The doubter's world, then, is the scene, as realistic as you will and perhaps we may say, too, without unwarranted enthusiasm, as bright beneath the morning sun, of the ever present, ever active life of God or--with the same meaning--of an evolution which we may call God or nature as we please. From this thought, too, if only we remember that nothing is unreal and no experience is without some contact with reality, there is but a step to the idea that God and man are actively parties to one and the same life. To repeat from above, the conflicts of human life are the perfection, the perfect living of God. God is, nay, God's life is, not what some, but what all men do, and the doubter's world is just the world, the world of things always relative, the world of constant conflict, in which alone this can be true.
II. THE PERFECT SYMPATHY BETWEEN THE SPIRITUAL AND THE MATERIAL.
But we pass to the second feature of this world in which we are journeying, namely, to the sympathy of the spiritual and the physical.
[p.204] As a matter of course the sceptic, by his peculiar attitude of mind, must imply something with reference to the relation of the two worlds, or the worlds commonly supposed to be two, the spiritual and the material, and because for him the reality cannot be exclusively one definite thing or any number, small or large, of definite things, all of them independent and exclusive, he must imply in the world of things, be these two or as many as you please, that they always work together for whatever is real. Such an implication at first hearing may or may not appear to be a pregnant one, but at least it suggests that in some genuine way there must be sympathy between the two things, the two worlds--spirit and matter, mind and body. These two must work together for whatever is real.
But by this necessary sympathy between the spiritual and the material is not meant a mere parallelism so called. Thinkers, present and past, have tried to be satisfied with such a meaning. To be quite real, however, sympathy must be substantial even to the point of unity, not formal. Some friends, and even some married people, are parallel, life matching life at each and every point, but not positively and vitally sympathetic. Still, in parallelism, the very name for which is fairly indicative of its import, there is a convenient approach to the meaning here intended. Moreover, our Cartesian philosophers were much given to a theory of parallelism in their views of the relation of the two spheres of mind and matter; their specific doctrine of continuous creation, already referred to, was parallelistic; and they found the human mind and [p.205] the human body, though distinctly two, still "parallel." Then, too, in more recent times, parallelism has been in evidence, figuring conspicuously at least as a working standpoint in the psychological laboratory, and figuring also, I venture to add, as an important assumption in philanthropic work. Accordingly, although the term itself does convey a good deal of its meaning, I shall try, in words as simple as possible, to show exactly what the theory of parallelism is. This done, we shall be able to see, or think through parallelism to sympathy of a more genuine and a more vital sort.