The Life of Reason | Page 6

it seriously
propose a heaven to be reached by a ladder nor a purgatory to be
shortened by prescribed devotions. It merely gives the real world an
ideal status and teaches men to accept a natural life on supernatural
grounds. The consequence is that the most pious can give an
unvarnished description of things. Even immortality and the idea of
God are submitted, in liberal circles, to scientific treatment. On the
other hand, it would be hard to conceive a more inveterate obsession
than that which keeps the attitude of these same minds inappropriate to
the objects they envisage. They have accepted natural conditions; they
will not accept natural ideals. The Life of Reason has no existence for
them, because, although its field is clear, they will not tolerate any
human or finite standard of value, and will not suffer extant interests,
which can alone guide them in action or judgment, to define the worth
of life.
The after-effects of Hebraism are here contrary to its foundations; for
the Jews loved the world so much that they brought themselves, in
order to win and enjoy it, to an intense concentration of purpose; but
this effort and discipline, which had of course been mythically
sanctioned, not only failed of its object, but grew far too absolute and
sublime to think its object could ever have been earthly; and the
supernatural machinery which was to have secured prosperity, while
that still enticed, now had to furnish some worthier object for the
passion it had artificially fostered. Fanaticism consists in redoubling
your effort when you have forgotten your aim.
An earnestness which is out of proportion to any knowledge or love of
real things, which is therefore dark and inward and thinks itself deeper
than the earth's foundations--such an earnestness, until culture turns it

into intelligent interests, will naturally breed a new mythology. It will
try to place some world of Afrites and shadowy giants behind the
constellations, which it finds too distinct and constant to be its
companions or supporters; and it will assign to itself vague and infinite
tasks, for which it is doubtless better equipped than for those which the
earth now sets before it. Even these, however, since they are parts of an
infinite whole, the mystic may (histrionically, perhaps, yet zealously)
undertake; but as his eye will be perpetually fixed on something
invisible beyond, and nothing will be done for its own sake or enjoyed
in its own fugitive presence, there will be little art and little joy in
existence. All will be a tossing servitude and illiberal mist, where the
parts will have no final values and the whole no pertinent direction.
[Sidenote: The Greeks thought straight in both physics and morals.]
In Greek philosophy the situation is far more auspicious. The ancients
led a rational life and envisaged the various spheres of speculation as
men might whose central interests were rational. In physics they leaped
at once to the conception of a dynamic unity and general evolution,
thus giving that background to human life which shrewd observation
would always have descried, and which modern science has laboriously
rediscovered. Two great systems offered, in two legitimate directions,
what are doubtless the final and radical accounts of physical being.
Heraclitus, describing the immediate, found it to be in constant and
pervasive change: no substances, no forms, no identities could be
arrested there, but as in the human soul, so in nature, all was instability,
contradiction, reconstruction, and oblivion. This remains the empirical
fact; and we need but to rescind the artificial division which Descartes
has taught us to make between nature and life, to feel again the absolute
aptness of Heraclitus's expressions. These were thought obscure only
because they were so disconcertingly penetrating and direct. The
immediate is what nobody sees, because convention and reflection turn
existence, as soon as they can, into ideas; a man who discloses the
immediate seems profound, yet his depth is nothing but innocence
recovered and a sort of intellectual abstention. Mysticism, scepticism,
and transcendentalism have all in their various ways tried to fall back
on the immediate; but none of them has been ingenuous enough. Each
has added some myth, or sophistry, or delusive artifice to its direct
observation. Heraclitus remains the honest prophet of immediacy: a

mystic without raptures or bad rhetoric, a sceptic who does not rely for
his results on conventions unwittingly adopted, a transcendentalist
without false pretensions or incongruous dogmas.
[Sidenote: Heraclitus and the immediate.]
The immediate is not, however, a good subject for discourse, and the
expounders of Heraclitus were not unnaturally blamed for monotony.
All they could do was to iterate their master's maxim, and declare
everything to be in flux. In suggesting laws of recurrence and a reason
in which what is common to many might be