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Title: The Will to Believe
and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy
Author: William James
Release Date: May 8, 2009 [EBook #26659]
Language: English
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THE WILL TO BELIEVE
AND OTHER ESSAYS IN
POPULAR PHILOSOPHY
BY WILLIAM JAMES
NEW IMPRESSION
LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.
FOURTH AVENUE & 30TH STREET, NEW YORK
LONDON, BOMBAY, AND CALCUTTA
1912
_Copyright, 1896_
BY WILLIAM JAMES
First Edition. February, 1897,
Reprinted, May, 1897, September, 1897,
March, 1898, August, 1899, June, 1902,
January, 1903, May, 1904, June, 1905,
March, 1907, April, 1908,
September, 1909, December, 1910,
November, 1911, November, 1912
To
My Old Friend,
CHARLES SANDERS PEIRCE,
To whose philosophic comradeship in old times
and to whose writings in more recent years
I owe more incitement and help than
I can express or repay.
{vii}
PREFACE.
At most of our American Colleges there are Clubs formed by the students
devoted to particular branches of learning; and these clubs have the
laudable custom of inviting once or twice a year some maturer scholar
to address them, the occasion often being made a public one. I have
from time to time accepted such invitations, and afterwards had my
discourse printed in one or other of the Reviews. It has seemed to me
that these addresses might now be worthy of collection in a volume, as
they shed explanatory light upon each other, and taken together express
a tolerably definite philosophic attitude in a very untechnical way.
Were I obliged to give a short name to the attitude in question, I
should call it that of _radical empiricism_, in spite of the fact that
such brief nicknames are nowhere more misleading than in philosophy. I
say 'empiricism,' because it is contented to regard its most assured
conclusions concerning matters of fact as hypotheses liable to
modification in the course of future experience; and I say 'radical,'
because it treats the doctrine of monism itself as an hypothesis, and,
{viii} unlike so much of the half-way empiricism that is current under
the name of positivism or agnosticism or scientific naturalism, it does
not dogmatically affirm monism as something with which all experience
has got to square. The difference between monism and pluralism is
perhaps the most pregnant of all the differences in philosophy. _Primâ
facie_ the world is a pluralism; as we find it, its unity seems to be
that of any collection; and our higher thinking consists chiefly of an
effort to redeem it from that first crude form. Postulating more unity
than the first experiences yield, we also discover more. But absolute
unity, in spite of brilliant dashes in its direction, still remains
undiscovered, still remains a _Grenzbegriff_. "Ever not quite" must be
the rationalistic philosopher's last confession concerning it. After
all that reason can do has been done, there still remains the opacity
of the finite facts as merely given, with most of their peculiarities
mutually unmediated and unexplained. To the very last, there are the
various 'points of view' which the philosopher must distinguish in
discussing the world; and what is inwardly clear from one point remains
a bare externality and datum to the other. The negative, the alogical,
is never wholly banished. Something--"call it fate, chance, freedom,
spontaneity, the devil, what you will"--is still wrong and other and
outside and unincluded, from _your_ point of view, even though you be
the greatest of philosophers. Something is always mere fact and
_givenness_; and there may be in the whole universe no one point of
view extant from which this would not be found to be the case.
"Reason," as a gifted writer says, "is {ix} but one item in the
mystery; and behind the proudest consciousness that ever reigned,
reason and wonder blushed face to face. The inevitable stales, while
doubt and hope are sisters. Not unfortunately the universe is
wild,--game-flavored as a hawk's wing. Nature is miracle all; the same
returns not save to bring the different. The slow round of the
engraver's lathe gains but the breadth of a hair, but the difference is
distributed back over the whole curve, never an instant true,--ever not
quite."[1]
This is pluralism, somewhat rhapsodically expressed. He who takes for
his hypothesis the notion that it is the permanent form of the world is
what I call a radical empiricist. For him the crudity of experience
remains an eternal element thereof. There is no possible point of view
from which the world can appear an absolutely single fact. Real
possibilities, real indeterminations, real beginnings, real ends, real
evil, real crises, catastrophes, and escapes, a real God, and a real
moral life, just as common-sense conceives these things, may remain in
empiricism as conceptions which that philosophy gives up the attempt
either to 'overcome' or to reinterpret in monistic form.
Many of my professionally trained _confrères_ will smile at the
irrationalism of this view, and at the artlessness of my essays in
point of technical form. But they should be taken as illustrations of
the radically empiricist attitude rather than as argumentations for its
validity. That admits meanwhile of {x} being argued in as technical a
shape as any one can desire, and possibly I may be spared to do later a
share of that work. Meanwhile these essays seem to light up with a
certain dramatic reality the attitude itself, and make it visible
alongside of the higher and lower dogmatisms between which in the pages
of philosophic history it has generally remained eclipsed from sight.
The first four essays are largely concerned with defending the
legitimacy of religious faith. To some rationalizing readers such
advocacy will seem a sad misuse of one's professional position.
Mankind, they will say, is only too prone to follow faith
unreasoningly, and needs no preaching nor encouragement in that
direction. I quite agree that what mankind at large most lacks is
criticism and caution, not faith. Its cardinal weakness is to let
belief follow recklessly upon lively conception, especially when the
conception has instinctive liking at its back. I admit, then, that
were I addressing the Salvation Army or a miscellaneous popular crowd
it would be a misuse of opportunity to preach the liberty of believing
as I have in these pages preached it. What such audiences most need is
that their faiths should be broken up and ventilated, that the
northwest wind of science should get into them and blow their
sickliness and barbarism away. But academic audiences, fed already on
science, have a very different need. Paralysis of their native
capacity for faith and timorous _abulia_ in the religious field are
their special forms of mental weakness, brought about by the notion,
carefully instilled, that there is something called scientific evidence
by {xi} waiting upon which they shall escape all danger of shipwreck in
regard to truth. But there is really no scientific or other method by
which men can steer safely between the opposite dangers of believing
too little or of believing too much. To face such dangers is
apparently our duty, and to hit the right channel between them is the
measure of our wisdom as men. It does not follow, because recklessness
may be a vice in soldiers, that courage ought never to be preached to
them. What _should_ be preached is courage weighted with
responsibility,--such courage as the Nelsons and Washingtons never
failed to show after they had taken everything into account that might
tell against their success, and made every provision to minimize
disaster in case they met defeat. I do not think that any one can
accuse me of preaching reckless faith. I have preached the right of
the individual to indulge his personal faith at his personal risk. I
have discussed the kinds of risk; I have contended that none of us
escape all of them; and I have only pleaded that it is better to face
them open-eyed than to act as if we did not know them to be there.
After all, though, you will say, Why such an ado about a matter
concerning which, however we may theoretically differ, we all
practically agree? In this age of toleration, no scientist will ever
try actively to interfere with our religious faith, provided we enjoy
it quietly with our friends and do not make a public nuisance of it in
the market-place. But it is just on this matter of the market-place
that I think the utility of such essays as mine may turn. If {xii}
religious hypotheses about the universe be in order at all, then the
active faiths of individuals in them, freely expressing themselves in
life, are the experimental tests by which they are verified, and the
only means by which their truth or falsehood can be wrought out. The
truest scientific hypothesis is that which, as we say, 'works' best;
and it can be no otherwise with religious hypotheses. Religious
history proves that one hypothesis after another has worked ill, has
crumbled at contact with a widening knowledge of the world, and has
lapsed from the minds of men. Some articles of faith, however, have
maintained themselves through every vicissitude, and possess even more
vitality to-day than ever before: it is for the 'science of religions'
to tell us just which hypotheses these are. Meanwhile the freest
competition of the various faiths with one another, and their openest
application to life by their several champions, are the most favorable
conditions under which the survival of the fittest can proceed. They
ought therefore not to lie hid each under its bushel, indulged-in
quietly with friends. They ought to live in publicity, vying with each
other; and it seems to me that (the régime of tolerance once granted,
and a fair field shown) the scientist has nothing to fear for his own
interests from the liveliest possible state of fermentation in the
religious world of his time. Those faiths will best stand the test
which adopt also his hypotheses, and make them integral elements of
their own. He should welcome therefore every species of religious
agitation and discussion, so long as he is willing to allow that some
religious hypothesis _may_ be {xiii} true. Of course there are plenty
of scientists who would deny that dogmatically, maintaining that
science has already ruled all possible religious hypotheses out of
court. Such scientists ought, I agree, to aim at imposing privacy on
religious faiths, the public manifestation of which could only be a
nuisance in their eyes. With all such scientists, as well as with
their allies outside of science, my quarrel openly lies; and I hope
that my book may do something to persuade the reader of their crudity,
and range him on my side. Religious fermentation is always a symptom
of the intellectual vigor of a society; and it is only when they forget
that they are hypotheses and put on rationalistic and authoritative
pretensions, that our faiths do harm. The most interesting and
valuable things about a man are his ideals and over-beliefs. The same
is true of nations and historic epochs; and the excesses of which the
particular individuals and epochs are guilty are compensated in the
total, and become profitable to mankind in the long run.
The essay 'On some Hegelisms' doubtless needs an apology for the
superficiality with which it treats a serious subject. It was written
as a squib, to be read in a college-seminary in Hegel's logic, several
of whose members, mature men, were devout champions of the dialectical
method. My blows therefore were aimed almost entirely at that. I
reprint the paper here (albeit with some misgivings), partly because I
believe the dialectical method to be wholly abominable when worked by
concepts alone, and partly because the essay casts some positive light
on the pluralist-empiricist point of view.
{xiv}
The paper on Psychical Research is added to the volume for convenience
and utility. Attracted to this study some years ago by my love of
sportsmanlike fair play in science, I have seen enough to convince me
of its great importance, and I wish to gain for it what interest I can.
The American Branch of the Society is in need of more support, and if
my article draws some new associates thereto, it will have served its
turn.
Apology is also needed for the repetition of the same passage in two
essays (pp. 59-61 and 96-7, 100-1). My excuse is that one cannot
always express the same thought in two ways that seem equally forcible,
so one has to copy one's former words.
The Crillon-quotation on page 62 is due to Mr. W. M. Salter (who
employed it in a similar manner in the 'Index' for August 24, 1882),
and the dream-metaphor on p. 174 is a reminiscence from some novel of
George Sand's--I forget which--read by me thirty years ago.
Finally, the revision of the essays has consisted almost entirely in
excisions. Probably less than a page and a half in all of new matter
has been added.
HARVARD UNIVERSITY,
CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS,
December, 1896.
[1] B. P. Blood: The Flaw in Supremacy: Published by the Author,
Amsterdam, N. Y., 1893.
{x}
CONTENTS.
PAGE
THE WILL TO BELIEVE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Hypotheses and options, 1. Pascal's wager, 5. Clifford's
veto, 8. Psychological causes of belief, 9. Thesis of the
Essay, 11. Empiricism and absolutism, 12. Objective certitude
and its unattainability, 13. Two different sorts of risks in
believing, 17. Some risk unavoidable, 19. Faith may bring
forth its own verification, 22. Logical conditions of religious
belief, 25.
IS LIFE WORTH LIVING . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
Temperamental Optimism and Pessimism, 33. How reconcile
with life one bent on suicide? 38. Religious melancholy and its
cure, 39. Decay of Natural Theology, 43. Instinctive antidotes
to pessimism, 46. Religion involves belief in an unseen
extension of the world, 51. Scientific positivism, 52. Doubt
actuates conduct as much as belief does, 54. To deny certain
faiths is logically absurd, for they make their objects true, 56.
Conclusion, 6l.
THE SENTIMENT OF RATIONALITY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
Rationality means fluent thinking, 63. Simplification, 65.
Clearness, 66. Their antagonism, 66. Inadequacy of the
abstract, 68. The thought of nonentity, 71. Mysticism, 74. Pure
theory cannot banish wonder, 75. The passage to practice may
restore the feeling of rationality, 75. Familiarity and
expectancy, 76. 'Substance,' 80. A rational world must appear
{xvi}
congruous with our powers, 82. But these differ from man to
man, 88. Faith is one of them, 90. Inseparable from doubt, 95.
May verify itself, 96. Its rôle in ethics, 98. Optimism and
pessimism, 101. Is this a moral universe?--what does the problem
mean? 103. Anaesthesia _versus_ energy, 107. Active assumption
necessary, 107. Conclusion, 110.
REFLEX ACTION AND THEISM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
Prestige of Physiology, 112. Plan of neural action, 113. God
the mind's adequate object, 116. Contrast between world as
perceived and as conceived, 118. God, 120. The mind's three
departments, 123. Science due to a subjective demand, 129.
Theism a mean between two extremes, 134. Gnosticism, 137.
No intellection except for practical ends, 140. Conclusion, 142.
THE DILEMMA OF DETERMINISM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145
Philosophies seek a rational world, 146. Determinism and
Indeterminism defined, 149. Both are postulates of rationality,
152. Objections to chance considered, 153. Determinism
involves pessimism, 159. Escape _via_ Subjectivism, 164.
Subjectivism leads to corruption, 170. A world with chance in
it is morally the less irrational alternative, 176. Chance not
incompatible with an ultimate Providence, 180.
THE MORAL PHILOSOPHER AND THE MORAL LIFE . . . . . . . . . . . . 184
The moral philosopher postulates a unified system, 185.
Origin of moral judgments, 185. Goods and ills are created by
judgment?, 189. Obligations are created by demands, 192. The
conflict of ideals, 198. Its solution, 205. Impossibility of an
abstract system of Ethics, 208. The easy-going and the
strenuous mood, 211. Connection between Ethics and Religion, 212.
GREAT MEN AND THEIR ENVIRONMENT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 216
Solidarity of causes in the world, 216. The human mind abstracts
in order to explain, 219. Different cycles of operation in
Nature, 220. Darwin's distinction between causes that produce
and causes that preserve a variation, 221. Physiological causes
produce, the environment only adopts or preserves, great men,
225. When adopted they become social ferments, 226. Messrs.
{xvii}
Spencer and Allen criticised, 232. Messrs. Wallace and
Gryzanowski quoted, 239. The laws of history, 244. Mental
evolution, 245. Analogy between original ideas and Darwin's
accidental variations, 247. Criticism of Spencer's views, 251.
THE IMPORTANCE OF INDIVIDUALS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 255
Small differences may be important, 256. Individual
differences are important because they are the causes of social
change, 259. Hero-worship justified, 261.
ON SOME HEGELISMS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 263
The world appears as a pluralism, 264. Elements of unity in
the pluralism, 268. Hegel's excessive claims, 273. He makes of
negation a bond of union, 273. The principle of totality, 277.
Monism and pluralism, 279. The fallacy of accident in Hegel,
280. The good and the bad infinite, 284. Negation, 286.
Conclusion, 292.--Note on the Anaesthetic revelation, 294.
WHAT PSYCHICAL RESEARCH HAS ACCOMPLISHED . . . . . . . . . . . . 299
The unclassified residuum, 299. The Society for Psychical
Research and its history, 303. Thought-transference, 308.
Gurney's work, 309. The census of hallucinations, 312.
Mediumship, 313. The 'subliminal self,' 315. 'Science' and her
counter-presumptions, 317. The scientific character of
Mr. Myers's work, 320. The mechanical-impersonal view of life
versus the personal-romantic view, 324.
INDEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 329
{1}
ESSAYS
IN
POPULAR PHILOSOPHY.
THE WILL TO BELIEVE.[1]
In the recently published Life by Leslie Stephen of his brother,
Fitz-James, there is an account of a school to which the latter went
when he was a boy. The teacher, a certain Mr. Guest, used to converse
with his pupils in this wise: "Gurney, what is the difference between
justification and sanctification?--Stephen, prove the omnipotence of
God!" etc. In the midst of our Harvard freethinking and indifference
we are prone to imagine that here at your good old orthodox College
conversation continues to be somewhat upon this order; and to show you
that we at Harvard have not lost all interest in these vital subjects,
I have brought with me to-night something like a sermon on
justification by faith to read to you,--I mean an essay in
justification _of_ faith, a defence of our right to adopt a believing
attitude in religious matters, in spite of the fact that our merely
logical {2} intellect may not have been coerced. 'The Will to
Believe,' accordingly, is the title of my paper.
I have long defended to my own students the lawfulness of voluntarily
adopted faith; but as soon as they have got well imbued with the
logical spirit, they have as a rule refused to admit my contention to
be lawful philosophically, even though in point of fact they were
personally all the time chock-full of some faith or other themselves.
I am all the while, however, so profoundly convinced that my own
position is correct, that your invitation has seemed to me a good
occasion to make my statements more clear. Perhaps your minds will be
more open than those with which I have hitherto had to deal. I will be
as little technical as I can, though I must begin by setting up some
technical distinctions that will help us in the end.
I.
Let us give the name of _hypothesis_ to anything that may be proposed
to our belief; and just as the electricians speak of live and dead
wires, let us speak of any hypothesis as either _live_ or _dead_. A
live hypothesis is one which appeals as a real possibility to him to
whom it is proposed. If I ask you to believe in the Mahdi, the notion
makes no electric connection with your nature,--it refuses to
scintillate with any credibility at all. As an hypothesis it is
completely dead. To an Arab, however (even if he be not one of the
Mahdi's followers), the hypothesis is among the mind's possibilities:
it is alive. This shows that deadness and liveness in an hypothesis
are not intrinsic properties, but relations to the {3} individual
thinker. They are measured by his willingness to act. The maximum of
liveness in an hypothesis means willingness to act irrevocably.
Practically, that means belief; but there is some believing tendency
wherever there is willingness to act at all.
Next, let us call the decision between two hypotheses an _option_.
Options may be of several kinds. They may be--1, _living_ or _dead_;
2, _forced_ or _avoidable_; 3, _momentous_ or _trivial_; and for our
purposes we may call an option a _genuine_ option when it is of the
forced, living, and momentous kind.
1. A living option is one in which both hypotheses are live ones. If
I say to you: "Be a theosophist or be a Mohammedan," it is probably a
dead option, because for you neither hypothesis is likely to be alive.
But if I say: "Be an agnostic or be a Christian," it is otherwise:
trained as you are, each hypothesis makes some appeal, however small,
to your belief.
2. Next, if I say to you: "Choose between going out with your umbrella
or without it," I do not offer you a genuine option, for it is not
forced. You can easily avoid it by not going out at all. Similarly,
if I say, "Either love me or hate me," "Either call my theory true or
call it false," your option is avoidable. You may remain indifferent
to me, neither loving nor hating, and you may decline to offer any
judgment as to my theory. But if I say, "Either accept this truth or
go without it," I put on you a forced option, for there is no standing
place outside of the alternative. Every dilemma based on a complete
logical disjunction, with no possibility of not choosing, is an option
of this forced kind.
{4}
3. Finally, if I were Dr. Nansen and proposed to you to join my North
Pole expedition, your option would be momentous; for this would
probably be your only similar opportunity, and your choice now would
either exclude you from the North Pole sort of immortality altogether
or put at least the chance of it into your hands. He who refuses to
embrace a unique opportunity loses the prize as surely as if he tried
and failed. _Per contra_, the option is trivial when the opportunity
is not unique, when the stake is insignificant, or when the decision is
reversible if it later prove unwise. Such trivial options abound in
the scientific life. A chemist finds an hypothesis live enough to
spend a year in its verification: he believes in it to that extent.
But if his experiments prove inconclusive either way, he is quit for
his loss of time, no vital harm being done.
It will facilitate our discussion if we keep all these distinctions
well in mind.
II.
The next matter to consider is the actual psychology of human opinion.
When we look at certain facts, it seems as if our passional and
volitional nature lay at the root of all our convictions. When we look
at others, it seems as if they could do nothing when the intellect had
once said its say. Let us take the latter facts up first.
Does it not seem preposterous on the very face of it to talk of our
opinions being modifiable at will? Can our will either help or hinder
our intellect in its perceptions of truth? Can we, by just willing it,
believe that Abraham Lincoln's existence is a myth, {5} and that the
portraits of him in McClure's Magazine are all of some one else? Can
we, by any effort of our will, or by any strength of wish that it were
true, believe ourselves well and about when we are roaring with
rheumatism in bed, or feel certain that the sum of the two one-dollar
bills in our pocket must be a hundred dollars? We can say any of these
things, but we are absolutely impotent to believe them; and of just
such things is the whole fabric of the truths that we do believe in
made up,--matters of fact, immediate or remote, as Hume said, and
relations between ideas, which are either there or not there for us if
we see them so, and which if not there cannot be put there by any
action of our own.
In Pascal's Thoughts there is a celebrated passage known in literature
as Pascal's wager. In it he tries to force us into Christianity by
reasoning as if our concern with truth resembled our concern with the
stakes in a game of chance. Translated freely his words are these: You
must either believe or not believe that God is--which will you do?
Your human reason cannot say. A game is going on between you and the
nature of things which at the day of judgment will bring out either
heads or tails. Weigh what your gains and your losses would be if you
should stake all you have on heads, or God's existence: if you win in
such case, you gain eternal beatitude; if you lose, you lose nothing at
all. If there were an infinity of chances, and only one for God in
this wager, still you ought to stake your all on God; for though you
surely risk a finite loss by this procedure, any finite loss is
reasonable, even a certain one is reasonable, if there is but the
possibility of {6} infinite gain. Go, then, and take holy water, and
have masses said; belief will come and stupefy your scruples,--_Cela
vous fera croire et vous abêtira_. Why should you not? At bottom,
what have you to lose?
You probably feel that when religious faith expresses itself thus, in
the language of the gaming-table, it is put to its last trumps. Surely
Pascal's own personal belief in masses and holy water had far other
springs; and this celebrated page of his is but an argument for others,
a last desperate snatch at a weapon against the hardness of the
unbelieving heart. We feel that a faith in masses and holy water
adopted wilfully after such a mechanical calculation would lack the
inner soul of faith's reality; and if we were ourselves in the place of
the Deity, we should probably take particular pleasure in cutting off
believers of this pattern from their infinite reward. It is evident
that unless there be some pre-existing tendency to believe in masses
and holy water, the option offered to the will by Pascal is not a
living option. Certainly no Turk ever took to masses and holy water on
its account; and even to us Protestants these means of salvation seem
such foregone impossibilities that Pascal's logic, invoked for them
specifically, leaves us unmoved. As well might the Mahdi write to us,
saying, "I am the Expected One whom God has created in his effulgence.
You shall be infinitely happy if you confess me; otherwise you shall be
cut off from the light of the sun. Weigh, then, your infinite gain if
I am genuine against your finite sacrifice if I am not!" His logic
would be that of Pascal; but he would vainly use it on us, for the
hypothesis he offers us is dead. No tendency to act on it exists in us
to any degree.
{7}
The talk of believing by our volition seems, then, from one point of
view, simply silly. From another point of view it is worse than silly,
it is vile. When one turns to the magnificent edifice of the physical
sciences, and sees how it was reared; what thousands of disinterested
moral lives of men lie buried in its mere foundations; what patience
and postponement, what choking down of preference, what submission to
the icy laws of outer fact are wrought into its very stones and mortar;
how absolutely impersonal it stands in its vast augustness,--then how
besotted and contemptible seems every little sentimentalist who comes
blowing his voluntary smoke-wreaths, and pretending to decide things
from out of his private dream! Can we wonder if those bred in the
rugged and manly school of science should feel like spewing such
subjectivism out of their mouths? The whole system of loyalties which
grow up in the schools of science go dead against its toleration; so
that it is only natural that those who have caught the scientific fever
should pass over to the opposite extreme, and write sometimes as if the
incorruptibly truthful intellect ought positively to prefer bitterness
and unacceptableness to the heart in its cup.
It fortifies my soul to know
That, though I perish, Truth is so--
sings Clough, while Huxley exclaims: "My only consolation lies in the
reflection that, however bad our posterity may become, so far as they
hold by the plain rule of not pretending to believe what they have no
reason to believe, because it may be to their advantage so to pretend
[the word 'pretend' is surely here redundant], they will not have
reached the {8} lowest depth of immorality." And that delicious
_enfant terrible_ Clifford writes; "Belief is desecrated when given to
unproved and unquestioned statements for the solace and private
pleasure of the believer,... Whoso would deserve well of his fellows
in this matter will guard the purity of his belief with a very
fanaticism of jealous care, lest at any time it should rest on an
unworthy object, and catch a stain which can never be wiped away....
If [a] belief has been accepted on insufficient evidence [even though
the belief be true, as Clifford on the same page explains] the pleasure
is a stolen one.... It is sinful because it is stolen in defiance of
our duty to mankind. That duty is to guard ourselves from such beliefs
as from a pestilence which may shortly master our own body and then
spread to the rest of the town.... It is wrong always, everywhere, and
for every one, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence."
III.
All this strikes one as healthy, even when expressed, as by Clifford,
with somewhat too much of robustious pathos in the voice. Free-will
and simple wishing do seem, in the matter of our credences, to be only
fifth wheels to the coach. Yet if any one should thereupon assume that
intellectual insight is what remains after wish and will and
sentimental preference have taken wing, or that pure reason is what
then settles our opinions, he would fly quite as directly in the teeth
of the facts.
It is only our already dead hypotheses that our willing nature is
unable to bring to life again But what has made them dead for us is
for the most part {9} a previous action of our willing nature of an
antagonistic kind. When I say 'willing nature,' I do not mean only
such deliberate volitions as may have set up habits of belief that we
cannot now escape from,--I mean all such factors of belief as fear and
hope, prejudice and passion, imitation and partisanship, the
circumpressure of our caste and set. As a matter of fact we find
ourselves believing, we hardly know how or why. Mr. Balfour gives the
name of 'authority' to all those influences, born of the intellectual
climate, that make hypotheses possible or impossible for us, alive or
dead. Here in this room, we all of us believe in molecules and the
conservation of energy, in democracy and necessary progress, in
Protestant Christianity and the duty of fighting for 'the doctrine of
the immortal Monroe,' all for no reasons worthy of the name. We see
into these matters with no more inner clearness, and probably with much
less, than any disbeliever in them might possess. His
unconventionality would probably have some grounds to show for its
conclusions; but for us, not insight, but the _prestige_ of the
opinions, is what makes the spark shoot from them and light up our
sleeping magazines of faith. Our reason is quite satisfied, in nine
hundred and ninety-nine cases out of every thousand of us, if it can
find a few arguments that will do to recite in case our credulity is
criticised by some one else. Our faith is faith in some one else's
faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case. Our belief
in truth itself, for instance, that there is a truth, and that our
minds and it are made for each other,--what is it but a passionate
affirmation of desire, in which our social system backs us up? We want
to have a truth; we want to believe that our {10} experiments and
studies and discussions must put us in a continually better and better
position towards it; and on this line we agree to fight out our
thinking lives. But if a pyrrhonistic sceptic asks us _how we know_
all this, can our logic find a reply? No! certainly it cannot. It is
just one volition against another,--we willing to go in for life upon a
trust or assumption which he, for his part, does not care to make.[2]
As a rule we disbelieve all facts and theories for which we have no
use. Clifford's cosmic emotions find no use for Christian feelings.
Huxley belabors the bishops because there is no use for sacerdotalism
in his scheme of life. Newman, on the contrary, goes over to Romanism,
and finds all sorts of reasons good for staying there, because a
priestly system is for him an organic need and delight. Why do so few
'scientists' even look at the evidence for telepathy, so called?
Because they think, as a leading biologist, now dead, once said to me,
that even if such a thing were true, scientists ought to band together
to keep it suppressed and concealed. It would undo the uniformity of
Nature and all sorts of other things without which scientists cannot
carry on their pursuits. But if this very man had been shown something
which as a scientist he might _do_ with telepathy, he might not only
have examined the evidence, but even have found it good enough. This
very law which the logicians would impose upon us--if I may give the
name of logicians to those who would rule out our willing nature
here--is based on nothing but their own natural wish to exclude all
elements for {11} which they, in their professional quality of
logicians, can find no use.
Evidently, then, our non-intellectual nature does influence our
convictions. There are passional tendencies and volitions which run
before and others which come after belief, and it is only the latter
that are too late for the fair; and they are not too late when the
previous passional work has been already in their own direction.
Pascal's argument, instead of being powerless, then seems a regular
clincher, and is the last stroke needed to make our faith in masses and
holy water complete. The state of things is evidently far from simple;
and pure insight and logic, whatever they might do ideally, are not the
only things that really do produce our creeds.
IV.
Our next duty, having recognized this mixed-up state of affairs, is to
ask whether it be simply reprehensible and pathological, or whether, on
the contrary, we must treat it as a normal element in making up our
minds. The thesis I defend is, briefly stated, this: _Our passional
nature not only lawfully may, but must, decide an option between
propositions, whenever it is a genuine option that cannot by its nature
be decided on intellectual grounds; for to say, under such
circumstances, "Do not decide, but leave the question open," is itself
a passional decision,--just like deciding yes or no,--and is attended
with the same risk of losing the truth_. The thesis thus abstractly
expressed will, I trust, soon become quite clear. But I must first
indulge in a bit more of preliminary work.
{12}
V.
It will be observed that for the purposes of this discussion we are on
'dogmatic' ground,--ground, I mean, which leaves systematic
philosophical scepticism altogether out of account. The postulate that
there is truth, and that it is the destiny of our minds to attain it,
we are deliberately resolving to make, though the sceptic will not make
it. We part company with him, therefore, absolutely, at this point.
But the faith that truth exists, and that our minds can find it, may be
held in two ways. We may talk of the _empiricist_ way and of the
_absolutist_ way of believing in truth. The absolutists in this matter
say that we not only can attain to knowing truth, but we can _know
when_ we have attained to knowing it; while the empiricists think that
although we may attain it, we cannot infallibly know when. To _know_
is one thing, and to know for certain _that_ we know is another. One
may hold to the first being possible without the second; hence the
empiricists and the absolutists, although neither of them is a sceptic
in the usual philosophic sense of the term, show very different degrees
of dogmatism in their lives.
If we look at the history of opinions, we see that the empiricist
tendency has largely prevailed in science, while in philosophy the
absolutist tendency has had everything its own way. The characteristic
sort of happiness, indeed, which philosophies yield has mainly
consisted in the conviction felt by each successive school or system
that by it bottom-certitude had been attained. "Other philosophies are
collections of opinions, mostly false; _my_ philosophy {13} gives
standing-ground forever,"--who does not recognize in this the key-note
of every system worthy of the name? A system, to be a system at all,
must come as a _closed_ system, reversible in this or that detail,
perchance, but in its essential features never!
Scholastic orthodoxy, to which one must always go when one wishes to
find perfectly clear statement, has beautifully elaborated this
absolutist conviction in a doctrine which it calls that of 'objective
evidence.' If, for example, I am unable to doubt that I now exist
before you, that two is less than three, or that if all men are mortal
then I am mortal too, it is because these things illumine my intellect
irresistibly. The final ground of this objective evidence possessed by
certain propositions is the _adaequatio intellectûs nostri cum rê_.
The certitude it brings involves an _aptitudinem ad extorquendum certum
assensum_ on the part of the truth envisaged, and on the side of the
subject a _quietem in cognitione_, when once the object is mentally
received, that leaves no possibility of doubt behind; and in the whole
transaction nothing operates but the _entitas ipsa_ of the object and
the _entitas ipsa_ of the mind. We slouchy modern thinkers dislike to
talk in Latin,--indeed, we dislike to talk in set terms at all; but at
bottom our own state of mind is very much like this whenever we
uncritically abandon ourselves: You believe in objective evidence, and
I do. Of some things we feel that we are certain: we know, and we know
that we do know. There is something that gives a click inside of us, a
bell that strikes twelve, when the hands of our mental clock have swept
the dial and meet over the meridian hour. The greatest empiricists
among us are only empiricists on reflection: when {14} left to their
instincts, they dogmatize like infallible popes. When the Cliffords
tell us how sinful it is to be Christians on such 'insufficient
evidence,' insufficiency is really the last thing they have in mind.
For them the evidence is absolutely sufficient, only it makes the other
way. They believe so completely in an anti-christian order of the
universe that there is no living option: Christianity is a dead
hypothesis from the start.
VI.
But now, since we are all such absolutists by instinct, what in our
quality of students of philosophy ought we to do about the fact? Shall
we espouse and indorse it? Or shall we treat it as a weakness of our
nature from which we must free ourselves, if we can?
I sincerely believe that the latter course is the only one we can
follow as reflective men. Objective evidence and certitude are
doubtless very fine ideals to play with, but where on this moonlit and
dream-visited planet are they found? I am, therefore, myself a
complete empiricist so far as my theory of human knowledge goes. I
live, to be sure, by the practical faith that we must go on
experiencing and thinking over our experience, for only thus can our
opinions grow more true; but to hold any one of them--I absolutely do
not care which--as if it never could be reinterpretable or corrigible,
I believe to be a tremendously mistaken attitude, and I think that the
whole history of philosophy will bear me out. There is but one
indefectibly certain truth, and that is the truth that pyrrhonistic
scepticism itself leaves {15} standing,--the truth that the present
phenomenon of consciousness exists. That, however, is the bare
starting-point of knowledge, the mere admission of a stuff to be
philosophized about. The various philosophies are but so many attempts
at expressing what this stuff really is. And if we repair to our
libraries what disagreement do we discover! Where is a certainly true
answer found? Apart from abstract propositions of comparison (such as
two and two are the same as four), propositions which tell us nothing
by themselves about concrete reality, we find no proposition ever
regarded by any one as evidently certain that has not either been
called a falsehood, or at least had its truth sincerely questioned by
some one else. The transcending of the axioms of geometry, not in play
but in earnest, by certain of our contemporaries (as Zöllner and
Charles H. Hinton), and the rejection of the whole Aristotelian logic
by the Hegelians, are striking instances in point.
No concrete test of what is really true has ever been agreed upon.
Some make the criterion external to the moment of perception, putting
it either in revelation, the _consensus gentium_, the instincts of the
heart, or the systematized experience of the race. Others make the
perceptive moment its own test,--Descartes, for instance, with his
clear and distinct ideas guaranteed by the veracity of God; Reid with
his 'common-sense;' and Kant with his forms of synthetic judgment _a
priori_. The inconceivability of the opposite; the capacity to be
verified by sense; the possession of complete organic unity or
self-relation, realized when a thing is its own other,--are standards
which, in turn, have been used. The much {16} lauded objective
evidence is never triumphantly there, it is a mere aspiration or
_Grenzbegriff_, marking the infinitely remote ideal of our thinking
life. To claim that certain truths now possess it, is simply to say
that when you think them true and they _are_ true, then their evidence
is objective, otherwise it is not. But practically one's conviction
that the evidence one goes by is of the real objective brand, is only
one more subjective opinion added to the lot. For what a contradictory
array of opinions have objective evidence and absolute certitude been
claimed! The world is rational through and through,--its existence is
an ultimate brute fact; there is a personal God,--a personal God is
inconceivable; there is an extra-mental physical world immediately
known,--the mind can only know its own ideas; a moral imperative
exists,--obligation is only the resultant of desires; a permanent
spiritual principle is in every one,--there are only shifting states of
mind; there is an endless chain of causes,--there is an absolute first
cause; an eternal necessity,--a freedom; a purpose,--no purpose; a
primal One,--a primal Many; a universal continuity,--an essential
discontinuity in things; an infinity,--no infinity. There is
this,--there is that; there is indeed nothing which some one has not
thought absolutely true, while his neighbor deemed it absolutely false;
and not an absolutist among them seems ever to have considered that the
trouble may all the time be essential, and that the intellect, even
with truth directly in its grasp, may have no infallible signal for
knowing whether it be truth or no. When, indeed, one remembers that
the most striking practical application to life of the doctrine of
objective certitude has been {17} the conscientious labors of the Holy
Office of the Inquisition, one feels less tempted than ever to lend the
doctrine a respectful ear.
But please observe, now, that when as empiricists we give up the
doctrine of objective certitude, we do not thereby give up the quest or
hope of truth itself. We still pin our faith on its existence, and
still believe that we gain an ever better position towards it by
systematically continuing to roll up experiences and think. Our great
difference from the scholastic lies in the way we face. The strength
of his system lies in the principles, the origin, the _terminus a quo_
of his thought; for us the strength is in the outcome, the upshot, the
_terminus ad quem_. Not where it comes from but what it leads to is to
decide. It matters not to an empiricist from what quarter an
hypothesis may come to him: he may have acquired it by fair means or by
foul; passion may have whispered or accident suggested it; but if the
total drift of thinking continues to confirm it, that is what he means
by its being true.
VII.
One more point, small but important, and our preliminaries are done.
There are two ways of looking at our duty in the matter of
opinion,--ways entirely different, and yet ways about whose difference
the theory of knowledge seems hitherto to have shown very little
concern. _We must know the truth_; and _we must avoid error_,--these
are our first and great commandments as would-be knowers; but they are
not two ways of stating an identical commandment, they are two
separable laws. Although it may indeed happen that when we believe the
truth _A_, we escape {18} as an incidental consequence from believing
the falsehood _B_, it hardly ever happens that by merely disbelieving
_B_ we necessarily believe _A_. We may in escaping _B_ fall into
believing other falsehoods, _C_ or _D_, just as bad as _B_; or we may
escape _B_ by not believing anything at all, not even _A_.
Believe truth! Shun error!--these, we see, are two materially
different laws; and by choosing between them we may end by coloring
differently our whole intellectual life. We may regard the chase for
truth as paramount, and the avoidance of error as secondary; or we may,
on the other hand, treat the avoidance of error as more imperative, and
let truth take its chance. Clifford, in the instructive passage which
I have quoted, exhorts us to the latter course. Believe nothing, he
tells us, keep your mind in suspense forever, rather than by closing it
on insufficient evidence incur the awful risk of believing lies. You,
on the other hand, may think that the risk of being in error is a very
small matter when compared with the blessings of real knowledge, and be
ready to be duped many times in your investigation rather than postpone
indefinitely the chance of guessing true. I myself find it impossible
to go with Clifford. We must remember that these feelings of our duty
about either truth or error are in any case only expressions of our
passional life. Biologically considered, our minds are as ready to
grind out falsehood as veracity, and he who says, "Better go without
belief forever than believe a lie!" merely shows his own preponderant
private horror of becoming a dupe. He may be critical of many of his
desires and fears, but this fear he slavishly obeys. He cannot imagine
any one questioning its binding force. For my own part, I {19} have
also a horror of being duped; but I can believe that worse things than
being duped may happen to a man in this world: so Clifford's
exhortation has to my ears a thoroughly fantastic sound. It is like a
general informing his soldiers that it is better to keep out of battle
forever than to risk a single wound. Not so are victories either over
enemies or over nature gained. Our errors are surely not such awfully
solemn things. In a world where we are so certain to incur them in
spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier
than this excessive nervousness on their behalf. At any rate, it seems
the fittest thing for the empiricist philosopher.
VIII.
And now, after all this introduction, let us go straight at our
question. I have said, and now repeat it, that not only as a matter of
fact do we find our passional nature influencing us in our opinions,
but that there are some options between opinions in which this
influence must be regarded both as an inevitable and as a lawful
determinant of our choice.
I fear here that some of you my hearers will begin to scent danger, and
lend an inhospitable ear. Two first steps of passion you have indeed
had to admit as necessary,--we must think so as to avoid dupery, and we
must think so as to gain truth; but the surest path to those ideal
consummations, you will probably consider, is from now onwards to take
no further passional step.
Well, of course, I agree as far as the facts will allow. Wherever the
option between losing truth and gaining it is not momentous, we can
throw the {20} chance of _gaining truth_ away, and at any rate save
ourselves from any chance of _believing falsehood_, by not making up
our minds at all till objective evidence has come. In scientific
questions, this is almost always the case; and even in human affairs in
general, the need of acting is seldom so urgent that a false belief to
act on is better than no belief at all. Law courts, indeed, have to
decide on the best evidence attainable for the moment, because a
judge's duty is to make law as well as to ascertain it, and (as a
learned judge once said to me) few cases are worth spending much time
over: the great thing is to have them decided on _any_ acceptable
principle, and got out of the way. But in our dealings with objective
nature we obviously are recorders, not makers, of the truth; and
decisions for the mere sake of deciding promptly and getting on to the
next business would be wholly out of place. Throughout the breadth of
physical nature facts are what they are quite independently of us, and
seldom is there any such hurry about them that the risks of being duped
by believing a premature theory need be faced. The questions here are
always trivial options, the hypotheses are hardly living (at any rate
not living for us spectators), the choice between believing truth or
falsehood is seldom forced. The attitude of sceptical balance is
therefore the absolutely wise one if we would escape mistakes. What
difference, indeed, does it make to most of us whether we have or have
not a theory of the Röntgen rays, whether we believe or not in
mind-stuff, or have a conviction about the causality of conscious
states? It makes no difference. Such options are not forced on us.
On every account it is better not to make them, but still keep weighing
reasons _pro et contra_ with an indifferent hand.
{21}
I speak, of course, here of the purely judging mind. For purposes of
discovery such indifference is to be less highly recommended, and
science would be far less advanced than she is if the passionate
desires of individuals to get their own faiths confirmed had been kept
out of the game. See for example the sagacity which Spencer and
Weismann now display. On the other hand, if you want an absolute
duffer in an investigation, you must, after all, take the man who has
no interest whatever in its results: he is the warranted incapable, the
positive fool. The most useful investigator, because the most
sensitive observer, is always he whose eager interest in one side of
the question is balanced by an equally keen nervousness lest he become
deceived.[3] Science has organized this nervousness into a regular
_technique_, her so-called method of verification; and she has fallen
so deeply in love with the method that one may even say she has ceased
to care for truth by itself at all. It is only truth as technically
verified that interests her. The truth of truths might come in merely
affirmative form, and she would decline to touch it. Such truth as
that, she might repeat with Clifford, would be stolen in defiance of
her duty to mankind. Human passions, however, are stronger than
technical rules. "Le coeur a ses raisons," as Pascal says, "que la
raison ne connaît pas;" and however indifferent to all but the bare
rules of the game the umpire, the abstract intellect, may be, the
concrete players who furnish him the materials to judge of are usually,
each one of them, in love with some pet 'live hypothesis' of his own.
Let us agree, however, that wherever there is no forced option, the
{22} dispassionately judicial intellect with no pet hypothesis, saving
us, as it does, from dupery at any rate, ought to be our ideal.
The question next arises: Are there not somewhere forced options in our
speculative questions, and can we (as men who may be interested at
least as much in positively gaining truth as in merely escaping dupery)
always wait with impunity till the coercive evidence shall have
arrived? It seems _a priori_ improbable that the truth should be so
nicely adjusted to our needs and powers as that. In the great
boarding-house of nature, the cakes and the butter and the syrup seldom
come out so even and leave the plates so clean. Indeed, we should view
them with scientific suspicion if they did.
IX.
_Moral questions_ immediately present themselves as questions whose
solution cannot wait for sensible proof. A moral question is a
question not of what sensibly exists, but of what is good, or would be
good if it did exist. Science can tell us what exists; but to compare
the _worths_, both of what exists and of what does not exist, we must
consult not science, but what Pascal calls our heart. Science herself
consults her heart when she lays it down that the infinite
ascertainment of fact and correction of false belief are the supreme
goods for man. Challenge the statement, and science can only repeat it
oracularly, or else prove it by showing that such ascertainment and
correction bring man all sorts of other goods which man's heart in turn
declares. The question of having moral beliefs at all or not having
them is decided by {23} our will. Are our moral preferences true or
false, or are they only odd biological phenomena, making things good or
bad for _us_, but in themselves indifferent? How can your pure
intellect decide? If your heart does not _want_ a world of moral
reality, your head will assuredly never make you believe in one.
Mephistophelian scepticism, indeed, will satisfy the head's
play-instincts much better than any rigorous idealism can. Some men
(even at the student age) are so naturally cool-hearted that the
moralistic hypothesis never has for them any pungent life, and in their
supercilious presence the hot young moralist always feels strangely ill
at ease. The appearance of knowingness is on their side, of naïveté
and gullibility on his. Yet, in the inarticulate heart of him, he
clings to it that he is not a dupe, and that there is a realm in which
(as Emerson says) all their wit and intellectual superiority is no
better than the cunning of a fox. Moral scepticism can no more be
refuted or proved by logic than intellectual scepticism can. When we
stick to it that there _is_ truth (be it of either kind), we do so with
our whole nature, and resolve to stand or fall by the results. The
sceptic with his whole nature adopts the doubting attitude; but which
of us is the wiser, Omniscience only knows.
Turn now from these wide questions of good to a certain class of
questions of fact, questions concerning personal relations, states of
mind between one man and another. _Do you like me or not?_--for
example. Whether you do or not depends, in countless instances, on
whether I meet you half-way, am willing to assume that you must like
me, and show you trust and expectation. The previous faith on my part
in your liking's existence is in such cases what makes {24} your liking
come. But if I stand aloof, and refuse to budge an inch until I have
objective evidence, until you shall have done something apt, as the
absolutists say, _ad extorquendum assensum meum_, ten to one your
liking never comes. How many women's hearts are vanquished by the mere
sanguine insistence of some man that they _must_ love him! he will not
consent to the hypothesis that they cannot. The desire for a certain
kind of truth here brings about that special truth's existence; and so
it is in innumerable cases of other sorts. Who gains promotions,
boons, appointments, but the man in whose life they are seen to play
the part of live hypotheses, who discounts them, sacrifices other
things for their sake before they have come, and takes risks for them
in advance? His faith acts on the powers above him as a claim, and
creates its own verification.
A social organism of any sort whatever, large or small, is what it is
because each member proceeds to his own duty with a trust that the
other members will simultaneously do theirs. Wherever a desired result
is achieved by the co-operation of many independent persons, its
existence as a fact is a pure consequence of the precursive faith in
one another of those immediately concerned. A government, an army, a
commercial system, a ship, a college, an athletic team, all exist on
this condition, without which not only is nothing achieved, but nothing
is even attempted. A whole train of passengers (individually brave
enough) will be looted by a few highwaymen, simply because the latter
can count on one another, while each passenger fears that if he makes a
movement of resistance, he will be shot before any one else backs him
up. If we believed that the whole car-full would rise {25} at once
with us, we should each severally rise, and train-robbing would never
even be attempted. There are, then, cases where a fact cannot come at
all unless a preliminary faith exists in its coming. _And where faith
in a fact can help create the fact_, that would be an insane logic
which should say that faith running ahead of scientific evidence is the
'lowest kind of immorality' into which a thinking being can fall. Yet
such is the logic by which our scientific absolutists pretend to
regulate our lives!
X.
In truths dependent on our personal action, then, faith based on desire
is certainly a lawful and possibly an indispensable thing.
But now, it will be said, these are all childish human cases, and have
nothing to do with great cosmical matters, like the question of
religious faith. Let us then pass on to that. Religions differ so
much in their accidents that in discussing the religious question we
must make it very generic and broad. What then do we now mean by the
religious hypothesis? Science says things are; morality says some
things are better than other things; and religion says essentially two
things.
First, she says that the best things are the more eternal things, the
overlapping things, the things in the universe that throw the last
stone, so to speak, and say the final word. "Perfection is
eternal,"--this phrase of Charles Secrétan seems a good way of putting
this first affirmation of religion, an affirmation which obviously
cannot yet be verified scientifically at all.
{26}
The second affirmation of religion is that we are better off even now
if we believe her first affirmation to be true.
Now, let us consider what the logical elements of this situation are
_in case the religious hypothesis in both its branches be really true_.
(Of course, we must admit that possibility at the outset. If we are to
discuss the question at all, it must involve a living option. If for
any of you religion be a hypothesis that cannot, by any living
possibility be true, then you need go no farther. I speak to the
'saving remnant' alone.) So proceeding, we see, first, that religion
offers itself as a _momentous_ option. We are supposed to gain, even
now, by our belief, and to lose by our non-belief, a certain vital
good. Secondly, religion is a _forced_ option, so far as that good
goes. We cannot escape the issue by remaining sceptical and waiting
for more light, because, although we do avoid error in that way _if
religion be untrue_, we lose the good, _if it be true_, just as
certainly as if we positively chose to disbelieve. It is as if a man
should hesitate indefinitely to ask a certain woman to marry him
because he was not perfectly sure that she would prove an angel after
he brought her home. Would he not cut himself off from that particular
angel-possibility as decisively as if he went and married some one
else? Scepticism, then, is not avoidance of option; it is option of a
certain particular kind of risk. _Better risk loss of truth than
chance of error_,--that is your faith-vetoer's exact position. He is
actively playing his stake as much as the believer is; he is backing
the field against the religious hypothesis, just as the believer is
backing the religious hypothesis against the field. To preach
scepticism to us as a duty until {27} 'sufficient evidence' for
religion be found, is tantamount therefore to telling us, when in
presence of the religious hypothesis, that to yield to our fear of its
being error is wiser and better than to yield to our hope that it may
be true. It is not intellect against all passions, then; it is only
intellect with one passion laying down its law. And by what, forsooth,
is the supreme wisdom of this passion warranted? Dupery for dupery,
what proof is there that dupery through hope is so much worse than
dupery through fear? I, for one, can see no proof; and I simply refuse
obedience to the scientist's command to imitate his kind of option, in
a case where my own stake is important enough to give me the right to
choose my own form of risk. If religion be true and the evidence for
it be still insufficient, I do not wish, by putting your extinguisher
upon my nature (which feels to me as if it had after all some business
in this matter), to forfeit my sole chance in life of getting upon the
winning side,--that chance depending, of course, on my willingness to
run the risk of acting as if my passional need of taking the world
religiously might be prophetic and right.
All this is on the supposition that it really may be prophetic and
right, and that, even to us who are discussing the matter, religion is
a live hypothesis which may be true. Now, to most of us religion comes
in a still further way that makes a veto on our active faith even more
illogical. The more perfect and more eternal aspect of the universe is
represented in our religions as having personal form. The universe is
no longer a mere _It_ to us, but a _Thou_, if we are religious; and any
relation that may be possible from person to person might be possible
{28} here. For instance, although in one sense we are passive portions
of the universe, in another we show a curious autonomy, as if we were
small active centres on our own account. We feel, too, as if the
appeal of religion to us were made to our own active good-will, as if
evidence might be forever withheld from us unless we met the hypothesis
half-way. To take a trivial illustration: just as a man who in a
company of gentlemen made no advances, asked a warrant for every
concession, and believed no one's word without proof, would cut himself
off by such churlishness from all the social rewards that a more
trusting spirit would earn,--so here, one who should shut himself up in
snarling logicality and try to make the gods extort his recognition
willy-nilly, or not get it at all, might cut himself off forever from
his only opportunity of making the gods' acquaintance. This feeling,
forced on us we know not whence, that by obstinately believing that
there are gods (although not to do so would be so easy both for our
logic and our life) we are doing the universe the deepest service we
can, seems part of the living essence of the religious hypothesis. If
the hypothesis _were_ true in all its parts, including this one, then
pure intellectualism, with its veto on our making willing advances,
would be an absurdity; and some participation of our sympathetic nature
would be logically required. I, therefore, for one cannot see my way
to accepting the agnostic rules for truth-seeking, or wilfully agree to
keep my willing nature out of the game. I cannot do so for this plain
reason, that _a rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from
acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those kinds of truth were
really there, would be an irrational rule_. That for me {29} is the
long and short of the formal logic of the situation, no matter what the
kinds of truth might materially be.
I confess I do not see how this logic can be escaped. But sad
experience makes me fear that some of you may still shrink from
radically saying with me, _in abstracto_, that we have the right to
believe at our own risk any hypothesis that is live enough to tempt our
will. I suspect, however, that if this is so, it is because you have
got away from the abstract logical point of view altogether, and are
thinking (perhaps without realizing it) of some particular religious
hypothesis which for you is dead. The freedom to 'believe what we
will' you apply to the case of some patent superstition; and the faith
you think of is the faith defined by the schoolboy when he said, "Faith
is when you believe something that you know ain't true." I can only
repeat that this is misapprehension. _In concreto_, the freedom to
believe can only cover living options which the intellect of the
individual cannot by itself resolve; and living options never seem
absurdities to him who has them to consider. When I look at the
religious question as it really puts itself to concrete men, and when I
think of all the possibilities which both practically and theoretically
it involves, then this command that we shall put a stopper on our
heart, instincts, and courage, and wait--acting of course meanwhile
more or less as if religion were _not_ true[4]--till {30} doomsday, or
till such time as our intellect and senses working together may have
raked in evidence enough,--this command, I say, seems to me the
queerest idol ever manufactured in the philosophic cave. Were we
scholastic absolutists, there might be more excuse. If we had an
infallible intellect with its objective certitudes, we might feel
ourselves disloyal to such a perfect organ of knowledge in not trusting
to it exclusively, in not waiting for its releasing word. But if we
are empiricists, if we believe that no bell in us tolls to let us know
for certain when truth is in our grasp, then it seems a piece of idle
fantasticality to preach so solemnly our duty of waiting for the bell.
Indeed we _may_ wait if we will,--I hope you do not think that I am
denying that,--but if we do so, we do so at our peril as much as if we
believed. In either case we _act_, taking our life in our hands. No
one of us ought to issue vetoes to the other, nor should we bandy words
of abuse. We ought, on the contrary, delicately and profoundly to
respect one another's mental freedom: then only shall we bring about
the intellectual republic; then only shall we have that spirit of inner
tolerance without which all our outer tolerance is soulless, and which
is empiricism's glory; then only shall we live and let live, in
speculative as well as in practical things.
I began by a reference to Fitz James Stephen; let me end by a quotation
from him. "What do you think {31} of yourself? What do you think of
the world?... These are questions with which all must deal as it seems
good to them. They are riddles of the Sphinx, and in some way or other
we must deal with them.... In all important transactions of life we
have to take a leap in the dark.... If we decide to leave the riddles
unanswered, that is a choice; if we waver in our answer, that, too, is
a choice: but whatever choice we make, we make it at our peril. If a
man chooses to turn his back altogether on God and the future, no one
can prevent him; no one can show beyond reasonable doubt that he is
mistaken. If a man thinks otherwise and acts as he thinks, I do not
see that any one can prove that _he_ is mistaken. Each must act as he
thinks best; and if he is wrong, so much the worse for him. We stand
on a mountain pass in the midst of whirling snow and blinding mist,
through which we get glimpses now and then of paths which may be
deceptive. If we stand still we shall be frozen to death. If we take
the wrong road we shall be dashed to pieces. We do not certainly know
whether there is any right one. What must we do? 'Be strong and of a
good courage.' Act for the best, hope for the best, and take what
comes.... If death ends all, we cannot meet death better."[5]
[1] An Address to the Philosophical Clubs of Yale and Brown
Universities. Published in the New World, June, 1896.
[2] Compare the admirable page 310 in S. H. Hodgson's "Time and Space,"
London, 1865.
[3] Compare Wilfrid Ward's Essay, "The Wish to Believe," in his
_Witnesses to the Unseen_, Macmillan & Co., 1893.
[4] Since belief is measured by action, he who forbids us to believe
religion to be true, necessarily also forbids us to act as we should if
we did believe it to be true. The whole defence of religious faith
hinges upon action. If the action required or inspired by the
religious hypothesis is in no way different from that dictated by the
naturalistic hypothesis, then religious faith is a pure superfluity,
better pruned away, and controversy about its legitimacy is a piece of
idle trifling, unworthy of serious minds. I myself believe, of course,
that the religious hypothesis gives to the world an expression which
specifically determines our reactions, and makes them in a large part
unlike what they might be on a purely naturalistic scheme of belief.
[5] Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, p. 353, 2d edition. London, 1874.
{32}
IS LIFE WORTH LIVING?[1]
When Mr. Mallock's book with this title appeared some fifteen years
ago, the jocose answer that "it depends on the _liver_" had great
currency in the newspapers. The answer which I propose to give
to-night cannot be jocose. In the words of one of Shakespeare's
prologues,--
"I come no more to make you laugh; things now,
That bear a weighty and a serious brow,
Sad, high, and working, full of state and woe,"--
must be my theme. In the deepest heart of all of us there is a corner
in which the ultimate mystery of things works sadly; and I know not
what such an association as yours intends, nor what you ask of those
whom you invite to address you, unless it be to lead you from the
surface-glamour of existence, and for an hour at least to make you
heedless to the buzzing and jigging and vibration of small interests
and excitements that form the tissue of our ordinary consciousness.
Without further explanation or apology, then, I ask you to join me in
turning an attention, commonly too unwilling, to the profounder
bass-note of life. Let us search the lonely depths for an hour
together, and see what answers in the last folds and recesses of things
our question may find.
{33}
I.
With many men the question of life's worth is answered by a
temperamental optimism which makes them incapable of believing that
anything seriously evil can exist. Our dear old Walt Whitman's works
are the standing text-book of this kind of optimism. The mere joy of
living is so immense in Walt Whitman's veins that it abolishes the
possibility of any other kind of feeling:--
"To breathe the air, how delicious!
To speak, to walk, to seize something by the hand!...
To be this incredible God I am!...
O amazement of things, even the least particle!
O spirituality of things!
I too carol the Sun, usher'd or at noon, or as now, setting;
I too throb to the brain and beauty of the earth and of all the
growths of the earth....
I sing to the last the equalities, modern or old,
I sing the endless finales of things,
I say Nature continues--glory continues.
I praise with electric voice,
For I do not see one imperfection in the universe,
And I do not see one cause or result lamentable at last."
So Rousseau, writing of the nine years he spent at Annecy, with nothing
but his happiness to tell:--
"How tell what was neither said nor done nor even thought, but tasted
only and felt, with no object of my felicity but the emotion of
felicity itself! I rose with the sun, and I was happy; I went to walk,
and I was happy; I saw 'Maman,' and I was happy; I left her, and I was
happy. I rambled through the woods and over the vine-slopes, I
wandered in the valleys, I read, I lounged, I {34} worked in the
garden, I gathered the fruits, I helped at the indoor work, and
happiness followed me everywhere. It was in no one assignable thing;
it was all within myself; it could not leave me for a single instant."
