第103章

"If we survey the held of history and ask what feature all great periods of revival, of expansion of the human mind, display in common, we shall find, I think, simply this: that each and all of them have said to the human being, 'The inmost nature of the reality is congenial to powers which you possess.' In what did the emancipating message of primitive Christianity consist, but in the announcement that God recognizes those weak and tender impulses which pagrtnism had so rudely overlooked.Take repentance: the man who can do nothing rightly can at least repent of his failures.But for paganism this faculty of repentance was a pure supernumerary, a straggler too late for the fair.Christianity took it and made it the one power within us which appealed straight to the heart of God.And after the night of the Middle Ages had so long branded with obloquy even the generous impulses of the flesh, and defined the Reality to be such that only slavish natures could commune with it? in what did the Sursum corda ! of the Renaissance lie but in the proclamation that the archetype of verity in things laid claim on the widest activity of our whole æsthetic being?

What were Luther's mission and Wesley's but appeals to powers which even the meanest of men might carry with them, faith and self-despair, but which were personal, requiring no priestly intermediation, and which brought their owner face to face with God? What caused the wild-fire influence of Rousseau but the assurance he gave that man's nature was in harmony with the nature of things, if only the paralyzing corruptions of custom would stand from between? How did Kant and Fichte, Goethe and Schiller, inspire their time with cheer, except by saying, 'Use all your powers;

that is the only obedience which the universe exacts'? And Carlyle with his gospel of Work, of Fact, of Veracity, how does he move us except by saying that the universe imposes no tasks upon us but such as the most humble can perform? Emerson's creed that everything that ever was or will be is here in the enveloping now; that man has but to obey himself -- '

He who will rest in what he is, is a part of Destiny' -- is in like manner nothing but an exorcism of all scepticism as to the pertinency of one's natural faculties."

In a word, 'Son of Man, stand upon thy feet and I will speak unto thee!' is the only revelation of truth to which the solving epochs have helped the disciple.But that has been enough to satisfy the greater part of his rational need.In se and per se the universal essence has hardly been more defined by any of these formulae than by the agnostics; but the mere assurance that my powers, such as they are, are not irrelevant to it, but pertinent, that it speaks to them and will in some way recognize their reply, that I can be a match for it if I will, and not a footless waif, suffices to make it rational to my feeling in the sense given above.Nothing could be more absurd than to hope for the definitive triumph of any philosophy which should refuse to legitimate, and to legitimate in an emphatic manner, the more powerful of our emotional and practical tendencies.Fatalism, whose solving word in all crises of behavior is 'All striving is vain,' will never reign supreme, for the impulse to take life strivingly is indestructible in the race.Moral creeds which speak to that impulse will be widely successful In spite of Inconsistency, vagueness, and shadowy determination of expectancy.Man needs a rule for his will, and will invent one if one be not given him."

After the emotional and active needs come the intellectual and æsthetic ones.The two great æsthetic principles, of richness and of ease, dominate our intellectual as well as our sensuous life.And, ceteris paribus , no system which should not be rich, simple, and harmonious would have a chance of being chosen for belief, if rich, simple, and harmonious systems were also there.Into the latter we should unhesitatingly settle, with that welcoming attitude of the will in which belief consists.

To quote from a remarkable book:

"This law that our consciousness constantly tends to the minimum of complexity and to the maximum of definiteness, is of great importance for all our knowledge....Our own activity of attention will thus determine what we are to know and what we are to believe.If things have more than a certain complexity, not only will our limited powers of attention forbid us to unravel this complexity, but we shall strongly desire to believe the things much simpler than they are.For our thoughts about them will have a constant tendency to become as simple and definite as possible.

Put a man into a perfect chaos of phenomena-sounds, sights, feelings --

and if the man continued to exist, and to be rational at all, his attention would doubtless soon find for him a way to make up some kind of rhythmic regularity, which he would impute to the things about him, so as to imagine that he had discovered some laws of sequence in this mad new world.And thus, in every case where we fancy ourselves sure of a simple law of Nature, we must remember that a great deal of the fancied simplicity may be due, in the given case, not to Nature, but to the ineradicable prejudice of our own minds in favor of regularity and simplicity.All our thoughts are determined, in great measure, by this law of least effort, as it is found exemplified in our activity of attention...The aim of the whole process seems to be to reach as complete and united a conception of reality as possible, a conception wherein the greatest fulness of data shall be combined with the greatest simplicity of conception.The effort of consciousness seems to be to combine the greatest richness of content with the greatest definiteness of organization."

The richness is got by including all the facts of sense in the scheme;