Through Nature to God. Fiske John

millions of ages? What is the grand lesson that is taught by all this? It is the lesson of the unity of nature. To learn it rightly is to learn that all the things that we can see and know, in the course of our life in this world, are so intimately woven together that nothing could be left out without reducing the whole marvellous scheme to chaos. Whatever else may be true, the conviction is brought home to us that in all this endless multifariousness there is one single principle at work, that all is tending toward an end that was involved from the very beginning, if one can speak of beginnings and ends where the process is eternal. The whole universe is animated by a single principle of life, and whatever we see in it, whether to our half-trained understanding and narrow experience it may seem to be good or bad, is an indispensable part of the stupendous scheme. As Aristotle said, so long ago, in one of those characteristic flashes of insight into the heart of things in which no one has ever excelled him, in nature there is nothing that is out of place or interpolated, as in an ill-constructed drama.

      To-day we can begin to realize how much was implied in this prophetic hint of Aristotle's, for we are forced to admit that whatever may be the function of evil in this world, it is unquestionably an indispensable function, and not something interpolated from without. Whatever exists is part of the dramatic whole, and this can quickly be proved. The goodness in the world – all that we love and praise and emulate – we are ready enough to admit into our scheme of things, and to rest upon it our belief in God. The misery, the pain, the wickedness, we would fain leave out. But if there were no such thing as evil, how could there be such a thing as goodness? Or to put it somewhat differently, if we had never known anything but goodness, how could we ever distinguish it from evil? How could we recognize it as good? How would its quality of goodness in any wise interest or concern us? This question goes down to the bottom of things, for it appeals to the fundamental conditions according to which conscious intelligence exists at all. Its answer will therefore be likely to help us. It will not enable us to solve the problem of evil, enshrouded as it is in a mystery impenetrable by finite intelligence, but it will help us to state the problem correctly; and surely this is no small help. In the mere work of purifying our intellectual vision there is that which heals and soothes us. To learn to see things without distortion is to prepare one's self for taking the world in the right mood, and in this we find strength and consolation.

      V

      What Conscious Life is made of

      To return to our question, how could we have good without evil, we must pause for a moment and inquire into the constitution of the human mind. What we call the soul, the mind, the conscious self, is something strange and wonderful. In our ordinary efforts to conceive it, invisible and impalpable as it is, we are apt to try so strenuously to divorce it from the notion of substance that it seems ethereal, unreal, ghostlike. Yet of all realities the soul is the most solid, sound, and undeniable. Thoughts and feelings are the fundamental facts from which there is no escaping. Our whole universe, from the sands on the seashore to the flaming suns that throng the Milky Way, is built up of sights and sounds, of tastes and odours, of pleasures and pains, of sensations of motion and resistance either felt directly or inferred. This is no ghostly universe, but all intensely real as it exists in that intensest of realities, the human soul! Consciousness, the soul's fundamental fact, is the most fundamental of facts. But a truly marvellous affair is consciousness! The most general truth that we can assert with regard to it is this, that it exists only by virtue of incessant change. A state of consciousness that should continue through an appreciable interval of time without undergoing change would not be a state of consciousness. It would be unconsciousness.

      This perpetual change, then, is what makes conscious life. It is only by virtue of this endless procession of fleeting phases of consciousness that the human soul exists at all. It is thus that we are made. Why we should have been made thus is a question aiming so far beyond our ken that it is idle to ask it. We might as well inquire whether Infinite Power could have made twice two equal five. We must rest content with knowing that it is thus we were created; it is thus that the human soul exists. Just as dynamic astronomy rests upon the law of gravitation, just as physics is based upon the properties of waves, so the modern science of mind has been built upon the fundamental truth that consciousness exists only by virtue of unceasing change. Our conscious life is a stream of varying psychical states which quickly follow one another in a perpetual shimmer, with never an instant of rest. The elementary psychical states, indeed, lie below consciousness, or, as we say, they are sub-conscious. We may call these primitive pulsations the psychical molecules out of which are compounded the feelings and thoughts that well up into the full stream of consciousness. Just as in chemistry we explain the qualitative differences among things as due to diversities of arrangement among compounded molecules and atoms, so in psychology we have come to see that thoughts and feelings in all their endless variety are diversely compounded of sub-conscious psychical molecules.

      Musical sounds furnish us with a simple and familiar illustration of this. When the sounds of taps or blows impinge upon the ear slowly, at the rate of not more than sixteen in a second, they are cognized as separate and non-musical noises. When they pass beyond that rate of speed, they are cognized as a continuous musical tone of very low pitch; a state of consciousness which seems simple, but which we now see is really compound. As the speed of the blows increases, further qualitative differences arise; the musical tone rises in pitch until it becomes too acute for the ear to cognize, and thus vanishes from consciousness. But this is far from being the whole story; for the series of blows or pulsations make not only a single vivid fundamental tone, but also a multifarious companion group of fainter overtones, and the diverse blending of these faint harmonics constitutes the whole difference in tone quality between the piano and the flute, the violin and the trumpet, or any other instruments. If you take up a violin and sound the F one octave above the treble staff, there are produced, in the course of a single second, several thousand psychical states which together make up the sensation of pitch, fifty-five times as many psychical states which together make up the sensation of tone quality, and an immense number of other psychical states which together make up the sensation of intensity. These psychical states are not, in any strict sense of the term, states of consciousness; for if they were to rise individually into consciousness, the result would be an immense multitude of sensations, and not a single apparently homogeneous sensation. There is no alternative but to conclude that in this case a seemingly simple state of consciousness is in reality compounded of an immense multitude of sub-conscious psychical changes.

      Now, what is thus true in the case of musical sounds is equally true of all states of consciousness whatever, both those that we call intellectual and those that we call emotional. All are highly compounded aggregates of innumerable minute sub-conscious psychical pulsations, if we may so call them. In every stream of human consciousness that we call a soul each second of time witnesses thousands of infinitely small changes, in which one fleeting group of pulsations in the primordial mind-stuff gives place to another and a different but equally fleeting group. Each group is unlike its immediate predecessor. The absence of difference would be continuance, and continuance means stagnation, blankness, negation, death. That ceaseless flutter, in which the quintescence of conscious life consists, is kept up by the perpetual introduction of the relations of likeness and unlikeness. Each one of the infinitesimal changes is a little act of discrimination, a recognition of a unit of feeling as either like or unlike some other unit of feeling. So in these depths of the soul's life the arrangements and re-arrangements of units go on, while on the surface the results appear from moment to moment in sensations keen or dull, in perceptions clear or vague, in judgments wise or foolish, in memories gay or sad, in sordid or lofty trains of thought, in gusts of anger or thrills of love. The whole fabric of human thought and human emotion is built up out of minute sub-conscious discriminations of likenesses and unlikenesses, just as much as the material world in all its beauty is built up out of undulations among invisible molecules.

      VI

      Without the Element of Antagonism there could be no Consciousness, and therefore no World

      We may now come up out of these depths, accessible only to the plummet of psychologic analysis, and move with somewhat freer gait in the region of common and familiar experiences. It is an undeniable fact that we cannot know anything whatever except as contrasted with something else. The contrast may be bold and sharp, or it may dwindle into a slight discrimination,