Experiment with magnet—Principle of polarity—Applies universally—Analogies in spiritual world—Zoroastrian religion—Changes in modern environment—Require corresponding changes in religions and philosophies. Scatter a heap of iron filings on a plate of glass; bring near it a magnet, and tap the glass gently, and you will see the filings arrange themselves in regular forms.
If one pole only of the magnet is brought near the glass the filings arrange themselves in lines radiating from that pole.
Next lay the bar-magnet on the glass so that the filings are influenced by both poles; they will arrange themselves into a series of regular curves.
In other words, the Chaos of a confused heap of inert matter has become a Cosmos of harmonious arrangement assuming definite form in obedience to law.
As the old saying has it, that ‘every road leads to Rome,’ so this simple experiment leads up to a principle which underlies all existence knowable to human faculty—that of Polarity. Why do the iron filings arrange[2] themselves in regular curves? Because they are magnetised by the influence of the larger magnet, and each little particle of iron is converted into a little magnet with two opposite poles attracting and repelling.
 
What is a magnet? It is a special manifestation of the more general principle of polarity, by which energy, when it passes from the passive or neutralised into the active state, does so under the condition of developing opposite and conflicting energies: no action without reaction, no positive without a negative, and, as we see it in the simplest form in our magnets, no North Pole without a South Pole—like ever repelling like and attracting unlike. The magnet, again, may be considered as a special form of electricity, for if we send an electric current through a coil of copper wire encircling a bar of soft iron, the bar is at once converted into a magnet; so that a magnet may be considered as the summing up, at two opposite extremities or poles, of the attractive and repulsive effects of electric currents circulating round it. But this electricity is itself subject to the law of polarity, whether developed by chemical action in the form of a current or electricity in motion, or by friction in the form of statical electricity of small quantity but high tension. In all cases a positive implies a negative; in all, like repels like and attracts unlike.[3] Conversely, as polarity produces definite structure, so definite structure everywhere implies polarity.
The same principle prevails not only throughout the inorganic or world of matter, but throughout the organic or world of life, and specially throughout its highest manifestations in human life and character, and in the highest products of its evolution, in societies, religions, and philosophies. To show this by some familiar and striking examples is the main object of this book.
But here let me interpose a word of caution. I must avoid the error which vitiates Professor Drummond’s interesting work on ‘Natural Law in the Spiritual World,’ of confounding analogy and identity. Because the principle of polarity pervades alike the natural and spiritual worlds, I am far from assuming that the laws under which it acts are identical; and that virtue and vice, pain and pleasure, ugliness and beauty, are products of the same mathematical changes of sign and inverse squares or cubes of distances, as regulate the attractions and repulsions of molecules and atoms. All I say is, that the same pervading principle may be traced wherever human thought and human knowledge extend; that it is apparently, for some reason unknown to us, the essential condition of all existence within the sphere of that thought and that knowledge; and that what lies beyond it is the great unknown, behind the impenetrable veil which it is not given to mortals to uplift. In like manner, if I call myself ‘a modern Zoroastrian,’ it is not that I wish or expect to teach a new religion or revive an old one, to see Christian churches dedicated to Ormuzd, or right reverend bishops exchanging the apron and shovel-hat for the mitre and flowing robes of the ancient Magi;[4] but simply this. All religions I take to be ‘working hypotheses,’ by which successive ages and races of men try to satisfy the aspirations and harmonise the knowledge which in the course of evolution have come to be, for the time, their spiritual equipment. The best proof of any religion is, that it exists—i.e. that it is part of the same evolution, and that on the whole it works well, i.e. is in tolerable harmony with its environment. When that environment changes, when loftier views of morality prevail, when knowledge is increased and the domain of science everywhere extends its frontier, religions must change with it if they are to remain good working, and not become unworkable and unbelievable hypotheses.
Now of all the religious hypotheses which remain workable in the present state of human knowledge, that seems to me the best which frankly recognises the existence of this dual law, or law of polarity, as the fundamental condition of the universe, and, personifying the good principle under the name of Ormuzd, and the evil one under that of Ahriman, looks with earnest but silent and unspoken reverence on the great unknown beyond, which may, in some way incomprehensible to mortals, reconcile the two opposites, and give the final victory to the good.
Oh! yet we hope that somehow good
Will be the final goal of ill.
So sings the poet of the nineteenth century: so, if we understand his doctrine rightly, taught the Bactrian sage, Zoroaster, some forty centuries earlier.
