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, 1807, 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. 

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PREFACE. 

At most of our American Colleges there are Clubs formed by the studentsdevoted to particular branches of learning; and these clubs have thelaudable custom of inviting once or twice a year some maturer scholarto address them, the occasion often being made a public one. I havefrom time to time accepted such invitations, and afterwards had mydiscourse printed in one or other of the Reviews. It has seemed to methat these addresses might now be worthy of collection in a volume, asthey shed explanatory light upon each other, and taken together expressa tolerably definite philosophic attitude in a very untechnical way. 

Were I obliged to give a short name to the attitude in question, Ishould call it that of _radical empiricism_, in spite of the fact thatsuch brief nicknames are nowhere more misleading than in philosophy. Isay 'empiricism, ' because it is contented to regard its most assuredconclusions concerning matters of fact as hypotheses liable tomodification 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 underthe name of positivism or agnosticism or scientific naturalism, it doesnot dogmatically affirm monism as something with which all experiencehas got to square. The difference between monism and pluralism isperhaps the most pregnant of all the differences in philosophy. _Primâfacie_ the world is a pluralism; as we find it, its unity seems to bethat of any collection; and our higher thinking consists chiefly of aneffort to redeem it from that first crude form. Postulating more unitythan the first experiences yield, we also discover more. But absoluteunity, in spite of brilliant dashes in its direction, still remainsundiscovered, still remains a _Grenzbegriff_. "Ever not quite" must bethe rationalistic philosopher's last confession concerning it. Afterall that reason can do has been done, there still remains the opacityof the finite facts as merely given, with most of their peculiaritiesmutually unmediated and unexplained. To the very last, there are thevarious 'points of view' which the philosopher must distinguish indiscussing the world; and what is inwardly clear from one point remainsa 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 andoutside and unincluded, from _your_ point of view, even though you bethe greatest of philosophers. Something is always mere fact and_givenness_; and there may be in the whole universe no one point ofview extant from which this would not be found to be the case. "Reason, " as a gifted writer says, "is {ix} but one item in themystery; and behind the proudest consciousness that ever reigned, reason and wonder blushed face to face. The inevitable stales, whiledoubt and hope are sisters. Not unfortunately the universe iswild, --game-flavored as a hawk's wing. Nature is miracle all; the samereturns not save to bring the different. The slow round of theengraver's lathe gains but the breadth of a hair, but the difference isdistributed back over the whole curve, never an instant true, --ever notquite. "[1]

This is pluralism, somewhat rhapsodically expressed. He who takes forhis hypothesis the notion that it is the permanent form of the world iswhat I call a radical empiricist. For him the crudity of experienceremains an eternal element thereof. There is no possible point of viewfrom which the world can appear an absolutely single fact. Realpossibilities, real indeterminations, real beginnings, real ends, realevil, real crises, catastrophes, and escapes, a real God, and a realmoral life, just as common-sense conceives these things, may remain inempiricism as conceptions which that philosophy gives up the attempteither to 'overcome' or to reinterpret in monistic form. 

Many of my professionally trained _confrères_ will smile at theirrationalism of this view, and at the artlessness of my essays inpoint of technical form. But they should be taken as illustrations ofthe radically empiricist attitude rather than as argumentations for itsvalidity. That admits meanwhile of {x} being argued in as technical ashape as any one can desire, and possibly I may be spared to do later ashare of that work. Meanwhile these essays seem to light up with acertain dramatic reality the attitude itself, and make it visiblealongside of the higher and lower dogmatisms between which in the pagesof philosophic history it has generally remained eclipsed from sight. 

The first four essays are largely concerned with defending thelegitimacy of religious faith. To some rationalizing readers suchadvocacy will seem a sad misuse of one's professional position. Mankind, they will say, is only too prone to follow faithunreasoningly, and needs no preaching nor encouragement in thatdirection. I quite agree that what mankind at large most lacks iscriticism and caution, not faith. Its cardinal weakness is to letbelief follow recklessly upon lively conception, especially when theconception has instinctive liking at its back. I admit, then, thatwere I addressing the Salvation Army or a miscellaneous popular crowdit would be a misuse of opportunity to preach the liberty of believingas I have in these pages preached it. What such audiences most need isthat their faiths should be broken up and ventilated, that thenorthwest wind of science should get into them and blow theirsickliness and barbarism away. But academic audiences, fed already onscience, have a very different need. Paralysis of their nativecapacity for faith and timorous _abulia_ in the religious field aretheir special forms of mental weakness, brought about by the notion, carefully instilled, that there is something called scientific evidenceby {xi} waiting upon which they shall escape all danger of shipwreck inregard to truth. But there is really no scientific or other method bywhich men can steer safely between the opposite dangers of believingtoo little or of believing too much. To face such dangers isapparently our duty, and to hit the right channel between them is themeasure of our wisdom as men. It does not follow, because recklessnessmay be a vice in soldiers, that courage ought never to be preached tothem. What _should_ be preached is courage weighted withresponsibility, --such courage as the Nelsons and Washingtons neverfailed to show after they had taken everything into account that mighttell against their success, and made every provision to minimizedisaster in case they met defeat. I do not think that any one canaccuse me of preaching reckless faith. I have preached the right ofthe individual to indulge his personal faith at his personal risk. Ihave discussed the kinds of risk; I have contended that none of usescape all of them; and I have only pleaded that it is better to facethem 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 matterconcerning which, however we may theoretically differ, we allpractically agree? In this age of toleration, no scientist will evertry actively to interfere with our religious faith, provided we enjoyit quietly with our friends and do not make a public nuisance of it inthe market-place. But it is just on this matter of the market-placethat I think the utility of such essays as mine may turn. If {xii}religious hypotheses about the universe be in order at all, then theactive faiths of individuals in them, freely expressing themselves inlife, are the experimental tests by which they are verified, and theonly means by which their truth or falsehood can be wrought out. Thetruest scientific hypothesis is that which, as we say, 'works' best;and it can be no otherwise with religious hypotheses. Religioushistory proves that one hypothesis after another has worked ill, hascrumbled at contact with a widening knowledge of the world, and haslapsed from the minds of men. Some articles of faith, however, havemaintained themselves through every vicissitude, and possess even morevitality to-day than ever before: it is for the 'science of religions'to tell us just which hypotheses these are. Meanwhile the freestcompetition of the various faiths with one another, and their openestapplication to life by their several champions, are the most favorableconditions under which the survival of the fittest can proceed. Theyought therefore not to lie hid each under its bushel, indulged-inquietly with friends. They ought to live in publicity, vying with eachother; 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 owninterests from the liveliest possible state of fermentation in thereligious world of his time. Those faiths will best stand the testwhich adopt also his hypotheses, and make them integral elements oftheir own. He should welcome therefore every species of religiousagitation and discussion, so long as he is willing to allow that somereligious hypothesis _may_ be {xiii} true. Of course there are plentyof scientists who would deny that dogmatically, maintaining thatscience has already ruled all possible religious hypotheses out ofcourt. Such scientists ought, I agree, to aim at imposing privacy onreligious faiths, the public manifestation of which could only be anuisance in their eyes. With all such scientists, as well as withtheir allies outside of science, my quarrel openly lies; and I hopethat my book may do something to persuade the reader of their crudity, and range him on my side. Religious fermentation is always a symptomof the intellectual vigor of a society; and it is only when they forgetthat they are hypotheses and put on rationalistic and authoritativepretensions, that our faiths do harm. The most interesting andvaluable things about a man are his ideals and over-beliefs. The sameis true of nations and historic epochs; and the excesses of which theparticular individuals and epochs are guilty are compensated in thetotal, and become profitable to mankind in the long run. 

The essay 'On some Hegelisms' doubtless needs an apology for thesuperficiality with which it treats a serious subject. It was writtenas a squib, to be read in a college-seminary in Hegel's logic, severalof whose members, mature men, were devout champions of the dialecticalmethod. My blows therefore were aimed almost entirely at that. Ireprint the paper here (albeit with some misgivings), partly because Ibelieve the dialectical method to be wholly abominable when worked byconcepts alone, and partly because the essay casts some positive lighton the pluralist-empiricist point of view. 

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The paper on Psychical Research is added to the volume for convenienceand utility. Attracted to this study some years ago by my love ofsportsmanlike fair play in science, I have seen enough to convince meof 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 ifmy article draws some new associates thereto, it will have served itsturn. 

Apology is also needed for the repetition of the same passage in twoessays (pp. 59-61 and 96-7, 100-1). My excuse is that one cannotalways 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 (whoemployed 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 ofGeorge Sand's--I forget which--read by me thirty years ago. 

Finally, the revision of the essays has consisted almost entirely inexcisions. Probably less than a page and a half in all of new matterhas been added. 

HARVARD UNIVERSITY, CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS, December, 1896. 

[1] B. P. Blood: The Flaw in Supremacy: Published by the Author, Amsterdam, N. Y. , 1893. 

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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

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 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. 

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 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

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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 wentwhen he was a boy. The teacher, a certain Mr. Guest, used to conversewith his pupils in this wise: "Gurney, what is the difference betweenjustification and sanctification?--Stephen, prove the omnipotence ofGod!" etc. In the midst of our Harvard freethinking and indifferencewe are prone to imagine that here at your good old orthodox Collegeconversation continues to be somewhat upon this order; and to show youthat we at Harvard have not lost all interest in these vital subjects, I have brought with me to-night something like a sermon onjustification by faith to read to you, --I mean an essay injustification _of_ faith, a defence of our right to adopt a believingattitude in religious matters, in spite of the fact that our merelylogical {2} intellect may not have been coerced. 'The Will toBelieve, ' accordingly, is the title of my paper. 

I have long defended to my own students the lawfulness of voluntarilyadopted faith; but as soon as they have got well imbued with thelogical spirit, they have as a rule refused to admit my contention tobe lawful philosophically, even though in point of fact they werepersonally all the time chock-full of some faith or other themselves. I am all the while, however, so profoundly convinced that my ownposition is correct, that your invitation has seemed to me a goodoccasion to make my statements more clear. Perhaps your minds will bemore open than those with which I have hitherto had to deal. I will beas little technical as I can, though I must begin by setting up sometechnical distinctions that will help us in the end. 

I. 

Let us give the name of _hypothesis_ to anything that may be proposedto our belief; and just as the electricians speak of live and deadwires, let us speak of any hypothesis as either _live_ or _dead_. Alive hypothesis is one which appeals as a real possibility to him towhom it is proposed. If I ask you to believe in the Mahdi, the notionmakes no electric connection with your nature, --it refuses toscintillate with any credibility at all. As an hypothesis it iscompletely dead. To an Arab, however (even if he be not one of theMahdi's followers), the hypothesis is among the mind's possibilities:it is alive. This shows that deadness and liveness in an hypothesisare not intrinsic properties, but relations to the {3} individualthinker. They are measured by his willingness to act. The maximum ofliveness in an hypothesis means willingness to act irrevocably. Practically, that means belief; but there is some believing tendencywherever 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 ourpurposes we may call an option a _genuine_ option when it is of theforced, living, and momentous kind. 

1. A living option is one in which both hypotheses are live ones. IfI say to you: "Be a theosophist or be a Mohammedan, " it is probably adead 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 umbrellaor without it, " I do not offer you a genuine option, for it is notforced. 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 orcall it false, " your option is avoidable. You may remain indifferentto me, neither loving nor hating, and you may decline to offer anyjudgment as to my theory. But if I say, "Either accept this truth orgo without it, " I put on you a forced option, for there is no standingplace outside of the alternative. Every dilemma based on a completelogical disjunction, with no possibility of not choosing, is an optionof this forced kind. 

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3. Finally, if I were Dr. Nansen and proposed to you to join my NorthPole expedition, your option would be momentous; for this wouldprobably be your only similar opportunity, and your choice now wouldeither exclude you from the North Pole sort of immortality altogetheror put at least the chance of it into your hands. He who refuses toembrace a unique opportunity loses the prize as surely as if he triedand failed. _Per contra_, the option is trivial when the opportunityis not unique, when the stake is insignificant, or when the decision isreversible if it later prove unwise. Such trivial options abound inthe scientific life. A chemist finds an hypothesis live enough tospend a year in its verification: he believes in it to that extent. But if his experiments prove inconclusive either way, he is quit forhis loss of time, no vital harm being done. 

It will facilitate our discussion if we keep all these distinctionswell 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 andvolitional nature lay at the root of all our convictions. When we lookat others, it seems as if they could do nothing when the intellect hadonce 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 ouropinions being modifiable at will? Can our will either help or hinderour intellect in its perceptions of truth? Can we, by just willing it, believe that Abraham Lincoln's existence is a myth, {5} and that theportraits of him in McClure's Magazine are all of some one else? Canwe, by any effort of our will, or by any strength of wish that it weretrue, believe ourselves well and about when we are roaring withrheumatism in bed, or feel certain that the sum of the two one-dollarbills in our pocket must be a hundred dollars? We can say any of thesethings, but we are absolutely impotent to believe them; and of justsuch things is the whole fabric of the truths that we do believe inmade up, --matters of fact, immediate or remote, as Hume said, andrelations between ideas, which are either there or not there for us ifwe see them so, and which if not there cannot be put there by anyaction of our own. 

In Pascal's Thoughts there is a celebrated passage known in literatureas Pascal's wager. In it he tries to force us into Christianity byreasoning as if our concern with truth resembled our concern with thestakes in a game of chance. Translated freely his words are these: Youmust 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 thenature of things which at the day of judgment will bring out eitherheads or tails. Weigh what your gains and your losses would be if youshould stake all you have on heads, or God's existence: if you win insuch case, you gain eternal beatitude; if you lose, you lose nothing atall. If there were an infinity of chances, and only one for God inthis wager, still you ought to stake your all on God; for though yousurely risk a finite loss by this procedure, any finite loss isreasonable, even a certain one is reasonable, if there is but thepossibility of {6} infinite gain. Go, then, and take holy water, andhave masses said; belief will come and stupefy your scruples, --_Celavous 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, inthe language of the gaming-table, it is put to its last trumps. SurelyPascal's own personal belief in masses and holy water had far othersprings; and this celebrated page of his is but an argument for others, a last desperate snatch at a weapon against the hardness of theunbelieving heart. We feel that a faith in masses and holy wateradopted wilfully after such a mechanical calculation would lack theinner soul of faith's reality; and if we were ourselves in the place ofthe Deity, we should probably take particular pleasure in cutting offbelievers of this pattern from their infinite reward. It is evidentthat unless there be some pre-existing tendency to believe in massesand holy water, the option offered to the will by Pascal is not aliving option. Certainly no Turk ever took to masses and holy water onits account; and even to us Protestants these means of salvation seemsuch foregone impossibilities that Pascal's logic, invoked for themspecifically, 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 becut off from the light of the sun. Weigh, then, your infinite gain ifI am genuine against your finite sacrifice if I am not!" His logicwould be that of Pascal; but he would vainly use it on us, for thehypothesis he offers us is dead. No tendency to act on it exists in usto any degree. 

{7}

The talk of believing by our volition seems, then, from one point ofview, simply silly. From another point of view it is worse than silly, it is vile. When one turns to the magnificent edifice of the physicalsciences, and sees how it was reared; what thousands of disinterestedmoral lives of men lie buried in its mere foundations; what patienceand postponement, what choking down of preference, what submission tothe icy laws of outer fact are wrought into its very stones and mortar;how absolutely impersonal it stands in its vast augustness, --then howbesotted and contemptible seems every little sentimentalist who comesblowing his voluntary smoke-wreaths, and pretending to decide thingsfrom out of his private dream! Can we wonder if those bred in therugged and manly school of science should feel like spewing suchsubjectivism out of their mouths? The whole system of loyalties whichgrow up in the schools of science go dead against its toleration; sothat it is only natural that those who have caught the scientific fevershould pass over to the opposite extreme, and write sometimes as if theincorruptibly truthful intellect ought positively to prefer bitternessand 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 thereflection that, however bad our posterity may become, so far as theyhold by the plain rule of not pretending to believe what they have noreason to believe, because it may be to their advantage so to pretend[the word 'pretend' is surely here redundant], they will not havereached the {8} lowest depth of immorality. " And that delicious_enfant terrible_ Clifford writes; "Belief is desecrated when given tounproved and unquestioned statements for the solace and privatepleasure of the believer, . . . Whoso would deserve well of his fellowsin this matter will guard the purity of his belief with a veryfanaticism of jealous care, lest at any time it should rest on anunworthy object, and catch a stain which can never be wiped away. . . . If [a] belief has been accepted on insufficient evidence [even thoughthe belief be true, as Clifford on the same page explains] the pleasureis a stolen one. . . . It is sinful because it is stolen in defiance ofour duty to mankind. That duty is to guard ourselves from such beliefsas from a pestilence which may shortly master our own body and thenspread to the rest of the town. . . . It is wrong always, everywhere, andfor 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-willand simple wishing do seem, in the matter of our credences, to be onlyfifth wheels to the coach. Yet if any one should thereupon assume thatintellectual insight is what remains after wish and will andsentimental preference have taken wing, or that pure reason is whatthen settles our opinions, he would fly quite as directly in the teethof the facts. 

It is only our already dead hypotheses that our willing nature isunable to bring to life again But what has made them dead for us isfor the most part {9} a previous action of our willing nature of anantagonistic kind. When I say 'willing nature, ' I do not mean onlysuch deliberate volitions as may have set up habits of belief that wecannot now escape from, --I mean all such factors of belief as fear andhope, prejudice and passion, imitation and partisanship, thecircumpressure of our caste and set. As a matter of fact we findourselves believing, we hardly know how or why. Mr. Balfour gives thename of 'authority' to all those influences, born of the intellectualclimate, that make hypotheses possible or impossible for us, alive ordead. Here in this room, we all of us believe in molecules and theconservation of energy, in democracy and necessary progress, inProtestant Christianity and the duty of fighting for 'the doctrine ofthe immortal Monroe, ' all for no reasons worthy of the name. We seeinto these matters with no more inner clearness, and probably with muchless, than any disbeliever in them might possess. Hisunconventionality would probably have some grounds to show for itsconclusions; but for us, not insight, but the _prestige_ of theopinions, is what makes the spark shoot from them and light up oursleeping magazines of faith. Our reason is quite satisfied, in ninehundred and ninety-nine cases out of every thousand of us, if it canfind a few arguments that will do to recite in case our credulity iscriticised by some one else. Our faith is faith in some one else'sfaith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case. Our beliefin truth itself, for instance, that there is a truth, and that ourminds and it are made for each other, --what is it but a passionateaffirmation of desire, in which our social system backs us up? We wantto have a truth; we want to believe that our {10} experiments andstudies and discussions must put us in a continually better and betterposition towards it; and on this line we agree to fight out ourthinking lives. But if a pyrrhonistic sceptic asks us _how we know_all this, can our logic find a reply? No! certainly it cannot. It isjust one volition against another, --we willing to go in for life upon atrust 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 nouse. Clifford's cosmic emotions find no use for Christian feelings. Huxley belabors the bishops because there is no use for sacerdotalismin his scheme of life. Newman, on the contrary, goes over to Romanism, and finds all sorts of reasons good for staying there, because apriestly 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 togetherto keep it suppressed and concealed. It would undo the uniformity ofNature and all sorts of other things without which scientists cannotcarry on their pursuits. But if this very man had been shown somethingwhich as a scientist he might _do_ with telepathy, he might not onlyhave examined the evidence, but even have found it good enough. Thisvery law which the logicians would impose upon us--if I may give thename of logicians to those who would rule out our willing naturehere--is based on nothing but their own natural wish to exclude allelements for {11} which they, in their professional quality oflogicians, can find no use. 

Evidently, then, our non-intellectual nature does influence ourconvictions. There are passional tendencies and volitions which runbefore and others which come after belief, and it is only the latterthat are too late for the fair; and they are not too late when theprevious passional work has been already in their own direction. Pascal's argument, instead of being powerless, then seems a regularclincher, and is the last stroke needed to make our faith in masses andholy water complete. The state of things is evidently far from simple;and pure insight and logic, whatever they might do ideally, are not theonly things that really do produce our creeds. 

IV. 

Our next duty, having recognized this mixed-up state of affairs, is toask whether it be simply reprehensible and pathological, or whether, onthe contrary, we must treat it as a normal element in making up ourminds. The thesis I defend is, briefly stated, this: _Our passionalnature not only lawfully may, but must, decide an option betweenpropositions, whenever it is a genuine option that cannot by its naturebe decided on intellectual grounds; for to say, under suchcircumstances, "Do not decide, but leave the question open, " is itselfa passional decision, --just like deciding yes or no, --and is attendedwith the same risk of losing the truth_. The thesis thus abstractlyexpressed will, I trust, soon become quite clear. But I must firstindulge 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 systematicphilosophical scepticism altogether out of account. The postulate thatthere 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 makeit. We part company with him, therefore, absolutely, at this point. But the faith that truth exists, and that our minds can find it, may beheld in two ways. We may talk of the _empiricist_ way and of the_absolutist_ way of believing in truth. The absolutists in this mattersay that we not only can attain to knowing truth, but we can _knowwhen_ we have attained to knowing it; while the empiricists think thatalthough we may attain it, we cannot infallibly know when. To _know_is one thing, and to know for certain _that_ we know is another. Onemay hold to the first being possible without the second; hence theempiricists and the absolutists, although neither of them is a scepticin the usual philosophic sense of the term, show very different degreesof dogmatism in their lives. 

If we look at the history of opinions, we see that the empiricisttendency has largely prevailed in science, while in philosophy theabsolutist tendency has had everything its own way. The characteristicsort of happiness, indeed, which philosophies yield has mainlyconsisted in the conviction felt by each successive school or systemthat by it bottom-certitude had been attained. "Other philosophies arecollections of opinions, mostly false; _my_ philosophy {13} givesstanding-ground forever, "--who does not recognize in this the key-noteof 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 tofind perfectly clear statement, has beautifully elaborated thisabsolutist conviction in a doctrine which it calls that of 'objectiveevidence. ' If, for example, I am unable to doubt that I now existbefore you, that two is less than three, or that if all men are mortalthen I am mortal too, it is because these things illumine my intellectirresistibly. The final ground of this objective evidence possessed bycertain propositions is the _adaequatio intellectûs nostri cum rê_. The certitude it brings involves an _aptitudinem ad extorquendum certumassensum_ on the part of the truth envisaged, and on the side of thesubject a _quietem in cognitione_, when once the object is mentallyreceived, that leaves no possibility of doubt behind; and in the wholetransaction nothing operates but the _entitas ipsa_ of the object andthe _entitas ipsa_ of the mind. We slouchy modern thinkers dislike totalk in Latin, --indeed, we dislike to talk in set terms at all; but atbottom our own state of mind is very much like this whenever weuncritically abandon ourselves: You believe in objective evidence, andI do. Of some things we feel that we are certain: we know, and we knowthat we do know. There is something that gives a click inside of us, abell that strikes twelve, when the hands of our mental clock have sweptthe dial and meet over the meridian hour. The greatest empiricistsamong us are only empiricists on reflection: when {14} left to theirinstincts, they dogmatize like infallible popes. When the Cliffordstell us how sinful it is to be Christians on such 'insufficientevidence, ' insufficiency is really the last thing they have in mind. For them the evidence is absolutely sufficient, only it makes the otherway. They believe so completely in an anti-christian order of theuniverse that there is no living option: Christianity is a deadhypothesis from the start. 

VI. 

But now, since we are all such absolutists by instinct, what in ourquality of students of philosophy ought we to do about the fact? Shallwe espouse and indorse it? Or shall we treat it as a weakness of ournature from which we must free ourselves, if we can?

I sincerely believe that the latter course is the only one we canfollow as reflective men. Objective evidence and certitude aredoubtless very fine ideals to play with, but where on this moonlit anddream-visited planet are they found? I am, therefore, myself acomplete empiricist so far as my theory of human knowledge goes. Ilive, to be sure, by the practical faith that we must go onexperiencing and thinking over our experience, for only thus can ouropinions grow more true; but to hold any one of them--I absolutely donot care which--as if it never could be reinterpretable or corrigible, I believe to be a tremendously mistaken attitude, and I think that thewhole history of philosophy will bear me out. There is but oneindefectibly certain truth, and that is the truth that pyrrhonisticscepticism itself leaves {15} standing, --the truth that the presentphenomenon of consciousness exists. That, however, is the barestarting-point of knowledge, the mere admission of a stuff to bephilosophized about. The various philosophies are but so many attemptsat expressing what this stuff really is. And if we repair to ourlibraries what disagreement do we discover! Where is a certainly trueanswer found? Apart from abstract propositions of comparison (such astwo and two are the same as four), propositions which tell us nothingby themselves about concrete reality, we find no proposition everregarded by any one as evidently certain that has not either beencalled a falsehood, or at least had its truth sincerely questioned bysome one else. The transcending of the axioms of geometry, not in playbut in earnest, by certain of our contemporaries (as Zöllner andCharles H. Hinton), and the rejection of the whole Aristotelian logicby 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, puttingit either in revelation, the _consensus gentium_, the instincts of theheart, or the systematized experience of the race. Others make theperceptive moment its own test, --Descartes, for instance, with hisclear and distinct ideas guaranteed by the veracity of God; Reid withhis 'common-sense;' and Kant with his forms of synthetic judgment _apriori_. The inconceivability of the opposite; the capacity to beverified by sense; the possession of complete organic unity orself-relation, realized when a thing is its own other, --are standardswhich, in turn, have been used. The much {16} lauded objectiveevidence is never triumphantly there, it is a mere aspiration or_Grenzbegriff_, marking the infinitely remote ideal of our thinkinglife. To claim that certain truths now possess it, is simply to saythat when you think them true and they _are_ true, then their evidenceis objective, otherwise it is not. But practically one's convictionthat the evidence one goes by is of the real objective brand, is onlyone more subjective opinion added to the lot. For what a contradictoryarray of opinions have objective evidence and absolute certitude beenclaimed! The world is rational through and through, --its existence isan ultimate brute fact; there is a personal God, --a personal God isinconceivable; there is an extra-mental physical world immediatelyknown, --the mind can only know its own ideas; a moral imperativeexists, --obligation is only the resultant of desires; a permanentspiritual principle is in every one, --there are only shifting states ofmind; there is an endless chain of causes, --there is an absolute firstcause; an eternal necessity, --a freedom; a purpose, --no purpose; aprimal One, --a primal Many; a universal continuity, --an essentialdiscontinuity in things; an infinity, --no infinity. There isthis, --there is that; there is indeed nothing which some one has notthought absolutely true, while his neighbor deemed it absolutely false;and not an absolutist among them seems ever to have considered that thetrouble may all the time be essential, and that the intellect, evenwith truth directly in its grasp, may have no infallible signal forknowing whether it be truth or no. When, indeed, one remembers thatthe most striking practical application to life of the doctrine ofobjective certitude has been {17} the conscientious labors of the HolyOffice of the Inquisition, one feels less tempted than ever to lend thedoctrine a respectful ear. 

But please observe, now, that when as empiricists we give up thedoctrine of objective certitude, we do not thereby give up the quest orhope of truth itself. We still pin our faith on its existence, andstill believe that we gain an ever better position towards it bysystematically continuing to roll up experiences and think. Our greatdifference from the scholastic lies in the way we face. The strengthof 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 todecide. It matters not to an empiricist from what quarter anhypothesis may come to him: he may have acquired it by fair means or byfoul; passion may have whispered or accident suggested it; but if thetotal drift of thinking continues to confirm it, that is what he meansby 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 ofopinion, --ways entirely different, and yet ways about whose differencethe theory of knowledge seems hitherto to have shown very littleconcern. _We must know the truth_; and _we must avoid error_, --theseare our first and great commandments as would-be knowers; but they arenot two ways of stating an identical commandment, they are twoseparable laws. Although it may indeed happen that when we believe thetruth _A_, we escape {18} as an incidental consequence from believingthe falsehood _B_, it hardly ever happens that by merely disbelieving_B_ we necessarily believe _A_. We may in escaping _B_ fall intobelieving other falsehoods, _C_ or _D_, just as bad as _B_; or we mayescape _B_ by not believing anything at all, not even _A_. 

Believe truth! Shun error!--these, we see, are two materiallydifferent laws; and by choosing between them we may end by coloringdifferently our whole intellectual life. We may regard the chase fortruth as paramount, and the avoidance of error as secondary; or we may, on the other hand, treat the avoidance of error as more imperative, andlet truth take its chance. Clifford, in the instructive passage whichI have quoted, exhorts us to the latter course. Believe nothing, hetells us, keep your mind in suspense forever, rather than by closing iton 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 verysmall matter when compared with the blessings of real knowledge, and beready to be duped many times in your investigation rather than postponeindefinitely the chance of guessing true. I myself find it impossibleto go with Clifford. We must remember that these feelings of our dutyabout either truth or error are in any case only expressions of ourpassional life. Biologically considered, our minds are as ready togrind out falsehood as veracity, and he who says, "Better go withoutbelief forever than believe a lie!" merely shows his own preponderantprivate horror of becoming a dupe. He may be critical of many of hisdesires and fears, but this fear he slavishly obeys. He cannot imagineany one questioning its binding force. For my own part, I {19} havealso a horror of being duped; but I can believe that worse things thanbeing duped may happen to a man in this world: so Clifford'sexhortation has to my ears a thoroughly fantastic sound. It is like ageneral informing his soldiers that it is better to keep out of battleforever than to risk a single wound. Not so are victories either overenemies or over nature gained. Our errors are surely not such awfullysolemn things. In a world where we are so certain to incur them inspite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthierthan this excessive nervousness on their behalf. At any rate, it seemsthe fittest thing for the empiricist philosopher. 

VIII. 

And now, after all this introduction, let us go straight at ourquestion. I have said, and now repeat it, that not only as a matter offact do we find our passional nature influencing us in our opinions, but that there are some options between opinions in which thisinfluence must be regarded both as an inevitable and as a lawfuldeterminant of our choice. 

I fear here that some of you my hearers will begin to scent danger, andlend an inhospitable ear. Two first steps of passion you have indeedhad to admit as necessary, --we must think so as to avoid dupery, and wemust think so as to gain truth; but the surest path to those idealconsummations, you will probably consider, is from now onwards to takeno further passional step. 

Well, of course, I agree as far as the facts will allow. Wherever theoption between losing truth and gaining it is not momentous, we canthrow the {20} chance of _gaining truth_ away, and at any rate saveourselves from any chance of _believing falsehood_, by not making upour minds at all till objective evidence has come. In scientificquestions, this is almost always the case; and even in human affairs ingeneral, the need of acting is seldom so urgent that a false belief toact on is better than no belief at all. Law courts, indeed, have todecide on the best evidence attainable for the moment, because ajudge's duty is to make law as well as to ascertain it, and (as alearned judge once said to me) few cases are worth spending much timeover: the great thing is to have them decided on _any_ acceptableprinciple, and got out of the way. But in our dealings with objectivenature we obviously are recorders, not makers, of the truth; anddecisions for the mere sake of deciding promptly and getting on to thenext business would be wholly out of place. Throughout the breadth ofphysical nature facts are what they are quite independently of us, andseldom is there any such hurry about them that the risks of being dupedby believing a premature theory need be faced. The questions here arealways trivial options, the hypotheses are hardly living (at any ratenot living for us spectators), the choice between believing truth orfalsehood is seldom forced. The attitude of sceptical balance istherefore the absolutely wise one if we would escape mistakes. Whatdifference, indeed, does it make to most of us whether we have or havenot a theory of the Röntgen rays, whether we believe or not inmind-stuff, or have a conviction about the causality of consciousstates? It makes no difference. Such options are not forced on us. On every account it is better not to make them, but still keep weighingreasons _pro et contra_ with an indifferent hand. 

{21}

I speak, of course, here of the purely judging mind. For purposes ofdiscovery such indifference is to be less highly recommended, andscience would be far less advanced than she is if the passionatedesires of individuals to get their own faiths confirmed had been keptout of the game. See for example the sagacity which Spencer andWeismann now display. On the other hand, if you want an absoluteduffer in an investigation, you must, after all, take the man who hasno interest whatever in its results: he is the warranted incapable, thepositive fool. The most useful investigator, because the mostsensitive observer, is always he whose eager interest in one side ofthe question is balanced by an equally keen nervousness lest he becomedeceived. [3] Science has organized this nervousness into a regular_technique_, her so-called method of verification; and she has fallenso deeply in love with the method that one may even say she has ceasedto care for truth by itself at all. It is only truth as technicallyverified that interests her. The truth of truths might come in merelyaffirmative form, and she would decline to touch it. Such truth asthat, she might repeat with Clifford, would be stolen in defiance ofher duty to mankind. Human passions, however, are stronger thantechnical rules. "Le coeur a ses raisons, " as Pascal says, "que laraison ne connaît pas;" and however indifferent to all but the barerules of the game the umpire, the abstract intellect, may be, theconcrete 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, savingus, as it does, from dupery at any rate, ought to be our ideal. 

The question next arises: Are there not somewhere forced options in ourspeculative questions, and can we (as men who may be interested atleast as much in positively gaining truth as in merely escaping dupery)always wait with impunity till the coercive evidence shall havearrived? It seems _a priori_ improbable that the truth should be sonicely adjusted to our needs and powers as that. In the greatboarding-house of nature, the cakes and the butter and the syrup seldomcome out so even and leave the plates so clean. Indeed, we should viewthem with scientific suspicion if they did. 

IX. 

_Moral questions_ immediately present themselves as questions whosesolution cannot wait for sensible proof. A moral question is aquestion not of what sensibly exists, but of what is good, or would begood if it did exist. Science can tell us what exists; but to comparethe _worths_, both of what exists and of what does not exist, we mustconsult not science, but what Pascal calls our heart. Science herselfconsults her heart when she lays it down that the infiniteascertainment of fact and correction of false belief are the supremegoods for man. Challenge the statement, and science can only repeat itoracularly, or else prove it by showing that such ascertainment andcorrection bring man all sorts of other goods which man's heart in turndeclares. The question of having moral beliefs at all or not havingthem is decided by {23} our will. Are our moral preferences true orfalse, or are they only odd biological phenomena, making things good orbad for _us_, but in themselves indifferent? How can your pureintellect decide? If your heart does not _want_ a world of moralreality, your head will assuredly never make you believe in one. Mephistophelian scepticism, indeed, will satisfy the head'splay-instincts much better than any rigorous idealism can. Some men(even at the student age) are so naturally cool-hearted that themoralistic hypothesis never has for them any pungent life, and in theirsupercilious presence the hot young moralist always feels strangely illat ease. The appearance of knowingness is on their side, of naïvetéand gullibility on his. Yet, in the inarticulate heart of him, heclings 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 nobetter than the cunning of a fox. Moral scepticism can no more berefuted or proved by logic than intellectual scepticism can. When westick to it that there _is_ truth (be it of either kind), we do so withour whole nature, and resolve to stand or fall by the results. Thesceptic with his whole nature adopts the doubting attitude; but whichof us is the wiser, Omniscience only knows. 

