"Not so," reply saints, artists, Cambridge rationalists, and all the
better sort; for they feel that their religious, aesthetic, or moral
emotions are not conditioned, directly or indirectly, by physical needs,
nor, indeed, by anything in the physical universe. Some things, they
feel, are good, not because they are means to physical well-being, but
because they are good in themselves. In nowise does the value of
aesthetic or religious rapture depend upon the physical satisfaction it
affords. There are things in life the worth of which cannot be related
to the physical universe,--things of which the worth is not relative but
absolute. Of these matters I speak cautiously and without authority: for
my immediate purpose--to present my conception of the religious
character--I need say only that to some the materialistic conception of
the universe does not seem to explain those emotions which they feel
with supreme certainty and absolute disinterestedness. The fact is, men
of science, having got us into the habit of attempting to justify all
our feelings and states of mind by reference to the physical universe,
have almost bullied some of us into believing that what cannot be so
justified does not exist.
I call him a religious man who, feeling with conviction that some things
are good in themselves, and that physical existence is not amongst them,
pursues, at the expense of physical existence, that which appears to him
good. All those who hold with uncompromising sincerity that spiritual is
more important than material life, are, in my sense, religious. For
instance, in Paris I have seen young painters, penniless, half-fed,
unwarmed, ill-clothed, their women and children in no better case,
working all day in feverish ecstasy at unsaleable pictures, and quite
possibly they would have killed or wounded anyone who suggested a
compromise with the market. When materials and credit failed altogether,
they stole newspapers and boot-blacking that they might continue to
serve their masterful passion. They were superbly religious. All artists
are religious. All uncompromising belief is religious. A man who so
cares for truth that he will go to prison, or death, rather than
acknowledge a God in whose existence he does not believe, is as
religious, and as much a martyr in the cause of religion, as Socrates
or Jesus. He has set his criterion of values outside the physical
universe.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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