals 
 and principles of truth and righteousness are 
 
28 MENTAL LIFE 
 
 the only real and satisfying goals of human 
 striving. 
 
 Thus we see that when Father Tyrrell says 
 that the Holy Spirit means the spirit of holiness, 
 he has the highest authority of literary analogy 
 on his side ; and if the thought of another world, 
 and of disembodied spirits, should cease entirely 
 in the future to be suggested by the word '* spirit," 
 it would not only be of immense help towards the 
 scientific and moral advancement of religion, but 
 also a distinct literary gain. For undoubtedly 
 the poetic and ennobling use of the word is 
 that which I cited from Father Tyrrell where he 
 speaks of the spirit of Fra Angelico and of the 
 spirit of holiness. It is in this sense that lovers 
 of freedom speak of the spirit of liberty or the 
 spirit of John Milton. Analogous also is the 
 meaning when, for instance, Americans, filled 
 with a consciousness of the great mission which 
 their country is to achieve in the history of 
 mankind, speak of the American spirit, as of a 
 deep and real, although as yet almost uncon- 
 scious, purpose which is to inspire the masses 
 of the Republic. Now, it is quite possible that 
 Christianity will suffer no diminution of power or 
 eclipse of glory when the expression " the spirit 
 of Jesus Christ" ceases entirely to suggest the 
 
MENTAL LIFE 29 
 
 idea of a disembodied agency operating directly 
 upon men, and comes to mean exclusively that 
 idealistic trend in human history which exists 
 in and out of the churches, and which has 
 freed the slave, is emancipating woman and is 
 bringing kings and lords, and all worshippers 
 of Mammon, into the fellowship of a universal 
 equality. 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 The Mystery of Spirit Communication. 
 
 THERE are certain points in the course of 
 cosmic evolution where new series of 
 phenomena begin to manifest themselves — 
 phenomena which cannot be explained in the 
 terms and under the generalisations which were 
 adequate to account for previous lines and forms 
 of development. For instance, once assume 
 that matter has already begun to move, and it is 
 possible to conceive how the whole procedure 
 from star-dust to planetary system has gone on. 
 But how the initial impulse could have come 
 about from a state of quiescent matter, no mortal 
 can conceive who starts with only the known 
 laws of inertia. Accordingly, Aristotle felt him- 
 self constrained to posit a Prime Mover, which 
 was of the nature of mind. The beginning of 
 motion, then, is a mystery. For, although we 
 may not allow ourselves Aristotle's jump to an 
 infinite rational will, and although we take the 
 stand that the nature of matter itself, if we only 
 
 30 
 
SPIRIT COMMUNICATION 31 
 
 knew it more intimately, would be seen to 
 contain an explanation of the genesis of motion, 
 the beginning of motion is nevertheless a mystery 
 — it is an event which cannot be accounted for 
 according to any known uniformity of natural 
 sequence. 
 
 Similarly with the origin of life. Experience 
 has given us no instance of the generation of 
 living tissue except from tissue already living. 
 All goes smoothly with our biology, so long as 
 we may presuppose that life already exists. 
 Yet we find ourselves logically compelled to 
 believe in a time when there was no living matter 
 on the earth. How, then, can we account for 
 its first appearance ? We are compelled, again, 
 either to have recourse to an original act of 
 creative mind, or to accept the beginning of life 
 as a mystery, in the sense that it is a phenomenon 
 which cannot as yet be accounted for or 
 classified by chemistry and physics. 
 
 The origin of intelligence is also generally 
 recognised as a problem unsolved. But the 
 mysteriousness of the inter-communication of 
 separate minds has been almost universally 
 overlooked. 
 
 There is no belief more deeply embedded 
 in common sense than the conviction that 
 
 c 
 
B2 SPIRIT COMMUNICATION 
 
 separate minds communicate with one another. 
 If any person in a meeting of human beings 
 thought that all the others existed only in 
 his mind, he would be insane. Somehow it is 
 a presupposition of all sanity, that other minds 
 than one's own exist independently of one's own 
 recognition of them, and therefore of one's own 
 existence. Indeed, to doubt one's own being is 
 not a more alarming symptom of mental aberra- 
 tion than to question the independent reality of 
 other personal consciousnesses with whom one, 
 somehow or other, is in communication. In 
 short, what in our experience is meant by the 
 existence of intelligence is the existence of a 
 plurality of intelligences in rapport with one another. 
 Yet how could such communication have ever 
 begun ? 
 
 First as to the plurality of minds. Modern 
 psychologists, as we have seen, have done 
 much to destroy the old notion of the ego as 
 a substantial entity which exists even when 
 no mental operation is going on. But their 
 destructive criticism has only brought out the 
 more prominently the fact of the plurality 
 of consciousnesses. There may be gathered 
 together in one room two hundred human 
 intelligences, listening to the discourse of a 
 
SPIRIT COMMUNICATION 33 
 
 speaker. But each intelligence is in a peculiar 
 way absolutely separated from every other ; 
 that is, by no possible conceivability of accident 
 can the mental activity of one person flow 
 into or fuse with that of another in the way in 
 which the different thoughts, feelings, appetites 
 and desires within the mind of any one person 
 cohere in the unity of his self-consciousness. If it 
 did, the two persons would coalesce into one 
 person. The experiences in one man's soul 
 never by any possible chance stray over into the 
 domain of another's. *' My thought," as Pro- 
 fessor James vividly says, " belongs with my 
 other thoughts, and your thought with your 
 other thoughts. There is no giving or bartering 
 between them. No thought ever comes into 
 direct sight of a thought in another personal 
 consciousness than its own. Absolute insulation, 
 irreducible pluralism, is the law. Neither 
 contemporaneity, nor proximity in space, nor 
 similarity of quality and content, are able to 
 fuse thoughts together which are sundered by 
 this barrier of belonging to different personal 
 minds. The breaches between such thoughts are 
 the most absolute breaches in nature. 
 
 When we feel this to be so, the mystery of 
 communication of mind and mind becomes for 
 
34 SPIRIT COMMUNICATION 
 
 us the most absolute mystery in nature. There 
 are astonishing breaches even within the mental 
 life of one self-conscious personality ; strange 
 indeed, for instance, is the time-gap in a man's 
 mind when he is sound asleep. And yet, 
 despite hours of suspended continuity of 
 memory, the conscious identity of the past 
 blends into that of the present. As Professor 
 James well puts the case, " When Peter and 
 Paul wake up in the same bed and recognise 
 that they have been asleep, each one of them 
 mentally reaches back and makes connection 
 with but one of the two streams of thought 
 which were broken by the sleeping hours. 
 As the current of an electrode buried in 
 the ground unerringly finds its way to its own 
 similarly buried mate, across no matter how 
 much intervening earth ; so Peter's present 
 instantly finds out Peter's past, and never by 
 mistake knits itself on to that of Paul." Yet 
 Peter and Paul, although each is absolutely 
 encased in his own memory-synthesis, are as 
 fully aware of each other's existence and quality 
 of mind as of their own ; and, were they not 
 so, woe to them ! The inference as to another's 
 mind is as valid and irresistible as the insight into 
 oneself. But this is not all. There is not a 
 
SPIRIT COMMUNICATION 35 
 
 characteristic of self-conscious personality in 
 anyone which has not somehow been awakened 
 by mental contact with other personalities. 
 
 The fact that one finite human intelligence 
 can communicate with another is more familiar 
 to us, and more deeply inwrought into our 
 lives as a presupposition of all sane action and 
 calculation, than any other fact ; nobody denies 
 it : in doing so he would prove it. It is so 
 common that, to the child's mind and the 
 ordinary man's, it goes without saying ; few 
 have even thought to ask how it is conceivable 
 that two intelligences can come into reciprocal 
 understanding. Yet the more one attempts to 
 explain it, and the more one brings vividly to 
 mind all the factors involved, the more inexplic- 
 able it appears. There is only one experience 
 more mysterious. The supreme mystery of 
 mysteries is that of which I shall treat in a 
 later chapter, under the name of spiritual com- 
 munion. While that experience presupposes 
 the one which we are here discussing as spirit com- 
 munication, it is nevertheless not explained by it. 
 
 The mysteriousness of communication may 
 perhaps be borne in upon us the more acutely, if 
 we consider a case where the attempt to commu- 
 nicatcifails of its customary success. I once saw 
 
36 SPIRIT COMMUNICATION 
 
 a mother ttying to convey to her boy of ten the 
 simple thought that what he saw standing before 
 him in the street was a horse. She repeated the 
 word "horse," while pointing to the animal; 
 then she patted it, and let her boy do the same. 
 To me the little fellow looked perfectly normal ; 
 but, despite all her efforts, she failed to transmit 
 her thought to him. When I ventured to imply, 
 in euphemistic phrase, that the child was an 
 idiot, the woman, with a mother's indomitable 
 pride and faith, smiled in pity at me, and replied, 
 ** No ; the child's intelligence is as bright as 
 anyone's, but there is some barrier, some inter- 
 posing obstacle, between his spirit and ours, 
 which renders communication impossible. It is 
 not that my boy has no mind, but that his spirit 
 is imprisoned within a body without doors and 
 windows. After death, if not now, the barrier 
 will fall away!" Her theory, although it may 
 have been born of pride, covered the facts at 
 least as well as my hypothesis that her boy 
 had no intelligence at all. As Browning says, 
 in Paracelsus: 
 
 May not truth be lodged alike in all, 
 The lowest as the highest ? — some slight film 
 The interposing bar which binds a soul 
 And makes the idiot, just as makes the sage 
 Some film removed ? 
 
SPIRIT COMMUNICATION 37 
 
 But we must not let Browning's metaphor 
 tempt us to conceive that spirit communication 
 might become immediate and perfect, were only- 
 all interposing media removed. If at one time 
 and in one place physical substance is a barrier, 
 it must be remembered that at most times 
 and places it is a conductor or transmitter. 
 If we imaginatively conceive the situation, we 
 shall see that when two intelligences succeed 
 in communicating, the whole inter-standing 
 universe of matter, including their bodies, 
 instead of proving a barrier and an obstacle, 
 becomes itself a supple medium for the transit 
 of thought ; and even then they could not 
 communicate were it not that they are the 
 inheritors of an art the beginnings of which are 
 hidden in the remotest obscurity of human 
 history. How that art originated baffles utterly 
 the wit of man. Thus much, however, we can 
 know — that an intervening medium is a sine qua 
 non of the art of communication. 
 
 Every effort to communicate directly, spirit 
 to spirit — that is, mystically, by inner union, 
 without the mediation of matter — has failed* 
 The attempt to do so without doubt violates the 
 very constitution of self-conscious personality, 
 and would finally disintegrate and destroy one's 
 
38 SPIRIT COMMUNICATION 
 
 sanity. The recognition, however, on the other 
 hand, of the necessity of a physical medium of 
 communication stimulates and develops the 
 efficiency and the character of the ego. The 
 art of communication, at any one period of the 
 social evolution of mind, furthermore, has never 
 been developed except as it has taken advantage 
 of the organised channels of communication 
 which we have inherited from the lower animals. 
 There is no instance of the success of any effort 
 to develop new and supplementary senses or 
 occult powers. Indeed, a true doctrine of the 
 supremacy of spirit in the nature of man, 
 although it denies the independent existence 
 of matter, must assert the dependence of 
 spirit upon it in every effort at self-realisation. 
 Although matter is not master, yet neither can 
 the spirit overlook this peculiar item in con- 
 sciousness which we call the physical universe. 
 