Turn now from these wide questions of good to a certain class ofquestions of fact, questions concerning personal relations, states ofmind between one man and another. _Do you like me or not?_--forexample. Whether you do or not depends, in countless instances, onwhether I meet you half-way, am willing to assume that you must likeme, and show you trust and expectation. The previous faith on my partin your liking's existence is in such cases what makes {24} your likingcome. But if I stand aloof, and refuse to budge an inch until I haveobjective evidence, until you shall have done something apt, as theabsolutists say, _ad extorquendum assensum meum_, ten to one yourliking never comes. How many women's hearts are vanquished by the meresanguine insistence of some man that they _must_ love him! he will notconsent to the hypothesis that they cannot. The desire for a certainkind of truth here brings about that special truth's existence; and soit is in innumerable cases of other sorts. Who gains promotions, boons, appointments, but the man in whose life they are seen to playthe part of live hypotheses, who discounts them, sacrifices otherthings for their sake before they have come, and takes risks for themin advance? His faith acts on the powers above him as a claim, andcreates its own verification. 

A social organism of any sort whatever, large or small, is what it isbecause each member proceeds to his own duty with a trust that theother members will simultaneously do theirs. Wherever a desired resultis achieved by the co-operation of many independent persons, itsexistence as a fact is a pure consequence of the precursive faith inone another of those immediately concerned. A government, an army, acommercial system, a ship, a college, an athletic team, all exist onthis condition, without which not only is nothing achieved, but nothingis even attempted. A whole train of passengers (individually braveenough) will be looted by a few highwaymen, simply because the lattercan count on one another, while each passenger fears that if he makes amovement of resistance, he will be shot before any one else backs himup. If we believed that the whole car-full would rise {25} at oncewith us, we should each severally rise, and train-robbing would nevereven be attempted. There are, then, cases where a fact cannot come atall unless a preliminary faith exists in its coming. _And where faithin a fact can help create the fact_, that would be an insane logicwhich should say that faith running ahead of scientific evidence is the'lowest kind of immorality' into which a thinking being can fall. Yetsuch is the logic by which our scientific absolutists pretend toregulate our lives!

X. 

In truths dependent on our personal action, then, faith based on desireis certainly a lawful and possibly an indispensable thing. 

But now, it will be said, these are all childish human cases, and havenothing to do with great cosmical matters, like the question ofreligious faith. Let us then pass on to that. Religions differ somuch in their accidents that in discussing the religious question wemust make it very generic and broad. What then do we now mean by thereligious hypothesis? Science says things are; morality says somethings are better than other things; and religion says essentially twothings. 

First, she says that the best things are the more eternal things, theoverlapping things, the things in the universe that throw the laststone, so to speak, and say the final word. "Perfection iseternal, "--this phrase of Charles Secrétan seems a good way of puttingthis first affirmation of religion, an affirmation which obviouslycannot yet be verified scientifically at all. 

{26}

The second affirmation of religion is that we are better off even nowif 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 todiscuss the question at all, it must involve a living option. If forany of you religion be a hypothesis that cannot, by any livingpossibility be true, then you need go no farther. I speak to the'saving remnant' alone. ) So proceeding, we see, first, that religionoffers itself as a _momentous_ option. We are supposed to gain, evennow, by our belief, and to lose by our non-belief, a certain vitalgood. Secondly, religion is a _forced_ option, so far as that goodgoes. We cannot escape the issue by remaining sceptical and waitingfor more light, because, although we do avoid error in that way _ifreligion be untrue_, we lose the good, _if it be true_, just ascertainly as if we positively chose to disbelieve. It is as if a manshould hesitate indefinitely to ask a certain woman to marry himbecause he was not perfectly sure that she would prove an angel afterhe brought her home. Would he not cut himself off from that particularangel-possibility as decisively as if he went and married some oneelse? Scepticism, then, is not avoidance of option; it is option of acertain particular kind of risk. _Better risk loss of truth thanchance of error_, --that is your faith-vetoer's exact position. He isactively playing his stake as much as the believer is; he is backingthe field against the religious hypothesis, just as the believer isbacking the religious hypothesis against the field. To preachscepticism to us as a duty until {27} 'sufficient evidence' forreligion be found, is tantamount therefore to telling us, when inpresence of the religious hypothesis, that to yield to our fear of itsbeing error is wiser and better than to yield to our hope that it maybe true. It is not intellect against all passions, then; it is onlyintellect 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 thandupery through fear? I, for one, can see no proof; and I simply refuseobedience to the scientist's command to imitate his kind of option, ina case where my own stake is important enough to give me the right tochoose my own form of risk. If religion be true and the evidence forit be still insufficient, I do not wish, by putting your extinguisherupon my nature (which feels to me as if it had after all some businessin this matter), to forfeit my sole chance in life of getting upon thewinning side, --that chance depending, of course, on my willingness torun the risk of acting as if my passional need of taking the worldreligiously might be prophetic and right. 

All this is on the supposition that it really may be prophetic andright, and that, even to us who are discussing the matter, religion isa live hypothesis which may be true. Now, to most of us religion comesin a still further way that makes a veto on our active faith even moreillogical. The more perfect and more eternal aspect of the universe isrepresented in our religions as having personal form. The universe isno longer a mere _It_ to us, but a _Thou_, if we are religious; and anyrelation that may be possible from person to person might be possible{28} here. For instance, although in one sense we are passive portionsof the universe, in another we show a curious autonomy, as if we weresmall active centres on our own account. We feel, too, as if theappeal of religion to us were made to our own active good-will, as ifevidence might be forever withheld from us unless we met the hypothesishalf-way. To take a trivial illustration: just as a man who in acompany of gentlemen made no advances, asked a warrant for everyconcession, and believed no one's word without proof, would cut himselfoff by such churlishness from all the social rewards that a moretrusting spirit would earn, --so here, one who should shut himself up insnarling logicality and try to make the gods extort his recognitionwilly-nilly, or not get it at all, might cut himself off forever fromhis only opportunity of making the gods' acquaintance. This feeling, forced on us we know not whence, that by obstinately believing thatthere are gods (although not to do so would be so easy both for ourlogic and our life) we are doing the universe the deepest service wecan, seems part of the living essence of the religious hypothesis. Ifthe hypothesis _were_ true in all its parts, including this one, thenpure intellectualism, with its veto on our making willing advances, would be an absurdity; and some participation of our sympathetic naturewould be logically required. I, therefore, for one cannot see my wayto accepting the agnostic rules for truth-seeking, or wilfully agree tokeep my willing nature out of the game. I cannot do so for this plainreason, that _a rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me fromacknowledging certain kinds of truth if those kinds of truth werereally there, would be an irrational rule_. That for me {29} is thelong and short of the formal logic of the situation, no matter what thekinds of truth might materially be. 

I confess I do not see how this logic can be escaped. But sadexperience makes me fear that some of you may still shrink fromradically saying with me, _in abstracto_, that we have the right tobelieve at our own risk any hypothesis that is live enough to tempt ourwill. I suspect, however, that if this is so, it is because you havegot away from the abstract logical point of view altogether, and arethinking (perhaps without realizing it) of some particular religioushypothesis which for you is dead. The freedom to 'believe what wewill' you apply to the case of some patent superstition; and the faithyou think of is the faith defined by the schoolboy when he said, "Faithis when you believe something that you know ain't true. " I can onlyrepeat that this is misapprehension. _In concreto_, the freedom tobelieve can only cover living options which the intellect of theindividual cannot by itself resolve; and living options never seemabsurdities to him who has them to consider. When I look at thereligious question as it really puts itself to concrete men, and when Ithink of all the possibilities which both practically and theoreticallyit involves, then this command that we shall put a stopper on ourheart, instincts, and courage, and wait--acting of course meanwhilemore or less as if religion were _not_ true[4]--till {30} doomsday, ortill such time as our intellect and senses working together may haveraked in evidence enough, --this command, I say, seems to me thequeerest idol ever manufactured in the philosophic cave. Were wescholastic absolutists, there might be more excuse. If we had aninfallible intellect with its objective certitudes, we might feelourselves disloyal to such a perfect organ of knowledge in not trustingto it exclusively, in not waiting for its releasing word. But if weare empiricists, if we believe that no bell in us tolls to let us knowfor certain when truth is in our grasp, then it seems a piece of idlefantasticality 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 amdenying that, --but if we do so, we do so at our peril as much as if webelieved. In either case we _act_, taking our life in our hands. Noone of us ought to issue vetoes to the other, nor should we bandy wordsof abuse. We ought, on the contrary, delicately and profoundly torespect one another's mental freedom: then only shall we bring aboutthe intellectual republic; then only shall we have that spirit of innertolerance without which all our outer tolerance is soulless, and whichis empiricism's glory; then only shall we live and let live, inspeculative as well as in practical things. 

I began by a reference to Fitz James Stephen; let me end by a quotationfrom him. "What do you think {31} of yourself? What do you think ofthe world?. . . These are questions with which all must deal as it seemsgood to them. They are riddles of the Sphinx, and in some way or otherwe must deal with them. . . . In all important transactions of life wehave to take a leap in the dark. . . . If we decide to leave the riddlesunanswered, that is a choice; if we waver in our answer, that, too, isa choice: but whatever choice we make, we make it at our peril. If aman chooses to turn his back altogether on God and the future, no onecan prevent him; no one can show beyond reasonable doubt that he ismistaken. If a man thinks otherwise and acts as he thinks, I do notsee that any one can prove that _he_ is mistaken. Each must act as hethinks best; and if he is wrong, so much the worse for him. We standon a mountain pass in the midst of whirling snow and blinding mist, through which we get glimpses now and then of paths which may bedeceptive. If we stand still we shall be frozen to death. If we takethe wrong road we shall be dashed to pieces. We do not certainly knowwhether there is any right one. What must we do? 'Be strong and of agood courage. ' Act for the best, hope for the best, and take whatcomes. . . . If death ends all, we cannot meet death better. "[5]

[1] An Address to the Philosophical Clubs of Yale and BrownUniversities. 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 believereligion to be true, necessarily also forbids us to act as we should ifwe did believe it to be true. The whole defence of religious faithhinges upon action. If the action required or inspired by thereligious hypothesis is in no way different from that dictated by thenaturalistic hypothesis, then religious faith is a pure superfluity, better pruned away, and controversy about its legitimacy is a piece ofidle trifling, unworthy of serious minds. I myself believe, of course, that the religious hypothesis gives to the world an expression whichspecifically determines our reactions, and makes them in a large partunlike 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 yearsago, the jocose answer that "it depends on the _liver_" had greatcurrency in the newspapers. The answer which I propose to giveto-night cannot be jocose. In the words of one of Shakespeare'sprologues, --

 "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 cornerin which the ultimate mystery of things works sadly; and I know notwhat such an association as yours intends, nor what you ask of thosewhom you invite to address you, unless it be to lead you from thesurface-glamour of existence, and for an hour at least to make youheedless to the buzzing and jigging and vibration of small interestsand excitements that form the tissue of our ordinary consciousness. Without further explanation or apology, then, I ask you to join me inturning an attention, commonly too unwilling, to the profounderbass-note of life. Let us search the lonely depths for an hourtogether, and see what answers in the last folds and recesses of thingsour question may find. 

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I. 

With many men the question of life's worth is answered by atemperamental optimism which makes them incapable of believing thatanything seriously evil can exist. Our dear old Walt Whitman's worksare the standing text-book of this kind of optimism. The mere joy ofliving is so immense in Walt Whitman's veins that it abolishes thepossibility 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 nothingbut his happiness to tell:--

"How tell what was neither said nor done nor even thought, but tastedonly and felt, with no object of my felicity but the emotion offelicity 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 washappy. I rambled through the woods and over the vine-slopes, Iwandered in the valleys, I read, I lounged, I {34} worked in thegarden, I gathered the fruits, I helped at the indoor work, andhappiness 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 likethese universal, there would never be any occasion for such discoursesas the present one. No philosopher would seek to prove articulatelythat life is worth living, for the fact that it absolutely is so wouldvouch for itself, and the problem disappear in the vanishing of thequestion rather than in the coming of anything like a reply. But weare not magicians to make the optimistic temperament universal; andalongside of the deliverances of temperamental optimism concerninglife, those of temperamental pessimism always exist, and oppose to thema standing refutation. In what is called 'circular insanity, ' phasesof melancholy succeed phases of mania, with no outward cause that wecan discover; and often enough to one and the same well person lifewill present incarnate radiance to-day and incarnate drearinessto-morrow, according to the fluctuations of what the older medicalbooks used to call "the concoction of the humors. " In the words of thenewspaper joke, "it depends on the liver. " Rousseau's ill-balancedconstitution undergoes a change, and behold him in his latter evil daysa prey to melancholy and black delusions of suspicion and fear. Somemen seem launched upon the world even from their birth with souls asincapable of happiness as Walt Whitman's was of gloom, and they haveleft us their messages in even more lasting verse than his, --theexquisite Leopardi, for example; or our own contemporary, {35} JamesThomson, in that pathetic book, The City of Dreadful Night, which Ithink 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 acongregation gathered to listen to a preacher in a great unilluminedcathedral at night. The sermon is too long to quote, but it endsthus:--

 "'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;

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 "'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, --

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 "'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 whenyou will, "--these verses flow truthfully from the melancholy Thomson'spen, and are in truth a consolation for all to whom, as to him, theworld is far more like a steady den of fear than a continual fountainof delight. That life is not worth living the whole army of suicidesdeclare, --an army whose roll-call, like the famous evening gun of theBritish 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 lifeis 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 thepalate and lightnesses of heart of a London dinner-party, the walls ofthe chamber were parted, and through their gap the nearest human beingswho were famishing and in misery were borne into the midst of thecompany feasting and fancy free; if, pale from death, horrible indestitution, broken by despair, body by body they were laid upon thesoft carpet, one beside the chair of every guest, --would only thecrumbs of the dainties be cast to them; would only a passing glance, apassing thought, be vouchsafed to them? Yet the actual facts, the realrelation of each Dives and Lazarus, are not altered by the {38}intervention of the house-wall between the table and the sick-bed, --bythe few feet of ground (how few!) which are, indeed, all that separatethe merriment from the misery. "

II. 

To come immediately to the heart of my theme, then, what I propose isto imagine ourselves reasoning with a fellow-mortal who is on suchterms with life that the only comfort left him is to brood on theassurance, "You may end it when you will. " What reasons can we pleadthat may render such a brother (or sister) willing to take up theburden 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 ablasphemous act to anticipate his absolving hand. But can _we_ findnothing richer or more positive than this, no reflections to urgewhereby the suicide may actually see, and in all sad seriousness feel, that in spite of adverse appearances even for him life is still worthliving? There are suicides and suicides (in the United States aboutthree thousand of them every year), and I must frankly confess thatwith 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 thesebelong to the ultimate mystery of evil, concerning which I can onlyoffer considerations tending toward religious patience at the end ofthis hour. My task, let me say now, is practically narrow, and mywords are to deal only with that metaphysical _tedium vitae_ which ispeculiar to {39} reflecting men. Most of you are devoted, for good orill, to the reflective life. Many of you are students of philosophy, and have already felt in your own persons the scepticism and unrealitythat 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, almostas often as too much sensualism does, to the edge of the slope, at thebottom of which lie pessimism and the nightmare or suicidal view oflife. But to the diseases which reflection breeds, still furtherreflection can oppose effective remedies; and it is of the melancholyand _Weltschmerz_ bred of reflection that I now proceed to speak. 

Let me say, immediately, that my final appeal is to nothing morerecondite than religious faith. So far as my argument is to bedestructive, it will consist in nothing more than the sweeping away ofcertain views that often keep the springs of religious faithcompressed; and so far as it is to be constructive, it will consist inholding up to the light of day certain considerations calculated to letloose these springs in a normal, natural way. Pessimism is essentiallya 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 nonormal religious reply. 

Now, there are two stages of recovery from this disease, two differentlevels upon which one may emerge from the midnight view to the daylightview of things, and I must treat of them in turn. The second stage isthe more complete and joyous, and it corresponds to the freer exerciseof religious {40} trust and fancy. There are, as is well known, persons who are naturally very free in this regard, others who are notat all so. There are persons, for instance, whom we find indulging totheir heart's content in prospects of immortality; and there are otherswho experience the greatest difficulty in making such a notion seemreal to themselves at all. These latter persons are tied to theirsenses, restricted to their natural experience; and many of them, moreover, feel a sort of intellectual loyalty to what they call 'hardfacts, ' which is positively shocked by the easy excursions into theunseen that other people make at the bare call of sentiment. Minds ofeither class may, however, be intensely religious. They may equallydesire atonement and reconciliation, and crave acquiescence andcommunion with the total soul of things. But the craving, when themind is pent in to the hard facts, especially as science now revealsthem, can breed pessimism, quite as easily as it breeds optimism whenit inspires religious trust and fancy to wing their way to another anda better world. 

That is why I call pessimism an essentially religious disease. Thenightmare view of life has plenty of organic sources; but its greatreflective source has at all times been the contradiction between thephenomena of nature and the craving of the heart to believe that behindnature there is a spirit whose expression nature is. What philosopherscall 'natural theology' has been one way of appeasing this craving;that poetry of nature in which our English literature is so rich hasbeen another way. Now, suppose a mind of the latter of our twoclasses, whose imagination is pent in consequently, and who takes its{41} facts 'hard;' suppose it, moreover, to feel strongly the cravingfor communion, and yet to realize how desperately difficult it is toconstrue the scientific order of nature either theologically orpoetically, --and what result can there be but inner discord andcontradiction? Now, this inner discord (merely as discord) can berelieved in either of two ways: The longing to read the factsreligiously may cease, and leave the bare facts by themselves; or, supplementary facts may be discovered or believed-in, which permit thereligious reading to go on. These two ways of relief are the twostages of recovery, the two levels of escape from pessimism, to which Imade allusion a moment ago, and which the sequel will, I trust, makemore clear. 

III. 

Starting then with nature, we naturally tend, if we have the religiouscraving, to say with Marcus Aurelius, "O Universe! what thou wishest Iwish. " Our sacred books and traditions tell us of one God who madeheaven and earth, and, looking on them, saw that they were good. Yet, on more intimate acquaintance, the visible surfaces of heaven and earthrefuse to be brought by us into any intelligible unity at all. Everyphenomenon that we would praise there exists cheek by jowl with somecontrary phenomenon that cancels all its religious effect upon themind. Beauty and hideousness, love and cruelty, life and death keephouse together in indissoluble partnership; and there gradually stealsover us, instead of the old warm notion of a man-loving Deity, that ofan awful power that neither hates nor loves, but rolls all things {42}together meaninglessly to a common doom. This is an uncanny, asinister, a nightmare view of life, and its peculiar _unheimlichkeit_, or poisonousness, lies expressly in our holding two things togetherwhich cannot possibly agree, --in our clinging, on the one hand, to thedemand that there shall be a living spirit of the whole; and, on theother, to the belief that the course of nature must be such a spirit'sadequate manifestation and expression. It is in the contradictionbetween the supposed being of a spirit that encompasses and owns us, and with which we ought to have some communion, and the character ofsuch a spirit as revealed by the visible world's course, that thisparticular death-in-life paradox and this melancholy-breeding puzzlereside, Carlyle expresses the result in that chapter of his immortal'Sartor Resartus' entitled 'The Everlasting No. ' "I lived, " writespoor Teufelsdröckh, "in a continual, indefinite, pining fear;tremulous, pusillanimous, apprehensive of I knew not what: it seemed asif 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 devouringmonster, wherein I, palpitating, lay waiting to be devoured. "

This is the first stage of speculative melancholy. No brute can havethis sort of melancholy; no man who is irreligious can become its prey. It is the sick shudder of the frustrated religious demand, and not themere necessary outcome of animal experience. Teufelsdröckh himselfcould have made shift to face the general chaos and bedevilment of thisworld's experiences very well, were he not the victim of an originallyunlimited trust and affection towards them. If he might meet thempiecemeal, with no suspicion {43} of any whole expressing itself inthem, shunning the bitter parts and husbanding the sweet ones, as theoccasion served, and as the day was foul or fair, he could havezigzagged toward an easy end, and felt no obligation to make the airvocal with his lamentations. The mood of levity, of 'I don't care, ' isfor this world's ills a sovereign and practical anaesthetic. But, no!something deep down in Teufelsdröckh and in the rest of us tells usthat there _is_ a Spirit in things to which we owe allegiance, and forwhose sake we must keep up the serious mood. And so the inner feverand discord also are kept up; for nature taken on her visible surfacereveals no such Spirit, and beyond the facts of nature we are at thepresent stage of our inquiry not supposing ourselves to look. 

Now, I do not hesitate frankly and sincerely to confess to you thatthis real and genuine discord seems to me to carry with it theinevitable bankruptcy of natural religion naïvely and simply taken. There were times when Leibnitzes with their heads buried in monstrouswigs could compose Theodicies, and when stall-fed officials of anestablished church could prove by the valves in the heart and the roundligament of the hip-joint the existence of a "Moral and IntelligentContriver of the World. " But those times are past; and we of thenineteenth century, with our evolutionary theories and our mechanicalphilosophies, already know nature too impartially and too well toworship unreservedly any God of whose character she can be an adequateexpression. Truly, all we know of good and duty proceeds from nature;but none the less so all we know of evil. Visible nature is allplasticity 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 arefree in our dealings with her several parts to obey or destroy, and tofollow no law but that of prudence in coming to terms with such otherparticular features as will help us to our private ends. If there be adivine Spirit of the universe, nature, such as we know her, cannotpossibly be its _ultimate word_ to man. Either there is no Spiritrevealed in nature, or else it is inadequately revealed there; and (asall the higher religions have assumed) what we call visible nature, or_this_ world, must be but a veil and surface-show whose full meaningresides in a supplementary unseen or _other_ world. 

I cannot help, therefore, accounting it on the whole a gain (though itmay seem for certain poetic constitutions a very sad loss) that thenaturalistic superstition, the worship of the God of nature, simplytaken as such, should have begun to loosen its hold upon the educatedmind. In fact, if I am to express my personal opinion unreservedly, Ishould say (in spite of its sounding blasphemous at first to certainears) that the initial step towards getting into healthy ultimaterelations with the universe is the act of rebellion against the ideathat such a God exists. Such rebellion essentially is that which inthe chapter I have quoted from Carlyle goes on to describe:--

"'Wherefore, like a coward, dost thou forever pip and whimper, and gocowering 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 consumesthee? Let it come, then, I will meet it and defy it!' And as I sothought, 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 therecesses of my being, of my Me, and then was it that my whole Me stoodup, in native God-created majesty, and recorded its Protest. Such aProtest, the most important transaction in life, may that sameIndignation and Defiance, in a psychological point of view, be fitlycalled. The Everlasting No had said: 'Behold, thou art fatherless, outcast, and the Universe is mine;' to which my whole Me now madeanswer: 'I am not thine, but Free, and forever hate thee!' From thathour, " 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 personsexulting in their emancipation from belief in the God of theirancestral Calvinism, --him who made the garden and the serpent, andpre-appointed the eternal fires of hell. Some of them have foundhumaner gods to worship, others are simply converts from all theology;but, both alike, they {46} assure us that to have got rid of thesophistication of thinking they could feel any reverence or duty towardthat impossible idol gave a tremendous happiness to their souls. Now, to make an idol of the spirit of nature, and worship it, also leads tosophistication; and in souls that are religious and would also bescientific the sophistication breeds a philosophical melancholy, fromwhich the first natural step of escape is the denial of the idol; andwith the downfall of the idol, whatever lack of positive joyousness mayremain, there comes also the downfall of the whimpering and coweringmood. With evil simply taken as such, men can make short work, fortheir relations with it then are only practical. It looms up no longerso spectrally, it loses all its haunting and perplexing significance, as soon as the mind attacks the instances of it singly, and ceases toworry about their derivation from the 'one and only Power. '

Here, then, on this stage of mere emancipation from monisticsuperstition, the would-be suicide may already get encouraging answersto his question about the worth of life. There are in most meninstinctive springs of vitality that respond healthily when the burdenof metaphysical and infinite responsibility rolls off. The certaintythat you now _may_ step out of life whenever you please, and that to doso is not blasphemous or monstrous, is itself an immense relief. Thethought 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, ifonly to see what to-morrow's newspaper will contain, or what the nextpostman will bring. 

But far deeper forces than this mere vital curiosity are arousable, even in the pessimistically-tending mind; for where the loving andadmiring impulses are dead, the hating and fighting impulses will stillrespond to fit appeals. This evil which we feel so deeply is somethingthat we can also help to overthrow; for its sources, now that no'Substance' or 'Spirit' is behind them, are finite, and we can dealwith each of them in turn. It is, indeed, a remarkable fact thatsufferings and hardships do not, as a rule, abate the love of life;they seem, on the contrary, usually to give it a keener zest. Thesovereign source of melancholy is repletion. Need and struggle arewhat excite and inspire us; our hour of triumph is what brings thevoid. Not the Jews of the captivity, but those of the days ofSolomon's glory are those from whom the pessimistic utterances in ourBible come. Germany, when she lay trampled beneath the hoofs ofBonaparte's troopers, produced perhaps the most optimistic andidealistic literature that the world has seen; and not till the French'milliards' were distributed after 1871 did pessimism overrun thecountry in the shape in which we see it there to-day. The history ofour own race is one long commentary on the cheerfulness that comes withfighting ills. Or take the Waldenses, of whom I lately have beenreading, as examples of what strong men will endure. In 1483 a papalbull of Innocent VIII. Enjoined their extermination. It absolved thosewho should take up the crusade against them from all ecclesiasticalpains and penalties, released them from {48} any oath, legitimizedtheir 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 ofour brethren have not been put to death. Jordan Terbano was burntalive at Susa; Hippolite Rossiero at Turin, Michael Goneto, anoctogenarian, at Sarcena; Vilermin Ambrosio hanged on the Col di Meano;Hugo Chiambs, of Fenestrelle, had his entrails torn from his livingbody at Turin; Peter Geymarali of Bobbio in like manner had hisentrails taken out in Lucerna, and a fierce cat thrust in their placeto torture him further; Maria Romano was buried alive at Rocca Patia;Magdalena Fauno underwent the same fate at San Giovanni; SusannaMichelini was bound hand and foot, and left to perish of cold andhunger on the snow at Sarcena; Bartolomeo Fache, gashed with sabres, had the wounds filled up with quicklime, and perished thus in agony atPenile; Daniel Michelini had his tongue torn out at Bobbo for havingpraised God; James Baridari perished covered with sulphurous matcheswhich had been forced into his flesh under the nails, between thefingers, in the nostrils, in the lips, and all over the body, and thenlighted; Daniel Rovelli had his mouth filled with gunpowder, which, being lighted, blew his head to pieces;. . . Sara Rostignol was slitopen from the legs to the bosom, and left so to perish on the roadbetween Eyral and Lucerna; Anna Charbonnier was impaled, and carriedthus on a pike from San Giovanni to La Torre. "[2]

_Und dergleicken mehr_! In 1630 the plague swept away one-half of theVaudois population, including fifteen of their seventeen pastors. Theplaces of these were supplied from Geneva and Dauphiny, and {49} thewhole Vaudois people learned French in order to follow their services. More than once their number fell, by unremitting persecution, from thenormal standard of twenty-five thousand to about four thousand. In1686 the Duke of Savoy ordered the three thousand that remained to giveup their faith or leave the country. Refusing, they fought the Frenchand Piedmontese armies till only eighty of their fighting men remainedalive or uncaptured, when they gave up, and were sent in a body toSwitzerland. But in 1689, encouraged by William of Orange and led byone of their pastor-captains, between eight hundred and nine hundred ofthem returned to conquer their old homes again. They fought their wayto Bobi, reduced to four hundred men in the first half year, and metevery force sent against them, until at last the Duke of Savoy, givingup his alliance with that abomination of desolation, Louis XIV. , restored them to comparative freedom, --since which time they haveincreased and multiplied in their barren Alpine valleys to this day. 

What are our woes and sufferance compared with these? Does not therecital of such a fight so obstinately waged against such odds fill uswith resolution against our petty powers of darkness, --machinepoliticians, spoilsmen, and the rest? Life is worth living, no matterwhat it bring, if only such combats may be carried to successfulterminations and one's heel set on the tyrant's throat. To thesuicide, then, in his supposed world of multifarious and immoralnature, you can appeal--and appeal in the name of the very evils thatmake 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 ofcowering religions preach: it is not resignation in the sense oflicking a despotic Deity's hand. It is, on the contrary, a resignationbased on manliness and pride. So long as your would-be suicide leavesan evil of his own unremedied, so long he has strictly no concern withevil in the abstract and at large. The submission which you demand ofyourself to the general fact of evil in the world, your apparentacquiescence in it, is here nothing but the conviction that evil atlarge is _none of your business_ until your business with your privateparticular evils is liquidated and settled up. A challenge of thissort, with proper designation of detail, is one that need only be madeto be accepted by men whose normal instincts are not decayed; and yourreflective would-be suicide may easily be moved by it to face life witha certain interest again. The sentiment of honor is a very penetratingthing. When you and I, for instance, realize how many innocent beastshave had to suffer in cattle-cars and slaughter-pens and lay down theirlives that we might grow up, all fattened and clad, to sit togetherhere in comfort and carry on this discourse, it does, indeed, put ourrelation to the universe in a more solemn light. "Does not, " as ayoung Amherst philosopher (Xenos Clark, now dead) once wrote, "theacceptance of a happy life upon such terms involve a point of honor?"Are we not bound to take some suffering upon ourselves, to do someself-denying service with our lives, in return for all those lives uponwhich ours are built? To hear this question is to answer it in but onepossible way, if one have a normally constituted heart. 

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Thus, then, we see that mere instinctive curiosity, pugnacity, andhonor may make life on a purely naturalistic basis seem worth livingfrom day to day to men who have cast away all metaphysics in order toget rid of hypochondria, but who are resolved to owe nothing as yet toreligion and its more positive gifts. A poor half-way stage, some ofyou may be inclined to say; but at least you must grant it to be anhonest stage; and no man should dare to speak meanly of these instinctswhich are our nature's best equipment, and to which religion herselfmust in the last resort address her own peculiar appeals. 

IV. 

And now, in turning to what religion may have to say to the question, Icome to what is the soul of my discourse. Religion has meant manythings in human history; but when from now onward I use the word I meanto use it in the supernaturalist sense, as declaring that the so-calledorder of nature, which constitutes this world's experience, is only oneportion of the total universe, and that there stretches beyond thisvisible world an unseen world of which we now know nothing positive, but in its relation to which the true significance of our presentmundane life consists. A man's religious faith (whatever more specialitems of doctrine it may involve) means for me essentially his faith inthe existence of an unseen order of some kind in which the riddles ofthe natural order may be found explained. In the more developedreligions the natural world has always been regarded as the merescaffolding or vestibule of a truer, more eternal world, and affirmedto be a sphere of {52} education, trial, or redemption. In thesereligions, one must in some fashion die to the natural life before onecan enter into life eternal. The notion that this physical world ofwind and water, where the sun rises and the moon sets, is absolutelyand ultimately the divinely aimed-at and established thing, is onewhich we find only in very early religions, such as that of the mostprimitive Jews. It is this natural religion (primitive still, in spiteof the fact that poets and men of science whose good-will exceeds theirperspicacity keep publishing it in new editions tuned to ourcontemporary ears) that, as I said a while ago, has suffered definitivebankruptcy in the opinion of a circle of persons, among whom I mustcount myself, and who are growing more numerous every day. For suchpersons the physical order of nature, taken simply as science knows it, cannot be held to reveal any one harmonious spiritual intent. It ismere _weather_, as Chauncey Wright called it, doing and undoing withoutend. 

Now, I wish to make you feel, if I can in the short remainder of thishour, that we have a right to believe the physical order to be only apartial order; that we have a right to supplement it by an unseenspiritual order which we assume on trust, if only thereby life may seemto us better worth living again. But as such a trust will seem to someof you sadly mystical and execrably unscientific, I must first say aword or two to weaken the veto which you may consider that scienceopposes to our act. 

There is included in human nature an ingrained naturalism andmaterialism of mind which can only admit facts that are actuallytangible. Of this sort of mind the entity called 'science' is theidol. {53} Fondness for the word 'scientist' is one of the notes bywhich you may know its votaries; and its short way of killing anyopinion that it disbelieves in is to call it 'unscientific. ' It mustbe granted that there is no slight excuse for this. Science has madesuch glorious leaps in the last three hundred years, and extended ourknowledge of nature so enormously both in general and in detail; men ofscience, moreover, have as a class displayed such admirablevirtues, --that it is no wonder if the worshippers of science lose theirhead. In this very University, accordingly, I have heard more than oneteacher say that all the fundamental conceptions of truth have alreadybeen found by science, and that the future has only the details of thepicture to fill in. But the slightest reflection on the realconditions will suffice to show how barbaric such notions are. Theyshow such a lack of scientific imagination, that it is hard to see howone who is actively advancing any part of science can make a mistake socrude. Think how many absolutely new scientific conceptions havearisen in our own generation, how many new problems have beenformulated that were never thought of before, and then cast an eye uponthe brevity of science's career. It began with Galileo, not threehundred years ago. Four thinkers since Galileo, each informing hissuccessor of what discoveries his own lifetime had seen achieved, mighthave passed the torch of science into our hands as we sit here in thisroom. Indeed, for the matter of that, an audience much smaller thanthe present one, an audience of some five or six score people, if eachperson in it could speak for his own generation, would carry us away tothe black unknown of the human species, {54} to days without a documentor monument to tell their tale. Is it credible that such a mushroomknowledge, such a growth overnight as this, _can_ represent more thanthe minutest glimpse of what the universe will really prove to be whenadequately understood? No! our science is a drop, our ignorance a sea. Whatever else be certain, this at least is certain, --that the world ofour present natural knowledge _is_ enveloped in a larger world of_some_ sort of whose residual properties we at present can frame nopositive idea. 

Agnostic positivism, of course, admits this principle theoretically inthe most cordial terms, but insists that we must not turn it to anypractical use. We have no right, this doctrine tells us, to dreamdreams, or suppose anything about the unseen part of the universe, merely because to do so may be for what we are pleased to call ourhighest interests. We must always wait for sensible evidence for ourbeliefs; and where such evidence is inaccessible we must frame nohypotheses whatever. Of course this is a safe enough position _inabstracto_. If a thinker had no stake in the unknown, no vital needs, to live or languish according to what the unseen world contained, aphilosophic neutrality and refusal to believe either one way or theother would be his wisest cue. But, unfortunately, neutrality is notonly inwardly difficult, it is also outwardly unrealizable, where ourrelations 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, ofdoubting, or refusing to believe, that a certain thing _is_, iscontinuing to act as if it were _not_. If, for instance, {55} I refuseto believe that the room is getting cold, I leave the windows open andlight no fire just as if it still were warm. If I doubt that you areworthy of my confidence, I keep you uninformed of all my secrets justas if you were _un_worthy of the same. If I doubt the need of insuringmy house, I leave it uninsured as much as if I believed there were noneed. And so if I must not believe that the world is divine, I canonly express that refusal by declining ever to act distinctively as ifit were so, which can only mean acting on certain critical occasions asif it were _not_ so, or in an irreligious way. There are, you see, inevitable occasions in life when inaction is a kind of action, andmust count as action, and when not to be for is to be practicallyagainst; and in all such cases strict and consistent neutrality is anunattainable thing. 

