A large proportion of every man’s available energy, mental and physical (it is the same) is exhausted in the process of an interminable and unnecessary digestion. More or less chronic costiveness reduces vitality by sending a stream of putrefactive poison circulating through the blood. The body is bloated with venom, the mind darkened by the glooms and uncharitablenesses that are the spiritual fruits of constipation. Suffering, the glutton causes his neighbours to suffer. And after forty or fifty years of gormandising, a cancer makes its appearance and the victim of gluttony bids a long and excruciating farewell to the scenes of his vice. It was syphilis that turned even moderate and occasional lechery into sin. Cancer, which leaves the savage and the frugal Oriental unscathed, but preys with ever increasing fury on the overfed Westerner, is the last-paid wage, the parting gift of a life of gluttony.
Much in the life of man to which we now attach “spiritual” and transcendental values, might and perhaps should be revalued in terms of hygiene. Starting from the axiom that it is a man’s first duty to use all his powers to the best purpose, to be as completely as possible himself, we can re-interpret a great deal of morality and religion as rules of health for the attainment and keeping up of an ideal efficiency. Many sins, it is obvious, make a man physically unhealthy and therefore incapable of doing or being his best—a burden to himself and a nuisance to his neighbours. It is unnecessary to labour the point. But vice compromises other modes of healthful existence besides the physical.
Sin is visited by punishments more subtle than constipation, venereal disease and all their unpleasant spiritual concomitants. For example, there are certain human potentialities which can only be developed into actuality when the mind is in a state of quiet. For those who live in a state of agitation, certain kinds of serene and lasting happiness, certain intellectual and creative processes are impossible.
Now it is precisely the excessive indulgence of those natural proclivities called “sins” that tends to keep the mind in agitation and prevent a man from realising what are perhaps the most important potentialities of thought and happiness he holds within him. Sloth, avarice, lechery and anger are hygienically unsound; they dull the mind and trouble it, raise mud, so to speak, by stirring. Reasonable activity of a kind which it is possible to believe worth while, a controlled temper, a chastity not so excessive as to be harmful, a humility unpreoccupied with the trivial fears, desires, and hopes which fill the life of the vain and proud—these things are hygienically sound, because they make it possible for the man who practises them to realise the potentialities which, were his mind kept by vice in a state of agitated distraction, would perforce remain latent and for ever unactual.
Mysticism, which is the systematic cultivation of mental quietness, the deliberate and conscious pursuit of the serenest kind of happiness, may be most satisfactorily regarded as a rule of health. Mystics attribute their happiness and their creative powers to a union with God. The hypothesis is, to say the least, unnecessary. Atheists and epileptics have received inspirations which have never been attributed to the Holy Spirit. Every symptom of the trance—from the “sense of presence” to total unconsciousness can be produced artificially in the laboratory.
The drug taker, the epileptic, the suddenly “inspired” mathematician or artist, the experimental psychologist differ from the religious mystic only in their attitude towards the mystical experiences which they all equally share. Believing them to be divine, the religious mystic cultivates his experiences, makes use of them to bring him happiness and serenity. The others accept them as merely curious sensations, like giddiness or the hiccoughs, and do not attempt, therefore, to make a systematic use of their experiences in the conduct of their lives. In this they are wrong.
We are, I think, fairly safe in supposing that religious mystics do not in fact unite themselves with that impossible being, a God at once almighty and personal, limited and limitless. But that does not in any way detract from the value of mysticism as a way to perfect health. No man supposes that he is entering into direct communion with the deity when he does Swedish exercises or cleans his teeth. If we make a habit of Müller and Pepsodent, we do so because they keep us fit. It is for the same reason that we should make a habit of mysticism as well as of moral virtue. Leading a virtuous and reasonable life, practising the arts of meditation and recollection, we shall unbury all our hidden talents, shall attain in spite of circumstances to the happiness of serenity and integration, shall come, in a word, to be completely and perfectly ourselves.
BATAVIA
Hygiene is doubtless an excellent thing. But I begin to wonder, as I re-read the preceding section, why I should have found it necessary to insist on hygiene to the total exclusion of God. Temperament, I suppose, is partly accountable. But it is mainly an affair—as usual—of unreasoning prejudices, the fruit of mental habits acquired during childhood. Men who have had a certain kind of training can see divinity, or the possibility of it, everywhere. Those whose upbringing has been of a different kind spend their whole lives sterilising and hermetically sealing their universe, so as to prevent any germ of godhead from entering and breeding dangerously within it. They demand that the cosmos shall be bacteriologically pure. No life; hygiene, but at all costs not a god. Considered dispassionately, this prejudice does not seem to me any more worthy of respect than its opposite. Indeed, it is probably much less respectable.
The fact that men have had stupid and obviously incorrect ideas about God does not justify us in trying to eliminate God from out of the universe. Men have had stupid and incorrect ideas on almost every subject that can be thought about. They have believed, for example, that the earth is flat and that the sun revolves round it. But we do not regard that as a valid reason for denying the existence of astronomy.
The belief that God is a person and that a real personal contact can be established between him and a human being is probably unfounded. We are persons ourselves, and we therefore tend to see all things in terms of personality. The uneducated man of average intelligence tends, quite naturally and as a matter of course, to interpret a thunderstorm in terms of human feelings. Science provides a different and more satisfactory interpretation.
All contemporary Western men and women possess at least the rudiments of physical science and the scientific habit of mind as an inheritance; they have been brought up to think of nature in terms of impersonal law, not in terms of anthropomorphic passion. Not even the stupidest European or American now imagines that a thunderstorm is a manifestation of divine tantrums. But among peoples brought up in a different way, only thinkers of the highest genius can conceive of a thunderstorm as a purely impersonal happening. There is no well-established science of religion.
The stupid Westerner has almost no educational advantages, when it comes to religious matters, over his savage and Oriental brothers. His natural instinct is to regard God as a person, and he has received no training that might cause him to modify his first spontaneous opinion as it has modified his natural, untutored opinion about thunderstorms. Among primitive peoples there arise occasionally men of scientific genius who know, intuitively, the truth about thunderstorms.
Where God is concerned, we are all more or less primitives; only the greatest religious geniuses have any knowledge (and it is knowledge of a personal, intuitive, hardly communicable kind) of the truth about God. It is significant that Buddha, whom one feels to have been the most intellectually powerful of all the great religious leaders, should have rejected completely the idea of a personal God and gone beyond it. Two thousand five hundred years hence the majority of human beings may have arrived at the position reached by Gautama two thousand five hundred years ago. We like to speak of ourselves as “moderns”; but in point of fact the vast majority of us are the most barbarously primitive of ancients.
BATAVIA
Indian servants are scarcely more than pieces of moving furniture. They have obliterated themselves, and nothing remains in your presence but a kind of abstract and unindividualised efficiency—or inefficiency, as the case may be. But in Burma and throughout Malaya, wherever the servants are Chinamen or Malays, you become aware that the machine which makes your bed or pulls your rickshaw or waits upon you at table is human and has no desire to suppress the fact. Its eye is critical; the expressions on its face are comments on your words and actions. And when you walk in the streets you have an uncomfortable feeling that you are being judged and condemned to an eternal derision. The European woman is generally unaware in India that the attendant machine is a man; the thing is reliably sexless. The Burman, the Chinaman, the Malay, who have no knowledge of caste and consider themselves the equals of any man or woman, give no such comfortable assurance of sexlessness. To discover humanity—and of the most “human,” the all too human variety—in what you have been accustomed to regard as a labour-saving
