Fashionable Philosophy | Page 8

said, acute personal suffering. Nor,
as these experiments must be purely personal, and involve experiences
of an entirely novel kind, is it possible to discuss them except with
those who have participated in them. One might as well attempt to
describe the emotion of love to a man whose affections had never been
called forth. If I have alluded to them so fully now, it is because they
justify me in making the assertion, for which I can offer no other proof
than they have afforded to me personally, that a force does exist in
nature possessing an inherent spiritual potency--I use the word spiritual
for lack of a better--which is capable of lifting humanity to a higher
moral plane of daily living and acting than that which it has hitherto

attained. But I fear I am trespassing on your patience in having said
thus much.
Lady Fritterly. Oh no, Mr Rollestone; please go on. There is something
so delightfully fresh and original in all you are saying, I can't tell you
how much you interest me.
Germsell [_aside_]. I know a milkmaid quite as fresh and rather more
original. [Aloud, looking at his watch.] Bless me! it is past six, and I
have an appointment at the club at six. So sorry to tear myself away,
dear Lady Fritterly. I can't tell you how I have enjoyed the intellectual
treat you have provided for me.
Lady Fritterly. I thank you so much for coming. I hope you will often
look in on our Sundays. I think, you know, that these little
conversations are so very improving.
Germsell. You may rely upon me; it is impossible to imagine anything
more interesting. [Mutters as he leaves the room.] No, Lady Fritterly,
this is the last time I enter this house, except perhaps to dinner. You
don't catch me again making one of your Sunday afternoon collection
of bores and idiots. What an insufferable prig that Rollestone is!
Fussle [aside to Drygull]. Thank heaven, that pompous nuisance has
taken himself off!
Drygull [aside to Fussle]. I don't know which I dislike most--the
Pharisee of science or the Pharisee of religion.
Rollestone. If, then, you admit that the human organism not only cannot
generate force, but that the emotions which control the body are in their
turn generated by a force which is behind it, and that this force is
dependent for its manifestation on its own special conditions, as well as
on those of its transmitting organic medium, I venture to assert that
experiment in the direction I have suggested will prove to our
consciousness that the moral or spiritual quality of the original invading
force is a pure one, and that the degree of its pollution in the human
frame is the effect of inherited and other organic conditions; and the

question which presents itself to the experimentalist is, whether by an
effort of the will this same force may not be evoked to change and
purify those conditions. Indeed the very effort is in itself an invocation,
and if made unflinchingly, will not fail to meet with a response. Much
that has heretofore been to earnest seekers unknowable will become
knowable, and a love, Mr Coldwaite, higher, if that be possible, than
the love of humanity, yet correlative with and inseparable from it, will
be found pressing with an irresistible potency into those vacant spaces
of the human heart, which have from all time yearned for a closer
contact with the Great Source of all love and of all force. It is in this
attempt to sever the love of humanity from its Author, that the
Positivist philosophy has failed: it is the worship of a husk without the
kernel, of a body without the soul; and hence it will never satisfy the
human aspiration. That aspiration is ever the same; it needs, if you will
allow me to say so, Lady Fritterly, no new religion to satisfy its
demands. If the world is of late beginning to feel dissatisfied with
Christianity, it is not because the moral standard which that religion
proposes is not sufficiently lofty for its requirements, but because, after
eighteen hundred years of effort, its professors have altogether failed to
reach that standard. Christianity seems a failure because Christians
have failed--have failed to understand its application to everyday life,
have failed to embody it in practice, and have sought an escape from
the apparent impossibility of doing so, by smothering it with dogmas,
and diverting its scope from this world to the next. It will be time to
look for a new religion, when we have succeeded in the literal
application of the ethics of the one we have got to the social and
economic problems of daily life. It is not by any intellectual effort or
scientific