If moods like this could be made permanent, and constitutions like
these universal, there would never be any occasion for such discourses
as the present one. No philosopher would seek to prove articulately
that life is worth living, for the fact that it absolutely is so would
vouch for itself, and the problem disappear in the vanishing of the
question rather than in the coming of anything like a reply. But we
are not magicians to make the optimistic temperament universal; and
alongside of the deliverances of temperamental optimism concerning
life, those of temperamental pessimism always exist, and oppose to them
a standing refutation. In what is called 'circular insanity,' phases
of melancholy succeed phases of mania, with no outward cause that we
can discover; and often enough to one and the same well person life
will present incarnate radiance to-day and incarnate dreariness
to-morrow, according to the fluctuations of what the older medical
books used to call "the concoction of the humors." In the words of the
newspaper joke, "it depends on the liver." Rousseau's ill-balanced
constitution undergoes a change, and behold him in his latter evil days
a prey to melancholy and black delusions of suspicion and fear. Some
men seem launched upon the world even from their birth with souls as
incapable of happiness as Walt Whitman's was of gloom, and they have
left us their messages in even more lasting verse than his,--the
exquisite Leopardi, for example; or our own contemporary, {35} James
Thomson, in that pathetic book, The City of Dreadful Night, which I
think is less well-known than it should be for its literary beauty,
simply because men are afraid to quote its words,--they are so gloomy,
and at the same time so sincere. In one place the poet describes a
congregation gathered to listen to a preacher in a great unillumined
cathedral at night. The sermon is too long to quote, but it ends
thus:--
"'O Brothers of sad lives! they are so brief;
A few short years must bring us all relief:
Can we not bear these years of laboring breath.
But if you would not this poor life fulfil,
Lo, you are free to end it when you will,
Without the fear of waking after death.'--
"The organ-like vibrations of his voice
Thrilled through the vaulted aisles and died away;
The yearning of the tones which bade rejoice
Was sad and tender as a requiem lay:
Our shadowy congregation rested still,
As brooding on that 'End it when you will.'
* * * * *
"Our shadowy congregation rested still,
As musing on that message we had heard,
And brooding on that 'End it when you will,'
Perchance awaiting yet some other word;
When keen as lightning through a muffled sky
Sprang forth a shrill and lamentable cry;--
"'The man speaks sooth, alas! the man speaks sooth:
We have no personal life beyond the grave;
There is no God; Fate knows nor wrath nor ruth:
Can I find here the comfort which I crave?
"'In all eternity I had one chance,
One few years' term of gracious human life,--
The splendors of the intellect's advance,
The sweetness of the home with babes and wife;
{36}
"'The social pleasures with their genial wit;
The fascination of the worlds of art;
The glories of the worlds of Nature lit
By large imagination's glowing heart;
"'The rapture of mere being, full of health;
The careless childhood and the ardent youth;
The strenuous manhood winning various wealth,
The reverend age serene with life's long truth;
"'All the sublime prerogatives of Man;
The storied memories of the times of old,
The patient tracking of the world's great plan
Through sequences and changes myriadfold.
"'This chance was never offered me before;
For me the infinite past is blank and dumb;
This chance recurreth never, nevermore;
Blank, blank for me the infinite To-come.
"'And this sole chance was frustrate from my birth,
A mockery, a delusion; and my breath
Of noble human life upon this earth
So racks me that I sigh for senseless death.
"'My wine of life is poison mixed with gall,
My noonday passes in a nightmare dream,
I worse than lose the years which are my all:
What can console me for the loss supreme?
"'Speak not of comfort where no comfort is,
Speak not at all: can words make foul things fair!
Our life 's a cheat, our death a black abyss:
Hush, and be mute, envisaging despair.'
"This vehement voice came from the northern aisle,
Rapid and shrill to its abrupt harsh close;
And none gave answer for a certain while,
For words must shrink from these most wordless woes;
At last the pulpit speaker simply said,
With humid eyes and thoughtful, drooping head,--
{37}
"'My Brother, my poor Brothers, it is thus:
This life holds nothing good for us,
But it ends soon and nevermore can be;
And we knew nothing of it ere our birth,
And shall know nothing when consigned to earth;
I ponder these thoughts, and they comfort me.'"
"It ends soon, and never more can be," "Lo, you are free to end it when
you will,"--these verses flow truthfully from the melancholy Thomson's
pen, and are in truth a consolation for all to whom, as to him, the
world is far more like a steady den of fear than a continual fountain
of delight. That life is not worth living the whole army of suicides
declare,--an army whose roll-call, like the famous evening gun of the
British army, follows the sun round the world and never terminates.
We, too, as we sit here in our comfort, must 'ponder these things'
also, for we are of one substance with these suicides, and their life
is the life we share. The plainest intellectual integrity,--nay, more,
the simplest manliness and honor, forbid us to forget their case.
"If suddenly," says Mr. Ruskin, "in the midst of the enjoyments of the
palate and lightnesses of heart of a London dinner-party, the walls of
the chamber were parted, and through their gap the nearest human beings
who were famishing and in misery were borne into the midst of the
company feasting and fancy free; if, pale from death, horrible in
destitution, broken by despair, body by body they were laid upon the
soft carpet, one beside the chair of every guest,--would only the
crumbs of the dainties be cast to them; would only a passing glance, a
passing thought, be vouchsafed to them? Yet the actual facts, the real
relation of each Dives and Lazarus, are not altered by the {38}
intervention of the house-wall between the table and the sick-bed,--by
the few feet of ground (how few!) which are, indeed, all that separate
the merriment from the misery."
II.
To come immediately to the heart of my theme, then, what I propose is
to imagine ourselves reasoning with a fellow-mortal who is on such
terms with life that the only comfort left him is to brood on the
assurance, "You may end it when you will." What reasons can we plead
that may render such a brother (or sister) willing to take up the
burden again? Ordinary Christians, reasoning with would-be suicides,
have little to offer them beyond the usual negative, "Thou shalt not."
God alone is master of life and death, they say, and it is a
blasphemous act to anticipate his absolving hand. But can _we_ find
nothing richer or more positive than this, no reflections to urge
whereby the suicide may actually see, and in all sad seriousness feel,
that in spite of adverse appearances even for him life is still worth
living? There are suicides and suicides (in the United States about
three thousand of them every year), and I must frankly confess that
with perhaps the majority of these my suggestions are impotent to deal.
Where suicide is the result of insanity or sudden frenzied impulse,
reflection is impotent to arrest its headway; and cases like these
belong to the ultimate mystery of evil, concerning which I can only
offer considerations tending toward religious patience at the end of
this hour. My task, let me say now, is practically narrow, and my
words are to deal only with that metaphysical _tedium vitae_ which is
peculiar to {39} reflecting men. Most of you are devoted, for good or
ill, to the reflective life. Many of you are students of philosophy,
and have already felt in your own persons the scepticism and unreality
that too much grubbing in the abstract roots of things will breed.
This is, indeed, one of the regular fruits of the over-studious career.
Too much questioning and too little active responsibility lead, almost
as often as too much sensualism does, to the edge of the slope, at the
bottom of which lie pessimism and the nightmare or suicidal view of
life. But to the diseases which reflection breeds, still further
reflection can oppose effective remedies; and it is of the melancholy
and _Weltschmerz_ bred of reflection that I now proceed to speak.
Let me say, immediately, that my final appeal is to nothing more
recondite than religious faith. So far as my argument is to be
destructive, it will consist in nothing more than the sweeping away of
certain views that often keep the springs of religious faith
compressed; and so far as it is to be constructive, it will consist in
holding up to the light of day certain considerations calculated to let
loose these springs in a normal, natural way. Pessimism is essentially
a religious disease. In the form of it to which you are most liable,
it consists in nothing but a religious demand to which there comes no
normal religious reply.
Now, there are two stages of recovery from this disease, two different
levels upon which one may emerge from the midnight view to the daylight
view of things, and I must treat of them in turn. The second stage is
the more complete and joyous, and it corresponds to the freer exercise
of religious {40} trust and fancy. There are, as is well known,
persons who are naturally very free in this regard, others who are not
at all so. There are persons, for instance, whom we find indulging to
their heart's content in prospects of immortality; and there are others
who experience the greatest difficulty in making such a notion seem
real to themselves at all. These latter persons are tied to their
senses, restricted to their natural experience; and many of them,
moreover, feel a sort of intellectual loyalty to what they call 'hard
facts,' which is positively shocked by the easy excursions into the
unseen that other people make at the bare call of sentiment. Minds of
either class may, however, be intensely religious. They may equally
desire atonement and reconciliation, and crave acquiescence and
communion with the total soul of things. But the craving, when the
mind is pent in to the hard facts, especially as science now reveals
them, can breed pessimism, quite as easily as it breeds optimism when
it inspires religious trust and fancy to wing their way to another and
a better world.
That is why I call pessimism an essentially religious disease. The
nightmare view of life has plenty of organic sources; but its great
reflective source has at all times been the contradiction between the
phenomena of nature and the craving of the heart to believe that behind
nature there is a spirit whose expression nature is. What philosophers
call 'natural theology' has been one way of appeasing this craving;
that poetry of nature in which our English literature is so rich has
been another way. Now, suppose a mind of the latter of our two
classes, whose imagination is pent in consequently, and who takes its
{41} facts 'hard;' suppose it, moreover, to feel strongly the craving
for communion, and yet to realize how desperately difficult it is to
construe the scientific order of nature either theologically or
poetically,--and what result can there be but inner discord and
contradiction? Now, this inner discord (merely as discord) can be
relieved in either of two ways: The longing to read the facts
religiously may cease, and leave the bare facts by themselves; or,
supplementary facts may be discovered or believed-in, which permit the
religious reading to go on. These two ways of relief are the two
stages of recovery, the two levels of escape from pessimism, to which I
made allusion a moment ago, and which the sequel will, I trust, make
more clear.
III.
Starting then with nature, we naturally tend, if we have the religious
craving, to say with Marcus Aurelius, "O Universe! what thou wishest I
wish." Our sacred books and traditions tell us of one God who made
heaven and earth, and, looking on them, saw that they were good. Yet,
on more intimate acquaintance, the visible surfaces of heaven and earth
refuse to be brought by us into any intelligible unity at all. Every
phenomenon that we would praise there exists cheek by jowl with some
contrary phenomenon that cancels all its religious effect upon the
mind. Beauty and hideousness, love and cruelty, life and death keep
house together in indissoluble partnership; and there gradually steals
over us, instead of the old warm notion of a man-loving Deity, that of
an awful power that neither hates nor loves, but rolls all things {42}
together meaninglessly to a common doom. This is an uncanny, a
sinister, a nightmare view of life, and its peculiar _unheimlichkeit_,
or poisonousness, lies expressly in our holding two things together
which cannot possibly agree,--in our clinging, on the one hand, to the
demand that there shall be a living spirit of the whole; and, on the
other, to the belief that the course of nature must be such a spirit's
adequate manifestation and expression. It is in the contradiction
between the supposed being of a spirit that encompasses and owns us,
and with which we ought to have some communion, and the character of
such a spirit as revealed by the visible world's course, that this
particular death-in-life paradox and this melancholy-breeding puzzle
reside, Carlyle expresses the result in that chapter of his immortal
'Sartor Resartus' entitled 'The Everlasting No.' "I lived," writes
poor Teufelsdröckh, "in a continual, indefinite, pining fear;
tremulous, pusillanimous, apprehensive of I knew not what: it seemed as
if all things in the heavens above and the earth beneath would hurt me;
as if the heavens and the earth were but boundless jaws of a devouring
monster, wherein I, palpitating, lay waiting to be devoured."
This is the first stage of speculative melancholy. No brute can have
this sort of melancholy; no man who is irreligious can become its prey.
It is the sick shudder of the frustrated religious demand, and not the
mere necessary outcome of animal experience. Teufelsdröckh himself
could have made shift to face the general chaos and bedevilment of this
world's experiences very well, were he not the victim of an originally
unlimited trust and affection towards them. If he might meet them
piecemeal, with no suspicion {43} of any whole expressing itself in
them, shunning the bitter parts and husbanding the sweet ones, as the
occasion served, and as the day was foul or fair, he could have
zigzagged toward an easy end, and felt no obligation to make the air
vocal with his lamentations. The mood of levity, of 'I don't care,' is
for this world's ills a sovereign and practical anaesthetic. But, no!
something deep down in Teufelsdröckh and in the rest of us tells us
that there _is_ a Spirit in things to which we owe allegiance, and for
whose sake we must keep up the serious mood. And so the inner fever
and discord also are kept up; for nature taken on her visible surface
reveals no such Spirit, and beyond the facts of nature we are at the
present stage of our inquiry not supposing ourselves to look.
Now, I do not hesitate frankly and sincerely to confess to you that
this real and genuine discord seems to me to carry with it the
inevitable bankruptcy of natural religion naïvely and simply taken.
There were times when Leibnitzes with their heads buried in monstrous
wigs could compose Theodicies, and when stall-fed officials of an
established church could prove by the valves in the heart and the round
ligament of the hip-joint the existence of a "Moral and Intelligent
Contriver of the World." But those times are past; and we of the
nineteenth century, with our evolutionary theories and our mechanical
philosophies, already know nature too impartially and too well to
worship unreservedly any God of whose character she can be an adequate
expression. Truly, all we know of good and duty proceeds from nature;
but none the less so all we know of evil. Visible nature is all
plasticity and indifference,--a moral multiverse, as one might call it,
and not a moral {44} universe. To such a harlot we owe no allegiance;
with her as a whole we can establish no moral communion; and we are
free in our dealings with her several parts to obey or destroy, and to
follow no law but that of prudence in coming to terms with such other
particular features as will help us to our private ends. If there be a
divine Spirit of the universe, nature, such as we know her, cannot
possibly be its _ultimate word_ to man. Either there is no Spirit
revealed in nature, or else it is inadequately revealed there; and (as
all the higher religions have assumed) what we call visible nature, or
_this_ world, must be but a veil and surface-show whose full meaning
resides in a supplementary unseen or _other_ world.
I cannot help, therefore, accounting it on the whole a gain (though it
may seem for certain poetic constitutions a very sad loss) that the
naturalistic superstition, the worship of the God of nature, simply
taken as such, should have begun to loosen its hold upon the educated
mind. In fact, if I am to express my personal opinion unreservedly, I
should say (in spite of its sounding blasphemous at first to certain
ears) that the initial step towards getting into healthy ultimate
relations with the universe is the act of rebellion against the idea
that such a God exists. Such rebellion essentially is that which in
the chapter I have quoted from Carlyle goes on to describe:--
"'Wherefore, like a coward, dost thou forever pip and whimper, and go
cowering and trembling? Despicable biped!... Hast thou not a heart;
canst thou not suffer whatsoever it be; and, as a Child of Freedom,
though outcast, trample Tophet itself under thy feet, while it consumes
thee? Let it come, then, I will meet it and defy it!' And as I so
thought, there rushed like a stream of fire {45} over my whole soul;
and I shook base Fear away from me forever....
"Thus had the Everlasting No pealed authoritatively through all the
recesses of my being, of my Me, and then was it that my whole Me stood
up, in native God-created majesty, and recorded its Protest. Such a
Protest, the most important transaction in life, may that same
Indignation and Defiance, in a psychological point of view, be fitly
called. The Everlasting No had said: 'Behold, thou art fatherless,
outcast, and the Universe is mine;' to which my whole Me now made
answer: 'I am not thine, but Free, and forever hate thee!' From that
hour," Teufelsdröckh-Carlyle adds, "I began to be a man."
And our poor friend, James Thomson, similarly writes:--
"Who is most wretched in this dolorous place?
I think myself, yet I would rather be
My miserable self than He, than He
Who formed such creatures to his own disgrace.
The vilest thing must be less vile than Thou
From whom it had its being, God and Lord!
Creator of all woe and sin! abhorred,
Malignant and implacable! I vow
That not for all Thy power furled and unfurled,
For all the temples to Thy glory built,
Would I assume the ignominious guilt
Of having made such men in such a world."
We are familiar enough in this community with the spectacle of persons
exulting in their emancipation from belief in the God of their
ancestral Calvinism,--him who made the garden and the serpent, and
pre-appointed the eternal fires of hell. Some of them have found
humaner gods to worship, others are simply converts from all theology;
but, both alike, they {46} assure us that to have got rid of the
sophistication of thinking they could feel any reverence or duty toward
that impossible idol gave a tremendous happiness to their souls. Now,
to make an idol of the spirit of nature, and worship it, also leads to
sophistication; and in souls that are religious and would also be
scientific the sophistication breeds a philosophical melancholy, from
which the first natural step of escape is the denial of the idol; and
with the downfall of the idol, whatever lack of positive joyousness may
remain, there comes also the downfall of the whimpering and cowering
mood. With evil simply taken as such, men can make short work, for
their relations with it then are only practical. It looms up no longer
so spectrally, it loses all its haunting and perplexing significance,
as soon as the mind attacks the instances of it singly, and ceases to
worry about their derivation from the 'one and only Power.'
Here, then, on this stage of mere emancipation from monistic
superstition, the would-be suicide may already get encouraging answers
to his question about the worth of life. There are in most men
instinctive springs of vitality that respond healthily when the burden
of metaphysical and infinite responsibility rolls off. The certainty
that you now _may_ step out of life whenever you please, and that to do
so is not blasphemous or monstrous, is itself an immense relief. The
thought of suicide is now no longer a guilty challenge and obsession.
"This little life is all we must endure;
The grave's most holy peace is ever sure,"--
says Thomson; adding, "I ponder these thoughts, and they comfort me."
Meanwhile we can always {47} stand it for twenty-four hours longer, if
only to see what to-morrow's newspaper will contain, or what the next
postman will bring.
But far deeper forces than this mere vital curiosity are arousable,
even in the pessimistically-tending mind; for where the loving and
admiring impulses are dead, the hating and fighting impulses will still
respond to fit appeals. This evil which we feel so deeply is something
that we can also help to overthrow; for its sources, now that no
'Substance' or 'Spirit' is behind them, are finite, and we can deal
with each of them in turn. It is, indeed, a remarkable fact that
sufferings and hardships do not, as a rule, abate the love of life;
they seem, on the contrary, usually to give it a keener zest. The
sovereign source of melancholy is repletion. Need and struggle are
what excite and inspire us; our hour of triumph is what brings the
void. Not the Jews of the captivity, but those of the days of
Solomon's glory are those from whom the pessimistic utterances in our
Bible come. Germany, when she lay trampled beneath the hoofs of
Bonaparte's troopers, produced perhaps the most optimistic and
idealistic literature that the world has seen; and not till the French
'milliards' were distributed after 1871 did pessimism overrun the
country in the shape in which we see it there to-day. The history of
our own race is one long commentary on the cheerfulness that comes with
fighting ills. Or take the Waldenses, of whom I lately have been
reading, as examples of what strong men will endure. In 1483 a papal
bull of Innocent VIII. enjoined their extermination. It absolved those
who should take up the crusade against them from all ecclesiastical
pains and penalties, released them from {48} any oath, legitimized
their title to all property which they might have illegally acquired,
and promised remission of sins to all who should kill the heretics.
"There is no town in Piedmont," says a Vaudois writer, "where some of
our brethren have not been put to death. Jordan Terbano was burnt
alive at Susa; Hippolite Rossiero at Turin, Michael Goneto, an
octogenarian, at Sarcena; Vilermin Ambrosio hanged on the Col di Meano;
Hugo Chiambs, of Fenestrelle, had his entrails torn from his living
body at Turin; Peter Geymarali of Bobbio in like manner had his
entrails taken out in Lucerna, and a fierce cat thrust in their place
to torture him further; Maria Romano was buried alive at Rocca Patia;
Magdalena Fauno underwent the same fate at San Giovanni; Susanna
Michelini was bound hand and foot, and left to perish of cold and
hunger on the snow at Sarcena; Bartolomeo Fache, gashed with sabres,
had the wounds filled up with quicklime, and perished thus in agony at
Penile; Daniel Michelini had his tongue torn out at Bobbo for having
praised God; James Baridari perished covered with sulphurous matches
which had been forced into his flesh under the nails, between the
fingers, in the nostrils, in the lips, and all over the body, and then
lighted; Daniel Rovelli had his mouth filled with gunpowder, which,
being lighted, blew his head to pieces;... Sara Rostignol was slit
open from the legs to the bosom, and left so to perish on the road
between Eyral and Lucerna; Anna Charbonnier was impaled, and carried
thus on a pike from San Giovanni to La Torre."[2]
_Und dergleicken mehr_! In 1630 the plague swept away one-half of the
Vaudois population, including fifteen of their seventeen pastors. The
places of these were supplied from Geneva and Dauphiny, and {49} the
whole Vaudois people learned French in order to follow their services.
More than once their number fell, by unremitting persecution, from the
normal standard of twenty-five thousand to about four thousand. In
1686 the Duke of Savoy ordered the three thousand that remained to give
up their faith or leave the country. Refusing, they fought the French
and Piedmontese armies till only eighty of their fighting men remained
alive or uncaptured, when they gave up, and were sent in a body to
Switzerland. But in 1689, encouraged by William of Orange and led by
one of their pastor-captains, between eight hundred and nine hundred of
them returned to conquer their old homes again. They fought their way
to Bobi, reduced to four hundred men in the first half year, and met
every force sent against them, until at last the Duke of Savoy, giving
up his alliance with that abomination of desolation, Louis XIV.,
restored them to comparative freedom,--since which time they have
increased and multiplied in their barren Alpine valleys to this day.
What are our woes and sufferance compared with these? Does not the
recital of such a fight so obstinately waged against such odds fill us
with resolution against our petty powers of darkness,--machine
politicians, spoilsmen, and the rest? Life is worth living, no matter
what it bring, if only such combats may be carried to successful
terminations and one's heel set on the tyrant's throat. To the
suicide, then, in his supposed world of multifarious and immoral
nature, you can appeal--and appeal in the name of the very evils that
make his heart sick there--to wait and see his part of the battle out.
And the consent to live on, which you ask of him under these {50}
circumstances, is not the sophistical 'resignation' which devotees of
cowering religions preach: it is not resignation in the sense of
licking a despotic Deity's hand. It is, on the contrary, a resignation
based on manliness and pride. So long as your would-be suicide leaves
an evil of his own unremedied, so long he has strictly no concern with
evil in the abstract and at large. The submission which you demand of
yourself to the general fact of evil in the world, your apparent
acquiescence in it, is here nothing but the conviction that evil at
large is _none of your business_ until your business with your private
particular evils is liquidated and settled up. A challenge of this
sort, with proper designation of detail, is one that need only be made
to be accepted by men whose normal instincts are not decayed; and your
reflective would-be suicide may easily be moved by it to face life with
a certain interest again. The sentiment of honor is a very penetrating
thing. When you and I, for instance, realize how many innocent beasts
have had to suffer in cattle-cars and slaughter-pens and lay down their
lives that we might grow up, all fattened and clad, to sit together
here in comfort and carry on this discourse, it does, indeed, put our
relation to the universe in a more solemn light. "Does not," as a
young Amherst philosopher (Xenos Clark, now dead) once wrote, "the
acceptance of a happy life upon such terms involve a point of honor?"
Are we not bound to take some suffering upon ourselves, to do some
self-denying service with our lives, in return for all those lives upon
which ours are built? To hear this question is to answer it in but one
possible way, if one have a normally constituted heart.
{51}
Thus, then, we see that mere instinctive curiosity, pugnacity, and
honor may make life on a purely naturalistic basis seem worth living
from day to day to men who have cast away all metaphysics in order to
get rid of hypochondria, but who are resolved to owe nothing as yet to
religion and its more positive gifts. A poor half-way stage, some of
you may be inclined to say; but at least you must grant it to be an
honest stage; and no man should dare to speak meanly of these instincts
which are our nature's best equipment, and to which religion herself
must in the last resort address her own peculiar appeals.
IV.
And now, in turning to what religion may have to say to the question, I
come to what is the soul of my discourse. Religion has meant many
things in human history; but when from now onward I use the word I mean
to use it in the supernaturalist sense, as declaring that the so-called
order of nature, which constitutes this world's experience, is only one
portion of the total universe, and that there stretches beyond this
visible world an unseen world of which we now know nothing positive,
but in its relation to which the true significance of our present
mundane life consists. A man's religious faith (whatever more special
items of doctrine it may involve) means for me essentially his faith in
the existence of an unseen order of some kind in which the riddles of
the natural order may be found explained. In the more developed
religions the natural world has always been regarded as the mere
scaffolding or vestibule of a truer, more eternal world, and affirmed
to be a sphere of {52} education, trial, or redemption. In these
religions, one must in some fashion die to the natural life before one
can enter into life eternal. The notion that this physical world of
wind and water, where the sun rises and the moon sets, is absolutely
and ultimately the divinely aimed-at and established thing, is one
which we find only in very early religions, such as that of the most
primitive Jews. It is this natural religion (primitive still, in spite
of the fact that poets and men of science whose good-will exceeds their
perspicacity keep publishing it in new editions tuned to our
contemporary ears) that, as I said a while ago, has suffered definitive
bankruptcy in the opinion of a circle of persons, among whom I must
count myself, and who are growing more numerous every day. For such
persons the physical order of nature, taken simply as science knows it,
cannot be held to reveal any one harmonious spiritual intent. It is
mere _weather_, as Chauncey Wright called it, doing and undoing without
end.
Now, I wish to make you feel, if I can in the short remainder of this
hour, that we have a right to believe the physical order to be only a
partial order; that we have a right to supplement it by an unseen
spiritual order which we assume on trust, if only thereby life may seem
to us better worth living again. But as such a trust will seem to some
of you sadly mystical and execrably unscientific, I must first say a
word or two to weaken the veto which you may consider that science
opposes to our act.
There is included in human nature an ingrained naturalism and
materialism of mind which can only admit facts that are actually
tangible. Of this sort of mind the entity called 'science' is the
idol. {53} Fondness for the word 'scientist' is one of the notes by
which you may know its votaries; and its short way of killing any
opinion that it disbelieves in is to call it 'unscientific.' It must
be granted that there is no slight excuse for this. Science has made
such glorious leaps in the last three hundred years, and extended our
knowledge of nature so enormously both in general and in detail; men of
science, moreover, have as a class displayed such admirable
virtues,--that it is no wonder if the worshippers of science lose their
head. In this very University, accordingly, I have heard more than one
teacher say that all the fundamental conceptions of truth have already
been found by science, and that the future has only the details of the
picture to fill in. But the slightest reflection on the real
conditions will suffice to show how barbaric such notions are. They
show such a lack of scientific imagination, that it is hard to see how
one who is actively advancing any part of science can make a mistake so
crude. Think how many absolutely new scientific conceptions have
arisen in our own generation, how many new problems have been
formulated that were never thought of before, and then cast an eye upon
the brevity of science's career. It began with Galileo, not three
hundred years ago. Four thinkers since Galileo, each informing his
successor of what discoveries his own lifetime had seen achieved, might
have passed the torch of science into our hands as we sit here in this
room. Indeed, for the matter of that, an audience much smaller than
the present one, an audience of some five or six score people, if each
person in it could speak for his own generation, would carry us away to
the black unknown of the human species, {54} to days without a document
or monument to tell their tale. Is it credible that such a mushroom
knowledge, such a growth overnight as this, _can_ represent more than
the minutest glimpse of what the universe will really prove to be when
adequately understood? No! our science is a drop, our ignorance a sea.
Whatever else be certain, this at least is certain,--that the world of
our present natural knowledge _is_ enveloped in a larger world of
_some_ sort of whose residual properties we at present can frame no
positive idea.
Agnostic positivism, of course, admits this principle theoretically in
the most cordial terms, but insists that we must not turn it to any
practical use. We have no right, this doctrine tells us, to dream
dreams, or suppose anything about the unseen part of the universe,
merely because to do so may be for what we are pleased to call our
highest interests. We must always wait for sensible evidence for our
beliefs; and where such evidence is inaccessible we must frame no
hypotheses whatever. Of course this is a safe enough position _in
abstracto_. If a thinker had no stake in the unknown, no vital needs,
to live or languish according to what the unseen world contained, a
philosophic neutrality and refusal to believe either one way or the
other would be his wisest cue. But, unfortunately, neutrality is not
only inwardly difficult, it is also outwardly unrealizable, where our
relations to an alternative are practical and vital. This is because,
as the psychologists tell us, belief and doubt are living attitudes,
and involve conduct on our part. Our only way, for example, of
doubting, or refusing to believe, that a certain thing _is_, is
continuing to act as if it were _not_. If, for instance, {55} I refuse
to believe that the room is getting cold, I leave the windows open and
light no fire just as if it still were warm. If I doubt that you are
worthy of my confidence, I keep you uninformed of all my secrets just
as if you were _un_worthy of the same. If I doubt the need of insuring
my house, I leave it uninsured as much as if I believed there were no
need. And so if I must not believe that the world is divine, I can
only express that refusal by declining ever to act distinctively as if
it were so, which can only mean acting on certain critical occasions as
if it were _not_ so, or in an irreligious way. There are, you see,
inevitable occasions in life when inaction is a kind of action, and
must count as action, and when not to be for is to be practically
against; and in all such cases strict and consistent neutrality is an
unattainable thing.
And, after all, is not this duty of neutrality where only our inner
interests would lead us to believe, the most ridiculous of commands?
Is it not sheer dogmatic folly to say that our inner interests can have
no real connection with the forces that the hidden world may contain?
In other cases divinations based on inner interests have proved
prophetic enough. Take science itself! Without an imperious inner
demand on our part for ideal logical and mathematical harmonies, we
should never have attained to proving that such harmonies be hidden
between all the chinks and interstices of the crude natural world.
Hardly a law has been established in science, hardly a fact
ascertained, which was not first sought after, often with sweat and
blood, to gratify an inner need. Whence such needs come from we do not
know; we find them in us, and biological psychology so far only classes
them with Darwin's 'accidental variations.' {56} But the inner need of
believing that this world of nature is a sign of something more
spiritual and eternal than itself is just as strong and authoritative
in those who feel it, as the inner need of uniform laws of causation
ever can be in a professionally scientific head. The toil of many
generations has proved the latter need prophetic. Why _may_ not the
former one be prophetic, too? And if needs of ours outrun the visible
universe, why _may_ not that be a sign that an invisible universe is
there? What, in short, has authority to debar us from trusting our
religious demands? Science as such assuredly has no authority, for she
can only say what is, not what is not; and the agnostic "thou shalt not
believe without coercive sensible evidence" is simply an expression
(free to any one to make) of private personal appetite for evidence of
a certain peculiar kind.
Now, when I speak of trusting our religious demands, just what do I
mean by 'trusting'? Is the word to carry with it license to define in
detail an invisible world, and to anathematize and excommunicate those
whose trust is different? Certainly not! Our faculties of belief were
not primarily given us to make orthodoxies and heresies withal; they
were given us to live by. And to trust our religious demands means
first of all to live in the light of them, and to act as if the
invisible world which they suggest were real. It is a fact of human
nature, that men can live and die by the help of a sort of faith that
goes without a single dogma or definition. The bare assurance that
this natural order is not ultimate but a mere sign or vision, the
external staging of a many-storied universe, in which spiritual forces
have the last word and are eternal,--this bare {57} assurance is to
such men enough to make life seem worth living in spite of every
contrary presumption suggested by its circumstances on the natural
plane. Destroy this inner assurance, however, vague as it is, and all
the light and radiance of existence is extinguished for these persons
at a stroke. Often enough the wild-eyed look at life--the suicidal
mood--will then set in.
And now the application comes directly home to you and me. Probably to
almost every one of us here the most adverse life would seem well worth
living, if we only could be _certain_ that our bravery and patience
with it were terminating and eventuating and bearing fruit somewhere in
an unseen spiritual world. But granting we are not certain, does it
then follow that a bare trust in such a world is a fool's paradise and
lubberland, or rather that it is a living attitude in which we are free
to indulge? Well, we are free to trust at our own risks anything that
is not impossible, and that can bring analogies to bear in its behalf.
That the world of physics is probably not absolute, all the converging
multitude of arguments that make in favor of idealism tend to prove;
and that our whole physical life may lie soaking in a spiritual
atmosphere, a dimension of being that we at present have no organ for
apprehending, is vividly suggested to us by the analogy of the life of
our domestic animals. Our dogs, for example, are in our human life but
not of it. They witness hourly the outward body of events whose inner
meaning cannot, by any possible operation, be revealed to their
intelligence,--events in which they themselves often play the cardinal
part. My terrier bites a teasing boy, for example, and the father
demands damages. The dog {58} may be present at every step of the
negotiations, and see the money paid, without an inkling of what it all
means, without a suspicion that it has anything to do with _him_; and
he never _can_ know in his natural dog's life. Or take another case
which used greatly to impress me in my medical-student days. Consider
a poor dog whom they are vivisecting in a laboratory. He lies strapped
on a board and shrieking at his executioners, and to his own dark
consciousness is literally in a sort of hell. He cannot see a single
redeeming ray in the whole business; and yet all these
diabolical-seeming events are often controlled by human intentions with
which, if his poor benighted mind could only be made to catch a glimpse
of them, all that is heroic in him would religiously acquiesce.
Healing truth, relief to future sufferings of beast and man, are to be
bought by them. It may be genuinely a process of redemption. Lying on
his back on the board there he may be performing a function
incalculably higher than any that prosperous canine life admits of; and
yet, of the whole performance, this function is the one portion that
must remain absolutely beyond his ken.
Now turn from this to the life of man. In the dog's life we see the
world invisible to him because we live in both worlds. In human life,
although we only see our world, and his within it, yet encompassing
both these worlds a still wider world may be there, as unseen by us as
our world is by him; and to believe in that world _may_ be the most
essential function that our lives in this world have to perform. But
"_may_ be! _may_ be!" one now hears the positivist contemptuously
exclaim; "what use can a scientific life have for maybes?" Well, I
reply, the {59} 'scientific' life itself has much to do with maybes,
and human life at large has everything to do with them. So far as man
stands for anything, and is productive or originative at all, his
entire vital function may be said to have to deal with maybes. Not a
victory is gained, not a deed of faithfulness or courage is done,
except upon a maybe; not a service, not a sally of generosity, not a
scientific exploration or experiment or text-book, that may not be a
mistake. It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another
that we live at all. And often enough our faith beforehand in an
uncertified result _is the only thing that makes the result come true_.
Suppose, for instance, that you are climbing a mountain, and have
worked yourself into a position from which the only escape is by a
terrible leap. Have faith that you can successfully make it, and your
feet are nerved to its accomplishment. But mistrust yourself, and
think of all the sweet things you have heard the scientists say of
maybes, and you will hesitate so long that, at last, all unstrung and
trembling, and launching yourself in a moment of despair, you roll in
the abyss. In such a case (and it belongs to an enormous class), the
part of wisdom as well as of courage is to _believe what is in the line
of your needs_, for only by such belief is the need fulfilled. Refuse
to believe, and you shall indeed be right, for you shall irretrievably
perish. But believe, and again you shall be right, for you shall save
yourself. You make one or the other of two possible universes true by
your trust or mistrust,--both universes having been only _maybes_, in
this particular, before you contributed your act.
Now, it appears to me that the question whether life is worth living is
subject to conditions logically {60} much like these. It does, indeed,
depend on you _the liver_. If you surrender to the nightmare view and
crown the evil edifice by your own suicide, you have indeed made a
picture totally black. Pessimism, completed by your act, is true
beyond a doubt, so far as your world goes. Your mistrust of life has
removed whatever worth your own enduring existence might have given to
it; and now, throughout the whole sphere of possible influence of that
existence, the mistrust has proved itself to have had divining power.
But suppose, on the other hand, that instead of giving way to the
nightmare view you cling to it that this world is not the _ultimatum_.
Suppose you find yourself a very well-spring, as Wordsworth says, of--
"Zeal, and the virtue to exist by faith
As soldiers live by courage; as, by strength
Of heart, the sailor fights with roaring seas."
Suppose, however thickly evils crowd upon you, that your unconquerable
subjectivity proves to be their match, and that you find a more
wonderful joy than any passive pleasure can bring in trusting ever in
the larger whole. Have you not now made life worth living on these
terms? What sort of a thing would life really be, with your qualities
ready for a tussle with it, if it only brought fair weather and gave
these higher faculties of yours no scope? Please remember that
optimism and pessimism are definitions of the world, and that our own
reactions on the world, small as they are in bulk, are integral parts
of the whole thing, and necessarily help to determine the definition.
They may even be the decisive elements in determining the definition.
A large mass can have its unstable equilibrium overturned by the
addition {61} of a feather's weight; a long phrase may have its sense
reversed by the addition of the three letters _n-o-t_. This life is
worth living, we can say, _since it is what we make it, from the moral
point of view_; and we are determined to make it from that point of
view, so far as we have anything to do with it, a success.
Now, in this description of faiths that verify themselves I have
assumed that our faith in an invisible order is what inspires those
efforts and that patience which make this visible order good for moral
men. Our faith in the seen world's goodness (goodness now meaning
fitness for successful moral and religious life) has verified itself by
leaning on our faith in the unseen world. But will our faith in the
unseen world similarly verify itself? Who knows?
Once more it is a case of _maybe_; and once more maybes are the essence
of the situation. I confess that I do not see why the very existence
of an invisible world may not in part depend on the personal response
which any one of us may make to the religious appeal. God himself, in
short, may draw vital strength and increase of very being from our
fidelity. For my own part, I do not know what the sweat and blood and
tragedy of this life mean, if they mean anything short of this. If
this life be not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained
for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private
theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it _feels_ like a
real fight,--as if there were something really wild in the universe
which we, with all our idealities and faithfulnesses, are needed to
redeem; and first of all to redeem our own hearts from atheisms and
fears. For such a half-wild, half-saved universe our nature is
adapted. The deepest thing in our {62} nature is this _Binnenleben_
(as a German doctor lately has called it), this dumb region of the
heart in which we dwell alone with our willingnesses and
unwillingnesses, our faiths and fears. As through the cracks and
crannies of caverns those waters exude from the earth's bosom which
then form the fountain-heads of springs, so in these crepuscular depths
of personality the sources of all our outer deeds and decisions take
their rise. Here is our deepest organ of communication with the nature
of things; and compared with these concrete movements of our soul all
abstract statements and scientific arguments--the veto, for example,
which the strict positivist pronounces upon our faith--sound to us like
mere chatterings of the teeth. For here possibilities, not finished
facts, are the realities with which we have actively to deal; and to
quote my friend William Salter, of the Philadelphia Ethical Society,
"as the essence of courage is to stake one's life on a possibility, so
the essence of faith is to believe that the possibility exists."
These, then, are my last words to you: Be not afraid of life. Believe
that life _is_ worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.
The 'scientific proof' that you are right may not be clear before the
day of judgment (or some stage of being which that expression may serve
to symbolize) is reached. But the faithful fighters of this hour, or
the beings that then and there will represent them, may then turn to
the faint-hearted, who here decline to go on, with words like those
with which Henry IV. greeted the tardy Crillon after a great victory
had been gained: "Hang yourself, brave Crillon! we fought at Arques,
and you were not there."
[1] An Address to the Harvard Young Men's Christian Association.
Published in the International Journal of Ethics for October, 1895, and
as a pocket volume by S. B. Weston, Philadelphia, 1896.
[2] Quoted by George E. Waring in his book on Tyrol. Compare A.
Bérard: Les Vaudois, Lyon, Storck, 1892.
{63}
THE SENTIMENT OF RATIONALITY.[1]
I.
What is the task which philosophers set themselves to perform; and why
do they philosophize at all? Almost every one will immediately reply:
They desire to attain a conception of the frame of things which shall
on the whole be more rational than that somewhat chaotic view which
every one by nature carries about with him under his hat. But suppose
this rational conception attained, how is the philosopher to recognize
it for what it is, and not let it slip through ignorance? The only
answer can be that he will recognize its rationality as he recognizes
everything else, by certain subjective marks with which it affects him.
When he gets the marks, he may know that he has got the rationality.
What, then, are the marks? A strong feeling of ease, peace, rest, is
one of them. The transition from a state of puzzle and perplexity to
rational comprehension is full of lively relief and pleasure.
But this relief seems to be a negative rather than a positive
character. Shall we then say that the feeling of rationality is
constituted merely by the absence {64} of any feeling of irrationality?
I think there are very good grounds for upholding such a view. All
feeling whatever, in the light of certain recent psychological
speculations, seems to depend for its physical condition not on simple
discharge of nerve-currents, but on their discharge under arrest,
impediment, or resistance. Just as we feel no particular pleasure when
we breathe freely, but a very intense feeling of distress when the
respiratory motions are prevented,--so any unobstructed tendency to
action discharges itself without the production of much cogitative
accompaniment, and any perfectly fluent course of thought awakens but
little feeling; but when the movement is inhibited, or when the thought
meets with difficulties, we experience distress. It is only when the
distress is upon us that we can be said to strive, to crave, or to
aspire. When enjoying plenary freedom either in the way of motion or
of thought, we are in a sort of anaesthetic state in which we might say
with Walt Whitman, if we cared to say anything about ourselves at such
times, "I am sufficient as I am." This feeling of the sufficiency of
the present moment, of its absoluteness,--this absence of all need to
explain it, account for it, or justify it,--is what I call the
Sentiment of Rationality. As soon, in short, as we are enabled from
any cause whatever to think with perfect fluency, the thing we think of
seems to us _pro tanto_ rational.
Whatever modes of conceiving the cosmos facilitate this fluency,
produce the sentiment of rationality. Conceived in such modes, being
vouches for itself and needs no further philosophic formulation. But
this fluency may be obtained in various ways; and first I will take up
the theoretic way.
{65}
The facts of the world in their sensible diversity are always before
us, but our theoretic need is that they should be conceived in a way
that reduces their manifoldness to simplicity. Our pleasure at finding
that a chaos of facts is the expression of a single underlying fact is
like the relief of the musician at resolving a confused mass of sound
into melodic or harmonic order. The simplified result is handled with
far less mental effort than the original data; and a philosophic
conception of nature is thus in no metaphorical sense a labor-saving
contrivance. The passion for parsimony, for economy of means in
thought, is the philosophic passion _par excellence_; and any character
or aspect of the world's phenomena which gathers up their diversity
into monotony will gratify that passion, and in the philosopher's mind
stand for that essence of things compared with which all their other
determinations may by him be overlooked.
More universality or extensiveness is, then, one mark which the
philosopher's conceptions must possess. Unless they apply to an
enormous number of cases they will not bring him relief. The knowledge
of things by their causes, which is often given as a definition of
rational knowledge, is useless to him unless the causes converge to a
minimum number, while still producing the maximum number of effects.
The more multiple then are the instances, the more flowingly does his
mind rove from fact to fact. The phenomenal transitions are no real
transitions; each item is the same old friend with a slightly altered
dress.
Who does not feel the charm of thinking that the moon and the apple
are, as far as their relation to the {66} earth goes, identical; of
knowing respiration and combustion to be one; of understanding that the
balloon rises by the same law whereby the stone sinks; of feeling that
the warmth in one's palm when one rubs one's sleeve is identical with
the motion which the friction checks; of recognizing the difference
between beast and fish to be only a higher degree of that between human
father and son; of believing our strength when we climb the mountain or
fell the tree to be no other than the strength of the sun's rays which
made the corn grow out of which we got our morning meal?
But alongside of this passion for simplification there exists a sister
passion, which in some minds--though they perhaps form the minority--is
its rival. This is the passion for distinguishing; it is the impulse
to be _acquainted_ with the parts rather than to comprehend the whole.
Loyalty to clearness and integrity of perception, dislike of blurred
outlines, of vague identifications, are its characteristics. It loves
to recognize particulars in their full completeness, and the more of
these it can carry the happier it is. It prefers any amount of
incoherence, abruptness, and fragmentariness (so long as the literal
details of the separate facts are saved) to an abstract way of
conceiving things that, while it simplifies them, dissolves away at the
same time their concrete fulness. Clearness and simplicity thus set up
rival claims, and make a real dilemma for the thinker.
A man's philosophic attitude is determined by the balance in him of
these two cravings. No system of philosophy can hope to be universally
accepted among men which grossly violates either need, or {67} entirely
subordinates the one to the other. The fate of Spinosa, with his
barren union of all things in one substance, on the one hand; that of
Hume, with his equally barren 'looseness and separateness' of
everything, on the other,--neither philosopher owning any strict and
systematic disciples to-day, each being to posterity a warning as well
as a stimulus,--show us that the only possible philosophy must be a
compromise between an abstract monotony and a concrete heterogeneity.
But the only way to mediate between diversity and unity is to class the
diverse items as cases of a common essence which you discover in them.
Classification of things into extensive 'kinds' is thus the first step;
and classification of their relations and conduct into extensive 'laws'
is the last step, in their philosophic unification. A completed
theoretic philosophy can thus never be anything more than a completed
classification of the world's ingredients; and its results must always
be abstract, since the basis of every classification is the abstract
essence embedded in the living fact,--the rest of the living fact being
for the time ignored by the classifier. This means that none of our
explanations are complete. They subsume things under heads wider or
more familiar; but the last heads, whether of things or of their
connections, are mere abstract genera, data which we just find in
things and write down.
When, for example, we think that we have rationally explained the
connection of the facts _A_ and _B_ by classing both under their common
attribute _x_, it is obvious that we have really explained only so much
of these items as _is x_. To explain the connection of choke-damp and
suffocation by the lack of oxygen is {68} to leave untouched all the
other peculiarities both of choke-damp and of suffocation,--such as
convulsions and agony on the one hand, density and explosibility on the
other. In a word, so far as _A_ and _B_ contain _l_, _m_, _n_, and
_o_, _p_, _q,_ respectively, in addition to _x_, they are not explained
by _x_. Each additional particularity makes its distinct appeal. A
single explanation of a fact only explains it from a single point of
view. The entire fact is not accounted for until each and all of its
characters have been classed with their likes elsewhere. To apply this
now to the case of the universe, we see that the explanation of the
world by molecular movements explains it only so far as it actually
_is_ such movements. To invoke the 'Unknowable' explains only so much
as is unknowable, 'Thought' only so much as is thought, 'God' only so
much as is God. _Which_ thought? _Which_ God?--are questions that
have to be answered by bringing in again the residual data from which
the general term was abstracted. All those data that cannot be
analytically identified with the attribute invoked as universal
principle, remain as independent kinds or natures, associated
empirically with the said attribute but devoid of rational kinship with
it.
Hence the unsatisfactoriness of all our speculations. On the one hand,
so far as they retain any multiplicity in their terms, they fail to get
us out of the empirical sand-heap world; on the other, so far as they
eliminate multiplicity the practical man despises their empty
barrenness. The most they can say is that the elements of the world
are such and such, and that each is identical with itself wherever
found; but the question Where is it found? the practical man is left to
answer by his own wit. Which, of all the {69} essences, shall here and
now be held the essence of this concrete thing, the fundamental
philosophy never attempts to decide. We are thus led to the conclusion
that the simple classification of things is, on the one hand, the best
possible theoretic philosophy, but is, on the other, a most miserable
and inadequate substitute for the fulness of the truth. It is a
monstrous abridgment of life, which, like all abridgments is got by the
absolute loss and casting out of real matter. This is why so few human
beings truly care for philosophy. The particular determinations which
she ignores are the real matter exciting needs, quite as potent and
authoritative as hers. What does the moral enthusiast care for
philosophical ethics? Why does the _AEsthetik_ of every German
philosopher appear to the artist an abomination of desolation?
Grau, theurer Freund, ist alle Theorie
Und grün des Lebens goldner Baum.
The entire man, who feels all needs by turns, will take nothing as an
equivalent for life but the fulness of living itself. Since the
essences of things are as a matter of fact disseminated through the
whole extent of time and space, it is in their spread-outness and
alternation that he will enjoy them. When weary of the concrete clash
and dust and pettiness, he will refresh himself by a bath in the
eternal springs, or fortify himself by a look at the immutable natures.
But he will only be a visitor, not a dweller in the region; he will
never carry the philosophic yoke upon his shoulders, and when tired of
the gray monotony of her problems and insipid spaciousness of her
results, will always escape gleefully into the teeming and dramatic
richness of the concrete world.
{70}
So our study turns back here to its beginning. Every way of
classifying a thing is but a way of handling it for some particular
purpose. Conceptions, 'kinds,' are teleological instruments. No
abstract concept can be a valid substitute for a concrete reality
except with reference to a particular interest in the conceiver. The
interest of theoretic rationality, the relief of identification, is but
one of a thousand human purposes. When others rear their heads, it
must pack up its little bundle and retire till its turn recurs. The
exaggerated dignity and value that philosophers have claimed for their
solutions is thus greatly reduced. The only virtue their theoretic
conception need have is simplicity, and a simple conception is an
equivalent for the world only so far as the world is simple,--the world
meanwhile, whatever simplicity it may harbor, being also a mightily
complex affair. Enough simplicity remains, however, and enough urgency
in our craving to reach it, to make the theoretic function one of the
most invincible of human impulses. The quest of the fewest elements of
things is an ideal that some will follow, as long as there are men to
think at all.
But suppose the goal attained. Suppose that at last we have a system
unified in the sense that has been explained. Our world can now be
conceived simply, and our mind enjoys the relief. Our universal
concept has made the concrete chaos rational. But now I ask, Can that
which is the ground of rationality in all else be itself properly
called rational? It would seem at first sight that it might. One is
tempted at any rate to say that, since the craving for rationality is
appeased by the identification of one {71} thing with another, a datum
which left nothing else outstanding might quench that craving
definitively, or be rational _in se_. No otherness being left to annoy
us, we should sit down at peace. In other words, as the theoretic
tranquillity of the boor results from his spinning no further
considerations about his chaotic universe, so any datum whatever
(provided it were simple, clear, and ultimate) ought to banish puzzle
from the universe of the philosopher and confer peace, inasmuch as
there would then be for him absolutely no further considerations to
spin.
This in fact is what some persons think. Professor Bain says,--
"A difficulty is solved, a mystery unriddled, when it can be shown to
resemble something else; to be an example of a fact already known.
Mystery is isolation, exception, or it may be apparent contradiction:
the resolution of the mystery is found in assimilation, identity,
fraternity. When all things are assimilated, so far as assimilation
can go, so far as likeness holds, there is an end to explanation; there
is an end to what the mind can do, or can intelligently desire.... The
path of science as exhibited in modern ages is toward generality, wider
and wider, until we reach the highest, the widest laws of every
department of things; there explanation is finished, mystery ends,
perfect vision is gained."
But, unfortunately, this first answer will not hold. Our mind is so
wedded to the process of seeing an _other_ beside every item of its
experience, that when the notion of an absolute datum is presented to
it, it goes through its usual procedure and remains pointing at the
void beyond, as if in that lay further matter for contemplation. In
short, it spins for itself the further positive consideration of a
nonentity {72} enveloping the being of its datum; and as that leads
nowhere, back recoils the thought toward its datum again. But there is
no natural bridge between nonentity and this particular datum, and the
thought stands oscillating to and fro, wondering "Why was there
anything but nonentity; why just this universal datum and not another?"
and finds no end, in wandering mazes lost. Indeed, Bain's words are so
untrue that in reflecting men it is just when the attempt to fuse the
manifold into a single totality has been most successful, when the
conception of the universe as a unique fact is nearest its perfection,
that the craving for further explanation, the ontological
wonder-sickness, arises in its extremest form. As Schopenhauer says,
"The uneasiness which keeps the never-resting clock of metaphysics in
motion, is the consciousness that the non-existence of this world is
just as possible as its existence."
The notion of nonentity may thus be called the parent of the
philosophic craving in its subtilest and profoundest sense. Absolute
existence is absolute mystery, for its relations with the nothing
remain unmediated to our understanding. One philosopher only has
pretended to throw a logical bridge over this chasm. Hegel, by trying
to show that nonentity and concrete being are linked together by a
series of identities of a synthetic kind, binds everything conceivable
into a unity, with no outlying notion to disturb the free rotary
circulation of the mind within its bounds. Since such unchecked
movement gives the feeling of rationality, he must be held, if he has
succeeded, to have eternally and absolutely quenched all rational
demands.
But for those who deem Hegel's heroic effort to {73} have failed,
nought remains but to confess that when all things have been unified to
the supreme degree, the notion of a possible other than the actual may
still haunt our imagination and prey upon our system. The bottom of
being is left logically opaque to us, as something which we simply come
upon and find, and about which (if we wish to act) we should pause and
wonder as little as possible. The philosopher's logical tranquillity
is thus in essence no other than the boor's. They differ only as to
the point at which each refuses to let further considerations upset the
absoluteness of the data he assumes. The boor does so immediately, and
is liable at any moment to the ravages of many kinds of doubt. The
philosopher does not do so till unity has been reached, and is
warranted against the inroads of those considerations, but only
practically, not essentially, secure from the blighting breath of the
ultimate Why? If he cannot exorcise this question, he must ignore or
blink it, and, assuming the data of his system as something given, and
the gift as ultimate, simply proceed to a life of contemplation or of
action based on it. There is no doubt that this acting on an opaque
necessity is accompanied by a certain pleasure. See the reverence of
Carlyle for brute fact: "There is an infinite significance in fact."
"Necessity," says Dühring, and he means not rational but given
necessity, "is the last and highest point that we can reach.... It is
not only the interest of ultimate and definitive knowledge, but also
that of the feelings, to find a last repose and an ideal equilibrium in
an uttermost datum which can simply not be other than it is."
Such is the attitude of ordinary men in their theism, God's fiat being
in physics and morals such an {74} uttermost datum. Such also is the
attitude of all hard-minded analysts and _Verstandesmenschen_. Lotze,
Renouvier, and Hodgson promptly say that of experience as a whole no
account can be given, but neither seek to soften the abruptness of the
confession nor to reconcile us with our impotence.
But mediating attempts may be made by more mystical minds. The peace
of rationality may be sought through ecstasy when logic fails. To
religious persons of every shade of doctrine moments come when the
world, as it is, seems so divinely orderly, and the acceptance of it by
the heart so rapturously complete, that intellectual questions vanish;
nay, the intellect itself is hushed to sleep,--as Wordsworth says,
"thought is not; in enjoyment it expires." Ontological emotion so
fills the soul that ontological speculation can no longer overlap it
and put her girdle of interrogation-marks round existence. Even the
least religious of men must have felt with Walt Whitman, when loafing
on the grass on some transparent summer morning, that "swiftly arose
and spread round him the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument
of the earth." At such moments of energetic living we feel as if there
were something diseased and contemptible, yea vile, in theoretic
grubbing and brooding. In the eye of healthy sense the philosopher is
at best a learned fool.
Since the heart can thus wall out the ultimate irrationality which the
head ascertains, the erection of its procedure into a systematized
method would be a philosophic achievement of first-rate importance.
But as used by mystics hitherto it has lacked universality, being
available for few persons and at few times, and {75} even in these
being apt to be followed by fits of reaction and dryness; and if men
should agree that the mystical method is a subterfuge without logical
pertinency, a plaster but no cure, and that the idea of non-entity can
never be exorcised, empiricism will be the ultimate philosophy.
Existence then will be a brute fact to which as a whole the emotion of
ontologic wonder shall rightfully cleave, but remain eternally
unsatisfied. Then wonderfulness or mysteriousness will be an essential
attribute of the nature of things, and the exhibition and emphasizing
of it will continue to be an ingredient in the philosophic industry of
the race. Every generation will produce its Job, its Hamlet, its
Faust, or its Sartor Resartus.
With this we seem to have considered the possibilities of purely
theoretic rationality. But we saw at the outset that rationality meant
only unimpeded mental function. Impediments that arise in the
theoretic sphere might perhaps be avoided if the stream of mental
action should leave that sphere betimes and pass into the practical.
Let us therefore inquire what constitutes the feeling of rationality in
its _practical_ aspect. If thought is not to stand forever pointing at
the universe in wonder, if its movement is to be diverted from the
issueless channel of purely theoretic contemplation, let us ask what
conception of the universe will awaken active impulses capable of
effecting this diversion. A definition of the world which will give
back to the mind the free motion which has been blocked in the purely
contemplative path may so far make the world seem rational again.
Well, of two conceptions equally fit to satisfy the logical demand,
that one which awakens the active {76} impulses, or satisfies other
aesthetic demands better than the other, will be accounted the more
rational conception, and will deservedly prevail.
There is nothing improbable in the supposition that an analysis of the
world may yield a number of formulae, all consistent with the facts.
In physical science different formulae may explain the phenomena
equally well,--the one-fluid and the two-fluid theories of electricity,
for example. Why may it not be so with the world? Why may there not
be different points of view for surveying it, within each of which all
data harmonize, and which the observer may therefore either choose
between, or simply cumulate one upon another? A Beethoven
string-quartet is truly, as some one has said, a scraping of horses'
tails on cats' bowels, and may be exhaustively described in such terms;
but the application of this description in no way precludes the
simultaneous applicability of an entirely different description. Just
so a thorough-going interpretation of the world in terms of mechanical
sequence is compatible with its being interpreted teleologically, for
the mechanism itself may be designed.
If, then, there were several systems excogitated, equally satisfying to
our purely logical needs, they would still have to be passed in review,
and approved or rejected by our aesthetic and practical nature. Can we
define the tests of rationality which these parts of our nature would
use?
Philosophers long ago observed the remarkable fact that mere
familiarity with things is able to produce a feeling of their
rationality. The empiricist school has been so much struck by this
circumstance {77} as to have laid it down that the feeling of
rationality and the feeling of familiarity are one and the same thing,
and that no other kind of rationality than this exists. The daily
contemplation of phenomena juxtaposed in a certain order begets an
acceptance of their connection, as absolute as the repose engendered by
theoretic insight into their coherence. To explain a thing is to pass
easily back to its antecedents; to know it is easily to foresee its
consequents. Custom, which lets us do both, is thus the source of
whatever rationality the thing may gain in our thought.
In the broad sense in which rationality was defined at the outset of
this essay, it is perfectly apparent that custom must be one of its
factors. We said that any perfectly fluent and easy thought was devoid
of the sentiment of irrationality. Inasmuch then as custom acquaints
us with all the relations of a thing, it teaches us to pass fluently
from that thing to others, and _pro tanto_ tinges it with the rational
character.
