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But whether acting cosmically or personally it is always the same Spirit and therefore cannot lose its inherent character which is-that of the Power which creates ex nihilo.
He cannot derive any moral strength or comfort from the world about him because he conceives that world to be an implacable instrument of a god's uncertain, inexplicable will. He therefore cosmically projects, in a frenzy of despair, his crying human demand. And out of the wastes of space there arises for him a personal God. Anthropomorphic religions reveal man at his weakest, not at his best.
The free man does not fear and he is not consumed by fear's boundless conceit. He has no apprehensive conscience which unceasingly interprets all unusual or untoward events as being deliberate signs of a god's impending wrath. The free man knows that man is, cosmically considered, impressively insignificant.
To this fact the phenomenon owes its peculiar interest. For we behold here in the case of man the same spectacle that we see cosmically in the case of the moon, the spectacle of a world that has died of old age. No weak spot in their social organism destroyed them from within; no epidemic, in the shape of foreign hordes, fell upon them from without.
Moreover, Fire forms part of the ever 'youthful' realm of the world, whereas anything which exists as a spatially discernible entity, capable of being moved about mechanically, must have grown cosmically 'old'. That Ruskin was as much on the alert in regard to this theory as he was in regard to Newton's theory of gravitation, is shown by the following utterance from his The Queen of the Air.
We cannot conceive of It except as always BEING; but the distribution of world-systems both in time and space shows that it is not always cosmically active.
And it began to see that this Perfection, cosmically, was nothing but perfect Equanimity and Harmony; and in human relations, nothing but perfect Love and Justice. And Perfection began to glow before the eyes of the Western world like a new star, whose light touched with glamour all things as they came forth from Mystery, till to Mystery they were ready to return.
The duty and the obligations that bind the average person, are impossible to the cosmically conscious one. Not that he displays indifference toward the welfare and the rights of others. Far from that, he feels an added sense of responsibility for the irresponsible; an overwhelming compassion for the unfortunate, and a relationship greater than ever to mankind.
This knowledge will bring us to the wise observation that fundamentally, cosmically there is no place for enmity between nations and races and classes and the sexes; that the whole conglomerated mass of hatreds and inherited enmities and segregated interests; the absurd idea that one part of the world can permanently prosper by the enslavement of any part; the undeveloped and savage ideas that underlie our civilization; all these thought-concepts have no more reality in the cosmic scheme of things, than have the picture-blocks of the child in the adult life.
'Cosmic emotion' would here be the right name for religion. But is the matter by which Mr. Spencer's process of cosmic evolution is carried on any such principle of never-ending perfection as this? Indeed it is not, for the future end of every cosmically evolved thing or system of things is foretold by science to be death and tragedy; and Mr.
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