 There are manv discussions as to what sort 
 of reality the material world possesses when 
 viewed from the standpoint of the philosophical 
 idealist. The idealist declares that the universe 
 as we know it has no existence independent of 
 minds who perceive it. What, then, is this 
 world, which is, as it were, encompassed by 
 and derived from percipient mind ? Whatever 
 
SPIRIT COMMUNICATION 39 
 
 else it is or is not, we must, from the point of 
 view of the human will, or rather of the 
 plurality of human wills, conceive of the physical 
 universe as the permanent possibility of spirit 
 communication, as the indispensable medium of 
 the exchange of spiritual values. We must 
 think of absolute reality as a community of wills 
 operating by means of the wholly reliable and 
 trustworthy apparatus, which to our senses 
 appears to be an outer world, but which to the 
 communal mind of man is an inner universe, the 
 reality of which consists supremely in its 
 readiness and trustworthiness as a transmitter 
 of messages. Each personal intelligence at one 
 specialised point has the privilege of operating 
 this communal instrument. At that point 
 which we call his body he has such a vantage- 
 ground, and his desire to preserve it and per- 
 petuate successors is his will's recognition of 
 the necessity of the physical item in mental 
 experience, as the condition of communication 
 in a universe of irreducible pluralism. 
 
 There are those who stand in puzzled admira- 
 tion before the invention of wireless telegraphy ; 
 but this device is as nothing compared to the 
 daily communication by ordinary speech which 
 it presupposes. The wonder of wireless tele- 
 
40 SPIRIT COMMUNICATION 
 
 graphy concerns only a new medium or instru- 
 mentality for communication, supplementing the 
 human body ; it is, in fact, no mystery at all, as 
 it is wholly explicable and classifiable by the 
 known laws and presuppositions of physical 
 science. Indeed, it arose merely as a practical 
 deduction from these presuppositions. What 
 chiefly removes it from any claim to excite our 
 wonder is that those who operate it have already 
 been in collusion. They have agreed upon a 
 code ; they have attuned their instruments, and 
 they could not have done so except that they 
 were previously **in intelligence." It is no 
 mystery when two persons, after agreeing upon a 
 system of signals and going apart a few feet or a 
 few thousand miles, are able to understand the 
 messages they transmit to each other. It would 
 be a mystery, however, if two persons not already 
 in understanding, could ever, whether by wire- 
 less receivers or by word of mouth, or the use of 
 any other material means, exchange ideas. 
 
 Only one other kind of communication could 
 be more startling — but that is a kind which, as 
 our psychological analysis has shown, never 
 takes place. It would be still more won- 
 derful than communication by mechanical 
 means without pre-arrangement, if two human 
 
SPIRIT COMMUNICATION 41 
 
 intelligences could communicate, even after pre-- 
 arrangement, without any intervening medium 
 of communication. This, as I have in- 
 sisted, is a thing that never has happened and 
 never will happen ; as it would involve the 
 breakdown of the personal identity of those who 
 spiritually invaded each other. Even persons 
 who believe that telepathy is a fact, immediately 
 proceed to postulate some hitherto unknown 
 medium of transmission between spirit and spirit. 
 They assume some motion in the one brain which 
 occasions vibrations, and these, being transmitted 
 by some hypothetical ether to another brain 
 by chance attuned to response, awaken the 
 original thought or emotion in the spirit that 
 owns the second brain. But, even in the case 
 of telepathy, when once a medium of transmission 
 is assumed, the only element of mystery involved 
 is due to our inability to answer the question, 
 How can two spirits begin to communicate 
 unless they have precedently agreed that cer- 
 tain sequences of experience shall be adopted 
 by them as a code of signals ? Thus we come 
 back to the same mystery : how did the first 
 communication of spirit with spirit arise ? How 
 did the two minds come to an understanding, 
 unless there was already an understanding 
 
42 SPIRIT COMMUNICATION 
 
 between them, which, in rendering it possible, 
 rendered it also superfluous ? 
 
 Perhaps the force of this mystery will be felt 
 more closely if we consider the much-debated 
 possibility of establishing communication with 
 the supposed inhabitants of Mars. Could any 
 set of phenomena sent forth by dwellers on that 
 planet ever in themselves bear any mark that 
 could betray to us that they were being used as 
 a system of signals, or reveal to us the meaning 
 of the message intended to be communicated ? 
 No mere regularity of repetition, or symmetry of 
 form presented, no unprecedented outline or 
 quality, could in itself be a proof that the pheno- 
 menon was a signal ; for the essence of a signal 
 lies in no characteristic of the phenomenon 
 used, but exists wholly in the minds of those 
 who give and receive it. 
 
 The truth is that from the fact of communi- 
 cation we infer the intelligence, and, until the 
 communication takes place, no circumstances 
 leading us to infer an intelligence can contain 
 sufficient ground to justify the inference. There 
 are very few known circumstances of the planet 
 Mars to warrant the belief that intelligent 
 agencies inhabit it ; but, even if we should there 
 discover human bodies similar to our own, it is 
 
SPIRIT COMMUNICATION 4a 
 
 difficult to conceive how communication could 
 begin. That it would begin is most probable ; 
 but, when it took place, the very event would 
 seem to imply that there was already a general 
 community of mind, a mutual recognition and 
 understanding, as if the two minds had after all 
 been always only one mind. 
 
 We have, of course, before us incessantly, in 
 the case of each new-born child, the beginning 
 of spirit communication. But familiarity cannot 
 rob it of the glory of its freshness ; each time it 
 happens, the mother's joy is in part due to the 
 sense of the mystery of it all. To a trained 
 mind or to insight, it is not the rarity of an 
 occurrence which renders it mysterious, but 
 simply the inability to trace it to known causes. 
 
 My contention is that always, when we 
 conceive it possible for two spirits to communi- 
 cate any particular thought or sentiment, we 
 presuppose that they are already aware of a 
 system of pre-adopted signals. 
 
 It is a curious evidence of superficiality of 
 thought, betrayed by some persons interested in 
 communication with disembodied spirits, that 
 they feel the wonder of the thought that spirits 
 not in human bodies can come into rapport with 
 us, while they do not realise that in all such 
 
44 SPIRIT COMMUNICATION 
 
 supposed manifestations the spirits are repre- 
 sented as understanding and using some sort of 
 human language. If the spirits do this, however, 
 they must have already been in communication, 
 and the difficulty of their conveying their message 
 without possessing a body like ours is only a 
 problem of physics. It is further to be noticed 
 that supposed discarnate spirits, in proportion 
 as they seem not to understand our system of 
 signals or to speak a foreign language, appear to 
 have no intelligence. When the sceptical and 
 cynical are tempted to turn in disgust from the 
 results of mediumistic seances, the believers in 
 spiritism most logically and subtly reciprocate 
 the scorn, maintaining that lack of acquaintance 
 on the part of the spirits with our language, or 
 with new apparatus for communication with us, 
 is no proof of imbecility or triviality. But they 
 do undeniably concede that the remoter a spirit 
 is from our system of communication, the less 
 evidence there is of his intelHgence. If he were 
 quite removed from it, how could he ever begin 
 to communicate ? Nay, how could he ever 
 know that we were spirits ? 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 
 **0URSELF, NOT OuRSELVES." 
 
 IN the case of spirits in human bodies, born of 
 parents in intelHgent rapport, we find our- 
 selves almost forced to the conclusion that there 
 is no independent mind of the individual child, 
 but that the intelligence it manifests is only one 
 new centre of activity in a common or universal 
 human mind, which in some way awakens to 
 separate self-consciousness at distinct points, 
 while also gaining a vague consciousness of the 
 general mind of which it is a manifestation. But 
 if this be so, we reach the same position as 
 before — that somehow, in communicating with 
 other spirits, we are in a very deep sense com- 
 municating ultimately with ourself, and that our 
 identity with others is deeper even than the 
 ^* irreducible pluralism " of which Professor 
 James speaks. 
 
 In a preceding chapter I have cited approv- 
 ingly Carlyle's presentation of human beings as 
 spirits. But if one reads the whole of the 
 
 45 
 
46 '^OURSELF, NOT OURSELVES" 
 
 passage from which I have extracted sentences^ 
 one becomes aware that his conception of human 
 society as a spirit world is individuahstic and 
 anarchic, and in direct contradiction to the idea 
 that each human spirit is born of the social 
 mind. Carlyle, overlooking the organic inter- 
 dependence of human spirits, pictures the 
 thousand million living at any one time as 
 having somehow rushed or been spurted helter- 
 skelter out of the void and infinite " inane," and 
 as about to be soon extruded from our midst — 
 thrown, as it were, once more back into the void. 
 He distinctly speaks of this inane as the real 
 ** home " of spirits. Out of that they dip down 
 into our bewildering sense-world, and ere long 
 are snatched back. Surely a truer delineation of 
 human beings is that they are not only born into 
 families, but that as spirits they issue forth from 
 the mind of society as absolutely as their bodies 
 proceed from those of their parents. Without 
 doubt, they come trailing clouds of glory; but 
 these are of the very substance and form of the 
 social universe of man — which must therefore be 
 the reality of Wordsworth's '' God who is our 
 home." 
 
 There is a still surer ground for believing that 
 each of us as individual personalities of finite 
 
" OURSELF, NOT OURSELVES '' 47 
 
 intelligence is verily split off from the common 
 mind of human society. I have spoken thus far 
 as if spirit communication were simply intellec- 
 tual ; but J have not for a moment forgotten that 
 it is far more than a mere interchange of 
 knowledge. In all communication, indeed, the 
 intellect is subordinate and subsidiary to the 
 aggressive demands of the will and the exhaust- 
 less cravings of emotion. The intellectual aspect 
 of communication is an instance of the truth of 
 the theory that intellect in general is an invention 
 of the will — an organ for the gratification of 
 desire. Ordinarily this theory is thought of as 
 true only within the mental life of a single 
 individual. But a study of spirit communication 
 would lead one to believe that intellect in 
 individuals is an invention of the General Will 
 and the Common Heart of social humanity ; 
 for it is inconceivable how an isolated will 
 could ever have become self-conscious and fore- 
 seeing. In any case, spirit communication is 
 motived by a craving and a need which pre- 
 cedes any clear perception, and which itself 
 is the mother that 'invents and uses codes of 
 signals to make it possible. The messages 
 transmitted, moreover, are themselves but means 
 towards the gratification of the constitutional 
 
 D 
 
48 *^OURSELF, NOT OURSELVES" 
 
 needs of volition and feeling. Ultimately, these 
 cravings are nothing other than the need ot 
 serving and loving and of being served and loved 
 in conscious fellowship. 
 
 No one has more beautifully depicted these 
 yearnings of finite human spirits for one 
 another, across the absolute gulfs which insulate 
 every finite psychic entity from every other, 
 than Plato. None better than he was aware 
 that, while the bodily life participates in this 
 unrest, yet even the love that is of the senses 
 is rooted in a demand of the spirit, and can there- 
 fore never be satisfied until fellowship becomes 
 wholly spiritualised. Every poet who has known 
 the human heart, from Euripides to Robert 
 Browning, has ascribed this quality to the 
 mutual attraction of human beings. And every 
 observer of human nature with imagination 
 enough to reconstruct inward life from outward 
 incidents, finds no day or hour pass without 
 confirmations of the spiritual nature of love, 
 as well as of the irrepressible insistence of its 
 claim. 
 