Now, there is one particular relation of greater practical importance
than all the rest,--I mean the relation of a thing to its future
consequences. So long as an object is unusual, our expectations are
baffled; they are fully determined as soon as it becomes familiar. I
therefore propose this as the first practical requisite which a
philosophic conception must satisfy: _It must, in a general way at
least, banish uncertainty from the future_. The permanent presence of
the sense of futurity in the mind has been strangely ignored by most
writers, but the fact is that our consciousness at a given moment is
never free from the ingredient of expectancy. Every one knows how when
a painful thing has to be undergone in the {78} near future, the vague
feeling that it is impending penetrates all our thought with uneasiness
and subtly vitiates our mood even when it does not control our
attention; it keeps us from being at rest, at home in the given
present. The same is true when a great happiness awaits us. But when
the future is neutral and perfectly certain, 'we do not mind it,' as we
say, but give an undisturbed attention to the actual. Let now this
haunting sense of futurity be thrown off its bearings or left without
an object, and immediately uneasiness takes possession of the mind.
But in every novel or unclassified experience this is just what occurs;
we do not know what will come next; and novelty _per se_ becomes a
mental irritant, while custom _per se_ is a mental sedative, merely
because the one baffles while the other settles our expectations.
Every reader must feel the truth of this. What is meant by coming 'to
feel at home' in a new place, or with new people? It is simply that,
at first, when we take up our quarters in a new room, we do not know
what draughts may blow in upon our back, what doors may open, what
forms may enter, what interesting objects may be found in cupboards and
corners. When after a few days we have learned the range of all these
possibilities, the feeling of strangeness disappears. And so it does
with people, when we have got past the point of expecting any
essentially new manifestations from their character.
The utility of this emotional effect of expectation is perfectly
obvious; 'natural selection,' in fact, was bound to bring it about
sooner or later. It is of the utmost practical importance to an animal
that he should have prevision of the qualities of the objects {79} that
surround him, and especially that he should not come to rest in
presence of circumstances that might be fraught either with peril or
advantage,--go to sleep, for example, on the brink of precipices, in
the dens of enemies, or view with indifference some new-appearing
object that might, if chased, prove an important addition to the
larder. Novelty _ought_ to irritate him. All curiosity has thus a
practical genesis. We need only look at the physiognomy of a dog or a
horse when a new object comes into his view, his mingled fascination
and fear, to see that the element of conscious insecurity or perplexed
expectation lies at the root of his emotion. A dog's curiosity about
the movements of his master or a strange object only extends as far as
the point of deciding what is going to happen next. That settled,
curiosity is quenched. The dog quoted by Darwin, whose behavior in
presence of a newspaper moved by the wind seemed to testify to a sense
'of the supernatural,' was merely exhibiting the irritation of an
uncertain future. A newspaper which could move spontaneously was in
itself so unexpected that the poor brute could not tell what new
wonders the next moment might bring forth.
To turn back now to philosophy. An ultimate datum, even though it be
logically unrationalized, will, if its quality is such as to define
expectancy, be peacefully accepted by the mind; while if it leave the
least opportunity for ambiguity in the future, it will to that extent
cause mental uneasiness if not distress. Now, in the ultimate
explanations of the universe which the craving for rationality has
elicited from the human mind, the demands of expectancy to be satisfied
have always played a fundamental part. {80} The term set up by
philosophers as primordial has been one which banishes the
incalculable. 'Substance,' for example, means, as Kant says, _das
Beharrliche_, which will be as it has been, because its being is
essential and eternal. And although we may not be able to prophesy in
detail the future phenomena to which the substance shall give rise, we
may set our minds at rest in a general way, when we have called the
substance God, Perfection, Love, or Reason, by the reflection that
whatever is in store for us can never at bottom be inconsistent with
the character of this term; so that our attitude even toward the
unexpected is in a general sense defined. Take again the notion of
immortality, which for common people seems to be the touchstone of
every philosophic or religious creed: what is this but a way of saying
that the determination of expectancy is the essential factor of
rationality? The wrath of science against miracles, of certain
philosophers against the doctrine of free-will, has precisely the same
root,--dislike to admit any ultimate factor in things which may rout
our prevision or upset the stability of our outlook.
Anti-substantialist writers strangely overlook this function in the
doctrine of substance; "If there be such a _substratum_," says Mill,
"suppose it at this instant miraculously annihilated, and let the
sensations continue to occur in the same order, and how would the
_substratum_ be missed? By what signs should we be able to discover
that its existence had terminated? Should we not have as much reason
to believe that it still existed as we now have? And if we should not
then be warranted in believing it, how can we be so now?" Truly
enough, if we have {81} already securely bagged our facts in a certain
order, we can dispense with any further warrant for that order. But
with regard to the facts yet to come the case is far different. It
does not follow that if substance may be dropped from our conception of
the irrecoverably past, it need be an equally empty complication to our
notions of the future. Even if it were true that, for aught we know to
the contrary, the substance might develop at any moment a wholly new
set of attributes, the mere logical form of referring things to a
substance would still (whether rightly or wrongly) remain accompanied
by a feeling of rest and future confidence. In spite of the acutest
nihilistic criticism, men will therefore always have a liking for any
philosophy which explains things _per substantiam_.
A very natural reaction against the theosophizing conceit and
hide-bound confidence in the upshot of things, which vulgarly
optimistic minds display, has formed one factor of the scepticism of
empiricists, who never cease to remind us of the reservoir of
possibilities alien to our habitual experience which the cosmos may
contain, and which, for any warrant we have to the contrary, may turn
it inside out to-morrow. Agnostic substantialism like that of Mr.
Spencer, whose Unknowable is not merely the unfathomable but the
absolute-irrational, on which, if consistently represented in thought,
it is of course impossible to count, performs the same function of
rebuking a certain stagnancy and smugness in the manner in which the
ordinary philistine feels his security. But considered as anything
else than as reactions against an opposite excess, these philosophies
of uncertainty cannot be acceptable; the general mind will fail to {82}
come to rest in their presence, and will seek for solutions of a more
reassuring kind.
We may then, I think, with perfect confidence lay down as a first point
gained in our inquiry, that a prime factor in the philosophic craving
is the desire to have expectancy defined; and that no philosophy will
definitively triumph which in an emphatic manner denies the possibility
of gratifying this need.
We pass with this to the next great division of our topic. It is not
sufficient for our satisfaction merely to know the future as
determined, for it may be determined in either of many ways, agreeable
or disagreeable. For a philosophy to succeed on a universal scale it
must define the future _congruously with our spontaneous powers_. A
philosophy may be unimpeachable in other respects, but either of two
defects will be fatal to its universal acceptance. First, its ultimate
principle must not be one that essentially baffles and disappoints our
dearest desires and most cherished powers. A pessimistic principle
like Schopenhauer's incurably vicious Will-substance, or Hartmann's
wicked jack-of-all-trades the Unconscious, will perpetually call forth
essays at other philosophies. Incompatibility of the future with their
desires and active tendencies is, in fact, to most men a source of more
fixed disquietude than uncertainty itself. Witness the attempts to
overcome the 'problem of evil,' the 'mystery of pain.' There is no
'problem of good.'
But a second and worse defect in a philosophy than that of
contradicting our active propensities is to give them no object
whatever to press against. A philosophy whose principle is so
incommensurate with our most intimate powers as to deny them all {83}
relevancy in universal affairs, as to annihilate their motives at one
blow, will be even more unpopular than pessimism. Better face the
enemy than the eternal Void! This is why materialism will always fail
of universal adoption, however well it may fuse things into an
atomistic unity, however clearly it may prophesy the future eternity.
For materialism denies reality to the objects of almost all the
impulses which we most cherish. The real _meaning_ of the impulses, it
says, is something which has no emotional interest for us whatever.
Now, what is called 'extradition' is quite as characteristic of our
emotions as of our senses: both point to an object as the cause of the
present feeling. What an intensely objective reference lies in fear!
In like manner an enraptured man and a dreary-feeling man are not
simply aware of their subjective states; if they were, the force of
their feelings would all evaporate. Both believe there is outward
cause why they should feel as they do: either, "It is a glad world! how
good life is!" or, "What a loathsome tedium is existence!" Any
philosophy which annihilates the validity of the reference by
explaining away its objects or translating them into terms of no
emotional pertinency, leaves the mind with little to care or act for.
This is the opposite condition from that of nightmare, but when acutely
brought home to consciousness it produces a kindred horror. In
nightmare we have motives to act, but no power; here we have powers,
but no motives. A nameless _unheimlichkeit_ comes over us at the
thought of there being nothing eternal in our final purposes, in the
objects of those loves and aspirations which are our deepest energies.
The monstrously lopsided equation of the universe and its {84} knower,
which we postulate as the ideal of cognition, is perfectly paralleled
by the no less lopsided equation of the universe and the _doer_. We
demand in it a character for which our emotions and active propensities
shall be a match. Small as we are, minute as is the point by which the
cosmos impinges upon each one of us, each one desires to feel that his
reaction at that point is congruous with the demands of the vast
whole,--that he balances the latter, so to speak, and is able to do
what it expects of him. But as his abilities to do lie wholly in the
line of his natural propensities; as he enjoys reacting with such
emotions as fortitude, hope, rapture, admiration, earnestness, and the
like; and as he very unwillingly reacts with fear, disgust, despair, or
doubt,--a philosophy which should only legitimate emotions of the
latter sort would be sure to leave the mind a prey to discontent and
craving.
It is far too little recognized how entirely the intellect is built up
of practical interests. The theory of evolution is beginning to do
very good service by its reduction of all mentality to the type of
reflex action. Cognition, in this view, is but a fleeting moment, a
cross-section at a certain point, of what in its totality is a motor
phenomenon. In the lower forms of life no one will pretend that
cognition is anything more than a guide to appropriate action. The
germinal question concerning things brought for the first time before
consciousness is not the theoretic 'What is that?' but the practical
'Who goes there?' or rather, as Horwicz has admirably put it, 'What is
to be done?'--'Was fang' ich an?' In all our discussions about the
intelligence of lower animals, the only test we use is that of their
_acting_ as if for a purpose. {85} Cognition, in short, is incomplete
until discharged in act; and although it is true that the later mental
development, which attains its maximum through the hypertrophied
cerebrum of man, gives birth to a vast amount of theoretic activity
over and above that which is immediately ministerial to practice, yet
the earlier claim is only postponed, not effaced, and the active nature
asserts its rights to the end.
When the cosmos in its totality is the object offered to consciousness,
the relation is in no whit altered. React on it we must in some
congenial way. It was a deep instinct in Schopenhauer which led him to
reinforce his pessimistic argumentation by a running volley of
invective against the practical man and his requirements. No hope for
pessimism unless he is slain!
Helmholtz's immortal works on the eye and ear are to a great extent
little more than a commentary on the law that practical utility wholly
determines which parts of our sensations we shall be aware of, and
which parts we shall ignore. We notice or discriminate an ingredient
of sense only so far as we depend upon it to modify our actions. We
_comprehend_ a thing when we synthetize it by identity with another
thing. But the other great department of our understanding,
_acquaintance_ (the two departments being recognized in all languages
by the antithesis of such words as _wissen_ and _kennen_; _scire_ and
_noscere_, etc.), what is that also but a synthesis,--a synthesis of a
passive perception with a certain tendency to reaction? We are
acquainted with a thing as soon as we have learned how to behave
towards it, or how to meet the behavior which we expect from it. Up to
that point it is still 'strange' to us.
{86}
If there be anything at all in this view, it follows that however
vaguely a philosopher may define the ultimate universal datum, he
cannot be said to leave it unknown to us so long as he in the slightest
degree pretends that our emotional or active attitude toward it should
be of one sort rather than another. He who says "life is real, life is
earnest," however much he may speak of the fundamental mysteriousness
of things, gives a distinct definition to that mysteriousness by
ascribing to it the right to claim from us the particular mood called
seriousness,--which means the willingness to live with energy, though
energy bring pain. The same is true of him who says that all is
vanity. For indefinable as the predicate 'vanity' may be _in se_, it
is clearly something that permits anaesthesia, mere escape from
suffering, to be our rule of life. There can be no greater incongruity
than for a disciple of Spencer to proclaim with one breath that the
substance of things is unknowable, and with the next that the thought
of it should inspire us with awe, reverence, and a willingness to add
our co-operative push in the direction toward which its manifestations
seem to be drifting. The unknowable may be unfathomed, but if it make
such distinct demands upon our activity we surely are not ignorant of
its essential quality.
If we survey the field of history and ask what feature all great
periods of revival, of expansion of the human mind, display in common,
we shall find, I think, simply this: that each and all of them have
said to the human being, "The inmost nature of the reality is congenial
to _powers_ which you possess." In what did the emancipating message
of primitive Christianity consist but in the announcement that {87} God
recognizes those weak and tender impulses which paganism had so rudely
overlooked? Take repentance: the man who can do nothing rightly can at
least repent of his failures. But for paganism this faculty of
repentance was a pure supernumerary, a straggler too late for the fair.
Christianity took it, and made it the one power within us which
appealed straight to the heart of God. And after the night of the
middle ages had so long branded with obloquy even the generous impulses
of the flesh, and defined the reality to be such that only slavish
natures could commune with it, in what did the _sursum corda_ of the
platonizing renaissance lie but in the proclamation that the archetype
of verity in things laid claim on the widest activity of our whole
aesthetic being? What were Luther's mission and Wesley's but appeals
to powers which even the meanest of men might carry with them,--faith
and self-despair,--but which were personal, requiring no priestly
intermediation, and which brought their owner face to face with God?
What caused the wildfire influence of Rousseau but the assurance he
gave that man's nature was in harmony with the nature of things, if
only the paralyzing corruptions of custom would stand from between?
How did Kant and Fichte, Goethe and Schiller, inspire their time with
cheer, except by saying, "Use all your powers; that is the only
obedience the universe exacts"? And Carlyle with his gospel of work,
of fact, of veracity, how does he move us except by saying that the
universe imposes no tasks upon us but such as the most humble can
perform? Emerson's creed that everything that ever was or will be is
here in the enveloping now; that man has but to obey himself,--"He who
will rest in what he _is_, {88} is a part of destiny,"--is in like
manner nothing but an exorcism of all scepticism as to the pertinency
of one's natural faculties.
In a word, "Son of Man, _stand upon thy feet_ and I will speak unto
thee!" is the only revelation of truth to which the solving epochs have
helped the disciple. But that has been enough to satisfy the greater
part of his rational need. _In se_ and _per se_ the universal essence
has hardly been more defined by any of these formulas than by the
agnostic _x_; but the mere assurance that my powers, such as they are,
are not irrelevant to it, but pertinent; that it speaks to them and
will in some way recognize their reply; that I can be a match for it if
I will, and not a footless waif,--suffices to make it rational to my
feeling in the sense given above. Nothing could be more absurd than to
hope for the definitive triumph of any philosophy which should refuse
to legitimate, and to legitimate in an emphatic manner, the more
powerful of our emotional and practical tendencies. Fatalism, whose
solving word in all crises of behavior is "all striving is vain," will
never reign supreme, for the impulse to take life strivingly is
indestructible in the race. Moral creeds which speak to that impulse
will be widely successful in spite of inconsistency, vagueness, and
shadowy determination of expectancy. Man needs a rule for his will,
and will invent one if one be not given him.
But now observe a most important consequence. Men's active impulses
are so differently mixed that a philosophy fit in this respect for
Bismarck will almost certainly be unfit for a valetudinarian poet. In
other words, although one can lay down in advance the {89} rule that a
philosophy which utterly denies all fundamental ground for seriousness,
for effort, for hope, which says the nature of things is radically
alien to human nature, can never succeed,--one cannot in advance say
what particular dose of hope, or of gnosticism of the nature of things,
the definitely successful philosophy shall contain. In short, it is
almost certain that personal temperament will here make itself felt,
and that although all men will insist on being spoken to by the
universe in some way, few will insist on being spoken to in just the
same way. We have here, in short, the sphere of what Matthew Arnold
likes to call _Aberglaube_, legitimate, inexpugnable, yet doomed to
eternal variations and disputes.
Take idealism and materialism as examples of what I mean, and suppose
for a moment that both give a conception of equal theoretic clearness
and consistency, and that both determine our expectations equally well.
Idealism will be chosen by a man of one emotional constitution,
materialism by another. At this very day all sentimental natures, fond
of conciliation and intimacy, tend to an idealistic faith. Why?
Because idealism gives to the nature of things such kinship with our
personal selves. Our own thoughts are what we are most at home with,
what we are least afraid of. To say then that the universe essentially
is thought, is to say that I myself, potentially at least, am all.
There is no radically alien corner, but an all-pervading _intimacy_.
Now, in certain sensitively egotistic minds this conception of reality
is sure to put on a narrow, close, sick-room air. Everything
sentimental and priggish will be consecrated by it. That element in
reality which every strong man of common-sense willingly feels there
because it calls forth {90} powers that he owns--the rough, harsh,
sea-wave, north-wind element, the denier of persons, the
democratizer--is banished because it jars too much on the desire for
communion. Now, it is the very enjoyment of this element that throws
many men upon the materialistic or agnostic hypothesis, as a polemic
reaction against the contrary extreme. They sicken at a life wholly
constituted of intimacy. There is an overpowering desire at moments to
escape personality, to revel in the action of forces that have no
respect for our ego, to let the tides flow, even though they flow over
us. The strife of these two kinds of mental temper will, I think,
always be seen in philosophy. Some men will keep insisting on the
reason, the atonement, that lies in the heart of things, and that we
can act _with_; others, on the opacity of brute fact that we must react
_against_.
Now, there is one element of our active nature which the Christian
religion has emphatically recognized, but which philosophers as a rule
have with great insincerity tried to huddle out of sight in their
pretension to found systems of absolute certainty. I mean the element
of faith. Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is
still theoretically possible; and as the test of belief is willingness
to act, one may say that faith is the readiness to act in a cause the
prosperous issue of which is not certified to us in advance. It is in
fact the same moral quality which we call courage in practical affairs;
and there will be a very widespread tendency in men of vigorous nature
to enjoy a certain amount of uncertainty in their philosophic creed,
just as risk lends a zest to worldly activity. Absolutely certified
philosophies {91} seeking the _inconcussum_ are fruits of mental
natures in which the passion for identity (which we saw to be but one
factor of the rational appetite) plays an abnormally exclusive part.
In the average man, on the contrary, the power to trust, to risk a
little beyond the literal evidence, is an essential function. Any mode
of conceiving the universe which makes an appeal to this generous
power, and makes the man seem as if he were individually helping to
create the actuality of the truth whose metaphysical reality he is
willing to assume, will be sure to be responded to by large numbers.
The necessity of faith as an ingredient in our mental attitude is
strongly insisted on by the scientific philosophers of the present day;
but by a singularly arbitrary caprice they say that it is only
legitimate when used in the interests of one particular
proposition,--the proposition, namely, that the course of nature is
uniform. That nature will follow to-morrow the same laws that she
follows to-day is, they all admit, a truth which no man can _know_; but
in the interests of cognition as well as of action we must postulate or
assume it. As Helmholtz says: "Hier gilt nur der eine Rath: vertraue
und handle!" And Professor Bain urges: "Our only error is in proposing
to give any reason or justification of the postulate, or to treat it as
otherwise than begged at the very outset."
With regard to all other possible truths, however, a number of our most
influential contemporaries think that an attitude of faith is not only
illogical but shameful. Faith in a religious dogma for which there is
no outward proof, but which we are tempted to postulate for our
emotional interests, just as we {92} postulate the uniformity of nature
for our intellectual interests, is branded by Professor Huxley as "the
lowest depth of immorality." Citations of this kind from leaders of
the modern _Aufklärung_ might be multiplied almost indefinitely. Take
Professor Clifford's article on the 'Ethics of Belief.' He calls it
'guilt' and 'sin' to believe even the truth without 'scientific
evidence.' But what is the use of being a genius, unless _with the
same scientific evidence_ as other men, one can reach more truth than
they? Why does Clifford fearlessly proclaim his belief in the
conscious-automaton theory, although the 'proofs' before him are the
same which make Mr. Lewes reject it? Why does he believe in primordial
units of 'mind-stuff' on evidence which would seem quite worthless to
Professor Bain? Simply because, like every human being of the
slightest mental originality, he is peculiarly sensitive to evidence
that bears in some one direction. It is utterly hopeless to try to
exorcise such sensitiveness by calling it the disturbing subjective
factor, and branding it as the root of all evil. 'Subjective' be it
called! and 'disturbing' to those whom it foils! But if it helps those
who, as Cicero says, "vim naturae magis sentiunt," it is good and not
evil. Pretend what we may, the whole man within us is at work when we
form our philosophical opinions. Intellect, will, taste, and passion
co-operate just as they do in practical affairs; and lucky it is if the
passion be not something as petty as a love of personal conquest over
the philosopher across the way. The absurd abstraction of an intellect
verbally formulating all its evidence and carefully estimating the
probability thereof by a vulgar fraction by the size of whose
denominator and numerator alone it is swayed, is {93} ideally as inept
as it is actually impossible. It is almost incredible that men who are
themselves working philosophers should pretend that any philosophy can
be, or ever has been, constructed without the help of personal
preference, belief, or divination. How have they succeeded in so
stultifying their sense for the living facts of human nature as not to
perceive that every philosopher, or man of science either, whose
initiative counts for anything in the evolution of thought, has taken
his stand on a sort of dumb conviction that the truth must lie in one
direction rather than another, and a sort of preliminary assurance that
his notion can be made to work; and has borne his best fruit in trying
to make it work? These mental instincts in different men are the
spontaneous variations upon which the intellectual struggle for
existence is based. The fittest conceptions survive, and with them the
names of their champions shining to all futurity.
The coil is about us, struggle as we may. The only escape from faith
is mental nullity. What we enjoy most in a Huxley or a Clifford is not
the professor with his learning, but the human personality ready to go
in for what it feels to be right, in spite of all appearances. The
concrete man has but one interest,--to be right. That for him is the
art of all arts, and all means are fair which help him to it. Naked he
is flung into the world, and between him and nature there are no rules
of civilized warfare. The rules of the scientific game, burdens of
proof, presumptions, _experimenta crucis_, complete inductions, and the
like, are only binding on those who enter that game. As a matter of
fact we all more or less do enter it, because it helps us to our end.
But if the means presume to frustrate the end and call us cheats for
being right in {94} advance of their slow aid, by guesswork or by hook
or crook, what shall we say of them? Were all of Clifford's works,
except the Ethics of Belief, forgotten, he might well figure in future
treatises on psychology in place of the somewhat threadbare instance of
the miser who has been led by the association of ideas to prefer his
gold to all the goods he might buy therewith.
In short, if I am born with such a superior general reaction to
evidence that I can guess right and act accordingly, and gain all that
comes of right action, while my less gifted neighbor (paralyzed by his
scruples and waiting for more evidence which he dares not anticipate,
much as he longs to) still stands shivering on the brink, by what law
shall I be forbidden to reap the advantages of my superior native
sensitiveness? Of course I yield to my belief in such a case as this
or distrust it, alike at my peril, just as I do in any of the great
practical decisions of life. If my inborn faculties are good, I am a
prophet; if poor, I am a failure: nature spews me out of her mouth, and
there is an end of me. In the total game of life we stake our persons
all the while; and if in its theoretic part our persons will help us to
a conclusion, surely we should also stake them there, however
inarticulate they may be.[2]
{95}
But in being myself so very articulate in proving what to all readers
with a sense for reality will seem a platitude, am I not wasting words?
We cannot live or think at all without some degree of faith. Faith is
synonymous with working hypothesis. The only difference is that while
some hypotheses can be refuted in five minutes, others may defy ages.
A chemist who conjectures that a certain wall-paper contains arsenic,
and has faith enough to lead him to take the trouble to put some of it
into a hydrogen bottle, finds out by the results of his action whether
he was right or wrong. But theories like that of Darwin, or that of
the kinetic constitution of matter, may exhaust the labors of
generations in their corroboration, each tester of their truth
proceeding in this simple way,--that he acts as if it were true, and
expects the result to disappoint him if his assumption is false. The
longer disappointment is delayed, the stronger grows his faith in his
theory.
Now, in such questions as God, immortality, absolute morality, and
free-will, no non-papal believer at the present day pretends his faith
to be of an essentially different complexion; he can always doubt his
creed. But his intimate persuasion is that the odds in its favor are
strong enough to warrant him in acting all along on the assumption of
its truth. His corroboration or repudiation by the nature of things
may be deferred until the day of judgment. The {96} uttermost he now
means is something like this: "I _expect_ then to triumph with tenfold
glory; but if it should turn out, as indeed it may, that I have spent
my days in a fool's paradise, why, better have been the dupe of _such_
a dreamland than the cunning reader of a world like that which then
beyond all doubt unmasks itself to view." In short, we _go in_ against
materialism very much as we should _go in_, had we a chance, against
the second French empire or the Church of Rome, or any other system of
things toward which our repugnance is vast enough to determine
energetic action, but too vague to issue in distinct argumentation.
Our reasons are ludicrously incommensurate with the volume of our
feeling, yet on the latter we unhesitatingly act.
Now, I wish to show what to my knowledge has never been clearly pointed
out, that belief (as measured by action) not only does and must
continually outstrip scientific evidence, but that there is a certain
class of truths of whose reality belief is a factor as well as a
confessor; and that as regards this class of truths faith is not only
licit and pertinent, but essential and indispensable. The truths
cannot become true till our faith has made them so.
Suppose, for example, that I am climbing in the Alps, and have had the
ill-luck to work myself into a position from which the only escape is
by a terrible leap. Being without similar experience, I have no
evidence of my ability to perform it successfully; but hope and
confidence in myself make me sure I shall not miss my aim, and nerve my
feet to execute what without those subjective emotions would perhaps
have been impossible. But suppose that, on the contrary, {97} the
emotions of fear and mistrust preponderate; or suppose that, having
just read the Ethics of Belief, I feel it would be sinful to act upon
an assumption unverified by previous experience,--why, then I shall
hesitate so long that at last, exhausted and trembling, and launching
myself in a moment of despair, I miss my foothold and roll into the
abyss. In this case (and it is one of an immense class) the part of
wisdom clearly is to believe what one desires; for the belief is one of
the indispensable preliminary conditions of the realization of its
object. _There are then cases where faith creates its own
verification_. Believe, and you shall be right, for you shall save
yourself; doubt, and you shall again be right, for you shall perish.
The only difference is that to believe is greatly to your advantage.
The future movements of the stars or the facts of past history are
determined now once for all, whether I like them or not. They are
given irrespective of my wishes, and in all that concerns truths like
these subjective preference should have no part; it can only obscure
the judgment. But in every fact into which there enters an element of
personal contribution on my part, as soon as this personal contribution
demands a certain degree of subjective energy which, in its turn, calls
for a certain amount of faith in the result,--so that, after all, the
future fact is conditioned by my present faith in it,--how trebly
asinine would it be for me to deny myself the use of the subjective
method, the method of belief based on desire!
In every proposition whose bearing is universal (and such are all the
propositions of philosophy), the acts of the subject and their
consequences throughout eternity should be included in the formula. If
_M_ {98} represent the entire world _minus_ the reaction of the thinker
upon it, and if _M_ + _x_ represent the absolutely total matter of
philosophic propositions (_x_ standing for the thinker's reaction and
its results),--what would be a universal truth if the term x were of
one complexion, might become egregious error if _x_ altered its
character. Let it not be said that _x_ is too infinitesimal a
component to change the character of the immense whole in which it lies
imbedded. Everything depends on the point of view of the philosophic
proposition in question. If we have to define the universe from the
point of view of sensibility, the critical material for our judgment
lies in the animal kingdom, insignificant as that is, quantitatively
considered. The moral definition of the world may depend on phenomena
more restricted still in range. In short, many a long phrase may have
its sense reversed by the addition of three letters, _n-o-t_; many a
monstrous mass have its unstable equilibrium discharged one way or the
other by a feather weight that falls.
Let us make this clear by a few examples. The philosophy of evolution
offers us to-day a new criterion to serve as an ethical test between
right and wrong. Previous criteria, it says, being subjective, have
left us still floundering in variations of opinion and the _status
belli_. Here is a criterion which is objective and fixed: _That is to
be called good which is destined to prevail or survive_. But we
immediately see that this standard can only remain objective by leaving
myself and my conduct out. If what prevails and survives does so by my
help, and cannot do so without that help; if something else will
prevail in case I alter my conduct,--how can I possibly now, conscious
of alternative courses of action open before me, either of which {99} I
may suppose capable of altering the path of events, decide which course
to take by asking what path events will follow? If they follow my
direction, evidently my direction cannot wait on them. The only
possible manner in which an evolutionist can use his standard is the
obsequious method of forecasting the course society would take _but for
him_, and then putting an extinguisher on all personal idiosyncrasies
of desire and interest, and with bated breath and tiptoe tread
following as straight as may be at the tail, and bringing up the rear
of everything. Some pious creatures may find a pleasure in this; but
not only does it violate our general wish to lead and not to follow (a
wish which is surely not immoral if we but lead aright), but if it be
treated as every ethical principle must be treated,--namely, as a rule
good for all men alike,--its general observance would lead to its
practical refutation by bringing about a general deadlock. Each good
man hanging back and waiting for orders from the rest, absolute
stagnation would ensue. Happy, then, if a few unrighteous ones
contribute an initiative which sets things moving again!
All this is no caricature. That the course of destiny may be altered
by individuals no wise evolutionist ought to doubt. Everything for him
has small beginnings, has a bud which may be 'nipped,' and nipped by a
feeble force. Human races and tendencies follow the law, and have also
small beginnings. The best, according to evolution, is that which has
the biggest endings. Now, if a present race of men, enlightened in the
evolutionary philosophy, and able to forecast the future, were able to
discern in a tribe arising near them the potentiality of future
supremacy; were able to see that their own {100} race would eventually
be wiped out of existence by the new-comers if the expansion of these
were left unmolested,--these present sages would have two courses open
to them, either perfectly in harmony with the evolutionary test:
Strangle the new race now, and ours survives; help the new race, and it
survives. In both cases the action is right as measured by the
evolutionary standard,--it is action for the winning side.
Thus the evolutionist foundation of ethics is purely objective only to
the herd of nullities whose votes count for zero in the march of
events. But for others, leaders of opinion or potentates, and in
general those to whose actions position or genius gives a far-reaching
import, and to the rest of us, each in his measure,--whenever we
espouse a cause we contribute to the determination of the evolutionary
standard of right. The truly wise disciple of this school will then
admit faith as an ultimate ethical factor. Any philosophy which makes
such questions as, What is the ideal type of humanity? What shall be
reckoned virtues? What conduct is good? depend on the question, What
is going to succeed?--must needs fall back on personal belief as one of
the ultimate conditions of the truth. For again and again success
depends on energy of act; energy again depends on faith that we shall
not fail; and that faith in turn on the faith that we are right,--which
faith thus verifies itself.
Take as an example the question of optimism or pessimism, which makes
so much noise just now in Germany. Every human being must sometime
decide for himself whether life is worth living. Suppose that in
looking at the world and seeing how full it is of misery, of old age,
of wickedness and {101} pain, and how unsafe is his own future, he
yields to the pessimistic conclusion, cultivates disgust and dread,
ceases striving, and finally commits suicide. He thus adds to the mass
_M_ of mundane phenomena, independent of his subjectivity, the
subjective complement _x_, which makes of the whole an utterly black
picture illumined by no gleam of good. Pessimism completed, verified
by his moral reaction and the deed in which this ends, is true beyond a
doubt. _M_ + _x_ expresses a state of things totally bad. The man's
belief supplied all that was lacking to make it so, and now that it is
made so the belief was right.
But now suppose that with the same evil facts _M_, the man's reaction
_x_ is exactly reversed; suppose that instead of giving way to the evil
he braves it, and finds a sterner, more wonderful joy than any passive
pleasure can yield in triumphing over pain and defying fear; suppose he
does this successfully, and however thickly evils crowd upon him proves
his dauntless subjectivity to be more than their match,--will not every
one confess that the bad character of the _M_ is here the _conditio
sine qua non_ of the good character of the _x_? Will not every one
instantly declare a world fitted only for fair-weather human beings
susceptible of every passive enjoyment, but without independence,
courage, or fortitude, to be from a moral point of view incommensurably
inferior to a world framed to elicit from the man every form of
triumphant endurance and conquering moral energy? As James Hinton
says,--
"Little inconveniences, exertions, pains.--these are the only things in
which we rightly feel our life at all. If these be not there,
existence becomes worthless, or worse; {102} success in putting them
all away is fatal. So it is men engage in athletic sports, spend their
holidays in climbing up mountains, find nothing so enjoyable as that
which taxes their endurance and their energy. This is the way we are
made, I say. It may or may not be a mystery or a paradox; it is a
fact. Now, this enjoyment in endurance is just according to the
intensity of life: the more physical vigor and balance, the more
endurance can be made an element of satisfaction. A sick man cannot
stand it. The line of enjoyable suffering is not a fixed one; it
fluctuates with the perfectness of the life. That our pains are, as
they are, unendurable, awful, overwhelming, crushing, not to be borne
save in misery and dumb impatience, which utter exhaustion alone makes
patient,--that our pains are thus unendurable, means not that they are
too great, but that _we are sick_. We have not got our proper life.
So you perceive pain is no more necessarily an evil, but an essential
element of the highest good."[3]
But the highest good can be achieved only by our getting our proper
life; and that can come about only by help of a moral energy born of
the faith that in some way or other we shall succeed in getting it if
we try pertinaciously enough. This world _is_ good, we must say, since
it is what we make it,--and we shall make it good. How can we exclude
from the cognition of a truth a faith which is involved in the creation
of the truth? _M_ has its character indeterminate, susceptible of
forming part of a thorough-going pessimism on the one hand, or of a
meliorism, a moral (as distinguished from a sensual) optimism on the
other. All depends on the character of the {103} personal contribution
_x_. Wherever the facts to be formulated contain such a contribution,
we may logically, legitimately, and inexpugnably believe what we
desire. The belief creates its verification. The thought becomes
literally father to the fact, as the wish was father to the thought.[4]
Let us now turn to the radical question of life,--the question whether
this be at bottom a moral or an unmoral universe,--and see whether the
method of faith may legitimately have a place there. It is really the
question of materialism. Is the world a simple brute actuality, an
existence _de facto_ about which the deepest thing that can be said is
that it happens so to be; or is the judgment of _better_ or worse, of
_ought_, as intimately pertinent to phenomena as the simple judgment
_is_ or _is not_? The materialistic theorists say that judgments of
worth are themselves mere matters of fact; that the words 'good' and
'bad' have no sense apart from subjective passions and interests which
we may, if we please, play fast and loose with at will, so far as any
duty of ours to the non-human universe is concerned. Thus, when a
materialist says it is better for him to suffer great inconvenience
than to break a promise, he only means that his social interests have
become so knit up with {104} keeping faith that, those interests once
being granted, it is better for him to keep the promise in spite of
everything. But the interests themselves are neither right nor wrong,
except possibly with reference to some ulterior order of interests
which themselves again are mere subjective data without character,
either good or bad.
For the absolute moralists, on the contrary, the interests are not
there merely to be felt,--they are to be believed in and obeyed. Not
only is it best for my social interests to keep my promise, but best
for me to have those interests, and best for the cosmos to have this
me. Like the old woman in the story who described the world as resting
on a rock, and then explained that rock to be supported by another
rock, and finally when pushed with questions said it was rocks all the
way down,--he who believes this to be a radically moral universe must
hold the moral order to rest either on an absolute and ultimate
_should_, or on a series of _shoulds_ all the way down.[5]
The practical difference between this objective sort of moralist and
the other one is enormous. The subjectivist in morals, when his moral
feelings are at war with the facts about him, is always free to seek
harmony by toning down the sensitiveness of the feelings. Being mere
data, neither good nor evil in themselves, he may pervert them or lull
them to sleep by any means at his command. Truckling, compromise,
time-serving, capitulations of conscience, are conventionally
opprobrious names for what, if successfully carried out, {105} would be
on his principles by far the easiest and most praiseworthy mode of
bringing about that harmony between inner and outer relations which is
all that he means by good. The absolute moralist, on the other hand,
when his interests clash with the world, is not free to gain harmony by
sacrificing the ideal interests. According to him, these latter should
be as they are and not otherwise. Resistance then, poverty, martyrdom
if need be, tragedy in a word,--such are the solemn feasts of his
inward faith. Not that the contradiction between the two men occurs
every day; in commonplace matters all moral schools agree. It is only
in the lonely emergencies of life that our creed is tested: then
routine maxims fail, and we fall back on our gods. It cannot then be
said that the question, Is this a moral world? is a meaningless and
unverifiable question because it deals with something non-phenomenal.
Any question is full of meaning to which, as here, contrary answers
lead to contrary behavior. And it seems as if in answering such a
question as this we might proceed exactly as does the physical
philosopher in testing an hypothesis. He deduces from the hypothesis
an experimental action, _x_; this he adds to the facts _M_ already
existing. It fits them if the hypothesis be true; if not, there is
discord. The results of the action corroborate or refute the idea from
which it flowed. So here: the verification of the theory which you may
hold as to the objectively moral character of the world can consist
only in this,--that if you proceed to act upon your theory it will be
reversed by nothing that later turns up as your action's fruit; it will
harmonize so well with the entire drift of experience that the latter
will, as it were, adopt it, or at most give it an ampler {106}
interpretation, without obliging you in any way to change the essence
of its formulation. If this be an objectively moral universe, all acts
that I make on that assumption, all expectations that I ground on it,
will tend more and more completely to interdigitate with the phenomena
already existing. _M_ + _x_ will be in accord; and the more I live,
and the more the fruits of my activity come to light, the more
satisfactory the consensus will grow. While if it be not such a moral
universe, and I mistakenly assume that it is, the course of experience
will throw ever new impediments in the way of my belief, and become
more and more difficult to express in its language. Epicycle upon
epicycle of subsidiary hypothesis will have to be invoked to give to
the discrepant terms a temporary appearance of squaring with each
other; but at last even this resource will fail.
If, on the other hand, I rightly assume the universe to be not moral,
in what does my verification consist? It is that by letting moral
interests sit lightly, by disbelieving that there is any duty about
_them_ (since duty obtains only as _between_ them and other phenomena),
and so throwing them over if I find it hard to get them satisfied,--it
is that by refusing to take up a tragic attitude, I deal in the
long-run most satisfactorily with the facts of life. "All is vanity"
is here the last word of wisdom. Even though in certain limited series
there may be a great appearance of seriousness, he who in the main
treats things with a degree of good-natured scepticism and radical
levity will find that the practical fruits of his epicurean hypothesis
verify it more and more, and not only save him from pain but do honor
to his sagacity. While, on the other hand, he who contrary {107} to
reality stiffens himself in the notion that certain things absolutely
should be, and rejects the truth that at bottom it makes no difference
what is, will find himself evermore thwarted and perplexed and
bemuddled by the facts of the world, and his tragic disappointment
will, as experience accumulates, seem to drift farther and farther away
from that final atonement or reconciliation which certain partial
tragedies often get.
_Anaesthesia_ is the watchword of the moral sceptic brought to bay and
put to his trumps. _Energy_ is that of the moralist. Act on my creed,
cries the latter, and the results of your action will prove the creed
true, and that the nature of things is earnest infinitely. Act on
mine, says the epicurean, and the results will prove that seriousness
is but a superficial glaze upon a world of fundamentally trivial
import. You and your acts and the nature of things will be alike
enveloped in a single formula, a universal _vanitas vanitatum_.
For the sake of simplicity I have written as if the verification might
occur in the life of a single philosopher,--which is manifestly untrue,
since the theories still face each other, and the facts of the world
give countenance to both. Rather should we expect, that, in a question
of this scope, the experience of the entire human race must make the
verification, and that all the evidence will not be 'in' till the final
integration of things, when the last man has had his say and
contributed his share to the still unfinished _x_. Then the proof will
be complete; then it will appear without doubt whether the moralistic x
has filled up the gap which alone kept the _M_ of the world from
forming an even and harmonious unity, or whether the {108}
non-moralistic _x_ has given the finishing touches which were alone
needed to make the _M_ appear outwardly as vain as it inwardly was.
But if this be so, is it not clear that the facts _M_, taken _per se_,
are inadequate to justify a conclusion either way in advance of my
action? My action is the complement which, by proving congruous or
not, reveals the latent nature of the mass to which it is applied. The
world may in fact be likened unto a lock, whose inward nature, moral or
unmoral, will never reveal itself to our simply expectant gaze. The
positivists, forbidding us to make any assumptions regarding it,
condemn us to eternal ignorance, for the 'evidence' which they wait for
can never come so long as we are passive. But nature has put into our
hands two keys, by which we may test the lock. If we try the moral key
_and it fits_, it is a moral lock. If we try the unmoral key and _it_
fits, it is an unmoral lock. I cannot possibly conceive of any other
sort of 'evidence' or 'proof' than this. It is quite true that the
co-operation of generations is needed to educe it. But in these
matters the solidarity (so called) of the human race is a patent fact.
The essential thing to notice is that our active preference is a
legitimate part of the game,--that it is our plain business as men to
try one of the keys, and the one in which we most confide. If then the
proof exist not till I have acted, and I must needs in acting run the
risk of being wrong, how can the popular science professors be right in
objurgating in me as infamous a 'credulity' which the strict logic of
the situation requires? If this really be a moral universe; if by my
acts I be a factor of its destinies; if to believe where I may doubt be
itself a moral act {109} analogous to voting for a side not yet sure to
win,--by what right shall they close in upon me and steadily negate the
deepest conceivable function of my being by their preposterous command
that I shall stir neither hand nor foot, but remain balancing myself in
eternal and insoluble doubt? Why, doubt itself is a decision of the
widest practical reach, if only because we may miss by doubting what
goods we might be gaining by espousing the winning side. But more than
that! it is often practically impossible to distinguish doubt from
dogmatic negation. If I refuse to stop a murder because I am in doubt
whether it be not justifiable homicide, I am virtually abetting the
crime. If I refuse to bale out a boat because I am in doubt whether my
efforts will keep her afloat, I am really helping to sink her. If in
the mountain precipice I doubt my right to risk a leap, I actively
connive at my destruction. He who commands himself not to be credulous
of God, of duty, of freedom, of immortality, may again and again be
indistinguishable from him who dogmatically denies them. Scepticism in
moral matters is an active ally of immorality. Who is not for is
against. The universe will have no neutrals in these questions. In
theory as in practice, dodge or hedge, or talk as we like about a wise
scepticism, we are really doing volunteer military service for one side
or the other.
Yet obvious as this necessity practically is, thousands of innocent
magazine readers lie paralyzed and terrified in the network of shallow
negations which the leaders of opinion have thrown over their souls.
All they need to be free and hearty again in the exercise of their
birthright is that these fastidious vetoes should be swept away. All
that the human {110} heart wants is its chance. It will willingly
forego certainty in universal matters if only it can be allowed to feel
that in them it has that same inalienable right to run risks, which no
one dreams of refusing to it in the pettiest practical affairs. And if
I, in these last pages, like the mouse in the fable, have gnawed a few
of the strings of the sophistical net that has been binding down its
lion-strength, I shall be more than rewarded for my pains.
To sum up: No philosophy will permanently be deemed rational by all men
which (in addition to meeting logical demands) does not to some degree
pretend to determine expectancy, and in a still greater degree make a
direct appeal to all those powers of our nature which we hold in
highest esteem. Faith, being one of these powers, will always remain a
factor not to be banished from philosophic constructions, the more so
since in many ways it brings forth its own verification. In these
points, then, it is hopeless to look for literal agreement among
mankind.
The ultimate philosophy, we may therefore conclude, must not be too
strait-laced in form, must not in all its parts divide heresy from
orthodoxy by too sharp a line. There must be left over and above the
propositions to be subscribed, _ubique, semper, et ab omnibus_, another
realm into which the stifled soul may escape from pedantic scruples and
indulge its own faith at its own risks; and all that can here be done
will be to mark out distinctly the questions which fall within faith's
sphere.
[1] This essay as far as page 75 consists of extracts from an article
printed in Mind for July, 1879. Thereafter it is a reprint of an
address to the Harvard Philosophical Club, delivered in 1880, and
published in the Princeton Review, July, 1882.
[2] At most, the command laid upon us by science to believe nothing not
yet verified by the senses is a prudential rule intended to maximize
our right thinking and minimize our errors _in the long run_. In the
particular instance we must frequently lose truth by obeying it; but on
the whole we are safer if we follow it consistently, for we are sure to
cover our losses with our gains. It is like those gambling and
insurance rules based on probability, in which we secure ourselves
against losses in detail by hedging on the total run. But this hedging
philosophy requires that long run should be there; and this makes it
inapplicable to the question of religious faith as the latter comes
home to the individual man. He plays the game of life not to escape
losses, for he brings nothing with him to lose; he plays it for gains;
and it is now or never with him, for the long run which exists indeed
for humanity, is not there for him. Let him doubt, believe, or deny,
he runs his risk, and has the natural right to choose which one it
shall be.
[3] Life of James Hinton, pp. 172, 173. See also the excellent chapter
on Faith and Sight in the Mystery of Matter, by J. Allanson Picton.
Hinton's Mystery of Pain will undoubtedly always remain the classical
utterance on this subject.
[4] Observe that in all this not a word has been said of free-will. It
all applies as well to a predetermined as to an indeterminate universe.
If _M_ + _x_ is fixed in advance, the belief which leads to _x_ and the
desire which prompts the belief are also fixed. But fixed or not,
these subjective states form a phenomenal condition necessarily
preceding the facts; necessarily constitutive, therefore, of the truth
_M_ + _x_ which we seek. If, however, free acts be possible, a faith
in their possibility, by augmenting the moral energy which gives them
birth, will increase their frequency in a given individual.
[5] In either case, as a later essay explains (see p. 193), the
_should_ which the moralist regards as binding upon him must be rooted
in the feeling of some other thinker, or collection of thinkers, to
whose demands he individually bows.
{111}
REFLEX ACTION AND THEISM.[1]
MEMBERS OF THE MINISTERS' INSTITUTE:
Let me confess to the diffidence with which I find myself standing here
to-day. When the invitation of your committee reached me last fall,
the simple truth is that I accepted it as most men accept a
challenge,--not because they wish to fight, but because they are
ashamed to say no. Pretending in my small sphere to be a teacher, I
felt it would be cowardly to shrink from the keenest ordeal to which a
teacher can be exposed,--the ordeal of teaching other teachers.
Fortunately, the trial will last but one short hour; and I have the
consolation of remembering Goethe's verses,--
"Vor den Wissenden sich stellen,
Sicher ist 's in allen Fällen,"--
for if experts are the hardest people to satisfy, they have at any rate
the liveliest sense of the difficulties of one's task, and they know
quickest when one hits the mark.
Since it was as a teacher of physiology that I was most unworthily
officiating when your committee's {112} invitation reached me, I must
suppose it to be for the sake of bringing a puff of the latest winds of
doctrine which blow over that somewhat restless sea that my presence is
desired. Among all the healthy symptoms that characterize this age, I
know no sounder one than the eagerness which theologians show to
assimilate results of science, and to hearken to the conclusions of men
of science about universal matters. One runs a better chance of being
listened to to-day if one can quote Darwin and Helmholtz than if one
can only quote Schleiermacher or Coleridge. I almost feel myself this
moment that were I to produce a frog and put him through his
physiological performances in a masterly manner before your eyes, I
should gain more reverential ears for what I have to say during the
remainder of the hour. I will not ask whether there be not something
of mere fashion in this prestige which the words of the physiologists
enjoy just now. If it be a fashion, it is certainly a beneficial one
upon the whole; and to challenge it would come with a poor grace from
one who at the moment he speaks is so conspicuously profiting by its
favors.
I will therefore only say this: that the latest breeze from the
physiological horizon need not necessarily be the most important one.
Of the immense amount of work which the laboratories of Europe and
America, and one may add of Asia and Australia, are producing every
year, much is destined to speedy refutation; and of more it may be said
that its interest is purely technical, and not in any degree
philosophical or universal.
This being the case, I know you will justify me if I fall back on a
doctrine which is fundamental and well established rather than novel,
and ask you whether {113} by taking counsel together we may not trace
some new consequences from it which shall interest us all alike as men.
I refer to the doctrine of reflex action, especially as extended to the
brain. This is, of course, so familiar to you that I hardly need
define it. In a general way, all educated people know what reflex
action means.
It means that the acts we perform are always the result of outward
discharges from the nervous centres, and that these outward discharges
are themselves the result of impressions from the external world,
carried in along one or another of our sensory nerves. Applied at
first to only a portion of our acts, this conception has ended by being
generalized more and more, so that now most physiologists tell us that
every action whatever, even the most deliberately weighed and
calculated, does, so far as its organic conditions go, follow the
reflex type. There is not one which cannot be remotely, if not
immediately, traced to an origin in some incoming impression of sense.
There is no impression of sense which, unless inhibited by some other
stronger one, does not immediately or remotely express itself in action
of some kind. There is no one of those complicated performances in the
convolutions of the brain to which our trains of thought correspond,
which is not a mere middle term interposed between an incoming
sensation that arouses it and an outgoing discharge of some sort,
inhibitory if not exciting, to which itself gives rise. The structural
unit of the nervous system is in fact a triad, neither of whose
elements has any independent existence. The sensory impression exists
only for the sake of awaking the central process of reflection, and the
central process of reflection exists {114} only for the sake of calling
forth the final act. All action is thus _re_-action upon the outer
world; and the middle stage of consideration or contemplation or
thinking is only a place of transit, the bottom of a loop, both whose
ends have their point of application in the outer world. If it should
ever have no roots in the outer world, if it should ever happen that it
led to no active measures, it would fail of its essential function, and
would have to be considered either pathological or abortive. The
current of life which runs in at our eyes or ears is meant to run out
at our hands, feet, or lips. The only use of the thoughts it occasions
while inside is to determine its direction to whichever of these organs
shall, on the whole, under the circumstances actually present, act in
the way most propitious to our welfare.
The willing department of our nature, in short, dominates both the
conceiving department and the feeling department; or, in plainer
English, perception and thinking are only there for behavior's sake.
I am sure I am not wrong in stating this result as one of the
fundamental conclusions to which the entire drift of modern
physiological investigation sweeps us. If asked what great
contribution physiology has made to psychology of late years, I am sure
every competent authority will reply that her influence has in no way
been so weighty as in the copious illustration, verification, and
consolidation of this broad, general point of view.
I invite you, then, to consider what may be the possible speculative
consequences involved in this great achievement of our generation.
Already, it dominates all the new work done in psychology; but {115}
what I wish to ask is whether its influence may not extend far beyond
the limits of psychology, even into those of theology herself. The
relations of the doctrine of reflex action with no less a matter than
the doctrine of theism is, in fact, the topic to which I now invite
your attention.
We are not the first in the field. There have not been wanting writers
enough to say that reflex action and all that follows from it give the
_coup de grâce_ to the superstition of a God.
If you open, for instance, such a book on comparative psychology, as
der Thierische Wille of G. H. Schneider, you will find, sandwiched in
among the admirable dealings of the author with his proper subject, and
popping out upon us in unexpected places, the most delightfully _naïf_
German onslaughts on the degradation of theologians, and the utter
incompatibility of so many reflex adaptations to the environment with
the existence of a creative intelligence. There was a time, remembered
by many of us here, when the existence of reflex action and all the
other harmonies between the organism and the world were held to prove a
God. Now, they are held to disprove him. The next turn of the
whirligig may bring back proof of him again.
Into this debate about his existence, I will not pretend to enter. I
must take up humbler ground, and limit my ambition to showing that a
God, whether existent or not, is at all events the kind of being which,
if he did exist, would form _the most adequate possible object_ for
minds framed like our own to conceive as lying at the root of the
universe. My thesis, in other words, is this: that some outward
reality of {116} a nature defined as God's nature must be defined, is
the only ultimate object that is at the same time rational and possible
for the human mind's contemplation. _Anything short of God is not
rational, anything more than God is not possible_, if the human mind be
in truth the triadic structure of impression, reflection, and reaction
which we at the outset allowed.
Theism, whatever its objective warrant, would thus be seen to have a
subjective anchorage in its congruity with our nature as thinkers; and,
however it may fare with its truth, to derive from this subjective
adequacy the strongest possible guaranty of its permanence. It is and
will be the classic mean of rational opinion, the centre of gravity of
all attempts to solve the riddle of life,--some falling below it by
defect, some flying above it by excess, itself alone satisfying every
mental need in strictly normal measure. Our gain will thus in the
first instance be psychological. We shall merely have investigated a
chapter in the natural history of the mind, and found that, as a matter
of such natural history, God may be called the normal object of the
mind's belief. Whether over and above this he be really the living
truth is another question. If he is, it will show the structure of our
mind to be in accordance with the nature of reality. Whether it be or
not in such accordance is, it seems to me, one of those questions that
belong to the province of personal faith to decide. I will not touch
upon the question here, for I prefer to keep to the strictly
natural-history point of view. I will only remind you that each one of
us is entitled either to doubt or to believe in the harmony between his
faculties and the truth; and that, whether he doubt or {117} believe,
he does it alike on his personal responsibility and risk.
"Du musst glauben, du musst wagen,
Denn die Götter leihn kein Pfand,
Nur ein Wunder kann dich tragen
In das schöne Wunderland."
I will presently define exactly what I mean by God and by Theism, and
explain what theories I referred to when I spoke just now of attempts
to fly beyond the one and to outbid the other.
But, first of all, let me ask you to linger a moment longer over what I
have called the reflex theory of mind, so as to be sure that we
understand it absolutely before going on to consider those of its
consequences of which I am more particularly to speak. I am not quite
sure that its full scope is grasped even by those who have most
zealously promulgated it. I am not sure, for example, that all
physiologists see that it commits them to regarding the mind as an
essentially teleological mechanism. I mean by this that the conceiving
or theorizing faculty--the mind's middle department--functions
_exclusively for the sake of ends_ that do not exist at all in the
world of impressions we receive by way of our senses, but are set by
our emotional and practical subjectivity altogether.[2] It is a
transformer of the world of our impressions into a totally different
world,--the world of our conception; and the transformation is effected
in the interests of our volitional nature, and for no other purpose
whatsoever. Destroy the volitional nature, the definite subjective
purposes, preferences, {118} fondnesses for certain effects, forms,
orders, and not the slightest motive would remain for the brute order
of our experience to be remodelled at all. But, as we have the
elaborate volitional constitution we do have, the remodelling must be
effected; there is no escape. The world's contents are _given_ to each
of us in an order so foreign to our subjective interests that we can
hardly by an effort of the imagination picture to ourselves what it is
like. We have to break that order altogether,--and by picking out from
it the items which concern us, and connecting them with others far
away, which we say 'belong' with them, we are able to make out definite
threads of sequence and tendency; to foresee particular liabilities and
get ready for them; and to enjoy simplicity and harmony in place of
what was chaos. Is not the sum of your actual experience taken at this
moment and impartially added together an utter chaos? The strains of
my voice, the lights and shades inside the room and out, the murmur of
the wind, the ticking of the clock, the various organic feelings you
may happen individually to possess, do these make a whole at all? Is
it not the only condition of your mental sanity in the midst of them
that most of them should become non-existent for you, and that a few
others--the sounds, I hope, which I am uttering--should evoke from
places in your memory that have nothing to do with this scene
associates fitted to combine with them in what we call a rational train
of thought,--rational, because it leads to a conclusion which we have
some organ to appreciate? We have no organ or faculty to appreciate
the simply given order. The real world as it is given objectively at
this moment is the sum total of all its beings and {119} events now.
But can we think of such a sum? Can we realize for an instant what a
cross-section of all existence at a definite point of time would be?
While I talk and the flies buzz, a sea-gull catches a fish at the mouth
of the Amazon, a tree falls in the Adirondack wilderness, a man sneezes
in Germany, a horse dies in Tartary, and twins are born in France.
What does that mean? Does the contemporaneity of these events with one
another and with a million others as disjointed, form a rational bond
between them, and unite them into anything that means for us a world?
Yet just such a collateral contemporaneity, and nothing else, is the
real order of the world. It is an order with which we have nothing to
do but to get away from it as fast as possible. As I said, we break
it: we break it into histories, and we break it into arts, and we break
it into sciences; and then we begin to feel at home. We make ten
thousand separate serial orders of it, and on any one of these we react
as though the others did not exist. We discover among its various
parts relations that were never given to sense at all (mathematical
relations, tangents, squares, and roots and logarithmic functions), and
out of an infinite number of these we call certain ones essential and
lawgiving, and ignore the rest. Essential these relations are, but
only _for our purpose_, the other relations being just as real and
present as they; and our purpose is to _conceive simply_ and to
_foresee_. Are not simple conception and prevision subjective ends
pure and simple? They are the ends of what we call science; and the
miracle of miracles, a miracle not yet exhaustively cleared up by any
philosophy, is that the given order lends itself to the remodelling.
It shows itself plastic to many of our scientific, to {120} many of our
aesthetic, to many of our practical purposes and ends.
When the man of affairs, the artist, or the man of science fails, he is
not rebutted. He tries again. He says the impressions of sense _must_
give way, _must_ be reduced to the desiderated form.[3] They all
postulate in the interests of their volitional nature a harmony between
the latter and the nature of things. The theologian does no more. And
the reflex doctrine of the mind's structure, though all theology should
as yet have failed of its endeavor, could but confess that the endeavor
itself at least obeyed in form the mind's most necessary law.[4]
Now for the question I asked above: What kind of a being would God be
if he did exist? The word 'God' has come to mean many things in the
history {121} of human thought, from Venus and Jupiter to the 'Idee'
which figures in the pages of Hegel. Even the laws of physical nature
have, in these positivistic times, been held worthy of divine honor and
presented as the only fitting object of our reverence.[5] Of course,
if our discussion is to bear any fruit, we must mean something more
definite than this. We must not call any object of our loyalty a 'God'
without more ado, simply because to awaken our loyalty happens to be
one of God's functions. He must have some intrinsic characteristics of
his own besides; and theism must mean the faith of that man who
believes that the object of _his_ loyalty has those other attributes,
negative or positive, as the case may be.
Now, as regards a great many of the attributes of God, and their
amounts and mutual relations, the world has been delivered over to
disputes. All such may for our present purpose be considered as quite
inessential. Not only such matters as his mode of revealing himself,
the precise extent of his providence and power and their connection
with our free-will, the proportion of his mercy to his justice, and the
amount of his responsibility for evil; but also his metaphysical
relation to the phenomenal world, whether causal, substantial, ideal,
or what not,--are affairs of purely sectarian opinion that need not
concern us at all. Whoso debates them presupposes the essential
features of theism to be granted already; and it is with these
essential features, the bare poles of the subject, that our business
exclusively lies.
