The Stammering Century

by Gilbert Seldes

  Yet none of these things deeply affected the morality of daily life. Universalist, Unitarian, Transcendentalist, and disciple of New Thought, still agreed that sobriety and virtue, chastity and self-improvement were the foundations of a good life. Even phrenology preached self-culture and self-development to such a degree that its pamphlets read like parodies of twentieth-century advertisements. The old responsibility for sin was taught with a new emphasis. Man is responsible for his failures, for his poverty, for his ill-health, for his unhappiness. The moral accounting system drawn up by Franklin could have been endorsed by Jonathan Edwards, by Noyes, by Alcott, by Frances Willard, and by Elbert Hubbard. To perfect oneself morally is the goal of them all. The Puritan ethics suggested restraint on one’s natural impulses because the impulses themselves were evil. Liberal morality practiced restraint for the exaltation of self and for the general good of humanity. Even the cult of love had a strong moralistic basis. The God who is all-love, no less than the God who is all-just, desires our natural instincts to be checked, so that those who are evil may become good and those who are good may become perfect.

  But if the fundamental morality remained unchanged, New Thought pronounced the old law with shifted accents. It offered to every man, as his birthright, complete realization of himself. In one of Marden’s books he taught: “That everybody ought to be happier than the happiest of us are now; that our lives were intended to be infinitely richer and more abundant than at present; that we should have plenty of everything which is good for us; that the lack of anything which is really necessary and desirable does not fit the constitution of any right-living human being, and that we shorten our lives very materially through our own false thinking, our bad living, and our old-age convictions, and that to be happy and attain the highest efficiency, one must harmonize with the best, the highest thing in him.”

  The whole idea of boundaries was offensive to New Thought. The finite must merge into the infinite at all costs and no man must be allowed to cut himself off from his fellows. Sharp lines, definitions, classifications, were all to be erased, so that the mind of man might again be in harmony with the unbounded universe. So each teacher promised everything. There was no discipline in this religion and the possibilities for every individual were without end. “There is a power inside of you which if you could discover and use it would make of you everything you ever dreamed or imagined you could become.” Thus in a scientific age miracles were restored to mankind.

  It was inevitable that the optimistic religion of New Thought should go into business. It was essentially a religion of success. The successful man had brushed away limitations, had denied contradictions and realized himself fully. Marden, Trine, and Hubbard in their various ways were successful enough, but for the most part the business side of New Thought is rather sad reading and one turns from its surface optimism in magazines of success and advertisements of Personality to wonder whether the defeat of Jonathan Edwards was as desirable as it seemed. A cut above the success cult is Horace Fletcher who opposed to the “fear-thought” his idea of menticulture, saying that “it had been proven that none are so ill-favored as to be exempt from regeneration by the influence of optimistic thinking” and suggesting that beauty, too, is the reward of happy thoughts. But, in general, the business men of New Thought advised stock-brokers to become at one with God so that they might put over big deals, and refined the old bluff of the Yankee into “we are what we assert ourselves to be,” or “claim that you are what you desire to be.” New Thought turned assumption into aggressiveness and sired the go-getter. When it went into business for itself it was incoherent and often fraudulent. It became a mail order religion with loud complaints against the “peculiar laws” by which the post office department prevented prophets from selling sacred handkerchiefs guaranteed to cure cancer and barrenness. In unsubtle ways it managed to connect regeneration with the restoration of sexual vitality. At the same time, its professions were always lofty and it gave rise to the current sanctimonious chatter about service. From it also came the highly organized business of self-improvement. The moderate claims of President Eliot that the careful reading of fifty volumes of great literature will lay a foundation for being considered a well-read man, are laughed to scorn by the higher advertising which promises savoir faire in French and in etiquette, in memory and public speaking, in a fragrant breath and a knowledge of philosophy, and offers to develop a great personality in addition to all learning and all graces. The degradation of the idea of the will in all this is as marked as the expansion of the idea of self-reliance. Between them has been created a new and distinct type of American and there are moments when one thinks that it is the dominant type.

  This was not the intention of New Thought. As late as 1916, the scheduled purposes of the New Thought Alliance were “to teach the infinitude of the Supreme One, Divinity of Man and his Infinite possibilities through the creative power of constructive thinking and obedience to the voice of the Indwelling Presence which is our source of Inspiration, Power, Health, and Prosperity.” And, the following year, some effort was made to bring the “creative power of constructive thinking” to bear on this sentence itself. As a result certain affirmations were made. New Thought, after accepting the universe, allowed itself to be precise:

  “We affirm the freedom of each soul as to choice and as to belief, and would not, by the adoption of any declaration of principles, limit such freedom. The essence of the New Thought is Truth, and each individual must be loyal to the Truth he sees. The windows of his soul must be kept open at each moment for the higher light, and his mind must be always hospitable to each new inspiration.

  “We affirm the Good. This is supreme, universal, and everlasting. Man is made in the image of the Good, and evil and pain are but the tests and correctives that appear when his thought does not reflect the full glory of this image.