And, after all, is not this duty of neutrality where only our innerinterests would lead us to believe, the most ridiculous of commands?Is it not sheer dogmatic folly to say that our inner interests can haveno real connection with the forces that the hidden world may contain?In other cases divinations based on inner interests have provedprophetic enough. Take science itself! Without an imperious innerdemand on our part for ideal logical and mathematical harmonies, weshould never have attained to proving that such harmonies be hiddenbetween all the chinks and interstices of the crude natural world. Hardly a law has been established in science, hardly a factascertained, which was not first sought after, often with sweat andblood, to gratify an inner need. Whence such needs come from we do notknow; we find them in us, and biological psychology so far only classesthem with Darwin's 'accidental variations. ' {56} But the inner need ofbelieving that this world of nature is a sign of something morespiritual and eternal than itself is just as strong and authoritativein those who feel it, as the inner need of uniform laws of causationever can be in a professionally scientific head. The toil of manygenerations has proved the latter need prophetic. Why _may_ not theformer one be prophetic, too? And if needs of ours outrun the visibleuniverse, why _may_ not that be a sign that an invisible universe isthere? What, in short, has authority to debar us from trusting ourreligious demands? Science as such assuredly has no authority, for shecan only say what is, not what is not; and the agnostic "thou shalt notbelieve without coercive sensible evidence" is simply an expression(free to any one to make) of private personal appetite for evidence ofa certain peculiar kind. 

Now, when I speak of trusting our religious demands, just what do Imean by 'trusting'? Is the word to carry with it license to define indetail an invisible world, and to anathematize and excommunicate thosewhose trust is different? Certainly not! Our faculties of belief werenot primarily given us to make orthodoxies and heresies withal; theywere given us to live by. And to trust our religious demands meansfirst of all to live in the light of them, and to act as if theinvisible world which they suggest were real. It is a fact of humannature, that men can live and die by the help of a sort of faith thatgoes without a single dogma or definition. The bare assurance thatthis natural order is not ultimate but a mere sign or vision, theexternal staging of a many-storied universe, in which spiritual forceshave the last word and are eternal, --this bare {57} assurance is tosuch men enough to make life seem worth living in spite of everycontrary presumption suggested by its circumstances on the naturalplane. Destroy this inner assurance, however, vague as it is, and allthe light and radiance of existence is extinguished for these personsat a stroke. Often enough the wild-eyed look at life--the suicidalmood--will then set in. 

And now the application comes directly home to you and me. Probably toalmost every one of us here the most adverse life would seem well worthliving, if we only could be _certain_ that our bravery and patiencewith it were terminating and eventuating and bearing fruit somewhere inan unseen spiritual world. But granting we are not certain, does itthen follow that a bare trust in such a world is a fool's paradise andlubberland, or rather that it is a living attitude in which we are freeto indulge? Well, we are free to trust at our own risks anything thatis not impossible, and that can bring analogies to bear in its behalf. That the world of physics is probably not absolute, all the convergingmultitude of arguments that make in favor of idealism tend to prove;and that our whole physical life may lie soaking in a spiritualatmosphere, a dimension of being that we at present have no organ forapprehending, is vividly suggested to us by the analogy of the life ofour domestic animals. Our dogs, for example, are in our human life butnot of it. They witness hourly the outward body of events whose innermeaning cannot, by any possible operation, be revealed to theirintelligence, --events in which they themselves often play the cardinalpart. My terrier bites a teasing boy, for example, and the fatherdemands damages. The dog {58} may be present at every step of thenegotiations, and see the money paid, without an inkling of what it allmeans, without a suspicion that it has anything to do with _him_; andhe never _can_ know in his natural dog's life. Or take another casewhich used greatly to impress me in my medical-student days. Considera poor dog whom they are vivisecting in a laboratory. He lies strappedon a board and shrieking at his executioners, and to his own darkconsciousness is literally in a sort of hell. He cannot see a singleredeeming ray in the whole business; and yet all thesediabolical-seeming events are often controlled by human intentions withwhich, if his poor benighted mind could only be made to catch a glimpseof them, all that is heroic in him would religiously acquiesce. Healing truth, relief to future sufferings of beast and man, are to bebought by them. It may be genuinely a process of redemption. Lying onhis back on the board there he may be performing a functionincalculably higher than any that prosperous canine life admits of; andyet, of the whole performance, this function is the one portion thatmust remain absolutely beyond his ken. 

Now turn from this to the life of man. In the dog's life we see theworld invisible to him because we live in both worlds. In human life, although we only see our world, and his within it, yet encompassingboth these worlds a still wider world may be there, as unseen by us asour world is by him; and to believe in that world _may_ be the mostessential function that our lives in this world have to perform. But"_may_ be! _may_ be!" one now hears the positivist contemptuouslyexclaim; "what use can a scientific life have for maybes?" Well, Ireply, 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 manstands for anything, and is productive or originative at all, hisentire vital function may be said to have to deal with maybes. Not avictory is gained, not a deed of faithfulness or courage is done, except upon a maybe; not a service, not a sally of generosity, not ascientific exploration or experiment or text-book, that may not be amistake. It is only by risking our persons from one hour to anotherthat we live at all. And often enough our faith beforehand in anuncertified result _is the only thing that makes the result come true_. Suppose, for instance, that you are climbing a mountain, and haveworked yourself into a position from which the only escape is by aterrible leap. Have faith that you can successfully make it, and yourfeet are nerved to its accomplishment. But mistrust yourself, andthink of all the sweet things you have heard the scientists say ofmaybes, and you will hesitate so long that, at last, all unstrung andtrembling, and launching yourself in a moment of despair, you roll inthe abyss. In such a case (and it belongs to an enormous class), thepart of wisdom as well as of courage is to _believe what is in the lineof your needs_, for only by such belief is the need fulfilled. Refuseto believe, and you shall indeed be right, for you shall irretrievablyperish. But believe, and again you shall be right, for you shall saveyourself. You make one or the other of two possible universes true byyour trust or mistrust, --both universes having been only _maybes_, inthis particular, before you contributed your act. 

Now, it appears to me that the question whether life is worth living issubject to conditions logically {60} much like these. It does, indeed, depend on you _the liver_. If you surrender to the nightmare view andcrown the evil edifice by your own suicide, you have indeed made apicture totally black. Pessimism, completed by your act, is truebeyond a doubt, so far as your world goes. Your mistrust of life hasremoved whatever worth your own enduring existence might have given toit; and now, throughout the whole sphere of possible influence of thatexistence, the mistrust has proved itself to have had divining power. But suppose, on the other hand, that instead of giving way to thenightmare 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 unconquerablesubjectivity proves to be their match, and that you find a morewonderful joy than any passive pleasure can bring in trusting ever inthe larger whole. Have you not now made life worth living on theseterms? What sort of a thing would life really be, with your qualitiesready for a tussle with it, if it only brought fair weather and gavethese higher faculties of yours no scope? Please remember thatoptimism and pessimism are definitions of the world, and that our ownreactions on the world, small as they are in bulk, are integral partsof 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 theaddition {61} of a feather's weight; a long phrase may have its sensereversed by the addition of the three letters _n-o-t_. This life isworth living, we can say, _since it is what we make it, from the moralpoint of view_; and we are determined to make it from that point ofview, so far as we have anything to do with it, a success. 

Now, in this description of faiths that verify themselves I haveassumed that our faith in an invisible order is what inspires thoseefforts and that patience which make this visible order good for moralmen. Our faith in the seen world's goodness (goodness now meaningfitness for successful moral and religious life) has verified itself byleaning on our faith in the unseen world. But will our faith in theunseen world similarly verify itself? Who knows?

Once more it is a case of _maybe_; and once more maybes are the essenceof the situation. I confess that I do not see why the very existenceof an invisible world may not in part depend on the personal responsewhich any one of us may make to the religious appeal. God himself, inshort, may draw vital strength and increase of very being from ourfidelity. For my own part, I do not know what the sweat and blood andtragedy of this life mean, if they mean anything short of this. Ifthis life be not a real fight, in which something is eternally gainedfor the universe by success, it is no better than a game of privatetheatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it _feels_ like areal fight, --as if there were something really wild in the universewhich we, with all our idealities and faithfulnesses, are needed toredeem; and first of all to redeem our own hearts from atheisms andfears. For such a half-wild, half-saved universe our nature isadapted. The deepest thing in our {62} nature is this _Binnenleben_(as a German doctor lately has called it), this dumb region of theheart in which we dwell alone with our willingnesses andunwillingnesses, our faiths and fears. As through the cracks andcrannies of caverns those waters exude from the earth's bosom whichthen form the fountain-heads of springs, so in these crepuscular depthsof personality the sources of all our outer deeds and decisions taketheir rise. Here is our deepest organ of communication with the natureof things; and compared with these concrete movements of our soul allabstract statements and scientific arguments--the veto, for example, which the strict positivist pronounces upon our faith--sound to us likemere chatterings of the teeth. For here possibilities, not finishedfacts, are the realities with which we have actively to deal; and toquote my friend William Salter, of the Philadelphia Ethical Society, "as the essence of courage is to stake one's life on a possibility, sothe essence of faith is to believe that the possibility exists. "

These, then, are my last words to you: Be not afraid of life. Believethat life _is_ worth living, and your belief will help create the fact. The 'scientific proof' that you are right may not be clear before theday of judgment (or some stage of being which that expression may serveto symbolize) is reached. But the faithful fighters of this hour, orthe beings that then and there will represent them, may then turn tothe faint-hearted, who here decline to go on, with words like thosewith which Henry IV. Greeted the tardy Crillon after a great victoryhad 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, andas 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 whydo they philosophize at all? Almost every one will immediately reply:They desire to attain a conception of the frame of things which shallon the whole be more rational than that somewhat chaotic view whichevery one by nature carries about with him under his hat. But supposethis rational conception attained, how is the philosopher to recognizeit for what it is, and not let it slip through ignorance? The onlyanswer can be that he will recognize its rationality as he recognizeseverything 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, isone of them. The transition from a state of puzzle and perplexity torational comprehension is full of lively relief and pleasure. 

But this relief seems to be a negative rather than a positivecharacter. Shall we then say that the feeling of rationality isconstituted merely by the absence {64} of any feeling of irrationality?I think there are very good grounds for upholding such a view. Allfeeling whatever, in the light of certain recent psychologicalspeculations, seems to depend for its physical condition not on simpledischarge of nerve-currents, but on their discharge under arrest, impediment, or resistance. Just as we feel no particular pleasure whenwe breathe freely, but a very intense feeling of distress when therespiratory motions are prevented, --so any unobstructed tendency toaction discharges itself without the production of much cogitativeaccompaniment, and any perfectly fluent course of thought awakens butlittle feeling; but when the movement is inhibited, or when the thoughtmeets with difficulties, we experience distress. It is only when thedistress is upon us that we can be said to strive, to crave, or toaspire. When enjoying plenary freedom either in the way of motion orof thought, we are in a sort of anaesthetic state in which we might saywith Walt Whitman, if we cared to say anything about ourselves at suchtimes, "I am sufficient as I am. " This feeling of the sufficiency ofthe present moment, of its absoluteness, --this absence of all need toexplain it, account for it, or justify it, --is what I call theSentiment of Rationality. As soon, in short, as we are enabled fromany cause whatever to think with perfect fluency, the thing we think ofseems to us _pro tanto_ rational. 

Whatever modes of conceiving the cosmos facilitate this fluency, produce the sentiment of rationality. Conceived in such modes, beingvouches for itself and needs no further philosophic formulation. Butthis fluency may be obtained in various ways; and first I will take upthe theoretic way. 

{65}

The facts of the world in their sensible diversity are always beforeus, but our theoretic need is that they should be conceived in a waythat reduces their manifoldness to simplicity. Our pleasure at findingthat a chaos of facts is the expression of a single underlying fact islike the relief of the musician at resolving a confused mass of soundinto melodic or harmonic order. The simplified result is handled withfar less mental effort than the original data; and a philosophicconception of nature is thus in no metaphorical sense a labor-savingcontrivance. The passion for parsimony, for economy of means inthought, is the philosophic passion _par excellence_; and any characteror aspect of the world's phenomena which gathers up their diversityinto monotony will gratify that passion, and in the philosopher's mindstand for that essence of things compared with which all their otherdeterminations may by him be overlooked. 

More universality or extensiveness is, then, one mark which thephilosopher's conceptions must possess. Unless they apply to anenormous number of cases they will not bring him relief. The knowledgeof things by their causes, which is often given as a definition ofrational knowledge, is useless to him unless the causes converge to aminimum number, while still producing the maximum number of effects. The more multiple then are the instances, the more flowingly does hismind rove from fact to fact. The phenomenal transitions are no realtransitions; each item is the same old friend with a slightly altereddress. 

Who does not feel the charm of thinking that the moon and the appleare, as far as their relation to the {66} earth goes, identical; ofknowing respiration and combustion to be one; of understanding that theballoon rises by the same law whereby the stone sinks; of feeling thatthe warmth in one's palm when one rubs one's sleeve is identical withthe motion which the friction checks; of recognizing the differencebetween beast and fish to be only a higher degree of that between humanfather and son; of believing our strength when we climb the mountain orfell the tree to be no other than the strength of the sun's rays whichmade the corn grow out of which we got our morning meal?

But alongside of this passion for simplification there exists a sisterpassion, which in some minds--though they perhaps form the minority--isits rival. This is the passion for distinguishing; it is the impulseto be _acquainted_ with the parts rather than to comprehend the whole. Loyalty to clearness and integrity of perception, dislike of blurredoutlines, of vague identifications, are its characteristics. It lovesto recognize particulars in their full completeness, and the more ofthese it can carry the happier it is. It prefers any amount ofincoherence, abruptness, and fragmentariness (so long as the literaldetails of the separate facts are saved) to an abstract way ofconceiving things that, while it simplifies them, dissolves away at thesame time their concrete fulness. Clearness and simplicity thus set uprival claims, and make a real dilemma for the thinker. 

A man's philosophic attitude is determined by the balance in him ofthese two cravings. No system of philosophy can hope to be universallyaccepted among men which grossly violates either need, or {67} entirelysubordinates the one to the other. The fate of Spinosa, with hisbarren union of all things in one substance, on the one hand; that ofHume, with his equally barren 'looseness and separateness' ofeverything, on the other, --neither philosopher owning any strict andsystematic disciples to-day, each being to posterity a warning as wellas a stimulus, --show us that the only possible philosophy must be acompromise between an abstract monotony and a concrete heterogeneity. But the only way to mediate between diversity and unity is to class thediverse 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 completedtheoretic philosophy can thus never be anything more than a completedclassification of the world's ingredients; and its results must alwaysbe abstract, since the basis of every classification is the abstractessence embedded in the living fact, --the rest of the living fact beingfor the time ignored by the classifier. This means that none of ourexplanations are complete. They subsume things under heads wider ormore familiar; but the last heads, whether of things or of theirconnections, are mere abstract genera, data which we just find inthings and write down. 

When, for example, we think that we have rationally explained theconnection of the facts _A_ and _B_ by classing both under their commonattribute _x_, it is obvious that we have really explained only so muchof these items as _is x_. To explain the connection of choke-damp andsuffocation by the lack of oxygen is {68} to leave untouched all theother peculiarities both of choke-damp and of suffocation, --such asconvulsions and agony on the one hand, density and explosibility on theother. 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 explainedby _x_. Each additional particularity makes its distinct appeal. Asingle explanation of a fact only explains it from a single point ofview. The entire fact is not accounted for until each and all of itscharacters have been classed with their likes elsewhere. To apply thisnow to the case of the universe, we see that the explanation of theworld by molecular movements explains it only so far as it actually_is_ such movements. To invoke the 'Unknowable' explains only so muchas is unknowable, 'Thought' only so much as is thought, 'God' only somuch as is God. _Which_ thought? _Which_ God?--are questions thathave to be answered by bringing in again the residual data from whichthe general term was abstracted. All those data that cannot beanalytically identified with the attribute invoked as universalprinciple, remain as independent kinds or natures, associatedempirically with the said attribute but devoid of rational kinship withit. 

Hence the unsatisfactoriness of all our speculations. On the one hand, so far as they retain any multiplicity in their terms, they fail to getus out of the empirical sand-heap world; on the other, so far as theyeliminate multiplicity the practical man despises their emptybarrenness. The most they can say is that the elements of the worldare such and such, and that each is identical with itself whereverfound; but the question Where is it found? the practical man is left toanswer by his own wit. Which, of all the {69} essences, shall here andnow be held the essence of this concrete thing, the fundamentalphilosophy never attempts to decide. We are thus led to the conclusionthat the simple classification of things is, on the one hand, the bestpossible theoretic philosophy, but is, on the other, a most miserableand inadequate substitute for the fulness of the truth. It is amonstrous abridgment of life, which, like all abridgments is got by theabsolute loss and casting out of real matter. This is why so few humanbeings truly care for philosophy. The particular determinations whichshe ignores are the real matter exciting needs, quite as potent andauthoritative as hers. What does the moral enthusiast care forphilosophical ethics? Why does the _AEsthetik_ of every Germanphilosopher 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 anequivalent for life but the fulness of living itself. Since theessences of things are as a matter of fact disseminated through thewhole extent of time and space, it is in their spread-outness andalternation that he will enjoy them. When weary of the concrete clashand dust and pettiness, he will refresh himself by a bath in theeternal 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 willnever carry the philosophic yoke upon his shoulders, and when tired ofthe gray monotony of her problems and insipid spaciousness of herresults, will always escape gleefully into the teeming and dramaticrichness of the concrete world. 

{70}

So our study turns back here to its beginning. Every way ofclassifying a thing is but a way of handling it for some particularpurpose. Conceptions, 'kinds, ' are teleological instruments. Noabstract concept can be a valid substitute for a concrete realityexcept with reference to a particular interest in the conceiver. Theinterest of theoretic rationality, the relief of identification, is butone of a thousand human purposes. When others rear their heads, itmust pack up its little bundle and retire till its turn recurs. Theexaggerated dignity and value that philosophers have claimed for theirsolutions is thus greatly reduced. The only virtue their theoreticconception need have is simplicity, and a simple conception is anequivalent for the world only so far as the world is simple, --the worldmeanwhile, whatever simplicity it may harbor, being also a mightilycomplex affair. Enough simplicity remains, however, and enough urgencyin our craving to reach it, to make the theoretic function one of themost invincible of human impulses. The quest of the fewest elements ofthings is an ideal that some will follow, as long as there are men tothink at all. 

But suppose the goal attained. Suppose that at last we have a systemunified in the sense that has been explained. Our world can now beconceived simply, and our mind enjoys the relief. Our universalconcept has made the concrete chaos rational. But now I ask, Can thatwhich is the ground of rationality in all else be itself properlycalled rational? It would seem at first sight that it might. One istempted at any rate to say that, since the craving for rationality isappeased by the identification of one {71} thing with another, a datumwhich left nothing else outstanding might quench that cravingdefinitively, or be rational _in se_. No otherness being left to annoyus, we should sit down at peace. In other words, as the theoretictranquillity of the boor results from his spinning no furtherconsiderations about his chaotic universe, so any datum whatever(provided it were simple, clear, and ultimate) ought to banish puzzlefrom the universe of the philosopher and confer peace, inasmuch asthere would then be for him absolutely no further considerations tospin. 

This in fact is what some persons think. Professor Bain says, --

"A difficulty is solved, a mystery unriddled, when it can be shown toresemble 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 assimilationcan go, so far as likeness holds, there is an end to explanation; thereis an end to what the mind can do, or can intelligently desire. . . . Thepath of science as exhibited in modern ages is toward generality, widerand wider, until we reach the highest, the widest laws of everydepartment of things; there explanation is finished, mystery ends, perfect vision is gained. "

But, unfortunately, this first answer will not hold. Our mind is sowedded to the process of seeing an _other_ beside every item of itsexperience, that when the notion of an absolute datum is presented toit, it goes through its usual procedure and remains pointing at thevoid beyond, as if in that lay further matter for contemplation. Inshort, it spins for itself the further positive consideration of anonentity {72} enveloping the being of its datum; and as that leadsnowhere, back recoils the thought toward its datum again. But there isno natural bridge between nonentity and this particular datum, and thethought stands oscillating to and fro, wondering "Why was thereanything but nonentity; why just this universal datum and not another?"and finds no end, in wandering mazes lost. Indeed, Bain's words are sountrue that in reflecting men it is just when the attempt to fuse themanifold into a single totality has been most successful, when theconception of the universe as a unique fact is nearest its perfection, that the craving for further explanation, the ontologicalwonder-sickness, arises in its extremest form. As Schopenhauer says, "The uneasiness which keeps the never-resting clock of metaphysics inmotion, is the consciousness that the non-existence of this world isjust as possible as its existence. "

The notion of nonentity may thus be called the parent of thephilosophic craving in its subtilest and profoundest sense. Absoluteexistence is absolute mystery, for its relations with the nothingremain unmediated to our understanding. One philosopher only haspretended to throw a logical bridge over this chasm. Hegel, by tryingto show that nonentity and concrete being are linked together by aseries of identities of a synthetic kind, binds everything conceivableinto a unity, with no outlying notion to disturb the free rotarycirculation of the mind within its bounds. Since such uncheckedmovement gives the feeling of rationality, he must be held, if he hassucceeded, to have eternally and absolutely quenched all rationaldemands. 

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 tothe supreme degree, the notion of a possible other than the actual maystill haunt our imagination and prey upon our system. The bottom ofbeing is left logically opaque to us, as something which we simply comeupon and find, and about which (if we wish to act) we should pause andwonder as little as possible. The philosopher's logical tranquillityis thus in essence no other than the boor's. They differ only as tothe point at which each refuses to let further considerations upset theabsoluteness of the data he assumes. The boor does so immediately, andis liable at any moment to the ravages of many kinds of doubt. Thephilosopher does not do so till unity has been reached, and iswarranted against the inroads of those considerations, but onlypractically, not essentially, secure from the blighting breath of theultimate Why? If he cannot exorcise this question, he must ignore orblink it, and, assuming the data of his system as something given, andthe gift as ultimate, simply proceed to a life of contemplation or ofaction based on it. There is no doubt that this acting on an opaquenecessity is accompanied by a certain pleasure. See the reverence ofCarlyle for brute fact: "There is an infinite significance in fact. ""Necessity, " says Dühring, and he means not rational but givennecessity, "is the last and highest point that we can reach. . . . It isnot only the interest of ultimate and definitive knowledge, but alsothat of the feelings, to find a last repose and an ideal equilibrium inan uttermost datum which can simply not be other than it is. "

Such is the attitude of ordinary men in their theism, God's fiat beingin physics and morals such an {74} uttermost datum. Such also is theattitude of all hard-minded analysts and _Verstandesmenschen_. Lotze, Renouvier, and Hodgson promptly say that of experience as a whole noaccount can be given, but neither seek to soften the abruptness of theconfession nor to reconcile us with our impotence. 

But mediating attempts may be made by more mystical minds. The peaceof rationality may be sought through ecstasy when logic fails. Toreligious persons of every shade of doctrine moments come when theworld, as it is, seems so divinely orderly, and the acceptance of it bythe 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 sofills the soul that ontological speculation can no longer overlap itand put her girdle of interrogation-marks round existence. Even theleast religious of men must have felt with Walt Whitman, when loafingon the grass on some transparent summer morning, that "swiftly aroseand spread round him the peace and knowledge that pass all the argumentof the earth. " At such moments of energetic living we feel as if therewere something diseased and contemptible, yea vile, in theoreticgrubbing and brooding. In the eye of healthy sense the philosopher isat best a learned fool. 

Since the heart can thus wall out the ultimate irrationality which thehead ascertains, the erection of its procedure into a systematizedmethod would be a philosophic achievement of first-rate importance. But as used by mystics hitherto it has lacked universality, beingavailable for few persons and at few times, and {75} even in thesebeing apt to be followed by fits of reaction and dryness; and if menshould agree that the mystical method is a subterfuge without logicalpertinency, a plaster but no cure, and that the idea of non-entity cannever be exorcised, empiricism will be the ultimate philosophy. Existence then will be a brute fact to which as a whole the emotion ofontologic wonder shall rightfully cleave, but remain eternallyunsatisfied. Then wonderfulness or mysteriousness will be an essentialattribute of the nature of things, and the exhibition and emphasizingof it will continue to be an ingredient in the philosophic industry ofthe race. Every generation will produce its Job, its Hamlet, itsFaust, or its Sartor Resartus. 

With this we seem to have considered the possibilities of purelytheoretic rationality. But we saw at the outset that rationality meantonly unimpeded mental function. Impediments that arise in thetheoretic sphere might perhaps be avoided if the stream of mentalaction should leave that sphere betimes and pass into the practical. Let us therefore inquire what constitutes the feeling of rationality inits _practical_ aspect. If thought is not to stand forever pointing atthe universe in wonder, if its movement is to be diverted from theissueless channel of purely theoretic contemplation, let us ask whatconception of the universe will awaken active impulses capable ofeffecting this diversion. A definition of the world which will giveback to the mind the free motion which has been blocked in the purelycontemplative 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 otheraesthetic demands better than the other, will be accounted the morerational conception, and will deservedly prevail. 

There is nothing improbable in the supposition that an analysis of theworld may yield a number of formulae, all consistent with the facts. In physical science different formulae may explain the phenomenaequally 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 notbe different points of view for surveying it, within each of which alldata harmonize, and which the observer may therefore either choosebetween, or simply cumulate one upon another? A Beethovenstring-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 thesimultaneous applicability of an entirely different description. Justso a thorough-going interpretation of the world in terms of mechanicalsequence is compatible with its being interpreted teleologically, forthe mechanism itself may be designed. 

If, then, there were several systems excogitated, equally satisfying toour purely logical needs, they would still have to be passed in review, and approved or rejected by our aesthetic and practical nature. Can wedefine the tests of rationality which these parts of our nature woulduse?

Philosophers long ago observed the remarkable fact that merefamiliarity with things is able to produce a feeling of theirrationality. The empiricist school has been so much struck by thiscircumstance {77} as to have laid it down that the feeling ofrationality and the feeling of familiarity are one and the same thing, and that no other kind of rationality than this exists. The dailycontemplation of phenomena juxtaposed in a certain order begets anacceptance of their connection, as absolute as the repose engendered bytheoretic insight into their coherence. To explain a thing is to passeasily back to its antecedents; to know it is easily to foresee itsconsequents. Custom, which lets us do both, is thus the source ofwhatever rationality the thing may gain in our thought. 

In the broad sense in which rationality was defined at the outset ofthis essay, it is perfectly apparent that custom must be one of itsfactors. We said that any perfectly fluent and easy thought was devoidof the sentiment of irrationality. Inasmuch then as custom acquaintsus with all the relations of a thing, it teaches us to pass fluentlyfrom that thing to others, and _pro tanto_ tinges it with the rationalcharacter. 

Now, there is one particular relation of greater practical importancethan all the rest, --I mean the relation of a thing to its futureconsequences. So long as an object is unusual, our expectations arebaffled; they are fully determined as soon as it becomes familiar. Itherefore propose this as the first practical requisite which aphilosophic conception must satisfy: _It must, in a general way atleast, banish uncertainty from the future_. The permanent presence ofthe sense of futurity in the mind has been strangely ignored by mostwriters, but the fact is that our consciousness at a given moment isnever free from the ingredient of expectancy. Every one knows how whena painful thing has to be undergone in the {78} near future, the vaguefeeling that it is impending penetrates all our thought with uneasinessand subtly vitiates our mood even when it does not control ourattention; it keeps us from being at rest, at home in the givenpresent. The same is true when a great happiness awaits us. But whenthe future is neutral and perfectly certain, 'we do not mind it, ' as wesay, but give an undisturbed attention to the actual. Let now thishaunting sense of futurity be thrown off its bearings or left withoutan 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 amental irritant, while custom _per se_ is a mental sedative, merelybecause the one baffles while the other settles our expectations. 

Every reader must feel the truth of this. What is meant by coming 'tofeel 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 knowwhat draughts may blow in upon our back, what doors may open, whatforms may enter, what interesting objects may be found in cupboards andcorners. When after a few days we have learned the range of all thesepossibilities, the feeling of strangeness disappears. And so it doeswith people, when we have got past the point of expecting anyessentially new manifestations from their character. 

The utility of this emotional effect of expectation is perfectlyobvious; 'natural selection, ' in fact, was bound to bring it aboutsooner or later. It is of the utmost practical importance to an animalthat he should have prevision of the qualities of the objects {79} thatsurround him, and especially that he should not come to rest inpresence of circumstances that might be fraught either with peril oradvantage, --go to sleep, for example, on the brink of precipices, inthe dens of enemies, or view with indifference some new-appearingobject that might, if chased, prove an important addition to thelarder. Novelty _ought_ to irritate him. All curiosity has thus apractical genesis. We need only look at the physiognomy of a dog or ahorse when a new object comes into his view, his mingled fascinationand fear, to see that the element of conscious insecurity or perplexedexpectation lies at the root of his emotion. A dog's curiosity aboutthe movements of his master or a strange object only extends as far asthe point of deciding what is going to happen next. That settled, curiosity is quenched. The dog quoted by Darwin, whose behavior inpresence of a newspaper moved by the wind seemed to testify to a sense'of the supernatural, ' was merely exhibiting the irritation of anuncertain future. A newspaper which could move spontaneously was initself so unexpected that the poor brute could not tell what newwonders the next moment might bring forth. 

To turn back now to philosophy. An ultimate datum, even though it belogically unrationalized, will, if its quality is such as to defineexpectancy, be peacefully accepted by the mind; while if it leave theleast opportunity for ambiguity in the future, it will to that extentcause mental uneasiness if not distress. Now, in the ultimateexplanations of the universe which the craving for rationality haselicited from the human mind, the demands of expectancy to be satisfiedhave always played a fundamental part. {80} The term set up byphilosophers as primordial has been one which banishes theincalculable. 'Substance, ' for example, means, as Kant says, _dasBeharrliche_, which will be as it has been, because its being isessential and eternal. And although we may not be able to prophesy indetail the future phenomena to which the substance shall give rise, wemay set our minds at rest in a general way, when we have called thesubstance God, Perfection, Love, or Reason, by the reflection thatwhatever is in store for us can never at bottom be inconsistent withthe character of this term; so that our attitude even toward theunexpected is in a general sense defined. Take again the notion ofimmortality, which for common people seems to be the touchstone ofevery philosophic or religious creed: what is this but a way of sayingthat the determination of expectancy is the essential factor ofrationality? The wrath of science against miracles, of certainphilosophers against the doctrine of free-will, has precisely the sameroot, --dislike to admit any ultimate factor in things which may routour prevision or upset the stability of our outlook. 

Anti-substantialist writers strangely overlook this function in thedoctrine of substance; "If there be such a _substratum_, " says Mill, "suppose it at this instant miraculously annihilated, and let thesensations continue to occur in the same order, and how would the_substratum_ be missed? By what signs should we be able to discoverthat its existence had terminated? Should we not have as much reasonto believe that it still existed as we now have? And if we should notthen be warranted in believing it, how can we be so now?" Trulyenough, if we have {81} already securely bagged our facts in a certainorder, we can dispense with any further warrant for that order. Butwith regard to the facts yet to come the case is far different. Itdoes not follow that if substance may be dropped from our conception ofthe irrecoverably past, it need be an equally empty complication to ournotions of the future. Even if it were true that, for aught we know tothe contrary, the substance might develop at any moment a wholly newset of attributes, the mere logical form of referring things to asubstance would still (whether rightly or wrongly) remain accompaniedby a feeling of rest and future confidence. In spite of the acutestnihilistic criticism, men will therefore always have a liking for anyphilosophy which explains things _per substantiam_. 

A very natural reaction against the theosophizing conceit andhide-bound confidence in the upshot of things, which vulgarlyoptimistic minds display, has formed one factor of the scepticism ofempiricists, who never cease to remind us of the reservoir ofpossibilities alien to our habitual experience which the cosmos maycontain, and which, for any warrant we have to the contrary, may turnit inside out to-morrow. Agnostic substantialism like that of Mr. Spencer, whose Unknowable is not merely the unfathomable but theabsolute-irrational, on which, if consistently represented in thought, it is of course impossible to count, performs the same function ofrebuking a certain stagnancy and smugness in the manner in which theordinary philistine feels his security. But considered as anythingelse than as reactions against an opposite excess, these philosophiesof uncertainty cannot be acceptable; the general mind will fail to {82}come to rest in their presence, and will seek for solutions of a morereassuring kind. 

We may then, I think, with perfect confidence lay down as a first pointgained in our inquiry, that a prime factor in the philosophic cravingis the desire to have expectancy defined; and that no philosophy willdefinitively triumph which in an emphatic manner denies the possibilityof gratifying this need. 

We pass with this to the next great division of our topic. It is notsufficient for our satisfaction merely to know the future asdetermined, for it may be determined in either of many ways, agreeableor disagreeable. For a philosophy to succeed on a universal scale itmust define the future _congruously with our spontaneous powers_. Aphilosophy may be unimpeachable in other respects, but either of twodefects will be fatal to its universal acceptance. First, its ultimateprinciple must not be one that essentially baffles and disappoints ourdearest desires and most cherished powers. A pessimistic principlelike Schopenhauer's incurably vicious Will-substance, or Hartmann'swicked jack-of-all-trades the Unconscious, will perpetually call forthessays at other philosophies. Incompatibility of the future with theirdesires and active tendencies is, in fact, to most men a source of morefixed disquietude than uncertainty itself. Witness the attempts toovercome 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 ofcontradicting our active propensities is to give them no objectwhatever to press against. A philosophy whose principle is soincommensurate with our most intimate powers as to deny them all {83}relevancy in universal affairs, as to annihilate their motives at oneblow, will be even more unpopular than pessimism. Better face theenemy than the eternal Void! This is why materialism will always failof universal adoption, however well it may fuse things into anatomistic unity, however clearly it may prophesy the future eternity. For materialism denies reality to the objects of almost all theimpulses which we most cherish. The real _meaning_ of the impulses, itsays, is something which has no emotional interest for us whatever. Now, what is called 'extradition' is quite as characteristic of ouremotions as of our senses: both point to an object as the cause of thepresent feeling. What an intensely objective reference lies in fear!In like manner an enraptured man and a dreary-feeling man are notsimply aware of their subjective states; if they were, the force oftheir feelings would all evaporate. Both believe there is outwardcause why they should feel as they do: either, "It is a glad world! howgood life is!" or, "What a loathsome tedium is existence!" Anyphilosophy which annihilates the validity of the reference byexplaining away its objects or translating them into terms of noemotional pertinency, leaves the mind with little to care or act for. This is the opposite condition from that of nightmare, but when acutelybrought home to consciousness it produces a kindred horror. Innightmare we have motives to act, but no power; here we have powers, but no motives. A nameless _unheimlichkeit_ comes over us at thethought of there being nothing eternal in our final purposes, in theobjects 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 paralleledby the no less lopsided equation of the universe and the _doer_. Wedemand in it a character for which our emotions and active propensitiesshall be a match. Small as we are, minute as is the point by which thecosmos impinges upon each one of us, each one desires to feel that hisreaction at that point is congruous with the demands of the vastwhole, --that he balances the latter, so to speak, and is able to dowhat it expects of him. But as his abilities to do lie wholly in theline of his natural propensities; as he enjoys reacting with suchemotions as fortitude, hope, rapture, admiration, earnestness, and thelike; and as he very unwillingly reacts with fear, disgust, despair, ordoubt, --a philosophy which should only legitimate emotions of thelatter sort would be sure to leave the mind a prey to discontent andcraving. 