{122}
Now, what are these essential features? First, it is essential that
God be conceived as the deepest power in the universe; and, second, he
must be conceived under the form of a mental personality. The
personality need not be determined intrinsically any further than is
involved in the holding of certain things dear, and in the recognition
of our dispositions toward those things, the things themselves being
all good and righteous things. But, extrinsically considered, so to
speak, God's personality is to be regarded, like any other personality,
as something lying outside of my own and other than me, and whose
existence I simply come upon and find. A power not ourselves, then,
which not only makes for righteousness, but means it, and which
recognizes us,--such is the definition which I think nobody will be
inclined to dispute. Various are the attempts to shadow forth the
other lineaments of so supreme a personality to our human imagination;
various the ways of conceiving in what mode the recognition, the
hearkening to our cry, can come. Some are gross and idolatrous; some
are the most sustained efforts man's intellect has ever made to keep
still living on that subtile edge of things where speech and thought
expire. But, with all these differences, the essence remains
unchanged. In whatever other respects the divine personality may
differ from ours or may resemble it, the two are consanguineous at
least in this,--that both have purposes for which they care, and each
can hear the other's call.
Meanwhile, we can already see one consequence and one point of
connection with the reflex-action theory of mind. Any mind,
constructed on the {123} triadic-reflex pattern, must first get its
impression from the object which it confronts; then define what that
object is, and decide what active measures its presence demands; and
finally react. The stage of reaction depends on the stage of
definition, and these, of course, on the nature of the impressing
object. When the objects are concrete, particular, and familiar, our
reactions are firm and certain enough,--often instinctive. I see the
desk, and lean on it; I see your quiet faces, and I continue to talk.
But the objects will not stay concrete and particular: they fuse
themselves into general essences, and they sum themselves into a
whole,--the universe. And then the object that confronts us, that
knocks on our mental door and asks to be let in, and fixed and decided
upon and actively met, is just this whole universe itself and its
essence.
What are _they_, and how shall I meet _them_?
The whole flood of faiths and systems here rush in. Philosophies and
denials of philosophy, religions and atheisms, scepticisms and
mysticisms, confirmed emotional moods and habitual practical biases,
jostle one another; for all are alike trials, hasty, prolix, or of
seemly length, to answer this momentous question. And the function of
them all, long or short, that which the moods and the systems alike
subserve and pass into, is the third stage,--the stage of action. For
no one of them itself is final. They form but the middle segment of
the mental curve, and not its termination. As the last theoretic pulse
dies away, it does not leave the mental process complete: it is but the
forerunner of the practical moment, in which alone the cycle of
mentality finds its rhythmic pause.
{124}
We easily delude ourselves about this middle stage. Sometimes we think
it final, and sometimes we fail to see, amid the monstrous diversity in
the length and complication of the cogitations which may fill it, that
it can have but one essential function, and that the one we have
pointed out,--the function of defining the direction which our
activity, immediate or remote, shall take.
If I simply say, "Vanitas vanitatum, omnia vanitas!" I am defining the
total nature of things in a way that carries practical consequences
with it as decidedly as if I write a treatise De Natura Rerum in twenty
volumes. The treatise may trace its consequences more minutely than
the saying; but the only worth of either treatise or saying is that the
consequences are there. The long definition can do no more than draw
them; the short definition does no less. Indeed, it may be said that
if two apparently different definitions of the reality before us should
have identical consequences, those two definitions would really be
identical definitions, made delusively to appear different merely by
the different verbiage in which they are expressed.[6]
My time is unfortunately too short to stay and give to this truth the
development it deserves; but I will assume that you grant it without
further parley, and pass to the next step in my argument. And here,
too, I shall have to bespeak your close attention for a moment, while I
pass over the subject far more {125} rapidly than it deserves. Whether
true or false, any view of the universe which shall completely satisfy
the mind must obey conditions of the mind's own imposing, must at least
let the mind be the umpire to decide whether it be fit to be called a
rational universe or not. Not any nature of things which may seem to
be will also seem to be _ipso facto_ rational; and if it do not seem
rational, it will afflict the mind with a ceaseless uneasiness, till it
be formulated or interpreted in some other and more congenial way. The
study of what the mind's criteria of rationality are, the definition of
its exactions in this respect, form an intensely interesting subject
into which I cannot enter now with any detail.[7] But so much I think
you will grant me without argument,--that all three departments of the
mind alike have a vote in the matter, and that no conception will pass
muster which violates any of their essential modes of activity, or
which leaves them without a chance to work. By what title is it that
every would-be universal formula, every system of philosophy which
rears its head, receives the inevitable critical volley from one half
of mankind, and falls to the rear, to become at the very best the creed
of some partial sect? Either it has dropped out of its net some of our
impressions of sense,--what we call the facts of nature,--or it has
left the theoretic and defining department with a lot of
inconsistencies and unmediated transitions on its hands; or else,
finally, it has left some one or more of our fundamental active and
emotional powers with no object outside of themselves to react-on or to
live for. Any one of these defects is fatal to its complete success.
Some one {126} will be sure to discover the flaw, to scout the system,
and to seek another in its stead.
I need not go far to collect examples to illustrate to an audience of
theologians what I mean. Nor will you in particular, as champions of
the Unitarianism of New England, be slow to furnish, from the motives
which led to your departure from our orthodox ancestral Calvinism,
instances enough under the third or practical head. A God who gives so
little scope to love, a predestination which takes from endeavor all
its zest with all its fruit, are irrational conceptions, because they
say to our most cherished powers, There is no object for you.
Well, just as within the limits of theism some kinds are surviving
others by reason of their greater practical rationality, so theism
itself, by reason of its practical rationality, is certain to survive
all lower creeds. Materialism and agnosticism, even were they true,
could never gain universal and popular acceptance; for they both,
alike, give a solution of things which is irrational to the practical
third of our nature, and in which we can never volitionally feel at
home. Each comes out of the second or theoretic stage of mental
functioning, with its definition of the essential nature of things, its
formula of formulas prepared. The whole array of active forces of our
nature stands waiting, impatient for the word which shall tell them how
to discharge themselves most deeply and worthily upon life. "Well!"
cry they, "what shall we do?" "Ignoramus, ignorabimus!" says
agnosticism. "React upon atoms and their concussions!" says
materialism. What a collapse! The mental train misses fire, the
middle fails to ignite the end, the cycle breaks down half-way to its
conclusion; and the active {127} powers left alone, with no proper
object on which to vent their energy, must either atrophy, sicken, and
die, or else by their pent-up convulsions and excitement keep the whole
machinery in a fever until some less incommensurable solution, some
more practically rational formula, shall provide a normal issue for the
currents of the soul.
Now, theism always stands ready with the most practically rational
solution it is possible to conceive. Not an energy of our active
nature to which it does not authoritatively appeal, not an emotion of
which it does not normally and naturally release the springs. At a
single stroke, it changes the dead blank _it_ of the world into a
living _thou_, with whom the whole man may have dealings. To you, at
any rate, I need waste no words in trying to prove its supreme
commensurateness with all the demands that department Number Three of
the mind has the power to impose on department Number Two.
Our volitional nature must then, until the end of time, exert a
constant pressure upon the other departments of the mind to induce them
to function to theistic conclusions. No contrary formulas can be more
than provisionally held. Infra-theistic theories must be always in
unstable equilibrium; for department Number Three ever lurks in ambush,
ready to assert its rights, and on the slightest show of justification
it makes its fatal spring, and converts them into the other form in
which alone mental peace and order can permanently reign.
The question is, then, _Can_ departments One and Two, _can_ the facts
of nature and the theoretic elaboration of them, always lead to
theistic conclusions?
The future history of philosophy is the only {128} authority capable of
answering that question. I, at all events, must not enter into it
to-day, as that would be to abandon the purely natural-history point of
view I mean to keep.
This only is certain, that the theoretic faculty lives between two
fires which never give her rest, and make her incessantly revise her
formulations. If she sink into a premature, short-sighted, and
idolatrous theism, in comes department Number One with its battery of
facts of sense, and dislodges her from her dogmatic repose. If she
lazily subside into equilibrium with the same facts of sense viewed in
their simple mechanical outwardness, up starts the practical reason
with its demands, and makes _that_ couch a bed of thorns. From
generation to generation thus it goes,--now a movement of reception
from without, now one of expansion from within; department Number Two
always worked to death, yet never excused from taking the most
responsible part in the arrangements. To-day, a crop of new facts;
to-morrow, a flowering of new motives,--the theoretic faculty always
having to effect the transition, and life growing withal so complex and
subtle and immense that her powers of conceiving are almost ruptured
with the strain. See how, in France, the mummy-cloths of the academic
and official theistic philosophy are rent by the facts of evolution,
and how the young thinkers are at work! See, in Great Britain, how the
dryness of the strict associationist school, which under the
ministration of Mill, Bain, and Spencer dominated us but yesterday,
gives way to more generous idealisms, born of more urgent emotional
needs and wrapping the same facts in far more massive intellectual
harmonies! These are but tackings to the common {129} port, to that
ultimate _Weltanschauung_ of maximum subjective as well as objective
richness, which, whatever its other properties may be, will at any rate
wear the theistic form.
Here let me say one word about a remark we often hear coming from the
anti-theistic wing: It is base, it is vile, it is the lowest depth of
immorality, to allow department Number Three to interpose its demands,
and have any vote in the question of what is true and what is false;
the mind must be a passive, reactionless sheet of white paper, on which
reality will simply come and register its own philosophic definition,
as the pen registers the curve on the sheet of a chronograph. "Of all
the cants that are canted in this canting age" this has always seemed
to me the most wretched, especially when it comes from professed
psychologists. As if the mind could, consistently with its definition,
be a reactionless sheet at all! As if conception could possibly occur
except for a teleological purpose, except to show us the way from a
state of things our senses cognize to another state of things our will
desires! As if 'science' itself were anything else than such an end of
desire, and a most peculiar one at that! And as if the 'truths' of
bare physics in particular, which these sticklers for intellectual
purity contend to be the only uncontaminated form, were not as great an
alteration and falsification of the simply 'given' order of the world,
into an order conceived solely for the mind's convenience and delight,
as any theistic doctrine possibly can be!
Physics is but one chapter in the great jugglery which our conceiving
faculty is forever playing with {130} the order of being as it presents
itself to our reception. It transforms the unutterable dead level and
continuum of the 'given' world into an utterly unlike world of sharp
differences and hierarchic subordinations for no other reason than to
satisfy certain subjective passions we possess.[8]
And, so far as we can see, the given world is there only for the sake
of the operation. At any rate, to operate upon it is our only chance
of approaching it; for never can we get a glimpse of it in the
unimaginable insipidity of its virgin estate. To bid the man's
subjective interests be passive till truth express itself from out the
environment, is to bid the sculptor's chisel be passive till the statue
express itself from out the stone. Operate we must! and the only
choice left us is that between operating to poor or to rich results.
The only possible duty there can be in the matter is the duty of
getting the richest results that the material given will allow. The
richness lies, of course, in the energy of all three departments of the
mental cycle. Not a sensible 'fact' of department One must be left in
the cold, not a faculty of department Three be paralyzed; and
department Two must form an indestructible bridge. It is natural that
the habitual neglect of department One by theologians should arouse
indignation; but it is most _un_natural that the indignation should
take the form of a wholesale denunciation of department Three. It is
the story of Kant's dove over again, denouncing the {131} pressure of
the air. Certain of our positivists keep chiming to us, that, amid the
wreck of every other god and idol, one divinity still stands
upright,--that his name is Scientific Truth, and that he has but one
commandment, but that one supreme, saying, _Thou shalt not be a
theist_, for that would be to satisfy thy subjective propensities, and
the satisfaction of those is intellectual damnation. These most
conscientious gentlemen think they have jumped off their own
feet,--emancipated their mental operations from the control of their
subjective propensities at large and _in toto_. But they are deluded.
They have simply chosen from among the entire set of propensities at
their command those that were certain to construct, out of the
materials given, the leanest, lowest, aridest result,--namely, the bare
molecular world,--and they have sacrificed all the rest.[9]
Man's chief difference from the brutes lies in the exuberant excess of
his subjective propensities,--his pre-eminence over them simply and
solely in the number and in the fantastic and unnecessary character of
his wants, physical, moral, aesthetic, and intellectual. Had his whole
life not been a quest for the superfluous, he would never have
established himself as inexpugnably as he has done in the necessary.
And from the consciousness of this he should draw the lesson that his
wants are to be trusted; that even {132} when their gratification seems
farthest off, the uneasiness they occasion is still the best guide of
his life, and will lead him to issues entirely beyond his present
powers of reckoning. Prune down his extravagance, sober him, and you
undo him. The appetite for immediate consistency at any cost, or what
the logicians call the 'law of parsimony,'--which is nothing but the
passion for conceiving the universe in the most labor-saving
way,--will, if made the exclusive law of the mind, end by blighting the
development of the intellect itself quite as much as that of the
feelings or the will. The scientific conception of the world as an
army of molecules gratifies this appetite after its fashion most
exquisitely. But if the religion of exclusive scientificism should
ever succeed in suffocating all other appetites out of a nation's mind,
and imbuing a whole race with the persuasion that simplicity and
consistency demand a _tabula rasa_ to be made of every notion that does
not form part of the _soi-disant_ scientific synthesis, that nation,
that race, will just as surely go to ruin, and fall a prey to their
more richly constituted neighbors, as the beasts of the field, as a
whole, have fallen a prey to man.
I have myself little fear for our Anglo-Saxon race. Its moral,
aesthetic, and practical wants form too dense a stubble to be mown by
any scientific Occam's razor that has yet been forged. The knights of
the razor will never form among us more than a sect; but when I see
their fraternity increasing in numbers, and, what is worse, when I see
their negations acquiring almost as much prestige and authority as
their affirmations legitimately claim over the minds of the docile
public, I feel as if the influences working in the direction of our
mental barbarization were {133} beginning to be rather strong, and
needed some positive counteraction. And when I ask myself from what
quarter the invasion may best be checked, I can find no answer as good
as the one suggested by casting my eyes around this room. For this
needful task, no fitter body of men than the Unitarian clergy exists.
Who can uphold the rights of department Three of the mind with better
grace than those who long since showed how they could fight and suffer
for department One? As, then, you burst the bonds of a narrow
ecclesiastical tradition, by insisting that no fact of sense or result
of science must be left out of account in the religious synthesis, so
may you still be the champions of mental completeness and
all-sidedness. May you, with equal success, avert the formation of a
narrow scientific tradition, and burst the bonds of any synthesis which
would pretend to leave out of account those forms of being, those
relations of reality, to which at present our active and emotional
tendencies are our only avenues of approach. I hear it said that
Unitarianism is not growing in these days. I know nothing of the truth
of the statement; but if it be true, it is surely because the great
ship of Orthodoxy is nearing the port and the pilot is being taken on
board. If you will only lead in a theistic science, as successfully as
you have led in a scientific theology, your separate name as Unitarians
may perish from the mouths of men; for your task will have been done,
and your function at an end. Until that distant day, you have work
enough in both directions awaiting you.
Meanwhile, let me pass to the next division of our subject. I said
that we are forced to regard God as {134} the normal object of the
mind's belief, inasmuch as any conception that falls short of God is
irrational, if the word 'rational' be taken in its fullest sense; while
any conception that goes beyond God is impossible, if the human mind be
constructed after the triadic-reflex pattern we have discussed at such
length. The first half of the thesis has been disposed of.
Infra-theistic conceptions, materialisms and agnosticisms, are
irrational because they are inadequate stimuli to man's practical
nature. I have now to justify the latter half of the thesis.
I dare say it may for an instant have perplexed some of you that I
should speak of conceptions that aimed at going beyond God, and of
attempts to fly above him or outbid him; so I will now explain exactly
what I mean. In defining the essential attributes of God, I said he
was a personality lying outside our own and other than us,--a power not
ourselves. Now, the attempts to fly beyond theism, of which I speak,
are attempts to get over this ultimate duality of God and his believer,
and to transform it into some sort or other of identity. If
infratheistic ways of looking on the world leave it in the third
person, a mere _it_; and if theism turns the _it_ into a _thou_,--so we
may say that these other theories try to cover it with the mantle of
the first person, and to make it a part of _me_.
I am well aware that I begin here to tread on ground in which trenchant
distinctions may easily seem to mutilate the facts.
That sense of emotional reconciliation with God which characterizes the
highest moments of the theistic consciousness may be described as
'oneness' with him, and so from the very bosom of theism a {135}
monistic doctrine seem to arise. But this consciousness of
self-surrender, of absolute practical union between one's self and the
divine object of one's contemplation, is a totally different thing from
any sort of substantial identity. Still the object God and the subject
I are two. Still I simply come upon him, and find his existence given
to me; and the climax of my practical union with what is given, forms
at the same time the climax of my perception that as a numerical fact
of existence I am something radically other than the Divinity with
whose effulgence I am filled.
Now, it seems to me that the only sort of union of creature with
creator with which theism, properly so called, comports, is of this
emotional and practical kind; and it is based unchangeably on the
empirical fact that the thinking subject and the object thought are
numerically two. How my mind and will, which are not God, can yet
cognize and leap to meet him, how I ever came to be so separate from
him, and how God himself came to be at all, are problems that for the
theist can remain unsolved and insoluble forever. It is sufficient for
him to know that he himself simply is, and needs God; and that behind
this universe God simply is and will be forever, and will in some way
hear his call. In the practical assurance of these empirical facts,
without 'Erkentnisstheorie' or philosophical ontology, without
metaphysics of emanation or creation to justify or make them more
intelligible, in the blessedness of their mere acknowledgment as given,
lie all the peace and power he craves. The floodgates of the religious
life are opened, and the full currents can pour through.
It is this empirical and practical side of the theistic position, its
theoretic chastity and modesty, which I {136} wish to accentuate here.
The highest flights of theistic mysticism, far from pretending to
penetrate the secrets of the _me_ and the _thou_ in worship, and to
transcend the dualism by an act of intelligence, simply turn their
backs on such attempts. The problem for them has simply
vanished,--vanished from the sight of an attitude which refuses to
notice such futile theoretic difficulties. Get but that "peace of God
which passeth understanding," and the questions of the understanding
will cease from puzzling and pedantic scruples be at rest. In other
words, theistic mysticism, that form of theism which at first sight
seems most to have transcended the fundamental otherness of God from
man, has done it least of all in the theoretic way. The pattern of its
procedure is precisely that of the simplest man dealing with the
simplest fact of his environment. Both he and the theist tarry in
department Two of their minds only so long as is necessary to define
what is the presence that confronts them. The theist decides that its
character is such as to be fitly responded to on his part by a
religious reaction; and into that reaction he forthwith pours his soul.
His insight into the _what_ of life leads to results so immediately and
intimately rational that the _why_, the _how_, and the _whence_ of it
are questions that lose all urgency. 'Gefühl ist Alles,' Faust says.
The channels of department Three have drained those of department Two
of their contents; and happiness over the fact that being has made
itself what it is, evacuates all speculation as to how it could make
itself at all.
But now, although to most human minds such a position as this will be
the position of rational equilibrium, it is not difficult to bring
forward certain {137} considerations, in the light of which so simple
and practical a mental movement begins to seem rather short-winded and
second-rate and devoid of intellectual style. This easy acceptance of
an opaque limit to our speculative insight; this satisfaction with a
Being whose character we simply apprehend without comprehending
anything more about him, and with whom after a certain point our
dealings can be only of a volitional and emotional sort; above all,
this sitting down contented with a blank unmediated dualism,--are they
not the very picture of unfaithfulness to the rights and duties of our
theoretic reason?
Surely, if the universe is reasonable (and we must believe that it is
so), it must be susceptible, potentially at least, of being reasoned
_out_ to the last drop without residuum. Is it not rather an insult to
the very word 'rational' to say that the rational character of the
universe and its creator means no more than that we practically feel at
home in their presence, and that our powers are a match for their
demands? Do they not in fact demand to be _understood_ by us still
more than to be reacted on? Is not the unparalleled development of
department Two of the mind in man his crowning glory and his very
essence; and may not the _knowing of the truth_ be his absolute
vocation? And if it is, ought he flatly to acquiesce in a spiritual
life of 'reflex type,' whose form is no higher than that of the life
that animates his spinal cord,--nay, indeed, that animates the writhing
segments of any mutilated worm?
It is easy to see how such arguments and queries may result in the
erection of an ideal of our mental destiny, far different from the
simple and practical religious one we have described. We may well
begin {138} to ask whether such things as practical reactions can be
the final upshot and purpose of all our cognitive energy. Mere outward
acts, changes in the position of parts of matter (for they are nothing
else), can they possibly be the culmination and consummation of our
relations with the nature of things? Can they possibly form a result
to which our godlike powers of insight shall be judged merely
subservient? Such an idea, if we scan it closely, soon begins to seem
rather absurd. Whence this piece of matter comes and whither that one
goes, what difference ought that to make to the nature of things,
except so far as with the comings and the goings our wonderful inward
conscious harvest may be reaped?
And so, very naturally and gradually, one may be led from the theistic
and practical point of view to what I shall call the _gnostical_ one.
We may think that department Three of the mind, with its doings of
right and its doings of wrong, must be there only to serve department
Two; and we may suspect that the sphere of our activity exists for no
other purpose than to illumine our cognitive consciousness by the
experience of its results. Are not all sense and all emotion at bottom
but turbid and perplexed modes of what in its clarified shape is
intelligent cognition? Is not all experience just the eating of the
fruit of the tree of _knowledge_ of good and evil, and nothing more?
These questions fan the fire of an unassuageable gnostic thirst, which
is as far removed from theism in one direction as agnosticism was
removed from it in the other; and which aspires to nothing less than an
absolute unity of knowledge with its object, and refuses to be
satisfied short of a fusion and solution and saturation of both
impression and action with reason, and {139} an absorption of all three
departments of the mind into one. Time would fail us to-day (even had
I the learning, which I have not) to speak of gnostic systems in
detail. The aim of all of them is to shadow forth a sort of process by
which spirit, emerging from its beginnings and exhausting the whole
circle of finite experience in its sweep, shall at last return and
possess itself as its own object at the climax of its career. This
climax is the religious consciousness. At the giddy height of this
conception, whose latest and best known form is the Hegelian
philosophy, definite words fail to serve their purpose; and the
ultimate goal,--where object and subject, worshipped and worshipper,
facts and the knowledge of them, fall into one, and where no other is
left outstanding beyond this one that alone is, and that we may call
indifferently act or fact, reality or idea, God or creation,--this
goal, I say, has to be adumbrated to our halting and gasping
intelligence by coarse physical metaphors, 'positings' and
'self-returnings' and 'removals' and 'settings free,' which hardly help
to make the matter clear.
But from the midst of the curdling and the circling of it all we seem
dimly to catch a glimpse of a state in which the reality to be known
and the power of knowing shall have become so mutually adequate that
each exhaustively is absorbed by the other and the twain become one
flesh, and in which the light shall somehow have soaked up all the
outer darkness into its own ubiquitous beams. Like all headlong
ideals, this apotheosis of the bare conceiving faculty has its depth
and wildness, its pang and its charm. To many it sings a truly siren
strain; and so long as it is held only as a postulate, as a mere
vanishing {140} point to give perspective to our intellectual aim, it
is hard to see any empirical title by which we may deny the legitimacy
of gnosticism's claims. That we are not as yet near the goal it
prefigures can never be a reason why we might not continue indefinitely
to approach it; and to all sceptical arguments, drawn from our reason's
actual finiteness, gnosticism can still oppose its indomitable faith in
the infinite character of its potential destiny.
Now, here it is that the physiologist's generalization, as it seems to
me, may fairly come in, and by ruling any such extravagant faith out of
court help to legitimate our personal mistrust of its pretensions. I
confess that I myself have always had a great mistrust of the
pretensions of the gnostic faith. Not only do I utterly fail to
understand what a cognitive faculty erected into the absolute of being,
with itself as its object, can mean; but even if we grant it a being
other than itself for object, I cannot reason myself out of the belief
that however familiar and at home we might become with the character of
that being, the bare being of it, the fact that it is there at all,
must always be something blankly given and presupposed in order that
conception may begin its work; must in short lie beyond speculation,
and not be enveloped in its sphere.
Accordingly, it is with no small pleasure that as a student of
physiology and psychology I find the only lesson I can learn from these
sciences to be one that corroborates these convictions. From its first
dawn to its highest actual attainment, we find that the cognitive
faculty, where it appears to exist at all, appears but as one element
in an organic mental whole, and as a minister to higher mental
powers,--the powers {141} of will. Such a thing as its emancipation
and absolution from these organic relations receives no faintest color
of plausibility from any fact we can discern. Arising as a part, in a
mental and objective world which are both larger than itself, it must,
whatever its powers of growth may be (and I am far from wishing to
disparage them), remain a part to the end. This is the character of
the cognitive element in all the mental life we know, and we have no
reason to suppose that that character will ever change. On the
contrary, it is more than probable that to the end of time our power of
moral and volitional response to the nature of things will be the
deepest organ of communication therewith we shall ever possess. In
every being that is real there is something external to, and sacred
from, the grasp of every other. God's being is sacred from ours. To
co-operate with his creation by the best and rightest response seems
all he wants of us. In such co-operation with his purposes, not in any
chimerical speculative conquest of him, not in any theoretic drinking
of him up, must lie the real meaning of our destiny.
This is nothing new. All men know it at those rare moments when the
soul sobers herself, and leaves off her chattering and protesting and
insisting about this formula or that. In the silence of our theories
we then seem to listen, and to hear something like the pulse of Being
beat; and it is borne in upon us that the mere turning of the
character, the dumb willingness to suffer and to serve this universe,
is more than all theories about it put together. The most any theory
about it can do is to bring us to that. Certain it is that the acutest
theories, the greatest intellectual power, the most elaborate
education, are a {142} sheer mockery when, as too often happens, they
feed mean motives and a nerveless will. And it is equally certain that
a resolute moral energy, no matter how inarticulate or unequipped with
learning its owner may be, extorts from us a respect we should never
pay were we not satisfied that the essential root of human personality
lay there.
I have sketched my subject in the briefest outlines; but still I hope
you will agree that I have established my point, and that the
physiological view of mentality, so far from invalidating, can but give
aid and comfort to the theistic attitude of mind. Between agnosticism
and gnosticism, theism stands midway, and holds to what is true in
each. With agnosticism, it goes so far as to confess that we cannot
know how Being made itself or us. With gnosticism, it goes so far as
to insist that we can know Being's character when made, and how it asks
us to behave.
If any one fear that in insisting so strongly that behavior is the aim
and end of every sound philosophy I have curtailed the dignity and
scope of the speculative function in us, I can only reply that in this
ascertainment of the _character_ of Being lies an almost infinite
speculative task. Let the voluminous considerations by which all
modern thought converges toward idealistic or pan-psychic conclusions
speak for me. Let the pages of a Hodgson, of a Lotze, of a Renouvier,
reply whether within the limits drawn by purely empirical theism the
speculative faculty finds not, and shall not always find, enough to do.
But do it little or much, its _place_ in a philosophy is always the
same, and is set by the structural form of the mind. Philosophies,
whether expressed in sonnets or {143} systems, all must wear this form.
The thinker starts from some experience of the practical world, and
asks its meaning. He launches himself upon the speculative sea, and
makes a voyage long or short. He ascends into the empyrean, and
communes with the eternal essences. But whatever his achievements and
discoveries be while gone, the utmost result they can issue in is some
new practical maxim or resolve, or the denial of some old one, with
which inevitably he is sooner or later washed ashore on the _terra
firma_ of concrete life again.
Whatever thought takes this voyage is a philosophy. We have seen how
theism takes it. And in the philosophy of a thinker who, though long
neglected, is doing much to renovate the spiritual life of his native
France to-day (I mean Charles Renouvier, whose writings ought to be
better known among us than they are), we have an instructive example of
the way in which this very empirical element in theism, its confession
of an ultimate opacity in things, of a dimension of being which escapes
our theoretic control, may suggest a most definite practical
conclusion,--this one, namely, that 'our wills are free.' I will say
nothing of Renouvier's line of reasoning; it is contained in many
volumes which I earnestly recommend to your attention.[10] But to
enforce my doctrine that the number of volumes is not what makes the
philosophy, let me conclude by recalling to you the little poem of
Tennyson, published last year, in which the speculative voyage is made,
and the same conclusion reached in a few lines:--
{144}
"Out of the deep, my child, out of the deep,
From that great deep before our world begins,
Whereon the Spirit of God moves as he will,--
Out of the deep, my child, out of the deep,
From that true world within the world we see,
Whereof our world is but the bounding shore,--
Out of the deep, Spirit, out of the deep,
With this ninth moon that sends the hidden sun
Down yon dark sea, thou comest, darling boy.
For in the world which is not ours, they said,
'Let us make man,' and that which should be man,
From that one light no man can look upon,
Drew to this shore lit by the suns and moons
And all the shadows. O dear Spirit, half-lost
In thine own shadow and this fleshly sign
That thou art thou,--who wailest being born
And banish'd into mystery,...
...our mortal veil
And shattered phantom of that Infinite One,
Who made thee unconceivably thyself
Out of his whole world-self and all in all,--
Live thou, and of the grain and husk, the grape
And ivyberry, choose; and still depart
From death to death through life and life, and find
Nearer and ever nearer Him who wrought
Not matter, nor the finite-infinite,
_But this main miracle, that thou art thou,
With power on thine own act and on the world_."
[1] Address delivered to the Unitarian Ministers' Institute at
Princeton, Mass., 1881, and printed in the Unitarian Review for October
of that year.
[2] See some Remarks on Spencer's Definition of Mind, in the Journal of
Speculative Philosophy for January, 1878.
[3] "No amount of failure in the attempt to subject the world of
sensible experience to a thorough-going system of conceptions, and to
bring all happenings back to cases of immutably valid law, is able to
shake our faith in the rightness of our principles. We hold fast to
our demand that even the greatest apparent confusion must sooner or
later solve itself in transparent formulas. We begin the work ever
afresh; and, refusing to believe that nature will permanently withhold
the reward of our exertions, think rather that we have hitherto only
failed to push them in the right direction. And all this pertinacity
flows from a conviction that we have no right to renounce the
fulfilment of our task. What, in short sustains the courage of
investigators is the force of obligation of an ethical idea."
(Sigwart: Logik, bd. ii., p. 23.)
This is a true account of the spirit of science. Does it essentially
differ from the spirit of religion? And is any one entitled to say in
advance, that, while the one form of faith shall be crowned with
success, the other is certainly doomed to fail?
[4] Concerning the transformation of the given order into the order of
conception, see S. H. Hodgson, The Philosophy of Reflection, chap. v.;
H. Lotze, Logik, sects. 342-351; C. Sigwart, Logik, sects. 60-63, 105.
[5] Haeckel has recently (Der Monismus, 1893, p. 37) proposed the
Cosmic Ether as a divinity fitted to reconcile science with theistic
faith.
[6] See the admirably original "Illustrations of the Logic of Science,"
by C. S. Peirce, especially the second paper, "How to make our Thoughts
clear," in the Popular Science Monthly for January, 1878.
[7] On this subject, see the preceding Essay.
[8] "As soon as it is recognized that our thought, as logic deals with
it, reposes on our _will to think_, the primacy of the will, even in
the theoretical sphere, must be conceded; and the last of
presuppositions is not merely [Kant's] that 'I think' must accompany
all my representations, but also that 'I will' must dominate all my
thinking." (Sigwart; Logik, ll. 25.)
[9] As our ancestors said, _Fiat justitia, pereat mundus_, so we, who
do not believe in justice or any absolute good, must, according to
these prophets, be willing to see the world perish, in order that
_scientia fiat_. Was there ever a more exquisite idol of the den, or
rather of the _shop_? In the clean sweep to be made of superstitions,
let the idol of stern obligation to be scientific go with the rest, and
people will have a fair chance to understand one another. But this
blowing of hot and of cold makes nothing but confusion.
[10] Especially the Essais de Critique Générale, 2me Edition, 6 vols.,
12mo, Paris, 1875; and the Esquisse d'une Classification Systématique
des Doctrines Philosophiques, 2 vols., 8vo, Paris, 1885.
{145}
THE DILEMMA OF DETERMINISM.[1]
A common opinion prevails that the juice has ages ago been pressed out
of the free-will controversy, and that no new champion can do more than
warm up stale arguments which every one has heard. This is a radical
mistake. I know of no subject less worn out, or in which inventive
genius has a better chance of breaking open new ground,--not, perhaps,
of forcing a conclusion or of coercing assent, but of deepening our
sense of what the issue between the two parties really is, of what the
ideas of fate and of free-will imply. At our very side almost, in the
past few years, we have seen falling in rapid succession from the press
works that present the alternative in entirely novel lights. Not to
speak of the English disciples of Hegel, such as Green and Bradley; not
to speak of Hinton and Hodgson, nor of Hazard here,--we see in the
writings of Renouvier, Fouillée, and Delboeuf[2] how completely changed
and refreshed is the form of all the old disputes. I cannot pretend to
vie in originality with any of the masters I have named, and my
ambition limits itself to just one little point. If I can make two of
the necessarily implied corollaries {146} of determinism clearer to you
than they have been made before, I shall have made it possible for you
to decide for or against that doctrine with a better understanding of
what you are about. And if you prefer not to decide at all, but to
remain doubters, you will at least see more plainly what the subject of
your hesitation is. I thus disclaim openly on the threshold all
pretension to prove to you that the freedom of the will is true. The
most I hope is to induce some of you to follow my own example in
assuming it true, and acting as if it were true. If it be true, it
seems to me that this is involved in the strict logic of the case. Its
truth ought not to be forced willy-nilly down our indifferent throats.
It ought to be freely espoused by men who can equally well turn their
backs upon it. In other words, our first act of freedom, if we are
free, ought in all inward propriety to be to affirm that we are free.
This should exclude, it seems to me, from the free-will side of the
question all hope of a coercive demonstration,--a demonstration which
I, for one, am perfectly contented to go without.
With thus much understood at the outset, we can advance. But not
without one more point understood as well. The arguments I am about to
urge all proceed on two suppositions: first, when we make theories
about the world and discuss them with one another, we do so in order to
attain a conception of things which shall give us subjective
satisfaction; and, second, if there be two conceptions, and the one
seems to us, on the whole, more rational than the other, we are
entitled to suppose that the more rational one is the truer of the two.
I hope that you are all willing to make these suppositions with me;
{147} for I am afraid that if there be any of you here who are not,
they will find little edification in the rest of what I have to say. I
cannot stop to argue the point; but I myself believe that all the
magnificent achievements of mathematical and physical science--our
doctrines of evolution, of uniformity of law, and the rest--proceed
from our indomitable desire to cast the world into a more rational
shape in our minds than the shape into which it is thrown there by the
crude order of our experience. The world has shown itself, to a great
extent, plastic to this demand of ours for rationality. How much
farther it will show itself plastic no one can say. Our only means of
finding out is to try; and I, for one, feel as free to try conceptions
of moral as of mechanical or of logical rationality. If a certain
formula for expressing the nature of the world violates my moral
demand, I shall feel as free to throw it overboard, or at least to
doubt it, as if it disappointed my demand for uniformity of sequence,
for example; the one demand being, so far as I can see, quite as
subjective and emotional as the other is. The principle of causality,
for example,--what is it but a postulate, an empty name covering simply
a demand that the sequence of events shall some day manifest a deeper
kind of belonging of one thing with another than the mere arbitrary
juxtaposition which now phenomenally appears? It is as much an altar
to an unknown god as the one that Saint Paul found at Athens. All our
scientific and philosophic ideals are altars to unknown gods.
Uniformity is as much so as is free-will. If this be admitted, we can
debate on even terms. But if any one pretends that while freedom and
variety are, in the first instance, subjective demands, necessity and
uniformity are something {148} altogether different, I do not see how
we can debate at all.[3]
To begin, then, I must suppose you acquainted with all the usual
arguments on the subject. I cannot stop to take up the old proofs from
causation, from statistics, from the certainty with which we can
foretell one another's conduct, from the fixity of character, and all
the rest. But there are two words which usually encumber these
classical arguments, {149} and which we must immediately dispose of if
we are to make any progress. One is the eulogistic word _freedom_, and
the other is the opprobrious word _chance_. The word 'chance' I wish
to keep, but I wish to get rid of the word 'freedom.' Its eulogistic
associations have so far overshadowed all the rest of its meaning that
both parties claim the sole right to use it, and determinists to-day
insist that they alone are freedom's champions. Old-fashioned
determinism was what we may call _hard_ determinism. It did not shrink
from such words as fatality, bondage of the will, necessitation, and
the like. Nowadays, we have a _soft_ determinism which abhors harsh
words, and, repudiating fatality, necessity, and even predetermination,
says that its real name is freedom; for freedom is only necessity
understood, and bondage to the highest is identical with true freedom.
Even a writer as little used to making capital out of soft words as Mr.
Hodgson hesitates not to call himself a 'free-will determinist.'
Now, all this is a quagmire of evasion under which the real issue of
fact has been entirely smothered. Freedom in all these senses presents
simply no problem at all. No matter what the soft determinist mean by
it,--whether he mean the acting without external constraint; whether he
mean the acting rightly, or whether he mean the acquiescing in the law
of the whole,--who cannot answer him that sometimes we are free and
sometimes we are not? But there _is_ a problem, an issue of fact and
not of words, an issue of the most momentous importance, which is often
decided without discussion in one sentence,--nay, in one clause of a
sentence,--by those very writers who spin out whole chapters in their
efforts to show {150} what 'true' freedom is; and that is the question
of determinism, about which we are to talk to-night.
Fortunately, no ambiguities hang about this word or about its opposite,
indeterminism. Both designate an outward way in which things may
happen, and their cold and mathematical sound has no sentimental
associations that can bribe our partiality either way in advance. Now,
evidence of an external kind to decide between determinism and
indeterminism is, as I intimated a while back, strictly impossible to
find. Let us look at the difference between them and see for
ourselves. What does determinism profess?
It professes that those parts of the universe already laid down
absolutely appoint and decree what the other parts shall be. The
future has no ambiguous possibilities hidden in its womb: the part we
call the present is compatible with only one totality. Any other
future complement than the one fixed from eternity is impossible. The
whole is in each and every part, and welds it with the rest into an
absolute unity, an iron block, in which there can be no equivocation or
shadow of turning.
"With earth's first clay they did the last man knead,
And there of the last harvest sowed the seed.
And the first morning of creation wrote
What the last dawn of reckoning shall read."
Indeterminism, on the contrary, says that the parts have a certain
amount of loose play on one another, so that the laying down of one of
them does not necessarily determine what the others shall be. It
admits that possibilities may be in excess of actualities, and that
things not yet revealed to our knowledge may really in themselves be
ambiguous. Of two {151} alternative futures which we conceive, both
may now be really possible; and the one become impossible only at the
very moment when the other excludes it by becoming real itself.
Indeterminism thus denies the world to be one unbending unit of fact.
It says there is a certain ultimate pluralism in it; and, so saying, it
corroborates our ordinary unsophisticated view of things. To that
view, actualities seem to float in a wider sea of possibilities from
out of which they are chosen; and, _somewhere_, indeterminism says,
such possibilities exist, and form a part of truth.
Determinism, on the contrary, says they exist _nowhere_, and that
necessity on the one hand and impossibility on the other are the sole
categories of the real. Possibilities that fail to get realized are,
for determinism, pure illusions: they never were possibilities at all.
There is nothing inchoate, it says, about this universe of ours, all
that was or is or shall be actual in it having been from eternity
virtually there. The cloud of alternatives our minds escort this mass
of actuality withal is a cloud of sheer deceptions, to which
'impossibilities' is the only name that rightfully belongs.
The issue, it will be seen, is a perfectly sharp one, which no
eulogistic terminology can smear over or wipe out. The truth _must_
lie with one side or the other, and its lying with one side makes the
other false.
The question relates solely to the existence of possibilities, in the
strict sense of the term, as things that may, but need not, be. Both
sides admit that a volition, for instance, has occurred. The
indeterminists say another volition might have occurred in its place;
the determinists swear that nothing could possibly {152} have occurred
in its place. Now, can science be called in to tell us which of these
two point-blank contradicters of each other is right? Science
professes to draw no conclusions but such as are based on matters of
fact, things that have actually happened; but how can any amount of
assurance that something actually happened give us the least grain of
information as to whether another thing might or might not have
happened in its place? Only facts can be proved by other facts. With
things that are possibilities and not facts, facts have no concern. If
we have no other evidence than the evidence of existing facts, the
possibility-question must remain a mystery never to be cleared up.
And the truth is that facts practically have hardly anything to do with
making us either determinists or indeterminists. Sure enough, we make
a flourish of quoting facts this way or that; and if we are
determinists, we talk about the infallibility with which we can predict
one another's conduct; while if we are indeterminists, we lay great
stress on the fact that it is just because we cannot foretell one
another's conduct, either in war or statecraft or in any of the great
and small intrigues and businesses of men, that life is so intensely
anxious and hazardous a game. But who does not see the wretched
insufficiency of this so-called objective testimony on both sides?
What fills up the gaps in our minds is something not objective, not
external. What divides us into possibility men and anti-possibility
men is different faiths or postulates,--postulates of rationality. To
this man the world seems more rational with possibilities in it,--to
that man more rational with possibilities excluded; and talk as we will
about having to yield to {153} evidence, what makes us monists or
pluralists, determinists or indeterminists, is at bottom always some
sentiment like this.
The stronghold of the deterministic sentiment is the antipathy to the
idea of chance. As soon as we begin to talk indeterminism to our
friends, we find a number of them shaking their heads. This notion of
alternative possibility, they say, this admission that any one of
several things may come to pass, is, after all, only a roundabout name
for chance; and chance is something the notion of which no sane mind
can for an instant tolerate in the world. What is it, they ask, but
barefaced crazy unreason, the negation of intelligibility and law? And
if the slightest particle of it exist anywhere, what is to prevent the
whole fabric from falling together, the stars from going out, and chaos
from recommencing her topsy-turvy reign?
Remarks of this sort about chance will put an end to discussion as
quickly as anything one can find. I have already told you that
'chance' was a word I wished to keep and use. Let us then examine
exactly what it means, and see whether it ought to be such a terrible
bugbear to us. I fancy that squeezing the thistle boldly will rob it
of its sting.
The sting of the word 'chance' seems to lie in the assumption that it
means something positive, and that if anything happens by chance, it
must needs be something of an intrinsically irrational and preposterous
sort. Now, chance means nothing of the kind. It is a purely negative
and relative term,[4] giving us {154} no information about that of
which it is predicated, except that it happens to be disconnected with
something else,--not controlled, secured, or necessitated by other
things in advance of its own actual presence. As this point is the
most subtile one of the whole lecture, and at the same time the point
on which all the rest hinges, I beg you to pay particular attention to
it. What I say is that it tells us nothing about what a thing may be
in itself to call it 'chance.' It may be a bad thing, it may be a good
thing. It may be lucidity, transparency, fitness incarnate, matching
the whole system of other things, when it has once befallen, in an
unimaginably perfect way. All you mean by calling it 'chance' is that
this is not guaranteed, that it may also fall out otherwise. For the
system of other things has no positive hold on the chance-thing. Its
origin is in a certain fashion negative: it escapes, and says, Hands
off! coming, when it comes, as a free gift, or not at all.
This negativeness, however, and this opacity of the chance-thing when
thus considered _ab. extra_, or from the point of view of previous
things or distant things, do not preclude its having any amount of
positiveness and luminosity from within, and at its own place and
moment. All that its chance-character asserts about it is that there
is something in it really of its own, something that is not the
unconditional property of the whole. If the whole wants this property,
the whole must wait till it can get it, if it be a matter of chance.
That the universe may actually be a sort of joint-stock society of this
sort, in which the sharers have both limited liabilities and limited
powers, is of course a simple and conceivable notion.
Nevertheless, many persons talk as if the minutest {155} dose of
disconnectedness of one part with another, the smallest modicum of
independence, the faintest tremor of ambiguity about the future, for
example, would ruin everything, and turn this goodly universe into a
sort of insane sand-heap or nulliverse, no universe at all. Since
future human volitions are as a matter of fact the only ambiguous
things we are tempted to believe in, let us stop for a moment to make
ourselves sure whether their independent and accidental character need
be fraught with such direful consequences to the universe as these.
What is meant by saying that my choice of which way to walk home after
the lecture is ambiguous and matter of chance as far as the present
moment is concerned? It means that both Divinity Avenue and Oxford
Street are called; but that only one, and that one _either_ one, shall
be chosen. Now, I ask you seriously to suppose that this ambiguity of
my choice is real; and then to make the impossible hypothesis that the
choice is made twice over, and each time falls on a different street.
In other words, imagine that I first walk through Divinity Avenue, and
then imagine that the powers governing the universe annihilate ten
minutes of time with all that it contained, and set me back at the door
of this hall just as I was before the choice was made. Imagine then
that, everything else being the same, I now make a different choice and
traverse Oxford Street. You, as passive spectators, look on and see
the two alternative universes,--one of them with me walking through
Divinity Avenue in it, the other with the same me walking through
Oxford Street. Now, if you are determinists you believe one of these
universes to have been from eternity impossible: you believe it to have
{156} been impossible because of the intrinsic irrationality or
accidentality somewhere involved in it. But looking outwardly at these
universes, can you say which is the impossible and accidental one, and
which the rational and necessary one? I doubt if the most iron-clad
determinist among you could have the slightest glimmer of light on this
point. In other words, either universe _after the fact_ and once there
would, to our means of observation and understanding, appear just as
rational as the other. There would be absolutely no criterion by which
we might judge one necessary and the other matter of chance. Suppose
now we relieve the gods of their hypothetical task and assume my
choice, once made, to be made forever. I go through Divinity Avenue
for good and all. If, as good determinists, you now begin to affirm,
what all good determinists punctually do affirm, that in the nature of
things I _couldn't_ have gone through Oxford Street,--had I done so it
would have been chance, irrationality, insanity, a horrid gap in
nature,--I simply call your attention to this, that your affirmation is
what the Germans call a _Machtspruch_, a mere conception fulminated as
a dogma and based on no insight into details. Before my choice, either
street seemed as natural to you as to me. Had I happened to take
Oxford Street, Divinity Avenue would have figured in your philosophy as
the gap in nature; and you would have so proclaimed it with the best
deterministic conscience in the world.
But what a hollow outcry, then, is this against a chance which, if it
were present to us, we could by no character whatever distinguish from
a rational necessity! I have taken the most trivial of examples, but
no possible example could lead to any different {157} result. For what
are the alternatives which, in point of fact, offer themselves to human
volition? What are those futures that now seem matters of chance? Are
they not one and all like the Divinity Avenue and Oxford Street of our
example? Are they not all of them _kinds_ of things already here and
based in the existing frame of nature? Is any one ever tempted to
produce an _absolute_ accident, something utterly irrelevant to the
rest of the world? Do not all the motives that assail us, all the
futures that offer themselves to our choice, spring equally from the
soil of the past; and would not either one of them, whether realized
through chance or through necessity, the moment it was realized, seem
to us to fit that past, and in the completest and most continuous
manner to interdigitate with the phenomena already there?[5]
The more one thinks of the matter, the more one wonders that so empty
and gratuitous a hubbub as this outcry against chance should have found
so great an echo in the hearts of men. It is a word which tells us
absolutely nothing about what chances, or about the _modus operandi_ of
the chancing; and the use of it as a war-cry shows only a temper of
{158} intellectual absolutism, a demand that the world shall be a solid
block, subject to one control,--which temper, which demand, the world
may not be bound to gratify at all. In every outwardly verifiable and
practical respect, a world in which the alternatives that now actually
distract _your_ choice were decided by pure chance would be by _me_
absolutely undistinguished from the world in which I now live. I am,
therefore, entirely willing to call it, so far as your choices go, a
world of chance for me. To _yourselves_, it is true, those very acts
of choice, which to me are so blind, opaque, and external, are the
opposites of this, for you are within them and effect them. To you
they appear as decisions; and decisions, for him who makes them, are
altogether peculiar psychic facts. Self-luminous and self-justifying
at the living moment at which they occur, they appeal to no outside
moment to put its stamp upon them or make them continuous with the rest
of nature. Themselves it is rather who seem to make nature continuous;
and in their strange and intense function of granting consent to one
possibility and withholding it from another, to transform an equivocal
and double future into an inalterable and simple past.
But with the psychology of the matter we have no concern this evening.
The quarrel which determinism has with chance fortunately has nothing
to do with this or that psychological detail. It is a quarrel
altogether metaphysical. Determinism denies the ambiguity of future
volitions, because it affirms that nothing future can be ambiguous.
But we have said enough to meet the issue. Indeterminate future
volitions do mean chance. Let us not fear to shout it from the
house-tops if need be; for we now know that {159} the idea of chance
is, at bottom, exactly the same thing as the idea of gift,--the one
simply being a disparaging, and the other a eulogistic, name for
anything on which we have no effective _claim_. And whether the world
be the better or the worse for having either chances or gifts in it
will depend altogether on _what_ these uncertain and unclaimable things
turn out to be.
And this at last brings us within sight of our subject. We have seen
what determinism means: we have seen that indeterminism is rightly
described as meaning chance; and we have seen that chance, the very
name of which we are urged to shrink from as from a metaphysical
pestilence, means only the negative fact that no part of the world,
however big, can claim to control absolutely the destinies of the
whole. But although, in discussing the word 'chance,' I may at moments
have seemed to be arguing for its real existence, I have not meant to
do so yet. We have not yet ascertained whether this be a world of
chance or no; at most, we have agreed that it seems so. And I now
repeat what I said at the outset, that, from any strict theoretical
point of view, the question is insoluble. To deepen our theoretic
sense of the _difference_ between a world with chances in it and a
deterministic world is the most I can hope to do; and this I may now at
last begin upon, after all our tedious clearing of the way.
I wish first of all to show you just what the notion that this is a
deterministic world implies. The implications I call your attention to
are all bound up with the fact that it is a world in which we
constantly have to make what I shall, with your permission, call
judgments of regret. Hardly an hour passes in {160} which we do not
wish that something might be otherwise; and happy indeed are those of
us whose hearts have never echoed the wish of Omar Khayam--
"That we might clasp, ere closed, the book of fate,
And make the writer on a fairer leaf
Inscribe our names, or quite obliterate.
"Ah! Love, could you and I with fate conspire
To mend this sorry scheme of things entire,
Would we not shatter it to bits, and then
Remould it nearer to the heart's desire?"
Now, it is undeniable that most of these regrets are foolish, and quite
on a par in point of philosophic value with the criticisms on the
universe of that friend of our infancy, the hero of the fable The
Atheist and the Acorn,--
"Fool! had that bough a pumpkin bore,
Thy whimsies would have worked no more," etc.
Even from the point of view of our own ends, we should probably make a
botch of remodelling the universe. How much more then from the point
of view of ends we cannot see! Wise men therefore regret as little as
they can. But still some regrets are pretty obstinate and hard to
stifle,--regrets for acts of wanton cruelty or treachery, for example,
whether performed by others or by ourselves. Hardly any one can remain
_entirely_ optimistic after reading the confession of the murderer at
Brockton the other day: how, to get rid of the wife whose continued
existence bored him, he inveigled her into a desert spot, shot her four
times, and then, as she lay on the ground and said to him, "You didn't
do it on purpose, did you, dear?" replied, "No, I {161} didn't do it on
purpose," as he raised a rock and smashed her skull. Such an
occurrence, with the mild sentence and self-satisfaction of the
prisoner, is a field for a crop of regrets, which one need not take up
in detail. We feel that, although a perfect mechanical fit to the rest
of the universe, it is a bad moral fit, and that something else would
really have been better in its place.
But for the deterministic philosophy the murder, the sentence, and the
prisoner's optimism were all necessary from eternity; and nothing else
for a moment had a ghost of a chance of being put into their place. To
admit such a chance, the determinists tell us, would be to make a
suicide of reason; so we must steel our hearts against the thought.
And here our plot thickens, for we see the first of those difficult
implications of determinism and monism which it is my purpose to make
you feel. If this Brockton murder was called for by the rest of the
universe, if it had to come at its preappointed hour, and if nothing
else would have been consistent with the sense of the whole, what are
we to think of the universe? Are we stubbornly to stick to our
judgment of regret, and say, though it _couldn't_ be, yet it _would_
have been a better universe with something different from this Brockton
murder in it? That, of course, seems the natural and spontaneous thing
for us to do; and yet it is nothing short of deliberately espousing a
kind of pessimism. The judgment of regret calls the murder bad.
Calling a thing bad means, if it mean anything at all, that the thing
ought not to be, that something else ought to be in its stead.
Determinism, in denying that anything else can be in its stead,
virtually defines the universe {162} as a place in which what ought to
be is impossible,--in other words, as an organism whose constitution is
afflicted with an incurable taint, an irremediable flaw. The pessimism
of a Schopenhauer says no more than this,--that the murder is a
symptom; and that it is a vicious symptom because it belongs to a
vicious whole, which can express its nature no otherwise than by
bringing forth just such a symptom as that at this particular spot.
Regret for the murder must transform itself, if we are determinists and
wise, into a larger regret. It is absurd to regret the murder alone.
Other things being what they are, _it_ could not be different. What we
should regret is that whole frame of things of which the murder is one
member. I see no escape whatever from this pessimistic conclusion, if,
being determinists, our judgment of regret is to be allowed to stand at
all.
The only deterministic escape from pessimism is everywhere to abandon
the judgment of regret. That this can be done, history shows to be not
impossible. The devil, _quoad existentiam_, may be good. That is,
although he be a _principle_ of evil, yet the universe, with such a
principle in it, may practically be a better universe than it could
have been without. On every hand, in a small way, we find that a
certain amount of evil is a condition by which a higher form of good is
bought. There is nothing to prevent anybody from generalizing this
view, and trusting that if we could but see things in the largest of
all ways, even such matters as this Brockton murder would appear to be
paid for by the uses that follow in their train. An optimism _quand
même_, a systematic and infatuated optimism like that ridiculed by
Voltaire in his Candide, is one of the possible {163} ideal ways in
which a man may train himself to look on life. Bereft of dogmatic
hardness and lit up with the expression of a tender and pathetic hope,
such an optimism has been the grace of some of the most religious
characters that ever lived.
"Throb thine with Nature's throbbing breast,
And all is clear from east to west."
Even cruelty and treachery may be among the absolutely blessed fruits
of time, and to quarrel with any of their details may be blasphemy.
The only real blasphemy, in short, may be that pessimistic temper of
the soul which lets it give way to such things as regrets, remorse, and
grief.
Thus, our deterministic pessimism may become a deterministic optimism
at the price of extinguishing our judgments of regret.
But does not this immediately bring us into a curious logical
predicament? Our determinism leads us to call our judgments of regret
wrong, because they are pessimistic in implying that what is impossible
yet ought to be. But how then about the judgments of regret
themselves? If they are wrong, other judgments, judgments of approval
presumably, ought to be in their place. But as they are necessitated,
nothing else _can_ be in their place; and the universe is just what it
was before,--namely, a place in which what ought to be appears
impossible. We have got one foot out of the pessimistic bog, but the
other one sinks all the deeper. We have rescued our actions from the
bonds of evil, but our judgments are now held fast. When murders and
treacheries cease to be sins, regrets are theoretic absurdities and
errors. The theoretic and the active life thus play a kind of {164}
see-saw with each other on the ground of evil. The rise of either
sends the other down. Murder and treachery cannot be good without
regret being bad: regret cannot be good without treachery and murder
being bad. Both, however, are supposed to have been foredoomed; so
something must be fatally unreasonable, absurd, and wrong in the world.
It must be a place of which either sin or error forms a necessary part.
From this dilemma there seems at first sight no escape. Are we then so
soon to fall back into the pessimism from which we thought we had
emerged? And is there no possible way by which we may, with good
intellectual consciences, call the cruelties and the treacheries, the
reluctances and the regrets, _all_ good together?
Certainly there is such a way, and you are probably most of you ready
to formulate it yourselves. But, before doing so, remark how
inevitably the question of determinism and indeterminism slides us into
the question of optimism and pessimism, or, as our fathers called it,
'the question of evil.' The theological form of all these disputes is
the simplest and the deepest, the form from which there is the least
escape,--not because, as some have sarcastically said, remorse and
regret are clung to with a morbid fondness by the theologians as
spiritual luxuries, but because they are existing facts of the world,
and as such must be taken into account in the deterministic
interpretation of all that is fated to be. If they are fated to be
error, does not the bat's wing of irrationality still cast its shadow
over the world?
The refuge from the quandary lies, as I said, not far off. The
necessary acts we erroneously regret {165} may be good, and yet our
error in so regretting them may be also good, on one simple condition;
and that condition is this: The world must not be regarded as a machine
whose final purpose is the making real of any outward good, but rather
as a contrivance for deepening the theoretic consciousness of what
goodness and evil in their intrinsic natures are. Not the doing either
of good or of evil is what nature cares for, but the knowing of them.
Life is one long eating of the fruit of the tree of _knowledge_. I am
in the habit, in thinking to myself, of calling this point of view the
_gnostical_ point of view. According to it, the world is neither an
optimism nor a pessimism, but a _gnosticism_. But as this term may
perhaps lead to some misunderstandings, I will use it as little as
possible here, and speak rather of _subjectivism_, and the
_subjectivistic_ point of view.
Subjectivism has three great branches,--we may call them scientificism,
sentimentalism, and sensualism, respectively. They all agree
essentially about the universe, in deeming that what happens there is
subsidiary to what we think or feel about it. Crime justifies its
criminality by awakening our intelligence of that criminality, and
eventually our remorses and regrets; and the error included in remorses
and regrets, the error of supposing that the past could have been
different, justifies itself by its use. Its use is to quicken our
sense of _what_ the irretrievably lost is. When we think of it as that
which might have been ('the saddest words of tongue or pen'), the
quality of its worth speaks to us with a wilder sweetness; and,
conversely, the dissatisfaction wherewith we think of what seems to
have driven it from its natural place gives us the severer pang.
