I do not propose to write an ode to dejection," wrote Thoreau at the beginning of Walden, "but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning." We applaud that attitude of ruddy good mental health, his reason awake to all the influences of the world. I try to echo that call to bright-eyed common sense whenever I write.
Yet we all have known times when that chanticleer has died, killed off by what Keats called the "wakeful anguish of the soul." We have all tasted bitterness when our reason or will or self-discipline has been unable to heal the abyss gouged out of our hearts by the certainty of our own deaths. Most times we can agree with Alan Watts when he says that death "is the natural and necessary end of human life -- as natural as leaves falling in the autumn." Reason supports us in this, and so we conclude that death, when it comes at the end of a well-lived life, should cause no fear.
Yet doesn't William James cut closer when he says that no matter how much "sanguine healthy-mindedness does its best" to keep us "living in the moment," the "skull [grinning] in at the banquet" remains our truest, most enduring, companion? Shelley tried to freeze the skull in an iambic snare, only to be mocked by the attempt, for he learned it did not matter if
we feel, reason laugh, or weep:
Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away
[for] it is the same!....Nought may endure but
Mutability.
Such doubts raised by our mortality can not be solved, puzzle-like, by reason. They can not be erased by good premises and conclusions, for they become an atmosphere we breathe, haunting the "sullied flesh" we must inhabit. And, perhaps inevitably, they force us to want, if not to seek, for something beyond ourselves that will relieve us of the burden of too-close company with our mortal selves.
Thus does the "need" for religion begin, in a terror and longing common to us all. What power can reason have against such ghostly yet adamant foundations of the self? We freethinkers can champion reason against the children of these urges, shine light upon the abuses caused by superstition, guile, and fraud. Yet, much as it may nag our sense of right, some redoubt exists called the "heart" or "spirit." There we suffer, in all their sharp rapaciousness, those uncertainties that sap our strength and cast our will to the side, a redoubt which can not be breached by the siege guns of common sense.
Before any of us reject such "transcendental notions," think to what is evoked by fine poetry, by Hamlet's soliloquy, by Beethoven's Ninth. We must acknowledge, if we wish to be true to our selves, that feelings boil within us which can not and should not be denied life. If every wish for greater certainty earns our scorn, if every urge for continuity provokes our laughter, then we inevitably forfeit that part of our humanity which gives our vaunted reason any legitimacy and warrant for action.
Freethinkers, if they wish to be true freethinkers, must necessarily make a treaty with their "religious" intuitions, if by religious we mean the longing for doubt to be done with. I say "true freethinkers" because one who places his chips on reason alone has closed himself off from indelible sources of inspiration and knowledge. He has, instead, taken on a dry and dusty companion, a rarefied Sancho Panza who can only comment upon cause and effect and watch the passing show with arid attention. To think freely means to think as John Donne observed, with the entire body and not just the brain, else we get a "squint left-handedness" that denies the fullness of our being.
No one can be an entirely reasonable creature, and no system of beliefs, if based on reason, can be entirely trusted. We must, of course, work hard to purge the world of the fraudulence and perversity engendered by superstition. But we must not become so proud in this mission that we poison the "humanness" we are trying to preserve. Nothing human should be alien to the freethinker, most especially the fears and desires that inform those human actions the freethinker hates most. We must make sure that we don't suffer from a righteousness of reason, which is really a loss of love. As David Hume has rightly said, "reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions." "Passions," because they include every conceivable motive for action, give life a piquant complexity that cannot be reasoned away.
Reason, in the guise of the dictum that "every cause and solution lies within each of us," does not recognize the burden of loneliness it brings, nor the limits of its power. While a clear mind may shine more strongly than a befuddled one, it should never shine so clear as to banish those inevitable wisps of doubt about what the candle is worth. While we choose the more reasonable paths, we should not forget our shadows, those bodiless reminders of depths into which reason's light is only swallowed and lost. For within that gloom and silence hides a poetry about us far stronger than any smoothly-planed argument, a poetry of need so common to us all that, save for a chance twist of time and space, we might well have found ourselves in the other camp.