 Indeed, it is only when the appetites and 
 desires of the body, as the young know them, 
 begin to wane, or to pall upon the senses, that 
 spiritual isolation first induces throughout the 
 
^^OURSELF, NOT OURSELVES" 49 
 
 soul a massive and appalling chill, a weight 
 of bereavement unbearable. It is only with 
 advancing years that the sense of loneliness by 
 its limitless reach makes us aware of the vast- 
 ness of the human spirit and its capacity to love 
 and be loved. I have known men and women 
 over threescore years of age, who were stricken 
 down with general paralysis, except that the 
 brain and organs of speech remained intact, and 
 who^were thus bedridden for years ; and who yet, 
 by the majestic strength and intensity of their 
 esteem for those whom they admired, and by 
 the peace they experienced in the presence 
 and conversation of these, demonstrated that 
 the spiritual vigour of their best days had 
 suffered no diminution or eclipse. Such is the 
 communication of spirits who emanate from a 
 common mind and are inheritors ot a communal 
 art of signalling through space. 
 
 The problem of establishing means of com- 
 munication with spirits outside our social system 
 is, on the other hand, almost grotesque ; and it 
 sometimes obtrudes itself in far from serious 
 incidents. An unusual sight or sound, if it 
 cannot be traced to known physical causes, often 
 tempts us to suspect that it emanates from 
 some intelligent agent who wishes to communi- 
 
50 ^'OURSELF, NOT OURSELVES" 
 
 cate. Your dining-room clock, let us say, 
 besides its wonted tick, begins to emit knocks 
 or raps. In jest, but not illogically, you begin 
 to ask questions. You say, *' If there be a 
 spirit, will it rap three times ? " Observe, 
 however, that by your question you imply that 
 it knows the purport of your human language, 
 and so is already in understanding with you. 
 If this be so, communication is easy ; but, 
 then, there must already have been prior 
 communication with those of your speech, 
 else how could it know what your question 
 meant ? But suppose your question is not 
 followed up by responsive raps : that is no 
 proof that the original erratic raps did not 
 emanate from the will of a spirit ; they may 
 have been induced by a spirit that had not 
 derived its being from our communal mind. 
 
 The consideration of such a case may perhaps 
 cause the suspicion to flash upon us that com- 
 munication between two spirits not begotten of one 
 communal mind would be, if not an impossibility, 
 at least an abnormality — a thing which the com- 
 munal mind in each must, by its very loyalty to the 
 spiritual whole to which it belongs, condemn as 
 illicit. But my immediate purpose here is only 
 to create a realising sense in the reader that all 
 
"OURSELF, NOT OURSELVES" 51 
 
 exchange of thought between one human being 
 and another is essentially spirit communication, 
 and that the fact that it is mediated by our 
 bodies in no wise materialises its nature. Even 
 spirits who are disembodied must, if we are to 
 pay any respect to alleged spiritistic manifesta- 
 tions, also resort to material means, and can in 
 no wise interrupt or intercept the ordinary laws 
 of mechanics. 
 
 The advantage of bearing in mind that all 
 human conversation is spirit communication is 
 this, that it helps us to lift our thought out of a 
 materialistic way of interpreting our daily life. 
 The mechanism of communication ceases to 
 assume the supreme role ; it is seen to be what 
 it really is — the slave of the will of man. This 
 point of view causes us to accept with gratitude 
 and humility our bodily existence and the whole 
 material universe, as the only conceivable 
 condition upon which spirit communication is 
 possible. While it asserts the supremacy of the 
 human spirit, it also asserts the absolute depend- 
 ence of finite moral intelligences upon an 
 intervening medium which can be trusted in 
 absolute faith to be true to its own order and 
 sequences. The slightest arbitrariness or whim- 
 sicality on the part of the medium through which 
 
52 ^^OURSELF, NOT OURSELVES" 
 
 we communicate would convert the spiritual 
 order into a pandemonium of bewilderment. 
 Spirit communication takes place not in spite of 
 our bodily nature, but by virtue of it. Indeed, 
 the test of the worth of any code of conduct in 
 the treatment of our bodies must be that 
 obedience to its injunctions preserves them 
 intact and renders them and the whole universe 
 of matter more efficient as a medium for the 
 transference of sentiment and for the triumphant 
 advance of community of spirit. 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 
 Spiritual Communion. 
 
 WE cannot move to the heart of our theme 
 more quickly than by using as stepping- 
 stones three texts from the sacred scriptures of 
 the world: one from the Gospel according to 
 Matthew, the second from Professor Clifford's 
 essay on ** The Ethics of Religion," and the 
 third from Shelley's ** Prometheus Unbound." 
 That from St. Matthew is the oft-quoted 
 sentence, '* Where two or three are gathered 
 together in my name, there am I in the midst ot 
 them." The one from Professor Clifford is an 
 almost unknown but a profound sentence, in which 
 he makes wholly true a famous but inadequate 
 dictum of Matthew Arnold's. Arnold had 
 declared that ** God is the enduring Power, 
 not ourselves, that makes for righteousness." 
 Clifford, with wider and finer vision, rounds and 
 closes in the truth by saying, *' It is Ourself, not 
 ourselves, that makes for righteousness." The 
 
 53 
 
54 SPIRITUAL COMMUNION 
 
 third text consists of Shelley's outburst in praise 
 of ideal humanity, where he cries — 
 
 Man, one harmonious soul of many a soul, 
 Whose nature is its own divine control, 
 Where all things flow to all, as rivers to the sea ! 
 
 Now, it is remotely possible that by the words 
 which the first Gospel attributes to him, Jesus 
 only meant that after his death, if several of his 
 disciples should meet together in devotion to his 
 cause, an occurrence would happen like those 
 which are alleged to take place in modern 
 spiritualistic seances. Conceivably — let us grant 
 — he meant that when his spirit had left his 
 body he would return as a disembodied intelli- 
 gence and make his presence known to them. 
 But it is hard to believe that he could have 
 meant only this. For, whatever penetration he 
 may have had into a supernatural and super- 
 human order of existence, and whatever powers 
 he may have possessed transcending those of 
 ordinary mortality, he certainly stands unique 
 among the sons of men for his profound insight 
 into the human spirit as it manifests itself in 
 our deeper social life. Now, in that deeper life 
 there is a rare and exalted experience to which 
 loyal disciples of the master-souls of history have 
 borne witness. It is that after the death of a 
 
SPIRITUAL COMMUNION 55 
 
 great and good man, his less gifted followers, 
 drawing closer to one another in the hour of 
 bereavement, for a new dedication of their own 
 gifts to their imperilled cause, find themselves 
 wonderfully reinforced in energy of soul, in glow 
 of enthusiasm, and in clearness of spiritual 
 vision. This renewal of the life of each so 
 transcends the moral genius of any one, that it 
 cannot be traced to the separate individualities 
 present. It is also unmistakably dependent 
 upon the fact that they are gathered together in 
 one meeting-place, in the purpose of their 
 departed leader. Were they to see the universal 
 character of their experience, and to formulate 
 it in the strict but prosaic phraseology of mental 
 and social science, they would declare that a 
 group in such circumstances begins to act like 
 one mind, and that the new influx of power which 
 each person receives is derived from the general 
 will of the group. 
 
 Now, is it possible that Jesus, who had once 
 travelled to Jordan to be baptised of John — 
 that Jesus, whose great predecessor had recently 
 suffered martyrdom — had never directly experi- 
 enced the working of this law ? Further, if he 
 had had such experience, is it possible that he 
 would have prophesied the manifestation of 
 
56 SPIRITUAL COMMUNION 
 
 himself after death in the midst of his disciples- 
 only as a disembodied spirit ? 
 
 It is conceivable, of course, that in his thought 
 Jesus blended the purely psychic and social 
 experience with a ** spiritistic " interpretation of 
 it. If he did, however, that would not lead any 
 thinker trained in mental science to overlook the 
 fact that the reality he referred to was the 
 psychic and social experience, while his spiritism 
 was only a theory to account for the sublime 
 fact. 
 
 But as one ponders the inner meaning of the 
 New Testament stories in the light of the best 
 historical and psychological criticism, one's 
 suspicion grows deeper that in all probability 
 this saying attributed to Jesus was first formu- 
 lated after his death by a disciple who had 
 himself experienced the working of the wonderful 
 law to which the words plainly point. It must 
 have seemed to such a one, unused to the 
 rigorous discipline of modern psychological 
 analysis, that the new spiritual power which had 
 entered into them was verily Christ's living 
 presence ; with this difference, that before it had 
 been bodily and external to them, while now it 
 energised them from within. But whether Jesus 
 anticipated, or the writer of the Gospel actually 
 
SPIRITUAL COMMUNION 57 
 
 experienced, the rare phenomenon, it is equally 
 precious ; also, the striking formulation of it in 
 the Gospel of St. Matthew unquestionably 
 deserves the pre-eminence given to it by all 
 Christian teachers. 
 
 After the foregoing analysis, can anyone 
 doubt that to say with Professor Clifford, *' It is 
 Ourself, not ourselves, that makes for righteous- 
 ness," is but to utter St. Matthew's truth less 
 concretely but more universally ? Again, it was 
 the experience of this organic unity of men 
 inspired by an ideal, that projected itself through 
 the imagination of Shelley into a vision of all 
 human society as ** one harmonious soul of many 
 a soul, whose nature is its own divine control. 
 
 Now, a joyful consciousness of the one har-^ 
 monious soul unifying their wills was a distin- 
 guishing mark of the Apostles after Pentecost. 
 The general will of the newly founded society 
 was their Comforter and inspirer, and they gave 
 it at least equal eminence, as an object of praise 
 and thanksgiving, with the Person of Jesus 
 himself, and with "the Father'* whom he 
 worshipped. 
 
 For the purpose of our argument, let us 
 discriminate between communion and communi- 
 cation. We may limit the word ** communica-^ 
 
58 SPIRITUAL COMMUNION 
 
 tion " to the fellowship of individual person 
 with person. Then it is possible for us to 
 reserve the word " communion " for the conscious 
 unity of the soul of an individual person with 
 that group-spirit which becomes the directing 
 will and harmoniser of men in moral fellowship. 
 If we interpret the worship of God the Father 
 as psychologically an inward meditation, achiev- 
 ing its richest fruition in the isolated spirit 
 during solitude and through the contemplation 
 of rational principles, and if we regard loyalty 
 to Jesus Christ as but a special instance of the 
 fellowship of person with person in holy friend- 
 ship, we become aware, after acquaintance with 
 the power of the group-spirit, that the two former 
 experiences by no means cover the fullness of 
 religious life. Communion — the union of one 
 person with the unifying will of many — is an 
 experience of a new order. While it does not 
 supersede, it supplements in an essential manner 
 both devotion in the isolated soul and co-opera- 
 tion of soul with soul. Only in communion 
 of the individual with the universal mind of a 
 concrete group is the craving of the spirit fully 
 satisfied. 
 
 What is more, to communion, as distinct from 
 other means of spiritual satisfaction, is attached 
 
SPIRITUAL COMMUNION 59 
 
 the happy circumstance that human life on earth 
 is more favourable to it than to reciprocal 
 communication or to the seclusion and retire- 
 ment of solitary worship. Scarcely once in a 
 lifetime may chance favour the meeting of spirit 
 with spirit in the perfect understanding for 
 which spirit yearns ; and even then the meeting 
 is likely to last only for one mystic moment. 
 Nor do the duties, cares and interests of life 
 allow frequent retirement and withdrawing of 
 consciousness to the soul's own centre of gravity, 
 where it realises its inward self-sufficiency. 
 The general will, however, of a group to which 
 we belong, and which is working for the estab-^ 
 lishment of a perfect society on earth, will 
 accompany us through the thick of the fight and 
 fuse itself with a thousand interests. Nor does 
 it require that the many persons shall indivi- 
 dually experience the perfection, each with each, 
 of spirit communication ; the soul of the group 
 tends to induce, but does not wait for, perfected 
 friendships. 
 
