Love, the Law of Life

The philosophy of Schopenhauer taught that the will is blind, but that the intellect is the awakened part of man. MHartmann’s philosophy of religion was similar— merely more metaphysical. It affirmed that the will is the blind, mechanical part of man, while the reason is the seat of cosmic, intelligent law.

The Buddhistic principle of perception also teaches that the blind portion of man is saved by reason. Knowledge thus becomes latent prerogative, and will is transmigration. The latter revolves from beast to man, and from man to beast. Buddhism teaches salvation from causality, that blind will must be saved by the power of reason.

Tolstoy too tripped upon this error. His religion was from first to last the religion of reason. He taught love insistently, but it was a theoretical love, the love of the Sermon on the Mount, not the love of the Cross.

Gotama regarded will and perception as dualistic. According to Gotama, life is a wandering, a perplexity; and reason, which delivers from this perplexity, is a new, special activity. Desire and perception, then, revolve in different orbits. And from the point of view that these two orders exist, the conclusion is reached that will and perception exist in completely different realms. But the impulsion to perceive proceeds from the will. It is a self-reconstruction which believes that erring desire is transferred to the world of perception, just as the cicada sheds its empty coat. In other words, it is a species of self-rescue.

It may be asked, then, whence knowledge is actually born. If through perception deliverance may be attained, what, really, is the relation between these two orders? It must be objected that these ideas all place too great esteem upon knowledge, and tend to an excess of theory.

How interesting it is that John avoided perplexing _ theories and declared that genuine love recognizes God. No clearer, briefer, more truth-laden word was ever spoken. The majority of philosophers have dealt with the methods of knowing and with formal values, 21. e., with values of categories. But John breaks away from real values of categories, and declares distinctly that without love it is impossible to recognize God. Certain men suspect herein a paradox. But, according to Kant’s epistemology, knowledge, 7. e., the faculty of recognition of the external world, is imperfect. Hence it is impossible to know God. The world as known by the individual in time and space and through the five senses of relative Nature is extremely circumscribed, and man cannot, after all, know God.

Kant declares that the Absolute does not enter into recognition. But when we discern through inner conscience, we cannot but believe in God. When we make our value judgments from within, God is infallibly revealed. And we are thus enabled to recognize the Absolute. For example, when we choose the way of goodness, our choice is due to nothing else than Absolute Life—Kant’s “categorical imperative.”’ God is not known through external knowledge, but in the world of will and desire Absoluteness is momentarily revealed. Kant thus explains the two kinds of perception, the external and the internal. It is for this reason that it is commonly asserted that modern philosophy dates from Kant.

If man would know the God of Jesus, he cannot reject conscience. If he casts out the shrine of the soul where dwells the inner living spirit, the revelation of God fails. And the attempt to account for the inner world of life by external matter, or electrons, or energy, or by stringing equations together, is futile. It is just here that many youths err.

Kant explains the process statically, while Bergson explains it dynamically. That is, according to Bergson, in the activity of life there is the experience of pure continuity. If we attend exclusively to the external, we are in danger of coarsening the inner life. We live by the power of life alone, and life’s experiences are solely internal. The word “‘life’’ does not, let me here caution the reader, signify the physical life, but the life of pure continuity, which we perceive intuitively. Our direct recognition, or intuitive perception, is solely through the inner self. If westart from anything external, confusion in our ideas of the structure of the cosmos is inescapable.

In modern philosophy no clearer teaching of a personal God has been given than that of Lotze. In the beginning of his philosophy of religion Lotze injects no epistemology. He says, ‘Recognize God as a Personality,” and by a flash of wisdom he makes man’s knowledge of God to rest upon his own inner structure.

When external forces oppress too vehemently, man degenerates to materialistic living. Marx confined the soul of man too forcibly within his equations of surplus value. In them there can be no recognition of God. But when we make the inner life our point of departure, we experience the vital throb within, and we become conscious of God. In the brief words, God is Love, we learn that our recognition of God must proceed from within.

We do not know the structure of the cosmos. But we do know our own inner structure. It is the unit termed the self; the life which attacks its environment; the inner corrective power which opposes natural selection and makes new selections. These things we recognize within ourselves, a recognition which is necessarily intuitive. y Recently in Tokyo a youth said to me, “I want to believe, but the temptation to die always possesses my soul.” I replied, ‘‘I too once got into such a pessimistic frame of mind, but I noticed that in my heart there was - something that remained. It was the consciousness of an impulse to help make the world just a bit better. And I came to feel that, even though everything external should be absolute gloom, if I still had the strength to grasp the handful of grit in my conscience, I should not abandon the effort to help set the universe right. I felt that even though God should appear to me evil, I ought, so long as life was in me, to continue my endeavor to correct that evil God. I resolved that so long as conscience remained, I would, no matter were I cast into hell, eat my way out of fatalism and causality, and keep the courage to go forward in the effort to correct and lead the universe on to the way of virtue.”

Men say, “God has cast me away,’ or “I’m worn out in the fight of life,’ and would abandon themselves; yet even when the temptation to suicide comes, we are never to throw away the shreds.of aspiration toward the good, but keep on advancing toward Goodness. Through love we are to mitigate the violence of the struggle for existence.