It is far too little recognized how entirely the intellect is built upof practical interests. The theory of evolution is beginning to dovery good service by its reduction of all mentality to the type ofreflex action. Cognition, in this view, is but a fleeting moment, across-section at a certain point, of what in its totality is a motorphenomenon. In the lower forms of life no one will pretend thatcognition is anything more than a guide to appropriate action. Thegerminal question concerning things brought for the first time beforeconsciousness is not the theoretic 'What is that?' but the practical'Who goes there?' or rather, as Horwicz has admirably put it, 'What isto be done?'--'Was fang' ich an?' In all our discussions about theintelligence of lower animals, the only test we use is that of their_acting_ as if for a purpose. {85} Cognition, in short, is incompleteuntil discharged in act; and although it is true that the later mentaldevelopment, which attains its maximum through the hypertrophiedcerebrum of man, gives birth to a vast amount of theoretic activityover and above that which is immediately ministerial to practice, yetthe earlier claim is only postponed, not effaced, and the active natureasserts 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 somecongenial way. It was a deep instinct in Schopenhauer which led him toreinforce his pessimistic argumentation by a running volley ofinvective against the practical man and his requirements. No hope forpessimism unless he is slain!

Helmholtz's immortal works on the eye and ear are to a great extentlittle more than a commentary on the law that practical utility whollydetermines which parts of our sensations we shall be aware of, andwhich parts we shall ignore. We notice or discriminate an ingredientof sense only so far as we depend upon it to modify our actions. We_comprehend_ a thing when we synthetize it by identity with anotherthing. But the other great department of our understanding, _acquaintance_ (the two departments being recognized in all languagesby the antithesis of such words as _wissen_ and _kennen_; _scire_ and_noscere_, etc. ), what is that also but a synthesis, --a synthesis of apassive perception with a certain tendency to reaction? We areacquainted with a thing as soon as we have learned how to behavetowards it, or how to meet the behavior which we expect from it. Up tothat point it is still 'strange' to us. 

{86}

If there be anything at all in this view, it follows that howevervaguely a philosopher may define the ultimate universal datum, hecannot be said to leave it unknown to us so long as he in the slightestdegree pretends that our emotional or active attitude toward it shouldbe of one sort rather than another. He who says "life is real, life isearnest, " however much he may speak of the fundamental mysteriousnessof things, gives a distinct definition to that mysteriousness byascribing to it the right to claim from us the particular mood calledseriousness, --which means the willingness to live with energy, thoughenergy bring pain. The same is true of him who says that all isvanity. For indefinable as the predicate 'vanity' may be _in se_, itis clearly something that permits anaesthesia, mere escape fromsuffering, to be our rule of life. There can be no greater incongruitythan for a disciple of Spencer to proclaim with one breath that thesubstance of things is unknowable, and with the next that the thoughtof it should inspire us with awe, reverence, and a willingness to addour co-operative push in the direction toward which its manifestationsseem to be drifting. The unknowable may be unfathomed, but if it makesuch distinct demands upon our activity we surely are not ignorant ofits essential quality. 

If we survey the field of history and ask what feature all greatperiods of revival, of expansion of the human mind, display in common, we shall find, I think, simply this: that each and all of them havesaid to the human being, "The inmost nature of the reality is congenialto _powers_ which you possess. " In what did the emancipating messageof primitive Christianity consist but in the announcement that {87} Godrecognizes those weak and tender impulses which paganism had so rudelyoverlooked? Take repentance: the man who can do nothing rightly can atleast repent of his failures. But for paganism this faculty ofrepentance was a pure supernumerary, a straggler too late for the fair. Christianity took it, and made it the one power within us whichappealed straight to the heart of God. And after the night of themiddle ages had so long branded with obloquy even the generous impulsesof the flesh, and defined the reality to be such that only slavishnatures could commune with it, in what did the _sursum corda_ of theplatonizing renaissance lie but in the proclamation that the archetypeof verity in things laid claim on the widest activity of our wholeaesthetic being? What were Luther's mission and Wesley's but appealsto powers which even the meanest of men might carry with them, --faithand self-despair, --but which were personal, requiring no priestlyintermediation, and which brought their owner face to face with God?What caused the wildfire influence of Rousseau but the assurance hegave that man's nature was in harmony with the nature of things, ifonly the paralyzing corruptions of custom would stand from between?How did Kant and Fichte, Goethe and Schiller, inspire their time withcheer, except by saying, "Use all your powers; that is the onlyobedience the universe exacts"? And Carlyle with his gospel of work, of fact, of veracity, how does he move us except by saying that theuniverse imposes no tasks upon us but such as the most humble canperform? Emerson's creed that everything that ever was or will be ishere in the enveloping now; that man has but to obey himself, --"He whowill rest in what he _is_, {88} is a part of destiny, "--is in likemanner nothing but an exorcism of all scepticism as to the pertinencyof one's natural faculties. 

In a word, "Son of Man, _stand upon thy feet_ and I will speak untothee!" is the only revelation of truth to which the solving epochs havehelped the disciple. But that has been enough to satisfy the greaterpart of his rational need. _In se_ and _per se_ the universal essencehas hardly been more defined by any of these formulas than by theagnostic _x_; but the mere assurance that my powers, such as they are, are not irrelevant to it, but pertinent; that it speaks to them andwill in some way recognize their reply; that I can be a match for it ifI will, and not a footless waif, --suffices to make it rational to myfeeling in the sense given above. Nothing could be more absurd than tohope for the definitive triumph of any philosophy which should refuseto legitimate, and to legitimate in an emphatic manner, the morepowerful of our emotional and practical tendencies. Fatalism, whosesolving word in all crises of behavior is "all striving is vain, " willnever reign supreme, for the impulse to take life strivingly isindestructible in the race. Moral creeds which speak to that impulsewill be widely successful in spite of inconsistency, vagueness, andshadowy 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 impulsesare so differently mixed that a philosophy fit in this respect forBismarck will almost certainly be unfit for a valetudinarian poet. Inother words, although one can lay down in advance the {89} rule that aphilosophy which utterly denies all fundamental ground for seriousness, for effort, for hope, which says the nature of things is radicallyalien to human nature, can never succeed, --one cannot in advance saywhat particular dose of hope, or of gnosticism of the nature of things, the definitely successful philosophy shall contain. In short, it isalmost certain that personal temperament will here make itself felt, and that although all men will insist on being spoken to by theuniverse in some way, few will insist on being spoken to in just thesame way. We have here, in short, the sphere of what Matthew Arnoldlikes to call _Aberglaube_, legitimate, inexpugnable, yet doomed toeternal variations and disputes. 

Take idealism and materialism as examples of what I mean, and supposefor a moment that both give a conception of equal theoretic clearnessand 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, fondof conciliation and intimacy, tend to an idealistic faith. Why?Because idealism gives to the nature of things such kinship with ourpersonal selves. Our own thoughts are what we are most at home with, what we are least afraid of. To say then that the universe essentiallyis 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 realityis sure to put on a narrow, close, sick-room air. Everythingsentimental and priggish will be consecrated by it. That element inreality which every strong man of common-sense willingly feels therebecause it calls forth {90} powers that he owns--the rough, harsh, sea-wave, north-wind element, the denier of persons, thedemocratizer--is banished because it jars too much on the desire forcommunion. Now, it is the very enjoyment of this element that throwsmany men upon the materialistic or agnostic hypothesis, as a polemicreaction against the contrary extreme. They sicken at a life whollyconstituted of intimacy. There is an overpowering desire at moments toescape personality, to revel in the action of forces that have norespect for our ego, to let the tides flow, even though they flow overus. The strife of these two kinds of mental temper will, I think, always be seen in philosophy. Some men will keep insisting on thereason, the atonement, that lies in the heart of things, and that wecan 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 Christianreligion has emphatically recognized, but which philosophers as a rulehave with great insincerity tried to huddle out of sight in theirpretension to found systems of absolute certainty. I mean the elementof faith. Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt isstill theoretically possible; and as the test of belief is willingnessto act, one may say that faith is the readiness to act in a cause theprosperous issue of which is not certified to us in advance. It is infact the same moral quality which we call courage in practical affairs;and there will be a very widespread tendency in men of vigorous natureto enjoy a certain amount of uncertainty in their philosophic creed, just as risk lends a zest to worldly activity. Absolutely certifiedphilosophies {91} seeking the _inconcussum_ are fruits of mentalnatures in which the passion for identity (which we saw to be but onefactor of the rational appetite) plays an abnormally exclusive part. In the average man, on the contrary, the power to trust, to risk alittle beyond the literal evidence, is an essential function. Any modeof conceiving the universe which makes an appeal to this generouspower, and makes the man seem as if he were individually helping tocreate the actuality of the truth whose metaphysical reality he iswilling to assume, will be sure to be responded to by large numbers. 

The necessity of faith as an ingredient in our mental attitude isstrongly insisted on by the scientific philosophers of the present day;but by a singularly arbitrary caprice they say that it is onlylegitimate when used in the interests of one particularproposition, --the proposition, namely, that the course of nature isuniform. That nature will follow to-morrow the same laws that shefollows to-day is, they all admit, a truth which no man can _know_; butin the interests of cognition as well as of action we must postulate orassume it. As Helmholtz says: "Hier gilt nur der eine Rath: vertraueund handle!" And Professor Bain urges: "Our only error is in proposingto give any reason or justification of the postulate, or to treat it asotherwise than begged at the very outset. "

With regard to all other possible truths, however, a number of our mostinfluential contemporaries think that an attitude of faith is not onlyillogical but shameful. Faith in a religious dogma for which there isno outward proof, but which we are tempted to postulate for ouremotional interests, just as we {92} postulate the uniformity of naturefor our intellectual interests, is branded by Professor Huxley as "thelowest depth of immorality. " Citations of this kind from leaders ofthe modern _Aufklärung_ might be multiplied almost indefinitely. TakeProfessor Clifford's article on the 'Ethics of Belief. ' He calls it'guilt' and 'sin' to believe even the truth without 'scientificevidence. ' But what is the use of being a genius, unless _with thesame scientific evidence_ as other men, one can reach more truth thanthey? Why does Clifford fearlessly proclaim his belief in theconscious-automaton theory, although the 'proofs' before him are thesame which make Mr. Lewes reject it? Why does he believe in primordialunits of 'mind-stuff' on evidence which would seem quite worthless toProfessor Bain? Simply because, like every human being of theslightest mental originality, he is peculiarly sensitive to evidencethat bears in some one direction. It is utterly hopeless to try toexorcise such sensitiveness by calling it the disturbing subjectivefactor, and branding it as the root of all evil. 'Subjective' be itcalled! and 'disturbing' to those whom it foils! But if it helps thosewho, as Cicero says, "vim naturae magis sentiunt, " it is good and notevil. Pretend what we may, the whole man within us is at work when weform our philosophical opinions. Intellect, will, taste, and passionco-operate just as they do in practical affairs; and lucky it is if thepassion be not something as petty as a love of personal conquest overthe philosopher across the way. The absurd abstraction of an intellectverbally formulating all its evidence and carefully estimating theprobability thereof by a vulgar fraction by the size of whosedenominator and numerator alone it is swayed, is {93} ideally as ineptas it is actually impossible. It is almost incredible that men who arethemselves working philosophers should pretend that any philosophy canbe, or ever has been, constructed without the help of personalpreference, belief, or divination. How have they succeeded in sostultifying their sense for the living facts of human nature as not toperceive that every philosopher, or man of science either, whoseinitiative counts for anything in the evolution of thought, has takenhis stand on a sort of dumb conviction that the truth must lie in onedirection rather than another, and a sort of preliminary assurance thathis notion can be made to work; and has borne his best fruit in tryingto make it work? These mental instincts in different men are thespontaneous variations upon which the intellectual struggle forexistence is based. The fittest conceptions survive, and with them thenames of their champions shining to all futurity. 

The coil is about us, struggle as we may. The only escape from faithis mental nullity. What we enjoy most in a Huxley or a Clifford is notthe professor with his learning, but the human personality ready to goin for what it feels to be right, in spite of all appearances. Theconcrete man has but one interest, --to be right. That for him is theart of all arts, and all means are fair which help him to it. Naked heis flung into the world, and between him and nature there are no rulesof civilized warfare. The rules of the scientific game, burdens ofproof, presumptions, _experimenta crucis_, complete inductions, and thelike, are only binding on those who enter that game. As a matter offact 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 forbeing right in {94} advance of their slow aid, by guesswork or by hookor crook, what shall we say of them? Were all of Clifford's works, except the Ethics of Belief, forgotten, he might well figure in futuretreatises on psychology in place of the somewhat threadbare instance ofthe miser who has been led by the association of ideas to prefer hisgold to all the goods he might buy therewith. 

In short, if I am born with such a superior general reaction toevidence that I can guess right and act accordingly, and gain all thatcomes of right action, while my less gifted neighbor (paralyzed by hisscruples and waiting for more evidence which he dares not anticipate, much as he longs to) still stands shivering on the brink, by what lawshall I be forbidden to reap the advantages of my superior nativesensitiveness? Of course I yield to my belief in such a case as thisor distrust it, alike at my peril, just as I do in any of the greatpractical decisions of life. If my inborn faculties are good, I am aprophet; if poor, I am a failure: nature spews me out of her mouth, andthere is an end of me. In the total game of life we stake our personsall the while; and if in its theoretic part our persons will help us toa conclusion, surely we should also stake them there, howeverinarticulate they may be. [2]

{95}

But in being myself so very articulate in proving what to all readerswith 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 issynonymous with working hypothesis. The only difference is that whilesome 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 itinto a hydrogen bottle, finds out by the results of his action whetherhe was right or wrong. But theories like that of Darwin, or that ofthe kinetic constitution of matter, may exhaust the labors ofgenerations in their corroboration, each tester of their truthproceeding in this simple way, --that he acts as if it were true, andexpects the result to disappoint him if his assumption is false. Thelonger disappointment is delayed, the stronger grows his faith in histheory. 

Now, in such questions as God, immortality, absolute morality, andfree-will, no non-papal believer at the present day pretends his faithto be of an essentially different complexion; he can always doubt hiscreed. But his intimate persuasion is that the odds in its favor arestrong enough to warrant him in acting all along on the assumption ofits truth. His corroboration or repudiation by the nature of thingsmay be deferred until the day of judgment. The {96} uttermost he nowmeans is something like this: "I _expect_ then to triumph with tenfoldglory; but if it should turn out, as indeed it may, that I have spentmy 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 thenbeyond all doubt unmasks itself to view. " In short, we _go in_ againstmaterialism very much as we should _go in_, had we a chance, againstthe second French empire or the Church of Rome, or any other system ofthings toward which our repugnance is vast enough to determineenergetic action, but too vague to issue in distinct argumentation. Our reasons are ludicrously incommensurate with the volume of ourfeeling, yet on the latter we unhesitatingly act. 

Now, I wish to show what to my knowledge has never been clearly pointedout, that belief (as measured by action) not only does and mustcontinually outstrip scientific evidence, but that there is a certainclass of truths of whose reality belief is a factor as well as aconfessor; and that as regards this class of truths faith is not onlylicit and pertinent, but essential and indispensable. The truthscannot become true till our faith has made them so. 

Suppose, for example, that I am climbing in the Alps, and have had theill-luck to work myself into a position from which the only escape isby a terrible leap. Being without similar experience, I have noevidence of my ability to perform it successfully; but hope andconfidence in myself make me sure I shall not miss my aim, and nerve myfeet to execute what without those subjective emotions would perhapshave been impossible. But suppose that, on the contrary, {97} theemotions of fear and mistrust preponderate; or suppose that, havingjust read the Ethics of Belief, I feel it would be sinful to act uponan assumption unverified by previous experience, --why, then I shallhesitate so long that at last, exhausted and trembling, and launchingmyself in a moment of despair, I miss my foothold and roll into theabyss. In this case (and it is one of an immense class) the part ofwisdom clearly is to believe what one desires; for the belief is one ofthe indispensable preliminary conditions of the realization of itsobject. _There are then cases where faith creates its ownverification_. Believe, and you shall be right, for you shall saveyourself; 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 aredetermined now once for all, whether I like them or not. They aregiven irrespective of my wishes, and in all that concerns truths likethese subjective preference should have no part; it can only obscurethe judgment. But in every fact into which there enters an element ofpersonal contribution on my part, as soon as this personal contributiondemands a certain degree of subjective energy which, in its turn, callsfor a certain amount of faith in the result, --so that, after all, thefuture fact is conditioned by my present faith in it, --how treblyasinine would it be for me to deny myself the use of the subjectivemethod, the method of belief based on desire!

In every proposition whose bearing is universal (and such are all thepropositions of philosophy), the acts of the subject and theirconsequences throughout eternity should be included in the formula. If_M_ {98} represent the entire world _minus_ the reaction of the thinkerupon it, and if _M_ + _x_ represent the absolutely total matter ofphilosophic propositions (_x_ standing for the thinker's reaction andits results), --what would be a universal truth if the term x were ofone complexion, might become egregious error if _x_ altered itscharacter. Let it not be said that _x_ is too infinitesimal acomponent to change the character of the immense whole in which it liesimbedded. Everything depends on the point of view of the philosophicproposition in question. If we have to define the universe from thepoint of view of sensibility, the critical material for our judgmentlies in the animal kingdom, insignificant as that is, quantitativelyconsidered. The moral definition of the world may depend on phenomenamore restricted still in range. In short, many a long phrase may haveits sense reversed by the addition of three letters, _n-o-t_; many amonstrous mass have its unstable equilibrium discharged one way or theother by a feather weight that falls. 

Let us make this clear by a few examples. The philosophy of evolutionoffers us to-day a new criterion to serve as an ethical test betweenright and wrong. Previous criteria, it says, being subjective, haveleft us still floundering in variations of opinion and the _statusbelli_. Here is a criterion which is objective and fixed: _That is tobe called good which is destined to prevail or survive_. But weimmediately see that this standard can only remain objective by leavingmyself and my conduct out. If what prevails and survives does so by myhelp, and cannot do so without that help; if something else willprevail in case I alter my conduct, --how can I possibly now, consciousof alternative courses of action open before me, either of which {99} Imay suppose capable of altering the path of events, decide which courseto take by asking what path events will follow? If they follow mydirection, evidently my direction cannot wait on them. The onlypossible manner in which an evolutionist can use his standard is theobsequious method of forecasting the course society would take _but forhim_, and then putting an extinguisher on all personal idiosyncrasiesof desire and interest, and with bated breath and tiptoe treadfollowing as straight as may be at the tail, and bringing up the rearof everything. Some pious creatures may find a pleasure in this; butnot only does it violate our general wish to lead and not to follow (awish which is surely not immoral if we but lead aright), but if it betreated as every ethical principle must be treated, --namely, as a rulegood for all men alike, --its general observance would lead to itspractical refutation by bringing about a general deadlock. Each goodman hanging back and waiting for orders from the rest, absolutestagnation would ensue. Happy, then, if a few unrighteous onescontribute an initiative which sets things moving again!

All this is no caricature. That the course of destiny may be alteredby individuals no wise evolutionist ought to doubt. Everything for himhas small beginnings, has a bud which may be 'nipped, ' and nipped by afeeble force. Human races and tendencies follow the law, and have alsosmall beginnings. The best, according to evolution, is that which hasthe biggest endings. Now, if a present race of men, enlightened in theevolutionary philosophy, and able to forecast the future, were able todiscern in a tribe arising near them the potentiality of futuresupremacy; were able to see that their own {100} race would eventuallybe wiped out of existence by the new-comers if the expansion of thesewere left unmolested, --these present sages would have two courses opento them, either perfectly in harmony with the evolutionary test:Strangle the new race now, and ours survives; help the new race, and itsurvives. In both cases the action is right as measured by theevolutionary standard, --it is action for the winning side. 

Thus the evolutionist foundation of ethics is purely objective only tothe herd of nullities whose votes count for zero in the march ofevents. But for others, leaders of opinion or potentates, and ingeneral those to whose actions position or genius gives a far-reachingimport, and to the rest of us, each in his measure, --whenever weespouse a cause we contribute to the determination of the evolutionarystandard of right. The truly wise disciple of this school will thenadmit faith as an ultimate ethical factor. Any philosophy which makessuch questions as, What is the ideal type of humanity? What shall bereckoned virtues? What conduct is good? depend on the question, Whatis going to succeed?--must needs fall back on personal belief as one ofthe ultimate conditions of the truth. For again and again successdepends on energy of act; energy again depends on faith that we shallnot fail; and that faith in turn on the faith that we are right, --whichfaith thus verifies itself. 

Take as an example the question of optimism or pessimism, which makesso much noise just now in Germany. Every human being must sometimedecide for himself whether life is worth living. Suppose that inlooking 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, heyields 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, thesubjective complement _x_, which makes of the whole an utterly blackpicture illumined by no gleam of good. Pessimism completed, verifiedby his moral reaction and the deed in which this ends, is true beyond adoubt. _M_ + _x_ expresses a state of things totally bad. The man'sbelief supplied all that was lacking to make it so, and now that it ismade 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 evilhe braves it, and finds a sterner, more wonderful joy than any passivepleasure can yield in triumphing over pain and defying fear; suppose hedoes this successfully, and however thickly evils crowd upon him proveshis dauntless subjectivity to be more than their match, --will not everyone confess that the bad character of the _M_ is here the _conditiosine qua non_ of the good character of the _x_? Will not every oneinstantly declare a world fitted only for fair-weather human beingssusceptible of every passive enjoyment, but without independence, courage, or fortitude, to be from a moral point of view incommensurablyinferior to a world framed to elicit from the man every form oftriumphant endurance and conquering moral energy? As James Hintonsays, --

"Little inconveniences, exertions, pains. --these are the only things inwhich we rightly feel our life at all. If these be not there, existence becomes worthless, or worse; {102} success in putting themall away is fatal. So it is men engage in athletic sports, spend theirholidays in climbing up mountains, find nothing so enjoyable as thatwhich taxes their endurance and their energy. This is the way we aremade, I say. It may or may not be a mystery or a paradox; it is afact. Now, this enjoyment in endurance is just according to theintensity of life: the more physical vigor and balance, the moreendurance can be made an element of satisfaction. A sick man cannotstand it. The line of enjoyable suffering is not a fixed one; itfluctuates with the perfectness of the life. That our pains are, asthey are, unendurable, awful, overwhelming, crushing, not to be bornesave in misery and dumb impatience, which utter exhaustion alone makespatient, --that our pains are thus unendurable, means not that they aretoo 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 essentialelement of the highest good. "[3]

But the highest good can be achieved only by our getting our properlife; and that can come about only by help of a moral energy born ofthe faith that in some way or other we shall succeed in getting it ifwe try pertinaciously enough. This world _is_ good, we must say, sinceit is what we make it, --and we shall make it good. How can we excludefrom the cognition of a truth a faith which is involved in the creationof the truth? _M_ has its character indeterminate, susceptible offorming part of a thorough-going pessimism on the one hand, or of ameliorism, a moral (as distinguished from a sensual) optimism on theother. 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 wedesire. The belief creates its verification. The thought becomesliterally 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 whetherthis be at bottom a moral or an unmoral universe, --and see whether themethod of faith may legitimately have a place there. It is really thequestion of materialism. Is the world a simple brute actuality, anexistence _de facto_ about which the deepest thing that can be said isthat 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 ofworth are themselves mere matters of fact; that the words 'good' and'bad' have no sense apart from subjective passions and interests whichwe may, if we please, play fast and loose with at will, so far as anyduty of ours to the non-human universe is concerned. Thus, when amaterialist says it is better for him to suffer great inconveniencethan to break a promise, he only means that his social interests havebecome so knit up with {104} keeping faith that, those interests oncebeing granted, it is better for him to keep the promise in spite ofeverything. But the interests themselves are neither right nor wrong, except possibly with reference to some ulterior order of interestswhich themselves again are mere subjective data without character, either good or bad. 

For the absolute moralists, on the contrary, the interests are notthere merely to be felt, --they are to be believed in and obeyed. Notonly is it best for my social interests to keep my promise, but bestfor me to have those interests, and best for the cosmos to have thisme. Like the old woman in the story who described the world as restingon a rock, and then explained that rock to be supported by anotherrock, and finally when pushed with questions said it was rocks all theway down, --he who believes this to be a radically moral universe musthold 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 andthe other one is enormous. The subjectivist in morals, when his moralfeelings are at war with the facts about him, is always free to seekharmony by toning down the sensitiveness of the feelings. Being meredata, neither good nor evil in themselves, he may pervert them or lullthem to sleep by any means at his command. Truckling, compromise, time-serving, capitulations of conscience, are conventionallyopprobrious names for what, if successfully carried out, {105} would beon his principles by far the easiest and most praiseworthy mode ofbringing about that harmony between inner and outer relations which isall 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 bysacrificing the ideal interests. According to him, these latter shouldbe as they are and not otherwise. Resistance then, poverty, martyrdomif need be, tragedy in a word, --such are the solemn feasts of hisinward faith. Not that the contradiction between the two men occursevery day; in commonplace matters all moral schools agree. It is onlyin the lonely emergencies of life that our creed is tested: thenroutine maxims fail, and we fall back on our gods. It cannot then besaid that the question, Is this a moral world? is a meaningless andunverifiable question because it deals with something non-phenomenal. Any question is full of meaning to which, as here, contrary answerslead to contrary behavior. And it seems as if in answering such aquestion as this we might proceed exactly as does the physicalphilosopher in testing an hypothesis. He deduces from the hypothesisan experimental action, _x_; this he adds to the facts _M_ alreadyexisting. It fits them if the hypothesis be true; if not, there isdiscord. The results of the action corroborate or refute the idea fromwhich it flowed. So here: the verification of the theory which you mayhold as to the objectively moral character of the world can consistonly in this, --that if you proceed to act upon your theory it will bereversed by nothing that later turns up as your action's fruit; it willharmonize so well with the entire drift of experience that the latterwill, as it were, adopt it, or at most give it an ampler {106}interpretation, without obliging you in any way to change the essenceof its formulation. If this be an objectively moral universe, all actsthat I make on that assumption, all expectations that I ground on it, will tend more and more completely to interdigitate with the phenomenaalready existing. _M_ + _x_ will be in accord; and the more I live, and the more the fruits of my activity come to light, the moresatisfactory the consensus will grow. While if it be not such a moraluniverse, and I mistakenly assume that it is, the course of experiencewill throw ever new impediments in the way of my belief, and becomemore and more difficult to express in its language. Epicycle uponepicycle of subsidiary hypothesis will have to be invoked to give tothe discrepant terms a temporary appearance of squaring with eachother; 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 moralinterests 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, --itis that by refusing to take up a tragic attitude, I deal in thelong-run most satisfactorily with the facts of life. "All is vanity"is here the last word of wisdom. Even though in certain limited seriesthere may be a great appearance of seriousness, he who in the maintreats things with a degree of good-natured scepticism and radicallevity will find that the practical fruits of his epicurean hypothesisverify it more and more, and not only save him from pain but do honorto his sagacity. While, on the other hand, he who contrary {107} toreality stiffens himself in the notion that certain things absolutelyshould be, and rejects the truth that at bottom it makes no differencewhat is, will find himself evermore thwarted and perplexed andbemuddled by the facts of the world, and his tragic disappointmentwill, as experience accumulates, seem to drift farther and farther awayfrom that final atonement or reconciliation which certain partialtragedies often get. 

_Anaesthesia_ is the watchword of the moral sceptic brought to bay andput 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 creedtrue, and that the nature of things is earnest infinitely. Act onmine, says the epicurean, and the results will prove that seriousnessis but a superficial glaze upon a world of fundamentally trivialimport. You and your acts and the nature of things will be alikeenveloped in a single formula, a universal _vanitas vanitatum_. 

For the sake of simplicity I have written as if the verification mightoccur in the life of a single philosopher, --which is manifestly untrue, since the theories still face each other, and the facts of the worldgive countenance to both. Rather should we expect, that, in a questionof this scope, the experience of the entire human race must make theverification, and that all the evidence will not be 'in' till the finalintegration of things, when the last man has had his say andcontributed his share to the still unfinished _x_. Then the proof willbe complete; then it will appear without doubt whether the moralistic xhas filled up the gap which alone kept the _M_ of the world fromforming an even and harmonious unity, or whether the {108}non-moralistic _x_ has given the finishing touches which were aloneneeded 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 myaction? My action is the complement which, by proving congruous ornot, reveals the latent nature of the mass to which it is applied. Theworld may in fact be likened unto a lock, whose inward nature, moral orunmoral, will never reveal itself to our simply expectant gaze. Thepositivists, forbidding us to make any assumptions regarding it, condemn us to eternal ignorance, for the 'evidence' which they wait forcan never come so long as we are passive. But nature has put into ourhands 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 othersort of 'evidence' or 'proof' than this. It is quite true that theco-operation of generations is needed to educe it. But in thesematters the solidarity (so called) of the human race is a patent fact. The essential thing to notice is that our active preference is alegitimate part of the game, --that it is our plain business as men totry one of the keys, and the one in which we most confide. If then theproof exist not till I have acted, and I must needs in acting run therisk of being wrong, how can the popular science professors be right inobjurgating in me as infamous a 'credulity' which the strict logic ofthe situation requires? If this really be a moral universe; if by myacts I be a factor of its destinies; if to believe where I may doubt beitself a moral act {109} analogous to voting for a side not yet sure towin, --by what right shall they close in upon me and steadily negate thedeepest conceivable function of my being by their preposterous commandthat I shall stir neither hand nor foot, but remain balancing myself ineternal and insoluble doubt? Why, doubt itself is a decision of thewidest practical reach, if only because we may miss by doubting whatgoods we might be gaining by espousing the winning side. But more thanthat! it is often practically impossible to distinguish doubt fromdogmatic negation. If I refuse to stop a murder because I am in doubtwhether it be not justifiable homicide, I am virtually abetting thecrime. If I refuse to bale out a boat because I am in doubt whether myefforts will keep her afloat, I am really helping to sink her. If inthe mountain precipice I doubt my right to risk a leap, I activelyconnive at my destruction. He who commands himself not to be credulousof God, of duty, of freedom, of immortality, may again and again beindistinguishable from him who dogmatically denies them. Scepticism inmoral matters is an active ally of immorality. Who is not for isagainst. The universe will have no neutrals in these questions. Intheory as in practice, dodge or hedge, or talk as we like about a wisescepticism, we are really doing volunteer military service for one sideor the other. 

Yet obvious as this necessity practically is, thousands of innocentmagazine readers lie paralyzed and terrified in the network of shallownegations which the leaders of opinion have thrown over their souls. All they need to be free and hearty again in the exercise of theirbirthright is that these fastidious vetoes should be swept away. Allthat the human {110} heart wants is its chance. It will willinglyforego certainty in universal matters if only it can be allowed to feelthat in them it has that same inalienable right to run risks, which noone dreams of refusing to it in the pettiest practical affairs. And ifI, in these last pages, like the mouse in the fable, have gnawed a fewof the strings of the sophistical net that has been binding down itslion-strength, I shall be more than rewarded for my pains. 

To sum up: No philosophy will permanently be deemed rational by all menwhich (in addition to meeting logical demands) does not to some degreepretend to determine expectancy, and in a still greater degree make adirect appeal to all those powers of our nature which we hold inhighest esteem. Faith, being one of these powers, will always remain afactor not to be banished from philosophic constructions, the more sosince in many ways it brings forth its own verification. In thesepoints, then, it is hopeless to look for literal agreement amongmankind. 

The ultimate philosophy, we may therefore conclude, must not be toostrait-laced in form, must not in all its parts divide heresy fromorthodoxy by too sharp a line. There must be left over and above thepropositions to be subscribed, _ubique, semper, et ab omnibus_, anotherrealm into which the stifled soul may escape from pedantic scruples andindulge its own faith at its own risks; and all that can here be donewill be to mark out distinctly the questions which fall within faith'ssphere. 

[1] This essay as far as page 75 consists of extracts from an articleprinted in Mind for July, 1879. Thereafter it is a reprint of anaddress to the Harvard Philosophical Club, delivered in 1880, andpublished in the Princeton Review, July, 1882. 

[2] At most, the command laid upon us by science to believe nothing notyet verified by the senses is a prudential rule intended to maximizeour right thinking and minimize our errors _in the long run_. In theparticular instance we must frequently lose truth by obeying it; but onthe whole we are safer if we follow it consistently, for we are sure tocover our losses with our gains. It is like those gambling andinsurance rules based on probability, in which we secure ourselvesagainst losses in detail by hedging on the total run. But this hedgingphilosophy requires that long run should be there; and this makes itinapplicable to the question of religious faith as the latter comeshome to the individual man. He plays the game of life not to escapelosses, 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 indeedfor 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 itshall be. 

[3] Life of James Hinton, pp. 172, 173. See also the excellent chapteron Faith and Sight in the Mystery of Matter, by J. Allanson Picton. Hinton's Mystery of Pain will undoubtedly always remain the classicalutterance on this subject. 

[4] Observe that in all this not a word has been said of free-will. Itall 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 thedesire which prompts the belief are also fixed. But fixed or not, these subjective states form a phenomenal condition necessarilypreceding the facts; necessarily constitutive, therefore, of the truth_M_ + _x_ which we seek. If, however, free acts be possible, a faithin their possibility, by augmenting the moral energy which gives thembirth, 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 rootedin the feeling of some other thinker, or collection of thinkers, towhose 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 hereto-day. When the invitation of your committee reached me last fall, the simple truth is that I accepted it as most men accept achallenge, --not because they wish to fight, but because they areashamed to say no. Pretending in my small sphere to be a teacher, Ifelt it would be cowardly to shrink from the keenest ordeal to which ateacher can be exposed, --the ordeal of teaching other teachers. Fortunately, the trial will last but one short hour; and I have theconsolation 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 ratethe liveliest sense of the difficulties of one's task, and they knowquickest when one hits the mark. 

Since it was as a teacher of physiology that I was most unworthilyofficiating when your committee's {112} invitation reached me, I mustsuppose it to be for the sake of bringing a puff of the latest winds ofdoctrine which blow over that somewhat restless sea that my presence isdesired. Among all the healthy symptoms that characterize this age, Iknow no sounder one than the eagerness which theologians show toassimilate results of science, and to hearken to the conclusions of menof science about universal matters. One runs a better chance of beinglistened to to-day if one can quote Darwin and Helmholtz than if onecan only quote Schleiermacher or Coleridge. I almost feel myself thismoment that were I to produce a frog and put him through hisphysiological performances in a masterly manner before your eyes, Ishould gain more reverential ears for what I have to say during theremainder of the hour. I will not ask whether there be not somethingof mere fashion in this prestige which the words of the physiologistsenjoy just now. If it be a fashion, it is certainly a beneficial oneupon the whole; and to challenge it would come with a poor grace fromone who at the moment he speaks is so conspicuously profiting by itsfavors. 