 Rare and wonderful, but undeniable, is the 
 inner strength and satisfaction which lonely, 
 misunderstood and disappointed men and women 
 experience from spiritual communion, without 
 even the opportunity of receiving and conferring 
 
60 SPIRITUAL COMMUNION 
 
 individualised affection. The craving which 
 cannot be satisfied except by the inpouring of 
 the general will is altogether different from that 
 which needs the love and affection of others. 
 The love for an individual spirit demands from 
 it recognition, appreciation and attention ; such 
 love must be noticed ; without approbation it is 
 cast down. He, on the other hand, who has 
 experienced inspiration from a group-spirit — 
 itself super-personal — is, as it were, himself 
 rendered super-personal. He has lost himself 
 and, with himself, the craving for love from 
 other personal selves ; but he has found himself 
 again in the larger self — the Social Oversoul — 
 which unifies him with others too closely to 
 admit of the consciousness that they are different 
 identities. 
 
 Human beings, as they advance beyond 
 middle life, generally crave more intensely even 
 than in youth the consolation of mutual under- 
 standing and deference of spirit for spirit ; but 
 exception from this rule should be made in the 
 case of those who have been quickened to new 
 life by spiritual communion. Theirs is the 
 Comforter ; even in death they will be sustained 
 and glad, although no love from an individual 
 person enfolds them. 
 
SPIRITUAL COMMUNION 61 
 
 How different is the demeanour of one who 
 craves personal devotion, from that of one who 
 no longer needs it. A few souls of the latter 
 type will be found in every church, in every 
 philanthropic, political, or social organisation. 
 They come in and out of meetings not seeking 
 to attract the attention of anyone to themselves. 
 They give their whole mind to the work in hand, 
 and dispense to all about them their own insight 
 and the sunshine of their own clear sky. No 
 cloud comes between them and the Group-Spirit, 
 which is verily the sun of their souls. Much 
 personal affection and admiration may be bes- 
 towed upon them, in the hope that their sunshine 
 may somehow be drawn to each admirer. But 
 they always create the impression that they do 
 not need anyone's love. The truth is, they 
 possess a secret, which the many have not 
 learned ; and probably, had it been told to the 
 many so that they understood it intellectually, 
 they would not accept it as the law of their heart. 
 The price of selflessness is higher than they wish 
 to pay. These are the souls whose lives, when 
 known from the inside, are seen to be tragic in 
 their melancholy. They crave what no one wishes 
 to bestow ; they offer what others do not care to 
 accept. Longing to love and be loved, they 
 
62 SPIRITUAL COMMUNION 
 
 become year by year less lovable, less attractive ; 
 they themselves are repelled by other persons of 
 their own type. They are drawn to the young, 
 the beautiful, the distinguished, but these turn 
 away from them. They grow hard and cynical ;. 
 their love unrequited becomes more and more 
 domineering, more and more reconciled at 
 possessing the body without the soul of love. 
 If they find satisfaction, it is because the original 
 spiritual nature which prompted their unrest has 
 lost its own quality. 
 
 It must not, however, be supposed that there 
 are two species of human soul — one constitu- 
 tionally self-centred and craving attention, the 
 other by nature disinterested and super-personaL 
 A man or woman may live half a lifetime 
 practising the arts of the self-centred type, ex- 
 emplifying its unlovable qualities and exercising 
 a harmful influence, and then — perhaps in one 
 instant of inner illumination, of richer influence 
 from the Group-Spirit — the process of a lifetime 
 may be transformed. Without efl'ort, without 
 anticipation, in the twinkling of an eye, they 
 may be changed, never again to revert to their 
 former meanness and misery of soul. Through 
 the mystery of mysteries the Group-Spirit 
 becomes the light and life of their being. 
 
SPIRITUAL COMMUNION 63 
 
 Generally, persons who at any age undergo 
 this change have no theory of human nature, no 
 psychology or sociology, which can account for 
 their new experience. They class it, accordingly, 
 among miracles. They assign it to a source 
 outside of the reservoir of human energies and 
 powers. They either trace it directly to the 
 unmediated act of some supernatural personal 
 will, or else they explain it as a merging of 
 themselves into identity with a transcendent 
 realm of impersonal energy. 
 
 Now, as with the beginning of motion, with 
 the origin of life, with the first manifestation of 
 intelligence and of communication between 
 rational finite wills, so with the inception of 
 spiritual communion : it is a mystery. Its first 
 beginning was due either to influx from some 
 superhuman and supernatural realm, or else to 
 powers in man and society before unsuspected, 
 powers not to be traced to any of the causes 
 which account for; all other mental experiences. 
 In spiritual communion we enter a realm of a 
 new order, the beginning of which is a mystery. 
 But, once assume that it has started — that the 
 Social Oversoul has somehow penetrated to the 
 central point of personal identity in any one mind 
 and communicated to it new enthusiasm, strength 
 
64 SPIRITUAL COMMUNION 
 
 and insight — and thereafter all the subsequent 
 facts are easy enough to explain. 
 
 The individual person who first experienced 
 the influx of the Social Oversoul must not only 
 have testified to it but manifested the truth of 
 his testimony by the new life that was in him. 
 Others felt it in him. He and they accordingly 
 invented theories, however primitive and un- 
 critical, to account for it. These were pre- 
 scientific, but were by no means wholly without 
 foundation. Indeed, many theories, varying in 
 depth of insight and closeness to fact, began to 
 pass current, and each reflected the general 
 intelligence of the nation and age in which it 
 originated. 
 
 One of the curious religious phenomena of our 
 day is that while, until our generation, the 
 historic and ecclesiastical Christian interpre- 
 tation of spiritual communion maintained its 
 monopoly by the suppression of heresies, now 
 many rival theories, being tolerated, are winning 
 the acceptance of cultivated and independent 
 men and women in all the nations of Christen- 
 dom. It is to be regretted, however, that 
 thus far, while a number of the new teach- 
 ings label themselves *' Science," no one ot 
 them has been promulgated, so far as I am 
 
SPIRITUAL COMMUNION 65 
 
 aware, by persons disciplined in the methods of 
 experimental psychology and familiar with its 
 ascertained results. We find Theosophists, 
 Faith-healers, Christian Scientists, Spiritualists, 
 Higher-Thought teachers — all with doctrines of 
 their own. But this mere intellectual disagree- 
 ment is not the worst feature of the present 
 transition period in spiritual life. Each group 
 declares that the highest religious experiences 
 cannot be attained except by persons who adopt 
 its exact phraseology and discipline. The plain 
 historic fact, however, is unmistakably against 
 any such sectarian narrowness. Buddhists and 
 Vedantists testify in their own way to the same 
 incoming of the Social Oversoul, with power and 
 blessing, as Christians ; and each sect of 
 Christians, from Roman Catholics to Quakers, 
 despite all differences of practice and interpre- 
 tation, bears witness to one fundamental 
 experience. 
 
 Now, no such claim to superiority as this 
 which every sect sets up for its dogmas is made 
 for the purely psychological and sociological 
 interpretation of spiritual communion. Experi- 
 mental psychologists do not pretend that a 
 scientific understanding of spiritual communion 
 is essential to the experience of it. The only 
 
66 SPIRITUAL COMMUNION 
 
 claim to superiority made for their science is 
 that it gives the universal formula, which must 
 supersede the more naive and less critical 
 interpretations, as soon as the public is suffici- 
 ently educated to understand it. But this 
 superiority will prove of incalculable value to 
 the moral advancement of religion. 
 
 When once the verifiable and real formula is 
 found, a factor will be introduced into religious 
 thought and discipline different in effect from 
 any which has existed heretofore. Until now, 
 every rationalising tendency in the sphere of 
 religion has led towards disruption, towards the 
 breaking up of religious organisation into sects, 
 and the discarding of traditions and dogmas. 
 But the moment the scientific formula for the 
 essential experience of all the ethical religions 
 begins to be understood and promulgated, a 
 rationalising tendency will be introduced, which 
 will make both for the reconstruction of old 
 organisations and the formation of new ones 
 with a cohesive power greater than any religious 
 body in the past has possessed. But more than 
 this. As I have already indicated, the new 
 formula will help the adherents of each sect to 
 see the deeper meaning which animates opposing 
 sects, and will also in this way establish unity. 
 
SPIRITUAL COMMUNION 67 
 
 But this is only in passing. Here, not the 
 beneficent result of a scientific interpretation, 
 but an analysis of spiritual communion is our 
 object. 
 
 Whoever formulated the statement, '' Where 
 two or three are gathered together in my name, 
 there am I in the midst of them," could not 
 have meant to imply that the manifestation and 
 the power of the Group-Spirit would be as great, 
 when only two or three were present, as when 
 the mental co-operation involved a thousand, or 
 several thousand. Indeed, it is quite clear that 
 two or three were cited as the minimum — as if 
 the Group-Spirit said : ** There must be at least 
 two ; it would be better if there were three ; 
 indeed, the more there are, the greater the effect 
 of My presence." 
 
 I have said above that when persons experience 
 the inflowing of the Group-Spirit, the insistence 
 of their craving for individual affection becomes 
 mitigated and assuaged ; and I have spoken of 
 the peace or joy, the renewed strength and 
 quickened insight, of those who are filled with 
 the social will. But where only two or three 
 are gathered together, the Group-Spirit can 
 never wholly satisfy the awakened thirst for 
 spiritual presence. That spirit itself seems, with- 
 
68 SPIRITUAL COMMUNION 
 
 in each individual, to demand a wider and more 
 permanent unification of human beings. If the 
 self-centred will craves the love and affection of 
 many individuals, the universalised will demands 
 a world-wide union of human beings. This 
 demand shows itself in a craving on the part of 
 individuals for communion with the spirit of a 
 group commensurate with the whole of human 
 society. Here we find the only possible explana- 
 tion for the propagandist fervour of the early 
 Christians and of members of modern movements 
 for specific economic and moral reforms. The 
 aggressiveness of individuals who have been 
 caught up in such idealistic agitations is one of 
 their distinguishing marks. Persons not so 
 aroused may dislike and protest against this 
 propagandist zeal, but they cannot deny that it 
 exists. Under the influence of the Group- 
 Spirit the most unobtrusive natures lose their 
 ordinary hesitation and reticence when the object 
 they have in view is no longer to serve self or 
 the reputation of self, but the Cause, which in 
 them becomes an appetite for sacrifice that 
 grows by what it feeds upon. 
 
 In organisations which aim not at any exter- 
 nal reform, but at more spiritual achievements 
 — such as opening the eyes of the souls of men 
 
SPIRITUAL COMMUNION 69 
 
 and the enlargement of their spiritual stature to 
 the dimensions of the universal will — the apos- 
 tolic fervour loses the limits that would have 
 been prescribed to it by the achievement of a 
 more specific measure. What those who have 
 participated in the upUft of religious fellowship 
 detect in themselves is that their zest in life, 
 their strength of will and their moral perception 
 undergo increase in proportion to the numbers 
 unified. Hence it is that schism and sectarian- 
 ism are felt by them to be an unpardonable sin 
 against the Holy Ghost. 
 
CHAPTER VI. 
 
 The Power of the Group-Spirit. 
 
 NO one has yet hazarded a quantitative 
 statement of the law as to the power and 
 character of the Group-Spirit, or of the Hmits 
 within which it acts. But, happily, the new 
 schools of empirical psychology have passed 
 from the study of individual minds in isolation 
 to the investigation of co-operative thinking, 
 feeling and purposing ; and some peculiarities 
 of these phenomena have been noted, in addition 
 to the general and vague fact that the greater 
 the number of persons united, the stronger 
 the domination of the unifying power of the 
 group. 
 
