IF I HAD MY LIFE TO LIVE OVER AGAIN—WHAT?

Evening Star, Issue 20316, 26 October 1929, Page 2

IF I HAD MY LIFE TO LIVE OVER AGAIN—WHAT?

DARWIN'S WISH Darwin lias loft a memorable confession of what he would do if ho had his life to live over again. In his ‘ Life and Letters ' he records bow at the age of thirty, or beyond, poetry of many binds—Milton, Gray, Wordsworth, Shelley—gave him “ great pleasure.” “ Even as a schoolboy 1 took intense delight in Shakespeare. Pictures and musie also were greatly enjoyed. In later years all this pleasure vanished. I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. I have lost almost all taste for pictures or music,” and also the exquisite delight which he’once had in fine scenery. He goes on to refer to the oddity of these results, which ho calls a “ lamentable loss,” because he still retains his interest in other forms of literature, biography, travel, essays, and novels, if they do not end unhappily, against which he thinks a law ought to be passed. And then he writes those memorable words: “My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone on which the higher tastes depend I cannot conceive. ... If I had to live my life over again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week.” * O * » Why? Darwin, with his usual analytical insight, ■ discerns the reason. “ The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and, more probably, to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.” It is from the emotional side of our nature that we get the driving forces of life. Darwin indicates three results that emerge when it is denied its rights—a loss of happiness, intellectual and moral injury. It is not difficult to see how these results emerge. Take happiness, e.g. fhe first condition of happiness, or at any rate a chief condition, is good health. Well, a famous physician, was telling us not long ago that the best specific for good health was to read plenty of good poetry. Health depends on the co-operation and unison of the multitudinous cells that constitute the body. Disease is due to these cells acting independently, as selfishness disorders the moral world. Now, music and, poetry (which is the highest form of music in words) exercise a a calming, a soothing, an elevating effect, quieting bodily unrest and purifying the mind and soul. Thus emerge health and happiness. But further, we are all dumb poets— i.e., we have emotions and feelings that surge up in us seeking utterance. Most of us fail to find words for oui deeper feelings of sorrow, joy, love, sympathy. Here the poet comes to us as a liberating force, freeing us from the trammels of conventionalities, and giving liberty to the pent up emotions of our being. So we enter into the happiness of liberty and joy. Any undue emotional repression must therefore mean a curtailment of these. ® But it is likewise injurious to the intellect. Darwin, with his usual caution, uses the qualifying word “ possibly.” But he need not have done so. There is no doubt about it. We may get at it in this way: the intellect is the originator of ideas. Everything we see was first an idea in somebody’s mind. Ideas without labour may not come to much, but labour without ideas will get nowhere, unless to chaos. But the force to make ideas operative must come from the emotions. The emotions are the dynamic that sets ideas moving. The poet has enriched humanity, not perhaps with its highest ideals, but with the dynamic that has enabled it to realise them. Ho has indeed supplied many of its best ideas. But his specific contribution to intellectual progress is to sot moving the motive force by which ideas are translated into facts. He packs truth into the smallest compass, gives it wings of music, and sets it singing in tho heart of man everywhere. Volumes, e.g., were written on patriotism, on the love of onels country, and the preservation of its liberties against oppression. But the immortal ‘Scots Wha Hae’ has done more than all of them to make such ideas current coin. And so in every other sphere of life. As a poet himself puts it:

No warrior he, no judge, no king, But he gives a voice to everything. He makes the flutter of a bird Immortal in a spoken word, And sets the murmur of the shore To human woo for evermore, And tells the bosom’s inmost feeling In crimson words like blood drops stealing. All scientific achievements depend on the last resort on the emotions that utilise them. Kidd, in his ‘Science of Power,’ makes this very clear relative to Germany and the Great War. He shows how for thirty years the war lords had kept steadily before the youth of the empire the ideal of German superiority and world conquest. And when the time came the match was ready to apply to the explosive forces that had been slowly maturing for over a score of years. And the match was the emotions that had been carefully schooled for “ Tho Day.” Thus an injury is done to the intellectual side of our nature if it ignores the poetic, the emotional. It is as if an engineer constructs a factory, perfecting all its mechanical arrangements, but makes no provision for tho power which shall set them all moving, and achieving the ends for which they have been called into existence. His work is all right as far as it goes. But it remains inoperative without the driving forces of steam or electricity from tho outside. This is still more true when we come into tho moral sphere. Darwin felt that. Ho said that the enfeeblement of the emotional part of our nature would be “ more probably ” injurious to