I will therefore only say this: that the latest breeze from thephysiological horizon need not necessarily be the most important one. Of the immense amount of work which the laboratories of Europe andAmerica, and one may add of Asia and Australia, are producing everyyear, much is destined to speedy refutation; and of more it may be saidthat its interest is purely technical, and not in any degreephilosophical or universal. 

This being the case, I know you will justify me if I fall back on adoctrine which is fundamental and well established rather than novel, and ask you whether {113} by taking counsel together we may not tracesome new consequences from it which shall interest us all alike as men. I refer to the doctrine of reflex action, especially as extended to thebrain. This is, of course, so familiar to you that I hardly needdefine it. In a general way, all educated people know what reflexaction means. 

It means that the acts we perform are always the result of outwarddischarges from the nervous centres, and that these outward dischargesare themselves the result of impressions from the external world, carried in along one or another of our sensory nerves. Applied atfirst to only a portion of our acts, this conception has ended by beinggeneralized more and more, so that now most physiologists tell us thatevery action whatever, even the most deliberately weighed andcalculated, does, so far as its organic conditions go, follow thereflex type. There is not one which cannot be remotely, if notimmediately, traced to an origin in some incoming impression of sense. There is no impression of sense which, unless inhibited by some otherstronger one, does not immediately or remotely express itself in actionof some kind. There is no one of those complicated performances in theconvolutions of the brain to which our trains of thought correspond, which is not a mere middle term interposed between an incomingsensation that arouses it and an outgoing discharge of some sort, inhibitory if not exciting, to which itself gives rise. The structuralunit of the nervous system is in fact a triad, neither of whoseelements has any independent existence. The sensory impression existsonly for the sake of awaking the central process of reflection, and thecentral process of reflection exists {114} only for the sake of callingforth the final act. All action is thus _re_-action upon the outerworld; and the middle stage of consideration or contemplation orthinking is only a place of transit, the bottom of a loop, both whoseends have their point of application in the outer world. If it shouldever have no roots in the outer world, if it should ever happen that itled to no active measures, it would fail of its essential function, andwould have to be considered either pathological or abortive. Thecurrent of life which runs in at our eyes or ears is meant to run outat our hands, feet, or lips. The only use of the thoughts it occasionswhile inside is to determine its direction to whichever of these organsshall, on the whole, under the circumstances actually present, act inthe way most propitious to our welfare. 

The willing department of our nature, in short, dominates both theconceiving department and the feeling department; or, in plainerEnglish, perception and thinking are only there for behavior's sake. 

I am sure I am not wrong in stating this result as one of thefundamental conclusions to which the entire drift of modernphysiological investigation sweeps us. If asked what greatcontribution physiology has made to psychology of late years, I am sureevery competent authority will reply that her influence has in no waybeen so weighty as in the copious illustration, verification, andconsolidation of this broad, general point of view. 

I invite you, then, to consider what may be the possible speculativeconsequences 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 beyondthe limits of psychology, even into those of theology herself. Therelations of the doctrine of reflex action with no less a matter thanthe doctrine of theism is, in fact, the topic to which I now inviteyour attention. 

We are not the first in the field. There have not been wanting writersenough 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, asder Thierische Wille of G. H. Schneider, you will find, sandwiched inamong the admirable dealings of the author with his proper subject, andpopping out upon us in unexpected places, the most delightfully _naïf_German onslaughts on the degradation of theologians, and the utterincompatibility of so many reflex adaptations to the environment withthe existence of a creative intelligence. There was a time, rememberedby many of us here, when the existence of reflex action and all theother harmonies between the organism and the world were held to prove aGod. Now, they are held to disprove him. The next turn of thewhirligig may bring back proof of him again. 

Into this debate about his existence, I will not pretend to enter. Imust take up humbler ground, and limit my ambition to showing that aGod, whether existent or not, is at all events the kind of being which, if he did exist, would form _the most adequate possible object_ forminds framed like our own to conceive as lying at the root of theuniverse. My thesis, in other words, is this: that some outwardreality of {116} a nature defined as God's nature must be defined, isthe only ultimate object that is at the same time rational and possiblefor the human mind's contemplation. _Anything short of God is notrational, anything more than God is not possible_, if the human mind bein truth the triadic structure of impression, reflection, and reactionwhich we at the outset allowed. 

Theism, whatever its objective warrant, would thus be seen to have asubjective anchorage in its congruity with our nature as thinkers; and, however it may fare with its truth, to derive from this subjectiveadequacy the strongest possible guaranty of its permanence. It is andwill be the classic mean of rational opinion, the centre of gravity ofall attempts to solve the riddle of life, --some falling below it bydefect, some flying above it by excess, itself alone satisfying everymental need in strictly normal measure. Our gain will thus in thefirst instance be psychological. We shall merely have investigated achapter in the natural history of the mind, and found that, as a matterof such natural history, God may be called the normal object of themind's belief. Whether over and above this he be really the livingtruth is another question. If he is, it will show the structure of ourmind to be in accordance with the nature of reality. Whether it be ornot in such accordance is, it seems to me, one of those questions thatbelong to the province of personal faith to decide. I will not touchupon the question here, for I prefer to keep to the strictlynatural-history point of view. I will only remind you that each one ofus is entitled either to doubt or to believe in the harmony between hisfaculties 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, andexplain what theories I referred to when I spoke just now of attemptsto fly beyond the one and to outbid the other. 

But, first of all, let me ask you to linger a moment longer over what Ihave called the reflex theory of mind, so as to be sure that weunderstand it absolutely before going on to consider those of itsconsequences of which I am more particularly to speak. I am not quitesure that its full scope is grasped even by those who have mostzealously promulgated it. I am not sure, for example, that allphysiologists see that it commits them to regarding the mind as anessentially teleological mechanism. I mean by this that the conceivingor theorizing faculty--the mind's middle department--functions_exclusively for the sake of ends_ that do not exist at all in theworld of impressions we receive by way of our senses, but are set byour emotional and practical subjectivity altogether. [2] It is atransformer of the world of our impressions into a totally differentworld, --the world of our conception; and the transformation is effectedin the interests of our volitional nature, and for no other purposewhatsoever. Destroy the volitional nature, the definite subjectivepurposes, preferences, {118} fondnesses for certain effects, forms, orders, and not the slightest motive would remain for the brute orderof our experience to be remodelled at all. But, as we have theelaborate volitional constitution we do have, the remodelling must beeffected; there is no escape. The world's contents are _given_ to eachof us in an order so foreign to our subjective interests that we canhardly by an effort of the imagination picture to ourselves what it islike. We have to break that order altogether, --and by picking out fromit the items which concern us, and connecting them with others faraway, which we say 'belong' with them, we are able to make out definitethreads of sequence and tendency; to foresee particular liabilities andget ready for them; and to enjoy simplicity and harmony in place ofwhat was chaos. Is not the sum of your actual experience taken at thismoment and impartially added together an utter chaos? The strains ofmy voice, the lights and shades inside the room and out, the murmur ofthe wind, the ticking of the clock, the various organic feelings youmay happen individually to possess, do these make a whole at all? Isit not the only condition of your mental sanity in the midst of themthat most of them should become non-existent for you, and that a fewothers--the sounds, I hope, which I am uttering--should evoke fromplaces in your memory that have nothing to do with this sceneassociates fitted to combine with them in what we call a rational trainof thought, --rational, because it leads to a conclusion which we havesome organ to appreciate? We have no organ or faculty to appreciatethe simply given order. The real world as it is given objectively atthis 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 across-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 mouthof the Amazon, a tree falls in the Adirondack wilderness, a man sneezesin Germany, a horse dies in Tartary, and twins are born in France. What does that mean? Does the contemporaneity of these events with oneanother and with a million others as disjointed, form a rational bondbetween them, and unite them into anything that means for us a world?Yet just such a collateral contemporaneity, and nothing else, is thereal order of the world. It is an order with which we have nothing todo but to get away from it as fast as possible. As I said, we breakit: we break it into histories, and we break it into arts, and we breakit into sciences; and then we begin to feel at home. We make tenthousand separate serial orders of it, and on any one of these we reactas though the others did not exist. We discover among its variousparts relations that were never given to sense at all (mathematicalrelations, tangents, squares, and roots and logarithmic functions), andout of an infinite number of these we call certain ones essential andlawgiving, and ignore the rest. Essential these relations are, butonly _for our purpose_, the other relations being just as real andpresent as they; and our purpose is to _conceive simply_ and to_foresee_. Are not simple conception and prevision subjective endspure and simple? They are the ends of what we call science; and themiracle of miracles, a miracle not yet exhaustively cleared up by anyphilosophy, is that the given order lends itself to the remodelling. It shows itself plastic to many of our scientific, to {120} many of ouraesthetic, to many of our practical purposes and ends. 

When the man of affairs, the artist, or the man of science fails, he isnot rebutted. He tries again. He says the impressions of sense _must_give way, _must_ be reduced to the desiderated form. [3] They allpostulate in the interests of their volitional nature a harmony betweenthe latter and the nature of things. The theologian does no more. Andthe reflex doctrine of the mind's structure, though all theology shouldas yet have failed of its endeavor, could but confess that the endeavoritself 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 beif he did exist? The word 'God' has come to mean many things in thehistory {121} of human thought, from Venus and Jupiter to the 'Idee'which figures in the pages of Hegel. Even the laws of physical naturehave, in these positivistic times, been held worthy of divine honor andpresented as the only fitting object of our reverence. [5] Of course, if our discussion is to bear any fruit, we must mean something moredefinite than this. We must not call any object of our loyalty a 'God'without more ado, simply because to awaken our loyalty happens to beone of God's functions. He must have some intrinsic characteristics ofhis own besides; and theism must mean the faith of that man whobelieves 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 theiramounts and mutual relations, the world has been delivered over todisputes. All such may for our present purpose be considered as quiteinessential. Not only such matters as his mode of revealing himself, the precise extent of his providence and power and their connectionwith our free-will, the proportion of his mercy to his justice, and theamount of his responsibility for evil; but also his metaphysicalrelation to the phenomenal world, whether causal, substantial, ideal, or what not, --are affairs of purely sectarian opinion that need notconcern us at all. Whoso debates them presupposes the essentialfeatures of theism to be granted already; and it is with theseessential features, the bare poles of the subject, that our businessexclusively lies. 

{122}

Now, what are these essential features? First, it is essential thatGod be conceived as the deepest power in the universe; and, second, hemust be conceived under the form of a mental personality. Thepersonality need not be determined intrinsically any further than isinvolved in the holding of certain things dear, and in the recognitionof our dispositions toward those things, the things themselves beingall good and righteous things. But, extrinsically considered, so tospeak, God's personality is to be regarded, like any other personality, as something lying outside of my own and other than me, and whoseexistence I simply come upon and find. A power not ourselves, then, which not only makes for righteousness, but means it, and whichrecognizes us, --such is the definition which I think nobody will beinclined to dispute. Various are the attempts to shadow forth theother lineaments of so supreme a personality to our human imagination;various the ways of conceiving in what mode the recognition, thehearkening to our cry, can come. Some are gross and idolatrous; someare the most sustained efforts man's intellect has ever made to keepstill living on that subtile edge of things where speech and thoughtexpire. But, with all these differences, the essence remainsunchanged. In whatever other respects the divine personality maydiffer from ours or may resemble it, the two are consanguineous atleast in this, --that both have purposes for which they care, and eachcan hear the other's call. 

Meanwhile, we can already see one consequence and one point ofconnection with the reflex-action theory of mind. Any mind, constructed on the {123} triadic-reflex pattern, must first get itsimpression from the object which it confronts; then define what thatobject is, and decide what active measures its presence demands; andfinally react. The stage of reaction depends on the stage ofdefinition, and these, of course, on the nature of the impressingobject. When the objects are concrete, particular, and familiar, ourreactions are firm and certain enough, --often instinctive. I see thedesk, and lean on it; I see your quiet faces, and I continue to talk. But the objects will not stay concrete and particular: they fusethemselves into general essences, and they sum themselves into awhole, --the universe. And then the object that confronts us, thatknocks on our mental door and asks to be let in, and fixed and decidedupon and actively met, is just this whole universe itself and itsessence. 

What are _they_, and how shall I meet _them_?

The whole flood of faiths and systems here rush in. Philosophies anddenials of philosophy, religions and atheisms, scepticisms andmysticisms, confirmed emotional moods and habitual practical biases, jostle one another; for all are alike trials, hasty, prolix, or ofseemly length, to answer this momentous question. And the function ofthem all, long or short, that which the moods and the systems alikesubserve and pass into, is the third stage, --the stage of action. Forno one of them itself is final. They form but the middle segment ofthe mental curve, and not its termination. As the last theoretic pulsedies away, it does not leave the mental process complete: it is but theforerunner of the practical moment, in which alone the cycle ofmentality finds its rhythmic pause. 

{124}

We easily delude ourselves about this middle stage. Sometimes we thinkit final, and sometimes we fail to see, amid the monstrous diversity inthe length and complication of the cogitations which may fill it, thatit can have but one essential function, and that the one we havepointed out, --the function of defining the direction which ouractivity, immediate or remote, shall take. 

If I simply say, "Vanitas vanitatum, omnia vanitas!" I am defining thetotal nature of things in a way that carries practical consequenceswith it as decidedly as if I write a treatise De Natura Rerum in twentyvolumes. The treatise may trace its consequences more minutely thanthe saying; but the only worth of either treatise or saying is that theconsequences are there. The long definition can do no more than drawthem; the short definition does no less. Indeed, it may be said thatif two apparently different definitions of the reality before us shouldhave identical consequences, those two definitions would really beidentical definitions, made delusively to appear different merely bythe different verbiage in which they are expressed. [6]

My time is unfortunately too short to stay and give to this truth thedevelopment it deserves; but I will assume that you grant it withoutfurther 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 Ipass over the subject far more {125} rapidly than it deserves. Whethertrue or false, any view of the universe which shall completely satisfythe mind must obey conditions of the mind's own imposing, must at leastlet the mind be the umpire to decide whether it be fit to be called arational universe or not. Not any nature of things which may seem tobe will also seem to be _ipso facto_ rational; and if it do not seemrational, it will afflict the mind with a ceaseless uneasiness, till itbe formulated or interpreted in some other and more congenial way. Thestudy of what the mind's criteria of rationality are, the definition ofits exactions in this respect, form an intensely interesting subjectinto which I cannot enter now with any detail. [7] But so much I thinkyou will grant me without argument, --that all three departments of themind alike have a vote in the matter, and that no conception will passmuster which violates any of their essential modes of activity, orwhich leaves them without a chance to work. By what title is it thatevery would-be universal formula, every system of philosophy whichrears its head, receives the inevitable critical volley from one halfof mankind, and falls to the rear, to become at the very best the creedof some partial sect? Either it has dropped out of its net some of ourimpressions of sense, --what we call the facts of nature, --or it hasleft the theoretic and defining department with a lot ofinconsistencies and unmediated transitions on its hands; or else, finally, it has left some one or more of our fundamental active andemotional powers with no object outside of themselves to react-on or tolive 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 oftheologians what I mean. Nor will you in particular, as champions ofthe Unitarianism of New England, be slow to furnish, from the motiveswhich led to your departure from our orthodox ancestral Calvinism, instances enough under the third or practical head. A God who gives solittle scope to love, a predestination which takes from endeavor allits zest with all its fruit, are irrational conceptions, because theysay to our most cherished powers, There is no object for you. 

Well, just as within the limits of theism some kinds are survivingothers by reason of their greater practical rationality, so theismitself, by reason of its practical rationality, is certain to surviveall 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 practicalthird of our nature, and in which we can never volitionally feel athome. Each comes out of the second or theoretic stage of mentalfunctioning, with its definition of the essential nature of things, itsformula of formulas prepared. The whole array of active forces of ournature stands waiting, impatient for the word which shall tell them howto discharge themselves most deeply and worthily upon life. "Well!"cry they, "what shall we do?" "Ignoramus, ignorabimus!" saysagnosticism. "React upon atoms and their concussions!" saysmaterialism. What a collapse! The mental train misses fire, themiddle fails to ignite the end, the cycle breaks down half-way to itsconclusion; and the active {127} powers left alone, with no properobject on which to vent their energy, must either atrophy, sicken, anddie, or else by their pent-up convulsions and excitement keep the wholemachinery in a fever until some less incommensurable solution, somemore practically rational formula, shall provide a normal issue for thecurrents of the soul. 

Now, theism always stands ready with the most practically rationalsolution it is possible to conceive. Not an energy of our activenature to which it does not authoritatively appeal, not an emotion ofwhich it does not normally and naturally release the springs. At asingle stroke, it changes the dead blank _it_ of the world into aliving _thou_, with whom the whole man may have dealings. To you, atany rate, I need waste no words in trying to prove its supremecommensurateness with all the demands that department Number Three ofthe mind has the power to impose on department Number Two. 

Our volitional nature must then, until the end of time, exert aconstant pressure upon the other departments of the mind to induce themto function to theistic conclusions. No contrary formulas can be morethan provisionally held. Infra-theistic theories must be always inunstable equilibrium; for department Number Three ever lurks in ambush, ready to assert its rights, and on the slightest show of justificationit makes its fatal spring, and converts them into the other form inwhich alone mental peace and order can permanently reign. 

The question is, then, _Can_ departments One and Two, _can_ the factsof nature and the theoretic elaboration of them, always lead totheistic conclusions?

The future history of philosophy is the only {128} authority capable ofanswering that question. I, at all events, must not enter into itto-day, as that would be to abandon the purely natural-history point ofview I mean to keep. 

This only is certain, that the theoretic faculty lives between twofires which never give her rest, and make her incessantly revise herformulations. If she sink into a premature, short-sighted, andidolatrous theism, in comes department Number One with its battery offacts of sense, and dislodges her from her dogmatic repose. If shelazily subside into equilibrium with the same facts of sense viewed intheir simple mechanical outwardness, up starts the practical reasonwith its demands, and makes _that_ couch a bed of thorns. Fromgeneration to generation thus it goes, --now a movement of receptionfrom without, now one of expansion from within; department Number Twoalways worked to death, yet never excused from taking the mostresponsible part in the arrangements. To-day, a crop of new facts;to-morrow, a flowering of new motives, --the theoretic faculty alwayshaving to effect the transition, and life growing withal so complex andsubtle and immense that her powers of conceiving are almost rupturedwith the strain. See how, in France, the mummy-cloths of the academicand official theistic philosophy are rent by the facts of evolution, and how the young thinkers are at work! See, in Great Britain, how thedryness of the strict associationist school, which under theministration of Mill, Bain, and Spencer dominated us but yesterday, gives way to more generous idealisms, born of more urgent emotionalneeds and wrapping the same facts in far more massive intellectualharmonies! These are but tackings to the common {129} port, to thatultimate _Weltanschauung_ of maximum subjective as well as objectiverichness, which, whatever its other properties may be, will at any ratewear the theistic form. 

Here let me say one word about a remark we often hear coming from theanti-theistic wing: It is base, it is vile, it is the lowest depth ofimmorality, 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 whichreality will simply come and register its own philosophic definition, as the pen registers the curve on the sheet of a chronograph. "Of allthe cants that are canted in this canting age" this has always seemedto me the most wretched, especially when it comes from professedpsychologists. As if the mind could, consistently with its definition, be a reactionless sheet at all! As if conception could possibly occurexcept for a teleological purpose, except to show us the way from astate of things our senses cognize to another state of things our willdesires! As if 'science' itself were anything else than such an end ofdesire, and a most peculiar one at that! And as if the 'truths' ofbare physics in particular, which these sticklers for intellectualpurity contend to be the only uncontaminated form, were not as great analteration 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 conceivingfaculty is forever playing with {130} the order of being as it presentsitself to our reception. It transforms the unutterable dead level andcontinuum of the 'given' world into an utterly unlike world of sharpdifferences and hierarchic subordinations for no other reason than tosatisfy certain subjective passions we possess. [8]

And, so far as we can see, the given world is there only for the sakeof the operation. At any rate, to operate upon it is our only chanceof approaching it; for never can we get a glimpse of it in theunimaginable insipidity of its virgin estate. To bid the man'ssubjective interests be passive till truth express itself from out theenvironment, is to bid the sculptor's chisel be passive till the statueexpress itself from out the stone. Operate we must! and the onlychoice 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 ofgetting the richest results that the material given will allow. Therichness lies, of course, in the energy of all three departments of themental cycle. Not a sensible 'fact' of department One must be left inthe cold, not a faculty of department Three be paralyzed; anddepartment Two must form an indestructible bridge. It is natural thatthe habitual neglect of department One by theologians should arouseindignation; but it is most _un_natural that the indignation shouldtake the form of a wholesale denunciation of department Three. It isthe story of Kant's dove over again, denouncing the {131} pressure ofthe air. Certain of our positivists keep chiming to us, that, amid thewreck of every other god and idol, one divinity still standsupright, --that his name is Scientific Truth, and that he has but onecommandment, but that one supreme, saying, _Thou shalt not be atheist_, for that would be to satisfy thy subjective propensities, andthe satisfaction of those is intellectual damnation. These mostconscientious gentlemen think they have jumped off their ownfeet, --emancipated their mental operations from the control of theirsubjective propensities at large and _in toto_. But they are deluded. They have simply chosen from among the entire set of propensities attheir command those that were certain to construct, out of thematerials given, the leanest, lowest, aridest result, --namely, the baremolecular world, --and they have sacrificed all the rest. [9]

Man's chief difference from the brutes lies in the exuberant excess ofhis subjective propensities, --his pre-eminence over them simply andsolely in the number and in the fantastic and unnecessary character ofhis wants, physical, moral, aesthetic, and intellectual. Had his wholelife not been a quest for the superfluous, he would never haveestablished himself as inexpugnably as he has done in the necessary. And from the consciousness of this he should draw the lesson that hiswants are to be trusted; that even {132} when their gratification seemsfarthest off, the uneasiness they occasion is still the best guide ofhis life, and will lead him to issues entirely beyond his presentpowers of reckoning. Prune down his extravagance, sober him, and youundo him. The appetite for immediate consistency at any cost, or whatthe logicians call the 'law of parsimony, '--which is nothing but thepassion for conceiving the universe in the most labor-savingway, --will, if made the exclusive law of the mind, end by blighting thedevelopment of the intellect itself quite as much as that of thefeelings or the will. The scientific conception of the world as anarmy of molecules gratifies this appetite after its fashion mostexquisitely. But if the religion of exclusive scientificism shouldever succeed in suffocating all other appetites out of a nation's mind, and imbuing a whole race with the persuasion that simplicity andconsistency demand a _tabula rasa_ to be made of every notion that doesnot form part of the _soi-disant_ scientific synthesis, that nation, that race, will just as surely go to ruin, and fall a prey to theirmore richly constituted neighbors, as the beasts of the field, as awhole, 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 byany scientific Occam's razor that has yet been forged. The knights ofthe razor will never form among us more than a sect; but when I seetheir fraternity increasing in numbers, and, what is worse, when I seetheir negations acquiring almost as much prestige and authority astheir affirmations legitimately claim over the minds of the docilepublic, I feel as if the influences working in the direction of ourmental barbarization were {133} beginning to be rather strong, andneeded some positive counteraction. And when I ask myself from whatquarter the invasion may best be checked, I can find no answer as goodas the one suggested by casting my eyes around this room. For thisneedful task, no fitter body of men than the Unitarian clergy exists. Who can uphold the rights of department Three of the mind with bettergrace than those who long since showed how they could fight and sufferfor department One? As, then, you burst the bonds of a narrowecclesiastical tradition, by insisting that no fact of sense or resultof science must be left out of account in the religious synthesis, somay you still be the champions of mental completeness andall-sidedness. May you, with equal success, avert the formation of anarrow scientific tradition, and burst the bonds of any synthesis whichwould pretend to leave out of account those forms of being, thoserelations of reality, to which at present our active and emotionaltendencies are our only avenues of approach. I hear it said thatUnitarianism is not growing in these days. I know nothing of the truthof the statement; but if it be true, it is surely because the greatship of Orthodoxy is nearing the port and the pilot is being taken onboard. If you will only lead in a theistic science, as successfully asyou have led in a scientific theology, your separate name as Unitariansmay 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 workenough in both directions awaiting you. 

Meanwhile, let me pass to the next division of our subject. I saidthat we are forced to regard God as {134} the normal object of themind's belief, inasmuch as any conception that falls short of God isirrational, if the word 'rational' be taken in its fullest sense; whileany conception that goes beyond God is impossible, if the human mind beconstructed after the triadic-reflex pattern we have discussed at suchlength. The first half of the thesis has been disposed of. Infra-theistic conceptions, materialisms and agnosticisms, areirrational because they are inadequate stimuli to man's practicalnature. 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 Ishould speak of conceptions that aimed at going beyond God, and ofattempts to fly above him or outbid him; so I will now explain exactlywhat I mean. In defining the essential attributes of God, I said hewas a personality lying outside our own and other than us, --a power notourselves. 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. Ifinfratheistic ways of looking on the world leave it in the thirdperson, a mere _it_; and if theism turns the _it_ into a _thou_, --so wemay say that these other theories try to cover it with the mantle ofthe first person, and to make it a part of _me_. 

I am well aware that I begin here to tread on ground in which trenchantdistinctions may easily seem to mutilate the facts. 

That sense of emotional reconciliation with God which characterizes thehighest 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 ofself-surrender, of absolute practical union between one's self and thedivine object of one's contemplation, is a totally different thing fromany sort of substantial identity. Still the object God and the subjectI are two. Still I simply come upon him, and find his existence givento me; and the climax of my practical union with what is given, formsat the same time the climax of my perception that as a numerical factof existence I am something radically other than the Divinity withwhose effulgence I am filled. 

Now, it seems to me that the only sort of union of creature withcreator with which theism, properly so called, comports, is of thisemotional and practical kind; and it is based unchangeably on theempirical fact that the thinking subject and the object thought arenumerically two. How my mind and will, which are not God, can yetcognize and leap to meet him, how I ever came to be so separate fromhim, and how God himself came to be at all, are problems that for thetheist can remain unsolved and insoluble forever. It is sufficient forhim to know that he himself simply is, and needs God; and that behindthis universe God simply is and will be forever, and will in some wayhear his call. In the practical assurance of these empirical facts, without 'Erkentnisstheorie' or philosophical ontology, withoutmetaphysics of emanation or creation to justify or make them moreintelligible, in the blessedness of their mere acknowledgment as given, lie all the peace and power he craves. The floodgates of the religiouslife are opened, and the full currents can pour through. 

It is this empirical and practical side of the theistic position, itstheoretic chastity and modesty, which I {136} wish to accentuate here. The highest flights of theistic mysticism, far from pretending topenetrate the secrets of the _me_ and the _thou_ in worship, and totranscend the dualism by an act of intelligence, simply turn theirbacks on such attempts. The problem for them has simplyvanished, --vanished from the sight of an attitude which refuses tonotice such futile theoretic difficulties. Get but that "peace of Godwhich passeth understanding, " and the questions of the understandingwill cease from puzzling and pedantic scruples be at rest. In otherwords, theistic mysticism, that form of theism which at first sightseems most to have transcended the fundamental otherness of God fromman, has done it least of all in the theoretic way. The pattern of itsprocedure is precisely that of the simplest man dealing with thesimplest fact of his environment. Both he and the theist tarry indepartment Two of their minds only so long as is necessary to definewhat is the presence that confronts them. The theist decides that itscharacter is such as to be fitly responded to on his part by areligious reaction; and into that reaction he forthwith pours his soul. His insight into the _what_ of life leads to results so immediately andintimately rational that the _why_, the _how_, and the _whence_ of itare questions that lose all urgency. 'Gefühl ist Alles, ' Faust says. The channels of department Three have drained those of department Twoof their contents; and happiness over the fact that being has madeitself what it is, evacuates all speculation as to how it could makeitself at all. 

But now, although to most human minds such a position as this will bethe position of rational equilibrium, it is not difficult to bringforward certain {137} considerations, in the light of which so simpleand practical a mental movement begins to seem rather short-winded andsecond-rate and devoid of intellectual style. This easy acceptance ofan opaque limit to our speculative insight; this satisfaction with aBeing whose character we simply apprehend without comprehendinganything more about him, and with whom after a certain point ourdealings can be only of a volitional and emotional sort; above all, this sitting down contented with a blank unmediated dualism, --are theynot the very picture of unfaithfulness to the rights and duties of ourtheoretic reason?

Surely, if the universe is reasonable (and we must believe that it isso), it must be susceptible, potentially at least, of being reasoned_out_ to the last drop without residuum. Is it not rather an insult tothe very word 'rational' to say that the rational character of theuniverse and its creator means no more than that we practically feel athome in their presence, and that our powers are a match for theirdemands? Do they not in fact demand to be _understood_ by us stillmore than to be reacted on? Is not the unparalleled development ofdepartment Two of the mind in man his crowning glory and his veryessence; and may not the _knowing of the truth_ be his absolutevocation? And if it is, ought he flatly to acquiesce in a spirituallife of 'reflex type, ' whose form is no higher than that of the lifethat animates his spinal cord, --nay, indeed, that animates the writhingsegments of any mutilated worm?

It is easy to see how such arguments and queries may result in theerection of an ideal of our mental destiny, far different from thesimple and practical religious one we have described. We may wellbegin {138} to ask whether such things as practical reactions can bethe final upshot and purpose of all our cognitive energy. Mere outwardacts, changes in the position of parts of matter (for they are nothingelse), can they possibly be the culmination and consummation of ourrelations with the nature of things? Can they possibly form a resultto which our godlike powers of insight shall be judged merelysubservient? Such an idea, if we scan it closely, soon begins to seemrather absurd. Whence this piece of matter comes and whither that onegoes, what difference ought that to make to the nature of things, except so far as with the comings and the goings our wonderful inwardconscious harvest may be reaped?

And so, very naturally and gradually, one may be led from the theisticand practical point of view to what I shall call the _gnostical_ one. We may think that department Three of the mind, with its doings ofright and its doings of wrong, must be there only to serve departmentTwo; and we may suspect that the sphere of our activity exists for noother purpose than to illumine our cognitive consciousness by theexperience of its results. Are not all sense and all emotion at bottombut turbid and perplexed modes of what in its clarified shape isintelligent cognition? Is not all experience just the eating of thefruit of the tree of _knowledge_ of good and evil, and nothing more?

These questions fan the fire of an unassuageable gnostic thirst, whichis as far removed from theism in one direction as agnosticism wasremoved from it in the other; and which aspires to nothing less than anabsolute unity of knowledge with its object, and refuses to besatisfied short of a fusion and solution and saturation of bothimpression and action with reason, and {139} an absorption of all threedepartments of the mind into one. Time would fail us to-day (even hadI the learning, which I have not) to speak of gnostic systems indetail. The aim of all of them is to shadow forth a sort of process bywhich spirit, emerging from its beginnings and exhausting the wholecircle of finite experience in its sweep, shall at last return andpossess itself as its own object at the climax of its career. Thisclimax is the religious consciousness. At the giddy height of thisconception, whose latest and best known form is the Hegelianphilosophy, definite words fail to serve their purpose; and theultimate goal, --where object and subject, worshipped and worshipper, facts and the knowledge of them, fall into one, and where no other isleft outstanding beyond this one that alone is, and that we may callindifferently act or fact, reality or idea, God or creation, --thisgoal, I say, has to be adumbrated to our halting and gaspingintelligence by coarse physical metaphors, 'positings' and'self-returnings' and 'removals' and 'settings free, ' which hardly helpto make the matter clear. 

But from the midst of the curdling and the circling of it all we seemdimly to catch a glimpse of a state in which the reality to be knownand the power of knowing shall have become so mutually adequate thateach exhaustively is absorbed by the other and the twain become oneflesh, and in which the light shall somehow have soaked up all theouter darkness into its own ubiquitous beams. Like all headlongideals, this apotheosis of the bare conceiving faculty has its depthand wildness, its pang and its charm. To many it sings a truly sirenstrain; and so long as it is held only as a postulate, as a merevanishing {140} point to give perspective to our intellectual aim, itis hard to see any empirical title by which we may deny the legitimacyof gnosticism's claims. That we are not as yet near the goal itprefigures can never be a reason why we might not continue indefinitelyto approach it; and to all sceptical arguments, drawn from our reason'sactual finiteness, gnosticism can still oppose its indomitable faith inthe infinite character of its potential destiny. 

Now, here it is that the physiologist's generalization, as it seems tome, may fairly come in, and by ruling any such extravagant faith out ofcourt help to legitimate our personal mistrust of its pretensions. Iconfess that I myself have always had a great mistrust of thepretensions of the gnostic faith. Not only do I utterly fail tounderstand what a cognitive faculty erected into the absolute of being, with itself as its object, can mean; but even if we grant it a beingother than itself for object, I cannot reason myself out of the beliefthat however familiar and at home we might become with the character ofthat being, the bare being of it, the fact that it is there at all, must always be something blankly given and presupposed in order thatconception 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 ofphysiology and psychology I find the only lesson I can learn from thesesciences to be one that corroborates these convictions. From its firstdawn to its highest actual attainment, we find that the cognitivefaculty, where it appears to exist at all, appears but as one elementin an organic mental whole, and as a minister to higher mentalpowers, --the powers {141} of will. Such a thing as its emancipationand absolution from these organic relations receives no faintest colorof plausibility from any fact we can discern. Arising as a part, in amental and objective world which are both larger than itself, it must, whatever its powers of growth may be (and I am far from wishing todisparage them), remain a part to the end. This is the character ofthe cognitive element in all the mental life we know, and we have noreason to suppose that that character will ever change. On thecontrary, it is more than probable that to the end of time our power ofmoral and volitional response to the nature of things will be thedeepest organ of communication therewith we shall ever possess. Inevery being that is real there is something external to, and sacredfrom, the grasp of every other. God's being is sacred from ours. Toco-operate with his creation by the best and rightest response seemsall he wants of us. In such co-operation with his purposes, not in anychimerical speculative conquest of him, not in any theoretic drinkingof him up, must lie the real meaning of our destiny. 

This is nothing new. All men know it at those rare moments when thesoul sobers herself, and leaves off her chattering and protesting andinsisting about this formula or that. In the silence of our theorieswe then seem to listen, and to hear something like the pulse of Beingbeat; and it is borne in upon us that the mere turning of thecharacter, the dumb willingness to suffer and to serve this universe, is more than all theories about it put together. The most any theoryabout it can do is to bring us to that. Certain it is that the acutesttheories, the greatest intellectual power, the most elaborateeducation, are a {142} sheer mockery when, as too often happens, theyfeed mean motives and a nerveless will. And it is equally certain thata resolute moral energy, no matter how inarticulate or unequipped withlearning its owner may be, extorts from us a respect we should neverpay were we not satisfied that the essential root of human personalitylay there. 

