Path of Vision; pocket essays of East and West/Part First, 3
III
THE HIGHEST IDEAL
THE living spirit of the ages is made up
of ideals more or less visionary in their
inception, more or less unattainable in their
plenitude. And in nations, as in individuals,
they are subject to the law of growth
and decay—the law that governs the seed
in the soil, the star-dust in the planetary
system—as well as to the law of conservation.
Like matter itself, an ideal is mutable, but indestructible. It does not die; it only undergoes a change. It expresses itself in art and literature and religion only after it has attained a certain degree of common conception. An idealist is ahead of his time only in the sense that he is articulate. The same is true of a nation. For even primitive people, even effete races have a message for those above or below them. The heritage of the Ideal, however small can not be exhausted.
That is why in periods of awakening, or of cataclysmic change, the light often comes from unremembered and unexpected sources—sources that were thought to be exhausted or barren. The ideals of Greece, of Rome, of the Orient, the ideals even of primitive man, come back to us, in the eternal cycle of the spirit, to leaven our own. They often surprise us in moments of depression or exaltation, in our silences, in our subliminal spells, even in our daily grind.
Out of the vague, even vagrant conceptions of the mind an ideal slowly evolves, assumes definite shape and form. Error-bound but truth-directed, we are constantly moving to a certain goal in its unfolding infinitudes. Its fiat is universal, despite its apparent failures. The grocer as well as the poet, at one time or another, must recognize and accept its circulating medium. Whether they squander it or save it or invest it—whether they profit by it or not—is another question. But they are idealists in that they are both dissatisfied with its purchasing power. We are all idealists in that we are ever discontented with the present state of the Ego and the World.
It is among the poor and obscure, however, that the ideal often finds its sincerest expression; for those who make it their business often speculate in certain tangible concrete forms of it—reform formulas—that are neither useful in a general way nor attractive. The poor man, on the other hand, concerns not himself with reforms; nor does he entertain such visions of a regenerated world as might obstruct the way to his immediate needs. His ideal, it is true, may consist in having a home instead of a slum-hole; in sending his children to school instead of the factory; in being free to work whenever and wherever he please, instead of being a slave to capital or to labor. It is nevertheless an ideal, which, although obviously material, has in it a spirituality that can revolutionnize the world. He sincerely desires to improve his own condition and to give the world better and healthier children. And this desire, though it be only partly realized in a lifetime, is the heritage of the ideal, which he bequeaths to them.
But the world seldom recognizes the spirituality in the material ideals of the poor. They are ridiculed by those who preach, but do not practice, the higher ethics. They are flouted, called base, worldly, sordid, by those professional idealists of religion and literature and art. And yet, a loaf of bread can regenerate a soul; a loaf of bread can precipitate a revolution. And by the law of reaction, materialism does become sordid, and the vaunted spirituality of its critics loses its vitality and attraction. Hence the epochal outbreaks of doubt, skepticism, heresy, revolt. For the man who is struggling for wealth and power or fame and glory, is no better and no worse, without a lofty ideal, than the man who is struggling for bread. The latter, in fact, is more deserving of respect, is more entitled to the consideration of the world. And the sooner he gets it, the better for the world. For the spirituality of his material ideals, now that he too has become a self-conscious Ego, is fast resolving itself into a monstrosity of selfishness. He is no longer a poor working man; he is a man of the working poor, who refuses to be poor for ever and refuses morever to work. He is a menace to-day. He will become a scourge to-morrow. No Labor Union can guide him; no Government can deter him. He is a fatality. Spiritually deformed himself, he comes, paradoxical as it may seem, to restore the world to its spiritual ideals. The religion that was given him as a consolation, he rejects; the faith that was perverted to keep him in bondage, to reconcile him to his gilded fetters, he renounces forever. But he will swing back with his masters from the height of a bloody crisis to the highest ideal—to a spirituality that is the common heritage and the cherished treasure of the rich and the poor. For a chastening process leaves its mark even upon our daily grind. It may take away our daily bread, but not the stuff of which our daily bread is made.
Indeed, the spiritual springs from a materialism intensified, sublimated. It is inherent in the material; and it should inform and illumine and beautify it. True, there is scarcely any evidence of this in the working man of to-day. But his spirituality, which is thought to be dead, is only dormant. And sometimes it betrays itself in a grotesque, spiritual somnambulism. For the working man still goes to church, despite the atheism, expressed or implied, of the two principal agents of his misery—the labor leader and the capitalist. The one in theory, the other in practice are responsible for his spiritual deformity. His leader tells him not to bother, not to worry about his soul; he even doubts its existence. And the capitalist, by his conduct in business and out of business, confirms, gives additional force to the labor leader's advice.