 In the first place, we know that the ** I " in the 
 midst of the two gathered together is not simply 
 the arithmetical doubling up or supplementation 
 of the powers and peculiarities of each of them. 
 The two together may have, instead of twofold, 
 a hundredfold the determination and enthusiasm 
 
 70 
 
THE GROUP-SPIRIT 71 
 
 — yes, and even intelligence — of each separately. 
 In this case one plus one equals not two but a 
 hundred. Father Tyrrell, in a passage which I 
 have cited in an earlier chapter, says that the 
 New Testament dictum is equivalent to the 
 statement that two heads are better than one. 
 But, as a critic has discriminatingly pointed out, 
 what Christ says is that two heads are better 
 than two. There still remain the two, but a third 
 party — not only a mightier, but one different 
 in gifts and qualities — springs into existence. 
 Wherever there are two together, there are 
 always three : and the third is master, by divine 
 right. The third is a something different from, 
 as well as more than, the other two, although 
 proceeding from them. Here, where the indi- 
 vidual personalities are unlike each other, 
 something resembling a new chemical compound 
 arises. John, a carpenter, and Thomas, a shoe- 
 maker, unified in spirit, do not make carpenter 
 plus shoemaker or John plus Thomas, but a 
 society — perhaps the nucleus of an army, the 
 head of a government. 
 
 This strange phenomenon is analogous to 
 that which, in a poetic manner and on a different 
 plane, Robert Browning indicates in his poem 
 entitled '' Abt Vogler " :— 
 
72 THE GROUP-SPIRIT 
 
 But here is the finger of God, a flash of the will that can, 
 Existent behind all laws, that made them, and lo, they 
 are ! 
 And I know not if, save in this, such gift be allowed to man, 
 That out of three sounds he frame, not a fourth sound, 
 but a star. 
 Consider it well : each tone of our scale in itself is nought ; 
 It is everywhere in the world — loud, soft, and all is said ; 
 Give it to me to use ! I mix it with two in my thought : 
 And, there ! Ye have heard and seen : consider, and 
 bow the head ! 
 
 Two other conditions governing the augmen- 
 tation of the power of the Group-Spirit are the 
 frequency of meeting of the two or three and the 
 prolongation of conference on each occasion. 
 
 The mental basis of the former is the fact 
 which psychologists have discovered, that in the 
 imaginative realisation of the meaning of any 
 experience, it makes a great difference how long 
 the intervals are between the concentrations of 
 the attention upon it. If the two or three meet 
 together very seldom, the over-arching and 
 interpenetrating Third can make himself felt but 
 faintly. Happily, the organisers of religious and 
 political meetings have not waited for a psycho- 
 logical formulation of this law of social dynamics, 
 but have intuitively acted upon it. On the other 
 hand, many a failure of a cause far more logical 
 
THE GROUP-SPIRIT 73 
 
 and humane than primitive politics or religion, 
 has been due to an absence of the practical tact 
 which would have induced any gifted statesman 
 spontaneously to secure the favourable frequency 
 of meeting as a means of generating enthusiasm 
 and solidifying it into self-immolating service. 
 
 Wherever one finds rational schemes of reform 
 cold and indifferent, it is likely that the rule of 
 frequency has been neglected. Indeed, so often 
 have the more rationalising reformers overlooked 
 the psychology of statesmanship, that the notion 
 is now widespread that social causes which 
 are free from superstition and prejudice are 
 inevitably cold ; that science and criticism chill 
 the heart. The truth, however, is that utter 
 bigotry and blind fury of ignorance would also 
 have become cold — nay, have died out entirely — 
 had their victims met as seldom as do the 
 children of light. 
 
 The fact is undeniable that supernaturalistic 
 churches have hitherto shown a cohesive power 
 far beyond that which any voluntary secular 
 organisation has ever manifested. It is true that 
 some States have held together as long as, or 
 longer than, the Christian Church ; but States 
 have openly depended upon coercion and violence 
 to a far greater degree than Churches have. It 
 
74 THE GROUP-SPIRIT 
 
 is when we compare voluntary naturalistic 
 organisations with voluntary institutions which 
 pretend to wield supernaturalistic sanctions, that 
 we note the comparative weakness of loyalty 
 among members of the former. So conspicuous 
 is the tendency of rationalistic organisations to 
 split up and come to an earlyend, that many find 
 in this tendency a sufficient ground for believing 
 that there is some inherent and innate incapacity 
 in purely naturalistic ideaHsm to excite enthusi- 
 asm, to bind hearts and win moral and material 
 support. But the many who thus reason forget 
 that hitherto the old-fashioned individualism of 
 the eighteenth century has blinded independent 
 thinkers to the ways and means of social organi- 
 sation. The earlier supernaturalistic organisa- 
 tions of religious sentiment, however, were more 
 fortunate than to be guided by a false psychology 
 which destroyed common sense ; quite naively 
 and tactfully their leaders adopted means which 
 individualistic rationalists, working from an 
 abstract theory, condemned as incompatible 
 with a scientific view of existence. 
 
 But now that experimental psychologists have 
 investigated co-operative thinking, feeling and 
 acting, a new era will quickly set in. Humanistic 
 idealists who wholly discard trust in spiritual 
 
THE GROUP-SPIRIT 75 
 
 agencies outside of man and society, will begin 
 to meet by twos and threes, on purpose to induce 
 a manifestation of the Group-Self. It is only 
 by experience and experiment that one can 
 discover the laws of that Self; but by these 
 methods it is easy for the organisers of a 
 movement to find out what degree of frequency 
 of meeting is favourable to the fostering of the 
 cohesive forces of the organisation. It is evident 
 that the social mind has its times and seasons, 
 its winter and summer, spring and autumn, and 
 that the cultivators of it must consider these 
 well — with an eye to the harvest. It is plain 
 that there must be, at not too great intervals, 
 times of intense warmth. If such seasons were 
 prolonged beyond a certain point, their continu- 
 ance would defeat their very purpose; if, 
 however, with a view to the main object, the 
 period of intense enthusiasm be ended at the 
 right moment, the psychic and social benefits, 
 although their inception was so sudden, may last 
 throughout the lifetime of the participants, and 
 live on in the life of a nation for centuries. 
 
 As regards the second condition to which I 
 have referred, the prolongation of conference on 
 each occasion — there is a psychological law 
 which it would be well for statesmen who mean 
 
76 THE GROUP-SPIRIT 
 
 to foster the Group-Spirit to bear in mind. 
 Any student who wishes to master any subject 
 of investigation does wisely to prolong his con- 
 centration of attention without interruption as 
 long as he can do so without, so to speak, 
 drawing upon his mental capital. The first 
 half-hour he may be scarcely able to exclude 
 disconcerting and scattered thoughts ; the second 
 half-hour he at least has got to the heart of 
 his subject. During the second hour, if his 
 mental powers have not begun to flag, he can 
 make a general survey and come into hyper- 
 sensitive relation with every factor in the 
 problem. If he is equal to a third hour's con- 
 centration, it is probable that he will advance 
 far more in the discovery of new relations than 
 in the two preceding hours together. Indeed, 
 the law by which mental work bears fruit is 
 rather that a man in the third hour does nine 
 times as much as in the first than only three 
 times. This law of intellectual productivity is 
 paralleled by an analogous augmentation of 
 emotional and volitional power, provided always 
 that the nervous system (which is involved in 
 emotional and volitional activity far more than 
 in purely intellectual effort) be not exhausted 
 or overstrained. This constitutional character- 
 
THE GROUP-SPIRIT 77 
 
 istic of the activity of each individual mind 
 reappears in co-operative thinking, feeHng and 
 willing. Men trained to work together on the 
 board of a bank or other economic corpora- 
 tion, or in the Cabinet of a Government, would 
 by no means be discouraged if, at the end 
 of an hour, or two hours, or three, no agreement 
 or solution had been arrived at ; nor, if their 
 experience had been long, would they for a 
 moment infer that the fourth hour was liable to 
 be no more productive than the preceding ones. 
 It is also probable that where one supreme 
 purpose controls the group, a fundamental har- 
 mony as regards general policy prevails, and 
 an intimate knowledge of the peculiarities of 
 each mind is possessed by the others in the 
 group, brain and nerve fatigue will not set in as 
 early for each person involved as is the case 
 with isolated thinking. 
 
 Persons who have discarded supernaturalistic 
 religion, and yet believe, from observation, that 
 efforts made to organise a naturalistic religion 
 of moral idealism have an inherent weakness as 
 regards cohesive power, must remember that 
 not only has there been not the frequency, but 
 also not the prolongation of conference on each 
 occasion which practical psychology would pre- 
 
78 THE GROUP-SPIRIT 
 
 scribe. Again, it must be remembered that the 
 lack of the proper frequency and prolongation of 
 conference is in no wise due to apathy among 
 the thousands of individual men and women 
 who are to-day naturalistic in their moral 
 idealism ; it is wholly due to their naivete as 
 statesmen and organisers of religious life. They 
 are out of the tradition of preachers and priests, 
 and of those patriots who have been wise enough 
 to see that national idealism is the basis of a 
 nation's strength in the hour of trial and temp- 
 tation. My readers will pardon my reiterating 
 the necessity for a new humility on the part of 
 those who have discarded the old religious 
 dogmas. That humility will consist in a willing- 
 ness to stoop to use, in the interests of 
 humanistic idealism, the means of fostering in- 
 sight and enthusiasm which practical psychology 
 places within our reach. 
 
 So important is this matter that I may be 
 allowed to cite two instances within my own 
 experience as an organiser of ethical societies. 
 For fourteen years, one such organisation had 
 been in the habit of meeting for an hour and a 
 quarter once a week. Its membership remained 
 stationary the whole time. It occurred to me 
 to suggest an experiment, to test the conclusion 
 
THE GROUP-SPIRIT 79 
 
 that a greater frequency of meeting would 
 engender an increase of interest. Two meetings 
 a week were established ; the audiences almost 
 doubled. But as these two meetings were on 
 the morning and evening of the same day, it 
 seemed a priori probable that the six intervening 
 days were too long an interval, and that much 
 of the new interest which was being generated 
 was dissipated during them. Accordingly, a 
 third meeting was instituted, in the midst of each 
 weekly interval. The result was that within a 
 year the membership increased more than three- 
 fold, and this increase was accompanied by a 
 natural deepening of interest and hope for the 
 movement. As yet, however, no other ethical 
 society in England or America — and we may 
 take ethical societies as to-day the best repre- 
 sentative of religious organisations on a non- 
 supernaturalistic basis — has imitated the encour- 
 aging example which I have cited. They all, 
 without exception, meet no more frequently than 
 once a week ; and many of them during a certain 
 part of the year have no conferences of any kind 
 for several months together. Where would the 
 Christian Churches be to-day, or Judaism, if 
 one hour and a quarter a week for nine or ten 
 months a year were the maximum of conference ? 
 
 p 
 
80 THE GROUP-SPIRIT 
 
 Undoubtedly one reason why intensive methods 
 of propaganda have fallen into disrepute among 
 many wise citizens is because the politicians who 
 instigate evangelical revivals often keep up 
 religious enthusiasm to the point where the 
 emotions and impulses attain a pernicious degree 
 of intensity. Some men and women are 
 naturally liable, even without any stimulus from 
 others, to a morbid intensity of absorption in 
 ideal interests ; and even those of the best 
 mental poise will, under a prolonged stress of 
 revivalistic excitement, show signs of nervous 
 instability. But the fact that emotions may 
 be made to reach a point where the interest of 
 societymust brand themasmorbidandpernicious, 
 is no reason for depreciating and discountenancing 
 them within the limits where they serve the 
 onward trend of humanity. The river within its 
 normal banks should not be denied appreciation 
 because it is possible to pour between them such 
 floods of water as may spread devastation and 
 ruin. 
 