Admirable artifice of {166} nature! we might be tempted to
exclaim,--deceiving us in order the better to enlighten us, and leaving
nothing undone to accentuate to our consciousness the yawning distance
of those opposite poles of good and evil between which creation swings.
We have thus clearly revealed to our view what may be called the
dilemma of determinism, so far as determinism pretends to think things
out at all. A merely mechanical determinism, it is true, rather
rejoices in not thinking them out. It is very sure that the universe
must satisfy its postulate of a physical continuity and coherence, but
it smiles at any one who comes forward with a postulate of moral
coherence as well. I may suppose, however, that the number of purely
mechanical or hard determinists among you this evening is small. The
determinism to whose seductions you are most exposed is what I have
called soft determinism,--the determinism which allows considerations
of good and bad to mingle with those of cause and effect in deciding
what sort of a universe this may rationally be held to be. The dilemma
of this determinism is one whose left horn is pessimism and whose right
horn is subjectivism. In other words, if determinism is to escape
pessimism, it must leave off looking at the goods and ills of life in a
simple objective way, and regard them as materials, indifferent in
themselves, for the production of consciousness, scientific and
ethical, in us.
To escape pessimism is, as we all know, no easy task. Your own studies
have sufficiently shown you the almost desperate difficulty of making
the notion that there is a single principle of things, and that
principle absolute perfection, rhyme together with {167} our daily
vision of the facts of life. If perfection be the principle, how comes
there any imperfection here? If God be good, how came he to
create--or, if he did not create, how comes he to permit--the devil?
The evil facts must be explained as seeming: the devil must be
whitewashed, the universe must be disinfected, if neither God's
goodness nor his unity and power are to remain impugned. And of all
the various ways of operating the disinfection, and making bad seem
less bad, the way of subjectivism appears by far the best.[6]
For, after all, is there not something rather absurd in our ordinary
notion of external things being good or bad in themselves? Can murders
and treacheries, considered as mere outward happenings, or motions of
matter, be bad without any one to feel their badness? And could
paradise properly be good in the absence of a sentient principle by
which the goodness was perceived? Outward goods and evils seem
practically indistinguishable except in so far as they result in
getting moral judgments made about them. But then the moral judgments
seem the main thing, and the outward facts mere perishing instruments
for their production. This is subjectivism. Every one must at some
time have wondered at that strange paradox of our moral nature, that,
though the {168} pursuit of outward good is the breath of its nostrils,
the attainment of outward good would seem to be its suffocation and
death. Why does the painting of any paradise or Utopia, in heaven or
on earth, awaken such yawnings for nirvana and escape? The white-robed
harp-playing heaven of our sabbath-schools, and the ladylike tea-table
elysium represented in Mr. Spencer's Data of Ethics, as the final
consummation of progress, are exactly on a par in this
respect,--lubberlands, pure and simple, one and all.[7] We look upon
them from this delicious mess of insanities and realities, strivings
and deadnesses, hopes and fears, agonies and exultations, which forms
our present state, and _tedium vitae_ is the only sentiment they awaken
in our breasts. To our crepuscular natures, born for the conflict, the
Rembrandtesque moral chiaroscuro, the shifting struggle of the sunbeam
in the gloom, such pictures of light upon light are vacuous and
expressionless, and neither to be enjoyed nor understood. If _this_ be
the whole fruit of the victory, we say; if the generations of mankind
suffered and laid down their lives; if prophets confessed and martyrs
sang in the fire, and all the sacred tears were shed for no other end
than that a race of creatures of such unexampled insipidity should
succeed, and protract _in saecula saeculorum_ their contented and
inoffensive lives,--why, at such a rate, better lose than win the
battle, or at all events better ring down the curtain before the last
act of the play, so that a business that began so importantly may be
saved from so singularly flat a winding-up.
{169}
All this is what I should instantly say, were I called on to plead for
gnosticism; and its real friends, of whom you will presently perceive I
am not one, would say without difficulty a great deal more. Regarded
as a stable finality, every outward good becomes a mere weariness to
the flesh. It must be menaced, be occasionally lost, for its goodness
to be fully felt as such. Nay, more than occasionally lost. No one
knows the worth of innocence till he knows it is gone forever, and that
money cannot buy it back. Not the saint, but the sinner that
repenteth, is he to whom the full length and breadth, and height and
depth, of life's meaning is revealed. Not the absence of vice, but
vice there, and virtue holding her by the throat, seems the ideal human
state. And there seems no reason to suppose it not a permanent human
state. There is a deep truth in what the school of Schopenhauer
insists on,--the illusoriness of the notion of moral progress. The
more brutal forms of evil that go are replaced by others more subtle
and more poisonous. Our moral horizon moves with us as we move, and
never do we draw nearer to the far-off line where the black waves and
the azure meet. The final purpose of our creation seems most plausibly
to be the greatest possible enrichment of our ethical consciousness,
through the intensest play of contrasts and the widest diversity of
characters. This of course obliges some of us to be vessels of wrath,
while it calls others to be vessels of honor. But the subjectivist
point of view reduces all these outward distinctions to a common
denominator. The wretch languishing in the felon's cell may be
drinking draughts of the wine of truth that will never pass the lips of
the so-called favorite of fortune. And the peculiar consciousness of
{170} each of them is an indispensable note in the great ethical
concert which the centuries as they roll are grinding out of the living
heart of man.
So much for subjectivism! If the dilemma of determinism be to choose
between it and pessimism, I see little room for hesitation from the
strictly theoretical point of view. Subjectivism seems the more
rational scheme. And the world may, possibly, for aught I know, be
nothing else. When the healthy love of life is on one, and all its
forms and its appetites seem so unutterably real; when the most brutal
and the most spiritual things are lit by the same sun, and each is an
integral part of the total richness,--why, then it seems a grudging and
sickly way of meeting so robust a universe to shrink from any of its
facts and wish them not to be. Rather take the strictly dramatic point
of view, and treat the whole thing as a great unending romance which
the spirit of the universe, striving to realize its own content, is
eternally thinking out and representing to itself.[8]
No one, I hope, will accuse me, after I have said all this, of
underrating the reasons in favor of subjectivism. And now that I
proceed to say why those reasons, strong as they are, fail to convince
my own mind, I trust the presumption may be that my objections are
stronger still.
I frankly confess that they are of a practical order. If we
practically take up subjectivism in a sincere and radical manner and
follow its consequences, we meet with some that make us pause. Let a
subjectivism {171} begin in never so severe and intellectual a way, it
is forced by the law of its nature to develop another side of itself
and end with the corruptest curiosity. Once dismiss the notion that
certain duties are good in themselves, and that we are here to do them,
no matter how we feel about them; once consecrate the opposite notion
that our performances and our violations of duty are for a common
purpose, the attainment of subjective knowledge and feeling, and that
the deepening of these is the chief end of our lives,--and at what
point on the downward slope are we to stop? In theology, subjectivism
develops as its 'left wing' antinomianism. In literature, its left
wing is romanticism. And in practical life it is either a nerveless
sentimentality or a sensualism without bounds.
Everywhere it fosters the fatalistic mood of mind. It makes those who
are already too inert more passive still; it renders wholly reckless
those whose energy is already in excess. All through history we find
how subjectivism, as soon as it has a free career, exhausts itself in
every sort of spiritual, moral, and practical license. Its optimism
turns to an ethical indifference, which infallibly brings dissolution
in its train. It is perfectly safe to say now that if the Hegelian
gnosticism, which has begun to show itself here and in Great Britain,
were to become a popular philosophy, as it once was in Germany, it
would certainly develop its left wing here as there, and produce a
reaction of disgust. Already I have heard a graduate of this very
school express in the pulpit his willingness to sin like David, if only
he might repent like David. You may tell me he was only sowing his
wild, or rather his tame, oats; and perhaps he was. But the point is
{172} that in the subjectivistic or gnostical philosophy oat-sowing,
wild or tame, becomes a systematic necessity and the chief function of
life. After the pure and classic truths, the exciting and rancid ones
must be experienced; and if the stupid virtues of the philistine herd
do not then come in and save society from the influence of the children
of light, a sort of inward putrefaction becomes its inevitable doom.
Look at the last runnings of the romantic school, as we see them in
that strange contemporary Parisian literature, with which we of the
less clever countries are so often driven to rinse out our minds after
they have become clogged with the dulness and heaviness of our native
pursuits. The romantic school began with the worship of subjective
sensibility and the revolt against legality of which Rousseau was the
first great prophet: and through various fluxes and refluxes, right
wings and left wings, it stands to-day with two men of genius, M. Renan
and M. Zola, as its principal exponents,--one speaking with its
masculine, and the other with what might be called its feminine, voice.
I prefer not to think now of less noble members of the school, and the
Renan I have in mind is of course the Renan of latest dates. As I have
used the term gnostic, both he and Zola are gnostics of the most
pronounced sort. Both are athirst for the facts of life, and both
think the facts of human sensibility to be of all facts the most worthy
of attention. Both agree, moreover, that sensibility seems to be there
for no higher purpose,--certainly not, as the Philistines say, for the
sake of bringing mere outward rights to pass and frustrating outward
wrongs. One dwells on the sensibilities for their energy, the other
for their sweetness; one speaks with a voice of {173} bronze, the other
with that of an Æolian harp; one ruggedly ignores the distinction of
good and evil, the other plays the coquette between the craven
unmanliness of his Philosophic Dialogues and the butterfly optimism of
his Souvenirs de Jeunesse. But under the pages of both there sounds
incessantly the hoarse bass of _vanitas vanitatum, omnia vanitas_,
which the reader may hear, whenever he will, between the lines. No
writer of this French romantic school has a word of rescue from the
hour of satiety with the things of life,--the hour in which we say, "I
take no pleasure in them,"--or from the hour of terror at the world's
vast meaningless grinding, if perchance such hours should come. For
terror and satiety are facts of sensibility like any others; and at
their own hour they reign in their own right. The heart of the
romantic utterances, whether poetical, critical, or historical, is this
inward remedilessness, what Carlyle calls this far-off whimpering of
wail and woe. And from this romantic state of mind there is absolutely
no possible _theoretic_ escape. Whether, like Renan, we look upon life
in a more refined way, as a romance of the spirit; or whether, like the
friends of M. Zola, we pique ourselves on our 'scientific' and
'analytic' character, and prefer to be cynical, and call the world a
'roman experimental' on an infinite scale,--in either case the world
appears to us potentially as what the same Carlyle once called it, a
vast, gloomy, solitary Golgotha and mill of death.
The only escape is by the practical way. And since I have mentioned
the nowadays much-reviled name of Carlyle, let me mention it once more,
and say it is the way of his teaching. No matter for Carlyle's life,
no matter for a great deal of his {174} writing. What was the most
important thing he said to us? He said: "Hang your sensibilities!
Stop your snivelling complaints, and your equally snivelling raptures!
Leave off your general emotional tomfoolery, and get to WORK like men!"
But this means a complete rupture with the subjectivist philosophy of
things. It says conduct, and not sensibility, is the ultimate fact for
our recognition. With the vision of certain works to be done, of
certain outward changes to be wrought or resisted, it says our
intellectual horizon terminates. No matter how we succeed in doing
these outward duties, whether gladly and spontaneously, or heavily and
unwillingly, do them we somehow must; for the leaving of them undone is
perdition. No matter how we feel; if we are only faithful in the
outward act and refuse to do wrong, the world will in so far be safe,
and we quit of our debt toward it. Take, then, the yoke upon our
shoulders; bend our neck beneath the heavy legality of its weight;
regard something else than our feeling as our limit, our master, and
our law; be willing to live and die in its service,--and, at a stroke,
we have passed from the subjective into the objective philosophy of
things, much as one awakens from some feverish dream, full of bad
lights and noises, to find one's self bathed in the sacred coolness and
quiet of the air of the night.
But what is the essence of this philosophy of objective conduct, so
old-fashioned and finite, but so chaste and sane and strong, when
compared with its romantic rival? It is the recognition of limits,
foreign and opaque to our understanding. It is the willingness, after
bringing about some external good, to feel at peace; for our
responsibility ends with the {175} performance of that duty, and the
burden of the rest we may lay on higher powers.[9]
"Look to thyself, O Universe,
Thou art better and not worse,"
we may say in that philosophy, the moment we have done our stroke of
conduct, however small. For in the view of that philosophy the
universe belongs to a plurality of semi-independent forces, each one of
which may help or hinder, and be helped or hindered by, the operations
of the rest.
But this brings us right back, after such a long detour, to the
question of indeterminism and to the conclusion of all I came here to
say to-night. For the only consistent way of representing a pluralism
and a world whose parts may affect one another through their conduct
being either good or bad is the indeterministic way. What interest,
zest, or excitement can there be in achieving the right way, unless we
are enabled to feel that the wrong way is also a possible and a natural
way,--nay, more, a menacing and an imminent way? And what sense can
there be in condemning ourselves for taking the wrong way, unless we
need have done nothing of the sort, unless the right way was open to us
as well? I cannot understand the willingness to act, no matter how we
feel, without the belief that acts are really good and bad. I cannot
understand the belief that an act is bad, without regret at its
happening. I cannot understand regret without the admission of real,
genuine possibilities in the world. Only _then_ is it {176} other than
a mockery to feel, after we have failed to do our best, that an
irreparable opportunity is gone from the universe, the loss of which it
must forever after mourn.
If you insist that this is all superstition, that possibility is in the
eye of science and reason impossibility, and that if I act badly 'tis
that the universe was foredoomed to suffer this defect, you fall right
back into the dilemma, the labyrinth, of pessimism and subjectivism,
from out of whose toils we have just wound our way.
Now, we are of course free to fall back, if we please. For my own
part, though, whatever difficulties may beset the philosophy of
objective right and wrong, and the indeterminism it seems to imply,
determinism, with its alternative of pessimism or romanticism, contains
difficulties that are greater still. But you will remember that I
expressly repudiated awhile ago the pretension to offer any arguments
which could be coercive in a so-called scientific fashion in this
matter. And I consequently find myself, at the end of this long talk,
obliged to state my conclusions in an altogether personal way. This
personal method of appeal seems to be among the very conditions of the
problem; and the most any one can do is to confess as candidly as he
can the grounds for the faith that is in him, and leave his example to
work on others as it may.
Let me, then, without circumlocution say just this. The world is
enigmatical enough in all conscience, whatever theory we may take up
toward it. The indeterminism I defend, the free-will theory of popular
sense based on the judgment of regret, represents {177} that world as
vulnerable, and liable to be injured by certain of its parts if they
act wrong. And it represents their acting wrong as a matter of
possibility or accident, neither inevitable nor yet to be infallibly
warded off. In all this, it is a theory devoid either of transparency
or of stability. It gives us a pluralistic, restless universe, in
which no single point of view can ever take in the whole scene; and to
a mind possessed of the love of unity at any cost, it will, no doubt,
remain forever inacceptable. A friend with such a mind once told me
that the thought of my universe made him sick, like the sight of the
horrible motion of a mass of maggots in their carrion bed.
But while I freely admit that the pluralism and the restlessness are
repugnant and irrational in a certain way, I find that every
alternative to them is irrational in a deeper way. The indeterminism
with its maggots, if you please to speak so about it, offends only the
native absolutism of my intellect,--an absolutism which, after all,
perhaps, deserves to be snubbed and kept in check. But the determinism
with its necessary carrion, to continue the figure of speech, and with
no possible maggots to eat the latter up, violates my sense of moral
reality through and through. When, for example, I imagine such carrion
as the Brockton murder, I cannot conceive it as an act by which the
universe, as a whole, logically and necessarily expresses its nature
without shrinking from complicity with such a whole. And I
deliberately refuse to keep on terms of loyalty with the universe by
saying blankly that the murder, since it does flow from the nature of
the whole, is not carrion. There are some instinctive reactions which
{178} I, for one, will not tamper with. The only remaining
alternative, the attitude of gnostical romanticism, wrenches my
personal instincts in quite as violent a way. It falsifies the simple
objectivity of their deliverance. It makes the goose-flesh the murder
excites in me a sufficient reason for the perpetration of the crime.
It transforms life from a tragic reality into an insincere melodramatic
exhibition, as foul or as tawdry as any one's diseased curiosity
pleases to carry it out. And with its consecration of the 'roman
naturaliste' state of mind, and its enthronement of the baser crew of
Parisian _littérateurs_ among the eternally indispensable organs by
which the infinite spirit of things attains to that subjective
illumination which is the task of its life, it leaves me in presence of
a sort of subjective carrion considerably more noisome than the
objective carrion I called it in to take away.
No! better a thousand times, than such systematic corruption of our
moral sanity, the plainest pessimism, so that it be straightforward;
but better far than that the world of chance. Make as great an uproar
about chance as you please, I know that chance means pluralism and
nothing more. If some of the members of the pluralism are bad, the
philosophy of pluralism, whatever broad views it may deny me, permits
me, at least, to turn to the other members with a clean breast of
affection and an unsophisticated moral sense. And if I still wish to
think of the world as a totality, it lets me feel that a world with a
chance in it of being altogether good, even if the chance never come to
pass, is better than a world with no such chance at all. That 'chance'
whose very notion I am exhorted and conjured to banish {179} from my
view of the future as the suicide of reason concerning it, that
'chance' is--what? Just this,--the chance that in moral respects the
future may be other and better than the past has been. This is the
only chance we have any motive for supposing to exist. Shame, rather,
on its repudiation and its denial! For its presence is the vital air
which lets the world live, the salt which keeps it sweet.
And here I might legitimately stop, having expressed all I care to see
admitted by others to-night. But I know that if I do stop here,
misapprehensions will remain in the minds of some of you, and keep all
I have said from having its effect; so I judge it best to add a few
more words.
In the first place, in spite of all my explanations, the word 'chance'
will still be giving trouble. Though you may yourselves be adverse to
the deterministic doctrine, you wish a pleasanter word than 'chance' to
name the opposite doctrine by; and you very likely consider my
preference for such a word a perverse sort of a partiality on my part.
It certainly _is_ a bad word to make converts with; and you wish I had
not thrust it so butt-foremost at you,--you wish to use a milder term.
Well, I admit there may be just a dash of perversity in its choice.
The spectacle of the mere word-grabbing game played by the soft
determinists has perhaps driven me too violently the other way; and,
rather than be found wrangling with them for the good words, I am
willing to take the first bad one which comes along, provided it be
unequivocal. The question is of things, not of eulogistic names for
them; and the best word is the one that enables men to {180} know the
quickest whether they disagree or not about the things. But the word
'chance,' with its singular negativity, is just the word for this
purpose. Whoever uses it instead of 'freedom,' squarely and resolutely
gives up all pretence to control the things he says are free. For
_him_, he confesses that they are no better than mere chance would be.
It is a word of _impotence_, and is therefore the only sincere word we
can use, if, in granting freedom to certain things, we grant it
honestly, and really risk the game. "Who chooses me must give and
forfeit all he hath." Any other word permits of quibbling, and lets
us, after the fashion of the soft determinists, make a pretence of
restoring the caged bird to liberty with one hand, while with the other
we anxiously tie a string to its leg to make sure it does not get
beyond our sight.
But now you will bring up your final doubt. Does not the admission of
such an unguaranteed chance or freedom preclude utterly the notion of a
Providence governing the world? Does it not leave the fate of the
universe at the mercy of the chance-possibilities, and so far insecure?
Does it not, in short, deny the craving of our nature for an ultimate
peace behind all tempests, for a blue zenith above all clouds?
To this my answer must be very brief. The belief in free-will is not
in the least incompatible with the belief in Providence, provided you
do not restrict the Providence to fulminating nothing but _fatal_
decrees. If you allow him to provide possibilities as well as
actualities to the universe, and to carry on his own thinking in those
two categories just as we do ours, chances may be there, uncontrolled
even by him, and the course of the universe be really ambiguous; {181}
and yet the end of all things may be just what he intended it to be
from all eternity.
An analogy will make the meaning of this clear. Suppose two men before
a chessboard,--the one a novice, the other an expert player of the
game. The expert intends to beat. But he cannot foresee exactly what
any one actual move of his adversary may be. He knows, however, all
the _possible_ moves of the latter; and he knows in advance how to meet
each of them by a move of his own which leads in the direction of
victory. And the victory infallibly arrives, after no matter how
devious a course, in the one predestined form of check-mate to the
novice's king.
Let now the novice stand for us finite free agents, and the expert for
the infinite mind in which the universe lies. Suppose the latter to be
thinking out his universe before he actually creates it. Suppose him
to say, I will lead things to a certain end, but I will not _now_[10]
decide on all the steps thereto. At various points, ambiguous
possibilities shall be left {182} open, _either_ of which, at a given
instant, may become actual. But whichever branch of these bifurcations
become real, I know what I shall do at the _next_ bifurcation to keep
things from drifting away from the final result I intend.[11]
The creator's plan of the universe would thus be left blank as to many
of its actual details, but all possibilities would be marked down. The
realization of some of these would be left absolutely to chance; that
is, would only be determined when the moment of realization came.
Other possibilities would be _contingently_ determined; that is, their
decision would have to wait till it was seen how the matters of
absolute chance fell out. But the rest of the plan, including its
final upshot, would be rigorously determined once for all. So the
creator himself would not need to know _all_ the details of actuality
until they came; and at any time his own view of the world would be a
view partly of facts and partly of possibilities, exactly as ours is
now. Of one thing, however, he might be certain; and that is that his
world was safe, and that no matter how much it might zig-zag he could
surely bring it home at last.
{183}
Now, it is entirely immaterial, in this scheme, whether the creator
leave the absolute chance-possibilities to be decided by himself, each
when its proper moment arrives, or whether, on the contrary, he
alienate this power from himself, and leave the decision out and out to
finite creatures such as we men are. The great point is that the
possibilities are really _here_. Whether it be we who solve them, or
he working through us, at those soul-trying moments when fate's scales
seem to quiver, and good snatches the victory from evil or shrinks
nerveless from the fight, is of small account, so long as we admit that
the issue is decided nowhere else than here and now. _That_ is what
gives the palpitating reality to our moral life and makes it tingle, as
Mr. Mallock says, with so strange and elaborate an excitement. This
reality, this excitement, are what the determinisms, hard and soft
alike, suppress by their denial that _anything_ is decided here and
now, and their dogma that all things were foredoomed and settled long
ago. If it be so, may you and I then have been foredoomed to the error
of continuing to believe in liberty.[12] It is fortunate for the
winding up of controversy that in every discussion with determinism
this _argumentum ad hominem_ can be its adversary's last word.
[1] An Address to the Harvard Divinity Students, published in the
Unitarian Review for September, 1884.
[2] And I may now say Charles S. Peirce,--see the Monist, for 1892-93.
[3] "The whole history of popular beliefs about Nature refutes the
notion that the thought of a universal physical order can possibly have
arisen from the purely passive reception and association of particular
perceptions. Indubitable as it is that men infer from known cases to
unknown, it is equally certain that this procedure, if restricted to
the phenomenal materials that spontaneously offer themselves, would
never have led to the belief in a general uniformity, but only to the
belief that law and lawlessness rule the world in motley alternation.
From the point of view of strict experience, nothing exists but the sum
of particular perceptions, with their coincidences on the one hand,
their contradictions on the other.
"That there is more order in the world than appears at first sight is
not discovered; _till the order is looked for_. The first impulse to
look for it proceeds from practical needs: where ends must be attained,
or produce a result. But the practical need is only the first occasion
for our reflection on the conditions of true knowledge; and even were
there no such need, motives would still be present for carrying us
beyond the stage of mere association. For not with an equal interest,
or rather with an equal lack of interest, does man contemplate those
natural processes in which a thing is linked with its former mate, and
those in which it is linked to something else. _The former processes
harmonize with the conditions of his own thinking_: the latter do not.
In the former, his _concepts_, _general judgments_, and _inferences_
apply to reality: in the latter, they have no such application. And
thus the intellectual satisfaction which at first comes to him without
reflection, at last excites in him the conscious wish to find realized
throughout the entire phenomenal world those rational continuities,
uniformities, and necessities which are the fundamental element and
guiding principle of his own thought." (Sigwart, Logik, bd. 3, s. 382.)
[4] Speaking technically, it is a word with a positive denotation, but
a connotation that is negative. Other things must be silent about
_what_ it is: it alone can decide that point at the moment in which it
reveals itself.
[5] A favorite argument against free-will is that if it be true, a
man's murderer may as probably be his best friend as his worst enemy, a
mother be as likely to strangle as to suckle her first-born, and all of
us be as ready to jump from fourth-story windows as to go out of front
doors, etc. Users of this argument should properly be excluded from
debate till they learn what the real question is. 'Free-will' does not
say that everything that is physically conceivable is also morally
possible. It merely says that of alternatives that really _tempt_ our
will more than one is really possible. Of course, the alternatives
that do thus tempt our will are vastly fewer than the physical
possibilities we can coldly fancy. Persons really tempted often do
murder their best friends, mothers do strangle their first-born, people
do jump out of fourth-story windows, etc.
[6] To a reader who says he is satisfied with a pessimism, and has no
objection to thinking the whole bad, I have no more to say: he makes
fewer demands on the world than I, who, making them, wish to look a
little further before I give up all hope of having them satisfied. If,
however, all he means is that the badness of some parts does not
prevent his acceptance of a universe whose _other_ parts give him
satisfaction, I welcome him as an ally. He has abandoned the notion of
the _Whole_, which is the essence of deterministic monism, and views
things as a pluralism, just as I do in this paper.
[7] Compare Sir James Stephen's Essays by a Barrister, London, 1862,
pp. 138, 318.
[8] Cet univers est un spectacle que Dieu se donne à lui-même. Servons
les intentions du grand chorège en contribuant à rendre le spectacle
aussi brillant, aussi varié que possible.--RENAN.
[9] The burden, for example, of seeing to it that the _end_ of all our
righteousness be some positive universal gain.
[10] This of course leaves the creative mind subject to the law of
time. And to any one who insists on the timelessness of that mind I
have no reply to make. A mind to whom all time is simultaneously
present must see all things under the form of actuality, or under some
form to us unknown. If he thinks certain moments as ambiguous in their
content while future, he must simultaneously know how the ambiguity
will have been decided when they are past. So that none of his mental
judgments can possibly be called hypothetical, and his world is one
from which chance is excluded. Is not, however, the timeless mind
rather a gratuitous fiction? And is not the notion of eternity being
given at a stroke to omniscience only just another way of whacking upon
us the block-universe, and of denying that possibilities exist?--just
the point to be proved. To say that time is an illusory appearance is
only a roundabout manner of saying there is no real plurality, and that
the frame of things is an absolute unit. Admit plurality, and time may
be its form.
[11] And this of course means 'miraculous' interposition, but not
necessarily of the gross sort our fathers took such delight in
representing, and which has so lost its magic for us. Emerson quotes
some Eastern sage as saying that if evil were really done under the
sun, the sky would incontinently shrivel to a snakeskin and cast it out
in spasms. But, says Emerson, the spasms of Nature are years and
centuries; and it will tax man's patience to wait so long. We may
think of the reserved possibilities God keeps in his own hand, under as
invisible and molecular and slowly self-summating a form as we please.
We may think of them as counteracting human agencies which he inspires
_ad hoc_. In short, signs and wonders and convulsions of the earth and
sky are not the only neutralizers of obstruction to a god's plans of
which it is possible to think.
[12] As long as languages contain a future perfect tense, determinists,
following the bent of laziness or passion, the lines of least
resistance, can reply in that tense, saying, "It will have been fated,"
to the still small voice which urges an opposite course; and thus
excuse themselves from effort in a quite unanswerable way.
{184}
THE MORAL PHILOSOPHER AND THE MORAL LIFE.[1]
The main purpose of this paper is to show that there is no such thing
possible as an ethical philosophy dogmatically made up in advance. We
all help to determine the content of ethical philosophy so far as we
contribute to the race's moral life. In other words, there can be no
final truth in ethics any more than in physics, until the last man has
had his experience and said his say. In the one case as in the other,
however, the hypotheses which we now make while waiting, and the acts
to which they prompt us, are among the indispensable conditions which
determine what that 'say' shall be.
First of all, what is the position of him who seeks an ethical
philosophy? To begin with, he must be distinguished from all those who
are satisfied to be ethical sceptics. He _will_ not be a sceptic;
therefore so far from ethical scepticism being one possible fruit of
ethical philosophizing, it can only be regarded as that residual
alternative to all philosophy which from the outset menaces every
would-be philosopher who may give up the quest discouraged, and
renounce his original aim. That aim is to find an account of the moral
relations that obtain among things, which {185} will weave them into
the unity of a stable system, and make of the world what one may call a
genuine universe from the ethical point of view. So far as the world
resists reduction to the form of unity, so far as ethical propositions
seem unstable, so far does the philosopher fail of his ideal. The
subject-matter of his study is the ideals he finds existing in the
world; the purpose which guides him is this ideal of his own, of
getting them into a certain form. This ideal is thus a factor in
ethical philosophy whose legitimate presence must never be overlooked;
it is a positive contribution which the philosopher himself necessarily
makes to the problem. But it is his only positive contribution. At
the outset of his inquiry he ought to have no other ideals. Were he
interested peculiarly in the triumph of any one kind of good, he would
_pro tanto_ cease to be a judicial investigator, and become an advocate
for some limited element of the case.
There are three questions in ethics which must be kept apart. Let them
be called respectively the _psychological_ question, the _metaphysical_
question, and the _casuistic_ question. The psychological question
asks after the historical _origin_ of our moral ideas and judgments;
the metaphysical question asks what the very _meaning_ of the words
'good,' 'ill,' and 'obligation' are; the casuistic question asks what
is the _measure_ of the various goods and ills which men recognize, so
that the philosopher may settle the true order of human obligations.
I.
The psychological question is for most disputants the only question.
When your ordinary doctor of {186} divinity has proved to his own
satisfaction that an altogether unique faculty called 'conscience' must
be postulated to tell us what is right and what is wrong; or when your
popular-science enthusiast has proclaimed that 'apriorism' is an
exploded superstition, and that our moral judgments have gradually
resulted from the teaching of the environment, each of these persons
thinks that ethics is settled and nothing more is to be said. The
familiar pair of names, Intuitionist and Evolutionist, so commonly used
now to connote all possible differences in ethical opinion, really
refer to the psychological question alone. The discussion of this
question hinges so much upon particular details that it is impossible
to enter upon it at all within the limits of this paper. I will
therefore only express dogmatically my own belief, which is this,--that
the Benthams, the Mills, and the Barns have done a lasting service in
taking so many of our human ideals and showing how they must have
arisen from the association with acts of simple bodily pleasures and
reliefs from pain. Association with many remote pleasures will
unquestionably make a thing significant of goodness in our minds; and
the more vaguely the goodness is conceived of, the more mysterious will
its source appear to be. But it is surely impossible to explain all
our sentiments and preferences in this simple way. The more minutely
psychology studies human nature, the more clearly it finds there traces
of secondary affections, relating the impressions of the environment
with one another and with our impulses in quite different ways from
those mere associations of coexistence and succession which are
practically all that pure empiricism can admit. Take the love of
drunkenness; take bashfulness, the terror {187} of high places, the
tendency to sea-sickness, to faint at the sight of blood, the
susceptibility to musical sounds; take the emotion of the comical, the
passion for poetry, for mathematics, or for metaphysics,--no one of
these things can be wholly explained by either association or utility.
They _go with_ other things that can be so explained, no doubt; and
some of them are prophetic of future utilities, since there is nothing
in us for which some use may not be found. But their origin is in
incidental complications to our cerebral structure, a structure whose
original features arose with no reference to the perception of such
discords and harmonies as these.
Well, a vast number of our moral perceptions also are certainly of this
secondary and brain-born kind. They deal with directly felt fitnesses
between things, and often fly in the teeth of all the prepossessions of
habit and presumptions of utility. The moment you get beyond the
coarser and more commonplace moral maxims, the Decalogues and Poor
Richard's Almanacs, you fall into schemes and positions which to the
eye of common-sense are fantastic and overstrained. The sense for
abstract justice which some persons have is as excentric a variation,
from the natural-history point of view, as is the passion for music or
for the higher philosophical consistencies which consumes the soul of
others. The feeling of the inward dignity of certain spiritual
attitudes, as peace, serenity, simplicity, veracity; and of the
essential vulgarity of others, as querulousness, anxiety, egoistic
fussiness, etc.,--are quite inexplicable except by an innate preference
of the more ideal attitude for its own pure sake. The nobler thing
_tastes_ better, and that is all that we can say. {188} 'Experience'
of consequences may truly teach us what things are _wicked_, but what
have consequences to do with what is _mean_ and _vulgar_? If a man has
shot his wife's paramour, by reason of what subtile repugnancy in
things is it that we are so disgusted when we hear that the wife and
the husband have made it up and are living comfortably together again?
Or if the hypothesis were offered us of a world in which Messrs.
Fourier's and Bellamy's and Morris's Utopias should all be outdone, and
millions kept permanently happy on the one simple condition that a
certain lost soul on the far-off edge of things should lead a life of
lonely torture, what except a specifical and independent sort of
emotion can it be which would make us immediately feel, even though an
impulse arose within us to clutch at the happiness so offered, how
hideous a thing would be its enjoyment when deliberately accepted as
the fruit of such a bargain? To what, once more, but subtile
brain-born feelings of discord can be due all these recent protests
against the entire race-tradition of retributive justice?--I refer to
Tolstoi with his ideas of non-resistance, to Mr. Bellamy with his
substitution of oblivion for repentance (in his novel of Dr.
Heidenhain's Process), to M. Guyau with his radical condemnation of the
punitive ideal. All these subtileties of the moral sensibility go as
much beyond what can be ciphered out from the 'laws of association' as
the delicacies of sentiment possible between a pair of young lovers go
beyond such precepts of the 'etiquette to be observed during
engagement' as are printed in manuals of social form.
No! Purely inward forces are certainly at work here. All the higher,
more penetrating ideals are {189} revolutionary. They present
themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience than in
that of probable causes of future experience, factors to which the
environment and the lessons it has so far taught as must learn to bend.
This is all I can say of the psychological question now. In the last
chapter of a recent work[2] I have sought to prove in a general way the
existence, in our thought, of relations which do not merely repeat the
couplings of experience. Our ideals have certainly many sources. They
are not all explicable as signifying corporeal pleasures to be gained,
and pains to be escaped. And for having so constantly perceived this
psychological fact, we must applaud the intuitionist school. Whether
or not such applause must be extended to that school's other
characteristics will appear as we take up the following questions.
The next one in order is the metaphysical question, of what we mean by
the words 'obligation,' 'good,' and 'ill.'
II.
First of all, it appears that such words can have no application or
relevancy in a world in which no sentient life exists. Imagine an
absolutely material world, containing only physical and chemical facts,
and existing from eternity without a God, without even an interested
spectator: would there be any sense in saying of that world that one of
its states is better than another? Or if there were two such worlds
possible, would there be any rhyme or reason in calling one good and
the other bad,--good or {190} bad positively, I mean, and apart from
the fact that one might relate itself better than the other to the
philosopher's private interests? But we must leave these private
interests out of the account, for the philosopher is a mental fact, and
we are asking whether goods and evils and obligations exist in physical
facts _per se_. Surely there is no _status_ for good and evil to exist
in, in a purely insentient world. How can one physical fact,
considered simply as a physical fact, be 'better' than another?
Betterness is not a physical relation. In its mere material capacity,
a thing can no more be good or bad than it can be pleasant or painful.
Good for what? Good for the production of another physical fact, do
you say? But what in a purely physical universe demands the production
of that other fact? Physical facts simply _are_ or are _not_; and
neither when present or absent, can they be supposed to make demands.
If they do, they can only do so by having desires; and then they have
ceased to be purely physical facts, and have become facts of conscious
sensibility. Goodness, badness, and obligation must be _realised_
somewhere in order really to exist; and the first step in ethical
philosophy is to see that no merely inorganic 'nature of things' can
realize them. Neither moral relations nor the moral law can swing _in
vacuo_. Their only habitat can be a mind which feels them; and no
world composed of merely physical facts can possibly be a world to
which ethical propositions apply.
The moment one sentient being, however, is made a part of the universe,
there is a chance for goods and evils really to exist. Moral relations
now have their _status_, in that being's consciousness. So far as he
feels anything to be good, he _makes_ it good. It {191} _is_ good, for
him; and being good for him, is absolutely good, for he is the sole
creator of values in that universe, and outside of his opinion things
have no moral character at all.
In such a universe as that it would of course be absurd to raise the
question of whether the solitary thinker's judgments of good and ill
are true or not. Truth supposes a standard outside of the thinker to
which he must conform; but here the thinker is a sort of divinity,
subject to no higher judge. Let us call the supposed universe which he
inhabits a _moral solitude_. In such a moral solitude it is clear that
there can be no outward obligation, and that the only trouble the
god-like thinker is liable to have will be over the consistency of his
own several ideals with one another. Some of these will no doubt be
more pungent and appealing than the rest, their goodness will have a
profounder, more penetrating taste; they will return to haunt him with
more obstinate regrets if violated. So the thinker will have to order
his life with them as its chief determinants, or else remain inwardly
discordant and unhappy. Into whatever equilibrium he may settle,
though, and however he may straighten out his system, it will be a
right system; for beyond the facts of his own subjectivity there is
nothing moral in the world.
If now we introduce a second thinker with his likes and dislikes into
the universe, the ethical situation becomes much more complex, and
several possibilities are immediately seen to obtain.
One of these is that the thinkers may ignore each other's attitude
about good and evil altogether, and each continue to indulge his own
preferences, indifferent to what the other may feel or do. In such a
{192} case we have a world with twice as much of the ethical quality in
it as our moral solitude, only it is without ethical unity. The same
object is good or bad there, according as you measure it by the view
which this one or that one of the thinkers takes. Nor can you find any
possible ground in such a world for saying that one thinker's opinion
is more correct than the other's, or that either has the truer moral
sense. Such a world, in short, is not a moral universe but a moral
dualism. Not only is there no single point of view within it from
which the values of things can be unequivocally judged, but there is
not even a demand for such a point of view, since the two thinkers are
supposed to be indifferent to each other's thoughts and acts. Multiply
the thinkers into a pluralism, and we find realized for us in the
ethical sphere something like that world which the antique sceptics
conceived of,--in which individual minds are the measures of all
things, and in which no one 'objective' truth, but only a multitude of
'subjective' opinions, can be found.
But this is the kind of world with which the philosopher, so long as he
holds to the hope of a philosophy, will not put up. Among the various
ideals represented, there must be, he thinks, some which have the more
truth or authority; and to these the others _ought_ to yield, so that
system and subordination may reign. Here in the word 'ought' the
notion of _obligation_ comes emphatically into view, and the next thing
in order must be to make its meaning clear.
Since the outcome of the discussion so far has been to show us that
nothing can be good or right except {193} so far as some consciousness
feels it to be good or thinks it to be right, we perceive on the very
threshold that the real superiority and authority which are postulated
by the philosopher to reside in some of the opinions, and the really
inferior character which he supposes must belong to others, cannot be
explained by any abstract moral 'nature of things' existing
antecedently to the concrete thinkers themselves with their ideals.
Like the positive attributes good and bad, the comparative ones better
and worse must be _realised_ in order to be real. If one ideal
judgment be objectively better than another, that betterness must be
made flesh by being lodged concretely in some one's actual perception.
It cannot float in the atmosphere, for it is not a sort of
meteorological phenomenon, like the aurora borealis or the zodiacal
light. Its _esse_ is _percipi_, like the _esse_ of the ideals
themselves between which it obtains. The philosopher, therefore, who
seeks to know which ideal ought to have supreme weight and which one
ought to be subordinated, must trace the _ought_ itself to the _de
facto_ constitution of some existing consciousness, behind which, as
one of the data of the universe, he as a purely ethical philosopher is
unable to go. This consciousness must make the one ideal right by
feeling it to be right, the other wrong by feeling it to be wrong. But
now what particular consciousness in the universe _can_ enjoy this
prerogative of obliging others to conform to a rule which it lays down?
If one of the thinkers were obviously divine, while all the rest were
human, there would probably be no practical dispute about the matter.
The divine thought would be the model, to which the others should
conform. But still the theoretic question {194} would remain, What is
the ground of the obligation, even here?
In our first essays at answering this question, there is an inevitable
tendency to slip into an assumption which ordinary men follow when they
are disputing with one another about questions of good and bad. They
imagine an abstract moral order in which the objective truth resides;
and each tries to prove that this pre-existing order is more accurately
reflected in his own ideas than in those of his adversary. It is
because one disputant is backed by this overarching abstract order that
we think the other should submit. Even so, when it is a question no
longer of two finite thinkers, but of God and ourselves,--we follow our
usual habit, and imagine a sort of _de jure_ relation, which antedates
and overarches the mere facts, and would make it right that we should
conform our thoughts to God's thoughts, even though he made no claim to
that effect, and though we preferred _de facto_ to go on thinking for
ourselves.
But the moment we take a steady look at the question, _we see not only
that without a claim actually made by some concrete person there can be
no obligation, but that there is some obligation wherever there is a
claim_. Claim and obligation are, in fact, coextensive terms; they
cover each other exactly. Our ordinary attitude of regarding ourselves
as subject to an overarching system of moral relations, true 'in
themselves,' is therefore either an out-and-out superstition, or else
it must be treated as a merely provisional abstraction from that real
Thinker in whose actual demand upon us to think as he does our
obligation must be ultimately based. In a theistic-ethical philosophy
that thinker in question is, of {195} course, the Deity to whom the
existence of the universe is due.
I know well how hard it is for those who are accustomed to what I have
called the superstitious view, to realize that every _de facto_ claim
creates in so far forth an obligation. We inveterately think that
something which we call the 'validity' of the claim is what gives to it
its obligatory character, and that this validity is something outside
of the claim's mere existence as a matter of fact. It rains down upon
the claim, we think, from some sublime dimension of being, which the
moral law inhabits, much as upon the steel of the compass-needle the
influence of the Pole rains down from out of the starry heavens. But
again, how can such an inorganic abstract character of imperativeness,
additional to the imperativeness which is in the concrete claim itself,
_exist_? Take any demand, however slight, which any creature, however
weak, may make. Ought it not, for its own sole sake, to be satisfied?
If not, prove why not. The only possible kind of proof you could
adduce would be the exhibition of another creature who should make a
demand that ran the other way. The only possible reason there can be
why any phenomenon ought to exist is that such a phenomenon actually is
desired. Any desire is imperative to the extent of its amount; it
_makes_ itself valid by the fact that it exists at all. Some desires,
truly enough, are small desires; they are put forward by insignificant
persons, and we customarily make light of the obligations which they
bring. But the fact that such personal demands as these impose small
obligations does not keep the largest obligations from being personal
demands.
If we must talk impersonally, to be sure we can say {196} that 'the
universe' requires, exacts, or makes obligatory such or such an action,
whenever it expresses itself through the desires of such or such a
creature. But it is better not to talk about the universe in this
personified way, unless we believe in a universal or divine
consciousness which actually exists. If there be such a consciousness,
then its demands carry the most of obligation simply because they are
the greatest in amount. But it is even then not _abstractly right_
that we should respect them. It is only concretely right,--or right
after the fact, and by virtue of the fact, that they are actually made.
Suppose we do not respect them, as seems largely to be the case in this
queer world. That ought not to be, we say; that is wrong. But in what
way is this fact of wrongness made more acceptable or intelligible when
we imagine it to consist rather in the laceration of an _à priori_
ideal order than in the disappointment of a living personal God? Do
we, perhaps, think that we cover God and protect him and make his
impotence over us less ultimate, when we back him up with this _à
priori_ blanket from which he may draw some warmth of further appeal?
But the only force of appeal to _us_, which either a living God or an
abstract ideal order can wield, is found in the 'everlasting ruby
vaults' of our own human hearts, as they happen to beat responsive and
not irresponsive to the claim. So far as they do feel it when made by
a living consciousness, it is life answering to life. A claim thus
livingly acknowledged is acknowledged with a solidity and fulness which
no thought of an 'ideal' backing can render more complete; while if, on
the other hand, the heart's response is withheld, the stubborn
phenomenon is there of an impotence in the claims {197} which the
universe embodies, which no talk about an eternal nature of things can
gloze over or dispel. An ineffective _à priori_ order is as impotent a
thing as an ineffective God; and in the eye of philosophy, it is as
hard a thing to explain.
We may now consider that what we distinguished as the metaphysical
question in ethical philosophy is sufficiently answered, and that we
have learned what the words 'good,' 'bad,' and 'obligation' severally
mean. They mean no absolute natures, independent of personal support.
They are objects of feeling and desire, which have no foothold or
anchorage in Being, apart from the existence of actually living minds.
Wherever such minds exist, with judgments of good and ill, and demands
upon one another, there is an ethical world in its essential features.
Were all other things, gods and men and starry heavens, blotted out
from this universe, and were there left but one rock with two loving
souls upon it, that rock would have as thoroughly moral a constitution
as any possible world which the eternities and immensities could
harbor. It would be a tragic constitution, because the rock's
inhabitants would die. But while they lived, there would be real good
things and real bad things in the universe; there would be obligations,
claims, and expectations; obediences, refusals, and disappointments;
compunctions and longings for harmony to come again, and inward peace
of conscience when it was restored; there would, in short, be a moral
life, whose active energy would have no limit but the intensity of
interest in each other with which the hero and heroine might be endowed.
{198}
We, on this terrestrial globe, so far as the visible facts go, are just
like the inhabitants of such a rock. Whether a God exist, or whether
no God exist, in yon blue heaven above us bent, we form at any rate an
ethical republic here below. And the first reflection which this leads
to is that ethics have as genuine and real a foothold in a universe
where the highest consciousness is human, as in a universe where there
is a God as well. 'The religion of humanity' affords a basis for
ethics as well as theism does. Whether the purely human system can
gratify the philosopher's demand as well as the other is a different
question, which we ourselves must answer ere we close.
III.
The last fundamental question in Ethics was, it will be remembered, the
_casuistic_ question. Here we are, in a world where the existence of a
divine thinker has been and perhaps always will be doubted by some of
the lookers-on, and where, in spite of the presence of a large number
of ideals in which human beings agree, there are a mass of others about
which no general consensus obtains. It is hardly necessary to present
a literary picture of this, for the facts are too well known. The wars
of the flesh and the spirit in each man, the concupiscences of
different individuals pursuing the same unshareable material or social
prizes, the ideals which contrast so according to races, circumstances,
temperaments, philosophical beliefs, etc.,--all form a maze of
apparently inextricable confusion with no obvious Ariadne's thread to
lead one out. Yet the philosopher, just because he is a philosopher,
adds his own peculiar ideal to the confusion {199} (with which if he
were willing to be a sceptic he would be passably content), and insists
that over all these individual opinions there is a _system of truth_
which he can discover if he only takes sufficient pains.
We stand ourselves at present in the place of that philosopher, and
must not fail to realize all the features that the situation comports.
In the first place we will not be sceptics; we hold to it that there is
a truth to be ascertained. But in the second place we have just gained
the insight that that truth cannot be a self-proclaiming set of laws,
or an abstract 'moral reason,' but can only exist in act, or in the
shape of an opinion held by some thinker really to be found. There is,
however, no visible thinker invested with authority. Shall we then
simply proclaim our own ideals as the lawgiving ones? No; for if we
are true philosophers we must throw our own spontaneous ideals, even
the dearest, impartially in with that total mass of ideals which are
fairly to be judged. But how then can we as philosophers ever find a
test; how avoid complete moral scepticism on the one hand, and on the
other escape bringing a wayward personal standard of our own along with
us, on which we simply pin our faith?
The dilemma is a hard one, nor does it grow a bit more easy as we
revolve it in our minds. The entire undertaking of the philosopher
obliges him to seek an impartial test. That test, however, must be
incarnated in the demand of some actually existent person; and how can
he pick out the person save by an act in which his own sympathies and
prepossessions are implied?
One method indeed presents itself, and has as a matter of history been
taken by the more serious {200} ethical schools. If the heap of things
demanded proved on inspection less chaotic than at first they seemed,
if they furnished their own relative test and measure, then the
casuistic problem would be solved. If it were found that all goods
_quâ_ goods contained a common essence, then the amount of this essence
involved in any one good would show its rank in the scale of goodness,
and order could be quickly made; for this essence would be _the_ good
upon which all thinkers were agreed, the relatively objective and
universal good that the philosopher seeks. Even his own private ideals
would be measured by their share of it, and find their rightful place
among the rest.
Various essences of good have thus been found and proposed as bases of
the ethical system. Thus, to be a mean between two extremes; to be
recognized by a special intuitive faculty; to make the agent happy for
the moment; to make others as well as him happy in the long run; to add
to his perfection or dignity; to harm no one; to follow from reason or
flow from universal law; to be in accordance with the will of God; to
promote the survival of the human species on this planet,--are so many
tests, each of which has been maintained by somebody to constitute the
essence of all good things or actions so far as they are good.
No one of the measures that have been actually proposed has, however,
given general satisfaction. Some are obviously not universally present
in all cases,--_e. g._, the character of harming no one, or that of
following a universal law; for the best course is often cruel; and many
acts are reckoned good on the sole condition that they be exceptions,
and serve not as examples of a universal law. Other {201} characters,
such as following the will of God, are unascertainable and vague.
Others again, like survival, are quite indeterminate in their
consequences, and leave us in the lurch where we most need their help:
a philosopher of the Sioux Nation, for example, will be certain to use
the survival-criterion in a very different way from ourselves. The
best, on the whole, of these marks and measures of goodness seems to be
the capacity to bring happiness. But in order not to break down
fatally, this test must be taken to cover innumerable acts and impulses
that never _aim_ at happiness; so that, after all, in seeking for a
universal principle we inevitably are carried onward to the most
universal principle,--that _the essence of good is simply to satisfy
demand_. The demand may be for anything under the sun. There is
really no more ground for supposing that all our demands can be
accounted for by one universal underlying kind of motive than there is
ground for supposing that all physical phenomena are cases of a single
law. The elementary forces in ethics are probably as plural as those
of physics are. The various ideals have no common character apart from
the fact that they are ideals. No single abstract principle can be so
used as to yield to the philosopher anything like a scientifically
accurate and genuinely useful casuistic scale.
A look at another peculiarity of the ethical universe, as we find it,
will still further show us the philosopher's perplexities. As a purely
theoretic problem, namely, the casuistic question would hardly ever
come up at all. If the ethical philosopher were only asking after the
best _imaginable_ system of goods he would indeed have an easy task;
for all demands as {202} such are _primâ facie_ respectable, and the
best simply imaginary world would be one in which _every_ demand was
gratified as soon as made. Such a world would, however, have to have a
physical constitution entirely different from that of the one which we
inhabit. It would need not only a space, but a time, 'of
_n_-dimensions,' to include all the acts and experiences incompatible
with one another here below, which would then go on in
conjunction,--such as spending our money, yet growing rich; taking our
holiday, yet getting ahead with our work; shooting and fishing, yet
doing no hurt to the beasts; gaining no end of experience, yet keeping
our youthful freshness of heart; and the like. There can be no
question that such a system of things, however brought about, would be
the absolutely ideal system; and that if a philosopher could create
universes _à priori_, and provide all the mechanical conditions, that
is the sort of universe which he should unhesitatingly create.
But this world of ours is made on an entirely different pattern, and
the casuistic question here is most tragically practical. The actually
possible in this world is vastly narrower than all that is demanded;
and there is always a _pinch_ between the ideal and the actual which
can only be got through by leaving part of the ideal behind. There is
hardly a good which we can imagine except as competing for the
possession of the same bit of space and time with some other imagined
good. Every end of desire that presents itself appears exclusive of
some other end of desire. Shall a man drink and smoke, _or_ keep his
nerves in condition?--he cannot do both. Shall he follow his fancy for
Amelia, _or_ for Henrietta?--both cannot be the choice of his heart.
Shall he have the {203} dear old Republican party, _or_ a spirit of
unsophistication in public affairs?--he cannot have both, etc. So that
the ethical philosopher's demand for the right scale of subordination
in ideals is the fruit of an altogether practical need. Some part of
the ideal must be butchered, and he needs to know which part. It is a
tragic situation, and no mere speculative conundrum, with which he has
to deal.
Now we are blinded to the real difficulty of the philosopher's task by
the fact that we are born into a society whose ideals are largely
ordered already. If we follow the ideal which is conventionally
highest, the others which we butcher either die and do not return to
haunt us; or if they come back and accuse us of murder, every one
applauds us for turning to them a deaf ear. In other words, our
environment encourages us not to be philosophers but partisans. The
philosopher, however, cannot, so long as he clings to his own ideal of
objectivity, rule out any ideal from being heard. He is confident, and
rightly confident, that the simple taking counsel of his own intuitive
preferences would be certain to end in a mutilation of the fulness of
the truth. The poet Heine is said to have written 'Bunsen' in the
place of 'Gott' in his copy of that author's work entitled "God in
History," so as to make it read 'Bunsen in der Geschichte.' Now, with
no disrespect to the good and learned Baron, is it not safe to say that
any single philosopher, however wide his sympathies, must be just such
a Bunsen in der Geschichte of the moral world, so soon as he attempts
to put his own ideas of order into that howling mob of desires, each
struggling to get breathing-room for the ideal to which it clings? The
very best of men must not only be insensible, but {204} be ludicrously
and peculiarly insensible, to many goods. As a militant, fighting
free-handed that the goods to which he is sensible may not be submerged
and lost from out of life, the philosopher, like every other human
being, is in a natural position. But think of Zeno and of Epicurus,
think of Calvin and of Paley, think of Kant and Schopenhauer, of
Herbert Spencer and John Henry Newman, no longer as one-sided champions
of special ideals, but as schoolmasters deciding what all must
think,--and what more grotesque topic could a satirist wish for on
which to exercise his pen? The fabled attempt of Mrs. Partington to
arrest the rising tide of the North Atlantic with her broom was a
reasonable spectacle compared with their effort to substitute the
content of their clean-shaven systems for that exuberant mass of goods
with which all human nature is in travail, and groaning to bring to the
light of day. Think, furthermore, of such individual moralists, no
longer as mere schoolmasters, but as pontiffs armed with the temporal
power, and having authority in every concrete case of conflict to order
which good shall be butchered and which shall be suffered to
survive,--and the notion really turns one pale. All one's slumbering
revolutionary instincts waken at the thought of any single moralist
wielding such powers of life and death. Better chaos forever than an
order based on any closet-philosopher's rule, even though he were the
most enlightened possible member of his tribe. No! if the philosopher
is to keep his judicial position, he must never become one of the
parties to the fray.
What can he do, then, it will now be asked, except to fall back on
scepticism and give up the notion of being a philosopher at all?
{205}
But do we not already see a perfectly definite path of escape which is
open to him just because he is a philosopher, and not the champion of
one particular ideal? Since everything which is demanded is by that
fact a good, must not the guiding principle for ethical philosophy
(since all demands conjointly cannot be satisfied in this poor world)
be simply to satisfy at all times _as many demands as we can_? That
act must be the best act, accordingly, which makes for the best whole,
in the sense of awakening the least sum of dissatisfactions. In the
casuistic scale, therefore, those ideals must be written highest which
_prevail at the least cost_, or by whose realization the least possible
number of other ideals are destroyed. Since victory and defeat there
must be, the victory to be philosophically prayed for is that of the
more inclusive side,--of the side which even in the hour of triumph
will to some degree do justice to the ideals in which the vanquished
party's interests lay. The course of history is nothing but the story
of men's struggles from generation to generation to find the more and
more inclusive order. _Invent some manner_ of realizing your own
ideals which will also satisfy the alien demands,--that and that only
is the path of peace! Following this path, society has shaken itself
into one sort of relative equilibrium after another by a series of
social discoveries quite analogous to those of science. Polyandry and
polygamy and slavery, private warfare and liberty to kill, judicial
torture and arbitrary royal power have slowly succumbed to actually
aroused complaints; and though some one's ideals are unquestionably the
worse off for each improvement, yet a vastly greater total number of
them find shelter in our civilized society than in the older {206}
savage ways. So far then, and up to date, the casuistic scale is made
for the philosopher already far better than he can ever make it for
himself. An experiment of the most searching kind has proved that the
laws and usages of the land are what yield the maximum of satisfaction
to the thinkers taken all together. The presumption in cases of
conflict must always be in favor of the conventionally recognized good.
The philosopher must be a conservative, and in the construction of his
casuistic scale must put the things most in accordance with the customs
of the community on top.
And yet if he be a true philosopher he must see that there is nothing
final in any actually given equilibrium of human ideals, but that, as
our present laws and customs have fought and conquered other past ones,
so they will in their turn be overthrown by any newly discovered order
which will hush up the complaints that they still give rise to, without
producing others louder still. "Rules are made for man, not man for
rules,"--that one sentence is enough to immortalize Green's Prolegomena
to Ethics. And although a man always risks much when he breaks away
from established rules and strives to realize a larger ideal whole than
they permit, yet the philosopher must allow that it is at all times
open to any one to make the experiment, provided he fear not to stake
his life and character upon the throw. The pinch is always here. Pent
in under every system of moral rules are innumerable persons whom it
weighs upon, and goods which it represses; and these are always
rumbling and grumbling in the background, and ready for any issue by
which they may get free. See the abuses which the {207} institution of
private property covers, so that even to-day it is shamelessly asserted
among us that one of the prime functions of the national government is
to help the adroiter citizens to grow rich. See the unnamed and
unnamable sorrows which the tyranny, on the whole so beneficent, of the
marriage-institution brings to so many, both of the married and the
unwed. See the wholesale loss of opportunity under our _régime_ of
so-called equality and industrialism, with the drummer and the
counter-jumper in the saddle, for so many faculties and graces which
could flourish in the feudal world. See our kindliness for the humble
and the outcast, how it wars with that stern weeding-out which until
now has been the condition of every perfection in the breed. See
everywhere the struggle and the squeeze; and ever-lastingly the problem
how to make them less. The anarchists, nihilists, and free-lovers; the
free-silverites, socialists, and single-tax men; the free-traders and
civil-service reformers; the prohibitionists and anti-vivisectionists;
the radical darwinians with their idea of the suppression of the
weak,--these and all the conservative sentiments of society arrayed
against them, are simply deciding through actual experiment by what
sort of conduct the maximum amount of good can be gained and kept in
this world. These experiments are to be judged, not _à priori_, but by
actually finding, after the fact of their making, how much more outcry
or how much appeasement comes about. What closet-solutions can
possibly anticipate the result of trials made on such a scale? Or what
can any superficial theorist's judgment be worth, in a world where
every one of hundreds of ideals has its special champion already
provided {208} in the shape of some genius expressly born to feel it,
and to fight to death in its behalf? The pure philosopher can only
follow the windings of the spectacle, confident that the line of least
resistance will always be towards the richer and the more inclusive
arrangement, and that by one tack after another some approach to the
kingdom of heaven is incessantly made.
