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"We do seem to find," Professor Murray writes, "not only in all
religions, but in practically all philosophies, some belief that man
is not quite alone in the universe, but is met in his endeavours
towards the good by some external help or sympathy. We find it
everywhere in the unsophisticated man. We find it in the unguarded
self-revelations of the most severe and conscientious Atheists.
Now, the Stoics, like many other schools of thought, drew an
argument from this consensus of all mankind. It was not an absolute
proof of the existence of the Gods or Providence, but it was a
strong indication. The existence of a common instinctive belief in
the mind of man gives at least a presumption that there must be a
good cause for that belief.
"This is a reasonable position. There must be some such cause. But
it does not follow that the only valid cause is the truth of the
content of the belief. I cannot help suspecting that this is
precisely one of those points on which Stoicism, in company with
almost all philosophy up to the present time, has gone astray
through not sufficiently realising its dependence on the human mind
as a natural biological product. For it is very important in this
matter to realise that the so-called belief is not really an
intellectual judgment so much as a craving of the whole nature.
"It is only of very late years that psychologists have begun to
realise the enormous dominion of those forces in man of which he is
normally unconscious. We cannot escape as easily as these brave men
dreamed from the grip of the blind powers beneath the threshold.
Indeed, as I see philosophy after philosophy falling into this
unproven belief in the Friend behind phenomena, as I find that I
myself cannot, except for a moment and by an effort, refrain from
making the same assumption, it seems to me that perhaps here too we
are under the spell of a very old ineradicable instinct. We are
gregarious animals; our ancestors have been such for countless ages.
We cannot help looking out on the world as gregarious animals do; we
see it in terms of humanity and of fellowship. Students of animals
under domestication have shown us how the habits of a gregarious
creature, taken away from his kind, are shaped in a thousand details
by reference to the lost pack which is no longer there--the pack
which a dog tries to smell his way back to all the time he is out
walking, the pack he calls to for help when danger threatens. It is
a strange and touching thing, this eternal hunger of the gregarious
animal for the herd of friends who are not there. And it may be, it
may very possibly be, that, in the matter of this Friend behind
phenomena our own yearning and our own almost ineradicable
instinctive conviction, since they are certainly not founded on
either reason or observation, are in origin the groping of a lonely-souled
gregarious animal to find its herd or its herd-leader in the
great spaces between the stars.
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