 The enormous psychic momentum which 
 religious communion generates must make every 
 student of human nature realise how deep in the 
 organic being of the individual man is the Race- 
 Will. Indeed, a comparison of the facts of the 
 
THE GROUP-SPIRIT 81 
 
 highest spiritual experience, as revealed in the 
 testimony of individuals and in the power of 
 religious organisations, with the manifestation of 
 primal instincts in man and the lower animals, 
 forces us to the conclusion that spiritual com- 
 munion and the mental phenomena accompany- 
 ing it have their counterpart, their prototype and 
 progenitor in what psychologists call the gre- 
 garious instinct in animals and in man. I have 
 more than once pointed out the differencebetween 
 the craving for individualised affection which 
 springs from active sympathy and tender emotion, 
 and that for spiritual communion. The same 
 distinction is found in the mental life of some of 
 the lower animals, and has been noted by the 
 profoundest students of animal psychology. Sir 
 Francis Galton, speaking on the basis of personal 
 observation of the life of the wild oxen in 
 Damaraland, says: ** Although the ox has so little 
 affection for or individual interest in his fellows, 
 he cannot endure even a momentary severance 
 from his herd. If he be separated from it by 
 stratagem or force, he exhibits every sign of 
 mental agony ; he strives with all his might to 
 get back again, and, when he succeeds, he 
 plunges into its middle, to bathe his whole body 
 with the comfort of closest companionship." 
 
82 THE GROUP-SPIRIT 
 
 We find, then, that in the animal creation, from 
 the ox up through savage tribes to the highest 
 spiritual life of man, the craving for a more 
 than personal affection has been passing through 
 various stages of self-consciousness ; and that 
 the highest and latest experience of the spirit 
 has its root in the lowest and earliest social 
 phenomena of the animal world. But the 
 strength of the instinct and the comfort of its 
 satisfaction were perhaps as great in the lowest 
 as they are in the highest manifestations. 
 
 Many students of religion who have found 
 themselves forced to abandon the old super- 
 naturalistic sanctions to right action, have been 
 alarmed lest the higher emotional and volitional 
 life of man might cease to find adequate motives, 
 and, as a result, might become atrophied. But 
 if an instinct not only as deep as human nature 
 itself, but embedded in the sub-human creation, 
 is underneath all spiritual aspirations, and is all 
 the time pressing upward, and only needs self- 
 consciousness in order to be transformed into a 
 craving for the highest communion, how can there 
 be any danger that the spiritual life will suffer 
 loss of incentive ? What greater force could 
 sanction the plea of the preacher for dying to 
 self and living in the universalised will of the 
 
THE GROUP-SPIRIT 83 
 
 community, than the fact that the whole ot 
 sentient nature has been travailing towards this 
 consummation ? It is generally regarded as a 
 hopeless task to try to suppress anti-social 
 conduct which is traceable to an instinct, for it 
 is assumed that fundamental human nature is 
 neither to be overcome nor deflected. But if 
 our nature when on the side of vice is practically 
 all-powerful and final, does it suddenly become 
 powerless when it happens to make for virtue ? 
 Rather, it would seem that in order to create 
 faith in man's social perfectibility all that is 
 needed is to prove that a gregarious instinct exists 
 in man, like that of the ox in Damaraland, andonly 
 needs completed self-consciousness to make it 
 irresistible. If it could be demonstrated to men 
 that their deeper mental agonies are chiefly due 
 to the separation of their interests from those of 
 the Tribal Self, they would strive with all their 
 might, like the wild oxen when isolated by 
 stratagem or force, to plunge into the very midst 
 of the corporate life of the community, to bathe 
 their whole being, body and soul, in the comfort 
 of fellowship. 
 
 Now, such a linking-up of the gregarious 
 instinct with the Christian craving for God seems 
 scientifically inevitable. 
 
84 THE GROUP-SPIRIT 
 
 Isolation frequently generates a passionate 
 terror in highly self-conscious minds, which 
 often leads to insanity, suicide, drunkenness, or 
 murderous hate. 
 
 Professor MacDougall, in his book on Social 
 Psychology, after citing Sir Francis Galton's 
 testimony as to the gregarious instinct in the 
 wild ox, points out the survival-value of this 
 instinct. '* Its utility," he says, " to animals 
 liable to the attacks of wild beasts of prey, is 
 obvious." In other words, we may grant that 
 the gregarious instinct originally was only one 
 among many spontaneous variations ; but, being 
 such that it helped the individuals which pos- 
 sessed it to survive, they propagated after their 
 kind, and thus perpetuated it, and in time 
 strengthened it. If we, then, recognise the 
 identity of this instinct in the lower animals 
 with the craving for spiritual communion in 
 mankind, we can but acknowledge that the 
 latter is the result of natural selection. 
 
 Furthermore, no one interested in the life of 
 nations can be blind to the present-day utility 
 of this craving. Its human utility is more ob- 
 vious than the serviceability of the gregarious 
 instinct to animals liable to the attacks of beasts 
 of prey. This is a subject which Professor 
 
THE GROUP-SPIRIT 85 
 
 Leuba, in his valuable essay on ** Religion as a 
 Factor in the Struggle for Existence," has made 
 his own, and I need only refer my readers to 
 his treatment of the theme. 
 
 Let me pass on to another characteristic of 
 the gregarious instinct in animals which proves 
 its psychic identity with the craving for spiritual 
 communion among men. The peculiarity I 
 refer to is pointed out by Professor MacDougall, 
 where he says, ** It seems to be a general rule 
 . . . . that the more numerous the herd or 
 crowd or society in which the individual finds 
 himself, the more complete is the satisfaction of 
 this impulse. It is probably owing to this pecu- 
 liarity of the instinct that gregarious animals 
 of so many species are found at times in aggre- 
 gations far larger than are necessary for mutual 
 protection or for the securing of any other 
 advantage." What is the fact to which he 
 here calls attention, except an illustration of the 
 principle that where two or three of a kind are 
 gathered together, the soul of the kind is there, 
 but that the more numerous the individuals 
 unified, the more complete the satisfaction of 
 the tribal impulse ? 
 
CHAPTER VII. 
 
 Spiritual Environment as a Factor in 
 Race-Development. 
 
 THE religions of the past can never be 
 satisfactorily explained or rightly appreci- 
 ated until they are viewed as disciplines devised 
 by statesmen to help nations in the struggle for 
 existence. They would be found hopelessly 
 wanting, if compared with a religion for to-day 
 which would satisfy the requirements of modern 
 critical philosophy and of the method and spirit 
 of science. From this point of view, indeed, 
 many even of the great religions would seem to 
 be little better than organised insanities. But, 
 judged as means towards the ends of tribal or 
 national preservation, each positive religion can 
 justify itself, at least relatively to the knowledge 
 and experience of the times in which it origi- 
 nated. At worst, it then appears to be a safe- 
 guard established to preserve the supremacy of 
 priests and princes. Even so, however, we 
 cannot wholly condemn it ; for we must bear in 
 
 86 
 
race-devp:lopment 87 
 
 mind that priests and princes were the only 
 organs through which the unified self-conscious- 
 ness of the tribe exercised its controlling 
 activity. 
 
 Thus, ancient Judaism can be vindicated 
 by the service it rendered for many centuries 
 in the development of the Jewish race. 
 Christian theology and discipline were likewise 
 justifiable so long as they were helps towards 
 the spiritual unification of the various races 
 coerced into material unity by the government 
 of the Roman Empire. Furthermore, it is 
 only when a religion is seen to be detrimental 
 to the best interests of its adherents and to 
 their social cohesion, that it should be wholly 
 condemned. 
 
 If a new religious synthesis were to be estab- 
 lished to-day, it would stand a better chance of 
 becoming a world-religion, able to benefit the 
 human race for millenniums to come, than any 
 previous system of spiritual discipline ; for 
 critical philosophy and scientific methods would 
 prevent its acceptance of unverifiable teachings, 
 and the intercommunication of all nations would 
 secure it against insularity and racial prejudice. 
 It would especially be fortunate in that it would 
 from the first be aware that the test of its worth 
 
88 RACE-DEVELOPMENT 
 
 must be its advancement of the welfare of nations 
 in the interests of the whole world. It would 
 not be tempted to adopt a rigid and absolute 
 creed. All arts and sciences would be summoned 
 to assist in its efforts at human amelioration, 
 but the adoption of any given means would not 
 be regarded as more than temporary, and 
 certainly not as committing it to their continu- 
 ance after they had ceased to be the best 
 possible ones available. Its preliminary task 
 would be to train the historic churches to view 
 religion as a factor in race-development ; for the 
 doctrine of evolution, thus applied by religious 
 teachers, preachers and statesmen, would become 
 as fruitful as modern science has proved to be 
 when applied to the commercial and other 
 material interests of nations. 
 
 It is, then, of supreme importance to the 
 human race that leaders of religion should now 
 be drilled in the fundamental conceptions of 
 evolution. Of especial advantage will it be 
 when they are able to apply in their own 
 domain the conception of the relation of organism 
 to environment, and of the adaptation of the one 
 to the other. 
 
 Two sets of distinctions concerning these will 
 be of pre-eminent service. 
 
RACE-DEVELOPMENT 8& 
 
 The first is this : that evolution may consist 
 either in an adaptation of the organisms of 
 any species to their environment, or in the adap- 
 tation of the environment to the ideal needs 
 of the organisms. Plants are illustrative only 
 of the first form of evolution ; animals of both. 
 Insects which have been blown from the main- 
 land to a small and remote island in the midst 
 of an ocean will undergo a process of adaptation 
 to their new home, by a gradual extinction of 
 those individuals whose large wings cause them 
 again to be blown out to sea, and by the 
 survival and propagation after their own kind of 
 spontaneous variations in the direction of smaller- 
 winged or wingless creatures. Here is mere 
 adaptation of organism to environment ; but 
 many animals have used their intelligence to 
 adapt their environment to the needs of their 
 species. Birds do this in building nests ; and, 
 indeed, animals much lower in the scale of 
 existence, and apparently without intelligence, 
 create an artificial environment either for 
 themselves or for their unborn offspring. If in 
 this latter case we cannot say that the individual 
 animal intelligently adapts means to ends, yet we 
 cannot deny that something astonishingly like 
 intelligence is manifested ; and the problem 
 
90 RACE-DEVELOPMENT 
 
 seems to be not so much whether there be 
 intelHgence or not, as of what order of conscious- 
 ness the intelligence partakes and in what being 
 it inheres. 
 
 That evolution which consists in the adapta- 
 tion of the environment to the ideal needs of the 
 organism, however, is most fully illustrated in 
 the life of human tribes. Men artificially 
 construct surroundings which will serve their 
 ends. They wear clothes, build houses, heat 
 them artificially, cook their food, and lay up 
 supplies for winter. 
 
 This distinction may be, and often is, regarded 
 as one between natural and artificial selection ; 
 yet it might be more exactly designated as 
 that between unintelligent and intelligent. But 
 in general the deep difference between the two 
 is overlooked; and, as the words "natural" 
 and *' artificial," ** unintelligent " and "intelli- 
 gent," do not call attention to the essential 
 characteristic of each, we cannot too often point 
 out that in the one kind of evolution there is 
 adaptation of organism to environment, and in 
 the other, adaptation of environment to the 
 ideal needs of the organism. I am careful not 
 to make the formula for the latter kind, a mere 
 inversion of the statement of the former. It 
 
RACE-DEVELOPMENT 91 
 
 should be noted that intelHgent selection 
 itself is of two kinds ; it may consist in the 
 adaptation of the environment to the needs of the 
 organism as it is^ but such adaptation fixes the 
 organism at its present point of development and 
 arrests further evolution. Only then does intelli- 
 gence advance the progressive development of 
 an organism, when it induces changes in 
 environment which will serve as means towards 
 a selection in the direction of an ideal capable 
 of being realised, but not yet actually embodied 
 in the organism. One might say that both 
 natural selection and the adaptation of environ- 
 ment to the organism as it is are realistic, as 
 contrasted with idealistic. 
 