For what proof have we, it is often asked nowadays, of the existence of the soul and of the necessity, in consequence, of a soul-ideal? I go neither to metaphysics nor to spiritualism for an answer. To those who deny its existence, who make light of the innate divine flame in man, who can not see anything outside of matter, or anything but matter in matter, to these materialists I offer the perfume of the rose, the light of the sun, the emanation of a firefly, the aura of a planet, to say nothing of the human understanding. Are these material? Do they, to go back to fundamentals in physics, occupy the same space with the objects from which they emanate?
The room in which I write, to take a simple example, becomes dark after sunset. It is not, you will concede, a vacuum. It is filled with air. But I turn a switch in the wall and the electric bulbs fill it also with light. The two substances, light and air, occupy the same space simultaneously. Now, if light were matter, it would have a specific gravity; and this specific gravity, were it heavier than that of the air, would chase it out of the room. In which case, I could not continue to write—I would cease forthwith to exist. And what is true of the light in my room, is true of the perfume of the rose, which hovers around it with the air it breathes and the sunshine it drinks. It is true, in fact, of the whole universe. For the air and the sunshine and the imponderable, intangible ether all occupy simultaneously the same space. How can our simple rule in physics explain this?
Or, to come to man, how can your material philosophy explain that quality in personality which is called magnetism, which I prefer to call spirituality? By chemistry, by the principle of attraction and repulsion in cells or an organic structure of cells? But the person that repels us outwardly, physically, sometimes attracts us by a something he has within—an emanation akin to the light of the sun and the perfume of the rose. What is it? Intellect, intelligence, emotions, social and eductional accomplishments? These are not always attractive. Intellect, on the contrary, might even be repulsive. Intelligence is not the heritage of man alone; the dumb beasts have a sagacity that sometimes excells our own. And the art of the bird building his nest and the bees making their honey-comb, can not be surpassed by the art of man. What is that mysterious, elusive quality then? Social accomplishments, charm? These may be rendered repulsive by selfishness, conceit,—by an inflated, assertive, aggressive Ego.
What is it, my dear Materialist, that draws you in your unconsciousness to me? I heard you once in Madison Square expounding wholesale the negations of the day; I saw you afterwards feeding the birds in the park. And I see you every day, though your name is not trumpeted in the daily press, giving of your mite to charity. There must be a flaw somewhere in your material philosophy. For if you are in yourself a sort of detached cosmos, why take the trouble to establish these little attachments between you and the outside world?
I think I understand you, forgive the boast, better than you understand yourself. The human personality, you tell me, is a bundle of intellections and emotions. Granted. But this is true, you will concede, of both primitive and civilized man. And some primitive men, you will also concede, I hope, are more attractive to us than the most developed specimen of civilization. I offer you this explanation, therefore, which you may accept or reject as you list. Your bundle of intellections and emotions,—your intelligence, your highly developed mind,—your passion for truth and justice,—these are cold and chilling and unfructifying, if they are not illumined and warmed by that innate, inherent flame, which is as evident at times in primitive man as well as in you and me. This innate light is the spirituality which is manifest in lesser or greater degree in individuals as in nations, according to the recognition it receives,—according to the ideal of it that is cheriched and upheld.
And this, I maintain, is the highest ideal of an individual or a nation. Complete victory in the struggle to attain it, is not often attained. But no defeat is richer in new possibilities than this of the spirit fighting for the spiritual ideal. And although no complete victory is often attained, socially conceived, materially considered, there is no such thing in it as complete failure. By a happy dispensation, every one is an object of comfort or of envy to his fellow men. No one is ever low enough, however baldly material he might be, or high enough, however spiritual he might become, to be alone. The ideal itself saves us from this dreary distinction. For we all find some one below us or above us—in most cases below and above us—to afford us a satisfaction and an incentive—to make the arduous ascent a pleasant jaunt. If the working man and the labor leader, the capitalist and the politician all recognized this truth and espoused the ideal it connotes, the social and industrial problems of the times would not seem so hopelessly insoluble, without general strikes and revolutions. For legislation alone is, after all, only a form of compulsion. And a man without a spiritual ideal will obey the law when he can't help it and break it when he can.