Inspiration
Essay.

by Robert G. Ingersoll
(1887)

From The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll (Dresden Edition, 1900–1902), Volume 11.
Source: https://thegreatagnostic.com/works/inspiration/
Public domain. CC0 / Public Domain Mark 1.0.

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WE are told that we have in our possession the inspired will of God.
What is meant by the word "inspired" is not exactly known; but whatever
else it may mean, certainly it means that the "inspired" must be the
true. If it is true, there is in fact no need of its being inspired—the
truth will take care of itself.

The church is forced to say that the Bible differs from all other books;
it is forced to say that it contains the actual will of God. Let us then
see what inspiration really is. A man looks at the sea, and the sea
says something to him. It makes an impression upon his mind. It awakens
memory, and this impression depends upon the man's experience—upon
his intellectual capacity. Another looks upon the same sea. He has a
different brain; he has had a different experience. The sea may speak
to him of joy; to the other of grief and tears. The sea cannot tell the
same thing to any two human beings, because no two human beings have had
the same experience.

Another, standing upon the shore, listening to what the great Greek
tragedian called "The multitudinous laughter of the sea," may say: Every
drop has visited all the shores of the earth; every one has been frozen
in the vast and icy North; every one has fallen in snow, has been
whirled by storms around mountain peaks; every one has been kissed to
vapor by the sun; every one has worn the seven-hued garment of light;
every one has fallen in pleasant rain, gurgled from springs and laughed
in brooks while lovers wooed upon the banks, and every one has rushed
with mighty rivers back to the sea's embrace. Everything in Nature tells
a different story to all eyes that see, and to all ears that hear.

Once in my life, and once only, I heard Horace Greeley deliver a
lecture. I think the title was "Across the Continent." At last he
reached the mammoth trees of California, and I thought, "Here is an
opportunity for the old man to indulge his fancy. Here are trees that
have outlived a thousand human governments. There are limbs above his
head older than the pyramids. While man was emerging from barbarism
to something like civilization, these trees were growing. Older than
history, every one appeared to be a memory, a witness, and a prophecy.
The same wind that filled the sails of the Argonauts had swayed these
trees." But these trees said nothing of this kind to Mr. Greeley. Upon
these subjects not a word was told him. Instead, he took his pencil, and
after figuring awhile, remarked: "One of these trees, sawed into inch
boards, would make more than three hundred thousand feet of lumber."

I was once riding in the cars in Illinois. There had been a violent
thunder storm. The rain had ceased, the sun was going down. The
great clouds had floated toward the west, and there they assumed most
wonderful architectural shapes. There were temples and palaces domed
and turreted, and they were touched with silver, with amethyst and gold.
They looked like the homes of the Titans, or the palaces of the gods.
A man was sitting near me. I touched him and said, "Did you ever see
anything so beautiful?" He looked out. He saw nothing of the cloud,
nothing of the sun, nothing of the color; he saw only the country, and
replied, "Yes, it is beautiful; I always did like rolling land."

On another occasion I was riding in a stage. There had been a snow, and
after the snow a sleet, and all the trees were bent, and all the boughs
were arched. Every fence, every log cabin, had been transfigured,
touched with a glory almost beyond this world. The great fields were a
pure and perfect white; the forests, drooping beneath their load of gems,
made wonderful caves, from which one almost expected to see troops of
fairies come. The whole world looked like a bride, jeweled from head to
foot. A German on the back seat, hearing our talk, and our exclamations
of wonder, leaned forward, looked out of the stage window, and said,
"Y-a-a-s; it looks like a clean table cloth!"

So, when we look upon a flower, a painting, a statue, a star, or a
violet, the more we know, the more we have experienced, the more we
have thought, the more we remember,—the more the statue, the star,
the painting, the violet, has to tell. Nature says to me all that I am
capable of understanding—gives all that I can receive.

As with star or flower or sea, so with a book. A man reads Shakespeare.
What does he get from him? All that he has the mind to understand. He
gets his little cup full. Let another read him who knows nothing of the
drama, nothing of the impersonations of passion, and what does he get?
Almost nothing. Shakespeare has a different story for each reader. He
is a world in which each recognizes his acquaintances—he may know a
few—he may know all.

The impression that Nature makes upon the mind, the stories told by sea
and star and flower, must be the natural food of thought. Leaving out
for the moment the impression gained from ancestors, the hereditary
fears and drifts and trends—the natural food of thought must be the
impression made upon the brain by coming in contact, through the medium
of the five senses, with what we call the outward world. The brain is
natural. Its food is natural. The result—thought—must be natural. The
supernatural can be constructed with no material except the natural. Of
the supernatural we can have no conception.

"Thought" may be deformed, and the thought of one may be strange to, and
denominated as unnatural by, another; but it cannot be supernatural.
It may be weak, it may be insane, but it is not supernatural. Above
the natural, man cannot rise. There can be deformed ideas, as there are
deformed persons. There can be religious monstrosities and misshapen,
but they must be naturally produced. Some people have ideas about
what they are pleased to call the supernatural; what they call the
supernatural is simply the deformed. The world is to each man according
to each man. It takes the world as it really is, and that man to make
that man's world, and that man's world cannot exist without that man.

You may ask, and what of all this? I reply: As with everything in
Nature, so with the Bible. It has a different story for each reader. Is
then, the Bible a different book to every human being who reads it? It
is. Can God, then, through the Bible, make the same revelation to two
persons? He cannot. Why? Because the man who reads it is the man who
inspires. Inspiration is in the man, as well as in the book. God should
have "inspired" readers as well as writers.

You may reply, God knew that his book would be understood differently
by each one; really intended that it should be understood as it is
understood by each. If this is so, then my understanding of the Bible
is the real revelation to me. If this is so, I have no right to take the
understanding of another. I must take the revelation made to me through
my understanding, and by that revelation I must stand. Suppose, then,
that I do read this Bible honestly, carefully, and when I get through I
am compelled to say, "The book is not true!"

If this is the honest result, then you are compelled to say, either that
God has made no revelation to me, or that the revelation that it is not
true is the revelation made to me, and by which I am bound. If the book
and my brain are both the work of the same infinite God, whose fault
is it that the book and the brain do not agree? Either God should have
written a book to fit my brain, or should have made my brain to fit his
book.

The inspiration of the Bible depends upon the ignorance of him who
reads.—The Truth Seeker Annual, New York, 1885.
