forms of denial. It is a passage remarkable for its conscientious
and resolute Agnosticism. And it is remarkable too for its
blindness to the possibility of separating quite completely the idea
of the Infinite Being from the idea of God. It is another striking
instance of that obsession of modern minds by merely Christian
theology of which I have already complained. Professor Murray has
quoted Mr. Bevan’s phrase for God, “the Friend behind phenomena,”
and he does not seem to realise that that phrase carries with it no
obligation whatever to believe that this Friend is in control of the
phenomena. He assumes that he is supposed to be in control as if it
were a matter of course:
“We do seem to find,” Professor Murray writes, “not only in all
religions, but in practically all philosophies, some belief that man
is not quite alone in the universe, but is met in his endeavours
towards the good by some external help or sympathy. We find it
everywhere in the unsophisticated man. We find it in the unguarded
self-revelations of the most severe and conscientious Atheists.
Now, the Stoics, like many other schools of thought, drew an
argument from this consensus of all mankind. It was not an absolute
proof of the existence of the Gods or Providence, but it was a
strong indication. The existence of a common instinctive belief in
the mind of man gives at least a presumption that there must be a
good cause for that belief.
“This is a reasonable position. There must be some such cause. But
it does not follow that the only valid cause is the truth of the
content of the belief. I cannot help suspecting that this is
precisely one of those points on which Stoicism, in company with
almost all philosophy up to the present time, has gone astray
through not sufficiently realising its dependence on the human mind
as a natural biological product. For it is very important in this
matter to realise that the so-called belief is not really an
intellectual judgment so much as a craving of the whole nature.
“It is only of very late years that psychologists have begun to
realise the enormous dominion of those forces in man of which he is
normally unconscious. We cannot escape as easily as these brave men
dreamed from the grip of the blind powers beneath the threshold.
Indeed, as I see philosophy after philosophy falling into this
unproven belief in the Friend behind phenomena, as I find that I
myself cannot, except for a moment and by an effort, refrain from
making the same assumption, it seems to me that perhaps here too we
are under the spell of a very old ineradicable instinct. We are
gregarious animals; our ancestors have been such for countless ages.
We cannot help looking out on the world as gregarious animals do; we
see it in terms of humanity and of fellowship. Students of animals
under domestication have shown us how the habits of a gregarious
creature, taken away from his kind, are shaped in a thousand details
by reference to the lost pack which is no longer there—the pack
which a dog tries to smell his way back to all the time he is out
walking, the pack he calls to for help when danger threatens. It is
a strange and touching thing, this eternal hunger of the gregarious
animal for the herd of friends who are not there. And it may be, it
may very possibly be, that, in the matter of this Friend behind
phenomena our own yearning and our own almost ineradicable
instinctive conviction, since they are certainly not founded on
either reason or observation, are in origin the groping of a lonely-souled gregarious animal to find its herd or its herd-leader in the
great spaces between the stars.
“At any rate, it is a belief very difficult to get rid of.”
There the passage and the lecture end.
I would urge that here again is an inadvertent witness to the
reality of God.
Professor Murray writes of gregarious animals as though there
existed solitary animals that are not gregarious, pure
individualists, “atheists” so to speak, and as though this appeal to
a life beyond one’s own was not the universal disposition of living
things. His classical training disposes him to a realistic
exaggeration of individual difference. But nearly every animal, and
certainly every mentally considerable animal, begins under parental
care, in a nest or a litter, mates to breed, and is associated for
much of its life. Even the great carnivores do not go alone except
when they are old and have done with the most of life. Every pack,
every herd, begins at some point in a couple, it is the equivalent
of the tiger’s litter if that were to remain undispersed. And it is
within the memory of men still living that in many districts the
African lion has with a change of game and conditions lapsed from a
“solitary” to a gregarious, that is to say a prolonged family habit
of life.
Man too, if in his ape-like phase he resembled the other higher
apes, is an animal becoming more gregarious and not less. He has
passed within the historical period from a tribal gregariousness to
a nearly cosmopolitan tolerance. And he has his tribe about him.
He is not, as Professor Murray seems to suggest, a solitary LOST
gregarious beast. Why should his desire for God be regarded as the
overflow of an unsatisfied gregarious instinct, when he has home,
town, society, companionship, trade union, state, INCREASINGLY at
hand to glut it? Why should gregariousness drive a man to God
rather than to the third-class carriage and the public-house? Why
should gregariousness drive men out of crowded Egyptian cities into
the cells of the Thebaid? Schopenhauer in a memorable passage
(about the hedgehogs who assembled for warmth) is flatly opposed to
Professor Murray, and seems far more plausible when he declares that
the nature of man is insufficiently gregarious. The parallel with
the dog is not a valid one.
Does not the truth lie rather in the supposition that it is not the
Friend that is the instinctive delusion but the isolation? Is not
the real deception, our belief that we are completely
individualised, and is it not possible that this that Professor
Murray calls “instinct” is really not a vestige but a new thing
arising out of our increasing understanding, an intellectual
penetration to that greater being of the species, that vine, of
which we are the branches? Why should not the soul of the species,
many faceted indeed, be nevertheless a soul like our own?
Here, as in the case of Professor Metchnikoff, and in many other
cases of atheism, it seems to me that nothing but an inadequate
understanding of individuation bars the way to at least the
intellectual recognition of the true God.
6. RELIGION AS ETHICS
And while I am dealing with rationalists, let me note certain recent
interesting utterances of Sir Harry Johnston’s. You will note that
while in this book we use the word “God” to indicate the God of the
Heart, Sir Harry uses “God” for that idea of God-of-the-Universe,
which we have spoken of as the Infinite Being. This use of the word
“God” is of late theological origin; the original identity of the
words “good” and “god” and all the stories of the gods are against
him. But Sir Harry takes up God only to define him away into
incomprehensible necessity. Thus:
“We know absolutely nothing concerning the Force we call God; and,
assuming such an intelligent ruling force to be in existence,
permeating this universe of millions of stars and (no doubt) tens of
millions of planets, we do not know under what conditions and
limitations It works. We are quite entitled to assume that the end
of such an influence is intended to be order out of chaos, happiness
and perfection out of incompleteness and misery; and we are entitled
to identify the reactionary forces of brute Nature with the
anthropomorphic Devil of primitive religions, the power of darkness
resisting the power of light. But in these conjectures we must
surely come to the conclusion that the theoretical potency we call
‘God’ makes endless experiments, and scrap-heaps the failures.
Think of the Dinosaurs and the expenditure of creative energy that
went to their differentiation and their wellnigh incredible physical
development… .
“To such a Divine Force as we postulate, the whole development and
perfecting of life on this planet, the whole production of man, may
seem little more than to any one of us would be the chipping out,
the cutting, the carving, and the polishing of a gem; and we should
feel as little remorse or pity for the scattered dust and fragments
as must the Creative Force of the immeasurably vast universe feel
for the DISJECTA MEMBRA of perfected life on this planet… .”
But thence he goes on to a curiously imperfect treatment of the God