Faith & Spirit Quote by Charles Fort

Fort is doing what he always does: taking a respectable idea, then pushing it one logical notch past comfort until it starts to look weirdly physical. The theologians, he notes, say the ideal life is “imitation of God.” Fine. But Fort’s real move is to swap a moral aspiration for a biological metaphor. If you’re inside an “organic thing” that contains you, that whole is your God in the only sense you can verify: it exceeds you, sustains you, and makes rules you experience as fate.

The intent isn’t devotional; it’s destabilizing. Fort treats “God” less as a heavenly person and more as a scale problem. Zoom out and the human becomes a cell; zoom in and the human becomes a deity to its own microscopic constituents. That inversion is classic Fort: the joke isn’t that religion is silly, but that our confidence in our own category (human, divine, significant) is provincial. He’s hinting that worship may be an instinct produced by hierarchy, not revelation.

Subtext: imitation of God starts to sound like the cell “imitating” the body by obeying signals it can’t understand. What believers call communion could be, in Fort’s skeptical frame, participation in a larger organism whose purposes are opaque. The line “as I am God to the cells that compose me” lands with a chilly intimacy: you don’t consult your cells; you use them. If that analogy holds, then the divine may be indifferent, and piety may be compliance mistaken for love.

Contextually, Fort is writing in the early 20th-century shadow of Darwin and modern systems-thinking, when old metaphysics had to compete with organism, network, and mechanism. He doesn’t discard God; he reclassifies God as an emergent, possibly impersonal totality - and dares you to notice what that does to prayer, morality, and human specialness.