tho mora! character. It certainly would. Why? Because the finer and more delicate and more complex an organism, the more serious injury becomes. and the more irreparable the loss. 'The"pencil with which we write this, if broken, can easily be repaired or another found to take its place, but if the injury is to tho hand, or the ©ye, or the mind, then it may be irreparable or fatal. Now, the moral and spiritual part of the nature is the subtlest and most sensitive of the organism. Hence hurt 6f it will be the most serious of all. But there, are those who deny the existence of such faculties—deny tho reality or the truth of the facts of a spiritual and religious world. They admit the power of knowing the phenomena of the visible world—the' world of the senses, and the intellect, and the aesthetic emotions stirred by the arts of music, poetry, painting. There are powers in human nature capable of apprehending and translating these into definite knowledge and experience. A man might be the greatest physicist, mathematician, geologist, botanist, and be incapable of being stirred by a poem nr a song or an oratorio. He might call it merely expensive noise. “Yet the world of music is a most real world. Man has faculties for reaching it and judging it; and the evidences of its reality are in the domain of fact and history.” It is the same relative to spiritual and religious phenomena. There is in man a side of his nature with faculties different from those by which wo judge of the things of sense and tho abstractions of tho intellect. The outcome and evidence of it is seen in history, in biography, in the experience of multitudes of tho wisest and the best, in every age, of every sex and condition. A man may be an agnostic here, just as he may be an agnostic in regard to the emotions, laws, or reality of art or music or poetry. e « • • This condition may be acquired by the non-use of the faculties or organs that achieve results in the sphere of morals and religion. These have their laws as definite and sure as those that operate in the world of matter and of mind. Every organ not used or abused we lose. Nature inexorably ordains that disuse of function entails atrophy of faculty. Darwin realised this relative to music and poetry. It would seem also, if the story we give below be true, that he felt the same in regard to religion. But the point we wish to make just now is that the opinions of those who restrict themselves to one 6r two spheres of thought and investigation, and yet presume to give judgment relative to phenomena in other spheres the laws of which they have not studied or obeyed, are of little consequence. A great biologist like Darwin is not, because of his eminence in this particular branch of science, entitled to give verdicts in others that have not come within the purview of his studies. And the same is true of the theologian. As Victor Hugo puts it: “There is a philosophy classed pathologically which denies the sun; this philosophy is called blindness. To set up a sense we lack as a source of truth is a fine piece of blind man’s assurance.” Darwin himself, with the honesty characteristic of him, recognised this. A student once wrote to him to ask if he believed in a higher and special revelation. He replied: “My opinion is of no value on such themes. I have been too busy with physiological problems to pay adequate attention or give the needed time for such studies.” » «- » « It would seem, however, if the following story be true, that Darwin, at the end of his life, regretted he had not done so. A few years ago a Melbourne weekly told of an interview that Lady Hope had with him near the end of his life. She said she had been asked to go and sit with Darwin, He was then bedridden. After describing the room and the surroundings, seating herself by his bedside she asked what lie had been reading. He replied “ Hebrews. The royal book, I call it.” Then, placing his finger on certain passages, he commented on them. Reference was made by Lady Hope to the Creation and its treatment in Genesis. Darwin seemed distressed, his fingers twitched nervously. He said: “I was a young man with unformed ideas. I threw out queries, suggestions, wondering all the time over everything; and, to my astonishment, the ideas took like wildfire. People made a religion of them.” Then he paused, spoke of “ tho holiness of God” and “the grandeur of this book.” After a little he asked her if she would speak to his servants and some of the neighbours in his summer house. “What shall I speak about?” she said. “Christ Jesus,” he replied, in a clear, emphatic voice, adding in a lower tone, “and His salvation. Is not that the best thing? And then I want you to sing some hymns with them. If you take the meeting at 3 p.m, this window will be open, and you will know that I am joining in the singing.” “The wonderful look of, brightness and animation on his face as he said this I shall never forget. How 1 wished I could have made a picture of the fine old man and his beautiful surroundings that autumn afternoon.” Lady Hope told this story at a morning prayer service in Northfield. It was afterwards repeated from the platform by the well-known Biblical scholar, Dr A. T. Robertson.