This, and this alone, seems to me to afford a working hypothesis which is based on fact, can be brought into harmony with the existing environment, and embraces,[5] in a wider synthesis, all that is good in other philosophies and religions.
When I talk of our new environment, it requires one who, like the author, has lived more than the Scriptural threescore and ten years, and has, so to speak, one foot on the past and one on the present, to realise how enormous is the change which a single generation has made in the whole spiritual surroundings of a civilised man of the nineteenth century. When I was a student at Cambridge, little more than fifty years ago, Astronomy was the only branch of natural science which could be said to be definitely brought within the domain of natural law. And that only as regards the law of gravity, and the motions of the heavenly bodies, for little or nothing was known as to their constitution. Geology was just beginning the series of conquests by which time and the order and succession of life on the earth have been annexed by science as completely as space by astronomy; and theories of cataclysms, universal deluges, and special recent creations of animals and man, still held their ground, and were quoted as proofs of a universe maintained by constant supernatural interference.
And when I say that space had been annexed to science by astronomy, it was really only that half of space which extends from the standpoint of the human senses in the direction of the infinitely great. The other equally important half which extends downwards to the infinitely small was unknown, or the subject only of the vaguest conjectures.
Chemistry was, to a great extent, an empirical science, and molecules and atoms were at best guesses at truth, or rather convenient mathematical abstractions[6] with no more actual reality than the symbols of the differential calculus. The real causes and laws of heat, light, and electricity, were as little known as those of molecular action and of chemical affinity. The great laws of the indestructibility of matter, the correlation of forces, and the conservation of energy, were unknown, or only just beginning to be foreshadowed. As regards life, protoplasm was a word unheard of; scientific biology, zoology, and botany were in their infancy; and the gradual building up of all living matter from a speck of protoplasm, through a primitive cell, was not even suspected. Above all, the works of Darwin had not been published, and evolution had not become the general law of modern thought; nor had the discovery of the antiquity of man, and of his slow development upwards from the rudest origins, shattered into fragments established beliefs as to his recent miraculous creation.
Science and miracle have been fighting out their battle during the last fifty years along the whole line, and science has been at every point victorious. Miracle, in the sense in which our fathers believed in it, has been not only repulsed, but annihilated so completely, that really little remains but to bury the dead.
The result of these discoveries has been to make a greater change in the spiritual environment of a single generation than would be made in their physical environment if the glacial period suddenly returned and buried Northern Europe under polar ice. The change is certainly greater in the last fifty years than it had been in the previous five hundred, and in many respects greater than in the previous five thousand.
It may be sufficient to glance shortly at the equally[7] great corresponding changes which this period has witnessed in the practical conditions of life and of society. If astronomy and geology have extended the dominion of the mind over space and time, steamers, railways, and the electric telegraph have gained the mastery over them for practical purposes. Commerce and emigration have assumed international proportions, and India, Australia, and America are nearer to us, and connected with us by closer ties, than Scotland was to England in my schoolboy days. Education and a cheap press have even in a greater degree revolutionised society, and knowledge, reaching the masses, has carried with it power, so that democracy and free-thought are, whether for good or evil, everywhere in the ascendant, and old privileges and traditions are everywhere decaying.
With such a great change of environment it is evident that many of the old creeds, institutions, and other organisms, adapted to old conditions, must have become as obsolete as a schoolboy’s jacket would be as the comfortable habiliment of a grown-up man. But as a lobster which has cast its shell does not feel at ease until it has grown a new one, so thinking men of the present day are driven to devise, to a great extent each for themselves, some larger theory which may serve them as a ‘working hypothesis’ with which to go through life, and bring the ineradicable aspirations and emotions of their nature into some tolerable harmony with existing facts.
To me, as one of those thinking units, this theory, of what for want of a better name I call ‘Zoroastrianism,’ has approved itself as a good working theory, which reconciles more intellectual and moral difficulties, and affords a better guide in conduct and practical life[8] than any other; and, in a word, enables me to reduce my own individual Chaos into some sort of an intelligible and ordered Cosmos. I feel moved, therefore, to preach through the press my little sermon upon it, for the benefit of those whom it may concern, feeling assured that the process of evolution, by which
The old order changes, giving place to new,
can best be assisted by the honest and unbiassed expression of the results of individual thought and experience on the part of any one of those units whose aggregates form the complicated organisms of religions and philosophies, of societies and of humanity.