I have sketched my subject in the briefest outlines; but still I hopeyou will agree that I have established my point, and that thephysiological view of mentality, so far from invalidating, can but giveaid and comfort to the theistic attitude of mind. Between agnosticismand gnosticism, theism stands midway, and holds to what is true ineach. With agnosticism, it goes so far as to confess that we cannotknow how Being made itself or us. With gnosticism, it goes so far asto insist that we can know Being's character when made, and how it asksus to behave. 

If any one fear that in insisting so strongly that behavior is the aimand end of every sound philosophy I have curtailed the dignity andscope of the speculative function in us, I can only reply that in thisascertainment of the _character_ of Being lies an almost infinitespeculative task. Let the voluminous considerations by which allmodern thought converges toward idealistic or pan-psychic conclusionsspeak for me. Let the pages of a Hodgson, of a Lotze, of a Renouvier, reply whether within the limits drawn by purely empirical theism thespeculative faculty finds not, and shall not always find, enough to do. But do it little or much, its _place_ in a philosophy is always thesame, 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, andasks its meaning. He launches himself upon the speculative sea, andmakes a voyage long or short. He ascends into the empyrean, andcommunes with the eternal essences. But whatever his achievements anddiscoveries be while gone, the utmost result they can issue in is somenew practical maxim or resolve, or the denial of some old one, withwhich inevitably he is sooner or later washed ashore on the _terrafirma_ of concrete life again. 

Whatever thought takes this voyage is a philosophy. We have seen howtheism takes it. And in the philosophy of a thinker who, though longneglected, is doing much to renovate the spiritual life of his nativeFrance to-day (I mean Charles Renouvier, whose writings ought to bebetter known among us than they are), we have an instructive example ofthe way in which this very empirical element in theism, its confessionof an ultimate opacity in things, of a dimension of being which escapesour theoretic control, may suggest a most definite practicalconclusion, --this one, namely, that 'our wills are free. ' I will saynothing of Renouvier's line of reasoning; it is contained in manyvolumes which I earnestly recommend to your attention. [10] But toenforce my doctrine that the number of volumes is not what makes thephilosophy, let me conclude by recalling to you the little poem ofTennyson, 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 atPrinceton, Mass. , 1881, and printed in the Unitarian Review for Octoberof that year. 

[2] See some Remarks on Spencer's Definition of Mind, in the Journal ofSpeculative Philosophy for January, 1878. 

[3] "No amount of failure in the attempt to subject the world ofsensible experience to a thorough-going system of conceptions, and tobring all happenings back to cases of immutably valid law, is able toshake our faith in the rightness of our principles. We hold fast toour demand that even the greatest apparent confusion must sooner orlater solve itself in transparent formulas. We begin the work everafresh; and, refusing to believe that nature will permanently withholdthe reward of our exertions, think rather that we have hitherto onlyfailed to push them in the right direction. And all this pertinacityflows from a conviction that we have no right to renounce thefulfilment of our task. What, in short sustains the courage ofinvestigators 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 essentiallydiffer from the spirit of religion? And is any one entitled to say inadvance, that, while the one form of faith shall be crowned withsuccess, the other is certainly doomed to fail?

[4] Concerning the transformation of the given order into the order ofconception, 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 theCosmic Ether as a divinity fitted to reconcile science with theisticfaith. 

[6] See the admirably original "Illustrations of the Logic of Science, "by C. S. Peirce, especially the second paper, "How to make our Thoughtsclear, " 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 withit, reposes on our _will to think_, the primacy of the will, even inthe theoretical sphere, must be conceded; and the last ofpresuppositions is not merely [Kant's] that 'I think' must accompanyall my representations, but also that 'I will' must dominate all mythinking. " (Sigwart; Logik, ll. 25. )

[9] As our ancestors said, _Fiat justitia, pereat mundus_, so we, whodo not believe in justice or any absolute good, must, according tothese prophets, be willing to see the world perish, in order that_scientia fiat_. Was there ever a more exquisite idol of the den, orrather 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, andpeople will have a fair chance to understand one another. But thisblowing 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 Systématiquedes 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 outof the free-will controversy, and that no new champion can do more thanwarm up stale arguments which every one has heard. This is a radicalmistake. I know of no subject less worn out, or in which inventivegenius has a better chance of breaking open new ground, --not, perhaps, of forcing a conclusion or of coercing assent, but of deepening oursense of what the issue between the two parties really is, of what theideas of fate and of free-will imply. At our very side almost, in thepast few years, we have seen falling in rapid succession from the pressworks that present the alternative in entirely novel lights. Not tospeak of the English disciples of Hegel, such as Green and Bradley; notto speak of Hinton and Hodgson, nor of Hazard here, --we see in thewritings of Renouvier, Fouillée, and Delboeuf[2] how completely changedand refreshed is the form of all the old disputes. I cannot pretend tovie in originality with any of the masters I have named, and myambition limits itself to just one little point. If I can make two ofthe necessarily implied corollaries {146} of determinism clearer to youthan they have been made before, I shall have made it possible for youto decide for or against that doctrine with a better understanding ofwhat you are about. And if you prefer not to decide at all, but toremain doubters, you will at least see more plainly what the subject ofyour hesitation is. I thus disclaim openly on the threshold allpretension to prove to you that the freedom of the will is true. Themost I hope is to induce some of you to follow my own example inassuming it true, and acting as if it were true. If it be true, itseems to me that this is involved in the strict logic of the case. Itstruth ought not to be forced willy-nilly down our indifferent throats. It ought to be freely espoused by men who can equally well turn theirbacks upon it. In other words, our first act of freedom, if we arefree, 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 thequestion all hope of a coercive demonstration, --a demonstration whichI, for one, am perfectly contented to go without. 

With thus much understood at the outset, we can advance. But notwithout one more point understood as well. The arguments I am about tourge all proceed on two suppositions: first, when we make theoriesabout the world and discuss them with one another, we do so in order toattain a conception of things which shall give us subjectivesatisfaction; and, second, if there be two conceptions, and the oneseems to us, on the whole, more rational than the other, we areentitled 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. Icannot stop to argue the point; but I myself believe that all themagnificent achievements of mathematical and physical science--ourdoctrines of evolution, of uniformity of law, and the rest--proceedfrom our indomitable desire to cast the world into a more rationalshape in our minds than the shape into which it is thrown there by thecrude order of our experience. The world has shown itself, to a greatextent, plastic to this demand of ours for rationality. How muchfarther it will show itself plastic no one can say. Our only means offinding out is to try; and I, for one, feel as free to try conceptionsof moral as of mechanical or of logical rationality. If a certainformula for expressing the nature of the world violates my moraldemand, I shall feel as free to throw it overboard, or at least todoubt it, as if it disappointed my demand for uniformity of sequence, for example; the one demand being, so far as I can see, quite assubjective and emotional as the other is. The principle of causality, for example, --what is it but a postulate, an empty name covering simplya demand that the sequence of events shall some day manifest a deeperkind of belonging of one thing with another than the mere arbitraryjuxtaposition which now phenomenally appears? It is as much an altarto an unknown god as the one that Saint Paul found at Athens. All ourscientific and philosophic ideals are altars to unknown gods. Uniformity is as much so as is free-will. If this be admitted, we candebate on even terms. But if any one pretends that while freedom andvariety are, in the first instance, subjective demands, necessity anduniformity are something {148} altogether different, I do not see howwe can debate at all. [3]

To begin, then, I must suppose you acquainted with all the usualarguments on the subject. I cannot stop to take up the old proofs fromcausation, from statistics, from the certainty with which we canforetell one another's conduct, from the fixity of character, and allthe rest. But there are two words which usually encumber theseclassical arguments, {149} and which we must immediately dispose of ifwe are to make any progress. One is the eulogistic word _freedom_, andthe other is the opprobrious word _chance_. The word 'chance' I wishto keep, but I wish to get rid of the word 'freedom. ' Its eulogisticassociations have so far overshadowed all the rest of its meaning thatboth parties claim the sole right to use it, and determinists to-dayinsist that they alone are freedom's champions. Old-fashioneddeterminism was what we may call _hard_ determinism. It did not shrinkfrom such words as fatality, bondage of the will, necessitation, andthe like. Nowadays, we have a _soft_ determinism which abhors harshwords, and, repudiating fatality, necessity, and even predetermination, says that its real name is freedom; for freedom is only necessityunderstood, 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 offact has been entirely smothered. Freedom in all these senses presentssimply no problem at all. No matter what the soft determinist mean byit, --whether he mean the acting without external constraint; whether hemean the acting rightly, or whether he mean the acquiescing in the lawof the whole, --who cannot answer him that sometimes we are free andsometimes we are not? But there _is_ a problem, an issue of fact andnot of words, an issue of the most momentous importance, which is oftendecided without discussion in one sentence, --nay, in one clause of asentence, --by those very writers who spin out whole chapters in theirefforts to show {150} what 'true' freedom is; and that is the questionof 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 mayhappen, and their cold and mathematical sound has no sentimentalassociations that can bribe our partiality either way in advance. Now, evidence of an external kind to decide between determinism andindeterminism is, as I intimated a while back, strictly impossible tofind. Let us look at the difference between them and see forourselves. What does determinism profess?

It professes that those parts of the universe already laid downabsolutely appoint and decree what the other parts shall be. Thefuture has no ambiguous possibilities hidden in its womb: the part wecall the present is compatible with only one totality. Any otherfuture complement than the one fixed from eternity is impossible. Thewhole is in each and every part, and welds it with the rest into anabsolute unity, an iron block, in which there can be no equivocation orshadow 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 certainamount of loose play on one another, so that the laying down of one ofthem does not necessarily determine what the others shall be. Itadmits that possibilities may be in excess of actualities, and thatthings not yet revealed to our knowledge may really in themselves beambiguous. Of two {151} alternative futures which we conceive, bothmay now be really possible; and the one become impossible only at thevery 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, itcorroborates our ordinary unsophisticated view of things. To thatview, actualities seem to float in a wider sea of possibilities fromout 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 thatnecessity on the one hand and impossibility on the other are the solecategories 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, allthat was or is or shall be actual in it having been from eternityvirtually there. The cloud of alternatives our minds escort this massof 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 noeulogistic terminology can smear over or wipe out. The truth _must_lie with one side or the other, and its lying with one side makes theother false. 

The question relates solely to the existence of possibilities, in thestrict sense of the term, as things that may, but need not, be. Bothsides admit that a volition, for instance, has occurred. Theindeterminists say another volition might have occurred in its place;the determinists swear that nothing could possibly {152} have occurredin its place. Now, can science be called in to tell us which of thesetwo point-blank contradicters of each other is right? Scienceprofesses to draw no conclusions but such as are based on matters offact, things that have actually happened; but how can any amount ofassurance that something actually happened give us the least grain ofinformation as to whether another thing might or might not havehappened in its place? Only facts can be proved by other facts. Withthings that are possibilities and not facts, facts have no concern. Ifwe have no other evidence than the evidence of existing facts, thepossibility-question must remain a mystery never to be cleared up. 

And the truth is that facts practically have hardly anything to do withmaking us either determinists or indeterminists. Sure enough, we makea flourish of quoting facts this way or that; and if we aredeterminists, we talk about the infallibility with which we can predictone another's conduct; while if we are indeterminists, we lay greatstress on the fact that it is just because we cannot foretell oneanother's conduct, either in war or statecraft or in any of the greatand small intrigues and businesses of men, that life is so intenselyanxious and hazardous a game. But who does not see the wretchedinsufficiency of this so-called objective testimony on both sides?What fills up the gaps in our minds is something not objective, notexternal. What divides us into possibility men and anti-possibilitymen is different faiths or postulates, --postulates of rationality. Tothis man the world seems more rational with possibilities in it, --tothat man more rational with possibilities excluded; and talk as we willabout having to yield to {153} evidence, what makes us monists orpluralists, determinists or indeterminists, is at bottom always somesentiment like this. 

The stronghold of the deterministic sentiment is the antipathy to theidea of chance. As soon as we begin to talk indeterminism to ourfriends, we find a number of them shaking their heads. This notion ofalternative possibility, they say, this admission that any one ofseveral things may come to pass, is, after all, only a roundabout namefor chance; and chance is something the notion of which no sane mindcan for an instant tolerate in the world. What is it, they ask, butbarefaced crazy unreason, the negation of intelligibility and law? Andif the slightest particle of it exist anywhere, what is to prevent thewhole fabric from falling together, the stars from going out, and chaosfrom recommencing her topsy-turvy reign?

Remarks of this sort about chance will put an end to discussion asquickly as anything one can find. I have already told you that'chance' was a word I wished to keep and use. Let us then examineexactly what it means, and see whether it ought to be such a terriblebugbear to us. I fancy that squeezing the thistle boldly will rob itof its sting. 

The sting of the word 'chance' seems to lie in the assumption that itmeans something positive, and that if anything happens by chance, itmust needs be something of an intrinsically irrational and preposteroussort. Now, chance means nothing of the kind. It is a purely negativeand relative term, [4] giving us {154} no information about that ofwhich it is predicated, except that it happens to be disconnected withsomething else, --not controlled, secured, or necessitated by otherthings in advance of its own actual presence. As this point is themost subtile one of the whole lecture, and at the same time the pointon which all the rest hinges, I beg you to pay particular attention toit. What I say is that it tells us nothing about what a thing may bein itself to call it 'chance. ' It may be a bad thing, it may be a goodthing. It may be lucidity, transparency, fitness incarnate, matchingthe whole system of other things, when it has once befallen, in anunimaginably perfect way. All you mean by calling it 'chance' is thatthis is not guaranteed, that it may also fall out otherwise. For thesystem of other things has no positive hold on the chance-thing. Itsorigin is in a certain fashion negative: it escapes, and says, Handsoff! coming, when it comes, as a free gift, or not at all. 

This negativeness, however, and this opacity of the chance-thing whenthus considered _ab. Extra_, or from the point of view of previousthings or distant things, do not preclude its having any amount ofpositiveness and luminosity from within, and at its own place andmoment. All that its chance-character asserts about it is that thereis something in it really of its own, something that is not theunconditional 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 thissort, in which the sharers have both limited liabilities and limitedpowers, is of course a simple and conceivable notion. 

Nevertheless, many persons talk as if the minutest {155} dose ofdisconnectedness of one part with another, the smallest modicum ofindependence, the faintest tremor of ambiguity about the future, forexample, would ruin everything, and turn this goodly universe into asort of insane sand-heap or nulliverse, no universe at all. Sincefuture human volitions are as a matter of fact the only ambiguousthings we are tempted to believe in, let us stop for a moment to makeourselves sure whether their independent and accidental character needbe fraught with such direful consequences to the universe as these. 

What is meant by saying that my choice of which way to walk home afterthe lecture is ambiguous and matter of chance as far as the presentmoment is concerned? It means that both Divinity Avenue and OxfordStreet are called; but that only one, and that one _either_ one, shallbe chosen. Now, I ask you seriously to suppose that this ambiguity ofmy choice is real; and then to make the impossible hypothesis that thechoice is made twice over, and each time falls on a different street. In other words, imagine that I first walk through Divinity Avenue, andthen imagine that the powers governing the universe annihilate tenminutes of time with all that it contained, and set me back at the doorof this hall just as I was before the choice was made. Imagine thenthat, everything else being the same, I now make a different choice andtraverse Oxford Street. You, as passive spectators, look on and seethe two alternative universes, --one of them with me walking throughDivinity Avenue in it, the other with the same me walking throughOxford Street. Now, if you are determinists you believe one of theseuniverses to have been from eternity impossible: you believe it to have{156} been impossible because of the intrinsic irrationality oraccidentality somewhere involved in it. But looking outwardly at theseuniverses, can you say which is the impossible and accidental one, andwhich the rational and necessary one? I doubt if the most iron-claddeterminist among you could have the slightest glimmer of light on thispoint. In other words, either universe _after the fact_ and once therewould, to our means of observation and understanding, appear just asrational as the other. There would be absolutely no criterion by whichwe might judge one necessary and the other matter of chance. Supposenow we relieve the gods of their hypothetical task and assume mychoice, once made, to be made forever. I go through Divinity Avenuefor good and all. If, as good determinists, you now begin to affirm, what all good determinists punctually do affirm, that in the nature ofthings I _couldn't_ have gone through Oxford Street, --had I done so itwould have been chance, irrationality, insanity, a horrid gap innature, --I simply call your attention to this, that your affirmation iswhat the Germans call a _Machtspruch_, a mere conception fulminated asa dogma and based on no insight into details. Before my choice, eitherstreet seemed as natural to you as to me. Had I happened to takeOxford Street, Divinity Avenue would have figured in your philosophy asthe gap in nature; and you would have so proclaimed it with the bestdeterministic conscience in the world. 

But what a hollow outcry, then, is this against a chance which, if itwere present to us, we could by no character whatever distinguish froma rational necessity! I have taken the most trivial of examples, butno possible example could lead to any different {157} result. For whatare the alternatives which, in point of fact, offer themselves to humanvolition? What are those futures that now seem matters of chance? Arethey not one and all like the Divinity Avenue and Oxford Street of ourexample? Are they not all of them _kinds_ of things already here andbased in the existing frame of nature? Is any one ever tempted toproduce an _absolute_ accident, something utterly irrelevant to therest of the world? Do not all the motives that assail us, all thefutures that offer themselves to our choice, spring equally from thesoil of the past; and would not either one of them, whether realizedthrough chance or through necessity, the moment it was realized, seemto us to fit that past, and in the completest and most continuousmanner to interdigitate with the phenomena already there?[5]

The more one thinks of the matter, the more one wonders that so emptyand gratuitous a hubbub as this outcry against chance should have foundso great an echo in the hearts of men. It is a word which tells usabsolutely nothing about what chances, or about the _modus operandi_ ofthe 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 solidblock, subject to one control, --which temper, which demand, the worldmay not be bound to gratify at all. In every outwardly verifiable andpractical respect, a world in which the alternatives that now actuallydistract _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, aworld of chance for me. To _yourselves_, it is true, those very actsof choice, which to me are so blind, opaque, and external, are theopposites of this, for you are within them and effect them. To youthey appear as decisions; and decisions, for him who makes them, arealtogether peculiar psychic facts. Self-luminous and self-justifyingat the living moment at which they occur, they appeal to no outsidemoment to put its stamp upon them or make them continuous with the restof nature. Themselves it is rather who seem to make nature continuous;and in their strange and intense function of granting consent to onepossibility and withholding it from another, to transform an equivocaland 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 nothingto do with this or that psychological detail. It is a quarrelaltogether metaphysical. Determinism denies the ambiguity of futurevolitions, because it affirms that nothing future can be ambiguous. But we have said enough to meet the issue. Indeterminate futurevolitions do mean chance. Let us not fear to shout it from thehouse-tops if need be; for we now know that {159} the idea of chanceis, at bottom, exactly the same thing as the idea of gift, --the onesimply being a disparaging, and the other a eulogistic, name foranything on which we have no effective _claim_. And whether the worldbe the better or the worse for having either chances or gifts in itwill depend altogether on _what_ these uncertain and unclaimable thingsturn out to be. 

And this at last brings us within sight of our subject. We have seenwhat determinism means: we have seen that indeterminism is rightlydescribed as meaning chance; and we have seen that chance, the veryname of which we are urged to shrink from as from a metaphysicalpestilence, means only the negative fact that no part of the world, however big, can claim to control absolutely the destinies of thewhole. But although, in discussing the word 'chance, ' I may at momentshave seemed to be arguing for its real existence, I have not meant todo so yet. We have not yet ascertained whether this be a world ofchance or no; at most, we have agreed that it seems so. And I nowrepeat what I said at the outset, that, from any strict theoreticalpoint of view, the question is insoluble. To deepen our theoreticsense of the _difference_ between a world with chances in it and adeterministic world is the most I can hope to do; and this I may now atlast 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 adeterministic world implies. The implications I call your attention toare all bound up with the fact that it is a world in which weconstantly have to make what I shall, with your permission, calljudgments of regret. Hardly an hour passes in {160} which we do notwish that something might be otherwise; and happy indeed are those ofus 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 quiteon a par in point of philosophic value with the criticisms on theuniverse of that friend of our infancy, the hero of the fable TheAtheist 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 abotch of remodelling the universe. How much more then from the pointof view of ends we cannot see! Wise men therefore regret as little asthey can. But still some regrets are pretty obstinate and hard tostifle, --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 atBrockton the other day: how, to get rid of the wife whose continuedexistence bored him, he inveigled her into a desert spot, shot her fourtimes, and then, as she lay on the ground and said to him, "You didn'tdo it on purpose, did you, dear?" replied, "No, I {161} didn't do it onpurpose, " as he raised a rock and smashed her skull. Such anoccurrence, with the mild sentence and self-satisfaction of theprisoner, is a field for a crop of regrets, which one need not take upin detail. We feel that, although a perfect mechanical fit to the restof the universe, it is a bad moral fit, and that something else wouldreally have been better in its place. 

But for the deterministic philosophy the murder, the sentence, and theprisoner's optimism were all necessary from eternity; and nothing elsefor a moment had a ghost of a chance of being put into their place. Toadmit such a chance, the determinists tell us, would be to make asuicide of reason; so we must steel our hearts against the thought. And here our plot thickens, for we see the first of those difficultimplications of determinism and monism which it is my purpose to makeyou feel. If this Brockton murder was called for by the rest of theuniverse, if it had to come at its preappointed hour, and if nothingelse would have been consistent with the sense of the whole, what arewe to think of the universe? Are we stubbornly to stick to ourjudgment of regret, and say, though it _couldn't_ be, yet it _would_have been a better universe with something different from this Brocktonmurder in it? That, of course, seems the natural and spontaneous thingfor us to do; and yet it is nothing short of deliberately espousing akind of pessimism. The judgment of regret calls the murder bad. Calling a thing bad means, if it mean anything at all, that the thingought 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 tobe is impossible, --in other words, as an organism whose constitution isafflicted with an incurable taint, an irremediable flaw. The pessimismof a Schopenhauer says no more than this, --that the murder is asymptom; and that it is a vicious symptom because it belongs to avicious whole, which can express its nature no otherwise than bybringing forth just such a symptom as that at this particular spot. Regret for the murder must transform itself, if we are determinists andwise, into a larger regret. It is absurd to regret the murder alone. Other things being what they are, _it_ could not be different. What weshould regret is that whole frame of things of which the murder is onemember. I see no escape whatever from this pessimistic conclusion, if, being determinists, our judgment of regret is to be allowed to stand atall. 

The only deterministic escape from pessimism is everywhere to abandonthe judgment of regret. That this can be done, history shows to be notimpossible. The devil, _quoad existentiam_, may be good. That is, although he be a _principle_ of evil, yet the universe, with such aprinciple in it, may practically be a better universe than it couldhave been without. On every hand, in a small way, we find that acertain amount of evil is a condition by which a higher form of good isbought. There is nothing to prevent anybody from generalizing thisview, and trusting that if we could but see things in the largest ofall ways, even such matters as this Brockton murder would appear to bepaid for by the uses that follow in their train. An optimism _quandmême_, a systematic and infatuated optimism like that ridiculed byVoltaire in his Candide, is one of the possible {163} ideal ways inwhich a man may train himself to look on life. Bereft of dogmatichardness and lit up with the expression of a tender and pathetic hope, such an optimism has been the grace of some of the most religiouscharacters 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 fruitsof time, and to quarrel with any of their details may be blasphemy. The only real blasphemy, in short, may be that pessimistic temper ofthe soul which lets it give way to such things as regrets, remorse, andgrief. 

Thus, our deterministic pessimism may become a deterministic optimismat the price of extinguishing our judgments of regret. 

But does not this immediately bring us into a curious logicalpredicament? Our determinism leads us to call our judgments of regretwrong, because they are pessimistic in implying that what is impossibleyet ought to be. But how then about the judgments of regretthemselves? If they are wrong, other judgments, judgments of approvalpresumably, ought to be in their place. But as they are necessitated, nothing else _can_ be in their place; and the universe is just what itwas before, --namely, a place in which what ought to be appearsimpossible. We have got one foot out of the pessimistic bog, but theother one sinks all the deeper. We have rescued our actions from thebonds of evil, but our judgments are now held fast. When murders andtreacheries cease to be sins, regrets are theoretic absurdities anderrors. 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 eithersends the other down. Murder and treachery cannot be good withoutregret being bad: regret cannot be good without treachery and murderbeing bad. Both, however, are supposed to have been foredoomed; sosomething 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 sosoon to fall back into the pessimism from which we thought we hademerged? And is there no possible way by which we may, with goodintellectual consciences, call the cruelties and the treacheries, thereluctances and the regrets, _all_ good together?

Certainly there is such a way, and you are probably most of you readyto formulate it yourselves. But, before doing so, remark howinevitably the question of determinism and indeterminism slides us intothe question of optimism and pessimism, or, as our fathers called it, 'the question of evil. ' The theological form of all these disputes isthe simplest and the deepest, the form from which there is the leastescape, --not because, as some have sarcastically said, remorse andregret are clung to with a morbid fondness by the theologians asspiritual luxuries, but because they are existing facts of the world, and as such must be taken into account in the deterministicinterpretation of all that is fated to be. If they are fated to beerror, does not the bat's wing of irrationality still cast its shadowover the world?

The refuge from the quandary lies, as I said, not far off. Thenecessary acts we erroneously regret {165} may be good, and yet ourerror 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 machinewhose final purpose is the making real of any outward good, but ratheras a contrivance for deepening the theoretic consciousness of whatgoodness and evil in their intrinsic natures are. Not the doing eitherof 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 amin the habit, in thinking to myself, of calling this point of view the_gnostical_ point of view. According to it, the world is neither anoptimism nor a pessimism, but a _gnosticism_. But as this term mayperhaps lead to some misunderstandings, I will use it as little aspossible 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 agreeessentially about the universe, in deeming that what happens there issubsidiary to what we think or feel about it. Crime justifies itscriminality by awakening our intelligence of that criminality, andeventually our remorses and regrets; and the error included in remorsesand regrets, the error of supposing that the past could have beendifferent, justifies itself by its use. Its use is to quicken oursense of _what_ the irretrievably lost is. When we think of it as thatwhich might have been ('the saddest words of tongue or pen'), thequality of its worth speaks to us with a wilder sweetness; and, conversely, the dissatisfaction wherewith we think of what seems tohave driven it from its natural place gives us the severer pang. Admirable artifice of {166} nature! we might be tempted toexclaim, --deceiving us in order the better to enlighten us, and leavingnothing undone to accentuate to our consciousness the yawning distanceof those opposite poles of good and evil between which creation swings. 

We have thus clearly revealed to our view what may be called thedilemma of determinism, so far as determinism pretends to think thingsout at all. A merely mechanical determinism, it is true, ratherrejoices in not thinking them out. It is very sure that the universemust satisfy its postulate of a physical continuity and coherence, butit smiles at any one who comes forward with a postulate of moralcoherence as well. I may suppose, however, that the number of purelymechanical or hard determinists among you this evening is small. Thedeterminism to whose seductions you are most exposed is what I havecalled soft determinism, --the determinism which allows considerationsof good and bad to mingle with those of cause and effect in decidingwhat sort of a universe this may rationally be held to be. The dilemmaof this determinism is one whose left horn is pessimism and whose righthorn is subjectivism. In other words, if determinism is to escapepessimism, it must leave off looking at the goods and ills of life in asimple objective way, and regard them as materials, indifferent inthemselves, for the production of consciousness, scientific andethical, in us. 

To escape pessimism is, as we all know, no easy task. Your own studieshave sufficiently shown you the almost desperate difficulty of makingthe notion that there is a single principle of things, and thatprinciple absolute perfection, rhyme together with {167} our dailyvision of the facts of life. If perfection be the principle, how comesthere any imperfection here? If God be good, how came he tocreate--or, if he did not create, how comes he to permit--the devil?The evil facts must be explained as seeming: the devil must bewhitewashed, the universe must be disinfected, if neither God'sgoodness nor his unity and power are to remain impugned. And of allthe various ways of operating the disinfection, and making bad seemless bad, the way of subjectivism appears by far the best. [6]

For, after all, is there not something rather absurd in our ordinarynotion of external things being good or bad in themselves? Can murdersand treacheries, considered as mere outward happenings, or motions ofmatter, be bad without any one to feel their badness? And couldparadise properly be good in the absence of a sentient principle bywhich the goodness was perceived? Outward goods and evils seempractically indistinguishable except in so far as they result ingetting moral judgments made about them. But then the moral judgmentsseem the main thing, and the outward facts mere perishing instrumentsfor their production. This is subjectivism. Every one must at sometime 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 anddeath. Why does the painting of any paradise or Utopia, in heaven oron earth, awaken such yawnings for nirvana and escape? The white-robedharp-playing heaven of our sabbath-schools, and the ladylike tea-tableelysium represented in Mr. Spencer's Data of Ethics, as the finalconsummation of progress, are exactly on a par in thisrespect, --lubberlands, pure and simple, one and all. [7] We look uponthem from this delicious mess of insanities and realities, strivingsand deadnesses, hopes and fears, agonies and exultations, which formsour present state, and _tedium vitae_ is the only sentiment they awakenin our breasts. To our crepuscular natures, born for the conflict, theRembrandtesque moral chiaroscuro, the shifting struggle of the sunbeamin the gloom, such pictures of light upon light are vacuous andexpressionless, and neither to be enjoyed nor understood. If _this_ bethe whole fruit of the victory, we say; if the generations of mankindsuffered and laid down their lives; if prophets confessed and martyrssang in the fire, and all the sacred tears were shed for no other endthan that a race of creatures of such unexampled insipidity shouldsucceed, and protract _in saecula saeculorum_ their contented andinoffensive lives, --why, at such a rate, better lose than win thebattle, or at all events better ring down the curtain before the lastact of the play, so that a business that began so importantly may besaved from so singularly flat a winding-up. 

{169}

All this is what I should instantly say, were I called on to plead forgnosticism; and its real friends, of whom you will presently perceive Iam not one, would say without difficulty a great deal more. Regardedas a stable finality, every outward good becomes a mere weariness tothe flesh. It must be menaced, be occasionally lost, for its goodnessto be fully felt as such. Nay, more than occasionally lost. No oneknows the worth of innocence till he knows it is gone forever, and thatmoney cannot buy it back. Not the saint, but the sinner thatrepenteth, is he to whom the full length and breadth, and height anddepth, of life's meaning is revealed. Not the absence of vice, butvice there, and virtue holding her by the throat, seems the ideal humanstate. And there seems no reason to suppose it not a permanent humanstate. There is a deep truth in what the school of Schopenhauerinsists on, --the illusoriness of the notion of moral progress. Themore brutal forms of evil that go are replaced by others more subtleand more poisonous. Our moral horizon moves with us as we move, andnever do we draw nearer to the far-off line where the black waves andthe azure meet. The final purpose of our creation seems most plausiblyto be the greatest possible enrichment of our ethical consciousness, through the intensest play of contrasts and the widest diversity ofcharacters. This of course obliges some of us to be vessels of wrath, while it calls others to be vessels of honor. But the subjectivistpoint of view reduces all these outward distinctions to a commondenominator. The wretch languishing in the felon's cell may bedrinking draughts of the wine of truth that will never pass the lips ofthe so-called favorite of fortune. And the peculiar consciousness of{170} each of them is an indispensable note in the great ethicalconcert which the centuries as they roll are grinding out of the livingheart of man. 

So much for subjectivism! If the dilemma of determinism be to choosebetween it and pessimism, I see little room for hesitation from thestrictly theoretical point of view. Subjectivism seems the morerational scheme. And the world may, possibly, for aught I know, benothing else. When the healthy love of life is on one, and all itsforms and its appetites seem so unutterably real; when the most brutaland the most spiritual things are lit by the same sun, and each is anintegral part of the total richness, --why, then it seems a grudging andsickly way of meeting so robust a universe to shrink from any of itsfacts and wish them not to be. Rather take the strictly dramatic pointof view, and treat the whole thing as a great unending romance whichthe spirit of the universe, striving to realize its own content, iseternally thinking out and representing to itself. [8]

No one, I hope, will accuse me, after I have said all this, ofunderrating the reasons in favor of subjectivism. And now that Iproceed to say why those reasons, strong as they are, fail to convincemy own mind, I trust the presumption may be that my objections arestronger still. 

I frankly confess that they are of a practical order. If wepractically take up subjectivism in a sincere and radical manner andfollow its consequences, we meet with some that make us pause. Let asubjectivism {171} begin in never so severe and intellectual a way, itis forced by the law of its nature to develop another side of itselfand end with the corruptest curiosity. Once dismiss the notion thatcertain duties are good in themselves, and that we are here to do them, no matter how we feel about them; once consecrate the opposite notionthat our performances and our violations of duty are for a commonpurpose, the attainment of subjective knowledge and feeling, and thatthe deepening of these is the chief end of our lives, --and at whatpoint on the downward slope are we to stop? In theology, subjectivismdevelops as its 'left wing' antinomianism. In literature, its leftwing is romanticism. And in practical life it is either a nervelesssentimentality or a sensualism without bounds. 

Everywhere it fosters the fatalistic mood of mind. It makes those whoare already too inert more passive still; it renders wholly recklessthose whose energy is already in excess. All through history we findhow subjectivism, as soon as it has a free career, exhausts itself inevery sort of spiritual, moral, and practical license. Its optimismturns to an ethical indifference, which infallibly brings dissolutionin its train. It is perfectly safe to say now that if the Hegeliangnosticism, which has begun to show itself here and in Great Britain, were to become a popular philosophy, as it once was in Germany, itwould certainly develop its left wing here as there, and produce areaction of disgust. Already I have heard a graduate of this veryschool express in the pulpit his willingness to sin like David, if onlyhe might repent like David. You may tell me he was only sowing hiswild, 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 oflife. After the pure and classic truths, the exciting and rancid onesmust be experienced; and if the stupid virtues of the philistine herddo not then come in and save society from the influence of the childrenof light, a sort of inward putrefaction becomes its inevitable doom. 

