American essays; Literature -- History and criticism
Professor Drummond was able to show the continuity of natural law in
the spiritual world by assuming that a spiritual world which was the
counterpart of the physical world actually existed. That Calvinism in
its main tenets tallies, or seems to tally, with science is no more
proof of the literal truth of those tenets than the ascribing of human
form and features to the man in the moon is proof of the existence of
such a man. Our minds, our spirits, are no doubt in a way under the
same law as are our bodies, because they are the outcome of our bodies
and our bodies are the outcome of material nature; but to base upon
that fact the existence of a corresponding world and life after death
is to leap beyond the bounds of all possible analogy.
Many of the dogmas of theology have a grain of natural truth in them.
This does not prove their truth, as applicable to some hypothetical
other world, but as applied to this world. The kingdom of heaven, as
the founder of Christianity taught, is not yonder and of to-morrow, but
is now and here.
Tolstoi, I think, is guilty of false analogy when, in attempting to get
rid of the idea of pleasure as the aim and purpose of art, he makes
the comparison with food, and says that pleasure is no more the end
in eating than it is in painting, or poetry, or music. The analogy is
false because the necessities of our bodies are not to be compared with
the luxuries, so to speak, of our minds. We cannot live without food,
but we can and do live without art. And yet, do we not eat because the
food tastes good? Is not the satisfaction of appetite the prime motive
in eating? If dining gave us no pleasure, we should probably soon learn
to swallow our food in a highly concentrated form, in capsules, and
thus make short work of it. Nature, of course, conceals her own purpose
in the pleasure we take in our food, just as she does in the pleasure
of the sexes; but of this purpose we take little thought, except in
the latter case how to defeat it. We do not have conscious pleasure in
breathing; hence our breathing is involuntary. We do have conscious
pleasure in food; hence our elaborate and ingenious cookery--often
to the detriment of our bodies. Take away the pleasures of life, the
innocent natural pleasure, take away the pleasures of art, and few of
us would care for either.
Man is a microcosm, an epitome of the universe, and its laws and
processes are repeated dimly or plainly in him. Then there are, of
course, real analogies and homologies between different parts of
nature, as between fluids and gases, and fluids and solids, between the
organic and the inorganic, between the animal, vegetable, and mineral
kingdoms.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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