IV.
All this amounts to saying that, so far as the casuistic question goes,
ethical science is just like physical science, and instead of being
deducible all at once from abstract principles, must simply bide its
time, and be ready to revise its conclusions from day to day. The
presumption of course, in both sciences, always is that the vulgarly
accepted opinions are true, and the right casuistic order that which
public opinion believes in; and surely it would be folly quite as
great, in most of us, to strike out independently and to aim at
originality in ethics as in physics. Every now and then, however, some
one is born with the right to be original, and his revolutionary
thought or action may bear prosperous fruit. He may replace old 'laws
of nature' by better ones; he may, by breaking old moral rules in a
certain place, bring in a total condition of things more ideal than
would have followed had the rules been kept.
On the whole, then, we must conclude that no philosophy of ethics is
possible in the old-fashioned absolute sense of the term. Everywhere
the ethical philosopher must wait on facts. The thinkers who create
the ideals come he knows not whence, their sensibilities are evolved he
knows not how; and the {209} question as to which of two conflicting
ideals will give the best universe then and there, can be answered by
him only through the aid of the experience of other men. I said some
time ago, in treating of the 'first' question, that the intuitional
moralists deserve credit for keeping most clearly to the psychological
facts. They do much to spoil this merit on the whole, however, by
mixing with it that dogmatic temper which, by absolute distinctions and
unconditional 'thou shalt nots,' changes a growing, elastic, and
continuous life into a superstitious system of relics and dead bones.
In point of fact, there are no absolute evils, and there are no
non-moral goods; and the _highest_ ethical life--however few may be
called to bear its burdens--consists at all times in the breaking of
rules which have grown too narrow for the actual case. There is but
one unconditional commandment, which is that we should seek
incessantly, with fear and trembling, so to vote and to act as to bring
about the very largest total universe of good which we can see.
Abstract rules indeed can help; but they help the less in proportion as
our intuitions are more piercing, and our vocation is the stronger for
the moral life. For every real dilemma is in literal strictness a
unique situation; and the exact combination of ideals realized and
ideals disappointed which each decision creates is always a universe
without a precedent, and for which no adequate previous rule exists.
The philosopher, then, _quâ_ philosopher, is no better able to
determine the best universe in the concrete emergency than other men.
He sees, indeed, somewhat better than most men, what the question
always is,--not a question of this good or that good simply taken, but
of the two total {210} universes with which these goods respectively
belong. He knows that he must vote always for the richer universe, for
the good which seems most organizable, most fit to enter into complex
combinations, most apt to be a member of a more inclusive whole. But
which particular universe this is he cannot know for certain in
advance; he only knows that if he makes a bad mistake the cries of the
wounded will soon inform him of the fact. In all this the philosopher
is just like the rest of us non-philosophers, so far as we are just and
sympathetic instinctively, and so far as we are open to the voice of
complaint. His function is in fact indistinguishable from that of the
best kind of statesman at the present day. His books upon ethics,
therefore, so far as they truly touch the moral life, must more and
more ally themselves with a literature which is confessedly tentative
and suggestive rather than dogmatic,--I mean with novels and dramas of
the deeper sort, with sermons, with books on statecraft and
philanthropy and social and economical reform. Treated in this way
ethical treatises may be voluminous and luminous as well; but they
never can be _final_, except in their abstractest and vaguest features;
and they must more and more abandon the old-fashioned, clear-cut, and
would-be 'scientific' form.
V.
The chief of all the reasons why concrete ethics cannot be final is
that they have to wait on metaphysical and theological beliefs. I said
some time back that real ethical relations existed in a purely human
world. They would exist even in what we called a moral solitude if the
thinker had various {211} ideals which took hold of him in turn. His
self of one day would make demands on his self of another; and some of
the demands might be urgent and tyrannical, while others were gentle
and easily put aside. We call the tyrannical demands _imperatives_.
If we ignore these we do not hear the last of it. The good which we
have wounded returns to plague us with interminable crops of
consequential damages, compunctions, and regrets. Obligation can thus
exist inside a single thinker's consciousness; and perfect peace can
abide with him only so far as he lives according to some sort of a
casuistic scale which keeps his more imperative goods on top. It is
the nature of these goods to be cruel to their rivals. Nothing shall
avail when weighed in the balance against them. They call out all the
mercilessness in our disposition, and do not easily forgive us if we
are so soft-hearted as to shrink from sacrifice in their behalf.
The deepest difference, practically, in the moral life of man is the
difference between the easy-going and the strenuous mood. When in the
easy-going mood the shrinking from present ill is our ruling
consideration. The strenuous mood, on the contrary, makes us quite
indifferent to present ill, if only the greater ideal be attained. The
capacity for the strenuous mood probably lies slumbering in every man,
but it has more difficulty in some than in others in waking up. It
needs the wilder passions to arouse it, the big fears, loves, and
indignations; or else the deeply penetrating appeal of some one of the
higher fidelities, like justice, truth, or freedom. Strong relief is a
necessity of its vision; and a world where all the mountains are
brought down and all the valleys are {212} exalted is no congenial
place for its habitation. This is why in a solitary thinker this mood
might slumber on forever without waking. His various ideals, known to
him to be mere preferences of his own, are too nearly of the same
denominational value: he can play fast or loose with them at will.
This too is why, in a merely human world without a God, the appeal to
our moral energy falls short of its maximal stimulating power. Life,
to be sure, is even in such a world a genuinely ethical symphony; but
it is played in the compass of a couple of poor octaves, and the
infinite scale of values fails to open up. Many of us, indeed,--like
Sir James Stephen in those eloquent 'Essays by a Barrister,'--would
openly laugh at the very idea of the strenuous mood being awakened in
us by those claims of remote posterity which constitute the last appeal
of the religion of humanity. We do not love these men of the future
keenly enough; and we love them perhaps the less the more we hear of
their evolutionized perfection, their high average longevity and
education, their freedom from war and crime, their relative immunity
from pain and zymotic disease, and all their other negative
superiorities. This is all too finite, we say; we see too well the
vacuum beyond. It lacks the note of infinitude and mystery, and may
all be dealt with in the don't-care mood. No need of agonizing
ourselves or making others agonize for these good creatures just at
present.
When, however, we believe that a God is there, and that he is one of
the claimants, the infinite perspective opens out. The scale of the
symphony is incalculably prolonged. The more imperative ideals now
begin to speak with an altogether new objectivity and significance, and
to utter the penetrating, shattering, {213} tragically challenging note
of appeal. They ring out like the call of Victor Hugo's alpine eagle,
"qui parle au précipice et que le gouffre entend," and the strenuous
mood awakens at the sound. It saith among the trumpets, ha, ha! it
smelleth the battle afar off, the thunder of the captains and the
shouting. Its blood is up; and cruelty to the lesser claims, so far
from being a deterrent element, does but add to the stern joy with
which it leaps to answer to the greater. All through history, in the
periodical conflicts of puritanism with the don't-care temper, we see
the antagonism of the strenuous and genial moods, and the contrast
between the ethics of infinite and mysterious obligation from on high,
and those of prudence and the satisfaction of merely finite need.
The capacity of the strenuous mood lies so deep down among our natural
human possibilities that even if there were no metaphysical or
traditional grounds for believing in a God, men would postulate one
simply as a pretext for living hard, and getting out of the game of
existence its keenest possibilities of zest. Our attitude towards
concrete evils is entirely different in a world where we believe there
are none but finite demanders, from what it is in one where we joyously
face tragedy for an infinite demander's sake. Every sort of energy and
endurance, of courage and capacity for handling life's evils, is set
free in those who have religious faith. For this reason the strenuous
type of character will on the battle-field of human history always
outwear the easy-going type, and religion will drive irreligion to the
wall.
It would seem, too,--and this is my final conclusion,--that the stable
and systematic moral universe {214} for which the ethical philosopher
asks is fully possible only in a world where there is a divine thinker
with all-enveloping demands. If such a thinker existed, his way of
subordinating the demands to one another would be the finally valid
casuistic scale; his claims would be the most appealing; his ideal
universe would be the most inclusive realizable whole. If he now
exist, then actualized in his thought already must be that ethical
philosophy which we seek as the pattern which our own must evermore
approach.[3] In the interests of our own ideal of systematically
unified moral truth, therefore, we, as would-be philosophers, must
postulate a divine thinker, and pray for the victory of the religious
cause. Meanwhile, exactly what the thought of the infinite thinker may
be is hidden from us even were we sure of his existence; so that our
postulation of him after all serves only to let loose in us the
strenuous mood. But this is what it does in all men, even those who
have no interest in philosophy. The ethical philosopher, therefore,
whenever he ventures to say which course of action is the best, is on
no essentially different level from the common man. "See, I have set
before thee this day life and good, and death and evil; therefore,
choose life that thou and thy seed may live,"--when this challenge
comes to us, it is simply our total character and personal genius that
are on trial; and if we invoke any so-called philosophy, our choice and
use of that also are but revelations of our personal aptitude or
incapacity for moral life. From this unsparing practical ordeal no
professor's lectures and no array of books {215} can save us. The
solving word, for the learned and the unlearned man alike, lies in the
last resort in the dumb willingnesses and unwillingnesses of their
interior characters, and nowhere else. It is not in heaven, neither is
it beyond the sea; but the word is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth
and in thy heart, that thou mayest do it.
[1] An Address to the Yale Philosophical Club, published in the
International Journal of Ethics, April, 1891.
[2] The Principles of Psychology, New York, H. Holt & Co, 1890.
[3] All this is set forth with great freshness and force in the work of
my colleague, Professor Josiah Royce: "The Religious Aspect of
Philosophy." Boston, 1885.
{216}
GREAT MEN AND THEIR ENVIRONMENT.[1]
A remarkable parallel, which I think has never been noticed, obtains
between the facts of social evolution on the one hand, and of
zoölogical evolution as expounded by Mr. Darwin on the other.
It will be best to prepare the ground for my thesis by a few very
general remarks on the method of getting at scientific truth. It is a
common platitude that a complete acquaintance with any one thing,
however small, would require a knowledge of the entire universe. Not a
sparrow falls to the ground but some of the remote conditions of his
fall are to be found in the milky way, in our federal constitution, or
in the early history of Europe. That is to say, alter the milky way,
alter the federal constitution, alter the facts of our barbarian
ancestry, and the universe would so far be a different universe from
what it now is. One fact involved in the difference might be that the
particular little street-boy who threw the stone which brought down the
sparrow might not find himself opposite the sparrow at that particular
moment; or, finding himself there, he might not be in that particular
serene and disengaged mood of mind which expressed itself in throwing
the stone. But, true as all this is, it would be very foolish for any
one who {217} was inquiring the cause of the sparrow's fall to overlook
the boy as too personal, proximate, and so to speak anthropomorphic an
agent, and to say that the true cause is the federal constitution, the
westward migration of the Celtic race, or the structure of the milky
way. If we proceeded on that method, we might say with perfect
legitimacy that a friend of ours, who had slipped on the ice upon his
door-step and cracked his skull, some months after dining with thirteen
at the table, died because of that ominous feast. I know, in fact, one
such instance; and I might, if I chose, contend with perfect logical
propriety that the slip on the ice was no real accident. "There are no
accidents," I might say, "for science. The whole history of the world
converged to produce that slip. If anything had been left out, the
slip would not have occurred just there and then. To say it would is
to deny the relations of cause and effect throughout the universe. The
real cause of the death was not the slip, _but the conditions which
engendered the slip_,--and among them his having sat at a table, six
months previous, one among thirteen. _That_ is truly the reason why he
died within the year."
It will soon be seen whose arguments I am, in form, reproducing here.
I would fain lay down the truth without polemics or recrimination. But
unfortunately we never fully grasp the import of any true statement
until we have a clear notion of what the opposite untrue statement
would be. The error is needed to set off the truth, much as a dark
background is required for exhibiting the brightness of a picture. And
the error which I am going to use as a foil to set off what seems to me
the truth of my own statements is contained in the philosophy of Mr.
Herbert Spencer and {218} his disciples. Our problem is, What are the
causes that make communities change from generation to
generation,--that make the England of Queen Anne so different from the
England of Elizabeth, the Harvard College of to-day so different from
that of thirty years ago?
I shall reply to this problem, The difference is due to the accumulated
influences of individuals, of their examples, their initiatives, and
their decisions. The Spencerian school replies, The changes are
irrespective of persons, and independent of individual control. They
are due to the environment, to the circumstances, the physical
geography, the ancestral conditions, the increasing experience of outer
relations; to everything, in fact, except the Grants and the Bismarcks,
the Joneses and the Smiths.
Now, I say that these theorizers are guilty of precisely the same
fallacy as he who should ascribe the death of his friend to the dinner
with thirteen, or the fall of the sparrow to the milky way. Like the
dog in the fable, who drops his real bone to snatch at its image, they
drop the real causes to snatch at others, which from no possible human
point of view are available or attainable. Their fallacy is a
practical one. Let us see where it lies. Although I believe in
free-will myself, I will waive that belief in this discussion, and
assume with the Spencerians the predestination of all human actions.
On that assumption I gladly allow that were the intelligence
investigating the man's or the sparrow's death omniscient and
omnipresent, able to take in the whole of time and space at a single
glance, there would not be the slightest objection to the milky way or
the fatal feast being {219} invoked among the sought-for causes. Such
a divine intelligence would see instantaneously all the infinite lines
of convergence towards a given result, and it would, moreover, see
impartially: it would see the fatal feast to be as much a condition of
the sparrow's death as of the man's; it would see the boy with the
stone to be as much a condition of the man's fall as of the sparrow's.
The human mind, however, is constituted on an entirely different plan.
It has no such power of universal intuition. Its finiteness obliges it
to see but two or three things at a time. If it wishes to take wider
sweeps it has to use 'general ideas,' as they are called, and in so
doing to drop all concrete truths. Thus, in the present case, if we as
men wish to feel the connection between the milky way and the boy and
the dinner and the sparrow and the man's death, we can do so only by
falling back on the enormous emptiness of what is called an abstract
proposition. We must say, All things in the world are fatally
predetermined, and hang together in the adamantine fixity of a system
of natural law. But in the vagueness of this vast proposition we have
lost all the concrete facts and links; and in all practical matters the
concrete links are the only things of importance. The human mind is
essentially partial. It can be efficient at all only by _picking out_
what to attend to, and ignoring everything else,--by narrowing its
point of view. Otherwise, what little strength it has is dispersed,
and it loses its way altogether. Man always wants his curiosity
gratified for a particular purpose. If, in the case of the sparrow,
the purpose is punishment, it would be idiotic to wander off from the
cats, boys, and other possible agencies close by in the street, to
{220} survey the early Celts and the milky way: the boy would meanwhile
escape. And if, in the case of the unfortunate man, we lose ourselves
in contemplation of the thirteen-at-table mystery, and fail to notice
the ice on the step and cover it with ashes, some other poor fellow,
who never dined out in his life, may slip on it in coming to the door,
and fall and break his head too.
It is, then, a necessity laid upon us as human beings to limit our
view. In mathematics we know how this method of ignoring and
neglecting quantities lying outside of a certain range has been adopted
in the differential calculus. The calculator throws out all the
'infinitesimals' of the quantities he is considering. He treats them
(under certain rules) as if they did not exist. In themselves they
exist perfectly all the while; but they are as if they did not exist
for the purposes of his calculation. Just so an astronomer, in dealing
with the tidal movements of the ocean, takes no account of the waves
made by the wind, or by the pressure of all the steamers which day and
night are moving their thousands of tons upon its surface. Just so the
marksman, in sighting his rifle, allows for the motion of the wind, but
not for the equally real motion of the earth and solar system. Just so
a business man's punctuality may overlook an error of five minutes,
while a physicist, measuring the velocity of light, must count each
thousandth of a second.
There are, in short, _different cycles of operation_ in nature;
different departments, so to speak, relatively independent of one
another, so that what goes on at any moment in one may be compatible
with almost any condition of things at the same time in the next. The
mould on the biscuit in the store-room of a {221} man-of-war vegetates
in absolute indifference to the nationality of the flag, the direction
of the voyage, the weather, and the human dramas that may go on on
board; and a mycologist may study it in complete abstraction from all
these larger details. Only by so studying it, in fact, is there any
chance of the mental concentration by which alone he may hope to learn
something of its nature. On the other hand, the captain who in
manoeuvring the vessel through a naval fight should think it necessary
to bring the mouldy biscuit into his calculations would very likely
lose the battle by reason of the excessive 'thoroughness' of his mind.
The causes which operate in these incommensurable cycles are connected
with one another only _if we take the whole universe into account_.
For all lesser points of view it is lawful--nay, more, it is for human
wisdom necessary--to regard them as disconnected and irrelevant to one
another.
And this brings us nearer to our special topic. If we look at an
animal or a human being, distinguished from the rest of his kind by the
possession of some extraordinary peculiarity, good or bad, we shall be
able to discriminate between the causes which originally _produced_ the
peculiarity in him and the causes that _maintain_ it after it is
produced; and we shall see, if the peculiarity be one that he was born
with, that these two sets of causes belong to two such irrelevant
cycles. It was the triumphant originality of Darwin to see this, and
to act accordingly. Separating the causes of production under the
title of 'tendencies to spontaneous variation,' and relegating them to
a physiological cycle which he forthwith {222} agreed to ignore
altogether,[2] he confined his attention to the causes of preservation,
and under the names of natural selection and sexual selection studied
them exclusively as functions of the cycle of the environment.
Pre-Darwinian philosophers had also tried to establish the doctrine of
descent with modification; but they all committed the blunder of
clumping the two cycles of causation into one. What preserves an
animal with his peculiarity, if it be a useful one, they saw to be the
nature of the environment to which the peculiarity was adjusted. The
giraffe with his peculiar neck is preserved by the fact that there are
in his environment tall trees whose leaves he can digest. But these
philosophers went further, and said that the presence of the trees not
only maintained an animal with a long neck to browse upon their
branches, but also produced him. They _made_ his neck long by the
constant striving they aroused in him to reach up to them. The
environment, in short, was supposed by these writers to mould the
animal by a kind of direct pressure, very much as a seal presses the
wax into harmony with itself. Numerous instances were given of the way
in which this goes on under our eyes. The exercise of the forge makes
the right arm strong, the palm grows callous to the oar, the mountain
air distends the chest, the chased fox grows cunning and the chased
bird shy, the arctic cold stimulates the animal combustion, and so
forth. Now these changes, of which many more examples might be
adduced, are {223} at present distinguished by the special name of
_adaptive_ changes. Their peculiarity is that that very feature in the
environment to which the animal's nature grows adjusted, itself
produces the adjustment. The 'inner relation,' to use Mr. Spencer's
phrase, 'corresponds' with its own efficient cause.
Darwin's first achievement was to show the utter insignificance in
amount of these changes produced by direct adaptation, the immensely
greater mass of changes being produced by internal molecular accidents,
of which we know nothing. His next achievement was to define the true
problem with which we have to deal when we study the effects of the
visible environment on the animal. That problem is simply this; Is the
environment more likely to _preserve or to destroy him_, on account of
this or that peculiarity with which he may be born? In giving the name
of 'accidental variations' to those peculiarities with which an animal
is born, Darwin does not for a moment mean to suggest that they are not
the fixed outcome of natural law. If the total system of the universe
be taken into account, the causes of these variations and the visible
environment which preserves or destroys them, undoubtedly do, in some
remote and roundabout way, hang together. What Darwin means is, that,
since that environment is a perfectly known thing, and its relations to
the organism in the way of destruction or preservation are tangible and
distinct, it would utterly confuse our finite understandings and
frustrate our hopes of science to mix in with it facts from such a
disparate and incommensurable cycle as that in which the variations are
produced. This last cycle is that of occurrences before the animal is
born. It is the cycle of influences upon ova and embryos; {224} in
which lie the causes that tip them and tilt them towards masculinity or
femininity, towards strength or weakness, towards health or disease,
and towards divergence from the parent type. What are the causes there?
In the first place, they are molecular and invisible,--inaccessible,
therefore, to direct observation of any kind. Secondly, their
operations are compatible with any social, political, and physical
conditions of environment. The same parents, living in the same
environing conditions, may at one birth produce a genius, at the next
an idiot or a monster. The visible external conditions are therefore
not direct determinants of this cycle; and the more we consider the
matter, the more we are forced to believe that two children of the same
parents are made to differ from each other by causes as
disproportionate to their ultimate effects as is the famous pebble on
the Rocky Mountain crest, which separates two rain-drops, to the Gulf
of St. Lawrence and the Pacific Ocean toward which it makes them
severally flow.
The great mechanical distinction between transitive forces and
discharging forces is nowhere illustrated on such a scale as in
physiology. Almost all causes there are forces of _detent_, which
operate by simply unlocking energy already stored up. They are
upsetters of unstable equilibria, and the resultant effect depends
infinitely more on the nature of the materials upset than on that of
the particular stimulus which joggles them down. Galvanic work, equal
to unity, done on a frog's nerve will discharge from the muscle to
which the nerve belongs mechanical work equal to seventy thousand; and
exactly the same muscular {225} effect will emerge if other irritants
than galvanism are employed. The irritant has merely started or
provoked something which then went on of itself,--as a match may start
a fire which consumes a whole town. And qualitatively as well as
quantitatively the effect may be absolutely incommensurable with the
cause. We find this condition of things in ail organic matter.
Chemists are distracted by the difficulties which the instability of
albuminoid compounds opposes to their study. Two specimens, treated in
what outwardly seem scrupulously identical conditions, behave in quite
different ways. You know about the invisible factors of fermentation,
and how the fate of a jar of milk--whether it turn into a sour clot or
a mass of koumiss--depends on whether the lactic acid ferment or the
alcoholic is introduced first, and gets ahead of the other in starting
the process. Now, when the result is the tendency of an ovum, itself
invisible to the naked eye, to tip towards this direction or that in
its further evolution,--to bring forth a genius or a dunce, even as the
rain-drop passes east or west of the pebble,--is it not obvious that
the deflecting cause must lie in a region so recondite and minute, must
be such a ferment of a ferment, an infinitesimal of so high an order,
that surmise itself may never succeed even in attempting to frame an
image of it?
Such being the case, was not Darwin right to turn his back upon that
region altogether, and to keep his own problem carefully free from all
entanglement with matters such as these? The success of his work is a
sufficiently affirmative reply.
And this brings us at last to the heart of our subject. The causes of
production of great men lie in a {226} sphere wholly inaccessible to
the social philosopher. He must simply accept geniuses as data, just
as Darwin accepts his spontaneous variations. For him, as for Darwin,
the only problem is, these data being given, How does the environment
affect them, and how do they affect the environment? Now, I affirm
that the relation of the visible environment to the great man is in the
main exactly what it is to the 'variation' in the Darwinian philosophy.
It chiefly adopts or rejects, preserves or destroys, in short _selects_
him.[3] And whenever it adopts and preserves the great man, it becomes
modified by his influence in an entirely original and peculiar way. He
acts as a ferment, and changes its constitution, just as the advent of
a new zoölogical species changes the faunal and floral equilibrium of
the region in which it appears. We all recollect Mr. Darwin's famous
statement of the influence of cats on the growth of clover in their
neighborhood. We all have read of the effects of the European rabbit
in New Zealand, and we have many of us taken part in the controversy
about the English sparrow here,--whether he kills most canker-worms, or
drives away most native birds. Just so the great man, whether he be an
importation from without like Clive in India or Agassiz here, or
whether he spring from the soil like Mahomet or Franklin, brings about
a rearrangement, on a large or a small scale, of the pre-existing
social relations.
{227}
The mutations of societies, then, from generation to generation, are in
the main due directly or indirectly to the acts or the example of
individuals whose genius was so adapted to the receptivities of the
moment, or whose accidental position of authority was so critical that
they became ferments, initiators of movement, setters of precedent or
fashion, centres of corruption, or destroyers of other persons, whose
gifts, had they had free play, would have led society in another
direction.
We see this power of individual initiative exemplified on a small scale
all about us, and on a large scale in the case of the leaders of
history. It is only following the common-sense method of a Lyell, a
Darwin, and a Whitney to interpret the unknown by the known, and reckon
up cumulatively the only causes of social change we can directly
observe. Societies of men are just like individuals, in that both at
any given moment offer ambiguous potentialities of development.
Whether a young man enters business or the ministry may depend on a
decision which has to be made before a certain day. He takes the place
offered in the counting-house, and is _committed_. Little by little,
the habits, the knowledges, of the other career, which once lay so
near, cease to be reckoned even among his possibilities. At first, he
may sometimes doubt whether the self he murdered in that decisive hour
might not have been the better of the two; but with the years such
questions themselves expire, and the old alternative _ego_, once so
vivid, fades into something less substantial than a dream. It is no
otherwise with nations. They may be committed by kings and ministers
to peace or war, by generals to victory or defeat, by prophets to this
{228} religion or to that, by various geniuses to fame in art, science,
or industry. A war is a true point of bifurcation of future
possibilities. Whether it fail or succeed, its declaration must be the
starting-point of new policies. Just so does a revolution, or any
great civic precedent, become a deflecting influence, whose operations
widen with the course of time. Communities obey their ideals; and an
accidental success fixes an ideal, as an accidental failure blights it.
Would England have to-day the 'imperial' ideal which she now has, if a
certain boy named Bob Clive had shot himself, as he tried to do, at
Madras? Would she be the drifting raft she is now in European
affairs[4] if a Frederic the Great had inherited her throne instead of
a Victoria, and if Messrs. Bentham, Mill, Cobden, and Bright had all
been born in Prussia? England has, no doubt, to-day precisely the same
intrinsic value relatively to the other nations that she ever had.
There is no such fine accumulation of human material upon the globe.
But in England the material has lost effective form, while in Germany
it has found it. Leaders give the form. Would England be crying
forward and backward at once, as she does now, 'letting I will not wait
upon I would,' wishing to conquer but not to fight, if her ideal had in
all these years been fixed by a succession of statesmen of supremely
commanding personality, working in one direction? Certainly not. She
would have espoused, for better or worse, either one course or another.
Had Bismarck died in his cradle, the Germans would still be satisfied
with appearing to themselves as a race of spectacled _Gelehrten_ and
political herbivora, and to the French as _ces bons_, or _ces naifs_,
{229} _Allemands_. Bismarck's will showed them, to their own great
astonishment, that they could play a far livelier game. The lesson
will not be forgotten. Germany may have many vicissitudes, but they--
"will never do away, I ween,
The marks of that which once hath been"--
of Bismarck's initiative, namely, from 1860 to 1873.
The fermentative influence of geniuses must be admitted as, at any
rate, one factor in the changes that constitute social evolution. The
community _may_ evolve in many ways. The accidental presence of this
or that ferment decides in which way it _shall_ evolve. Why, the very
birds of the forest, the parrot, the mino, have the power of human
speech, but never develop it of themselves; some one must be there to
teach them. So with us individuals. Rembrandt must teach us to enjoy
the struggle of light with darkness, Wagner to enjoy peculiar musical
effects; Dickens gives a twist to our sentimentality, Artemus Ward to
our humor; Emerson kindles a new moral light within us. But it is like
Columbus's egg. "All can raise the flowers now, for all have got the
seed." But if this be true of the individuals in the community, how
can it be false of the community as a whole? If shown a certain way, a
community may take it; if not, it will never find it. And the ways are
to a large extent indeterminate in advance. A nation may obey either
of many alternative impulses given by different men of genius, and
still live and be prosperous, just as a man may enter either of many
businesses. Only, the prosperities may differ in their type.
But the indeterminism is not absolute. Not every {230} 'man' fits
every 'hour.' Some incompatibilities there are. A given genius may
come either too early or too late. Peter the Hermit would now be sent
to a lunatic asylum. John Mill in the tenth century would have lived
and died unknown. Cromwell and Napoleon need their revolutions, Grant
his civil war. An Ajax gets no fame in the day of telescopic-sighted
rifles; and, to express differently an instance which Spencer uses,
what could a Watt have effected in a tribe which no precursive genius
had taught to smelt iron or to turn a lathe?
Now, the important thing to notice is that what makes a certain genius
now incompatible with his surroundings is usually the fact that some
previous genius of a different strain has warped the community away
from the sphere of his possible effectiveness. After Voltaire, no
Peter the Hermit; after Charles IX. and Louis XIV., no general
protestantization of France; after a Manchester school, a
Beaconsfield's success is transient; after a Philip II., a Castelar
makes little headway; and so on. Each bifurcation cuts off certain
sides of the field altogether, and limits the future possible angles of
deflection. A community is a living thing, and in words which I can do
no better than quote from Professor Clifford,[5] "it is the peculiarity
of living things not merely that they change under the influence of
surrounding circumstances, but that any change which takes place in
them is not lost but retained, and as it were built into the organism
to serve as the foundation for future actions. If you cause any
distortion in the growth of a tree and make it crooked, whatever you
may do afterwards to make the tree straight the mark of your {231}
distortion is there; it is absolutely indelible; it has become part of
the tree's nature.... Suppose, however, that you take a lump of gold,
melt it, and let it cool.... No one can tell by examining a piece of
gold how often it has been melted and cooled in geologic ages, or even
in the last year by the hand of man. Any one who cuts down an oak can
tell by the rings in its trunk how many times winter has frozen it into
widowhood, and how many times summer has warmed it into life. A living
being must always contain within itself the history, not merely of its
own existence, but of all its ancestors."
Every painter can tell us how each added line deflects his picture in a
certain sense. Whatever lines follow must be built on those first laid
down. Every author who starts to rewrite a piece of work knows how
impossible it becomes to use any of the first-written pages again. The
new beginning has already excluded the possibility of those earlier
phrases and transitions, while it has at the same time created the
possibility of an indefinite set of new ones, no one of which, however,
is completely determined in advance. Just so the social surroundings
of the past and present hour exclude the possibility of accepting
certain contributions from individuals; but they do not positively
define what contributions shall be accepted, for in themselves they are
powerless to fix what the nature of the individual offerings shall
be.[6]
{232}
Thus social evolution is a resultant of the interaction of two wholly
distinct factors,--the individual, deriving his peculiar gifts from the
play of physiological and infra-social forces, but bearing all the
power of initiative and origination in his hands; and, second, the
social environment, with its power of adopting or rejecting both him
and his gifts. Both factors are essential to change. The community
stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away
without the sympathy of the community.
All this seems nothing more than common-sense. All who wish to see it
developed by a man of genius should read that golden little work,
Bagehot's Physics and Politics, in which (it seems to me) the complete
sense of the way in which concrete things grow and change is as
livingly present as the straining after a pseudo-philosophy of
evolution is livingly absent. But there are never wanting minds to
whom such views seem personal and contracted, and allied to an
anthropomorphism long exploded in other fields of knowledge. "The
individual withers, and the world is more and more," to these writers;
and in a Buckle, a Draper, and a Taine we all know how much the 'world'
has come to be almost synonymous with the _climate_. We all know, too,
how the controversy has been kept up between the partisans of a
'science of history' and those who deny the existence of anything like
necessary 'laws' where human societies are concerned. Mr. Spencer, at
the opening of his Study of Sociology, makes an onslaught on the
'great-man theory' of history, from which a few passages may be
quoted:--
"The genesis of societies by the action of great men may be comfortably
believed so long as, resting in general {233} notions, you do not ask
for particulars. But now, if, dissatisfied with vagueness, we demand
that our ideas shall be brought into focus and exactly defined, we
discover the hypothesis to be utterly incoherent. If, not stopping at
the explanation of social progress as due to the great man, we go back
a step, and ask, Whence comes the great man? we find that the theory
breaks down completely. The question has two conceivable answers: his
origin is supernatural, or it is natural. Is his origin supernatural?
Then he is a deputy god, and we have theocracy once removed,--or,
rather, not removed at all.... Is this an unacceptable solution? Then
the origin of the great man is natural; and immediately this is
recognized, he must be classed with all other phenomena in the society
that gave him birth as a product of its antecedents. Along with the
whole generation of which he forms a minute part, along with its
institutions, language, knowledge, manners, and its multitudinous arts
and appliances, he is a _resultant_.... You must admit that the
genesis of the great man depends on the long series of complex
influences which has produced the race in which he appears, and the
social state into which that race has slowly grown.... Before he can
remake his society, his society must make him. All those changes of
which he is the proximate initiator have their chief causes in the
generations he descended from. If there is to be anything like a real
explanation of those changes, it must be sought in that aggregate of
conditions out of which both he and they have arisen."[7]
Now, it seems to me that there is something which one might almost call
impudent in the attempt which Mr. Spencer makes, in the first sentence
of this extract, to pin the reproach of vagueness upon those who
believe in the power of initiative of the great man.
{234}
Suppose I say that the singular moderation which now distinguishes
social, political, and religious discussion in England, and contrasts
so strongly with the bigotry and dogmatism of sixty years ago, is
largely due to J. S. Mill's example. I may possibly be wrong about the
facts; but I am, at any rate, 'asking for particulars,' and not
'resting in general notions.' And if Mr. Spencer should tell me it
started from no personal influence whatever, but from the 'aggregate of
conditions,' the 'generations,' Mill and all his contemporaries
'descended from,' the whole past order of nature in short, surely he,
not I, would be the person 'satisfied with vagueness.'
The fact is that Mr. Spencer's sociological method is identical with
that of one who would invoke the zodiac to account for the fall of the
sparrow, and the thirteen at table to explain the gentleman's death.
It is of little more scientific value than the Oriental method of
replying to whatever question arises by the unimpeachable truism, "God
is great." _Not_ to fall back on the gods, where a proximate principle
may be found, has with us Westerners long since become the sign of an
efficient as distinguished from an inefficient intellect.
To believe that the cause of everything is to be found in its
antecedents is the starting-point, the initial postulate, not the goal
and consummation, of science. If she is simply to lead us out of the
labyrinth by the same hole we went in by three or four thousand years
ago, it seems hardly worth while to have followed her through the
darkness at all. If anything is humanly certain it is that the great
man's society, properly so called, does not make him before he can
remake it. Physiological forces, with which {235} the social,
political, geographical, and to a great extent anthropological
conditions have just as much and just as little to do as the condition
of the crater of Vesuvius has to do with the flickering of this gas by
which I write, are what make him. Can it be that Mr. Spencer holds the
convergence of sociological pressures to have so impinged on
Stratford-upon-Avon about the 26th of April, 1564, that a W.
Shakespeare, with all his mental peculiarities, had to be born
there,--as the pressure of water outside a certain boat will cause a
stream of a certain form to ooze into a particular leak? And does he
mean to say that if the aforesaid W. Shakespeare had died of cholera
infantum, another mother at Stratford-upon-Avon would needs have
engendered a duplicate copy of him, to restore the sociologic
equilibrium,--just as the same stream of water will reappear, no matter
how often you pass a sponge over the leak, so long as the outside level
remains unchanged? Or might the substitute arise at
'Stratford-atte-Bowe'? Here, as elsewhere, it is very hard, in the
midst of Mr. Spencer's vagueness, to tell what he does mean at all.
We have, however, in his disciple, Mr. Grant Allen, one who leaves us
in no doubt whatever of his precise meaning. This widely informed,
suggestive, and brilliant writer published last year a couple of
articles in the Gentleman's Magazine, in which he maintained that
individuals have no initiative in determining social change.
"The differences between one nation and another, whether in intellect,
commerce, art, morals, or general temperament, ultimately depend, not
upon any mysterious properties of race, nationality, or any other
unknown and unintelligible abstractions, but simply and solely upon the
{236} physical circumstances to which they are exposed. If it be a
fact, as we know it to be, that the French nation differs recognizably
from the Chinese, and the people of Hamburg differ recognizably from
the people of Timbuctoo, then the notorious and conspicuous differences
between them are wholly due to the geographical position of the various
races. If the people who went to Hamburg had gone to Timbuctoo, they
would now be indistinguishable from the semi-barbarian negroes who
inhabit that central African metropolis;[8] and if the people who went
to Timbuctoo had gone to Hamburg, they would now have been
white-skinned merchants driving a roaring trade in imitation sherry and
indigestible port.... The differentiating agency must be sought in the
great permanent geographical features of land and sea; ... these have
necessarily and inevitably moulded the characters and histories of
every nation upon the earth.... We cannot regard any nation as an
active agent in differentiating itself. Only the surrounding
circumstances can have any effect in such a direction. [These two
sentences dogmatically deny the existence of the relatively independent
physiological cycle of causation.] To suppose otherwise is to suppose
that the mind of man is exempt from the universal law of causation.
There is no caprice, no spontaneous impulse, in human endeavors. Even
tastes and inclinations _must_ themselves be the result of surrounding
causes."[9]
{237}
Elsewhere Mr. Allen, writing of the Greek culture, says:--
"It was absolutely and unreservedly the product of the geographical
Hellas, acting upon the given factor of the undifferentiated Aryan
brain,... To me it seems a self-evident proposition that nothing
whatsoever can differentiate one body of men from another, except the
physical conditions in which they are set,--including, of course, under
the term _physical conditions_ the relations of place and time in which
they stand with regard to other bodies of men. To suppose otherwise is
to deny the primordial law of causation. To imagine that the mind can
differentiate itself is to imagine that it can be differentiated
without a cause."[10]
This outcry about the law of universal causation being undone, the
moment we refuse to invest in the kind of causation which is peddled
round by a particular school, makes one impatient. These writers have
no imagination of alternatives. With them there is no _tertium quid_
between outward environment and miracle. _Aut Caesar, aut nullus_!
_Aut_ Spencerism, _aut_ catechism!
If by 'physical conditions' Mr. Allen means what he does mean, the
outward cycle of visible nature and man, his assertion is simply
physiologically false. For a national mind differentiates 'itself'
whenever a genius is born in its midst by causes acting in the
invisible and molecular cycle. But if Mr. Allen means by 'physical
conditions' the whole of nature, his assertion, though true, forms but
the vague Asiatic {238} profession of belief in an all-enveloping fate,
which certainly need not plume itself on any specially advanced or
scientific character.
And how can a thinker so clever as Mr. Allen fail to have distinguished
in these matters between _necessary_ conditions and _sufficient_
conditions of a given result? The French say that to have an omelet we
must break our eggs; that is, the breaking of eggs is a necessary
condition of the omelet. But is it a sufficient condition? Does an
omelet appear whenever three eggs are broken? So of the Greek mind.
To get such versatile intelligence it may be that such commercial
dealings with the world as the geographical Hellas afforded are a
necessary condition. But if they are a sufficient condition, why did
not the Phoenicians outstrip the Greeks in intelligence? No
geographical environment can produce a given type of mind. It can only
foster and further certain types fortuitously produced, and thwart and
frustrate others. Once again, its function is simply selective, and
determines what shall actually be only by destroying what is positively
incompatible. An Arctic environment is incompatible with improvident
habits in its denizens; but whether the inhabitants of such a region
shall unite with their thrift the peacefulness of the Eskimo or the
pugnacity of the Norseman is, so far as the climate is concerned, an
accident. Evolutionists should not forget that we all have five
fingers not because four or six would not do just as well, but merely
because the first vertebrate above the fishes _happened_ to have that
number. He owed his prodigious success in founding a line of descent
to some entirely other quality,--we know {239} not which,--but the
inessential five fingers were taken in tow and preserved to the present
day. So of most social peculiarities. Which of them shall be taken in
tow by the few qualities which the environment necessarily exacts is a
matter of what physiological accidents shall happen among individuals.
Mr. Allen promises to prove his thesis in detail by the examples of
China, India, England, Rome, etc. I have not the smallest hesitation
in predicting that he will do no more with these examples than he has
done with Hellas. He will appear upon the scene after the fact, and
show that the quality developed by each race was, naturally enough, not
incompatible with its habitat. But he will utterly fail to show that
the particular form of compatibility fallen into in each case was the
one necessary and only possible form.
Naturalists know well enough how indeterminate the harmonies between a
fauna and its environment are. An animal may better his chances of
existence in either of many ways,--growing aquatic, arboreal, or
subterranean; small and swift, or massive and bulky; spiny, horny,
slimy, or venomous; more timid or more pugnacious; more cunning or more
fertile of offspring; more gregarious or more solitary; or in other
ways besides,--and any one of these ways may suit him to many widely
different environments.
Readers of Mr. A. R. Wallace will well remember the striking
illustrations of this in his Malay Archipelago:--
"Borneo closely resembles New Guinea not only in its vast size and its
freedom from volcanoes, but in its variety of geological structure, its
uniformity of climate, and the general aspect of the forest vegetation
that clothes its surface; the Moluccas are the counterpart of the
Philippines {240} in their volcanic structure, their extreme fertility,
their luxuriant forests, and their frequent earthquakes; and Bali, with
the east end of Java, has a climate almost as dry and a soil almost as
arid as that of Timor. Yet between these corresponding groups of
islands, constructed, as it were, after the same pattern, subjected to
the same climate, and bathed by the same oceans, there exists the
greatest possible contrast when we compare their animal productions.
Nowhere does the ancient doctrine that differences or similarities in
the various forms of life that inhabit different countries are due to
corresponding physical differences or similarities in the countries
themselves, meet with so direct and palpable a contradiction. Borneo
and New Guinea, as alike physically as two distinct countries can be,
are zoölogically wide as the poles asunder; while Australia, with its
dry winds, its open plains, its stony deserts, and its temperate
climate, yet produces birds and quadrupeds which are closely related to
those inhabiting the hot, damp, luxuriant forests which everywhere
clothe the plains and mountains of New Guinea."
Here we have similar physical-geography environments harmonizing with
widely differing animal lives, and similar animal lives harmonizing
with widely differing geographical environments. A singularly
accomplished writer, E. Gryzanowski, in the North American Review,[11]
uses the instances of Sardinia and Corsica in support of this thesis
with great effect He says:--
"These sister islands, lying in the very centre of the Mediterranean,
at almost equal distances from the centres of Latin and Neo-Latin
civilization, within easy reach of the Phoenician, the Greek, and the
Saracen, with a {241} coast-line of more than a thousand miles, endowed
with obvious and tempting advantages, and hiding untold sources of
agricultural and mineral wealth, have nevertheless remained unknown,
unheeded, and certainly uncared for during the thirty centuries of
European history.... These islands have dialects, but no language;
records of battles, but no history. They have customs, but no laws;
the _vendetta_, but no justice. They have wants and wealth, but no
commerce, timber and ports, but no shipping. They have legends, but no
poetry, beauty, but no art; and twenty years ago it could still be said
that they had universities, but no students.... That Sardinia, with
all her emotional and picturesque barbarism, has never produced a
single artist is almost as strange as her barbarism itself.... Near
the focus of European civilization, in the very spot which an _à
priori_ geographer would point out as the most favorable place for
material and intellectual, commercial, and political development, these
strange sister islands have slept their secular sleep, like _nodes_ on
the sounding-board of history."
This writer then goes on to compare Sardinia and Sicily with some
detail. All the material advantages are in favor of Sardinia, "and the
Sardinian population, being of an ancestry more mixed than that of the
English race, would justify far higher expectations than that of
Sicily." Yet Sicily's past history has been brilliant in the extreme,
and her commerce to-day is great. Dr. Gryzanowski has his own theory
of the historic torpor of these favored isles. He thinks they
stagnated because they never gained political autonomy, being always
owned by some Continental power. I will not dispute the theory; but I
will ask, Why did they not gain it? and answer immediately: Simply
because no individuals were {242} born there with patriotism and
ability enough to inflame their countrymen with national pride,
ambition, and thirst for independent life. Corsicans and Sardinians
are probably as good stuff as any of their neighbors. But the best
wood-pile will not blaze till a torch is applied, and the appropriate
torches seem to have been wanting.[12]
Sporadic great men come everywhere. But for a community to get
vibrating through and through {243} with intensely active life, many
geniuses coming together and in rapid succession are required. This is
why great epochs are so rare,--why the sudden bloom of a Greece, an
early Rome, a Renaissance, is such a mystery. Blow must follow blow so
fast that no cooling can occur in the intervals. Then the mass of the
nation grows incandescent, and may continue to glow by pure inertia
long after the originators of its internal movement have passed away.
We often hear surprise expressed that in these high tides of human
affairs not only the people should be filled with stronger life, but
that individual geniuses should seem so exceptionally abundant. This
mystery is just about as deep as the time-honored conundrum as to why
great rivers flow by great towns. It is true that great public
fermentations awaken and adopt many geniuses, who in more torpid times
would have had no chance to work. But over and above this there must
be an exceptional concourse of genius about a time, to make the
fermentation begin at all. The unlikeliness of the concourse is far
greater than the unlikeliness of any particular genius; hence the
rarity of these periods and the exceptional aspect which they always
wear.
{244}
It is folly, then, to speak of the 'laws of history' as of something
inevitable, which science has only to discover, and whose consequences
any one can then foretell but do nothing to alter or avert. Why, the
very laws of physics are conditional, and deal with _ifs_. The
physicist does not say, "The water will boil anyhow;" he only says it
will boil if a fire be kindled beneath it. And so the utmost the
student of sociology can ever predict is that _if_ a genius of a
certain sort show the way, society will be sure to follow. It might
long ago have been predicted with great confidence that both Italy and
Germany would reach a stable unity if some one could but succeed in
starting the process. It could not have been predicted, however, that
the _modus operandi_ in each case would be subordination to a paramount
state rather than federation, because no historian could have
calculated the freaks of birth and fortune which gave at the same
moment such positions of authority to three such peculiar individuals
as Napoleon III., Bismarck, and Cavour. So of our own politics. It is
certain now that the movement of the independents, reformers, or
whatever one please to call them, will triumph. But whether it do so
by converting the Republican party to its ends, or by rearing a new
party on the ruins of both our present factions, the historian cannot
say. There can be no doubt that the reform movement would make more
progress in one year with an adequate personal leader than as now in
ten without one. Were there a great citizen, splendid with every civic
gift, to be its candidate, who can doubt that he would lead us to
victory? But, at present, we, his environment, who sigh for him and
would so gladly preserve and adopt him if he came, can neither {245}
move without him, nor yet do anything to bring him forth.[13]
To conclude: The evolutionary view of history, when it denies the vital
importance of individual initiative, is, then, an utterly vague and
unscientific conception, a lapse from modern scientific determinism
into the most ancient oriental fatalism. The lesson of the analysis
that we have made (even on the completely deterministic hypothesis with
which we started) forms an appeal of the most stimulating sort to the
energy of the individual. Even the dogged resistance of the
reactionary conservative to changes which he cannot hope entirely to
defeat is justified and shown to be effective. He retards the
movement; deflects it a little by the concessions he extracts; gives it
a resultant momentum, compounded of his inertia and his adversaries'
speed; and keeps up, in short, a constant lateral pressure, which, to
be sure, never heads it round about, but brings it up at last at a goal
far to the right or left of that to which it would have drifted had he
allowed it to drift alone.
I now pass to the last division of my subject, the function of the
environment in _mental_ evolution. After what I have already said, I
may be quite concise. Here, if anywhere, it would seem at first sight
as if that school must be right which makes the mind passively plastic,
and the environment actively productive of the form and order of its
conceptions; which, in a word, thinks that all mental progress must
result from {246} a series of adaptive changes, in the sense already
defined of that word. We know what a vast part of our mental furniture
consists of purely remembered, not reasoned, experience. The entire
field of our habits and associations by contiguity belongs here. The
entire field of those abstract conceptions which were taught us with
the language into which we were born belongs here also. And, more than
this, there is reason to think that the order of 'outer relations'
experienced by the individual may itself determine the order in which
the general characters imbedded therein shall be noticed and extracted
by his mind.[14] The pleasures and benefits, moreover, which certain
parts of the environment yield, and the pains and hurts which other
parts inflict, determine the direction of our interest and our
attention, and so decide at which points the accumulation of mental
experiences shall begin. It might, accordingly, seem as if there were
no room for any other agency than this; as if the distinction we have
found so useful between 'spontaneous variation,' as the producer of
changed forms, and the environment, as their preserver and destroyer,
did not hold in the case of mental progress; as if, in a word, the
parallel with darwinism might no longer obtain, and Spencer might be
quite right with his fundamental law of intelligence, which says, "The
cohesion between psychical states is proportionate to the frequency
with which the relation between the answering external phenomena has
been repeated in experience."[15]
{247}
But, in spite of all these facts, I have no hesitation whatever in
holding firm to the darwinian distinction even here. I maintain that
the facts in question are all drawn from the lower strata of the mind,
so to speak,--from the sphere of its least evolved functions, from the
region of intelligence which man possesses in common with the brutes.
And I can easily show that throughout the whole extent of those mental
departments which are highest, which are most characteristically human,
Spencer's law is violated at every step; and that as a matter of fact
the new conceptions, emotions, and active tendencies which evolve are
originally produced in the shape of random images, fancies, accidental
out-births of spontaneous variation in the functional activity of the
excessively instable human brain, which the outer environment simply
confirms or refutes, adopts or rejects, preserves or
destroys,--selects, in short, just as it selects morphological and
social variations due to molecular accidents of an analogous sort.
It is one of the tritest of truisms that human intelligences of a
simple order are very literal. They are slaves of habit, doing what
they have been taught without variation; dry, prosaic, and
matter-of-fact in their remarks; devoid of humor, except of the coarse
physical kind which rejoices in a practical joke; taking the world for
granted; and possessing in their faithfulness and honesty the single
gift by which they are sometimes able to warm us into admiration. But
{248} even this faithfulness seems to have a sort of inorganic ring,
and to remind us more of the immutable properties of a piece of
inanimate matter than of the steadfastness of a human will capable of
alternative choice. When we descend to the brutes, all these
peculiarities are intensified. No reader of Schopenhauer can forget
his frequent allusions to the _trockener ernst_ of dogs and horses, nor
to their _ehrlichkeit_. And every noticer of their ways must receive a
deep impression of the fatally literal character of the few, simple,
and treadmill-like operations of their minds.
But turn to the highest order of minds, and what a change! Instead of
thoughts of concrete things patiently following one another in a beaten
track of habitual suggestion, we have the most abrupt cross-cuts and
transitions from one idea to another, the most rarefied abstractions
and discriminations, the most unheard-of combinations of elements, the
subtlest associations of analogy; in a word, we seem suddenly
introduced into a seething caldron of ideas, where everything is
fizzling and bobbing about in a state of bewildering activity, where
partnerships can be joined or loosened in an instant, treadmill routine
is unknown, and the unexpected seems the only law. According to the
idiosyncrasy of the individual, the scintillations will have one
character or another. They will be sallies of wit and humor; they will
be flashes of poetry and eloquence; they will be constructions of
dramatic fiction or of mechanical device, logical or philosophic
abstractions, business projects, or scientific hypotheses, with trains
of experimental consequences based thereon; they will be musical
sounds, or images of plastic beauty or picturesqueness, or visions of
moral harmony. But, whatever their {249} differences may be, they will
all agree in this,--that their genesis is sudden and, as it were,
spontaneous. That is to say, the same premises would not, in the mind
of another individual, have engendered just that conclusion; although,
when the conclusion is offered to the other individual, he may
thoroughly accept and enjoy it, and envy the brilliancy of him to whom
it first occurred.
To Professor Jevons is due the great credit of having emphatically
pointed out[16] how the genius of discovery depends altogether on the
number of these random notions and guesses which visit the
investigator's mind. To be fertile in hypotheses is the first
requisite, and to be willing to throw them away the moment experience
contradicts them is the next. The Baconian method of collating tables
of instances may be a useful aid at certain times. But one might as
well expect a chemist's note-book to write down the name of the body
analyzed, or a weather table to sum itself up into a prediction of
probabilities of its own accord, as to hope that the mere fact of
mental confrontation with a certain series of facts will be sufficient
to make _any_ brain conceive their law. The conceiving of the law is a
spontaneous variation in the strictest sense of the term. It flashes
out of one brain, and no other, because the instability of that brain
is such as to tip and upset itself in just that particular direction.
But the important thing to notice is that the good flashes and the bad
flashes, the triumphant hypotheses and the absurd conceits, are on an
exact equality in respect of their origin. Aristotle's absurd Physics
and his immortal Logic flow from one source: the forces that produce
the one produce the other. {250} When walking along the street,
thinking of the blue sky or the fine spring weather, I may either smile
at some grotesque whim which occurs to me, or I may suddenly catch an
intuition of the solution of a long-unsolved problem, which at that
moment was far from my thoughts. Both notions are shaken out of the
same reservoir,--the reservoir of a brain in which the reproduction of
images in the relations of their outward persistence or frequency has
long ceased to be the dominant law. But to the thought, when it is
once engendered, the consecration of agreement with outward relations
may come. The conceit perishes in a moment, and is forgotten. The
scientific hypothesis arouses in me a fever of desire for verification.
I read, write, experiment, consult experts. Everything corroborates my
notion, which being then published in a book spreads from review to
review and from mouth to mouth, till at last there is no doubt I am
enshrined in the Pantheon of the great diviners of nature's ways. The
environment _preserves_ the conception which it was unable to _produce_
in any brain less idiosyncratic than my own.
Now, the spontaneous upsettings of brains this way and that at
particular moments into particular ideas and combinations are matched
by their equally spontaneous permanent tiltings or saggings towards
determinate directions. The humorous bent is quite characteristic; the
sentimental one equally so. And the personal tone of each mind, which
makes it more alive to certain classes of experience than others, more
attentive to certain impressions, more open to certain reasons, is
equally the result of that invisible and unimaginable play of the
forces of growth within the nervous system which, irresponsibly to the
{251} environment, makes the brain peculiarly apt to function in a
certain way. Here again the selection goes on. The products of the
mind with the determined aesthetic bent please or displease the
community. We adopt Wordsworth, and grow unsentimental and serene. We
are fascinated by Schopenhauer, and learn from him the true luxury of
woe. The adopted bent becomes a ferment in the community, and alters
its tone. The alteration may be a benefit or a misfortune, for it is
(_pace_ Mr. Allen) a differentiation from within, which has to run the
gauntlet of the larger environment's selective power. Civilized
Languedoc, taking the tone of its scholars, poets, princes, and
theologians, fell a prey to its rude Catholic environment in the
Albigensian crusade. France in 1792, taking the tone of its St. Justs
and Marats, plunged into its long career of unstable outward relations.
Prussia in 1806, taking the tone of its Humboldts and its Steins,
proved itself in the most signal way 'adjusted' to its environment in
1872.
Mr. Spencer, in one of the strangest chapters of his Psychology,[17]
tries to show the necessary order in which the development of
conceptions in the human race occurs. No abstract conception can be
developed, according to him, until the outward experiences have reached
a certain degree of heterogeneity, definiteness, coherence, and so
forth.
"Thus the belief in an unchanging order, the belief in _law_, is a
belief of which the primitive man is absolutely incapable....
Experiences such as he receives furnish but few data for the conception
of uniformity, whether as displayed in things or in relations.... The
daily {252} impressions which the savage gets yield the notion very
imperfectly, and in but few cases. Of all the objects around,--trees,
stones, hills, pieces of water, clouds, and so forth,--most differ
widely, ... and few approach complete likeness so nearly as to make
discrimination difficult. Even between animals of the same species it
rarely happens that, whether alive or dead, they are presented in just
the same attitudes.... It is only along with a gradual development of
the arts ... that there come frequent experiences of perfectly straight
lines admitting of complete apposition, bringing the perceptions of
equality and inequality. Still more devoid is savage life of the
experiences which generate the conception of the uniformity of
succession. The sequences observed from hour to hour and day to day
seem anything but uniform, difference is a far more conspicuous trait
among them.... So that if we contemplate primitive human life as a
whole, we see that multiformity of sequence, rather than uniformity, is
the notion which it tends to generate.... Only as fast as the practice
of the arts develops the idea of measure can the consciousness of
uniformity become clear.... Those conditions furnished by advancing
civilization which make possible the notion of uniformity
simultaneously make possible the notion of _exactness_.... Hence the
primitive man has little experience which cultivates the consciousness
of what we call _truth_. How closely allied this is to the
consciousness which the practice of the arts cultivates is implied even
in language. We speak of a true surface as well as a true statement.
Exactness describes perfection in a mechanical fit, as well as perfect
agreement between the results of calculations."
The whole burden of Mr. Spencer's book is to show the fatal way in
which the mind, supposed passive, is moulded by its experiences of
'outer {253} relations.' In this chapter the yard-stick, the balance,
the chronometer, and other machines and instruments come to figure
among the 'relations' external to the mind. Surely they are so, after
they have been manufactured; but only because of the preservative power
of the social environment. Originally all these things and all other
institutions were flashes of genius in an individual head, of which the
outer environment showed no sign. Adopted by the race and become its
heritage, they then supply instigations to new geniuses whom they
environ to make new inventions and discoveries; and so the ball of
progress rolls. But take out the geniuses, or alter their
idiosyncrasies, and what increasing uniformities will the environment
show? We defy Mr. Spencer or any one else to reply.
The plain truth is that the 'philosophy' of evolution (as distinguished
from our special information about particular cases of change) is a
metaphysical creed, and nothing else. It is a mood of contemplation,
an emotional attitude, rather than a system of thought,--a mood which
is old as the world, and which no refutation of any one incarnation of
it (such as the spencerian philosophy) will dispel; the mood of
fatalistic pantheism, with its intuition of the One and All, which was,
and is, and ever shall be, and from whose womb each single thing
proceeds. Far be it from us to speak slightingly here of so hoary and
mighty a style of looking on the world as this. What we at present
call scientific discoveries had nothing to do with bringing it to
birth, nor can one easily conceive that they should ever give it its
_quietus_, no matter how logically incompatible with its spirit the
ultimate phenomenal distinctions which {254} science accumulates should
turn out to be. It can laugh at the phenomenal distinctions on which
science is based, for it draws its vital breath from a region
which--whether above or below--is at least altogether different from
that in which science dwells. A critic, however, who cannot disprove
the truth of the metaphysic creed, can at least raise his voice in
protest against its disguising itself in 'scientific' plumes. I think
that all who have had the patience to follow me thus far will agree
that the spencerian 'philosophy' of social and intellectual progress is
an obsolete anachronism, reverting to a pre-darwinian type of thought,
just as the spencerian philosophy of 'Force,' effacing all the previous
distinctions between actual and potential energy, momentum, work,
force, mass, etc., which physicists have with so much agony achieved,
carries us back to a pre-galilean age.
