The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day — John Shaqi
The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-dayUnderhill, Evelyn
Religion
The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day
Underhill, Evelyn
Spiritual life
More and more, as it seems to me, philosophy moves toward this reading
of existence. The revolt from the last century's materialism is almost
complete. In religious language, abstract thought is again finding and
feeling God within the world; and finding too in this discovery and
realization the meaning, and perhaps--if we may dare to use such a
word--the purpose of life. It suggests--and here, more and more,
psychology supports it--that, real and alive as we are in relation to
this system with which we find ourselves in correspondence, yet we are
not so real, nor so alive, as it is possible to be. The characters of
our psychic life point us on and up to other levels. Already we perceive
that man's universe is no fixed order; and that the many ways in which
he is able to apprehend it are earnests of a greater transfiguration, a
more profound contact with reality yet possible to him. Higher forms of
realization, a wider span of experience, a sharpening of our vague,
uncertain consciousness of value--these may well be before us. We have
to remember how dim, tentative, half-understood a great deal of our
so-called "normal" experience is: how narrow the little field of
consciousness, how small the number of impressions it picks up from the
rich flux of existence, how subjective the picture it constructs from
them. To take only one obvious example, artists and poets have given us
plenty of hints that a real beauty and significance which we seldom
notice lie at our very doors; and forbid us to contradict the statement
of religion that God is standing there too.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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