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EVOLUTION AND THE OTHER WORLD

EVOLUTION AND THE OTHER WORLD

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WHAT special students of so-called psychic phenomena will think of Mr. Henry Holt's two generous volumes 1 I do not know, but to me, and no doubt to many like me, they are quite the most important and significant, as they are the most entertaining, exposition of the subject. This is indeed something more than a dead book; it is a life- as it were the voice of a friend confiding to us through the hours of a long winter night the lessons, still mingled with hesitations and questions, of his ripe experience. The publicity of high spirits may abound; but there are pages also which will reveal their full meaning only to those who know the author as a friend in the literal sense of the word, passages, for those who understand, of almost sacred privacy. So, for instance, the minute account of the spectacle unfolding at sunrise to the eyes of the watcher at the author's summer home has its place and weight for all readers as an argument that, as these lovely things are far beyond "our ancestors' universe of darkness and silence," so there may be infinite ranges of perception still to be discovered

1 On the Cosmic Relations. By Henry Holt. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1914; second edition, 1919, title changed to The Cosmic Relations and Immortality.

by mankind; but to one who has entered that hospitable "gate, open to all who care to come," and with the kindly guidance of his host has seen the sunlight falling from mountain top to valley and from valley to lake, the printed words will be something more than the speech of a book to its unseen audience. These matters I should like to dwell on for their pleasantness and their wisdom; but, like a bad talker, I must use all my time in contradiction. For I need not defer saying that Mr. Holt's work seems to me to consist of two elements strangely compounded. Besides the appealing sagacity of the man of the world, inquisitive, sceptical of dogma, tolerant of all things except impertinence, resting finally in balance and measure-besides this sagacity of experience to which I bow, there is also in the book a philosophy of a more formal sort, to which, from the deepest knowledge of my heart, I am bound to demur.

Mr. Holt is avowedly of the school of “Lyell, Darwin, Spencer, Huxley, and their friends," who swept away "the flood of associations on which the old faiths depended"; he is a Spencerian à outrance. Such a state of mind might be set down as merely belated; but Mr. Holt is anything rather than tardy in his views. My quarrel with him is because, while adhering to the letter of evolution in its strict mechanical form, he would open his mind to the flood of spiritual associations with

no sense of the incongruity of such a position. I do not mean to imply that there is anything singular in this procedure, unless it be in the peculiar frankness and honesty of Mr. Holt's ideas. On the contrary, however individual some of his conclusions may appear, he has been borne onward on one of the great tides of the intellect. In the exaltation and lust of conquest that came with the Victorian demonstration of evolution, men's heads were a little turned, and whatever reservations they might make in deference to the Unknowable and the outlying realms of mystery, they were really and pugnaciously convinced that here was the word of truth which should silence the riddling questions of man's soul, as certainly as the Copernican system had led to the untangling of the orbits of the planets. The comparison of Darwin or Spencer with Copernicus became in fact one of the commonplaces of the wise and the unwise.

But this assurance of science was bought at a terrible price. It meant that every appearance of spontaneity in the universe must be subdued to a law of inflexible regularity, and that the soul of man was held to be no more than a momentary centre of molecular force in the vast abyss of matter. Naturally, the imagination of endless space and of the infinite mechanism of time, when the first enthusiasm of assertion calmed down, seemed to the human spirit a chill substitute for

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