[1] A lecture before the Harvard Natural History Society; published in
the Atlantic Monthly, October, 1880.
[2] Darwin's theory of pangenesis is, it is true, an attempt to account
(among other things) for variation. But it occupies its own separate
place, and its author no more invokes the environment when he talks of
the adhesions of gemmules than he invokes these adhesions when he talks
of the relations of the whole animal to the environment. _Divide et
impera!_
[3] It is true that it remodels him, also, to some degree, by its
educative influence, and that this constitutes a considerable
difference between the social case and the zoölogical case, I neglect
this aspect of the relation here, for the other is the more important.
At the end of the article I will return to it incidentally.
[4] The reader will remember when this was written.
[5] Lectures and Essays, i. 82.
[6] Mr. Grant Allen himself, in an article from which I shall presently
quote, admits that a set of people who, if they had been exposed ages
ago to the geographical agencies of Timbuctoo, would have developed
into negroes might now, after a protracted exposure to the conditions
of Hamburg, never become negroes if transplanted to Timbuctoo.
[7] Study of Sociology, pages 33-35.
[8] No! not even though they were bodily brothers! The geographical
factor utterly vanishes before the ancestral factor. The difference
between Hamburg and Timbuctoo as a cause of ultimate divergence of two
races is as nothing to the difference of constitution of the ancestors
of the two races, even though as in twin brothers, this difference
might be invisible to the naked eye. No two couples of the most
homogeneous race could possibly be found so identical as, if set in
identical environments, to give rise to two identical lineages. The
minute divergence at the start grows broader with each generation, and
ends with entirely dissimilar breeds.
[9] Article 'Nation Making,' in Gentleman's Magazine, 1878. I quote
from the reprint in the Popular Science Monthly Supplement December,
1878, pages 121, 123, 126.
[10] Article 'Hellas,' in Gentleman's Magazine, 1878. Reprint in
Popular Science Monthly Supplement, September, 1878.
[11] Vol. cxiii. p. 318 (October, 1871).
[12] I am well aware that in much that follows (though in nothing that
precedes) I seem to be crossing the heavily shotted bows of Mr. Galton,
for whose laborious investigations into the heredity of genius I have
the greatest respect. Mr. Galton inclines to think that genius of
intellect and passion is bound to express itself, whatever the outward
opportunity, and that within any given race an equal number of geniuses
of each grade must needs be born in every equal period of time; a
subordinate race cannot possibly engender a large number of high-class
geniuses, etc. He would, I suspect, infer the suppositions I go on to
make--of great men fortuitously assembling around a given epoch and
making it great, and of their being fortuitously absent from certain
places and times (from Sardinia, from Boston now, etc.)--to be
radically vicious. I hardly think, however, that he does justice to
the great complexity of the conditions of _effective_ greatness, and to
the way in which the physiological averages of production may be masked
entirely during long periods, either by the accidental mortality of
geniuses in infancy, or by the fact that the particular geniuses born
happened not to find tasks. I doubt the truth of his assertion that
_intellectual_ genius, like murder, 'will out.' It is true that certain
types are irrepressible. Voltaire, Shelley, Carlyle, can hardly be
conceived leading a dumb and vegetative life in any epoch. But take
Mr. Galton himself, take his cousin Mr. Darwin, and take Mr. Spencer:
nothing is to me more have died 'with all their music in them,' known
only to their friends as persons of strong and original character and
judgment. What has started them on their career of effective greatness
is simply the accident of each stumbling upon a task vast, brilliant,
and congenial enough to call out the convergence of all his passions
and powers. I see no more reason why, in case they had not fallen in
with their several hobbies at propitious periods in their life, they
need necessarily have hit upon other hobbies, and made themselves
equally great. Their case seems similar to that of the Washingtons,
Cromwells, and Grants, who simply rose to their occasions. But apart
from these causes of fallacy, I am strongly disposed to think that
where transcendent geniuses are concerned the numbers anyhow are so
small that their appearance will not fit into any scheme of averages.
That is, two or three might appear together, just as the two or three
balls nearest the target centre might be fired consecutively. Take
longer epochs and more firing, and the great geniuses and near balls
would on the whole be more spread out.
[13] Since this paper was written, President Cleveland has to a certain
extent met the need. But who can doubt that if he had certain other
qualities which he has not yet shown, his influence would have been
still more decisive? (1896.)
[14] That is, if a certain general character be rapidly repeated in our
outer experience with a number of strongly contrasted concomitants, it
will be sooner abstracted than if its associates are invariable or
monotonous.
[14] Principles of Psychology, i. 460. See also pp. 463, 464, 500. On
page 408 the law is formulated thus: The _persistence_ of the
connection in consciousness is proportionate to the _persistence_ of
the outer connection. Mr. Spencer works most with the law of
frequency. Either law, from my point of view, is false; but Mr.
Spencer ought not to think them synonymous.
[16] In his Principles of Science, chapters xi., xii., xxvi.
[17] Part viii. chap. iii.
{255}
THE IMPORTANCE OF INDIVIDUALS.
The previous Essay, on Great Men, etc., called forth two replies,--one
by Mr. Grant Allen, entitled the 'Genesis of Genius,' in the Atlantic
Monthly, vol. xlvii. p. 351; the other entitled 'Sociology and Hero
Worship,' by Mr. John Fiske, _ibidem_, p. 75. The article which
follows is a rejoinder to Mr. Allen's article. It was refused at the
time by the Atlantic, but saw the day later in the Open Court for
August, 1890. It appears here as a natural supplement to the foregoing
article, on which it casts some explanatory light.
Mr. Allen's contempt for hero-worship is based on very simple
considerations. A nation's great men, he says, are but slight
deviations from the general level. The hero is merely a special
complex of the ordinary qualities of his race. The petty differences
impressed upon ordinary Greek minds by Plato or Aristotle or Zeno, are
nothing at all compared with the vast differences between every Greek
mind and every Egyptian or Chinese mind. We may neglect them in a
philosophy of history, just as in calculating the impetus of a
locomotive we neglect the extra impetus given by a single piece of
better coal. What each man adds is but an infinitesimal fraction
compared with what he derives from his parents, or {256} indirectly
from his earlier ancestry. And if what the past gives to the hero is
so much bulkier than what the future receives from him, it is what
really calls for philosophical treatment. The problem for the
sociologist is as to what produces the average man; the extraordinary
men and what they produce may by the philosophers be taken for granted,
as too trivial variations to merit deep inquiry.
Now, as I wish to vie with Mr. Allen's unrivalled polemic amiability
and be as conciliatory as possible, I will not cavil at his facts or
try to magnify the chasm between an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Napoleon
and the average level of their respective tribes. Let it be as small
as Mr. Allen thinks. All that I object to is that he should think the
mere _size_ of a difference is capable of deciding whether that
difference be or be not a fit subject for philosophic study. Truly
enough, the details vanish in the bird's-eye view; but so does the
bird's-eye view vanish in the details. Which is the right point of
view for philosophic vision? Nature gives no reply, for both points of
view, being equally real, are equally natural; and no one natural
reality _per se_ is any more emphatic than any other. Accentuation,
foreground, and background are created solely by the interested
attention of the looker-on; and if the small difference between the
genius and his tribe interests me most, while the large one between
that tribe and another tribe interests Mr. Allen, our controversy
cannot be ended until a complete philosophy, accounting for all
differences impartially, shall justify us both.
An unlearned carpenter of my acquaintance once said in my hearing:
"There is very little difference between one man and another; but what
little there {257} is, _is very important_." This distinction seems to
me to go to the root of the matter. It is not only the size of the
difference which concerns the philosopher, but also its place and its
kind. An inch is a small thing, but we know the proverb about an inch
on a man's nose. Messrs. Allen and Spencer, in inveighing against
hero-worship, are thinking exclusively of the size of the inch; I, as a
hero-worshipper, attend to its seat and function.
Now, there is a striking law over which few people seem to have
pondered. It is this: That among all the differences which exist, the
only ones that interest us strongly are those _we do not take for
granted_. We are not a bit elated that our friend should have two
hands and the power of speech, and should practise the matter-of-course
human virtues; and quite as little are we vexed that our dog goes on
all fours and fails to understand our conversation. Expecting no more
from the latter companion, and no less from the former, we get what we
expect and are satisfied. We never think of communing with the dog by
discourse of philosophy, or with the friend by head-scratching or the
throwing of crusts to be snapped at. But if either dog or friend fall
above or below the expected standard, they arouse the most lively
emotion. On our brother's vices or genius we never weary of
descanting; to his bipedism or his hairless skin we do not consecrate a
thought. _What_ he says may transport us; that he is able to speak at
all leaves us stone cold. The reason of all this is that his virtues
and vices and utterances might, compatibly with the current range of
variation in our tribe, be just the opposites of what they are, while
his zoölogically human attributes cannot possibly go astray. There
{258} is thus a zone of insecurity in human affairs in which all the
dramatic interest lies; the rest belongs to the dead machinery of the
stage. This is the formative zone, the part not yet ingrained into the
race's average, not yet a typical, hereditary, and constant factor of
the social community in which it occurs. It is like the soft layer
beneath the bark of the tree in which all the year's growth is going
on. Life has abandoned the mighty trunk inside, which stands inert and
belongs almost to the inorganic world. Layer after layer of human
perfection separates me from the central Africans who pursued Stanley
with cries of "meat, meat!" This vast difference ought, on Mr. Allen's
principles, to rivet my attention far more than the petty one which
obtains between two such birds of a feather as Mr. Allen and myself.
Yet while I never feel proud that the sight of a passer-by awakens in
me no cannibalistic waterings of the mouth, I am free to confess that I
shall feel very proud if I do not publicly appear inferior to Mr. Allen
in the conduct of this momentous debate. To me as a teacher the
intellectual gap between my ablest and my dullest student counts for
infinitely more than that between the latter and the amphioxus: indeed,
I never thought of the latter chasm till this moment. Will Mr. Allen
seriously say that this is all human folly, and tweedledum and
tweedledee?
To a Veddah's eyes the differences between two white literary men seem
slight indeed,--same clothes, same spectacles, same harmless
disposition, same habit of scribbling on paper and poring over books,
etc. "Just two white fellows," the Veddah will say, "with no
perceptible difference." But what a difference to the literary men
themselves! Think, Mr. Allen, of {259} confounding our philosophies
together merely because both are printed in the same magazines and are
indistinguishable to the eye of a Veddah! Our flesh creeps at the
thought.
But in judging of history Mr. Allen deliberately prefers to place
himself at the Veddah's point of view, and to see things _en gros_ and
out of focus, rather than minutely. It is quite true that there are
things and differences enough to be seen either way. But which are the
humanly important ones, those most worthy to arouse our interest,--the
large distinctions or the small? In the answer to this question lies
the whole divergence of the hero-worshippers from the sociologists. As
I said at the outset, it is merely a quarrel of emphasis; and the only
thing I can do is to state my personal reasons for the emphasis I
prefer.
The zone of the individual differences, and of the social 'twists'
which by common confession they initiate, is the zone of formative
processes, the dynamic belt of quivering uncertainty, the line where
past and future meet. It is the theatre of all we do not take for
granted, the stage of the living drama of life; and however narrow its
scope, it is roomy enough to lodge the whole range of human passions.
The sphere of the race's average, on the contrary, no matter how large
it may be, is a dead and stagnant thing, an achieved possession, from
which all insecurity has vanished. Like the trunk of a tree, it has
been built up by successive concretions of successive active zones.
The moving present in which we live with its problems and passions, its
individual rivalries, victories, and defeats, will soon pass over to
the majority and leave its small deposit on this static mass, to make
room for fresh actors and a newer play. {260} And though it may be
true, as Mr. Spencer predicts, that each later zone shall fatally be
narrower than its forerunners; and that when the ultimate lady-like
tea-table elysium of the Data of Ethics shall prevail, such questions
as the breaking of eggs at the large or the small end will span the
whole scope of possible human warfare,--still even in this shrunken and
enfeebled generation, _spatio aetatis defessa vetusto_, what eagerness
there will be! Battles and defeats will occur, the victors will be
glorified and the vanquished dishonored just as in the brave days of
yore, the human heart still withdrawing itself from the much it has in
safe possession, and concentrating all its passion upon those
evanescent possibilities of fact which still quiver in fate's scale.
And is not its instinct right? Do not we here grasp the
race-differences _in the making_, and catch the only glimpse it is
allotted to us to attain of the working units themselves, of whose
differentiating action the race-gaps form but the stagnant sum? What
strange inversion of scientific procedure does Mr. Allen practise when
he teaches us to neglect elements and attend only to aggregate
resultants? On the contrary, simply because the active ring, whatever
its bulk, _is elementary_, I hold that the study of its conditions (be
these never so 'proximate') is the highest of topics for the social
philosopher. If individual variations determine its ups and downs and
hair-breadth escapes and twists and turns, as Mr. Allen and Mr. Fiske
both admit, Heaven forbid us from tabooing the study of these in favor
of the average! On the contrary, let us emphasize these, and the
importance of these; and in picking out from history our heroes, and
communing with their {261} kindred spirits,--in imagining as strongly
as possible what differences their individualities brought about in
this world, while its surface was still plastic in their hands, and
what whilom feasibilities they made impossible,--each one of us may
best fortify and inspire what creative energy may lie in his own
soul.[1]
This is the lasting justification of hero-worship, and the pooh-poohing
of it by 'sociologists' is the ever-lasting excuse for popular
indifference to their general laws and averages. The difference
between an America rescued by a Washington or by a 'Jenkins' may, as
Mr. Allen says, be 'little,' but it is, in the words of my carpenter
friend, 'important.' Some organizing genius must in the nature of
things have emerged from the French Revolution; but what Frenchman will
affirm it to have been an accident of no consequence that he should
have had the supernumerary idiosyncrasies of a Bonaparte? What animal,
domestic or wild, will call it a matter of no moment that scarce a word
of sympathy with brutes should have survived from the teachings of
Jesus of Nazareth?
The preferences of sentient creatures are what _create_ the importance
of topics. They are the absolute and ultimate law-giver here. And I
for my part cannot but consider the talk of the contemporary
sociological school about averages and general laws and predetermined
tendencies, with its obligatory undervaluing of the importance of
individual {262} differences, as the most pernicious and immoral of
fatalisms. Suppose there is a social equilibrium fated to be, whose is
it to be,--that of your preference, or mine? There lies the question
of questions, and it is one which no study of averages can decide.
[1] M. G. Tarde's book (itself a work of genius), Les Lois de
l'Imitation, Étude Sociologique (2me Édition, Paris, Alcan, 1895), is
the best possible commentary on this text,--'invention' on the one
hand, and 'imitation' on the other, being for this author the two sole
factors of social change.
{263}
ON SOME HEGELISMS.[1]
We are just now witnessing a singular phenomenon in British and
American philosophy. Hegelism, so defunct on its native soil that I
believe but a single youthful disciple of the school is to be counted
among the privat-docenten and younger professors of Germany, and whose
older champions are all passing off the stage, has found among us so
zealous and able a set of propagandists that to-day it may really be
reckoned one of the most powerful influences of the time in the higher
walks of thought. And there is no doubt that, as a movement of
reaction against the traditional British empiricism, the hegelian
influence represents expansion and freedom, and is doing service of a
certain kind. Such service, however, ought not to make us blindly
indulgent. Hegel's philosophy mingles mountain-loads of corruption
with its scanty merits, and must, now that it has become
quasi-official, make ready to defend itself as well as to attack
others. It is with no hope of converting independent thinkers, but
rather with the sole aspiration of showing some chance youthful
disciple that there _is_ another point of view in philosophy that I
fire this skirmisher's shot, which may, I hope, soon be followed by
somebody else's heavier musketry.
{264}
The point of view I have in mind will become clearer if I begin with a
few preparatory remarks on the motives and difficulties of
philosophizing in general.
To show that the real is identical with the ideal may roughly be set
down as the mainspring of philosophic activity. The atomic and
mechanical conception of the world is as ideal from the point of view
of some of our faculties as the teleological one is from the point of
view of others. In the realm of every ideal we can begin anywhere and
roam over the field, each term passing us to its neighbor, each member
calling for the next, and our reason rejoicing in its glad activity.
Where the parts of a conception seem thus to belong together by inward
kinship, where the whole is defined in a way congruous with our powers
of reaction, to see is to approve and to understand.
Much of the real seems at the first blush to follow a different law.
The parts seem, as Hegel has said, to be shot out of a pistol at us.
Each asserts itself as a simple brute fact, uncalled for by the rest,
which, so far as we can see, might even make a better system without
it. Arbitrary, foreign, jolting, discontinuous--are the adjectives by
which we are tempted to describe it. And yet from out the bosom of it
a partial ideality constantly arises which keeps alive our aspiration
that the whole may some day be construed in ideal form. Not only do
the materials lend themselves under certain circumstances to aesthetic
manipulation, but underlying their worst disjointedness are three great
continua in which for each of us reason's ideal is actually reached. I
mean the continua of memory or personal consciousness, of time and of
space. In {265} these great matrices of all we know, we are absolutely
at home. The things we meet are many, and yet are one; each is itself,
and yet all belong together; continuity reigns, yet individuality is
not lost.
Consider, for example, space. It is a unit. No force can in any way
break, wound, or tear it. It has no joints between which you can pass
your amputating knife, for it penetrates the knife and is not split,
Try to make a hole in space by annihilating an inch of it. To make a
hole you must drive something else through. But what can you drive
through space except what is itself spatial?
But notwithstanding it is this very paragon of unity, space in its
parts contains an infinite variety, and the unity and the variety do
not contradict each other, for they obtain in different respects. The
one is the whole, the many are the parts. Each part is one again, but
only one fraction; and part lies beside part in absolute nextness, the
very picture of peace and non-contradiction. It is true that the space
between two points both unites and divides them, just as the bar of a
dumb-bell both unites and divides the two balls. But the union and the
division are not _secundum idem_: it divides them by keeping them out
of the space between, it unites them by keeping them out of the space
beyond; so the double function presents no inconsistency.
Self-contradiction in space could only ensue if one part tried to oust
another from its position; but the notion of such an absurdity vanishes
in the framing, and cannot stay to vex the mind.[2] Beyond the parts
we see or think at any {266} given time extend further parts; but the
beyond is homogeneous with what is embraced, and follows the same law;
so that no surprises, no foreignness, can ever emerge from space's womb.
Thus with space our intelligence is absolutely intimate; it is
rationality and transparency incarnate. The same may be said of the
ego and of time. But if for simplicity's sake we ignore them, we may
truly say that when we desiderate rational knowledge of the world the
standard set by our knowledge of space is what governs our desire.[3]
Cannot the breaks, the jolts, the margin of foreignness, be exorcised
from other things and leave them unitary like the space they fill?
Could this be done, the philosophic kingdom of heaven would be at hand.
But the moment we turn to the material qualities {267} of being, we
find the continuity ruptured on every side. A fearful jolting begins.
Even if we simplify the world by reducing it to its mechanical bare
poles,--atoms and their motions,--the discontinuity is bad enough. The
laws of clash, the effects of distance upon attraction and repulsion,
all seem arbitrary collocations of data. The atoms themselves are so
many independent facts, the existence of any one of which in no wise
seems to involve the existence of the rest. We have not banished
discontinuity, we have only made it finer-grained. And to get even
that degree of rationality into the universe we have had to butcher a
great part of its contents. The secondary qualities we stripped off
from the reality and swept into the dust-bin labelled 'subjective
illusion,' still _as such_ are facts, and must themselves be
rationalized in some way.
But when we deal with facts believed to be purely subjective, we are
farther than ever from the goal. We have not now the refuge of
distinguishing between the 'reality' and its appearances. Facts of
thought being the only facts, differences of thought become the only
differences, and identities of thought the only identities there are.
Two thoughts that seem different are different to all eternity. We can
no longer speak of heat and light being reconciled in any _tertium
quid_ like wave-motion. For motion is motion, and light is light, and
heat heat forever, and their discontinuity is as absolute as their
existence. Together with the other attributes and things we conceive,
they make up Plato's realm of immutable ideas. Neither _per se_ calls
for the other, hatches it out, is its 'truth,' creates it, or has any
sort of inward community with it except that of being comparable {268}
in an ego and found more or less differing, or more or less resembling,
as the case may be. The world of qualities is a world of things almost
wholly discontinuous _inter se_. Each only says, "I am that I am," and
each says it on its own account and with absolute monotony. The
continuities of which they _partake_, in Plato's phrase, the ego,
space, and time, are for most of them the only grounds of union they
possess.
It might seem as if in the mere 'partaking' there lay a contradiction
of the discontinuity. If the white must partake of space, the heat of
time, and so forth,--do not whiteness and space, heat and time,
mutually call for or help to create each other?
Yes; a few such _à priori_ couplings must be admitted. They are the
axioms: no feeling except as occupying some space and time, or as a
moment in some ego; no motion but of something moved; no thought but of
an object; no time without a previous time,--and the like. But they
are limited in number, and they obtain only between excessively broad
genera of concepts, and leave quite undetermined what the
specifications of those genera shall be. What feeling shall fill
_this_ time, what substance execute _this_ motion, what qualities
combine in _this_ being, are as much unanswered questions as if the
metaphysical axioms never existed at all.
The existence of such syntheses as they are does then but slightly
mitigate the jolt, jolt, jolt we get when we pass over the facts of the
world. Everywhere indeterminate variables, subject only to these few
vague enveloping laws, independent in all besides.--such seems the
truth.
In yet another way, too, ideal and real are so far {269} apart that
their conjunction seems quite hopeless. To eat our cake and have it,
to lose our soul and save it, to enjoy the physical privileges of
selfishness and the moral luxury of altruism at the same time, would be
the ideal. But the real offers us these terms in the shape of mutually
exclusive alternatives of which only one can be true at once; so that
we must choose, and in choosing murder one possibility. The wrench is
absolute: "Either--or!" Just as whenever I bet a hundred dollars on an
event, there comes an instant when I am a hundred dollars richer or
poorer without any intermediate degrees passed over; just as my
wavering between a journey to Portland or to New York does not carry me
from Cambridge in a resultant direction in which both motions are
compounded, say to Albany, but at a given moment results in the
conjunction of reality in all its fulness for one alternative and
impossibility in all its fulness for the other,--so the bachelor joys
are utterly lost from the face of being for the married man, who must
henceforward find his account in something that is not them but is good
enough to make him forget them; so the careless and irresponsible
living in the sunshine, the 'unbuttoning after supper and sleeping upon
benches in the afternoon,' are stars that have set upon the path of him
who in good earnest makes himself a moralist. The transitions are
abrupt, absolute, truly shot out of a pistol; for while many
possibilities are called, the few that are chosen are chosen in all
their sudden completeness.
Must we then think that the world that fills space and time can yield
us no acquaintance of that high and perfect type yielded by empty space
and time themselves? Is what unity there is in the world {270} mainly
derived from the fact that the world is _in_ space and time and
'partakes' of them? Can no vision of it forestall the facts of it, or
know from some fractions the others before the others have arrived?
Are there real logically indeterminate possibilities which forbid there
being any equivalent for the happening of it all but the happening
itself? Can we gain no anticipatory assurance that what is to come
will have no strangeness? Is there no substitute, in short, for life
but the living itself in all its long-drawn weary length and breadth
and thickness?
In the negative reply to all these questions, a modest common-sense
finds no difficulty in acquiescing. To such a way of thinking the
notion of 'partaking' has a deep and real significance. Whoso partakes
of a thing enjoys his share, and comes into contact with the thing and
its other partakers. But he claims no more. His share in no wise
negates the thing or their share; nor does it preclude his possession
of reserved and private powers with which they have nothing to do, and
which are not all absorbed in the mere function of sharing. Why may
not the world be a sort of republican banquet of this sort, where all
the qualities of being respect one another's personal sacredness, yet
sit at the common table of space and time?
To me this view seems deeply probable. Things cohere, but the act of
cohesion itself implies but few conditions, and leaves the rest of
their qualifications indeterminate. As the first three notes of a tune
comport many endings, all melodious, but the tune is not named till a
particular ending has actually come,--so the parts actually known of
the universe may comport many ideally possible complements. But as
{271} the facts are not the complements, so the knowledge of the one is
not the knowledge of the other in anything but the few necessary
elements of which all must partake in order to be together at all.
Why, if one act of knowledge could from one point take in the total
perspective, with all mere possibilities abolished, should there ever
have been anything more than that act? Why duplicate it by the tedious
unrolling, inch by inch, of the foredone reality? No answer seems
possible. On the other hand, if we stipulate only a partial community
of partially independent powers, we see perfectly why no one part
controls the whole view, but each detail must come and be actually
given, before, in any special sense, it can be said to be determined at
all. This is the moral view, the view that gives to other powers the
same freedom it would have itself,--not the ridiculous 'freedom to do
right,' which in my mouth can only mean the freedom to do as _I_ think
right, but the freedom to do as _they_ think right, or wrong either.
After all, what accounts do the nether-most bounds of the universe owe
to me? By what insatiate conceit and lust of intellectual despotism do
I arrogate the right to know their secrets, and from my philosophic
throne to play the only airs they shall march to, as if I were the
Lord's anointed? Is not my knowing them at all a gift and not a right?
And shall it be given before they are given? _Data! gifts!_ something
to be thankful for! It is a gift that we can approach things at all,
and, by means of the time and space of which our minds and they
partake, alter our actions so as to meet them.
There are 'bounds of ord'nance' set for all things, where they must
pause or rue it. 'Facts' are the bounds of human knowledge, set for
it, not by it.
{272}
Now, to a mind like Hegel's such pusillanimous twaddle sounds simply
loathsome. Bounds that we can't overpass! Data! facts that say,
"Hands off, till we are given"! possibilities we can't control! a
banquet of which we merely share! Heavens, this is intolerable; such a
world is no world for a philosopher to have to do with. He must have
all or nothing. If the world cannot be rational in my sense, in the
sense of unconditional surrender, I refuse to grant that it is rational
at all. It is pure incoherence, a chaos, a nulliverse, to whose
haphazard sway I will not truckle. But, no! this is not the world.
The world is philosophy's own,--a single block, of which, if she once
get her teeth on any part, the whole shall inevitably become her prey
and feed her all-devouring theoretic maw. Naught shall be but the
necessities she creates and impossibilities; freedom shall mean freedom
to obey her will, ideal and actual shall be one: she, and I as her
champion, will be satisfied on no lower terms.
The insolence of sway, the _hubris_ on which gods take vengeance, is in
temporal and spiritual matters usually admitted to be a vice. A
Bonaparte and a Philip II. are called monsters. But when an
_intellect_ is found insatiate enough to declare that all existence
must bend the knee to its requirements, we do not call its owner a
monster, but a philosophic prophet. May not this be all wrong? Is
there any one of our functions exempted from the common lot of
liability to excess? And where everything else must be contented with
its part in the universe, shall the theorizing faculty ride rough-shod
over the whole?
I confess I can see no _à priori_ reason for the exception. He who
claims it must be judged by the {273} consequences of his acts, and by
them alone. Let Hegel then confront the universe with his claim, and
see how he can make the two match.
The universe absolutely refuses to let him travel without jolt. Time,
space, and his ego are continuous; so are degrees of heat, shades of
light and color, and a few other serial things; so too do potatoes call
for salt, and cranberries for sugar, in the taste of one who knows what
salt and sugar are. But on the whole there is nought to soften the
shock of surprise to his intelligence, as it passes from one quality of
being to another. Light is not heat, heat is not light; and to him who
holds the one the other is not given till it give itself. Real being
comes moreover and goes from any concept at its own sweet will, with no
permission asked of the conceiver. In despair must Hegel lift vain
hands of imprecation; and since he will take nothing but the whole, he
must throw away even the part he might retain, and call the nature of
things an _absolute_ muddle and incoherence.
But, hark! What wondrous strain is this that steals upon his ear?
Incoherence itself, may it not be the very sort of coherence I require?
Muddle! is it anything but a peculiar sort of transparency? Is not
jolt passage? Is friction other than a kind of lubrication? Is not a
chasm a filling?--a queer kind of filling, but a filling still. Why
seek for a glue to hold things together when their very falling apart
is the only glue you need? Let all that negation which seemed to
disintegrate the universe be the mortar that combines it, and the
problem stands solved. The paradoxical character of the notion could
not fail to please a mind monstrous even in its native {274} Germany,
where mental excess is endemic. Richard, for a moment brought to bay,
is himself again. He vaults into the saddle, and from that time his
career is that of a philosophic desperado,--one series of outrages upon
the chastity of thought.
And can we not ourselves sympathize with his mood in some degree? The
old receipts of squeezing the thistle and taking the bull by the horns
have many applications. An evil frankly accepted loses half its sting
and all its terror. The Stoics had their cheap and easy way of dealing
with evil. _Call_ your woes goods, they said; refuse to _call_ your
lost blessings by that name,--and you are happy. So of the
unintelligibilities: call them means of intelligibility, and what
further do you require? There is even a more legitimate excuse than
that. In the exceedingness of the facts of life over our formulas lies
a standing temptation at certain times to give up trying to say
anything adequate about them, and to take refuge in wild and whirling
words which but confess our impotence before their ineffability. Thus
Baron Bunsen writes to his wife: "Nothing is near but the far; nothing
true but the highest; nothing credible but the inconceivable; nothing
so real as the impossible; nothing clear but the deepest; nothing so
visible as the invisible; and no life is there but through death." Of
these ecstatic moments the _credo quia impossibile_ is the classical
expression. Hegel's originality lies in his making their mood
permanent and sacramental, and authorized to supersede all others,--not
as a mystical bath and refuge for feeling when tired reason sickens of
her intellectual responsibilities (thank Heaven! that bath is always
ready), but as the very form of intellectual responsibility itself.
{275}
And now after this long introduction, let me trace some of Hegel's ways
of applying his discovery. His system resembles a mouse-trap, in which
if you once pass the door you may be lost forever. Safety lies in not
entering. Hegelians have anointed, so to speak, the entrance with
various considerations which, stated in an abstract form, are so
plausible as to slide us unresistingly and almost unwittingly through
the fatal arch. It is not necessary to drink the ocean to know that it
is salt; nor need a critic dissect a whole system after proving that
its premises are rotten. I shall accordingly confine myself to a few
of the points that captivate beginners most; and assume that if they
break down, so must the system which they prop.
First of all, Hegel has to do utterly away with the sharing and
partaking business he so much loathes. He will not call contradiction
the glue in one place and identity in another; that is too
half-hearted. Contradiction must be a glue universal, and must derive
its credit from being shown to be latently involved in cases that we
hitherto supposed to embody pure continuity. Thus, the relations of an
ego with its objects, of one time with another time, of one place with
another place, of a cause with its effect, of a thing with its
properties, and especially of parts with wholes, must be shown to
involve contradiction. Contradiction, shown to lurk in the very heart
of coherence and continuity, cannot after that be held to defeat them,
and must be taken as the universal solvent,--or, rather, there is no
longer any need of a solvent. To 'dissolve' things in identity was the
dream of earlier cruder schools. Hegel will show that their very
difference is their identity, and that {276} in the act of detachment
the detachment is undone, and they fall into each other's arms.
Now, at the very outset it seems rather odd that a philosopher who
pretends that the world is absolutely rational, or in other words that
it can be completely understood, should fall back on a principle (the
identity of contradictories) which utterly defies understanding, and
obliges him in fact to use the word 'understanding,' whenever it occurs
in his pages, as a term of contempt. Take the case of space we used
above. The common man who looks at space believes there is nothing in
it to be acquainted with beyond what he sees; no hidden machinery, no
secrets, nothing but the parts as they lie side by side and make the
static whole. His intellect is satisfied with accepting space as an
ultimate genus of the given. But Hegel cries to him: "Dupe! dost thou
not see it to be one nest of incompatibilities? Do not the unity of
its wholeness and the diversity of its parts stand in patent
contradiction? Does it not both unite and divide things; and but for
this strange and irreconcilable activity, would it be at all? The
hidden dynamism of self-contradiction is what incessantly produces the
static appearance by which your sense is fooled."
But if the man ask how self-contradiction _can_ do all this, and how
its dynamism may be seen to work, Hegel can only reply by showing him
the space itself and saying: "Lo, _thus_." In other words, instead of
the principle of explanation being more intelligible than the thing to
be explained, it is absolutely unintelligible if taken by itself, and
must appeal to its pretended product to prove its existence. Surely,
such a system of explaining _notum per ignotum_, of {277} making the
_explicans_ borrow credentials from the _explicand_, and of creating
paradoxes and impossibilities where none were suspected, is a strange
candidate for the honor of being a complete rationalizer of the world.
The principle of the contradictoriness of identity and the identity of
contradictories is the essence of the hegelian system. But what
probably washes this principle down most with beginners is the
combination in which its author works it with another principle which
is by no means characteristic of his system, and which, for want of a
better name, might be called the 'principle of totality.' This
principle says that you cannot adequately know even a part until you
know of what whole it forms a part. As Aristotle writes and Hegel
loves to quote, an amputated hand is not even a hand. And as Tennyson
says,--
"Little flower--but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is."
Obviously, until we have taken in all the relations, immediate or
remote, into which the thing actually enters or potentially may enter,
we do not know all _about_ the thing.
And obviously for such an exhaustive acquaintance with the thing, an
acquaintance with every other thing, actual and potential, near and
remote, is needed; so that it is quite fair to say that omniscience
alone can completely know any one thing as it stands. Standing in a
world of relations, that world must be known before the thing is fully
known. This doctrine is of course an integral part of empiricism, an
integral part of common-sense. Since when could good men not apprehend
the passing hour {278} in the light of life's larger sweep,--not grow
dispassionate the more they stretched their view? Did the 'law of
sharing' so little legitimate their procedure that a law of identity of
contradictories, forsooth, must be trumped up to give it scope? Out
upon the idea!
Hume's account of causation is a good illustration of the way in which
empiricism may use the principle of totality. We call something a
cause; but we at the same time deny its effect to be in any latent way
contained in or substantially identical with it. We thus cannot tell
what its causality amounts to until its effect has actually supervened.
The effect, then, or something beyond the thing is what makes the thing
to be so far as it is a cause. Humism thus says that its causality is
something adventitious and not necessarily given when its other
attributes are there. Generalizing this, empiricism contends that we
must everywhere distinguish between the intrinsic being of a thing and
its relations, and, among these, between those that are essential to
our knowing it at all and those that may be called adventitious. The
thing as actually present in a given world is there with _all_ its
relations; for it to be known as it _there_ exists, they must be known
too, and it and they form a single fact for any consciousness large
enough to embrace that world as a unity. But what constitutes this
singleness of fact, this unity? Empiricism says, Nothing but the
relation-yielding matrix in which the several items of the world find
themselves embedded,--time, namely, and space, and the mind of the
knower. And it says that were some of the items quite different from
what they are and others the same, still, for aught we can see, an
equally unitary world might be, provided each {279} item were an object
for consciousness and occupied a determinate point in space and time.
All the adventitious relations would in such a world be changed, along
with the intrinsic natures and places of the beings between which they
obtained; but the 'principle of totality' in knowledge would in no wise
be affected.
But Hegelism dogmatically denies all this to be possible. In the first
place it says there are no intrinsic natures that may change; in the
second it says there are no adventitious relations. When the relations
of what we call a thing are told, no _caput mortuum_ of intrinsicality,
no 'nature,' is left. The relations soak up all there is of the thing;
the 'items' of the world are but _foci_ of relation with other _foci_
of relation; and all the relations are necessary. The unity of the
world has nothing to do with any 'matrix.' The matrix and the items,
each with all, make a unity, simply because each in truth is all the
rest. The proof lies in the _hegelian_ principle of totality, which
demands that if any one part be posited alone all the others shall
forthwith _emanate_ from it and infallibly reproduce the whole. In the
_modus operandi_ of the emanation comes in, as I said, that partnership
of the principle of totality with that of the identity of
contradictories which so recommends the latter to beginners in Hegel's
philosophy. To posit one item alone is to deny the rest; to deny them
is to refer to them; to refer to them is to begin, at least, to bring
them on the scene; and to begin is in the fulness of time to end.
If we call this a monism, Hegel is quick to cry, Not so! To say simply
that the one item is the rest {280} of the universe is as false and
one-sided as to say that it is simply itself. It is both and neither;
and the only condition on which we gain the right to affirm that it is,
is that we fail not to keep affirming all the while that it is not, as
well. Thus the truth refuses to be expressed in any single act of
judgment or sentence. The world appears as a monism _and_ a pluralism,
just as it appeared in our own introductory exposition.
But the trouble that keeps us and Hegel from ever joining hands over
this apparent formula of brotherhood is that we distinguish, or try to
distinguish, the respects in which the world is one from those in which
it is many, while all such stable distinctions are what he most
abominates. The reader may decide which procedure helps his reason
most. For my own part, the time-honored formula of empiricist
pluralism, that the world cannot be set down in any single proposition,
grows less instead of more intelligible when I add, "And yet the
different propositions that express it are one!" The unity of the
propositions is that of the mind that harbors them. Any one who
insists that their diversity is in any way itself their unity, can only
do so because he loves obscurity and mystification for their own pure
sakes.
Where you meet with a contradiction among realities, Herbart used to
say, it shows you have failed to make a real distinction. Hegel's
sovereign method of going to work and saving all possible
contradictions, lies in pertinaciously refusing to distinguish. He
takes what is true of a term _secundum quid_, treats it as true of the
same term _simpliciter_, and then, of course, applies it to the term
_secundum aliud_. A {281} good example of this is found in the first
triad. This triad shows that the mutability of the real world is due
to the fact that being constantly negates itself; that whatever _is_ by
the same act _is not_, and gets undone and swept away; and that thus
the irremediable torrent of life about which so much rhetoric has been
written has its roots in an ineluctable necessity which lies revealed
to our logical reason. This notion of a being which forever stumbles
over its own feet, and has to change in order to exist at all, is a
very picturesque symbol of the reality, and is probably one of the
points that make young readers feel as if a deep core of truth lay in
the system.
But how is the reasoning done? Pure being is assumed, without
determinations, being _secundum quid_. In this respect it agrees with
nothing. Therefore _simpliciter_ it is nothing; wherever we find it,
it is nothing; crowned with complete determinations then, or _secundum
aliud_, it is nothing still, and _hebt sich auf_.
It is as if we said, Man without his clothes may be named 'the naked.'
Therefore man _simpliciter_ is the naked; and finally man with his hat,
shoes, and overcoat on is the naked still.
Of course we may in this instance or any other repeat that the
conclusion is strictly true, however comical it seems. Man within the
clothes is naked, just as he is without them. Man would never have
invented the clothes had he not been naked. The fact of his being clad
at all does prove his essential nudity. And so in general,--the form
of any judgment, being the addition of a predicate to a subject, shows
that the subject has been conceived without the predicate, and thus by
a strained metaphor may {282} be called the predicate's negation. Well
and good! let the expression pass. But we must notice this. The
judgment has now created a new subject, the naked-clad, and all
propositions regarding this must be judged on their own merits; for
those true of the old subject, 'the naked,' are no longer true of this
one. For instance, we cannot say because the naked pure and simple
must not enter the drawing-room or is in danger of taking cold, that
the naked with his clothes on will also take cold or must stay in his
bedroom. Hold to it eternally that the clad man _is_ still naked if it
amuse you,--'tis designated in the bond; but the so-called
contradiction is a sterile boon. Like Shylock's pound of flesh, it
leads to no consequences. It does not entitle you to one drop of his
Christian blood either in the way of catarrh, social exclusion, or what
further results pure nakedness may involve.
In a version of the first step given by our foremost American
Hegelian,[4] we find this playing with the necessary form of judgment.
Pure being, he says, has no determinations. But the having none is
itself a determination. Wherefore pure being contradicts its own self,
and so on. Why not take heed to the _meaning_ of what is said? When
we make the predication concerning pure being, our meaning is merely
the denial of all other determinations than the particular one we make.
The showman who advertised his elephant as 'larger than any elephant in
the world except himself' must have been in an hegelian country where
he was afraid that if he were less explicit the audience would
dialectically proceed to say: {283} "This elephant, larger than any in
the world, involves a contradiction; for he himself is in the world,
and so stands endowed with the virtue of being both larger and smaller
than himself,--a perfect hegelian elephant, whose immanent
self-contradictoriness can only be removed in a higher synthesis. Show
us the higher synthesis! We don't care to see such a mere abstract
creature as your elephant." It may be (and it was indeed suggested in
antiquity) that all things are of their own size by being both larger
and smaller than themselves. But in the case of this elephant the
scrupulous showman nipped such philosophizing and all its inconvenient
consequences in the bud, by explicitly intimating that larger than any
_other_ elephant was all he meant.
Hegel's quibble with this word _other_ exemplifies the same fallacy.
All 'others,' as such, are according to him identical. That is,
'otherness,' which can only be predicated of a given thing _A_,
_secundum quid_ (as other than _B_, etc.), is predicated _simpliciter_,
and made to identify the _A_ in question with _B_, which is other only
_secundum aliud_,--namely other than _A_.
Another maxim that Hegelism is never tired of repeating is that "to
know a limit is already to be beyond it." "Stone walls do not a prison
make, nor iron bars a cage." The inmate of the penitentiary shows by
his grumbling that he is still in the stage of abstraction and of
separative thought. The more keenly he thinks of the fun he might be
having outside, the more deeply he ought to feel that the walls
identify him with it. They set him beyond them _secundum quid_, in
imagination, in longing, in despair; _argal_ they take him there
_simpliciter_ and {284} in every way,--in flesh, in power, in deed.
Foolish convict, to ignore his blessings!
Another mode of stating his principle is this: "To know the finite as
such, is also to know the infinite." Expressed in this abstract shape,
the formula is as insignificant as it is unobjectionable. We can cap
every word with a negative particle, and the word _finished_
immediately suggests the word _unfinished_, and we know the two words
together.
But it is an entirely different thing to take the knowledge of a
concrete case of ending, and to say that it virtually makes us
acquainted with other concrete facts _in infinitum_. For, in the first
place, the end may be an absolute one. The _matter_ of the universe,
for instance, is according to all appearances in finite amount; and if
we knew that we had counted the last bit of it, infinite knowledge in
that respect, so far from being given, would be impossible. With
regard to _space_, it is true that in drawing a bound we are aware of
more. But to treat this little fringe as the equal of infinite space
is ridiculous. It resembles infinite space _secundum quid_, or in but
one respect,--its spatial quality. We believe it homogeneous with
whatever spaces may remain; but it would be fatuous to say, because one
dollar in my pocket is homogeneous with all the dollars in the country,
that to have it is to have them. The further points of space are as
numerically distinct from the fringe as the dollars from the dollar,
and not until we have actually intuited them can we be said to 'know'
them _simpliciter_. The hegelian reply is that the _quality_ of space
constitutes its only _worth_; and that there is nothing true, good, or
beautiful to be known {285} in the spaces beyond which is not already
known in the fringe. This introduction of a eulogistic term into a
mathematical question is original. The 'true' and the 'false' infinite
are about as appropriate distinctions in a discussion of cognition as
the good and the naughty rain would be in a treatise on meteorology.
But when we grant that all the worth of the knowledge of distant spaces
is due to the knowledge of what they may carry in them, it then appears
more than ever absurd to say that the knowledge of the fringe is an
equivalent for the infinitude of the distant knowledge. The distant
spaces even _simpliciter_ are not yet yielded to our thinking; and if
they were yielded _simpliciter_, would not be yielded _secundum aliud_,
or in respect to their material filling out.
Shylock's bond was an omnipotent instrument compared with this
knowledge of the finite, which remains the ignorance it always was,
till the infinite by its own act has piece by piece placed itself in
our hands.
Here Hegelism cries out: "By the identity of the knowledges of infinite
and finite I never meant that one could be a _substitute_ for the
other; nor does true philosophy ever mean by identity capacity for
substitution." This sounds suspiciously like the good and the naughty
infinite, or rather like the mysteries of the Trinity and the
Eucharist. To the unsentimental mind there are but two sorts of
identity,--total identity and partial identity. Where the identity is
total, the things can be substituted wholly for one another. Where
substitution is impossible, it must be that the identity is incomplete.
It is the duty of the student then to ascertain the exact _quid,
secundum_ which it obtains, as we have tried to do above. Even the
Catholic will tell you that when he believes in the {286} identity of
the wafer with Christ's body, he does not mean in all respects,--so
that he might use it to exhibit muscular fibre, or a cook make it smell
like baked meat in the oven. He means that in the one sole respect of
nourishing his being in a certain way, it is identical with and can be
substituted for the very body of his Redeemer.
'The knowledge of opposites is one,' is one of the hegelian first
principles, of which the preceding are perhaps only derivatives. Here
again Hegelism takes 'knowledge' _simpliciter_, and substituting it for
knowledge in a particular respect, avails itself of the confusion to
cover other respects never originally implied. When the knowledge of a
thing is given us, we no doubt think that the thing may or must have an
opposite. This postulate of something opposite we may call a
'knowledge of the opposite' if we like; but it is a knowledge of it in
only that one single respect, that it is something opposite. No number
of opposites to a quality we have never directly experienced could ever
lead us positively to infer what that quality is. There is a jolt
between the negation of them and the actual positing of it in its
proper shape, that twenty logics of Hegel harnessed abreast cannot
drive us smoothly over.
The use of the maxim 'All determination is negation' is the fattest and
most full-blown application of the method of refusing to distinguish.
Taken in its vague confusion, it probably does more than anything else
to produce the sort of flicker and dazzle which are the first mental
conditions for the reception of Hegel's system. The word 'negation'
taken _simpliciter_ is treated as if it covered an indefinite number of
{287} _secundums_, culminating in the very peculiar one of
self-negation. Whence finally the conclusion is drawn that assertions
are universally self-contradictory. As this is an important matter, it
seems worth while to treat it a little minutely.
When I measure out a pint, say of milk, and so determine it, what do I
do? I virtually make two assertions regarding it,--it is this pint; it
is not those other gallons. One of these is an affirmation, the other
a negation. Both have a common subject; but the predicates being
mutually exclusive, the two assertions lie beside each other in endless
peace.
I may with propriety be said to make assertions more remote
still,--assertions of which those other gallons are the subject. As it
is not they, so are they not the pint which it is. The determination
"this is the pint" carries with it the negation,--"those are not the
pints." Here we have the same predicate; but the subjects are
exclusive of each other, so there is again endless peace. In both
couples of propositions negation and affirmation are _secundum aliud_:
this is _a_; this is n't not-_a_. This kind of negation involved in
determination cannot possibly be what Hegel wants for his purposes.
The table is not the chair, the fireplace is not the cupboard,--these
are literal expressions of the law of identity and contradiction, those
principles of the abstracting and separating understanding for which
Hegel has so sovereign a contempt, and which his logic is meant to
supersede.
And accordingly Hegelians pursue the subject further, saying there is
in every determination an element of real conflict. Do you not in
determining the milk to be this pint exclude it forever from the chance
of being those gallons, frustrate it from {288} expansion? And so do
you not equally exclude them from the being which it now maintains as
its own?
Assuredly if you had been hearing of a land flowing with milk and
honey, and had gone there with unlimited expectations of the rivers the
milk would fill; and if you found there was but this single pint in the
whole country,--the determination of the pint would exclude another
determination which your mind had previously made of the milk. There
would be a real conflict resulting in the victory of one side. The
rivers would be negated by the single pint being affirmed; and as
rivers and pint are affirmed of the same milk (first as supposed and
then as found), the contradiction would be complete.
But it is a contradiction that can never by any chance occur in real
nature or being. It can only occur between a false representation of a
being and the true idea of the being when actually cognized. The first
got into a place where it had no rights and had to be ousted. But in
_rerum naturâ_ things do not get into one another's logical places.
The gallons first spoken of never say, "We are the pint;" the pint
never says, "I am the gallons." It never tries to expand; and so there
is no chance for anything to exclude or negate it. It thus remains
affirmed absolutely.
Can it be believed in the teeth of these elementary truths that the
principle _determinatio negatio_ is held throughout Hegel to imply an
active contradiction, conflict, and exclusion? Do the horse-cars
jingling outside negate me writing in this room? Do I, reader, negate
you? Of course, if I say, "Reader, we are two, and therefore I am
two," I negate you, for I am actually thrusting a part into the seat of
the whole. {289} The orthodox logic expresses the fallacy by saying
the we is taken by me distributively instead of collectively; but as
long as I do not make this blunder, and am content with my part, we all
are safe. In _rerum naturâ_, parts remain parts. Can you imagine one
position in space trying to get into the place of another position and
having to be 'contradicted' by that other? Can you imagine your
thought of an object trying to dispossess the real object from its
being, and so being negated by it? The great, the sacred law of
partaking, the noiseless step of continuity, seems something that Hegel
cannot possibly understand. All or nothing is his one idea. For him
each point of space, of time, each feeling in the ego, each quality of
being, is clamoring, "I am the all,--there is nought else but me."
This clamor is its essence, which has to be negated in another act
which gives it its true determination. What there is of affirmative in
this determination is thus the mere residuum left from the negation by
others of the negation it originally applied to them.
But why talk of residuum? The Kilkenny cats of fable could leave a
residuum in the shape of their undevoured tails. But the Kilkenny cats
of existence as it appears in the pages of Hegel are all-devouring, and
leave no residuum. Such is the unexampled fury of their onslaught that
they get clean out of themselves and into each other, nay more, pass
right through each other, and then "return into themselves" ready for
another round, as insatiate, but as inconclusive, as the one that went
before.
If I characterized Hegel's own mood as _hubris_, the insolence of
excess, what shall I say of the mood he ascribes to being? Man makes
the gods in his {290} image; and Hegel, in daring to insult the
spotless _sôphrosune_ of space and time, the bound-respecters, in
branding as strife that law of sharing under whose sacred keeping, like
a strain of music, like an odor of incense (as Emerson says), the dance
of the atoms goes forward still, seems to me but to manifest his own
deformity.
This leads me to animadvert on an erroneous inference which hegelian
idealism makes from the form of the negative judgment. Every negation,
it says, must be an intellectual act. Even the most _naïf_ realism
will hardly pretend that the non-table as such exists _in se_ after the
same fashion as the table does. But table and non-table, since they
are given to our thought together, must be consubstantial. Try to make
the position or affirmation of the table as simple as you can, it is
also the negation of the non-table; and thus positive being itself
seems after all but a function of intelligence, like negation.
Idealism is proved, realism is unthinkable. Now I have not myself the
least objection to idealism,--an hypothesis which voluminous
considerations make plausible, and whose difficulties may be cleared
away any day by new discriminations or discoveries. But I object to
proving by these patent ready-made _à priori_ methods that which can
only be the fruit of a wide and patient induction. For the truth is
that our affirmations and negations do not stand on the same footing at
all, and are anything but consubstantial. An affirmation says
something about an objective existence. A negation says something
_about an affirmation_,--namely, that it is false. There are no
negative predicates or falsities in nature. Being makes no false
hypotheses that have {291} to be contradicted. The only denials she
can be in any way construed to perform are denials of our errors. This
shows plainly enough that denial must be of something mental, since the
thing denied is always a fiction. "The table is not the chair"
supposes the speaker to have been playing with the false notion that it
may have been the chair. But affirmation may perfectly well be of
something having no such necessary and constitutive relation to
thought. Whether it really is of such a thing is for harder
considerations to decide.
If idealism be true, the great question that presents itself is whether
its truth involve the necessity of an infinite, unitary, and omniscient
consciousness, or whether a republic of semi-detached consciousnesses
will do,--consciousnesses united by a certain common fund of
representations, but each possessing a private store which the others
do not share. Either hypothesis is to me conceivable. But whether the
egos be one or many, the _nextness_ of representations to one another
within them is the principle of unification of the universe. To be
thus consciously next to some other representation is the condition to
which each representation must submit, under penalty of being excluded
from this universe, and like Lord Dundreary's bird 'flocking all
alone,' and forming a separate universe by itself. But this is only a
condition of which the representations _partake_; it leaves all their
other determinations undecided. To say, because representation _b_
cannot be in the same universe with _a_ without being _a's neighbor_;
that therefore _a_ possesses, involves, or necessitates _b_, hide and
hair, flesh and fell, all appurtenances and belongings,--is {292} only
the silly hegelian all-or-nothing insatiateness once more.
Hegel's own logic, with all the senseless hocus-pocus of its triads,
utterly fails to prove his position. The only evident compulsion which
representations exert upon one another is compulsion to submit to the
conditions of entrance into the same universe with them--the conditions
of continuity, of selfhood, space, and time--under penalty of being
excluded. But what this universe shall be is a matter of fact which we
cannot decide till we know what representations _have_ submitted to
these its sole conditions. The conditions themselves impose no further
requirements. In short, the notion that real contingency and ambiguity
may be features of the real world is a perfectly unimpeachable
hypothesis. Only in such a world can moral judgments have a claim to
be. For the bad is that which takes the place of something else which
possibly might have been where it now is, and the better is that which
absolutely might be where it absolutely is not. In the universe of
Hegel--the absolute block whose parts have no loose play, the pure
plethora of necessary being with the oxygen of possibility all
suffocated out of its lungs--there can be neither good nor bad, but one
dead level of mere fate.
But I have tired the reader out. The worst of criticising Hegel is
that the very arguments we use against him give forth strange and
hollow sounds that make them seem almost as fantastic as the errors to
which they are addressed. The sense of a universal mirage, of a
ghostly unreality, steals over us, which is the very moonlit atmosphere
of Hegelism itself. What wonder then if, instead of {293} converting,
our words do but rejoice and delight, those already baptized in the
faith of confusion? To their charmed senses we all seem children of
Hegel together, only some of us have not the wit to know our own
father. Just as Romanists are sure to inform us that our reasons
against Papal Christianity unconsciously breathe the purest spirit of
Catholicism, so Hegelism benignantly smiles at our exertions, and
murmurs, "If the red slayer think he slays;" "When me they fly, I am
the wings," etc.
To forefend this unwelcome adoption, let me recapitulate in a few
propositions the reasons why I am not an hegelian.
1. We cannot eat our cake and have it; that is, the only real
contradiction there can be between thoughts is where one is true, the
other false. When this happens, one must go forever; nor is there any
'higher synthesis' in which both can wholly revive.
2. A chasm is not a bridge in any utilizable sense; that is, no mere
negation can be the instrument of a positive advance in thought.
3. The continua, time, space, and the ego, are bridges, because they
are without chasm.
4. But they bridge over the chasms between represented qualities only
partially.
5. This partial bridging, however, makes the qualities share in a
common world.
6. The other characteristics of the qualities are separate facts.
7. But the same quality appears in many times and spaces. Generic
sameness of the quality wherever found becomes thus a further means by
which the jolts are reduced.
8. What between different qualities jolts remain. {294} Each, as far
as the other is concerned, is an absolutely separate and contingent
being.
9. The moral judgment may lead us to postulate as irreducible the
contingencies of the world.
10. Elements mutually contingent are not in conflict so long as they
partake of the continua of time, space, etc.,--partaking being the
exact opposite of strife. They conflict only when, as mutually
exclusive possibilities, they strive to possess themselves of the same
parts of time, space, and ego.
11. That there are such real conflicts, irreducible to any
intelligence, and giving rise to an excess of possibility over
actuality, is an hypothesis, but a credible one. No philosophy should
pretend to be anything more.
NOTE.--Since the preceding article was written, some observations on
the effects of nitrous-oxide-gas-intoxication which I was prompted to
make by reading the pamphlet called The Anaesthetic Revelation and the
Gist of Philosophy, by Benjamin Paul Blood, Amsterdam, N. Y., 1874,
have made me understand better than ever before both the strength and
the weakness of Hegel's philosophy. I strongly urge others to repeat
the experiment, which with pure gas is short and harmless enough. The
effects will of course vary with the individual. Just as they vary in
the same individual from time to time; but it is probable that in the
former case, as in the latter, a generic resemblance will obtain. With
me, as with every other person of whom I have heard, the keynote of the
experience is the tremendously exciting sense of an intense
metaphysical illumination. Truth lies open to the view in depth
beneath depth of almost blinding evidence. The mind sees all the
logical relations of being with an apparent subtlety and instantaneity
to which its normal consciousness offers no parallel; only as sobriety
returns, the feeling of insight fades, and one is left staring vacantly
at a few disjointed words and phrases, as one stares at a
cadaverous-looking snow-peak from which the sunset glow has just fled,
or at the black cinder left by an extinguished brand.
{295}
The immense emotional sense of _reconciliation_ which characterizes the
'maudlin' stage of alcoholic drunkenness,--a stage which seems silly to
lookers-on, but the subjective rapture of which probably constitutes a
chief part of the temptation to the vice,--is well known. The centre
and periphery of things seem to come together. The ego and its
objects, the _meum_ and the _tuum_, are one. Now this, only a
thousandfold enhanced, was the effect upon me of the gas: and its first
result was to make peal through me with unutterable power the
conviction that Hegelism was true after all, and that the deepest
convictions of my intellect hitherto were wrong. Whatever idea or
representation occurred to the mind was seized by the same logical
forceps, and served to illustrate the same truth; and that truth was
that every opposition, among whatsoever things, vanishes in a higher
unity in which it is based; that all contradictions, so-called, are but
differences; that all differences are of degree; that all degrees are
of a common kind; that unbroken continuity is of the essence of being;
and that we are literally in the midst of _an infinite_, to perceive
the existence of which is the utmost we can attain. Without the _same_
as a basis, how could strife occur? Strife presupposes something to be
striven about; and in this common topic, the same for both parties, the
differences merge. From the hardest contradiction to the tenderest
diversity of verbiage differences evaporate; _yes_ and _no_ agree at
least in being assertions; a denial of a statement is but another mode
of stating the same, contradiction can only occur of the same
thing,--all opinions are thus synonyms, are synonymous, are the same.
But the same phrase by difference of emphasis is two; and here again
difference and no-difference merge in one.