Look at the last runnings of the romantic school, as we see them inthat strange contemporary Parisian literature, with which we of theless clever countries are so often driven to rinse out our minds afterthey have become clogged with the dulness and heaviness of our nativepursuits. The romantic school began with the worship of subjectivesensibility and the revolt against legality of which Rousseau was thefirst great prophet: and through various fluxes and refluxes, rightwings and left wings, it stands to-day with two men of genius, M. Renanand M. Zola, as its principal exponents, --one speaking with itsmasculine, 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 theRenan I have in mind is of course the Renan of latest dates. As I haveused the term gnostic, both he and Zola are gnostics of the mostpronounced sort. Both are athirst for the facts of life, and boththink the facts of human sensibility to be of all facts the most worthyof attention. Both agree, moreover, that sensibility seems to be therefor no higher purpose, --certainly not, as the Philistines say, for thesake of bringing mere outward rights to pass and frustrating outwardwrongs. One dwells on the sensibilities for their energy, the otherfor their sweetness; one speaks with a voice of {173} bronze, the otherwith that of an Æolian harp; one ruggedly ignores the distinction ofgood and evil, the other plays the coquette between the cravenunmanliness of his Philosophic Dialogues and the butterfly optimism ofhis Souvenirs de Jeunesse. But under the pages of both there soundsincessantly the hoarse bass of _vanitas vanitatum, omnia vanitas_, which the reader may hear, whenever he will, between the lines. Nowriter of this French romantic school has a word of rescue from thehour of satiety with the things of life, --the hour in which we say, "Itake no pleasure in them, "--or from the hour of terror at the world'svast meaningless grinding, if perchance such hours should come. Forterror and satiety are facts of sensibility like any others; and attheir own hour they reign in their own right. The heart of theromantic utterances, whether poetical, critical, or historical, is thisinward remedilessness, what Carlyle calls this far-off whimpering ofwail and woe. And from this romantic state of mind there is absolutelyno possible _theoretic_ escape. Whether, like Renan, we look upon lifein a more refined way, as a romance of the spirit; or whether, like thefriends 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 worldappears to us potentially as what the same Carlyle once called it, avast, gloomy, solitary Golgotha and mill of death. 

The only escape is by the practical way. And since I have mentionedthe 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 mostimportant 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 ofthings. It says conduct, and not sensibility, is the ultimate fact forour recognition. With the vision of certain works to be done, ofcertain outward changes to be wrought or resisted, it says ourintellectual horizon terminates. No matter how we succeed in doingthese outward duties, whether gladly and spontaneously, or heavily andunwillingly, do them we somehow must; for the leaving of them undone isperdition. No matter how we feel; if we are only faithful in theoutward 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 ourshoulders; bend our neck beneath the heavy legality of its weight;regard something else than our feeling as our limit, our master, andour law; be willing to live and die in its service, --and, at a stroke, we have passed from the subjective into the objective philosophy ofthings, much as one awakens from some feverish dream, full of badlights and noises, to find one's self bathed in the sacred coolness andquiet of the air of the night. 

But what is the essence of this philosophy of objective conduct, soold-fashioned and finite, but so chaste and sane and strong, whencompared with its romantic rival? It is the recognition of limits, foreign and opaque to our understanding. It is the willingness, afterbringing about some external good, to feel at peace; for ourresponsibility ends with the {175} performance of that duty, and theburden 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 ofconduct, however small. For in the view of that philosophy theuniverse belongs to a plurality of semi-independent forces, each one ofwhich may help or hinder, and be helped or hindered by, the operationsof the rest. 

But this brings us right back, after such a long detour, to thequestion of indeterminism and to the conclusion of all I came here tosay to-night. For the only consistent way of representing a pluralismand a world whose parts may affect one another through their conductbeing either good or bad is the indeterministic way. What interest, zest, or excitement can there be in achieving the right way, unless weare enabled to feel that the wrong way is also a possible and a naturalway, --nay, more, a menacing and an imminent way? And what sense canthere be in condemning ourselves for taking the wrong way, unless weneed have done nothing of the sort, unless the right way was open to usas well? I cannot understand the willingness to act, no matter how wefeel, without the belief that acts are really good and bad. I cannotunderstand the belief that an act is bad, without regret at itshappening. I cannot understand regret without the admission of real, genuine possibilities in the world. Only _then_ is it {176} other thana mockery to feel, after we have failed to do our best, that anirreparable opportunity is gone from the universe, the loss of which itmust forever after mourn. 

If you insist that this is all superstition, that possibility is in theeye of science and reason impossibility, and that if I act badly 'tisthat the universe was foredoomed to suffer this defect, you fall rightback 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 ownpart, though, whatever difficulties may beset the philosophy ofobjective right and wrong, and the indeterminism it seems to imply, determinism, with its alternative of pessimism or romanticism, containsdifficulties that are greater still. But you will remember that Iexpressly repudiated awhile ago the pretension to offer any argumentswhich could be coercive in a so-called scientific fashion in thismatter. And I consequently find myself, at the end of this long talk, obliged to state my conclusions in an altogether personal way. Thispersonal method of appeal seems to be among the very conditions of theproblem; and the most any one can do is to confess as candidly as hecan the grounds for the faith that is in him, and leave his example towork on others as it may. 

Let me, then, without circumlocution say just this. The world isenigmatical enough in all conscience, whatever theory we may take uptoward it. The indeterminism I defend, the free-will theory of popularsense based on the judgment of regret, represents {177} that world asvulnerable, and liable to be injured by certain of its parts if theyact wrong. And it represents their acting wrong as a matter ofpossibility or accident, neither inevitable nor yet to be infalliblywarded off. In all this, it is a theory devoid either of transparencyor of stability. It gives us a pluralistic, restless universe, inwhich no single point of view can ever take in the whole scene; and toa 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 methat the thought of my universe made him sick, like the sight of thehorrible motion of a mass of maggots in their carrion bed. 

But while I freely admit that the pluralism and the restlessness arerepugnant and irrational in a certain way, I find that everyalternative to them is irrational in a deeper way. The indeterminismwith its maggots, if you please to speak so about it, offends only thenative absolutism of my intellect, --an absolutism which, after all, perhaps, deserves to be snubbed and kept in check. But the determinismwith its necessary carrion, to continue the figure of speech, and withno possible maggots to eat the latter up, violates my sense of moralreality through and through. When, for example, I imagine such carrionas the Brockton murder, I cannot conceive it as an act by which theuniverse, as a whole, logically and necessarily expresses its naturewithout shrinking from complicity with such a whole. And Ideliberately refuse to keep on terms of loyalty with the universe bysaying blankly that the murder, since it does flow from the nature ofthe whole, is not carrion. There are some instinctive reactions which{178} I, for one, will not tamper with. The only remainingalternative, the attitude of gnostical romanticism, wrenches mypersonal instincts in quite as violent a way. It falsifies the simpleobjectivity of their deliverance. It makes the goose-flesh the murderexcites in me a sufficient reason for the perpetration of the crime. It transforms life from a tragic reality into an insincere melodramaticexhibition, as foul or as tawdry as any one's diseased curiositypleases to carry it out. And with its consecration of the 'romannaturaliste' state of mind, and its enthronement of the baser crew ofParisian _littérateurs_ among the eternally indispensable organs bywhich the infinite spirit of things attains to that subjectiveillumination which is the task of its life, it leaves me in presence ofa sort of subjective carrion considerably more noisome than theobjective carrion I called it in to take away. 

No! better a thousand times, than such systematic corruption of ourmoral sanity, the plainest pessimism, so that it be straightforward;but better far than that the world of chance. Make as great an uproarabout chance as you please, I know that chance means pluralism andnothing more. If some of the members of the pluralism are bad, thephilosophy of pluralism, whatever broad views it may deny me, permitsme, at least, to turn to the other members with a clean breast ofaffection and an unsophisticated moral sense. And if I still wish tothink of the world as a totality, it lets me feel that a world with achance in it of being altogether good, even if the chance never come topass, 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 myview of the future as the suicide of reason concerning it, that'chance' is--what? Just this, --the chance that in moral respects thefuture may be other and better than the past has been. This is theonly chance we have any motive for supposing to exist. Shame, rather, on its repudiation and its denial! For its presence is the vital airwhich lets the world live, the salt which keeps it sweet. 

And here I might legitimately stop, having expressed all I care to seeadmitted 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 allI have said from having its effect; so I judge it best to add a fewmore 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 tothe deterministic doctrine, you wish a pleasanter word than 'chance' toname the opposite doctrine by; and you very likely consider mypreference 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 hadnot 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 softdeterminists has perhaps driven me too violently the other way; and, rather than be found wrangling with them for the good words, I amwilling to take the first bad one which comes along, provided it beunequivocal. The question is of things, not of eulogistic names forthem; and the best word is the one that enables men to {180} know thequickest whether they disagree or not about the things. But the word'chance, ' with its singular negativity, is just the word for thispurpose. Whoever uses it instead of 'freedom, ' squarely and resolutelygives 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 wecan use, if, in granting freedom to certain things, we grant ithonestly, and really risk the game. "Who chooses me must give andforfeit all he hath. " Any other word permits of quibbling, and letsus, after the fashion of the soft determinists, make a pretence ofrestoring the caged bird to liberty with one hand, while with the otherwe anxiously tie a string to its leg to make sure it does not getbeyond our sight. 

But now you will bring up your final doubt. Does not the admission ofsuch an unguaranteed chance or freedom preclude utterly the notion of aProvidence governing the world? Does it not leave the fate of theuniverse at the mercy of the chance-possibilities, and so far insecure?Does it not, in short, deny the craving of our nature for an ultimatepeace behind all tempests, for a blue zenith above all clouds?

To this my answer must be very brief. The belief in free-will is notin the least incompatible with the belief in Providence, provided youdo not restrict the Providence to fulminating nothing but _fatal_decrees. If you allow him to provide possibilities as well asactualities to the universe, and to carry on his own thinking in thosetwo categories just as we do ours, chances may be there, uncontrolledeven 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 befrom all eternity. 

An analogy will make the meaning of this clear. Suppose two men beforea chessboard, --the one a novice, the other an expert player of thegame. The expert intends to beat. But he cannot foresee exactly whatany one actual move of his adversary may be. He knows, however, allthe _possible_ moves of the latter; and he knows in advance how to meeteach of them by a move of his own which leads in the direction ofvictory. And the victory infallibly arrives, after no matter howdevious a course, in the one predestined form of check-mate to thenovice's king. 

Let now the novice stand for us finite free agents, and the expert forthe infinite mind in which the universe lies. Suppose the latter to bethinking out his universe before he actually creates it. Suppose himto say, I will lead things to a certain end, but I will not _now_[10]decide on all the steps thereto. At various points, ambiguouspossibilities shall be left {182} open, _either_ of which, at a giveninstant, may become actual. But whichever branch of these bifurcationsbecome real, I know what I shall do at the _next_ bifurcation to keepthings from drifting away from the final result I intend. [11]

The creator's plan of the universe would thus be left blank as to manyof its actual details, but all possibilities would be marked down. Therealization of some of these would be left absolutely to chance; thatis, would only be determined when the moment of realization came. Other possibilities would be _contingently_ determined; that is, theirdecision would have to wait till it was seen how the matters ofabsolute chance fell out. But the rest of the plan, including itsfinal upshot, would be rigorously determined once for all. So thecreator himself would not need to know _all_ the details of actualityuntil they came; and at any time his own view of the world would be aview partly of facts and partly of possibilities, exactly as ours isnow. Of one thing, however, he might be certain; and that is that hisworld was safe, and that no matter how much it might zig-zag he couldsurely bring it home at last. 

{183}

Now, it is entirely immaterial, in this scheme, whether the creatorleave the absolute chance-possibilities to be decided by himself, eachwhen its proper moment arrives, or whether, on the contrary, healienate this power from himself, and leave the decision out and out tofinite creatures such as we men are. The great point is that thepossibilities are really _here_. Whether it be we who solve them, orhe working through us, at those soul-trying moments when fate's scalesseem to quiver, and good snatches the victory from evil or shrinksnerveless from the fight, is of small account, so long as we admit thatthe issue is decided nowhere else than here and now. _That_ is whatgives the palpitating reality to our moral life and makes it tingle, asMr. Mallock says, with so strange and elaborate an excitement. Thisreality, this excitement, are what the determinisms, hard and softalike, suppress by their denial that _anything_ is decided here andnow, and their dogma that all things were foredoomed and settled longago. If it be so, may you and I then have been foredoomed to the errorof continuing to believe in liberty. [12] It is fortunate for thewinding up of controversy that in every discussion with determinismthis _argumentum ad hominem_ can be its adversary's last word. 

[1] An Address to the Harvard Divinity Students, published in theUnitarian 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 thenotion that the thought of a universal physical order can possibly havearisen from the purely passive reception and association of particularperceptions. Indubitable as it is that men infer from known cases tounknown, it is equally certain that this procedure, if restricted tothe phenomenal materials that spontaneously offer themselves, wouldnever have led to the belief in a general uniformity, but only to thebelief that law and lawlessness rule the world in motley alternation. From the point of view of strict experience, nothing exists but the sumof 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 isnot discovered; _till the order is looked for_. The first impulse tolook for it proceeds from practical needs: where ends must be attained, or produce a result. But the practical need is only the first occasionfor our reflection on the conditions of true knowledge; and even werethere no such need, motives would still be present for carrying usbeyond the stage of mere association. For not with an equal interest, or rather with an equal lack of interest, does man contemplate thosenatural processes in which a thing is linked with its former mate, andthose in which it is linked to something else. _The former processesharmonize 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. Andthus the intellectual satisfaction which at first comes to him withoutreflection, at last excites in him the conscious wish to find realizedthroughout the entire phenomenal world those rational continuities, uniformities, and necessities which are the fundamental element andguiding principle of his own thought. " (Sigwart, Logik, bd. 3, s. 382. )

[4] Speaking technically, it is a word with a positive denotation, buta connotation that is negative. Other things must be silent about_what_ it is: it alone can decide that point at the moment in which itreveals itself. 

[5] A favorite argument against free-will is that if it be true, aman's murderer may as probably be his best friend as his worst enemy, amother be as likely to strangle as to suckle her first-born, and all ofus be as ready to jump from fourth-story windows as to go out of frontdoors, etc. Users of this argument should properly be excluded fromdebate till they learn what the real question is. 'Free-will' does notsay that everything that is physically conceivable is also morallypossible. It merely says that of alternatives that really _tempt_ ourwill more than one is really possible. Of course, the alternativesthat do thus tempt our will are vastly fewer than the physicalpossibilities we can coldly fancy. Persons really tempted often domurder their best friends, mothers do strangle their first-born, peopledo jump out of fourth-story windows, etc. 

[6] To a reader who says he is satisfied with a pessimism, and has noobjection to thinking the whole bad, I have no more to say: he makesfewer demands on the world than I, who, making them, wish to look alittle further before I give up all hope of having them satisfied. If, however, all he means is that the badness of some parts does notprevent his acceptance of a universe whose _other_ parts give himsatisfaction, I welcome him as an ally. He has abandoned the notion ofthe _Whole_, which is the essence of deterministic monism, and viewsthings 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. Servonsles intentions du grand chorège en contribuant à rendre le spectacleaussi brillant, aussi varié que possible. --RENAN. 

[9] The burden, for example, of seeing to it that the _end_ of all ourrighteousness be some positive universal gain. 

[10] This of course leaves the creative mind subject to the law oftime. And to any one who insists on the timelessness of that mind Ihave no reply to make. A mind to whom all time is simultaneouslypresent must see all things under the form of actuality, or under someform to us unknown. If he thinks certain moments as ambiguous in theircontent while future, he must simultaneously know how the ambiguitywill have been decided when they are past. So that none of his mentaljudgments can possibly be called hypothetical, and his world is onefrom which chance is excluded. Is not, however, the timeless mindrather a gratuitous fiction? And is not the notion of eternity beinggiven at a stroke to omniscience only just another way of whacking uponus the block-universe, and of denying that possibilities exist?--justthe point to be proved. To say that time is an illusory appearance isonly a roundabout manner of saying there is no real plurality, and thatthe frame of things is an absolute unit. Admit plurality, and time maybe its form. 

[11] And this of course means 'miraculous' interposition, but notnecessarily of the gross sort our fathers took such delight inrepresenting, and which has so lost its magic for us. Emerson quotessome Eastern sage as saying that if evil were really done under thesun, the sky would incontinently shrivel to a snakeskin and cast it outin spasms. But, says Emerson, the spasms of Nature are years andcenturies; and it will tax man's patience to wait so long. We maythink of the reserved possibilities God keeps in his own hand, under asinvisible 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 andsky are not the only neutralizers of obstruction to a god's plans ofwhich 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 leastresistance, can reply in that tense, saying, "It will have been fated, "to the still small voice which urges an opposite course; and thusexcuse themselves from effort in a quite unanswerable way. 

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THE MORAL PHILOSOPHER AND THE MORAL LIFE. [1]

The main purpose of this paper is to show that there is no such thingpossible as an ethical philosophy dogmatically made up in advance. Weall help to determine the content of ethical philosophy so far as wecontribute to the race's moral life. In other words, there can be nofinal truth in ethics any more than in physics, until the last man hashad 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 actsto which they prompt us, are among the indispensable conditions whichdetermine what that 'say' shall be. 

First of all, what is the position of him who seeks an ethicalphilosophy? To begin with, he must be distinguished from all those whoare satisfied to be ethical sceptics. He _will_ not be a sceptic;therefore so far from ethical scepticism being one possible fruit ofethical philosophizing, it can only be regarded as that residualalternative to all philosophy which from the outset menaces everywould-be philosopher who may give up the quest discouraged, andrenounce his original aim. That aim is to find an account of the moralrelations that obtain among things, which {185} will weave them intothe unity of a stable system, and make of the world what one may call agenuine universe from the ethical point of view. So far as the worldresists reduction to the form of unity, so far as ethical propositionsseem unstable, so far does the philosopher fail of his ideal. Thesubject-matter of his study is the ideals he finds existing in theworld; the purpose which guides him is this ideal of his own, ofgetting them into a certain form. This ideal is thus a factor inethical philosophy whose legitimate presence must never be overlooked;it is a positive contribution which the philosopher himself necessarilymakes to the problem. But it is his only positive contribution. Atthe outset of his inquiry he ought to have no other ideals. Were heinterested peculiarly in the triumph of any one kind of good, he would_pro tanto_ cease to be a judicial investigator, and become an advocatefor some limited element of the case. 

There are three questions in ethics which must be kept apart. Let thembe called respectively the _psychological_ question, the _metaphysical_question, and the _casuistic_ question. The psychological questionasks 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 whatis the _measure_ of the various goods and ills which men recognize, sothat 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 ownsatisfaction that an altogether unique faculty called 'conscience' mustbe postulated to tell us what is right and what is wrong; or when yourpopular-science enthusiast has proclaimed that 'apriorism' is anexploded superstition, and that our moral judgments have graduallyresulted from the teaching of the environment, each of these personsthinks that ethics is settled and nothing more is to be said. Thefamiliar pair of names, Intuitionist and Evolutionist, so commonly usednow to connote all possible differences in ethical opinion, reallyrefer to the psychological question alone. The discussion of thisquestion hinges so much upon particular details that it is impossibleto enter upon it at all within the limits of this paper. I willtherefore only express dogmatically my own belief, which is this, --thatthe Benthams, the Mills, and the Barns have done a lasting service intaking so many of our human ideals and showing how they must havearisen from the association with acts of simple bodily pleasures andreliefs from pain. Association with many remote pleasures willunquestionably make a thing significant of goodness in our minds; andthe more vaguely the goodness is conceived of, the more mysterious willits source appear to be. But it is surely impossible to explain allour sentiments and preferences in this simple way. The more minutelypsychology studies human nature, the more clearly it finds there tracesof secondary affections, relating the impressions of the environmentwith one another and with our impulses in quite different ways fromthose mere associations of coexistence and succession which arepractically all that pure empiricism can admit. Take the love ofdrunkenness; take bashfulness, the terror {187} of high places, thetendency to sea-sickness, to faint at the sight of blood, thesusceptibility to musical sounds; take the emotion of the comical, thepassion for poetry, for mathematics, or for metaphysics, --no one ofthese things can be wholly explained by either association or utility. They _go with_ other things that can be so explained, no doubt; andsome of them are prophetic of future utilities, since there is nothingin us for which some use may not be found. But their origin is inincidental complications to our cerebral structure, a structure whoseoriginal features arose with no reference to the perception of suchdiscords and harmonies as these. 

Well, a vast number of our moral perceptions also are certainly of thissecondary and brain-born kind. They deal with directly felt fitnessesbetween things, and often fly in the teeth of all the prepossessions ofhabit and presumptions of utility. The moment you get beyond thecoarser and more commonplace moral maxims, the Decalogues and PoorRichard's Almanacs, you fall into schemes and positions which to theeye of common-sense are fantastic and overstrained. The sense forabstract justice which some persons have is as excentric a variation, from the natural-history point of view, as is the passion for music orfor the higher philosophical consistencies which consumes the soul ofothers. The feeling of the inward dignity of certain spiritualattitudes, as peace, serenity, simplicity, veracity; and of theessential vulgarity of others, as querulousness, anxiety, egoisticfussiness, etc. , --are quite inexplicable except by an innate preferenceof 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 whathave consequences to do with what is _mean_ and _vulgar_? If a man hasshot his wife's paramour, by reason of what subtile repugnancy inthings is it that we are so disgusted when we hear that the wife andthe 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, andmillions kept permanently happy on the one simple condition that acertain lost soul on the far-off edge of things should lead a life oflonely torture, what except a specifical and independent sort ofemotion can it be which would make us immediately feel, even though animpulse arose within us to clutch at the happiness so offered, howhideous a thing would be its enjoyment when deliberately accepted asthe fruit of such a bargain? To what, once more, but subtilebrain-born feelings of discord can be due all these recent protestsagainst the entire race-tradition of retributive justice?--I refer toTolstoi with his ideas of non-resistance, to Mr. Bellamy with hissubstitution of oblivion for repentance (in his novel of Dr. Heidenhain's Process), to M. Guyau with his radical condemnation of thepunitive ideal. All these subtileties of the moral sensibility go asmuch beyond what can be ciphered out from the 'laws of association' asthe delicacies of sentiment possible between a pair of young lovers gobeyond such precepts of the 'etiquette to be observed duringengagement' 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 presentthemselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience than inthat of probable causes of future experience, factors to which theenvironment 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 lastchapter of a recent work[2] I have sought to prove in a general way theexistence, in our thought, of relations which do not merely repeat thecouplings of experience. Our ideals have certainly many sources. Theyare not all explicable as signifying corporeal pleasures to be gained, and pains to be escaped. And for having so constantly perceived thispsychological fact, we must applaud the intuitionist school. Whetheror not such applause must be extended to that school's othercharacteristics will appear as we take up the following questions. 

The next one in order is the metaphysical question, of what we mean bythe words 'obligation, ' 'good, ' and 'ill. '

II. 

First of all, it appears that such words can have no application orrelevancy in a world in which no sentient life exists. Imagine anabsolutely material world, containing only physical and chemical facts, and existing from eternity without a God, without even an interestedspectator: would there be any sense in saying of that world that one ofits states is better than another? Or if there were two such worldspossible, would there be any rhyme or reason in calling one good andthe other bad, --good or {190} bad positively, I mean, and apart fromthe fact that one might relate itself better than the other to thephilosopher's private interests? But we must leave these privateinterests out of the account, for the philosopher is a mental fact, andwe are asking whether goods and evils and obligations exist in physicalfacts _per se_. Surely there is no _status_ for good and evil to existin, 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, doyou say? But what in a purely physical universe demands the productionof that other fact? Physical facts simply _are_ or are _not_; andneither 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 haveceased to be purely physical facts, and have become facts of conscioussensibility. Goodness, badness, and obligation must be _realised_somewhere in order really to exist; and the first step in ethicalphilosophy is to see that no merely inorganic 'nature of things' canrealize them. Neither moral relations nor the moral law can swing _invacuo_. Their only habitat can be a mind which feels them; and noworld composed of merely physical facts can possibly be a world towhich 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 relationsnow have their _status_, in that being's consciousness. So far as hefeels anything to be good, he _makes_ it good. It {191} _is_ good, forhim; and being good for him, is absolutely good, for he is the solecreator of values in that universe, and outside of his opinion thingshave no moral character at all. 

In such a universe as that it would of course be absurd to raise thequestion of whether the solitary thinker's judgments of good and illare true or not. Truth supposes a standard outside of the thinker towhich he must conform; but here the thinker is a sort of divinity, subject to no higher judge. Let us call the supposed universe which heinhabits a _moral solitude_. In such a moral solitude it is clear thatthere can be no outward obligation, and that the only trouble thegod-like thinker is liable to have will be over the consistency of hisown several ideals with one another. Some of these will no doubt bemore pungent and appealing than the rest, their goodness will have aprofounder, more penetrating taste; they will return to haunt him withmore obstinate regrets if violated. So the thinker will have to orderhis life with them as its chief determinants, or else remain inwardlydiscordant and unhappy. Into whatever equilibrium he may settle, though, and however he may straighten out his system, it will be aright system; for beyond the facts of his own subjectivity there isnothing moral in the world. 

If now we introduce a second thinker with his likes and dislikes intothe universe, the ethical situation becomes much more complex, andseveral possibilities are immediately seen to obtain. 

One of these is that the thinkers may ignore each other's attitudeabout good and evil altogether, and each continue to indulge his ownpreferences, 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 init as our moral solitude, only it is without ethical unity. The sameobject is good or bad there, according as you measure it by the viewwhich this one or that one of the thinkers takes. Nor can you find anypossible ground in such a world for saying that one thinker's opinionis more correct than the other's, or that either has the truer moralsense. Such a world, in short, is not a moral universe but a moraldualism. Not only is there no single point of view within it fromwhich the values of things can be unequivocally judged, but there isnot even a demand for such a point of view, since the two thinkers aresupposed to be indifferent to each other's thoughts and acts. Multiplythe thinkers into a pluralism, and we find realized for us in theethical sphere something like that world which the antique scepticsconceived of, --in which individual minds are the measures of allthings, 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 heholds to the hope of a philosophy, will not put up. Among the variousideals represented, there must be, he thinks, some which have the moretruth or authority; and to these the others _ought_ to yield, so thatsystem and subordination may reign. Here in the word 'ought' thenotion of _obligation_ comes emphatically into view, and the next thingin order must be to make its meaning clear. 

Since the outcome of the discussion so far has been to show us thatnothing can be good or right except {193} so far as some consciousnessfeels it to be good or thinks it to be right, we perceive on the verythreshold that the real superiority and authority which are postulatedby the philosopher to reside in some of the opinions, and the reallyinferior character which he supposes must belong to others, cannot beexplained by any abstract moral 'nature of things' existingantecedently to the concrete thinkers themselves with their ideals. Like the positive attributes good and bad, the comparative ones betterand worse must be _realised_ in order to be real. If one idealjudgment be objectively better than another, that betterness must bemade flesh by being lodged concretely in some one's actual perception. It cannot float in the atmosphere, for it is not a sort ofmeteorological phenomenon, like the aurora borealis or the zodiacallight. Its _esse_ is _percipi_, like the _esse_ of the idealsthemselves between which it obtains. The philosopher, therefore, whoseeks to know which ideal ought to have supreme weight and which oneought to be subordinated, must trace the _ought_ itself to the _defacto_ constitution of some existing consciousness, behind which, asone of the data of the universe, he as a purely ethical philosopher isunable to go. This consciousness must make the one ideal right byfeeling it to be right, the other wrong by feeling it to be wrong. Butnow what particular consciousness in the universe _can_ enjoy thisprerogative of obliging others to conform to a rule which it lays down?

If one of the thinkers were obviously divine, while all the rest werehuman, there would probably be no practical dispute about the matter. The divine thought would be the model, to which the others shouldconform. But still the theoretic question {194} would remain, What isthe ground of the obligation, even here?

In our first essays at answering this question, there is an inevitabletendency to slip into an assumption which ordinary men follow when theyare disputing with one another about questions of good and bad. Theyimagine an abstract moral order in which the objective truth resides;and each tries to prove that this pre-existing order is more accuratelyreflected in his own ideas than in those of his adversary. It isbecause one disputant is backed by this overarching abstract order thatwe think the other should submit. Even so, when it is a question nolonger of two finite thinkers, but of God and ourselves, --we follow ourusual habit, and imagine a sort of _de jure_ relation, which antedatesand overarches the mere facts, and would make it right that we shouldconform our thoughts to God's thoughts, even though he made no claim tothat effect, and though we preferred _de facto_ to go on thinking forourselves. 

But the moment we take a steady look at the question, _we see not onlythat without a claim actually made by some concrete person there can beno obligation, but that there is some obligation wherever there is aclaim_. Claim and obligation are, in fact, coextensive terms; theycover each other exactly. Our ordinary attitude of regarding ourselvesas subject to an overarching system of moral relations, true 'inthemselves, ' is therefore either an out-and-out superstition, or elseit must be treated as a merely provisional abstraction from that realThinker in whose actual demand upon us to think as he does ourobligation must be ultimately based. In a theistic-ethical philosophythat thinker in question is, of {195} course, the Deity to whom theexistence of the universe is due. 

I know well how hard it is for those who are accustomed to what I havecalled the superstitious view, to realize that every _de facto_ claimcreates in so far forth an obligation. We inveterately think thatsomething which we call the 'validity' of the claim is what gives to itits obligatory character, and that this validity is something outsideof the claim's mere existence as a matter of fact. It rains down uponthe claim, we think, from some sublime dimension of being, which themoral law inhabits, much as upon the steel of the compass-needle theinfluence of the Pole rains down from out of the starry heavens. Butagain, 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, howeverweak, 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 couldadduce would be the exhibition of another creature who should make ademand that ran the other way. The only possible reason there can bewhy any phenomenon ought to exist is that such a phenomenon actually isdesired. 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 insignificantpersons, and we customarily make light of the obligations which theybring. But the fact that such personal demands as these impose smallobligations does not keep the largest obligations from being personaldemands. 

If we must talk impersonally, to be sure we can say {196} that 'theuniverse' requires, exacts, or makes obligatory such or such an action, whenever it expresses itself through the desires of such or such acreature. But it is better not to talk about the universe in thispersonified way, unless we believe in a universal or divineconsciousness which actually exists. If there be such a consciousness, then its demands carry the most of obligation simply because they arethe greatest in amount. But it is even then not _abstractly right_that we should respect them. It is only concretely right, --or rightafter 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 thisqueer world. That ought not to be, we say; that is wrong. But in whatway is this fact of wrongness made more acceptable or intelligible whenwe imagine it to consist rather in the laceration of an _à priori_ideal order than in the disappointment of a living personal God? Dowe, perhaps, think that we cover God and protect him and make hisimpotence over us less ultimate, when we back him up with this _àpriori_ 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 anabstract ideal order can wield, is found in the 'everlasting rubyvaults' of our own human hearts, as they happen to beat responsive andnot irresponsive to the claim. So far as they do feel it when made bya living consciousness, it is life answering to life. A claim thuslivingly acknowledged is acknowledged with a solidity and fulness whichno thought of an 'ideal' backing can render more complete; while if, onthe other hand, the heart's response is withheld, the stubbornphenomenon is there of an impotence in the claims {197} which theuniverse embodies, which no talk about an eternal nature of things cangloze over or dispel. An ineffective _à priori_ order is as impotent athing as an ineffective God; and in the eye of philosophy, it is ashard a thing to explain. 

We may now consider that what we distinguished as the metaphysicalquestion in ethical philosophy is sufficiently answered, and that wehave learned what the words 'good, ' 'bad, ' and 'obligation' severallymean. They mean no absolute natures, independent of personal support. They are objects of feeling and desire, which have no foothold oranchorage in Being, apart from the existence of actually living minds. 

Wherever such minds exist, with judgments of good and ill, and demandsupon one another, there is an ethical world in its essential features. Were all other things, gods and men and starry heavens, blotted outfrom this universe, and were there left but one rock with two lovingsouls upon it, that rock would have as thoroughly moral a constitutionas any possible world which the eternities and immensities couldharbor. It would be a tragic constitution, because the rock'sinhabitants would die. But while they lived, there would be real goodthings 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 peaceof conscience when it was restored; there would, in short, be a morallife, whose active energy would have no limit but the intensity ofinterest 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 justlike the inhabitants of such a rock. Whether a God exist, or whetherno God exist, in yon blue heaven above us bent, we form at any rate anethical republic here below. And the first reflection which this leadsto is that ethics have as genuine and real a foothold in a universewhere the highest consciousness is human, as in a universe where thereis a God as well. 'The religion of humanity' affords a basis forethics as well as theism does. Whether the purely human system cangratify the philosopher's demand as well as the other is a differentquestion, 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 adivine thinker has been and perhaps always will be doubted by some ofthe lookers-on, and where, in spite of the presence of a large numberof ideals in which human beings agree, there are a mass of others aboutwhich no general consensus obtains. It is hardly necessary to presenta literary picture of this, for the facts are too well known. The warsof the flesh and the spirit in each man, the concupiscences ofdifferent individuals pursuing the same unshareable material or socialprizes, the ideals which contrast so according to races, circumstances, temperaments, philosophical beliefs, etc. , --all form a maze ofapparently inextricable confusion with no obvious Ariadne's thread tolead one out. Yet the philosopher, just because he is a philosopher, adds his own peculiar ideal to the confusion {199} (with which if hewere willing to be a sceptic he would be passably content), and insiststhat 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, andmust 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 isa truth to be ascertained. But in the second place we have just gainedthe 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 theshape of an opinion held by some thinker really to be found. There is, however, no visible thinker invested with authority. Shall we thensimply proclaim our own ideals as the lawgiving ones? No; for if weare true philosophers we must throw our own spontaneous ideals, eventhe dearest, impartially in with that total mass of ideals which arefairly to be judged. But how then can we as philosophers ever find atest; how avoid complete moral scepticism on the one hand, and on theother escape bringing a wayward personal standard of our own along withus, on which we simply pin our faith?

The dilemma is a hard one, nor does it grow a bit more easy as werevolve it in our minds. The entire undertaking of the philosopherobliges him to seek an impartial test. That test, however, must beincarnated in the demand of some actually existent person; and how canhe pick out the person save by an act in which his own sympathies andprepossessions are implied?

One method indeed presents itself, and has as a matter of history beentaken by the more serious {200} ethical schools. If the heap of thingsdemanded proved on inspection less chaotic than at first they seemed, if they furnished their own relative test and measure, then thecasuistic problem would be solved. If it were found that all goods_quâ_ goods contained a common essence, then the amount of this essenceinvolved 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_ goodupon which all thinkers were agreed, the relatively objective anduniversal good that the philosopher seeks. Even his own private idealswould be measured by their share of it, and find their rightful placeamong the rest. 

Various essences of good have thus been found and proposed as bases ofthe ethical system. Thus, to be a mean between two extremes; to berecognized by a special intuitive faculty; to make the agent happy forthe moment; to make others as well as him happy in the long run; to addto his perfection or dignity; to harm no one; to follow from reason orflow from universal law; to be in accordance with the will of God; topromote the survival of the human species on this planet, --are so manytests, each of which has been maintained by somebody to constitute theessence 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 presentin all cases, --_e. G. _, the character of harming no one, or that offollowing a universal law; for the best course is often cruel; and manyacts 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 theirconsequences, and leave us in the lurch where we most need their help:a philosopher of the Sioux Nation, for example, will be certain to usethe survival-criterion in a very different way from ourselves. Thebest, on the whole, of these marks and measures of goodness seems to bethe capacity to bring happiness. But in order not to break downfatally, this test must be taken to cover innumerable acts and impulsesthat never _aim_ at happiness; so that, after all, in seeking for auniversal principle we inevitably are carried onward to the mostuniversal principle, --that _the essence of good is simply to satisfydemand_. The demand may be for anything under the sun. There isreally no more ground for supposing that all our demands can beaccounted for by one universal underlying kind of motive than there isground for supposing that all physical phenomena are cases of a singlelaw. The elementary forces in ethics are probably as plural as thoseof physics are. The various ideals have no common character apart fromthe fact that they are ideals. No single abstract principle can be soused as to yield to the philosopher anything like a scientificallyaccurate 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 purelytheoretic problem, namely, the casuistic question would hardly evercome up at all. If the ethical philosopher were only asking after thebest _imaginable_ system of goods he would indeed have an easy task;for all demands as {202} such are _primâ facie_ respectable, and thebest simply imaginary world would be one in which _every_ demand wasgratified as soon as made. Such a world would, however, have to have aphysical constitution entirely different from that of the one which weinhabit. It would need not only a space, but a time, 'of_n_-dimensions, ' to include all the acts and experiences incompatiblewith one another here below, which would then go on inconjunction, --such as spending our money, yet growing rich; taking ourholiday, yet getting ahead with our work; shooting and fishing, yetdoing no hurt to the beasts; gaining no end of experience, yet keepingour youthful freshness of heart; and the like. There can be noquestion that such a system of things, however brought about, would bethe absolutely ideal system; and that if a philosopher could createuniverses _à priori_, and provide all the mechanical conditions, thatis the sort of universe which he should unhesitatingly create. 