The new birth of conscience is the great effort to amend the world, which we term salvation. It is here that the new point of departure, within the self, is supplied. If Nature bestowed it, there would be no need of our assistance. But if not, then we need to make the new start by the help of that which life imparts within us. We recognize with certitude the self within. It is here that we have the point of departure for personality.

Personality exists in the cosmos, and therefore in me too personality appears. My own personality is the revelation of cosmic personality. The knowledge that the true form of the cosmos is personality is the first step in the process of recognition. Here, then, recognition and will are not disparate. The dualism of unsavable, purposeless will-impulse, to be saved (temporarily) by perception and intelligence, as taught by Schopenhauer and Hartmann, does not exist. Rather must we believe that the energetic will develops intelligence.

The Neo-Kantian thinkers teach that intelligence is a product of life. That is, intelligence is the secretion of the life within. We do not possess a particular faculty of intelligence, but intelligence is that which spontaneously springs forth from within. Therefore, if the life of conscience be noble, then its product, its secretion, of intelligence will naturally be pure. The clearer the activity of life, the clearer its product of intelligence, transforming our metaphysical recogni-’ tion of God. When, on the contrary, we are defeated by external environment, recognition does not arise. It remains naught but a catalogue of symbols.

The eye which sees God we call conscience. Conscience is a lens.

Blessed are the pure in heart! They will see God.

They see God because the lens is perfect. Conscience ever produces fresh creative effort. The new effort toward creation does not create solely that which it prefers. It is the endeavor to bring forth the evil recast as anew entity. This, then, is the Way of Life, the life of the conscience, the new departure in the amending of the cosmos. When this dynamic of love works within, we feel the recognition of God as the Source of Love issuing forth copiously as from a fountain.

It is also comparable to electricity. If an electromagnet remains insulated, no current is generated; but if it be moved within a coil of copper wire, a current is immediately set up. And the faster it is rotated, the higher the potential of the current, until a power greater than that of the steam that moves a locomotive is produced. In precisely similar fashion, when the life of the conscience is lacking, it is impossible for one clearly to know that God is the God of Life; but once the life of conscience is stirred, clear recognition of the God of Life is attained.

/ So long as God is thought of as a mere symbol, and yi /the life of conscience is not practiced, the God of Life may not be known. God is not a Being of quiescence and weakness. I believe that if we grasp the truth that God is the Mighty One who, working through spirit, amends the cosmos, we will immediately ascend to the truth that recognition of God proceeds from love and conscience.

If, as in the religion of asceticism of India, men bind their muscles and spend their lives in quietude, accomplishing nothing creative, it is possible for them to think of God as absolute non-existence; but when men rise and break their fetters, they forthwith discover the God who works.

In the throes of the struggle for existence men ever feel hate and fear; their hearts are not tranquil. They create fictitious enemy powers and live in continual dread. The sole way of deliverance lies through the knowledge that the true salvation of man is in love, not in conflict. A certain religionist has said, “It has been remarked that since the struggle for existence is the established rule of the world, we must inevitably fall as its victims. But it is not a particularly pleasant affair for the weak to submit continually to the strong.

Therefore, if we who are weak will sacrifice ourselves to the strong, we shall be able to bear it.”’ But he is wrong: the new point of departure for man must be the recognition that God has implanted the urge to amend ~ that which is, even if but slightly, in error.

It is not struggle that has been imposed, but effort through love; and it is God who has implanted it. When we advance after such a self-awakening, we learn that since we are creators, God too is a Creator; and when we are inwardly conscious of our aim, we become conscious of purpose in the universe. In other words, because we love, we are enabled to know God who is the source of love.

The religion of love as taught by Jesus has no philosophical theory of knowledge. It is only love through and through. It is love put into practice.

Christianity, however, has been weak in the practice of love; and the God of Christianity has, therefore, come to be thought of merely as a symbol—not imparted to man as the God of power and of love. In the society of today true philosophy, true religion, true science, do not yet exist. Men’s consciences are benumbed. True religion, philosophy, and science will appear at the moment when love is put into practice. The religion, the science, and the philosophy of the past have been the creations of men of disunited selves —men marred by defects and incapable of clearly visioning God.

If we would see God, we must first love. When we make a beginning in the life of conscience, we forthwith experience within us the revelation of God. Jesus it was who showed us the first step toward recognition through love. When with this resolve we go forward, we too are enabled to love offenders and folk who are in distress. This is the power which Jesus gives us. It was he who brought into this imperfect world of hate the teaching of love.

Through this love God is first perceived. The man who declares that he does not know God, has failed because he does not love. Divesting oneself of conscience and love, and declaring that one does not know God, is like covering the eyes and saying that one cannot see.

True recognition of God today must begin within the conscience. Professor Nishida says, “ True life must be discovered in Jesus who as a young man died on the. cross.” The emergence of love begins with Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus, too, taught that God forgives even criminals. Love alone recognizes. Just because Jesus lived the life of love, he reached this conclusion.

The man who says he cannot comprehend a God who forgives offenders owes his inability to his failure to practice love. When the electro-magnet is kept motionless, no current is generated.

The reason why we do not as yet truly perceive the nature of God is, after all, simply the sluggishness of our life of conscience. In order to know God we must rouse our life of conscience up to far greater activity. — He alone who loves is able to see God. For God is Love.