It is impossible to convey an idea of the torrential character of the
identification of opposites as it streams through the mind in this
experience. I have sheet after sheet of phrases dictated or written
during the intoxication, which to the sober reader seem meaningless
drivel, but which at the moment of transcribing were fused in the fire
of infinite rationality. God and devil, good and evil, life and death,
I and thou, sober and drunk, matter and form, black and white, quantity
and quality, shiver of ecstasy and shudder of horror, vomiting and
swallowing, inspiration and expiration, fate and reason, great and
small, extent and intent, joke and earnest, tragic and comic, and fifty
other {296} contrasts figure in these pages in the same monotonous way.
The mind saw how each term _belonged_ to its contrast through a
knife-edge moment of transition which _it_ effected, and which,
perennial and eternal, was the _nunc stans_ of life. The thought of
mutual implication of the parts in the bare form of a judgment of
opposition, as 'nothing--but,' 'no more--than,' 'only--if,' etc.,
produced a perfect delirium of theoretic rapture. And at last, when
definite ideas to work on came slowly, the mind went through the mere
_form_ of recognizing sameness in identity by contrasting the same word
with itself, differently emphasized, or shorn of its initial letter.
Let me transcribe a few sentences:
What's mistake but a kind of take?
What's nausea but a kind of -ausea?
Sober, drunk, -_unk_, astonishment.
Everything can become the subject of criticism--how
criticise without something _to_ criticise?
Agreement--disagreement!!
Emotion--motion!!!
Die away from, _from_, die away (without the _from_).
Reconciliation of opposites; sober, drunk, all the same!
Good and evil reconciled in a laugh!
It escapes, it escapes!
But----
What escapes, WHAT escapes?
Emphasis, EMphasis; there must be some emphasis in order
for there to be a phasis.
No verbiage can give it, because the verbiage is _other_.
_In_coherent, coherent--same.
And it fades! And it's infinite! AND it's infinite!
If it was n't _going_, why should you hold on to it?
Don't you see the difference, don't you see the identity?
Constantly opposites united!
The same me telling you to write and not to write!
Extreme--extreme, extreme! Within the _ex_tensity that
'extreme' contains is contained the '_extreme_' of intensity.
Something, and _other_ than that thing!
Intoxication, and _otherness_ than intoxication.
Every attempt at betterment,--every attempt at otherment,--is a----.
It fades forever and forever as we move.
{297}
There _is_ a reconciliation!
Reconciliation--_e_conciliation!
By God, how that hurts! By God, how it _does n't_ hurt!
Reconciliation of two extremes.
By George, nothing but _o_thing!
That sounds like nonsense, but it is pure _on_sense!
Thought deeper than speech----!
Medical school; divinity school, _school_! SCHOOL! Oh my
God, oh God, oh God!
The most coherent and articulate sentence which came was this:--
There are no differences but differences of degree between different
degrees of difference and no difference.
This phrase has the true Hegelian ring, being in fact a regular _sich
als sich auf sich selbst beziehende Negativität_. And true Hegelians
will _überhaupt_ be able to read between the lines and feel, at any
rate, what _possible_ ecstasies of cognitive emotion might have bathed
these tattered fragments of thought when they were alive. But for the
assurance of a certain amount of respect from them, I should hardly
have ventured to print what must be such caviare to the general.
But now comes the reverse of the medal. What is the principle of unity
in all this monotonous rain of instances? Although I did not see it at
first, I soon found that it was in each case nothing but the abstract
_genus_ of which the conflicting terms were opposite species. In other
words, although the flood of ontologic _emotion_ was Hegelian through
and through, the _ground_ for it was nothing but the world-old
principle that things are the same only so far and no farther than they
_are_ the same, or partake of a common nature,--the principle that
Hegel most tramples under foot. At the same time the rapture of
beholding a process that was infinite, changed (as the nature of the
infinitude was realized by the mind) into the sense of a dreadful and
ineluctable fate, with whose magnitude every finite effort is
incommensurable and in the light of which whatever happens is
indifferent. This instantaneous revulsion of mood from rapture to
horror is, perhaps, the strongest emotion I have ever experienced. I
got it repeatedly when the inhalation was continued long enough to
produce incipient nausea; and I cannot but regard it as the normal and
inevitable outcome of the {298} intoxication, if sufficiently
prolonged. A pessimistic fatalism, depth within depth of impotence and
indifference, reason and silliness united, not in a higher synthesis,
but in the fact that whichever you choose it is all one,--this is the
upshot of a revelation that began so rosy bright.
Even when the process stops short of this ultimatum, the reader will
have noticed from the phrases quoted how often it ends by losing the
clue. Something 'fades,' 'escapes;' and the feeling of insight is
changed into an intense one of bewilderment, puzzle, confusion,
astonishment. I know no more singular sensation than this intense
bewilderment, with nothing particular left to be bewildered at save the
bewilderment itself. It seems, indeed, _a causa sui_, or 'spirit
become its own object.'
My conclusion is that the togetherness of things in a common world, the
law of sharing, of which I have said so much, may, when perceived,
engender a very powerful emotion, that Hegel was so unusually
susceptible to this emotion throughout his life that its gratification
became his supreme end, and made him tolerably unscrupulous as to the
means he employed; that _indifferentism_ is the true outcome of every
view of the world which makes infinity and continuity to be its
essence, and that pessimistic or optimistic attitudes pertain to the
mere accidental subjectivity of the moment; finally, that the
identification of contradictories, so far from being the
self-developing process which Hegel supposes, is really a
self-consuming process, passing from the less to the more abstract, and
terminating either in a laugh at the ultimate nothingness, or in a mood
of vertiginous amazement at a meaningless infinity.
[1] Reprinted from Mind, April, 1882.
[2] The seeming contradiction between the infinitude of space and the
fact that it is all finished and given and there, can be got over in
more than one way. The simplest way is by idealism, which
distinguishes between space as actual and space as potential. For
idealism, space only exists so far as it is represented; but all
actually represented spaces are finite; it is only possibly
representable spaces that are infinite.
[3] Not only for simplicity's sake do we select space as the paragon of
a rationalizing continuum. Space determines the relations of the items
that enter it in a far more intricate way than does time; in a far more
fixed way than does the ego. By this last clause I mean that if things
are in space at all, they must conform to geometry; while the being in
an ego at all need not make them conform to logic or any other manner
of rationality. Under the sheltering wings of a self the matter of
unreason can lodge itself as safely as any other kind of content. One
cannot but respect the devoutness of the ego-worship of some of our
English-writing Hegelians. But at the same time one cannot help
fearing lest the monotonous contemplation of so barren a principle as
that of the pure formal self (which, be it never so essential a
condition of the existence of a world of organized experience at all,
must notwithstanding take its own _character_ from, not give the
character to, the separate empirical data over which its mantle is
cast), one cannot but fear, I say, lest the religion of the
transcendental ego should, like all religions of the 'one thing
needful,' end by sterilizing and occluding the minds of its believers.
[4] Journal of Speculative Philosophy, viii. 37.
{299}
WHAT PSYCHICAL RESEARCH HAS ACCOMPLISHED.[1]
"The great field for new discoveries," said a scientific friend to me
the other day, "is always the unclassified residuum." Round about the
accredited and orderly facts of every science there ever floats a sort
of dust-cloud of exceptional observations, of occurrences minute and
irregular and seldom met with, which it always proves more easy to
ignore than to attend to. The ideal of every science is that of a
closed and completed system of truth. The charm of most sciences to
their more passive disciples consists in their appearing, in fact, to
wear just this ideal form. Each one of our various _ologies_ seems to
offer a definite head of classification for every possible phenomenon
of the sort which it professes to cover; and so far from free is most
men's fancy, that, when a consistent and organized scheme of this sort
has once been comprehended and assimilated, a different scheme is
unimaginable. No alternative, whether to whole or parts, can any
longer be conceived as possible. Phenomena unclassifiable within the
system are therefore paradoxical {300} absurdities, and must be held
untrue. When, moreover, as so often happens, the reports of them are
vague and indirect; when they come as mere marvels and oddities rather
than as things of serious moment,--one neglects or denies them with the
best of scientific consciences. Only the born geniuses let themselves
be worried and fascinated by these outstanding exceptions, and get no
peace till they are brought within the fold. Your Galileos, Galvanis,
Fresnels, Purkinjes, and Darwins are always getting confounded and
troubled by insignificant things. Any one will renovate his science
who will steadily look after the irregular phenomena. And when the
science is renewed, its new formulas often have more of the voice of
the exceptions in them than of what were supposed to be the rules.
No part of the unclassified residuum has usually been treated with a
more contemptuous scientific disregard than the mass of phenomena
generally called _mystical_. Physiology will have nothing to do with
them. Orthodox psychology turns its back upon them. Medicine sweeps
them out; or, at most, when in an anecdotal vein, records a few of them
as 'effects of the imagination,'--a phrase of mere dismissal, whose
meaning, in this connection, it is impossible to make precise. All the
while, however, the phenomena are there, lying broadcast over the
surface of history. No matter where you open its pages, you find
things recorded under the name of divinations, inspirations, demoniacal
possessions, apparitions, trances, ecstasies, miraculous healings and
productions of disease, and occult powers possessed by peculiar
individuals over persons and things in their neighborhood. We suppose
that 'mediumship' {301} originated in Rochester, N. Y., and animal
magnetism with Mesmer; but once look behind the pages of official
history, in personal memoirs, legal documents, and popular narratives
and books of anecdote, and you will find that there never was a time
when these things were not reported just as abundantly as now. We
college-bred gentry, who follow the stream of cosmopolitan culture
exclusively, not infrequently stumble upon some old-established
journal, or some voluminous native author, whose names are never heard
of in _our_ circle, but who number their readers by the
quarter-million. It always gives us a little shock to find this mass
of human beings not only living and ignoring us and all our gods, but
actually reading and writing and cogitating without ever a thought of
our canons and authorities. Well, a public no less large keeps and
transmits from generation to generation the traditions and practices of
the occult; but academic science cares as little for its beliefs and
opinions as you, gentle reader, care for those of the readers of the
Waverley and the Fireside Companion. To no one type of mind is it
given to discern the totality of truth. Something escapes the best of
us,--not accidentally, but systematically, and because we have a twist.
The scientific-academic mind and the feminine-mystical mind shy from
each other's facts, just as they fly from each other's temper and
spirit. Facts are there only for those who have a mental affinity with
them. When once they are indisputably ascertained and admitted, the
academic and critical minds are by far the best fitted ones to
interpret and discuss them,--for surely to pass from mystical to
scientific speculations is like passing from lunacy to sanity; but on
the other hand if there is {302} anything which human history
demonstrates, it is the extreme slowness with which the ordinary
academic and critical mind acknowledges facts to exist which present
themselves as wild facts, with no stall or pigeon-hole, or as facts
which threaten to break up the accepted system. In psychology,
physiology, and medicine, wherever a debate between the mystics and the
scientifics has been once for all decided, it is the mystics who have
usually proved to be right about the _facts_, while the scientifics had
the better of it in respect to the theories. The most recent and
flagrant example of this is 'animal magnetism,' whose facts were
stoutly dismissed as a pack of lies by academic medical science the
world over, until the non-mystical theory of 'hypnotic suggestion' was
found for them,--when they were admitted to be so excessively and
dangerously common that special penal laws, forsooth, must be passed to
keep all persons unequipped with medical diplomas from taking part in
their production. Just so stigmatizations, invulnerabilities,
instantaneous cures, inspired discourses, and demoniacal possessions,
the records of which were shelved in our libraries but yesterday in the
alcove headed 'superstitions,' now, under the brand-new title of 'cases
of hystero-epilepsy,' are republished, reobserved, and reported with an
even too credulous avidity.
Repugnant as the mystical style of philosophizing maybe (especially
when self-complacent), there is no sort of doubt that it goes with a
gift for meeting with certain kinds of phenomenal experience. The
writer of these pages has been forced in the past few years to this
admission; and he now believes that he who will pay attention to facts
of the sort dear to mystics, {303} while reflecting upon them in
academic-scientific ways, will be in the best possible position to help
philosophy. It is a circumstance of good augury that certain
scientifically trained minds in all countries seem drifting to the same
conclusion. The Society for Psychical Research has been one means of
bringing science and the occult together in England and America; and
believing that this Society fulfils a function which, though limited,
is destined to be not unimportant in the organization of human
knowledge, I am glad to give a brief account of it to the uninstructed
reader.
According to the newspaper and drawing-room myth, soft-headedness and
idiotic credulity are the bond of sympathy in this Society, and general
wonder-sickness its dynamic principle. A glance at the membership
fails, however, to corroborate this view. The president is Prof. Henry
Sidgwick,[2] known by his other deeds as the most incorrigibly and
exasperatingly critical and sceptical mind in England. The hard-headed
Arthur Balfour is one vice-president, and the hard-headed Prof. J. P.
Langley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, is another. Such
men as Professor Lodge, the eminent English physicist, and Professor
Richet, the eminent French physiologist, are among the most active
contributors to the Society's Proceedings; and through the catalogue of
membership are sprinkled names honored throughout the world for their
scientific capacity. In fact, were I asked to point to a scientific
journal where hard-headedness and never-sleeping suspicion of sources
of error might be seen in their full bloom, {304} I think I should have
to fall back on the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research.
The common run of papers, say on physiological subjects, which one
finds in other professional organs, are apt to show a far lower level
of critical consciousness. Indeed, the rigorous canons of evidence
applied a few years ago to testimony in the case of certain 'mediums'
led to the secession from the Society of a number of spiritualists.
Messrs. Stainton Moses and A. R. Wallace, among others, thought that no
experiences based on mere eyesight could ever have a chance to be
admitted as true, if such an impossibly exacting standard of proof were
insisted on in every case.
The S. P. R., as I shall call it for convenience, was founded in 1882
by a number of gentlemen, foremost among whom seem to have been
Professors Sidgwick, W. F. Barrett, and Balfour Stewart, and Messrs. R.
H. Hutton, Hensleigh Wedgwood, Edmund Gurney, and F. W. H. Myers.
Their purpose was twofold,--first, to carry on systematic
experimentation with hypnotic subjects, mediums, clairvoyants, and
others; and, secondly, to collect evidence concerning apparitions,
haunted houses, and similar phenomena which are incidentally reported,
but which, from their fugitive character, admit of no deliberate
control. Professor Sidgwick, in his introductory address, insisted
that the divided state of public opinion on all these matters was a
scandal to science,--absolute disdain on _à priori_ grounds
characterizing what may be called professional opinion, while
indiscriminate credulity was too often found among those who pretended
to have a first-hand acquaintance with the facts.
As a sort of weather bureau for accumulating {305} reports of such
meteoric phenomena as apparitions, the S. P. R. has done an immense
amount of work. As an experimenting body, it cannot be said to have
completely fulfilled the hopes of its founders. The reasons for this
lie in two circumstances: first, the clairvoyant and other subjects who
will allow themselves to be experimented upon are few and far between;
and, secondly, work with them takes an immense amount of time, and has
had to be carried on at odd intervals by members engaged in other
pursuits. The Society has not yet been rich enough to control the
undivided services of skilled experimenters in this difficult field.
The loss of the lamented Edmund Gurney, who more than any one else had
leisure to devote, has been so far irreparable. But were there no
experimental work at all, and were the S. P. R. nothing but a
weather-bureau for catching sporadic apparitions, etc., in their
freshness, I am disposed to think its function indispensable in the
scientific organism. If any one of my readers, spurred by the thought
that so much smoke must needs betoken fire, has ever looked into the
existing literature of the supernatural for proof, he will know what I
mean. This literature is enormous, but it is practically worthless for
evidential purposes. Facts enough are cited, indeed; but the records
of them are so fallible and imperfect that at most they lead to the
opinion that it may be well to keep a window open upon that quarter in
one's mind.
In the S. P. R.'s Proceedings, on the contrary, a different law
prevails. Quality, and not mere quantity, is what has been mainly kept
in mind. The witnesses, where possible, have in every reported case
been cross-examined personally, the collateral facts {306} have been
looked up, and the story appears with its precise coefficient of
evidential worth stamped on it, so that all may know just what its
weight as proof may be. Outside of these Proceedings, I know of no
systematic attempt to _weigh_ the evidence for the supernatural. This
makes the value of the volumes already published unique; and I firmly
believe that as the years go on and the ground covered grows still
wider, the Proceedings will more and more tend to supersede all other
sources of information concerning phenomena traditionally deemed
occult. Collections of this sort are usually best appreciated by the
rising generation. The young anthropologists and psychologists who
will soon have full occupancy of the stage will feel how great a
scientific scandal it has been to leave a great mass of human
experience to take its chances between vague tradition and credulity on
the one hand and dogmatic denial at long range on the other, with no
body of persons extant who are willing and competent to study the
matter with both patience and rigor. If the Society lives long enough
for the public to become familiar with its presence, so that any
apparition, or house or person infested with unaccountable noises or
disturbances of material objects, will as a matter of course be
reported to its officers, we shall doubtless end by having a mass of
facts concrete enough to theorize upon. Its sustainers, therefore,
should accustom themselves to the idea that its first duty is simply to
exist from year to year and perform this recording function well,
though no conclusive results of any sort emerge at first. All our
learned societies have begun in some such modest way.
But one cannot by mere outward organization make much progress in
matters scientific. Societies can {307} back men of genius, but can
never take their place. The contrast between the parent Society and
the American Branch illustrates this. In England, a little group of
men with enthusiasm and genius for the work supplied the nucleus; in
this country, Mr. Hodgson had to be imported from Europe before any
tangible progress was made. What perhaps more than anything else has
held the Society together in England is Professor Sidgwick's
extraordinary gift of inspiring confidence in diverse sorts of people.
Such tenacity of interest in the result and such absolute impartiality
in discussing the evidence are not once in a century found in an
individual. His obstinate belief that there is something yet to be
brought to light communicates patience to the discouraged; his
constitutional inability to draw any precipitate conclusion reassures
those who are afraid of being dupes. Mrs. Sidgwick--a sister, by the
way, of the great Arthur Balfour--is a worthy ally of her husband in
this matter, showing a similarly rare power of holding her judgment in
suspense, and a keenness of observation and capacity for experimenting
with human subjects which are rare in either sex.
The _worker_ of the Society, as originally constituted, was Edmund
Gurney. Gurney was a man of the rarest sympathies and gifts.
Although, like Carlyle, he used to groan under the burden of his
labors, he yet exhibited a colossal power of dispatching business and
getting through drudgery of the most repulsive kind. His two thick
volumes on 'Phantasms of the Living,' collected and published in three
years, are a proof of this. Besides this, he had exquisite artistic
instincts, and his massive volume on 'The Power of Sound' was, when it
appeared, the most important {308} work on aesthetics in the English
language. He had also the tenderest heart and a mind of rare
metaphysical power, as his volumes of essays, 'Tertium Quid,' will
prove to any reader. Mr. Frederic Myers, already well known as one of
the most brilliant of English essayists, is the _ingenium praefervidum_
of the S. P. R. Of the value of Mr. Myers's theoretic writings I will
say a word later. Dr. Hodgson, the American secretary, is
distinguished by a balance of mind almost as rare in its way as
Sidgwick's. He is persuaded of the reality of many of the phenomena
called spiritualistic, but he also has uncommon keenness in detecting
error; and it is impossible to say in advance whether it will give him
more satisfaction to confirm or to smash a given case offered to his
examination.
It is now time to cast a brief look upon the actual contents of these
Proceedings. The first two years were largely taken up with
experiments in thought-transference. The earliest lot of these were
made with the daughters of a clergyman named Creery, and convinced
Messrs. Balfour Stewart, Barrett, Myers, and Gurney that the girls had
an inexplicable power of guessing names and objects thought of by other
persons. Two years later, Mrs. Sidgwick and Mr. Gurney, recommencing
experiments with the same girls, detected them signalling to each
other. It is true that for the most part the conditions of the earlier
series had excluded signalling, and it is also possible that the
cheating may have grafted itself on what was originally a genuine
phenomenon. Yet Gurney was wise in abandoning the entire series to the
scepticism of the reader. Many critics of the S. P. R. seem out of all
{309} its labors to have heard only of this case. But there are
experiments recorded with upwards of thirty other subjects. Three were
experimented upon at great length during the first two years: one was
Mr. G. A. Smith; the other two were young ladies in Liverpool in the
employment of Mr. Malcolm Guthrie.
It is the opinion of all who took part in these latter experiments that
sources of conscious and unconscious deception were sufficiently
excluded, and that the large percentage of correct reproductions by the
subjects of words, diagrams, and sensations occupying other persons'
consciousness were entirely inexplicable as results of chance. The
witnesses of these performances were in fact all so satisfied of the
genuineness of the phenomena, that 'telepathy' has figured freely in
the papers of the Proceedings and in Gurney's book on Phantasms as a
_vera causa_ on which additional hypotheses might be built. No mere
reader can be blamed, however, if he demand, for so revolutionary a
belief, a more overwhelming bulk of testimony than has yet been
supplied. Any day, of course, may bring in fresh experiments in
successful picture-guessing. But meanwhile, and lacking that, we can
only point out that the present data are strengthened in the flank, so
to speak, by all observations that tend to corroborate the possibility
of other kindred phenomena, such as telepathic impression,
clairvoyance, or what is called 'test-mediumship.' The wider genus
will naturally cover the narrower species with its credit.
Gurney's papers on hypnotism must be mentioned next. Some of them are
less concerned with establishing new facts than with analyzing old
ones. But omitting these, we find that in the line of pure {310}
observation Gurney claims to have ascertained in more than one subject
the following phenomenon: The subject's hands are thrust through a
blanket, which screens the operator from his eyes, and his mind is
absorbed in conversation with a third person. The operator meanwhile
points with his finger to one of the fingers of the subject, which
finger alone responds to this silent selection by becoming stiff or
anaesthetic, as the case may be. The interpretation is difficult, but
the phenomenon, which I have myself witnessed, seems authentic.
Another observation made by Gurney seems to prove the possibility of
the subject's mind being directly influenced by the operator's. The
hypnotized subject responds, or fails to respond, to questions asked by
a third party according to the operator's silent permission or refusal.
Of course, in these experiments all obvious sources of deception were
excluded. But Gurney's most important contribution to our knowledge of
hypnotism was his series of experiments on the automatic writing of
subjects who had received post-hypnotic suggestions. For example, a
subject during trance is told that he will poke the fire in six minutes
after waking. On being waked he has no memory of the order, but while
he is engaged in conversation his hand is placed on a _planchette_,
which immediately writes the sentence, "P., you will poke the fire in
six minutes." Experiments like this, which were repeated in great
variety, seem to prove that below the upper consciousness the hypnotic
consciousness persists, engrossed with the suggestion and able to
express itself through the involuntarily moving hand.
Gurney shares, therefore, with Janet and Binet, the {311} credit of
demonstrating the simultaneous existence of two different strata of
consciousness, ignorant of each other, in the same person. The
'extra-consciousness,' as one may call it, can be kept on tap, as it
were, by the method of automatic writing. This discovery marks a new
era in experimental psychology, and it is impossible to overrate its
importance. But Gurney's greatest piece of work is his laborious
'Phantasms of the Living.' As an example of the drudgery stowed away
in the volumes, it may suffice to say that in looking up the proofs for
the alleged physical phenomena of witchcraft, Gurney reports a careful
search through two hundred and sixty books on the subject, with the
result of finding no first-hand evidence recorded in the trials except
the confessions of the victims themselves; and these, of course, are
presumptively due to either torture or hallucination. This statement,
made in an unobtrusive note, is only one instance of the care displayed
throughout the volumes. In the course of these, Gurney discusses about
seven hundred cases of apparitions which he collected. A large number
of these were 'veridical,' in the sense of coinciding with some
calamity happening to the person who appeared. Gurney's explanation is
that the mind of the person undergoing the calamity was at that moment
able to impress the mind of the percipient with an hallucination.
Apparitions, on this 'telepathic' theory, may be called 'objective'
facts, although they are not 'material' facts. In order to test the
likelihood of such veridical hallucinations being due to mere chance,
Gurney instituted the 'census of hallucinations,' which has been
continued with the result of obtaining answers from over twenty-five
thousand persons, asked {312} at random in different countries whether,
when in good health and awake, they had ever heard a voice, seen a
form, or felt a touch which no material presence could account for.
The result seems to be, roughly speaking, that in England about one
adult in ten has had such an experience at least once in his life, and
that of the experiences themselves a large number coincide with some
distant event. The question is, Is the frequency of these latter cases
too great to be deemed fortuitous, and must we suppose an occult
connection between the two events? Mr. and Mrs. Sidgwick have worked
out this problem on the basis of the English returns, seventeen
thousand in number, with a care and thoroughness that leave nothing to
be desired. Their conclusion is that the cases where the apparition of
a person is seen on the day of his death are four hundred and forty
times too numerous to be ascribed to chance. The reasoning employed to
calculate this number is simple enough. If there be only a fortuitous
connection between the death of an individual and the occurrence of his
apparition to some one at a distance, the death is no more likely to
fall on the same day as the apparition than it is to occur on the same
day with any other event in nature. But the chance-probability that
any individual's death will fall on any given day marked in advance by
some other event is just equal to the chance-probability that the
individual will die at all on any specified day; and the national
death-rate gives that probability as one in nineteen thousand. If,
then, when the death of a person coincides with an apparition of the
same person, the coincidence be merely fortuitous, it ought not to
occur oftener than once in nineteen thousand cases. As a matter of
fact, {313} however, it does occur (according to the census) once in
forty-three cases, a number (as aforesaid) four hundred and forty times
too great. The American census, of some seven thousand answers, gives
a remarkably similar result. Against this conclusion the only rational
answer that I can see is that the data are still too few; that the net
was not cast wide enough; and that we need, to get fair averages, far
more than twenty-four thousand answers to the census question. This
may, of course, be true, though it seems exceedingly unlikely; and in
our own twenty-four thousand answers veridical cases may possibly have
heaped themselves unduly.
The next topic worth mentioning in the Proceedings is the discussion of
the physical phenomena of mediumship (slate-writing, furniture-moving,
and so forth) by Mrs. Sidgwick, Mr. Hodgson, and 'Mr. Davey.' This, so
far as it goes, is destructive of the claims of all the mediums
examined. 'Mr. Davey' himself produced fraudulent slate-writing of the
highest order, while Mr. Hodgson, a 'sitter' in his confidence,
reviewed the written reports of the series of his other sitters,--all
of them intelligent persons,--and showed that in every case they failed
to see the essential features of what was done before their eyes. This
Davey-Hodgson contribution is probably the most damaging document
concerning eye-witnesses' evidence that has ever been produced.
Another substantial bit of work based on personal observation is Mr.
Hodgson's report on Madame Blavatsky's claims to physical mediumship.
This is adverse to the lady's pretensions; and although some of Madame
Blavatsky's friends make light of it, it is a stroke from which her
reputation will not recover.
{314}
Physical mediumship in all its phases has fared hard in the
Proceedings. The latest case reported on is that of the famous Eusapia
Paladino, who being detected in fraud at Cambridge, after a brilliant
career of success on the continent, has, according to the draconian
rules of method which govern the Society, been ruled out from a further
hearing. The case of Stainton Moses, on the other hand, concerning
which Mr. Myers has brought out a mass of unpublished testimony, seems
to escape from the universal condemnation, and appears to force upon us
what Mr. Andrew Lang calls the choice between a moral and a physical
miracle.
In the case of Mrs. Piper, not a physical but a trance medium, we seem
to have no choice offered at all. Mr. Hodgson and others have made
prolonged study of this lady's trances, and are all convinced that
super-normal powers of cognition are displayed therein. These are
_primâ facie_ due to 'spirit-control.' But the conditions are so
complex that a dogmatic decision either for or against the
spirit-hypothesis must as yet be postponed.
One of the most important experimental contributions to the Proceedings
is the article of Miss X. on 'Crystal Vision.' Many persons who look
fixedly into a crystal or other vaguely luminous surface fall into a
kind of daze, and see visions. Miss X. has this susceptibility in a
remarkable degree, and is, moreover, an unusually intelligent critic.
She reports many visions which can only be described as apparently
clairvoyant, and others which beautifully fill a vacant niche incur
knowledge of subconscious mental operations. For example, looking into
the crystal before breakfast one morning she reads in printed
characters of the {315} death of a lady of her acquaintance, the date
and other circumstances all duly appearing in type. Startled by this,
she looks at the 'Times' of the previous day for verification, and
there among the deaths are the identical words which she has seen. On
the same page of the Times are other items which she remembers reading
the day before; and the only explanation seems to be that her eyes then
inattentively observed, so to speak, the death-item, which forthwith
fell into a special corner of her memory, and came out as a visual
hallucination when the peculiar modification of consciousness induced
by the crystal-gazing set in.
Passing from papers based on observation to papers based on narrative,
we have a number of ghost stories, etc., sifted by Mrs. Sidgwick and
discussed by Messrs. Myers and Podmore. They form the best ghost
literature I know of from the point of view of emotional interest. As
to the conclusions drawn, Mrs. Sidgwick is rigorously non-committal,
while Mr. Myers and Mr. Podmore show themselves respectively hospitable
and inhospitable to the notion that such stories have a basis of
objectivity dependent on the continued existence of the dead.
I must close my gossip about the Proceedings by naming what, after all,
seems to me the most important part of its contents. This is the long
series of articles by Mr. Myers on what he now calls the 'subliminal
self,' or what one might designate as ultra-marginal consciousness.
The result of Myers's learned and ingenious studies in hypnotism,
hallucinations, automatic writing, mediumship, and the whole series of
allied phenomena is a conviction which he expresses in the following
terms:--
{316}
"Each of us is in reality an abiding psychical entity far more
extensive than he knows,--an individuality which can never express
itself completely through any corporeal manifestation. The self
manifests itself through the organism; but there is always some part of
the self unmanifested, and always, as it seems, some power of organic
expression in abeyance or reserve."
The ordinary consciousness Mr. Myers likens to the visible part of the
solar spectrum; the total consciousness is like that spectrum prolonged
by the inclusion of the ultra-red and ultra-violet rays. In the
psychic spectrum the 'ultra' parts may embrace a far wider range, both
of physiological and of psychical activity, than is open to our
ordinary consciousness and memory. At the lower end we have the
_physiological_ extension, mind-cures, 'stigmatization' of ecstatics,
etc.; in the upper, the hyper-normal cognitions of the medium-trance.
Whatever the judgment of the future may be on Mr. Myers's speculations,
the credit will always remain to them of being the first attempt in any
language to consider the phenomena of hallucination, hypnotism,
automatism, double personality, and mediumship as connected parts of
one whole subject. All constructions in this field must be
provisional, and it is as something provisional that Mr. Myers offers
us his formulations. But, thanks to him, we begin to see for the first
time what a vast interlocked and graded system these phenomena, from
the rudest motor-automatisms to the most startling sensory-apparition,
form. Quite apart from Mr. Myers's conclusions, his methodical
treatment of them by classes and series is the first great step toward
overcoming the distaste of orthodox science to look at them at all.
{317}
One's reaction on hearsay testimony is always determined by one's own
experience. Most men who have once convinced themselves, by what seems
to them a careful examination, that any one species of the supernatural
exists, begin to relax their vigilance as to evidence, and throw the
doors of their minds more or less wide open to the supernatural along
its whole extent. To a mind that has thus made its _salto mortale_,
the minute work over insignificant cases and quiddling discussion of
'evidential values,' of which the Society's reports are full, seems
insufferably tedious. And it is so; few species of literature are more
truly dull than reports of phantasms. Taken simply by themselves, as
separate facts to stare at, they appear so devoid of meaning and sweep,
that, even were they certainly true, one would be tempted to leave them
out of one's universe for being so idiotic. Every other sort of fact
has some context and continuity with the rest of nature. These alone
are contextless and discontinuous.
Hence I think that the sort of loathing--no milder word will do--which
the very words 'psychical research' and 'psychical researcher' awaken
in so many honest scientific breasts is not only natural, but in a
sense praiseworthy. A man who is unable himself to conceive of any
_orbit_ for these mental meteors can only suppose that Messrs. Gurney,
Myers, & Co.'s mood in dealing with them must be that of silly
marvelling at so many detached prodigies. And such prodigies! So
science simply falls back on her general _non-possumus_; and most of
the would-be critics of the Proceedings have been contented to oppose
to the phenomena recorded the simple presumption that in some way or
other the reports _must_ be {318} fallacious,--for so far as the order
of nature has been subjected to really scientific scrutiny, it always
has been proved to run the other way. But the oftener one is forced to
reject an alleged sort of fact by the use of this mere presumption, the
weaker does the presumption itself get to be; and one might in course
of time use up one's presumptive privileges in this way, even though
one started (as our anti-telepathists do) with as good a case as the
great induction of psychology that all our knowledge comes by the use
of our eyes and ears and other senses. And we must remember also that
this undermining of the strength of a presumption by reiterated report
of facts to the contrary does not logically require that the facts in
question should all be well proved. A lot of rumors in the air against
a business man's credit, though they might all be vague, and no one of
them amount to proof that he is unsound, would certainly weaken the
_presumption_ of his soundness. And all the more would they have this
effect if they formed what Gurney called a fagot and not a chain,--that
is, if they were independent of one another, and came from different
quarters. Now, the evidence for telepathy, weak and strong, taken just
as it comes, forms a fagot and not a chain. No one item cites the
content of another item as part of its own proof. But taken together
the items have a certain general consistency; there is a method in
their madness, so to speak. So each of them adds presumptive value to
the lot; and cumulatively, as no candid mind can fail to see, they
subtract presumptive force from the orthodox belief that there can be
nothing in any one's intellect that has not come in through ordinary
experiences of sense.
But it is a miserable thing for a question of truth {319} to be
confined to mere presumption and counter-presumption, with no decisive
thunderbolt of fact to clear the baffling darkness. And, sooth to say,
in talking so much of the merely presumption-weakening value of our
records, I have myself been wilfully taking the point of view of the
so-called 'rigorously scientific' disbeliever, and making an _ad
hominem_ plea. My own point of view is different. For me the
thunderbolt _has_ fallen, and the orthodox belief has not merely had
its presumption weakened, but the truth itself of the belief is
decisively overthrown. If I may employ the language of the
professional logic-shop, a universal proposition can be made untrue by
a particular instance. If you wish to upset the law that all crows are
black, you must not seek to show that no crows are; it is enough if you
prove one single crow to be white. My own white crow is Mrs. Piper.
In the trances of this medium, I cannot resist the conviction that
knowledge appears which she has never gained by the ordinary waking use
of her eyes and ears and wits. What the source of this knowledge may
be I know not, and have not the glimmer of an explanatory suggestion to
make; but from admitting the fact of such knowledge I can see no
escape. So when I turn to the rest of the evidence, ghosts and all, I
cannot carry with me the irreversibly negative bias of the 'rigorously
scientific' mind, with its presumption as to what the true order of
nature ought to be. I feel as if, though the evidence be flimsy in
spots, it may nevertheless collectively carry heavy weight. The
rigorously scientific mind may, in truth, easily overshoot the mark.
Science means, first of all, a certain dispassionate method. To
suppose that it means a certain set of {320} results that one should
pin one's faith upon and hug forever is sadly to mistake its genius,
and degrades the scientific body to the status of a sect.
We all, scientists and non-scientists, live on some inclined plane of
credulity. The plane tips one way in one man, another way in another;
and may he whose plane tips in no way be the first to cast a stone! As
a matter of fact, the trances I speak of have broken down for my own
mind the limits of the admitted order of nature. Science, so far as
science denies such exceptional occurrences, lies prostrate in the dust
for me; and the most urgent intellectual need which I feel at present
is that science be built up again in a form in which such things may
have a positive place. Science, like life, feeds on its own decay.
New facts burst old rules; then newly divined conceptions bind old and
new together into a reconciling law.
And here is the real instructiveness of Messrs. Myers and Gurney's
work. They are trying with the utmost conscientiousness to find a
reconciling conception which shall subject the old laws of nature to
the smallest possible strain. Mr. Myers uses that method of gradual
approach which has performed such wonders in Darwin's hands. When
Darwin met a fact which seemed a poser to his theory, his regular
custom, as I have heard an able colleague say, was to fill in all round
it with smaller facts, as a wagoner might heap dirt round a big rock in
the road, and thus get his team over without upsetting. So Mr. Myers,
starting from the most ordinary facts of inattentive consciousness,
follows this clue through a long series which terminates in ghosts, and
seeks to show that these are but extreme manifestations of a {321}
common truth,--the truth that the invisible segments of our minds are
susceptible, under rarely realized conditions, of acting and being
acted upon by the invisible segments of other conscious lives. This
may not be ultimately true (for the theosophists, with their astral
bodies and the like, may, for aught I now know, prove to be on the
correcter trail), but no one can deny that it is in good scientific
form,--for science always takes a known kind of phenomenon, and tries
to extend its range.
I have myself, as American agent for the census, collected hundreds of
cases of hallucination in healthy persons. The result is to make me
feel that we all have potentially a 'subliminal' self, which may make
at any time irruption into our ordinary lives. At its lowest, it is
only the depository of our forgotten memories; at its highest, we do
not know what it is at all. Take, for instance, a series of cases.
During sleep, many persons have something in them which measures the
flight of time better than the waking self does. It wakes them at a
preappointed hour; it acquaints them with the moment when they first
awake. It may produce an hallucination,--as in a lady who informs me
that at the instant of waking she has a vision of her watch-face with
the hands pointing (as she has often verified) to the exact time. It
may be the feeling that some physiological period has elapsed; but,
whatever it is, it is subconscious.
A subconscious something may also preserve experiences to which we do
not openly attend. A lady taking her lunch in town finds herself
without her purse. Instantly a sense comes over her of rising from the
breakfast-table and hearing her purse drop upon the floor. On reaching
home she finds {322} nothing under the table, but summons the servant
to say where she has put the purse. The servant produces it, saying;
"How did you know where it was? You rose and left the room as if you
did n't know you 'd dropped it." The same subconscious something may
recollect what we have forgotten. A lady accustomed to taking
salicylate of soda for muscular rheumatism wakes one early winter
morning with an aching neck. In the twilight she takes what she
supposes to be her customary powder from a drawer, dissolves it in a
glass of water, and is about to drink it down, when she feels a sharp
slap on her shoulder and hears a voice in her ear saying, "Taste it!"
On examination, she finds she has got a morphine powder by mistake.
The natural interpretation is that a sleeping memory of the morphine
powders awoke in this quasi-explosive way. A like explanation offers
itself as most plausible for the following case: A lady, with little
time to catch the train, and the expressman about to call, is excitedly
looking for the lost key of a packed trunk. Hurrying upstairs with a
bunch of keys, proved useless, in her hand, she hears an 'objective'
voice distinctly say, "Try the key of the cake-box." Being tried, it
fits. This also may well have been the effect of forgotten experience.
Now, the effect is doubtless due to the same hallucinatory mechanism;
but the source is less easily assigned as we ascend the scale of cases.
A lady, for instance, goes after breakfast to see about one of her
servants who has become ill over night. She is startled at distinctly
reading over the bedroom door in gilt letters the word 'small-pox.'
The doctor is sent for, and ere long pronounces small-pox to be the
disease, although the lady says, "The thought of {323} the girl's
having small-pox never entered my mind till I saw the apparent
inscription." Then come other cases of warning; for example, that of a
youth sitting in a wagon under a shed, who suddenly hears his dead
mother's voice say, "Stephen, get away from here quick!" and jumps out
just in time to see the shed-roof fall.
After this come the experiences of persons appearing to distant friends
at or near the hour of death. Then, too, we have the trance-visions
and utterances, which may appear astonishingly profuse and continuous,
and maintain a fairly high intellectual level. For all these higher
phenomena, it seems to me that while the proximate mechanism is that of
'hallucination,' it is straining an hypothesis unduly to name any
ordinary subconscious mental operation--such as expectation,
recollection, or inference from inattentive perception--as the ultimate
cause that starts it up. It is far better tactics, if you wish to get
rid of mystery, to brand the narratives themselves as unworthy of
trust. The trustworthiness of most of them is to my own mind far from
proved. And yet in the light of the medium-trance, which is proved, it
seems as if they might well all be members of a natural kind of fact of
which we do not yet know the full extent.
Thousands of sensitive organizations in the United States to-day live
as steadily in the light of these experiences, and are as indifferent
to modern science, as if they lived in Bohemia in the twelfth century.
They are indifferent to science, because science is so callously
indifferent to their experiences. Although in its essence science only
stands for a method and for no fixed belief, yet as habitually taken,
both by its votaries and outsiders, it is {324} identified with a
certain fixed belief,--the belief that the hidden order of nature is
mechanical exclusively, and that non-mechanical categories are
irrational ways of conceiving and explaining even such things as human
life. Now, this mechanical rationalism, as one may call it, makes, if
it becomes one's only way of thinking, a violent breach with the ways
of thinking that have played the greatest part in human history.
Religious thinking, ethical thinking, poetical thinking, teleological,
emotional, sentimental thinking, what one might call the personal view
of life to distinguish it from the impersonal and mechanical, and the
romantic view of life to distinguish it from the rationalistic view,
have been, and even still are, outside of well-drilled scientific
circles, the dominant forms of thought. But for mechanical
rationalism, personality is an insubstantial illusion. The chronic
belief of mankind, that events may happen for the sake of their
personal significance, is an abomination; and the notions of our
grandfathers about oracles and omens, divinations and apparitions,
miraculous changes of heart and wonders worked by inspired persons,
answers to prayer and providential leadings, are a fabric absolutely
baseless, a mass of sheer _un_truth.
Now, of course, we must all admit that the excesses to which the
romantic and personal view of nature may lead, if wholly unchecked by
impersonal rationalism, are direful. Central African Mumbo-jumboism is
one of unchecked romanticism's fruits. One ought accordingly to
sympathize with that abhorrence of romanticism as a sufficient
world-theory; one ought to understand that lively intolerance of the
least grain of romanticism in the views of life of other people, which
are such characteristic marks of those who {325} follow the scientific
professions to-day. Our debt to science is literally boundless, and
our gratitude for what is positive in her teachings must be
correspondingly immense. But the S. P. R.'s Proceedings have, it seems
to me, conclusively proved one thing to the candid reader; and that is
that the verdict of pure insanity, of gratuitous preference for error,
of superstition without an excuse, which the scientists of our day are
led by their intellectual training to pronounce upon the entire thought
of the past, is a most shallow verdict. The personal and romantic view
of life has other roots besides wanton exuberance of imagination and
perversity of heart. It is perennially fed by _facts of experience_,
whatever the ulterior interpretation of those facts may prove to be;
and at no time in human history would it have been less easy than
now--at most times it would have been much more easy--for advocates
with a little industry to collect in its favor an array of contemporary
documents as good as those which our publications present. These
documents all relate to real experiences of persons. These experiences
have three characters in common: They are capricious, discontinuous,
and not easily controlled; they require peculiar persons for their
production; their significance seems to be wholly for personal life.
Those who preferentially attend to them, and still more those who are
individually subject to them, not only easily may find, but are
logically bound to find, in them valid arguments for their romantic and
personal conception of the world's course. Through my slight
participation in the investigations of the S. P. R. I have become
acquainted with numbers of persons of this sort, for whom the very word
'science' has become a name of reproach, for reasons that I now both
understand {326} and respect. It is the intolerance of science for
such phenomena as we are studying, her peremptory denial either of
their existence or of their significance (except as proofs of man's
absolute innate folly), that has set science so apart from the common
sympathies of the race. I confess that it is on this, its humanizing
mission, that the Society's best claim to the gratitude of our
generation seems to me to depend. It has restored continuity to
history. It has shown some reasonable basis for the most superstitious
aberrations of the foretime. It has bridged the chasm, healed the
hideous rift that science, taken in a certain narrow way, has shot into
the human world.
I will even go one step farther. When from our present advanced
standpoint we look back upon the past stages of human thought, whether
it be scientific thought or theological thought, we are amazed that a
universe which appears to us of so vast and mysterious a complication
should ever have seemed to any one so little and plain a thing.
Whether it be Descartes's world or Newton's, whether it be that of the
materialists of the last century or that of the Bridgewater treatises
of our own, it always looks the same to us,--incredibly perspectiveless
and short. Even Lyell's, Faraday's, Mill's, and Darwin's consciousness
of their respective subjects are already beginning to put on an
infantile and innocent look. Is it then likely that the science of our
own day will escape the common doom; that the minds of its votaries
will never look old-fashioned to the grandchildren of the latter? It
would be folly to suppose so. Yet if we are to judge by the analogy of
the past, when our science once becomes old-fashioned, it will be more
for its omissions of fact, for its {327} ignorance of whole ranges and
orders of complexity in the phenomena to be explained, than for any
fatal lack in its spirit and principles. The spirit and principles of
science are mere affairs of method; there is nothing in them that need
hinder science from dealing successfully with a world in which personal
forces are the starting-point of new effects. The only form of thing
that we directly encounter, the only experience that we concretely
have, is our own personal life. The only complete category of our
thinking, our professors of philosophy tell us, is the category of
personality, every other category being one of the abstract elements of
that. And this systematic denial on science's part of personality as a
condition of events, this rigorous belief that in its own essential and
innermost nature our world is a strictly impersonal world, may,
conceivably, as the whirligig of time goes round, prove to be the very
defect that our descendants will be most surprised at in our own
boasted science, the omission that to their eyes will most tend to make
it look perspectiveless and short.
[1] This Essay is formed of portions of an article in Scribner's
Magazine for March, 1890, of an article in the Forum for July, 1892,
and of the President's Address before the Society for Psychical
Research, published in the Proceedings for June, 1896, and in Science.
[2] Written in 1891. Since then, Mr. Balfour, the present writer, and
Professor William Crookes have held the presidential office.
{329}
INDEX.
ABSOLUTISM, 12, 30.
Abstract conceptions, 219.
Action, as a measure of belief, 3, 29-30.
Actual world narrower than ideal, 202.
Agnosticism, 54, 81, 126.
Allen, G., 231, 235, 256.
Alps, leap in the, 59, 96.
Alternatives, 156, 161, 202, 269.
Ambiguity of choice, 156; of being, 292.
Anaesthetic revelation, 294.
A priori truths, 268.
Apparitions, 311.
Aristotle, 249.
Associationism, in Ethics, 186.
Atheist and acorn, 160.
Authorities in Ethics, 204; _versus_ champions, 207.
Axioms, 268.
BAGEHOT, 232.
Bain, 71, 91.
Balfour, 9.
Being, its character, 142; in Hegel, 281.
Belief, 59. See 'Faith.'
Bellamy, 188.
Bismarck, 228.
Block-universe, 292.
Blood, B. P., vi, 294.
Brockton murderer, 160, 177.
Bunsen, 203, 274.
CALVINISM, 45.
Carlyle, 42, 44, 45, 73, 87, 173.
'Casuistic question' in Ethics, 198.
Causality, 147.
Causation, Hume's doctrine of, 278.
Census of hallucinations, 312.
Certitude, 13, 30.
Chance, 149, 153-9, 178-180.
Choice, 156.
Christianity, 5, 14.
Cicero, 92.
City of dreadful night, 35.
Clark, X., 50.
Classifications, 67.
Clifford, 6, 7, 10, 14, 19, 21, 92, 230.
Clive, 228.
Clough, 6.
Common-sense, 270.
Conceptual order of world, 118.
Conscience, 186-8.
Contradiction, as used by Hegel, 275-277.
Contradictions of philosophers, 16.
Crillon, 62
Criterion of truth, 15, 16; in Ethics, 205.
Crude order of experience, 118.
Crystal vision, 314.
Cycles in Nature, 220, 223-4.
DARWIN, 221, 223, 226, 320.
Data, 271.
Davey, 313.
Demands, as creators of value, 201.
'Determination is negation,' 286-290.
Determinism, 150; the Dilemma of;
145-183; 163, 166; hard and soft, 149.
Dogs, 57.
Dogmatism, 12.
Doubt, 54, 109.
Dupery, 27.
EASY-GOING mood, 211, 213.
Elephant, 282.
Emerson, 23, 175.
Empiricism, i., 12, 14, 17, 278.
England, 228.
Environment, its relation to great men,
223, 226; to great thoughts, 250.
Error, 163; duty of avoiding, 18.
Essence of good and bad, 200-1.
Ethical ideals, 200.
Ethical philosophy, 208, 210, 216.
Ethical standards, 205; diversity of, 200.
Ethics, its three questions, 185.
Evidence, objective, 13, 15, 16.
Evil, 46, 49, 161, 190.
Evolution, social, 232, 237; mental, 245.
Evolutionism, its test of right, 98-100.
Expectancy, 77-80.
Experience, crude, _versus_ rationalized,
118; tests our faiths, 105.
FACTS, 271.
Faith, that truth exists, 9, 23; in our
fellows, 24-5; school boys' definition of, 29;
a remedy for pessimism, 60, 101; religious, 56;
defined, 90; defended against 'scientific'
objections, viii-xi, 91-4; may
create its own verification, 59, 96-103.
Familiarity confers rationality, 76.
Fatalism, 88.
Fiske, 255, 260.
Fitzgerald, 160.
Freedom, 103, 271.
Free-will, 103, 145, 157.
GALTON, 242.
Geniuses, 226, 229.
Ghosts, 315,
Gnosticism, 138-140, 165, 169.
God, 61, 68; of Nature, 43; the most
adequate object for our mind, 116,
122; our relations to him, 134-6;
his providence, 182; his demands
create obligation, 193; his function
in Ethics, 212-215.
Goethe, 111.
Good, 168, 200, 201.
Goodness, 190.
Great-man theory of history, 232.
Great men and their environment, 216-254.
Green, 206,
Gryzanowski, 240.
Gurney, 306, 307, 311.
Guthrie, 309.
Guyau, 188.
HALLUCINATIONS, Census of, 312.
Happiness, 33.
Harris, 282.
Hegel, 72, 263; his excessive claims,
272; his use of negation, 273, 290;
of contradiction, 274, 276; on being,
281; on otherness, 283; on infinity,
284; on identity, 285; on determination,
289; his ontological emotion, 297.
Hegelisms, on some, 263-298.
Heine, 203.
Helmholtz, 85, 91.
Henry IV., 62.
Herbart, 280.
Hero-worship, 261.
Hinton, C. H., 15.
Hinton, J., 101.
Hodgson, R., 308.
Hodgson, S, H., 10.
Honor, 50.
Hugo, 213.
Human mind, its habit of abstracting, 219.
Hume on causation, 278.
Huxley, 6, 10, 92.
Hypnotism, 302, 309.
Hypotheses, live or dead, 2; their
verification, 105; of genius, 249.
IDEALS, 200; their conflict, 202.
Idealism, 89, 291.
Identity, 285.
Imperatives, 211.
Importance of individuals, the, 255-262;
of things, its ground, 257.
Indeterminism, 150.
Individual differences, 259.
Individuals, the importance of, 255-262
Infinite, 284.
Intuitionism, in Ethics, 186, 189.
JEVONS, 249.
Judgments of regret, 159.
KNOWING, 12.
Knowledge, 85.
LEAP on precipice, 59, 96.
Leibnitz, 43.
Life, is it worth living, 32-62.
MAGGOTS, 176-7.
Mahdi, the, 2, 6.
Mallock, 32, 183.
Marcus Aurelius, 41.
Materialism, 126.
'Maybes,' 59.
Measure of good, 205.
Mediumship, physical, 313, 314.
Melancholy, 34, 39, 42.
Mental evolution, 246; structure, 114, 117.
Mill, 234.
Mind, its triadic structure, 114, 117;
its evolution, 246; its three departments,
114, 122, 127-8.
Monism, 279.
Moods, the strenuous and the easy, 211, 213
Moralists, objective and subjective, 103-108.
Moral judgments, their origin, 186-8;
obligation, 192-7; order, 193;
philosophy, 184-5.
Moral philosopher and the moral life, the, 184-215.
Murder, 178.
Murderer, 160, 177.
Myers, 308, 315, 320.
Mystical phenomena, 300.
Mysticism, 74.
NAKED, the, 281.
Natural theology, 40-4.
Nature, 20, 41-4, 56.
Negation, as used by Hegel, 273.
Newman, 10.
Nitrous oxide, 294.
Nonentity, 72.
OBJECTIVE evidence, 13, 15, 16.
Obligation, 192-7.
Occult phenomena, 300; examples of, 323.
Omar Khayam, 160.
Optimism, 60, 102, 163.
Options offered to belief, 3, 11, 27.
Origin of moral judgments, 186-8.
'Other,' in Hegel, 283.
PARSIMONY, law of, 132.
Partaking, 268, 270, 275, 291.
Pascal's wager, 5, 11.
Personality, 324, 327.
Pessimism, 39, 40, 47, 60, 100, 101, 161, 167.
Philosophy, 65; depends on personal
demands, 93; makes world unreal,
39; seeks unification, 67-70; the
ultimate, 110; its contradictions, 16.
Physiology, its _prestige_, 112.
Piper, Mrs., 314, 319.
Plato, 268
Pluralism, vi, 151, 178, 192, 264, 267.
Positivism, 54, 108
Possibilities, 151, 181-2, 292, 294.
Postulates, 91-2.
Powers, our powers as congruous with the world, 86.
Providence, 180.
Psychical research, what it has accomplished, 299-327;
Society for, 303, 305, 325.
Pugnacity, 49, 51.
QUESTIONS, three, in Ethics, 185.
RATIONALISM, 12, 30.
Rationality, the sentiment of, 63-110;
limits of theoretic, 65-74; mystical,
74; practical, 82-4; postulates of, 152.
Rational order of world, 118, 125, 147.
Reflex action and theism, 111-144.
Reflex action defined, 113; it refutes gnosticism, 140-1.
Regret, judgments of, 159.
Religion, natural, 52; of humanity, 198.
Religious hypothesis, 25, 28, 51.
Religious minds, 40.
Renan, 170, 172.
Renouvier, 143.
Risks of belief or disbelief, ix, 26; rules for minimizing, 94.
Romantic view of world, 324.
Romanticism, 172-3.
Rousseau, 4, 33, 87.
Ruskin, 37.
SALTER, 62.
Scepticism, 12, 23, 109.
Scholasticism, 13.
Schopenhauer, 72, 169.
Science, 10, 21; its recency, 52-4;
due to peculiar desire, 129-132, 147;
its disbelief of the occult, 317-320;
its negation of personality, 324-6;
cannot decide question of determinism, 152.
Science of Ethics, 208-210.
Selection of great men, 226.
Sentiment of rationality, 63.
Seriousness, 86.
Shakespeare, 32, 235.
Sidgwick, 303, 307.
Sigwart, 120, 148.
Society for psychical research, 303; its 'Proceedings,' 305, 325.
Sociology, 259.
Solitude, moral, 191.
Space, 265.
Spencer, 168, 218, 232-235, 246, 251, 260.
Stephen, L., 1.
Stephen, Sir J., 1, 30, 212.
Stoics, 274.
Strenuous mood, 211, 213.
Subjectivism, 165, 170.
'Subliminal self,' 315, 321.
Substance, 80.
Suicide, 38, 50, 60.
System in philosophy, 13, 185, 199.
TELEPATHY, 10, 309.
Theism, and reflex action, 111-144.
Theism, 127, 134-6; see 'God.'
Theology, natural, 41; Calvinistic, 45.
Theoretic faculty, 128.
Thought-transference, 309.
Thomson, 35-7, 45, 46.
Toleration, 30.
Tolstoi, 188.
'Totality,' the principle of, 277.
Triadic structure of mind, 123.
Truth, criteria of, 15; and error, 18; moral, 190-1.
UNITARIANS, 126, 133.
Unknowable, the, 68, 81.
Universe = M + x, 101; its rationality, 125, 137.
Unseen world, 51, 54, 56, 61.
Utopias, 168.
VALUE, judgments of, 103.
Variations, in heredity, etc., 225, 249.
Vaudois, 48.
Veddah, 258.
Verification of theories, 95, 105-8.
Vivisection, 58.
WALDENSES, 47-9.
Wallace, 239, 304,
Whitman, 33, 64, 74.
Wordsworth, 60.
World, its ambiguity, 76; the invisible,
51, 54, 56; two orders of, 118.
Worth, judgments of, 103.
Wright, 52.
X., Miss, 314.
ZOLA, 172.
Zöllner, 15.
By the Same Author
THE PRINCIPLES OF PSYCHOLOGY.
2 vols. 8vo. New York: Henry Holt & Co. London;
Macmillan & Co. 1890
PSYCHOLOGY: BRIEFER COURSE (TEXT BOOK).
12mo. New York: Henry Holt & Co. London:
Macmillan & Co. 1892.
THE WILL TO BELIEVE, AND OTHER ESSAYS
IN POPULAR PHILOSOPHY.
12mo. New York, London. Bombay and Calcutta:
Longmans, Green & Co. 1897.
HUMAN IMMORTALITY: TWO SUPPOSED
OBJECTIONS TO THE DOCTRINE.
16mo. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. 1898.
TALKS TO TEACHERS ON PSYCHOLOGY: AND
TO STUDENTS ON SOME OF LIFE'S IDEALS.
12mo. New York: Henry Holt & Co. London,
Bombay and Calcutta: Longmans, Green & Co. 1899.
THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE:
A STUDY IN HUMAN NATURE.
Gifford Lectures delivered at Edinburgh in 1901-1902.
8vo. New York, London, Bombay and Calcutta:
Longmans, Green & Co. 1902.
PRAGMATISM: A NEW NAME FOR SOME OLD
WAYS OF THINKING: POPULAR LECTURES ON PHILOSOPHY.
New York, London, Bombay and Calcutta:
Longmans, Green & Co. 1907.
A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE: HIBBERT
LECTURES AT MANCHESTER COLLEGE ON THE
PRESENT SITUATION IN PHILOSOPHY.
New York, London, Bombay, and Calcutta:
Longmans, Green & Co. 1909.
THE MEANING OF TRUTH; A SEQUEL TO "PRAGMATISM."
New York, London, Bombay, and Calcutta;
Longmans, Green & Co. 1909.
THE LITERARY REMAINS OF HENRY JAMES
Edited, with an Introduction, by WILLIAM JAMES.
With Portrait. Crown 8vo. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin Co. 1885.
* * * * *
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