  “We affirm health, which is man’s divine inheritance. Man’s body is his holy temple. Every function of it, every cell of it, is intelligent, and is shaped, ruled, repaired, and controlled by mind. He whose body is full of light is full of health. Spiritual healing has existed among all races in all times. It has now become a part of the higher science and art of living the life more abundant.

  “We affirm the divine supply. He who serves God and man in the full understanding of the law of compensation shall not lack. Within us are unused resources of energy and power. He who lives with his whole being, and thus expresses fullness, shall reap fullness in return. He who gives himself, he who knows, and acts in his highest knowledge, he who trusts in the divine return, has learned the law of success.

  “We affirm the teaching of Christ that the Kingdom of Heaven is within us, that we are one with the Father, that we should judge not, that we should love one another, that we should heal the sick, that we should return good for evil, that we should minister to others, and that we should be perfect even as our Father in Heaven is perfect. These are not only ideals, but practical, every-day working principles.

  “We affirm these things, not as a profession, but practice, not in one day of the week, but in every hour and minute of every day, sleeping and waking, not in the ministry of the few, but in the service that included the democracy of all, not in words alone, but in the innermost thoughts of the heart expressed in living the life. ‘By their fruits ye shall know them.’

  “We affirm Heaven here and now, the life everlasting that becomes conscious immortality, the communion of mind with mind throughout the universe of thought, the nothingness of all error and negation, including death, the variety of unity that produces the individual expressions of the One-Life, and the quickened realization of the indwelling God in each soul that is making a new heaven and a new earth.”

  Of the mind-cure literature of his own time, James said, regretfully, that some of it is “so moonstruck with optimism and so vaguely expressed that an academically trained intellect finds it almost impossible to read it at all.” One wonders what he would have m
ade of the affirmations just quoted. He might assume that to affirm the freedom of belief means to protect or stand for that freedom as a principle. To affirm the divine supply would be to announce a belief in that supply. But what, precisely, is the meaning of affirming the Good? Does it mean appreciation of the Good, or preference for it, or only belief in the existence of the Good? Or that the Good alone exists and evil only “appears”? And, if these questions suggest the exact nature of the meaning of “affirm,” what is the meaning of affirming heaven here and now? Even a mind not academically trained becomes confused, wondering, if heaven is affirmed and established, what is the “nothingness of all error and negation,” and how death is included and precisely in what? What is the “higher science,” and what “the life more abundant,” and in what way is a body full of light?

  One wonders whether the vagueness of all these terms was not intentional. New Thought seemed to shrink from precision. Nothing in it was tough-minded. Its beliefs were all timid and timidly held. It lacked the power of dogmatic religions because it would not accept oppositions in nature and hostilities between men. It wavered between a mystic God and a scientific principle and, in practice, it exalted the aggressive American spirit on one day and taught ways of escape on another. It is not remarkable that, in the end, many of its leaders left New Thought behind and found a way of escape more sure than any of their own. For the only element in New Thought which is not a culmination of older native forces is its strain of Oriental mysticism. So far as it was strong at all, mysticism gave it strength.

  [1] The droning repetitions of the revivalists reappear, with other phrases, in New Thought. The second time a word is used, it requires half the attention of the first time. By the tenth repetition, the word is hypnotic, magical. It lulls the brain to sleep— or what is called, in New Thought, receptivity. Emerson did not know the trick. He said simply, “If a man is at heart just, then in so far is he God.” New Thought omits the qualification and repeats its assertions endlessly, for to assert and to repeat are essentials in the method. The foregoing and following quotations are selected by James from Ralph Waldo Trine as giving the “central point of view” of New Thought.

  [2] The succeeding affirmation does as much for astrology.

  XXIII. The Path to Nothing.

  THEY were all seekers for salvation, from the ecstatic Puritan to the vague yearners after New Thought. For some, salvation meant social equality; for others, an aristocracy in heaven. Some were fleeing from ills of the body and finding redemption in bran and water. Others, whose minds were sick, accepted any short way to the arms of the redeemer. For some, salvation was a means of escape from their own sins. Others, who had overcome Sin in themselves, sought the path to universal righteousness. The Christian felt his soul bruised by his separation from God; the abolitionist, by the bar between other men and himself. Even the dreary temperance worker looked forward to the perfection of mankind and the coming of God’s kingdom. The differences between them are many. From what were they escaping? And to what? And by what means? The abomination from which New Thought offered an escape was, like everything else in that cult, synthetic. Physical ills, moral defects, political injustice, external pressures, and lesions of the soul, were all to be cured by this single method: the method of thinking. By this method was prosecuted the search for the One. As intentionally as Thales or Anaximenes, New Thought brushed away the diversity of the forms of life to seek the one underlying principle. They found it in that moral law which Emerson had announced to them as a suitable object of worship. There was something restful in the thought of Oneness: it was in itself salvation from the plaguing diversity of daily life, from lust and lethargy and greed, and even from success. In New Thought, the Law was given names more benign, Good or All-Good, Divine, Almighty Presence, Nature, Kindly Light, the Over-Soul. But it was hardly necessary to make this God kind. For worship had ceased to be adoration: one merely contemplated the magnificence of the Law. The high priest had arrived at some rapture in this contemplation. The lesser orders—it was a religion without laity—swooned on a perfumed sea of vague ideas.

