The "Genius"

CHAPTER XXV

Those who have ever tried to read that very peculiar and, to many, very significant document know what an apparent jumble of contradictions and metaphysical balderdash it appears to be. The statement concerning the rapid multiplication and increased violence of diseases since the flood, which appears in the introduction is enough to shock any believer in definite, material, established natural science, and when Eugene came upon this in the outset, it irritated him, of course, greatly. Why should anybody make such a silly statement as this? Everybody knew that there had never been a flood. Why quote a myth as a fact? It irritated and from a critical point of view amused him. Then he came upon what he deemed to be a jumble of confusion in regard to matter and spirit. The author talked of the evidences of the five physical senses as being worthless, and yet was constantly referring to and using similes based upon those evidences to illustrate her spiritual meanings. He threw the book down a number of times, for the Biblical references irritated him. He did not believe in the Bible. The very word Christianity was a sickening jest, as sickening as it had been to the man in the church. To say that the miracles of Christ could be repeated today could not be serious. Still the man had testified. Wasn't that so? A certain vein of sincerity running through it all – that profound evidence of faith and sympathy which are the characteristics of all sincere reformers – appealed to him. Some little thoughts here and there – a profound acceptance of the spiritual understanding of Jesus, which he himself accepted, stayed with him. One sentence or paragraph somehow stuck in his mind, because he himself was of a metaphysical turn —

"Become conscious for a single moment that life and intelligence are purely spiritual, neither in nor of matter, and the body will then utter no complaints. If suffering from a belief in sickness, you will find yourself suddenly well. Sorrow is turned into joy when the body is controlled by spiritual life and love."

"God is a spirit," he recalled Jesus as saying. "They that worship Him must worship in spirit and in truth."

"You will find yourself suddenly well," thought Eugene. "Sorrow is turned into joy."

"Sorrow. What kind of sorrow? Love sorrow? This probably meant the end of earthly love; that that too was mortal."

He read on, discovering that Scientists believed in the immaculate conception of the Virgin Mary, which struck him as silly; also that they believed in the ultimate abolition of marriage as representing a mortal illusion of self-creation and perpetuation, and of course the having of children through the agency of the sexes, also the dematerialization of the body – its chemicalization into its native spirituality, wherein there can be neither sin, sickness, disease, decay nor death, were a part of their belief or understanding. It seemed to him to be a wild claim, and yet at the time, because of his natural metaphysical turn, it accorded with his sense of the mystery of life.

It should be remembered as a factor in this reading that Eugene was particularly fitted by temperament – introspective, imaginative, psychical – and by a momentarily despairing attitude, in which any straw was worth grasping at which promised relief from sorrow, despair and defeat, to make a study of this apparently radical theory of human existence. He had heard a great deal of Christian Science, seeing its churches built, its adherents multiplying, particularly in New York, and enthusiastically claiming freedom from every human ill. Idle, without entertainment or diversion and intensely introspective, it was natural that these curious statements should arrest him.

He was not unaware, also, from past reading and scientific speculation, that Carlyle had once said that "matter itself – the outer world of matter, was either nothing, or else a product due to man's mind" (Carlyle's Journal, from Froude's Life of Carlyle), and that Kant had held the whole universe to be something in the eye or mind – neither more nor less than a thought. Marcus Aurelius, he recalled, had said somewhere in his meditations that the soul of the universe was kind and merciful; that it had no evil in it, and was not harmed by evil. This latter thought stuck in his mind as peculiar because it was so diametrically opposed to his own feelings that the universe, the spirit of it that is, was subtle, cruel, crafty, and malicious. He wondered how a man who could come to be Emperor of Rome could have thought otherwise. Christ's Sermon on the Mount had always appealed to him as the lovely speculations of an idealist who had no real knowledge of life. Yet he had always wondered why "Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal" had thrilled him as something so beautiful that it must be true "For where your treasure is there will your heart be also." Keats had said "beauty is truth – truth beauty," and still another "truth is what is."

"And what is?" he had asked himself in answer to that.

"Beauty," was his reply to himself, for life at bottom, in spite of all its teeming terrors, was beautiful.