 The distinction between idealistic selection 
 and both the forms of realistic selection which I 
 am here trying to characterise with exactitude, 
 is that to which Huxley called attention in con- 
 trasting " the ethical process " with ** the cosmic 
 process." These words which he used to indicate 
 the distinction are fundamentally misleading ; but 
 one cannot read the Prolegomena to his lecture 
 on " Evolution and Ethics " without seeing that 
 what he had in mind as the cosmic process was 
 the adaptation eitherof organism to environment, 
 or of environment to the actual organism, and as 
 
92 RACE-DEVELOPMENT 
 
 the ethical process the adaptation of environ- 
 ment to the ideal needs of an organism. 
 
 While, as we have seen, the lower animals to 
 some degree adapt their environment to their 
 needs, so much more prominent and distinctly 
 idealistic is this process in the life of man that 
 it may conveniently be called the human process, 
 as compared with the sub-human, provided we 
 do not mistake this designation for a strictly 
 scientific one. The point of importance for us 
 here to notice is that, the higher man evolves, 
 the more absolute becomes the control of 
 environment by the organism in its own ideal 
 interests ; and, further, that man's higher life, 
 as distinct from his lower, is always an instance 
 of a more complete creation of an environment to 
 serve ideal ends. Religion is the supreme instance 
 of the domination of ideals over environment. 
 
 But before entering upon this branch of our 
 subject, let us consider the second line of 
 distinction to which I alluded above. There 
 are two totally different kinds of environment 
 for man and the higher orders of the animal 
 kingdom. Between the two kinds lies the whole 
 mysterious gulf that separates mind from matter. 
 Every human organism inhabits not only a 
 physical universe but also a Will- World, and its 
 
RACE-DEVELOPMENT 98 
 
 process of evolution consists in its adaptation 
 to, or control over, the latter as well as the 
 former. It is born into and grows up under a 
 continuous and massive play of human motives, 
 which both operate directly upon the soul and also 
 stand to its physical conditions largely in the 
 relation of cause to effect. To hope, therefore, 
 to change radically the material estate of the 
 great masses of a nation without first effecting a 
 revolution in their psychic environment is the 
 blindest folly. For how could the change be 
 effected — what dynamic could bring it about — 
 unless a new set of incentives aroused human 
 wills to put an end to the old order and establish 
 another ? The very effort of socialists to intro- 
 duce a re-distribution of wealth and a shifting of 
 the ownership of land and capital from individuals 
 to the community is an attempt to arouse or 
 create new ideas, new sentiments, a new direction 
 to enthusiasm and hope, a fresh vigour and 
 strength to human wills. Out of this newly 
 created psychic factor in a nation's life they 
 hope to bring about a mental pressure upon 
 voters, law-makers, and administrators which 
 will introduce into existence a new economic 
 order. Thus we see that, while a purely 
 physical environment undoubtedly has psychic 
 
94 RACE-DEVELOPMENT 
 
 effects, it is itself, so far at least as it is artificial, 
 a product of instincts, ambitions, sentiments and 
 purposes. How can we, then, overlook the fact 
 that each individual self-consciousness lives and 
 moves and has its being in an enveloping and 
 penetrating will-world ? 
 
 Unhappily, only physical surroundings have 
 been fully and consciously studied as an 
 environment. The will-world, in this capacity, 
 has been until quite recently almost entirely 
 overlooked. The word "environment" has 
 been constantly employed to mean the merely 
 physical surroundings of an organism. Socialists, 
 as we have just noted, insist upon the import- 
 ance of environment as a factor in race-develop- 
 ment ; but they themselves have been unaware 
 that they were attempting to generate a new 
 psychic environment as the pre-requisite of a 
 new economic order. If one includes under the 
 word " conditions " mental as well as physical 
 surroundings, the statement of socialists that we 
 must change the conditions of the poor before 
 we have a right to expect them to live a higher 
 moral life, is altogether true ; but it is quite false 
 and pernicious if by conditions is meant only 
 such factors as light, air, food-supply, heat and 
 cold, moisture and climate. 
 
RACE-DEVELOPMENT 9ft 
 
 Happily for the world, although scientific 
 evolutionists have been blind to the existence 
 and the significance of the psychic environment, 
 the common sense of mothers and fathers, 
 guided by solicitude for their children, has acted 
 spontaneously upon the principle that the 
 character of the will-world in which a child 
 moves is a determinant factor in its mental and 
 physical development. Many a mother, in spite 
 of her theoretical and professed trust to an 
 infinite Creator and to guardian angels, pro- 
 tects her child from harm as jealously, and is 
 as alert to allow no sinister influence from 
 inanimate nature or from playmate, servant or 
 chance acquaintance, by word or act, to operate 
 upon her child's soul or body, as a mother- 
 tigress is to shield her cub from the claws of a 
 swooping eagle. 
 
 This simile tempts me to dwell for a moment 
 upon the fact which I have indicated above, that 
 the human is not the only organism that lives in 
 a psychic as well as a physical environment. 
 The tigress is a psychic force, warding off from 
 her young other psychic forces, in a will-world, 
 just as much as is the human mother when 
 protecting her child from dangers to body and 
 soul. And it is not only human beings that 
 
 G 
 
96 RACE-DEVELOPMENT 
 
 discriminate between the psychic and the inani- 
 mate orders of environment. The way animals 
 act towards their enemies shows perfectly well a 
 difference of attitude from that which they assume 
 towards mere matter and physical force. Animals 
 towards their friends also use signals of warning 
 and of summons, whereas no animal would ever 
 attempt to signal to things which we ourselves 
 regard as not capable of psychic response. 
 The dog attempts to attract a human being's 
 attention and beg for food, while he never 
 indulges in the futility of supplicating a stick 
 or a stone or trying to attract its notice. 
 Probably the lower down an organism is in the 
 scale of animal existence, the more the physical 
 dominates over the psychic environment in 
 determining development ; for the animal in 
 its simplest form is scarcely different from the 
 plant, and the plant, so far as we know, is 
 exclusively immersed in and acted upon by its 
 physical surroundings. For man, however, it 
 would seem as if from the first the physical as a 
 factor has been subordinate to the psychic. 
 Certainly man has from the first been far 
 more intensely conscious of the psychic than of 
 the physical. 
 
 It is impossible to understand the widespread 
 
RACE-DEVELOPMENT 97 
 
 dominance of animism among human tribes, 
 except on the ground that primitive man's 
 interest was from the first almost wholly focussed 
 upon the personal agencies of the will-world as 
 the real forces with which he had to cope. It 
 was a necessity of his existence that he should 
 turn his attention to the chief sources of injury 
 or aid to himself, and these were undoubtedly 
 the individual human beings in nearest contact 
 with him. The result was that the first world 
 he knew was one of arbitrary wills, of loves, 
 hates, spites, retaliations, and the like. The only 
 reality he knew as an active power was a world 
 of wills that plotted to get their way. It must 
 surely have been this psychological point of 
 departure that led him on to interpret also all 
 the unusual events in inanimate nature, whether 
 adverse or favourable to himself, as animated by 
 ambitions and desires analogous to those of 
 human beings. 
 
 The supremacy of the psychic environment in 
 human imagination is also testified to in the 
 inner life of children, even of the most civilised 
 nations. Among us, children are still animistic, 
 although we adults have universally discarded 
 such an interpretation of non-animate nature. 
 They may have fully grasped the distinction 
 
98 RACE-DEVELOPMENT 
 
 between the inanimate and the volitional, but 
 they have ^ill the keenest enjoyment in personi- 
 fying the inanimate ; they find it difficult to feel 
 either delightedly at home or excitedly alarmed 
 in anything but a will-world. No feature of 
 the life of the children in the slums^of our great 
 cities is more pathetic than their triumphant 
 unconsciousness of the strictly physical envir- 
 onment around them, and theirjchildish buoyancy 
 in constructing about them an imaginary world 
 of wills which are favourable and kindred to 
 themselves. 
 
 Indeed, in the individual child and in the 
 progressive evolution of the human race, develop- 
 ment consists chiefly in the discarding of 
 an exclusively psychic interpretation of one's 
 whole environment, the gradual distinction 
 between the psychic and the inanimate, and 
 finally the narrowing down of the psychic to the 
 will-world of living human beings and of the 
 lower animals. With this tendency to drop the 
 belief m superhuman and supernatural agencies 
 and confine belief in psychic existences wholly 
 to living members of the human and animal 
 world, there is, however, no corresponding 
 diminution of the sense of the predominance 
 of the psychic environment, except in the very 
 
RACE-DEVELOPMENT 99 
 
 recent period since physical science and mechani- 
 cal invention have too much monopolised the 
 attention of trained thinkers in the service of 
 wealth-seekers. 
 
CHAPTER VIII. 
 The Environmental Origin of Moral Life. 
 
 THE actual dependence of the individual 
 mind upon the psychic milieu, as compared 
 with that of the physical organism upon its 
 material surroundings, will be perhaps most vividly 
 realised if we critically consider a passage from 
 a reply by Dr. Archdall Reid to Professor 
 MacDougall's essay in the Sociological Papers for 
 1906, on '* A Practicable Eugenic Suggestion." 
 But our critical consideration of the passage 
 will at the same time demonstrate the truth of 
 my assertion that the psychic influences which 
 determine the life of human beings are not 
 yet recognised as constituting an environment, 
 and that, as a result, an astonishing confusion 
 of thought prevails even among specialists in 
 the problems of social evolution. Dr. Reid is 
 refuting Professor MacDougall's contention that 
 ** mental and moral qualities are inheritable in 
 
 the same sense as physical qualities." He says : 
 
 100 
 
MORAL 'l^i^-' " ■ " I'oi 
 
 Supposing a child of refined and educated English 
 parents were reared from birth by African cannibals. 
 Then, in body, when grown, the child would resemble his 
 progenitors more than his captors ; but does anyone 
 believe that the same would be true of his mind ? We 
 have historical evidence that Anglo-Saxon children, reared 
 by American Indians, have been every whit as ferocious, 
 treacherous, and ruthless as their captors. All Anglo- 
 Indians know the disastrous effect of too much association 
 with native servants on the plastic minds of white children^ 
 and we all dread the influence of bad companionship on 
 our own offspring. The English child I speak of as reared 
 by cannibals would certainly display no hint of the language 
 and general knowledge of his parents, no tincture of their 
 moral, social, political and religious ideals and aspirations. 
 He would ruthlessly murder and enjoyingly eat the stranger. 
 He would harry the stranger's property and annex the 
 stranger's wives by the wool of their heads whenever 
 practicable. He would treat his own wives as beasts of 
 burden, and thrash them as a matter of routine. His 
 aesthetic ideals would be satisfied by plenty of grease, a 
 little paint, and a few beads ; his moral ideals by a 
 homicidal devotion to the tribal chief. His god would be 
 the native fetish, to whom he would offer human sacrifices. 
 He would go naked but unashamed. The Rev. John 
 Creedys of Grant Allen's story exist only in fiction. The 
 evidence, then, is overwhelming that mental and moral 
 qualities are not inherited in the same sense as physical 
 qualities. The common sense of mankind has universally 
 recognised this radical difference between man's mind and 
 his body. We let our children train their own bodies, 
 being satisfied that physically they will develop well enough 
 
102 MORAL LIFE 
 
 under the influence of sufficient food, fresh air and exercise ; 
 but to the training of their minds we devote the most 
 anxious care. We mould them, and we know that we 
 mould them. Nobody fears that his child will be made 
 short or dark by association with short or dark companions, 
 but everyone dreads that his child may become silly or 
 bad if his associates are silly or bad. 
 