  But, again and again, there came into the mind of the believer a suspicion that this was not all. The crass world obtruded itself. One held fast to the thought of loyalty, yet servants deserted on the eve of a dinner party. One was aggressive and assertive and thought of nothing but prosperity, yet banks failed and factories burned. The world refused to be defeated. It would not be manipulated by thought into acceptable shape. It had been reduced to one, but from that one particles split off, apparently unaware of their identity with the infinite and the eternal. Somehow disease struck down the brightest and the best. Failure overtook the most confident and the most happily gifted. Perhaps there was some way of passing beyond the mystic One. Perhaps, by an effort, the believer could find nothing.

  At the second general convention of disciples of New Thought (New York, 1900) there appeared the Swami Abhedananda, a prophetic presence, since New Thought was destined to be enormously influenced by Oriental mysticism. Always receptive, and always looking for some new thing, the leaders of New Thought were enchanted with Yoga. The 195 rules on which it is based were more than a thousand years old, but the great works on Yoga had only begun to make their way into English in the 1890’s and a Swami, or even a Guru, was impressive. And there was something peculiarly sympathetic in the methods and devices of Yoga, especially if one did not consider too closely what the golden object could be. The Yogin knew how to breathe, and how to chew his food, and how to sit, and how to go, enormously, into the silence. There is for example the sutra on posture quoted by Professor Leuba, which mentions “the lotus-posture and the hero-posture and the decent-posture and the mystic diagram, and the staff-posture and the posture with the rest and the bedstead, the seated curlew and the seated elephant and the seated camel, the even arrangement, the stable-and-easy and others of the same kind.” The sutra is explained by Max Mueller in a quotation from the Bhagavad-Gita: “ ‘A devotee should constantly devote his Self to abstraction, remaining in a secret place . . . fixing his seat firmly in a clean place, not too high nor too low, and covered over with a sheet of cloth, a deerskin, and blades of Kusa grass—and there seated on that seat, fixing his mind exclusively on one point, with the workings of the mind and senses restrained, he should practice devotion for purity of Self. Holding his body, head, and neck even and unmoved, remaining steady, looking at the tip of his own nose, and not looking about in all directions, with a tranquil self, devoid of fear, and adhering to the rules of Brahmakarins, he should restrain his mind and concentrate it on me (the Deity), as his final goal. Thus constantly devoting his Self to abstraction, a devotee whose mind is restrained, attains that tranquillity which culminates in final emancipation and assimilation with me.’ Elsewhere the devotee is directed to exclude from his mind ‘external objects,’ concentrate the visual power between the brows, and making the upward and downward life-breaths even, confining their movements ‘within the nose.’ In another place, he is directed to repeat the single syllable ‘om,’ a mystical formula for Brahma.”

  To Americans who had been developing systems of eating and not eating, it was enchanting to find that the esoteric wisdom of the East was so desperately concerned with the human body. Here was a new field and they drove their mechanical plows into it without stopping to wonder what the crop would be. Philosophers of New Thought developed strange oriental names. William Walker Atkinson, Yogi Ramacharaka, published at least eighteen works on the Hindo-Yogi Science of Breathing, on the Science of Psychic Healing, on Auto-suggestion, on Hatha Yoga, and Moral Culture and Gnani Yogi and Raja Yoga and Thought Force in Business. Hatha Yoga, the philosophy of physical well-being, we learn is “first Nature; and last Nature.” From which it is adduced that it is not necessary to wear rubber soles to prevent Nature (“mother earth”) from drawing out the magnetism she has given the human body. The book also explains Prana, or Pranic energy, precisely in the terms of a medieval
philosopher explaining that fire is hot because in fire there is a principle of heat which is called phlogiston. “Man obtains Prana as well as nourishment from his food—Prana as well as a cleansing effect from the water he drinks—Prana properly distributed as well as mere muscular development in physical exercises—Prana as well as heat from the rays of the sun—Prana as well as oxygen from the air he breathes—and so on.”

  [“What is Prana?” he asks in our behalf, and explains—if it is an explanation:

  “Occultists in all ages and lands have taught, usually secretly to a few followers, that there was to be found in the air, in water, in the food, in the sunlight, everywhere, a substance or principle from which all activity, energy, power, and vitality was derived. . . . We have preferred to designate this vital principle by the name by which it is known among the Hindu teachers and students—gurus and chelas—and have used for this purpose the Sanscrit word ‘Prana,’ meaning ‘Absolute Energy.’

  “Occult authorities teach that the principle which the Hindus term ‘Prana’ is the universal principle of energy or force, and that all energy or force is derived from the principle, or rather, is a particular form or manifestation of that principle.” Of course Prana is a great deal more. It is the active principle of life and must not be confounded with the Ego since “Prana is merely a form of energy used by the Ego in its material manifestation. When the Ego leaves the body, the Prana, being no longer under its control, responds only to the orders of the individual atoms. . . . With the Ego in control, cohesion exists and the atoms are held together by the Will of the Ego.