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Man too, if in his ape-like phase he resembled the other higher
apes, is an animal becoming more gregarious and not less. He has
passed within the historical period from a tribal gregariousness to
a nearly cosmopolitan tolerance. And he has his tribe about him.
He is not, as Professor Murray seems to suggest, a solitary LOST
gregarious beast. Why should his desire for God be regarded as the
overflow of an unsatisfied gregarious instinct, when he has home,
town, society, companionship, trade union, state, INCREASINGLY at
hand to glut it? Why should gregariousness drive a man to God
rather than to the third-class carriage and the public-house? Why
should gregariousness drive men out of crowded Egyptian cities into
the cells of the Thebaid? Schopenhauer in a memorable passage
(about the hedgehogs who assembled for warmth) is flatly opposed to
Professor Murray, and seems far more plausible when he declares that
the nature of man is insufficiently gregarious. The parallel with
the dog is not a valid one.
Does not the truth lie rather in the supposition that it is not the
Friend that is the instinctive delusion but the isolation? Is not
the real deception, our belief that we are completely
individualised, and is it not possible that this that Professor
Murray calls "instinct" is really not a vestige but a new thing
arising out of our increasing understanding, an intellectual
penetration to that greater being of the species, that vine, of
which we are the branches? Why should not the soul of the species,
many faceted indeed, be nevertheless a soul like our own?
Here, as in the case of Professor Metchnikoff, and in many other
cases of atheism, it seems to me that nothing but an inadequate
understanding of individuation bars the way to at least the
intellectual recognition of the true God.
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