 Although Dr. Reid here implies that mental 
 peculiarities are wholly or almost wholly due to 
 mental environment, and change of them to 
 change in it, he nevertheless fails wholly to see 
 that this is what he is advocating ; otherwise he 
 would not deny that physical peculiarities, 
 although inheritable, are responsive to change 
 in physical environment exactly as mental 
 peculiarities respond to mental environment. 
 Suppose the child of English parents is 
 reared from birth by African cannibals : of 
 course in body he would continue to resemble 
 his progenitors more than his captors, because 
 his material environment would not appreciably 
 have changed. His mind, however, from the 
 moment of birth would have entered a mental 
 milieu which possessed none of the active 
 characteristics due to civilisation. Therefore 
 his mind would grow to bear all the marks of 
 the cannibal will-world. Suppose, however, 
 that a child of English parents, while remaining 
 
MORAL LIFE 108 
 
 in the English mental envelope, were subjected 
 to a material change correspondingly as great 
 as the difference between the mental life of 
 England and that of African cannibals. He 
 would, if he were unfortunate enough to survive 
 a month, begin to lose his physical resemblance 
 to his English parents. Suppose that, from the 
 first, his hands and feet were bound, so that 
 muscular activity was impossible. Suppose 
 nervous shocks were administered, which no 
 child could undergo and remain normal. It 
 would be possible also to devise an environment 
 which would stunt the growth, so that the child 
 would remain a dwarf. He could be reduced 
 almost to skin and bone. Alcohol might be 
 administered to him daily. If we imagine that 
 he just escaped death, we shall also be convinced 
 that he would become far more unlike his 
 progenitors than a negro in a healthy physical 
 environment differs from an Englishman. The 
 truth is, physical qualities are no more and no 
 less inheritable than mental and moral. The 
 raw material of both, which is all that is 
 inherited, is absolutely at the mercy of the 
 physical and mental environments. So we see 
 that Dr. Reid's statement is false, as to the 
 overwhelming evidence that " mental and moral 
 
104 MORAL LIFE 
 
 qualities are not inherited in the same sense as 
 physical qualities." What we discover to be 
 true is that ordinarily the fundamental qualities 
 of man's physical environment remain approxi- 
 mately unchanged, whereas the psychic environ- 
 ment, if not far more unstable, can at least be 
 modified intentionally with great facility. We 
 further see, of course, that mental depends upon 
 physical existence, in a manner and to a degree in 
 which the physical does not depend upon the men- 
 tal. The child's mind might be killed, but his 
 body survive; the reverse, however, is not possible. 
 When Dr. Reid says that '* we let our children 
 train their own bodies, being satisfied that 
 physically they will develop well enough under 
 the influence of sufficient food, fresh air and 
 exercise, but that to the training of their minds 
 we devote the most anxious care," he posits a 
 contrast which does not exist ; for, surely, we 
 let our children train their own minds, when we 
 have once placed them under the influence of 
 sufficient mental food, moral fresh air and voli- 
 tional exercise. Indeed, that most anxious care 
 which we devote to the training of their minds, 
 is always, if we are wise, an eflbrt to create 
 an artificial mental environment, which will do 
 the work for us. When we mould our children^ 
 
MORAL LIFE 105 
 
 and. know that we mould them, we do Httle more 
 than allow them to train their own minds in 
 response to stimuli which we take great care to 
 set operating upon them in the manner we wish. 
 It altogether confuses the issue to assert that 
 nobody fears that his child will be made short 
 by association with short companions — an influ- 
 ence which is known not to make people short 
 — but that everybody fears it will be made bad 
 by bad companions ; for everybody does in fact 
 fear that his child will be made short by subjec- 
 tion to physical influences which we know do 
 make people short. 
 
 My disagreement, however, with Dr. Reid's- 
 contention that moral qualities are not inherited 
 in the same sense as physical qualities, does not 
 in the least prevent my full and cordial endorse- 
 ment of his vivid portrayal of the dependence of 
 the child's mind upon its mental milieu. It 
 should, however, be noted that this dependence 
 is no more absolute than that of its bodily 
 development upon its physical environment. 
 For, although the child of English parents by 
 change of mental surroundings could be turned 
 into a cannibal instead of a modern Englishman, 
 nevertheless the fundamental instincts of man 
 would not be wholly obliterated, and no new 
 
106 MORAL LIFE 
 
 ones would be generated. They would only have 
 been given a different direction, and stimulated 
 to a different degree. They would have been 
 fused and organised into different systems of 
 sentiments. This survival of the primitive 
 elements of mind would be analogous to the fact 
 that the body of a human child would still 
 remain a human body although its physical 
 environment might distort it in an extreme 
 degree from the type to which it would develop 
 under the ordinary conditions of sufficient food, 
 fresh air and exercise. Dr. Reid overlooks the fact 
 that what we call the normal development of a 
 human body is no more an inheritance than the 
 civilised development of a human mind ; for 
 the bodily development has been dependent 
 upon a given material environment, which we 
 assume to be the normal, and which we therefore 
 sometimes overlook. A child stunted in physical 
 growth at the age of eight has just as much 
 inherited that stature as one whose environment 
 has brought about its full development. The 
 full development is equally acquired and equally 
 inherited with the stunted. 
 
 I have pointed out that socialists by their 
 propaganda are attempting to create a psychic 
 environment, out of which they believe a new 
 
MORAL LIFE 107 
 
 economic order will issue; but that their conscious 
 thought jumps directly to the economic order they 
 wish to create, and that they themselves are un- 
 aware of the psychic character of the influences 
 by which they are endeavouring to bring it about. 
 I have also proved, by the foregoing citation 
 from Dr. Reid, that medical specialists who 
 have turned their attention to the problem of 
 heredity and environment are equally blind to 
 the environmental nature of the psychic factors 
 which mould the minds of children. In the 
 same way, religious teachers, preachers and 
 statesmen have always been attempting — most 
 wisely, but unconsciously and naively — to create 
 for individual souls a psychic environment that 
 would save them from sin and its consequences. 
 They have not so interpreted what they were 
 doing, and the consequence has been that what 
 they have done has been far less efficiently done 
 than it otherwise would have been. The in- 
 efficiency due to their misinterpretation of their 
 task is especially discernible in their reliance 
 upon purely idealistic or imagined spiritual 
 agencies. They have taught their would-be 
 convert to believe in disembodied intelligences, 
 good and evil, which, except for the subjective 
 belief, would not have been operating upon the 
 
108 MORAL LIFE 
 
 soul. They have at the same time been blind 
 to the extent and degree to which the actual, 
 positive psychic world of human society has been 
 exercising influence. It is therefore fair to 
 believe that when once the actual will-world into 
 which a child is born is recognised as a psychic 
 environment by religious reformers, they will 
 more and more jealously look to the character 
 of the positive mental and social surroundings 
 and rely less and less upon creating a belief in 
 superhuman and supernatural agencies. 
 
 The whole of the preceding argument goes 
 to prove that in the life of an individual there 
 is no such thing as a " spontaneous generation " 
 of moral insight and character. So far as we 
 have any experience, moral life is always 
 generated from precedent moral life, just as in 
 biology we have no experience that any living 
 organism ever comes into existence except 
 from already existing organisms. How moral 
 character first came into existence is as much 
 a mystery as how living matter first appeared 
 on our planet. 
 
 But, just as the belief in the spontaneous 
 generation of physical life ruled until the second 
 half of the last century, so what was equivalent to 
 belief in spontaneous generation of moral insight 
 
MORAL LIFE 109 
 
 and character prevailed. The belief that ethical 
 qualities were not due tosecondarypsychic causes 
 within the social organism of mankind, but were to 
 be traced to the direct action of superhuman and 
 supernatural agencies, was practically a belief in 
 the spontaneous generation of character. A 
 miraculous moral conversion, so far as finite 
 human intelligences are concerned, would con- 
 stitute a spontaneous generation. One may 
 accordingly summarise ** the new theology" and 
 the re-birth of religion in our day by saying that 
 it is analogous to the discarding in biological 
 thought of belief in spontaneous generation, and 
 the acceptance and demonstration of the truth 
 of the formula, omne vivum ex vivo. 
 
 This formula for the first time introduces as a 
 working hypothesis into religious policy the con- 
 ception of the spiritual environment of man. In 
 the light of it, we see that the problem of the 
 religious prophet is to replace adverse fate in the 
 lives of men by a just law of " karma " and the 
 loving providence of man. Events now befall 
 human beings which gradually demoralise them 
 or which shatter them mentally and physically. 
 This is what is meant by *'fate." Lines of 
 causation are allowed to operate which never 
 would for a moment be permitted by an all-wise 
 
110 MORAL LIFE 
 
 and loving human father, and which are by no 
 means exactly what the given individual needs 
 for his spiritual unfoldment. If the thought of 
 "karma" is that whatever befalls a man is just 
 the thing which he can best assimilate to his 
 own benefit, we are compelled to say that in 
 human experience as it now exists there is very 
 little karma. And if providence means that only 
 that befalls a man which is instigated by bene- 
 ficent wisdom, then we must also say that there 
 is very little providence in the world. But there 
 is nothing in the nature of things to prevent our 
 believing that karma and providence might be 
 made by us to rule supreme in the lives of 
 human beings. Nothing then would happen to 
 anyone which he could not and would not absorb^ 
 as nourishment, so to speak, both for soul and 
 body. 
 
 If such a psychic environment were created 
 and sustained as would serve the self-realisation 
 of each human being, it would play the role, in 
 the life of the individual, which is now assigned 
 to an omnipotent, omniscient and all-wise 
 Creator. Because of the role assigned to him^ 
 the Creator has been designated God, Saviour, 
 Redeemer. When the psychic milieu becomes a 
 truly spiritual environment, in the ethical sense 
 
MORAL LIFE 111 
 
 of the word ** spiritual," it will be counted 
 divine. It will be worshipped and obeyed as 
 the Holy Spirit. But even before this time 
 arrives, man's actual psychic environment, in so 
 far as it is good, together with the perfect one 
 which we know ought to exist but is not yet 
 completely actualised, will be worshipped as 
 divine. 
 
 I have in previous chapters indicated the 
 dignity and mystery of communication between 
 human spirits and of the communion of indi- 
 vidual persons with the social will of the 
 community. We now see, however, that the cul- 
 tivation of right communication and right com- 
 munion is not the whole of religious enterprise. 
 Equal in dignity and sublimity is the play of 
 right environment upon the individual soul, even 
 when the soul is wholly unconscious of what is 
 happening to itself. Indeed, the holiest respon- 
 sibility of the prophet arises from the fact that 
 by his teaching and preaching he is establishing 
 an environment which will influence the individual 
 soul, even before its spiritual consciousness 
 becomes in full measure self-knowing and self- 
 directing. 
 
 When human spirits are rightly environed, 
 religious conversion will not be, as it generally is 
 
112 MORAL LIFE 
 
 now, a painful and bewildering passage from a 
 self-centred to an unselfish life ; it will be but 
 the glad awakening into direct communication 
 and communion with the spiritual world which 
 conceived and nurtured it. 
 
London: 
 
 Aomin's Printing Society, Ltd., Brick Street 
 
 Piccadilly 
 
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