Only those of a metaphysical or natural religious turn of mind would care to follow the slow process of attempted alteration, which took place during the series of months which followed Angela's departure for Racine, her return to New York at Myrtle's solicitation, the time she spent in the maternity hospital, whither she was escorted on her arrival by Eugene and after. These are the deeps of being which only the more able intellectually essay, but Eugene wandered in them far and wide. There were long talks with Myrtle and Bangs – arguments upon all phases of mortal thought, real and unreal, with which Angela's situation had nothing to do. Eugene frankly confessed that he did not love her – that he did not want to live with her. He insisted that he could scarcely live without Suzanne. There was the taking up and reading or re-reading of odd philosophic and religious volumes, for he had nothing else to do. He did not care at first to go and sit with Angela, sorry as he was for her. He read or re-read Kent's "History of the Hebrews"; Weiniger's "Sex and Character"; Carl Snyder's "The World Machine"; Muzzey's "Spiritual Heroes"; Johnston's translation of "Bhagavad Ghita"; Emerson's essay on the Oversoul, and Huxley's "Science and Hebrew Tradition" and "Science and Christian Tradition." He learned from these things some curious facts which relate to religion, which he had either not known before or forgotten, i.e., that the Jews were almost the only race or nation which developed a consecutive line of religious thinkers or prophets; that their ideal was first and last a single God or Divinity, tribal at first, but later on universal, whose scope and significance were widened until He embraced the whole universe – was, in fact, the Universe – a governing principle – one God, however, belief in whom, His power to heal, to build up and overthrow had never been relinquished.

The Old Testament was full of that. Was that. The old prophets, he learned to his astonishment, were little more than whirling dervishes when they are first encountered historically, working themselves up into wild transports and frenzies, lying on the ground and writhing, cutting themselves as the Persian zealots do to this day in their feast of the tenth month and resorting to the most curious devices for nurturing their fanatic spirit, but always setting forth something that was astonishingly spiritual and great. They usually frequented the holy places and were to be distinguished by their wild looks and queer clothing. Isaiah eschewed clothing for three years (Is. 22, 21); Jeremiah appeared in the streets of the capital (according to Muzzey) with a wooden yoke on his neck, saying, "Thus shalt Juda's neck be bent under bondage to the Babylonian" (Jer. 27; 2 ff); Zedekiah came to King Ahab, wearing horns of iron like a steer, and saying, "Thus shalt thou push the Syrians" (1 Kings 22, 11). The prophet was called mad because he acted like a madman. Elisha dashed in on the gruff captain, Jehu, in his camp and broke a vial of oil on his head, saying, "Thus saith the Lord God of Israel, I have made thee king over the people of the Lord"; then he opened the door and fled. Somehow, though these things seemed wild, yet they accorded with Eugene's sense of prophecy. They were not cheap but great – wildly dramatic, like the word of a Lord God might be. Another thing that fascinated him was to find that the evolutionary hypothesis did not after all shut out a conception of a ruling, ordaining Divinity, as he had supposed, for he came across several things in the papers which, now that he was thinking about this so keenly, held him spellbound. One was quoted from a biological work by a man named George M. Gould, and read:

"Life reaches control of physical forces by the cell-mechanism, and, so far as we know, by it solely." From reading Mrs. Eddy and arguing with Bangs, Eugene was not prepared to admit this, but he was fascinated to see how it led ultimately to an acknowledgment of an active Divinity which shapes our ends. "No organic molecule shows any evidence of intellect, design or purpose. It is the product solely of mathematically determinate and invariable physical forces. Life becomes conscious of itself through specialized cellular activity, and human personality, therefore, can only be a unity of greater differentiations of function, a higher and fuller incarnation than the single cell incarnation. Life, or God, is in the cell… (And everywhere outside of it, quite as active and more so, perhaps, Eugene reserved mentally.) The cell's intelligence is His. (From reading Mrs. Eddy, Eugene could not quite agree with this. According to her, it was an illusion.) The human personality is also at last Himself and only Himself… If you wish to say 'Biologos' or God instead of Life, I heartily agree, and we are face to face with the sublime fact of biology. The cell is God's instrument and mediator in materiality; it is the mechanism of incarnation, the word made flesh and dwelling among us."

