2.8. THE BEING OF MANKIND.
I will boldly adopt the technicalities of the sects. I will speak as a
person with experience and declare that I have been through the
distresses of despair and the conviction of sin and that I have found
salvation.
I BELIEVE.
I believe in the scheme, in the Project of all things, in the
significance of myself and all life, and that my defects and uglinesses
and failures, just as much as my powers and successes, are things that
are necessary and important and contributory in that scheme, that scheme
which passes my understanding--and that no thwarting of my conception,
not even the cruelty of nature, now defeats or can defeat my faith,
however much it perplexes my mind.
And though I say that scheme passes my understanding, nevertheless I
hope you will see no inconsistency when I say that necessarily it has an
aspect towards me that I find imperative.
It has an aspect that I can perceive, however dimly and fluctuatingly.
I take it that to perceive this aspect to the utmost of my mental power
and to shape my acts according to that perception is my function in the
scheme; that if I hold steadfastly to that conception, I am SAVED. I
find in that idea of perceiving the scheme as a whole towards me and in
this attempt to perceive, that something to which all my other emotions
and passions may contribute by gathering and contributing experience,
and through which the synthesis of my life becomes possible.
Let me try to convey to you what it is I perceive, what aspect this
scheme seems to bear on the whole towards me.
The essential fact in man's history to my sense is the slow unfolding of
a sense of community with his kind, of the possibilities of
co-operations leading to scarce dreamt-of collective powers, of a
synthesis of the species, of the development of a common general idea, a
common general purpose out of a present confusion. In that awakening of
the species, one's OWN PERSONAL BEING LIVES AND MOVES--A PART OF IT AND
CONTRIBUTING TO IT. ONE'S INDIVIDUAL EXISTENCE IS NOT SO ENTIRELY CUT
OFF AS IT SEEMS AT FIRST; ONE'S ENTIRELY SEPARATE INDIVIDUALITY IS
ANOTHER, A PROFOUNDER, AMONG THE SUBTLE INHERENT DELUSIONS OF THE HUMAN
MIND. Between you and me as we set our minds together, and between us
and the rest of mankind, there is SOMETHING, something real, something
that rises through us and is neither you nor me, that comprehends us,
that is thinking here and using me and you to play against each other in
that thinking just as my finger and thumb play against each other as I
hold this pen with which I write.
Let me point out that this is no sentimental or mystical statement. It
is hard fact as any hard fact we know. We, you and I, are not only parts
in a thought process, but parts of one flow of blood and life. Let me
put that in a way that may be new to some readers. Let me remind you of
what is sometimes told as a jest, the fact that the number of one's
ancestors increases as we look back in time. Disregarding the chances of
intermarriage, each one of us had two parents, four grandparents, eight
great-grandparents, and so on backward, until very soon, in less than
fifty generations, we should find that, but for the qualification
introduced, we should have all the earth's inhabitants of that time as
our progenitors. For a hundred generations it must hold absolutely true,
that everyone of that time who has issue living now is ancestral to all
of us. That brings the thing quite within the historical period. There
is not a western European palaeolithic or neolithic relic that is not a
family relic for every soul alive. The blood in our veins has handled
it.
And there is something more. We are all going to mingle our blood again.
We cannot keep ourselves apart; the worst enemies will some day come to
the Peace of Verona. All the Montagues and Capulets are doomed to
intermarry. A time will come in less than fifty generations when all the
population of the world will have my blood, and I and my worst enemy
will not be able to say which child is his or mine.
But you may retort--perhaps you may die childless. Then all the sooner
the whole species will get the little legacy of my personal achievement,
whatever it may be.
You see that from this point of view--which is for me the vividly true
and dominating point of view--our individualities, our nations and
states and races are but bubbles and clusters of foam upon the great
stream of the blood of the species, incidental experiments in the
growing knowledge and consciousness of the race.
I think this real solidarity of humanity is a fact that is only slowly
being apprehended, that it is an idea that we who have come to realize
it have to assist in thinking into the collective mind. I believe the
species is still as a whole unawakened, still sunken in the delusion of
the permanent separateness of the individual and of races and nations,
that so it turns upon itself and frets against itself and fails to see
the stupendous possibilities of deliberate self-development that lie
open to it now.
I see myself in life as part of a great physical being that strains and
I believe grows towards beauty, and of a great mental being that strains
and I believe grows towards knowledge and power. In this persuasion that
I am a gatherer of experience, a mere tentacle that arranges thought
beside thought for this being of the species, this being that grows
beautiful and powerful, in this persuasion I find the ruling idea of
which I stand in need, the ruling idea that reconciles and adjudicates
among my warring motives. In it I find both concentration of myself and
escape from myself; in a word, I find Salvation.
