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CHAPTER V

Vision

"Where no vision is, the people perish."

RIEFLY put, the essence of all true religion is, that a man should so walk-that is, should so order his life and conduct—as seeing the Invisible. As seeing Him who is invisible, the majority of religionists would phrase it; but as already stated at the outset it would be wrong to deny a true religious instinct to those who honestly find themselves not to be in a position to attribute the idea of personality to the great First Cause. "Personal" or "impersonal" is not here the question at issue: for whether personal or impersonal, that First Principle in which we live and move and have our being is assuredly not to be seen or felt in any material or physical way by those human senses which bring to us our perception of the material world. For the right ordering of life and conduct the perceptions of the eye and of the ear avail not. Is it not, alas! true that the cultivation of Art, of Rhetoric, of Music, even in their highest walks is in some men's natures entirely compatible with the deepest moral degradation? The perception which is necessary for the right ordering of

life is attained in no wise through the operation of the organs of sense, is equally attainable by him who is blind or deaf, as by him who has all the physical senses. Men of science have learned to locate the physical senses in certain physical organs; and in truth much progress has been made in recent years in this direction, for besides the old "five senses we possess the sense of musical pitch located in the fibres of Corti, the sense of rotation in the semi-circular canals of the ear, the sense of colour in the conoidal filaments of the retinal structure of the eye. Men of science have long ago speculated on the existence of a special organ of moral perception, and Descartes even suggested that the pineal "gland of the brain was the seat of the soul. Modern physiology and modern psychology have alike failed to confirm any such specialised physical organ as the seat of the moral or spiritual perceptions, and the psychologist has been driven to attempt to account for the moral perceptions, the existence of which he certainly cannot deny, by some doctrine of cumulative experiences of the race, the perception or reception of which is transmitted by heredity. This is little more than another way of saying that all his attempts to give a physical explanation of hyperphysical facts have ended in failure. The facts remain. That men do possess a faculty of spiritual discernment that they, or at least that many of them, can "see" that which is invisible to the outward eye, and "hear" that which is inaudible to the outward ear; that they have a something in their being which not only is competent at least in measure to distinguish between right and wrong, but also in some way sits in active judgment upon their actions,

influencing their motives and shaping their characters and destinies, are primary facts not to be got rid of by denial or dismissal as mental aberrations. To him who possesses the spiritual perception the facts are as real as eyesight is to the man who can see. No amount of denials by blind men will convince a man who possesses the faculty of eyesight that his vision is a hallucination. He possesses something that they have not, and which, save possibly by analogy, they cannot understand. So is it in the sphere of the non-material perceptions. Spiritual vision of that which is outwardly invisible is the basis of the entire religious faculty. To it the crudest and the most highly developed forms of religious experience alike belong. Like all other human perceptions the religious perceptions need to be trained, to be interpreted, to be co-ordinated. That when untrained or unco-ordinated they may mislead, and may mislead the more the more intense they are, must be frankly admitted: for the same is true of all other human faculties. But again this is no reason for denying their reality, and certainly should not lead us to minimise their importance.

There is some advantage in digressing for a moment upon the faculty of discernment in general as a human possession: for there is a faculty of discernment that is not to be accounted for by the processes of logical reasoning or of formal thought, a faculty which enters into the intuitive processes which are observed to be practised by the artist and the poet, and even by the scientific discoverer. There are, for example, artists who have never studied the laws of geometry or perspective, who have never studied anatomy, and who yet in their

pictures obey the laws of those sciences by a sort of instinct. If a shadow is drawn so as to fall in a wrong direction, or a limb is drawn in some incorrect position, they will at once know that it is wrong. If you ask them how or why it is wrong they cannot tell you; they do not even themselves know the reason. All they can say is: "Why! I see that it is wrong." They have lived so much, so intimately amongst these things that they cannot make a mistake without at once recognising it to be a mistake. The faculty of reasoning plays absolutely no part here; they have acquired an intuition lacking in other men, and have become seers. It is so with the musician, who if he be a true musician having lived in his art, grows into an instinctive knowledge which others have to acquire by painful mastering of rules of harmony and counterpoint. The poet in like manner, if he be a true poet, attains as by instinct, that is to say by a species of inner discernment to flights of thought that philosophy could only have arrived at by long and painful effort. The faculty of vision or discernment which does not contradict reason, does not even employ reason, but which nevertheless arrives at rational results, by another process, is one of the most singular of human possessions. It was possessed by Faraday in a remarkable degree. Familiarising himself with the experimental facts, living amongst them, as his biographers tell us, letting, in Matthew Arnold's luminous phrase, his thoughts play freely about them, he became able to foresee new facts and new relations, which subsequently were verified by experiment, some only with extreme difficulty, and others not in his own lifetime. Herein his work

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resembled the intuitive process of the artist rather than the calculating and logical process of the philosopher. Newton, too, in spite of his own sententious dictum, hypotheses non fingo, was possessed of this indefinable faculty. It is on record that when he was asked how he came to deduce his laws of motion from the observation of the falling of bodies, he replied: "By constantly thinking about them." There is a very remarkable analogy, which is indeed something more than analogy, afforded by certain results in that part of mathematics known as the Integral Calculus. The mathematical process of integration is, as every beginner in mathematics knows, the converse of the process of differentiation, and many of the solutions of differential equations have been arrived at by performing the process of integrating them. But there were certain other differential equations with which the process of the integral calculus was found powerless to deal: they were insoluble, their integrals remained unknowable. Many of these have, however, become known in an altogether different way. Some mathematician of genius, with that quality of vision that is art and not science, had imagined what the integral ought to be, and, though his first suggestion may have had to be modified or adjusted before being finally established, proved that it was the integral, by finding, through the reverse process of differentiating that which he had imagined, that it yielded the differential equation of which the solution had been hitherto undiscoverable. This is a case where reasoning being powerless to step forward, a different faculty of the mind came in and found the solution from which, when once found, reasoning could step