The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress

Pantheism is mythical and has, as we have just seen, all the subversive powers of ordinary superstition. It turns the natural world, man’s stamping-ground and system of opportunities, into a self-justifying and sacred life; it endows the blameless giant with an inhuman soul and then worships the monstrous divinity it has fabricated. It thereby encounters the same dilemma that defeats all mythology when it forgets its merely poetic office and trespasses upon moral ground. It must either interpret the natural world faithfully, attributing to the mythical deity the sort of life that dramatically suits its visible behaviour, or if it idealises and moralises the spectacle it must renounce the material reality and efficacy of its gods. Either the cosmic power must cover the actual goodness and badness in nature impartially, when to worship it would be idolatrous, or it must cover only the better side of nature, those aspects of it which support and resemble human virtue. In the latter case it is human virtue that mythology is formulating in a dramatic fiction, a human ideal that is being illustrated by a poet, who selects for the purpose certain phases of nature and experience. By this idealisation the affinity which things often have to man’s interests may be brought out in a striking manner; but their total and real mechanism is no better represented than that of animals in Æsop’s fables.

To detect the divergence it suffices to open the eyes; and while nature may be rationally admired and cherished for so supporting the soul, it is her eventual ministry to man that makes her admirable, not her independent magnitude or antiquity. To worship nature as she really is, with all her innocent crimes made intentional by our mythology and her unfathomable constitution turned into a caricature of barbarian passions, is to subvert the order of values and to falsify natural philosophy. Yet this dislocation of reason, both in its conceptions and in its allegiance, is the natural outcome of thinking on mythical lines. A myth, by turning phenomena into expressions of thought and passion, teaches man to look for models and goals of action in that external world where reason can find nothing but instruments and materials.