The other was a quotation in a Sunday newspaper from some man who appeared to be a working physicist of the time – Edgar Lucien Larkin:

"With the discovery and recent perfection of the new ultra-violet light microscope and the companion apparatus, the microphotographic camera, with rapidly moving, sensitive films, it seems that the extreme limit of vision of the human eye has been reached. Inorganic and organic particles have been seen, and these so minute that (the smallest) objects visible in the most powerful old-style instruments are as huge chunks in comparison. An active microscopic universe as wonderful as the sidereal universe, the stellar structure, has been revealed. This complexity actually exists; but exploration has scarcely commenced. Within a hundred years, devoted to this research, the micro-universe may be partially understood. Laws of micro-movements may be detected and published in textbooks like those of the gigantic universe suns and their concentric planets and moons. I cannot look into these minute moving and living deeps without instantly believing that they are mental – every motion is controlled by mind. The longer I look at the amazing things, the deeper is this conviction. This micro-universe is rooted and grounded in a mental base. Positively and without hope of overthrow, this assertion is made – the flying particles know where to go. Coarse particles, those visible in old-time microscopes, when suspended in liquids, were observed to be in rapid motion, darting to all geometrical directions with high speed. But the ultra-violet microscope reveals moving trillions of far smaller bodies, and these rush on geometric lines and cutout angles with the most incredible speed, specific for each kind and type."

What were the angles? Eugene asked himself. Who made them? Who or what arranged the geometric lines? The "Divine Mind" of Mrs. Eddy? Had this woman really found the truth? He pondered this, reading on, and then one day in a paper he came upon this reflection in regard to the universe and its government by Alfred Russel Wallace, which interested him as a proof that there might be, as Jesus said and as Mrs. Eddy contended, a Divine Mind or central thought in which there was no evil intent, but only good. The quotation was: "Life is that power which, from air and water and the substances dissolved therein, builds up organized and highly complex structures possessing definite forms and functions; these are presented in a continuous state of decay and repair by internal circulation of fluids and gases; they reproduce their like, go through various phases of youth, maturity and age, die and quickly decompose into their constituent elements. They thus form continuous series of similar individuals and so long as external conditions render their existence possible seem to possess a potential immortality.

"It is very necessary to presuppose some vast intelligence, some pervading spirit, to explain the guidance of the lower forces in accordance with the preordained system of evolution we see prevailing. Nothing less will do…

"If, however, we go as far as this, we must go further… We have a perfect right, on logical and scientific grounds, to see in all the infinitely varied products of the animal and vegetable kingdoms, which we alone can make use of, a preparation for ourselves, to assist in our mental development, and to fit us for a progressively higher state of existence as spiritual beings.

"…It seems only logical to assume that the vast, the infinite chasm between ourselves and the Deity, is to some extent occupied by an almost infinite series of grades of beings, each successive grade having higher and higher powers in regard to the origination, the development and the control of the universe.

"…There may have been a vast system of co-operation of such grades of beings, from a very high grade of power and intelligence down to those unconscious or almost unconscious cell souls posited by Haeckel…

"I can imagine the … Infinite Being, foreseeing and determining the broad outlines of a universe…

"He might, for instance, impress a sufficient number of his highest angels to create by their will power the primal universe of ether, with all those inherent properties and forces necessary for what was to follow. Using this as a vehicle, the next subordinate association of angels would so act upon the ether as to develop from it, in suitable masses and at suitable distances, the various elements of matter, which, under the influence of such laws and forces as gravitation, heat, and electricity, would thenceforth begin to form those vast systems of nebulæ and suns which constitute our stellar universe.

"Then we may imagine these hosts of angels, to whom a thousand years are as one day, watching the development of this vast system of suns and planets until some one or more of them combined in itself all those conditions of size, of elementary constitution, of atmosphere, of mass of water and requisite distance from its source of heat as to insure a stability of constitution and uniformity of temperature for a given minimum of millions of years, or of ages, as would be required for the full development of a life world from amœba to man, with a surplus of a few hundreds of millions for his adequate development.

"We are led, therefore, to postulate a body of what we may term organizing spirits, who would be charged with the duty of so influencing the myriads of cell souls as to carry out their part of the work with accuracy and certainty…

"At successive stages of the development of the life world, more and perhaps higher intelligences might be required to direct the main lines of variation in definite directions, in accordance with the general design to be worked out, and to guard against a break in the particular line, which alone could lead ultimately to the production of the human form.

"This speculative suggestion, I venture to hope, will appeal to some of my readers as the very best approximation we are now able to formulate as to the deeper, the most fundamental causes of matter and force of life and consciousness, and of man himself, at his best, already a little lower than the angels, and, like them, destined to a permanent progressive existence in a world of spirit."

This very peculiar and apparently progressive statement in regard to the conclusion which naturalistic science had revealed in regard to the universe struck Eugene as pretty fair confirmation of Mrs. Eddy's contention that all was mind and its infinite variety and that the only difference between her and the British scientific naturalists was that they contended for an ordered hierarchy which could only rule and manifest itself according to its own ordered or self-imposed laws, which they could perceive or detect, whereas, she contended for a governing spirit which was everywhere and would act through ordered laws and powers of its own arrangement. God was a principle like a rule in mathematics – two times two is four, for instance – and was as manifest daily and hourly and momentarily in a hall bedroom as in the circling motions of suns and systems. God was a principle. He grasped that now. A principle could be and was of course anywhere and everywhere at one and the same time. One could not imagine a place for instance where two times two would not be four, or where that rule would not be. So, likewise with the omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent mind of God.

CHAPTER XXVI

The most dangerous thing to possess a man to the extent of dominating him is an idea. It can and does ride him to destruction. Eugene's idea of the perfection of eighteen was one of the most dangerous things in his nature. In a way, combined with the inability of Angela to command his interest and loyalty, it had been his undoing up to this date. A religious idea followed in a narrow sense would have diverted this other, but it also might have destroyed him, if he had been able to follow it. Fortunately the theory he was now interesting himself in was not a narrow dogmatic one in any sense, but religion in its large aspects, a comprehensive resumé and spiritual co-ordination of the metaphysical speculation of the time, which was worthy of anyone's intelligent inquiry. Christian Science as a cult or religion was shunned by current religions and religionists as something outré, impossible, uncanny – as necromancy, imagination, hypnotism, mesmerism, spiritism – everything, in short, that it was not, and little, if anything, that it really was. Mrs. Eddy had formulated or rather restated a fact that was to be found in the sacred writings of India; in the Hebrew testaments, old and new; in Socrates, Marcus Aurelius, St. Augustine, Emerson, and Carlyle. The one variation notable between her and the moderns was that her ruling unity was not malicious, as Eugene and many others fancied, but helpful. Her unity was a unity of love. God was everything but the father of evil, which according to her was an illusion – neither fact nor substance – sound and fury, signifying nothing.

It must be remembered that during all the time Eugene was doing this painful and religious speculation he was living in the extreme northern portion of the city, working desultorily at some paintings which he thought he might sell, visiting Angela occasionally, safely hidden away in the maternity hospital at One Hundred and Tenth Street, thinking hourly and momentarily of Suzanne, and wondering if, by any chance, he should ever see her any more. His mind had been so inflamed by the beauty and the disposition of this girl that he was really not normal any longer. He needed some shock, some catastrophe greater than any he had previously experienced to bring him to his senses. The loss of his position had done something. The loss of Suzanne had only heightened his affection for her. The condition of Angela had given him pause, for it was an interesting question what would become of her. "If she would only die!" he said to himself, for we have the happy faculty of hating most joyously on this earth the thing we have wronged the most. He could scarcely go and see her, so obsessed was he with the idea that she was a handicap to his career. The idea of her introducing a child into his life only made him savage. Now, if she should die, he would have the child to care for and Suzanne, because of it, might never come to him.

His one idea at this time was not to be observed too much, or rather not at all, for he considered himself to be in great disfavor, and only likely to do himself injury by a public appearance – a fact which was more in his own mind than anywhere else. If he had not believed it, it would not have been true. For this reason he had selected this quiet neighborhood where the line of current city traffic was as nothing, for here he could brood in peace. The family that he lived with knew nothing about him. Winter was setting in. Because of the cold and snow and high winds, he was not likely to see many people hereabouts – particularly those celebrities who had known him in the past. There was a great deal of correspondence that followed him from his old address, for his name had been used on many committees, he was in "Who's Who," and he had many friends less distinguished than those whose companionship would have required the expenditure of much money who would have been glad to look him up. He ignored all invitations, however; refused to indicate by return mail where he was for the present; walked largely at night; read, painted, or sat and brooded during the day. He was thinking all the time of Suzanne and how disastrously fate had trapped him apparently through her. He was thinking that she might come back, that she ought. Lovely, hurtful pictures came to him of re-encounters with her in which she would rush into his arms, never to part, from him any more. Angela, in her room at the hospital, received little thought from him. She was there. She was receiving expert medical attention. He was paying all the bills. Her serious time had not yet really come. Myrtle was seeing her. He caught glimpses of himself at times as a cruel, hard intellect driving the most serviceable thing his life had known from him with blows, but somehow it seemed justifiable. Angela was not suited to him. Why could she not live away from him? Christian Science set aside marriage entirely as a human illusion, conflicting with the indestructible unity of the individual with God. Why shouldn't she let him go?