But this world of ours is made on an entirely different pattern, andthe casuistic question here is most tragically practical. The actuallypossible in this world is vastly narrower than all that is demanded;and there is always a _pinch_ between the ideal and the actual whichcan only be got through by leaving part of the ideal behind. There ishardly a good which we can imagine except as competing for thepossession of the same bit of space and time with some other imaginedgood. Every end of desire that presents itself appears exclusive ofsome other end of desire. Shall a man drink and smoke, _or_ keep hisnerves in condition?--he cannot do both. Shall he follow his fancy forAmelia, _or_ for Henrietta?--both cannot be the choice of his heart. Shall he have the {203} dear old Republican party, _or_ a spirit ofunsophistication in public affairs?--he cannot have both, etc. So thatthe ethical philosopher's demand for the right scale of subordinationin ideals is the fruit of an altogether practical need. Some part ofthe ideal must be butchered, and he needs to know which part. It is atragic situation, and no mere speculative conundrum, with which he hasto deal. 

Now we are blinded to the real difficulty of the philosopher's task bythe fact that we are born into a society whose ideals are largelyordered already. If we follow the ideal which is conventionallyhighest, the others which we butcher either die and do not return tohaunt us; or if they come back and accuse us of murder, every oneapplauds us for turning to them a deaf ear. In other words, ourenvironment encourages us not to be philosophers but partisans. Thephilosopher, however, cannot, so long as he clings to his own ideal ofobjectivity, rule out any ideal from being heard. He is confident, andrightly confident, that the simple taking counsel of his own intuitivepreferences would be certain to end in a mutilation of the fulness ofthe truth. The poet Heine is said to have written 'Bunsen' in theplace of 'Gott' in his copy of that author's work entitled "God inHistory, " so as to make it read 'Bunsen in der Geschichte. ' Now, withno disrespect to the good and learned Baron, is it not safe to say thatany single philosopher, however wide his sympathies, must be just sucha Bunsen in der Geschichte of the moral world, so soon as he attemptsto put his own ideas of order into that howling mob of desires, eachstruggling to get breathing-room for the ideal to which it clings? Thevery best of men must not only be insensible, but {204} be ludicrouslyand peculiarly insensible, to many goods. As a militant, fightingfree-handed that the goods to which he is sensible may not be submergedand lost from out of life, the philosopher, like every other humanbeing, is in a natural position. But think of Zeno and of Epicurus, think of Calvin and of Paley, think of Kant and Schopenhauer, ofHerbert Spencer and John Henry Newman, no longer as one-sided championsof special ideals, but as schoolmasters deciding what all mustthink, --and what more grotesque topic could a satirist wish for onwhich to exercise his pen? The fabled attempt of Mrs. Partington toarrest the rising tide of the North Atlantic with her broom was areasonable spectacle compared with their effort to substitute thecontent of their clean-shaven systems for that exuberant mass of goodswith which all human nature is in travail, and groaning to bring to thelight of day. Think, furthermore, of such individual moralists, nolonger as mere schoolmasters, but as pontiffs armed with the temporalpower, and having authority in every concrete case of conflict to orderwhich good shall be butchered and which shall be suffered tosurvive, --and the notion really turns one pale. All one's slumberingrevolutionary instincts waken at the thought of any single moralistwielding such powers of life and death. Better chaos forever than anorder based on any closet-philosopher's rule, even though he were themost enlightened possible member of his tribe. No! if the philosopheris to keep his judicial position, he must never become one of theparties to the fray. 

What can he do, then, it will now be asked, except to fall back onscepticism 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 isopen to him just because he is a philosopher, and not the champion ofone particular ideal? Since everything which is demanded is by thatfact 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_? Thatact must be the best act, accordingly, which makes for the best whole, in the sense of awakening the least sum of dissatisfactions. In thecasuistic scale, therefore, those ideals must be written highest which_prevail at the least cost_, or by whose realization the least possiblenumber of other ideals are destroyed. Since victory and defeat theremust be, the victory to be philosophically prayed for is that of themore inclusive side, --of the side which even in the hour of triumphwill to some degree do justice to the ideals in which the vanquishedparty's interests lay. The course of history is nothing but the storyof men's struggles from generation to generation to find the more andmore inclusive order. _Invent some manner_ of realizing your ownideals which will also satisfy the alien demands, --that and that onlyis the path of peace! Following this path, society has shaken itselfinto one sort of relative equilibrium after another by a series ofsocial discoveries quite analogous to those of science. Polyandry andpolygamy and slavery, private warfare and liberty to kill, judicialtorture and arbitrary royal power have slowly succumbed to actuallyaroused complaints; and though some one's ideals are unquestionably theworse off for each improvement, yet a vastly greater total number ofthem find shelter in our civilized society than in the older {206}savage ways. So far then, and up to date, the casuistic scale is madefor the philosopher already far better than he can ever make it forhimself. An experiment of the most searching kind has proved that thelaws and usages of the land are what yield the maximum of satisfactionto the thinkers taken all together. The presumption in cases ofconflict must always be in favor of the conventionally recognized good. The philosopher must be a conservative, and in the construction of hiscasuistic scale must put the things most in accordance with the customsof the community on top. 

And yet if he be a true philosopher he must see that there is nothingfinal in any actually given equilibrium of human ideals, but that, asour present laws and customs have fought and conquered other past ones, so they will in their turn be overthrown by any newly discovered orderwhich will hush up the complaints that they still give rise to, withoutproducing others louder still. "Rules are made for man, not man forrules, "--that one sentence is enough to immortalize Green's Prolegomenato Ethics. And although a man always risks much when he breaks awayfrom established rules and strives to realize a larger ideal whole thanthey permit, yet the philosopher must allow that it is at all timesopen to any one to make the experiment, provided he fear not to stakehis life and character upon the throw. The pinch is always here. Pentin under every system of moral rules are innumerable persons whom itweighs upon, and goods which it represses; and these are alwaysrumbling and grumbling in the background, and ready for any issue bywhich they may get free. See the abuses which the {207} institution ofprivate property covers, so that even to-day it is shamelessly assertedamong us that one of the prime functions of the national government isto help the adroiter citizens to grow rich. See the unnamed andunnamable sorrows which the tyranny, on the whole so beneficent, of themarriage-institution brings to so many, both of the married and theunwed. See the wholesale loss of opportunity under our _régime_ ofso-called equality and industrialism, with the drummer and thecounter-jumper in the saddle, for so many faculties and graces whichcould flourish in the feudal world. See our kindliness for the humbleand the outcast, how it wars with that stern weeding-out which untilnow has been the condition of every perfection in the breed. Seeeverywhere the struggle and the squeeze; and ever-lastingly the problemhow to make them less. The anarchists, nihilists, and free-lovers; thefree-silverites, socialists, and single-tax men; the free-traders andcivil-service reformers; the prohibitionists and anti-vivisectionists;the radical darwinians with their idea of the suppression of theweak, --these and all the conservative sentiments of society arrayedagainst them, are simply deciding through actual experiment by whatsort of conduct the maximum amount of good can be gained and kept inthis world. These experiments are to be judged, not _à priori_, but byactually finding, after the fact of their making, how much more outcryor how much appeasement comes about. What closet-solutions canpossibly anticipate the result of trials made on such a scale? Or whatcan any superficial theorist's judgment be worth, in a world whereevery one of hundreds of ideals has its special champion alreadyprovided {208} in the shape of some genius expressly born to feel it, and to fight to death in its behalf? The pure philosopher can onlyfollow the windings of the spectacle, confident that the line of leastresistance will always be towards the richer and the more inclusivearrangement, and that by one tack after another some approach to thekingdom 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 beingdeducible all at once from abstract principles, must simply bide itstime, and be ready to revise its conclusions from day to day. Thepresumption of course, in both sciences, always is that the vulgarlyaccepted opinions are true, and the right casuistic order that whichpublic opinion believes in; and surely it would be folly quite asgreat, in most of us, to strike out independently and to aim atoriginality in ethics as in physics. Every now and then, however, someone is born with the right to be original, and his revolutionarythought or action may bear prosperous fruit. He may replace old 'lawsof nature' by better ones; he may, by breaking old moral rules in acertain place, bring in a total condition of things more ideal thanwould have followed had the rules been kept. 

On the whole, then, we must conclude that no philosophy of ethics ispossible in the old-fashioned absolute sense of the term. Everywherethe ethical philosopher must wait on facts. The thinkers who createthe ideals come he knows not whence, their sensibilities are evolved heknows not how; and the {209} question as to which of two conflictingideals will give the best universe then and there, can be answered byhim only through the aid of the experience of other men. I said sometime ago, in treating of the 'first' question, that the intuitionalmoralists deserve credit for keeping most clearly to the psychologicalfacts. They do much to spoil this merit on the whole, however, bymixing with it that dogmatic temper which, by absolute distinctions andunconditional 'thou shalt nots, ' changes a growing, elastic, andcontinuous life into a superstitious system of relics and dead bones. In point of fact, there are no absolute evils, and there are nonon-moral goods; and the _highest_ ethical life--however few may becalled to bear its burdens--consists at all times in the breaking ofrules which have grown too narrow for the actual case. There is butone unconditional commandment, which is that we should seekincessantly, with fear and trembling, so to vote and to act as to bringabout the very largest total universe of good which we can see. Abstract rules indeed can help; but they help the less in proportion asour intuitions are more piercing, and our vocation is the stronger forthe moral life. For every real dilemma is in literal strictness aunique situation; and the exact combination of ideals realized andideals disappointed which each decision creates is always a universewithout a precedent, and for which no adequate previous rule exists. The philosopher, then, _quâ_ philosopher, is no better able todetermine the best universe in the concrete emergency than other men. He sees, indeed, somewhat better than most men, what the questionalways is, --not a question of this good or that good simply taken, butof the two total {210} universes with which these goods respectivelybelong. He knows that he must vote always for the richer universe, forthe good which seems most organizable, most fit to enter into complexcombinations, most apt to be a member of a more inclusive whole. Butwhich particular universe this is he cannot know for certain inadvance; he only knows that if he makes a bad mistake the cries of thewounded will soon inform him of the fact. In all this the philosopheris just like the rest of us non-philosophers, so far as we are just andsympathetic instinctively, and so far as we are open to the voice ofcomplaint. His function is in fact indistinguishable from that of thebest kind of statesman at the present day. His books upon ethics, therefore, so far as they truly touch the moral life, must more andmore ally themselves with a literature which is confessedly tentativeand suggestive rather than dogmatic, --I mean with novels and dramas ofthe deeper sort, with sermons, with books on statecraft andphilanthropy and social and economical reform. Treated in this wayethical treatises may be voluminous and luminous as well; but theynever can be _final_, except in their abstractest and vaguest features;and they must more and more abandon the old-fashioned, clear-cut, andwould-be 'scientific' form. 

V. 

The chief of all the reasons why concrete ethics cannot be final isthat they have to wait on metaphysical and theological beliefs. I saidsome time back that real ethical relations existed in a purely humanworld. They would exist even in what we called a moral solitude if thethinker had various {211} ideals which took hold of him in turn. Hisself of one day would make demands on his self of another; and some ofthe demands might be urgent and tyrannical, while others were gentleand easily put aside. We call the tyrannical demands _imperatives_. If we ignore these we do not hear the last of it. The good which wehave wounded returns to plague us with interminable crops ofconsequential damages, compunctions, and regrets. Obligation can thusexist inside a single thinker's consciousness; and perfect peace canabide with him only so far as he lives according to some sort of acasuistic scale which keeps his more imperative goods on top. It isthe nature of these goods to be cruel to their rivals. Nothing shallavail when weighed in the balance against them. They call out all themercilessness in our disposition, and do not easily forgive us if weare so soft-hearted as to shrink from sacrifice in their behalf. 

The deepest difference, practically, in the moral life of man is thedifference between the easy-going and the strenuous mood. When in theeasy-going mood the shrinking from present ill is our rulingconsideration. The strenuous mood, on the contrary, makes us quiteindifferent to present ill, if only the greater ideal be attained. Thecapacity for the strenuous mood probably lies slumbering in every man, but it has more difficulty in some than in others in waking up. Itneeds the wilder passions to arouse it, the big fears, loves, andindignations; or else the deeply penetrating appeal of some one of thehigher fidelities, like justice, truth, or freedom. Strong relief is anecessity of its vision; and a world where all the mountains arebrought down and all the valleys are {212} exalted is no congenialplace for its habitation. This is why in a solitary thinker this moodmight slumber on forever without waking. His various ideals, known tohim to be mere preferences of his own, are too nearly of the samedenominational 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 toour moral energy falls short of its maximal stimulating power. Life, to be sure, is even in such a world a genuinely ethical symphony; butit is played in the compass of a couple of poor octaves, and theinfinite scale of values fails to open up. Many of us, indeed, --likeSir James Stephen in those eloquent 'Essays by a Barrister, '--wouldopenly laugh at the very idea of the strenuous mood being awakened inus by those claims of remote posterity which constitute the last appealof the religion of humanity. We do not love these men of the futurekeenly enough; and we love them perhaps the less the more we hear oftheir evolutionized perfection, their high average longevity andeducation, their freedom from war and crime, their relative immunityfrom pain and zymotic disease, and all their other negativesuperiorities. This is all too finite, we say; we see too well thevacuum beyond. It lacks the note of infinitude and mystery, and mayall be dealt with in the don't-care mood. No need of agonizingourselves or making others agonize for these good creatures just atpresent. 

When, however, we believe that a God is there, and that he is one ofthe claimants, the infinite perspective opens out. The scale of thesymphony is incalculably prolonged. The more imperative ideals nowbegin to speak with an altogether new objectivity and significance, andto utter the penetrating, shattering, {213} tragically challenging noteof appeal. They ring out like the call of Victor Hugo's alpine eagle, "qui parle au précipice et que le gouffre entend, " and the strenuousmood awakens at the sound. It saith among the trumpets, ha, ha! itsmelleth the battle afar off, the thunder of the captains and theshouting. Its blood is up; and cruelty to the lesser claims, so farfrom being a deterrent element, does but add to the stern joy withwhich it leaps to answer to the greater. All through history, in theperiodical conflicts of puritanism with the don't-care temper, we seethe antagonism of the strenuous and genial moods, and the contrastbetween 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 naturalhuman possibilities that even if there were no metaphysical ortraditional grounds for believing in a God, men would postulate onesimply as a pretext for living hard, and getting out of the game ofexistence its keenest possibilities of zest. Our attitude towardsconcrete evils is entirely different in a world where we believe thereare none but finite demanders, from what it is in one where we joyouslyface tragedy for an infinite demander's sake. Every sort of energy andendurance, of courage and capacity for handling life's evils, is setfree in those who have religious faith. For this reason the strenuoustype of character will on the battle-field of human history alwaysoutwear the easy-going type, and religion will drive irreligion to thewall. 

It would seem, too, --and this is my final conclusion, --that the stableand systematic moral universe {214} for which the ethical philosopherasks is fully possible only in a world where there is a divine thinkerwith all-enveloping demands. If such a thinker existed, his way ofsubordinating the demands to one another would be the finally validcasuistic scale; his claims would be the most appealing; his idealuniverse would be the most inclusive realizable whole. If he nowexist, then actualized in his thought already must be that ethicalphilosophy which we seek as the pattern which our own must evermoreapproach. [3] In the interests of our own ideal of systematicallyunified moral truth, therefore, we, as would-be philosophers, mustpostulate a divine thinker, and pray for the victory of the religiouscause. Meanwhile, exactly what the thought of the infinite thinker maybe is hidden from us even were we sure of his existence; so that ourpostulation of him after all serves only to let loose in us thestrenuous mood. But this is what it does in all men, even those whohave no interest in philosophy. The ethical philosopher, therefore, whenever he ventures to say which course of action is the best, is onno essentially different level from the common man. "See, I have setbefore thee this day life and good, and death and evil; therefore, choose life that thou and thy seed may live, "--when this challengecomes to us, it is simply our total character and personal genius thatare on trial; and if we invoke any so-called philosophy, our choice anduse of that also are but revelations of our personal aptitude orincapacity for moral life. From this unsparing practical ordeal noprofessor's lectures and no array of books {215} can save us. Thesolving word, for the learned and the unlearned man alike, lies in thelast resort in the dumb willingnesses and unwillingnesses of theirinterior characters, and nowhere else. It is not in heaven, neither isit beyond the sea; but the word is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouthand in thy heart, that thou mayest do it. 

[1] An Address to the Yale Philosophical Club, published in theInternational 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 ofmy colleague, Professor Josiah Royce: "The Religious Aspect ofPhilosophy. " Boston, 1885. 

{216}

GREAT MEN AND THEIR ENVIRONMENT. [1]

A remarkable parallel, which I think has never been noticed, obtainsbetween the facts of social evolution on the one hand, and ofzoölogical evolution as expounded by Mr. Darwin on the other. 

It will be best to prepare the ground for my thesis by a few verygeneral remarks on the method of getting at scientific truth. It is acommon platitude that a complete acquaintance with any one thing, however small, would require a knowledge of the entire universe. Not asparrow falls to the ground but some of the remote conditions of hisfall are to be found in the milky way, in our federal constitution, orin the early history of Europe. That is to say, alter the milky way, alter the federal constitution, alter the facts of our barbarianancestry, and the universe would so far be a different universe fromwhat it now is. One fact involved in the difference might be that theparticular little street-boy who threw the stone which brought down thesparrow might not find himself opposite the sparrow at that particularmoment; or, finding himself there, he might not be in that particularserene and disengaged mood of mind which expressed itself in throwingthe stone. But, true as all this is, it would be very foolish for anyone who {217} was inquiring the cause of the sparrow's fall to overlookthe boy as too personal, proximate, and so to speak anthropomorphic anagent, and to say that the true cause is the federal constitution, thewestward migration of the Celtic race, or the structure of the milkyway. If we proceeded on that method, we might say with perfectlegitimacy that a friend of ours, who had slipped on the ice upon hisdoor-step and cracked his skull, some months after dining with thirteenat the table, died because of that ominous feast. I know, in fact, onesuch instance; and I might, if I chose, contend with perfect logicalpropriety that the slip on the ice was no real accident. "There are noaccidents, " I might say, "for science. The whole history of the worldconverged to produce that slip. If anything had been left out, theslip would not have occurred just there and then. To say it would isto deny the relations of cause and effect throughout the universe. Thereal cause of the death was not the slip, _but the conditions whichengendered the slip_, --and among them his having sat at a table, sixmonths previous, one among thirteen. _That_ is truly the reason why hedied 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. Butunfortunately we never fully grasp the import of any true statementuntil we have a clear notion of what the opposite untrue statementwould be. The error is needed to set off the truth, much as a darkbackground is required for exhibiting the brightness of a picture. Andthe error which I am going to use as a foil to set off what seems to methe truth of my own statements is contained in the philosophy of Mr. Herbert Spencer and {218} his disciples. Our problem is, What are thecauses that make communities change from generation togeneration, --that make the England of Queen Anne so different from theEngland of Elizabeth, the Harvard College of to-day so different fromthat of thirty years ago?

I shall reply to this problem, The difference is due to the accumulatedinfluences of individuals, of their examples, their initiatives, andtheir decisions. The Spencerian school replies, The changes areirrespective of persons, and independent of individual control. Theyare due to the environment, to the circumstances, the physicalgeography, the ancestral conditions, the increasing experience of outerrelations; 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 samefallacy as he who should ascribe the death of his friend to the dinnerwith thirteen, or the fall of the sparrow to the milky way. Like thedog in the fable, who drops his real bone to snatch at its image, theydrop the real causes to snatch at others, which from no possible humanpoint of view are available or attainable. Their fallacy is apractical one. Let us see where it lies. Although I believe infree-will myself, I will waive that belief in this discussion, andassume with the Spencerians the predestination of all human actions. On that assumption I gladly allow that were the intelligenceinvestigating the man's or the sparrow's death omniscient andomnipresent, able to take in the whole of time and space at a singleglance, there would not be the slightest objection to the milky way orthe fatal feast being {219} invoked among the sought-for causes. Sucha divine intelligence would see instantaneously all the infinite linesof convergence towards a given result, and it would, moreover, seeimpartially: it would see the fatal feast to be as much a condition ofthe sparrow's death as of the man's; it would see the boy with thestone 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 itto see but two or three things at a time. If it wishes to take widersweeps it has to use 'general ideas, ' as they are called, and in sodoing to drop all concrete truths. Thus, in the present case, if we asmen wish to feel the connection between the milky way and the boy andthe dinner and the sparrow and the man's death, we can do so only byfalling back on the enormous emptiness of what is called an abstractproposition. We must say, All things in the world are fatallypredetermined, and hang together in the adamantine fixity of a systemof natural law. But in the vagueness of this vast proposition we havelost all the concrete facts and links; and in all practical matters theconcrete links are the only things of importance. The human mind isessentially partial. It can be efficient at all only by _picking out_what to attend to, and ignoring everything else, --by narrowing itspoint of view. Otherwise, what little strength it has is dispersed, and it loses its way altogether. Man always wants his curiositygratified for a particular purpose. If, in the case of the sparrow, the purpose is punishment, it would be idiotic to wander off from thecats, boys, and other possible agencies close by in the street, to{220} survey the early Celts and the milky way: the boy would meanwhileescape. And if, in the case of the unfortunate man, we lose ourselvesin contemplation of the thirteen-at-table mystery, and fail to noticethe 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 ourview. In mathematics we know how this method of ignoring andneglecting quantities lying outside of a certain range has been adoptedin 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 theyexist perfectly all the while; but they are as if they did not existfor the purposes of his calculation. Just so an astronomer, in dealingwith the tidal movements of the ocean, takes no account of the wavesmade by the wind, or by the pressure of all the steamers which day andnight are moving their thousands of tons upon its surface. Just so themarksman, in sighting his rifle, allows for the motion of the wind, butnot for the equally real motion of the earth and solar system. Just soa business man's punctuality may overlook an error of five minutes, while a physicist, measuring the velocity of light, must count eachthousandth of a second. 

There are, in short, _different cycles of operation_ in nature;different departments, so to speak, relatively independent of oneanother, so that what goes on at any moment in one may be compatiblewith almost any condition of things at the same time in the next. Themould on the biscuit in the store-room of a {221} man-of-war vegetatesin absolute indifference to the nationality of the flag, the directionof the voyage, the weather, and the human dramas that may go on onboard; and a mycologist may study it in complete abstraction from allthese larger details. Only by so studying it, in fact, is there anychance of the mental concentration by which alone he may hope to learnsomething of its nature. On the other hand, the captain who inmanoeuvring the vessel through a naval fight should think it necessaryto bring the mouldy biscuit into his calculations would very likelylose the battle by reason of the excessive 'thoroughness' of his mind. 

The causes which operate in these incommensurable cycles are connectedwith 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 humanwisdom necessary--to regard them as disconnected and irrelevant to oneanother. 

And this brings us nearer to our special topic. If we look at ananimal or a human being, distinguished from the rest of his kind by thepossession of some extraordinary peculiarity, good or bad, we shall beable to discriminate between the causes which originally _produced_ thepeculiarity in him and the causes that _maintain_ it after it isproduced; and we shall see, if the peculiarity be one that he was bornwith, that these two sets of causes belong to two such irrelevantcycles. It was the triumphant originality of Darwin to see this, andto act accordingly. Separating the causes of production under thetitle of 'tendencies to spontaneous variation, ' and relegating them toa physiological cycle which he forthwith {222} agreed to ignorealtogether, [2] he confined his attention to the causes of preservation, and under the names of natural selection and sexual selection studiedthem exclusively as functions of the cycle of the environment. 

Pre-Darwinian philosophers had also tried to establish the doctrine ofdescent with modification; but they all committed the blunder ofclumping the two cycles of causation into one. What preserves ananimal with his peculiarity, if it be a useful one, they saw to be thenature of the environment to which the peculiarity was adjusted. Thegiraffe with his peculiar neck is preserved by the fact that there arein his environment tall trees whose leaves he can digest. But thesephilosophers went further, and said that the presence of the trees notonly maintained an animal with a long neck to browse upon theirbranches, but also produced him. They _made_ his neck long by theconstant striving they aroused in him to reach up to them. Theenvironment, in short, was supposed by these writers to mould theanimal by a kind of direct pressure, very much as a seal presses thewax into harmony with itself. Numerous instances were given of the wayin which this goes on under our eyes. The exercise of the forge makesthe right arm strong, the palm grows callous to the oar, the mountainair distends the chest, the chased fox grows cunning and the chasedbird shy, the arctic cold stimulates the animal combustion, and soforth. Now these changes, of which many more examples might beadduced, are {223} at present distinguished by the special name of_adaptive_ changes. Their peculiarity is that that very feature in theenvironment to which the animal's nature grows adjusted, itselfproduces the adjustment. The 'inner relation, ' to use Mr. Spencer'sphrase, 'corresponds' with its own efficient cause. 

Darwin's first achievement was to show the utter insignificance inamount of these changes produced by direct adaptation, the immenselygreater mass of changes being produced by internal molecular accidents, of which we know nothing. His next achievement was to define the trueproblem with which we have to deal when we study the effects of thevisible environment on the animal. That problem is simply this; Is theenvironment more likely to _preserve or to destroy him_, on account ofthis or that peculiarity with which he may be born? In giving the nameof 'accidental variations' to those peculiarities with which an animalis born, Darwin does not for a moment mean to suggest that they are notthe fixed outcome of natural law. If the total system of the universebe taken into account, the causes of these variations and the visibleenvironment which preserves or destroys them, undoubtedly do, in someremote and roundabout way, hang together. What Darwin means is, that, since that environment is a perfectly known thing, and its relations tothe organism in the way of destruction or preservation are tangible anddistinct, it would utterly confuse our finite understandings andfrustrate our hopes of science to mix in with it facts from such adisparate and incommensurable cycle as that in which the variations areproduced. This last cycle is that of occurrences before the animal isborn. It is the cycle of influences upon ova and embryos; {224} inwhich lie the causes that tip them and tilt them towards masculinity orfemininity, 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, theiroperations are compatible with any social, political, and physicalconditions of environment. The same parents, living in the sameenvironing conditions, may at one birth produce a genius, at the nextan idiot or a monster. The visible external conditions are thereforenot direct determinants of this cycle; and the more we consider thematter, the more we are forced to believe that two children of the sameparents are made to differ from each other by causes asdisproportionate to their ultimate effects as is the famous pebble onthe Rocky Mountain crest, which separates two rain-drops, to the Gulfof St. Lawrence and the Pacific Ocean toward which it makes themseverally flow. 

The great mechanical distinction between transitive forces anddischarging forces is nowhere illustrated on such a scale as inphysiology. Almost all causes there are forces of _detent_, whichoperate by simply unlocking energy already stored up. They areupsetters of unstable equilibria, and the resultant effect dependsinfinitely more on the nature of the materials upset than on that ofthe particular stimulus which joggles them down. Galvanic work, equalto unity, done on a frog's nerve will discharge from the muscle towhich the nerve belongs mechanical work equal to seventy thousand; andexactly the same muscular {225} effect will emerge if other irritantsthan galvanism are employed. The irritant has merely started orprovoked something which then went on of itself, --as a match may starta fire which consumes a whole town. And qualitatively as well asquantitatively the effect may be absolutely incommensurable with thecause. We find this condition of things in ail organic matter. Chemists are distracted by the difficulties which the instability ofalbuminoid compounds opposes to their study. Two specimens, treated inwhat outwardly seem scrupulously identical conditions, behave in quitedifferent 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 ora mass of koumiss--depends on whether the lactic acid ferment or thealcoholic is introduced first, and gets ahead of the other in startingthe process. Now, when the result is the tendency of an ovum, itselfinvisible to the naked eye, to tip towards this direction or that inits further evolution, --to bring forth a genius or a dunce, even as therain-drop passes east or west of the pebble, --is it not obvious thatthe deflecting cause must lie in a region so recondite and minute, mustbe such a ferment of a ferment, an infinitesimal of so high an order, that surmise itself may never succeed even in attempting to frame animage of it?

Such being the case, was not Darwin right to turn his back upon thatregion altogether, and to keep his own problem carefully free from allentanglement with matters such as these? The success of his work is asufficiently affirmative reply. 

And this brings us at last to the heart of our subject. The causes ofproduction of great men lie in a {226} sphere wholly inaccessible tothe social philosopher. He must simply accept geniuses as data, justas Darwin accepts his spontaneous variations. For him, as for Darwin, the only problem is, these data being given, How does the environmentaffect them, and how do they affect the environment? Now, I affirmthat the relation of the visible environment to the great man is in themain 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 becomesmodified by his influence in an entirely original and peculiar way. Heacts as a ferment, and changes its constitution, just as the advent ofa new zoölogical species changes the faunal and floral equilibrium ofthe region in which it appears. We all recollect Mr. Darwin's famousstatement of the influence of cats on the growth of clover in theirneighborhood. We all have read of the effects of the European rabbitin New Zealand, and we have many of us taken part in the controversyabout the English sparrow here, --whether he kills most canker-worms, ordrives away most native birds. Just so the great man, whether he be animportation from without like Clive in India or Agassiz here, orwhether he spring from the soil like Mahomet or Franklin, brings abouta rearrangement, on a large or a small scale, of the pre-existingsocial relations. 

{227}

The mutations of societies, then, from generation to generation, are inthe main due directly or indirectly to the acts or the example ofindividuals whose genius was so adapted to the receptivities of themoment, or whose accidental position of authority was so critical thatthey became ferments, initiators of movement, setters of precedent orfashion, centres of corruption, or destroyers of other persons, whosegifts, had they had free play, would have led society in anotherdirection. 

We see this power of individual initiative exemplified on a small scaleall about us, and on a large scale in the case of the leaders ofhistory. It is only following the common-sense method of a Lyell, aDarwin, and a Whitney to interpret the unknown by the known, and reckonup cumulatively the only causes of social change we can directlyobserve. Societies of men are just like individuals, in that both atany given moment offer ambiguous potentialities of development. Whether a young man enters business or the ministry may depend on adecision which has to be made before a certain day. He takes the placeoffered in the counting-house, and is _committed_. Little by little, the habits, the knowledges, of the other career, which once lay sonear, cease to be reckoned even among his possibilities. At first, hemay sometimes doubt whether the self he murdered in that decisive hourmight not have been the better of the two; but with the years suchquestions themselves expire, and the old alternative _ego_, once sovivid, fades into something less substantial than a dream. It is nootherwise with nations. They may be committed by kings and ministersto 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 futurepossibilities. Whether it fail or succeed, its declaration must be thestarting-point of new policies. Just so does a revolution, or anygreat civic precedent, become a deflecting influence, whose operationswiden with the course of time. Communities obey their ideals; and anaccidental success fixes an ideal, as an accidental failure blights it. 

Would England have to-day the 'imperial' ideal which she now has, if acertain boy named Bob Clive had shot himself, as he tried to do, atMadras? Would she be the drifting raft she is now in Europeanaffairs[4] if a Frederic the Great had inherited her throne instead ofa Victoria, and if Messrs. Bentham, Mill, Cobden, and Bright had allbeen born in Prussia? England has, no doubt, to-day precisely the sameintrinsic 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 Germanyit has found it. Leaders give the form. Would England be cryingforward and backward at once, as she does now, 'letting I will not waitupon I would, ' wishing to conquer but not to fight, if her ideal had inall these years been fixed by a succession of statesmen of supremelycommanding personality, working in one direction? Certainly not. Shewould have espoused, for better or worse, either one course or another. Had Bismarck died in his cradle, the Germans would still be satisfiedwith appearing to themselves as a race of spectacled _Gelehrten_ andpolitical herbivora, and to the French as _ces bons_, or _ces naifs_, {229} _Allemands_. Bismarck's will showed them, to their own greatastonishment, that they could play a far livelier game. The lessonwill 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 anyrate, one factor in the changes that constitute social evolution. Thecommunity _may_ evolve in many ways. The accidental presence of thisor that ferment decides in which way it _shall_ evolve. Why, the verybirds of the forest, the parrot, the mino, have the power of humanspeech, but never develop it of themselves; some one must be there toteach them. So with us individuals. Rembrandt must teach us to enjoythe struggle of light with darkness, Wagner to enjoy peculiar musicaleffects; Dickens gives a twist to our sentimentality, Artemus Ward toour humor; Emerson kindles a new moral light within us. But it is likeColumbus's egg. "All can raise the flowers now, for all have got theseed. " But if this be true of the individuals in the community, howcan it be false of the community as a whole? If shown a certain way, acommunity may take it; if not, it will never find it. And the ways areto a large extent indeterminate in advance. A nation may obey eitherof many alternative impulses given by different men of genius, andstill live and be prosperous, just as a man may enter either of manybusinesses. Only, the prosperities may differ in their type. 

But the indeterminism is not absolute. Not every {230} 'man' fitsevery 'hour. ' Some incompatibilities there are. A given genius maycome either too early or too late. Peter the Hermit would now be sentto a lunatic asylum. John Mill in the tenth century would have livedand died unknown. Cromwell and Napoleon need their revolutions, Granthis civil war. An Ajax gets no fame in the day of telescopic-sightedrifles; and, to express differently an instance which Spencer uses, what could a Watt have effected in a tribe which no precursive geniushad taught to smelt iron or to turn a lathe?

Now, the important thing to notice is that what makes a certain geniusnow incompatible with his surroundings is usually the fact that someprevious genius of a different strain has warped the community awayfrom the sphere of his possible effectiveness. After Voltaire, noPeter the Hermit; after Charles IX. And Louis XIV. , no generalprotestantization of France; after a Manchester school, aBeaconsfield's success is transient; after a Philip II. , a Castelarmakes little headway; and so on. Each bifurcation cuts off certainsides of the field altogether, and limits the future possible angles ofdeflection. A community is a living thing, and in words which I can dono better than quote from Professor Clifford, [5] "it is the peculiarityof living things not merely that they change under the influence ofsurrounding circumstances, but that any change which takes place inthem is not lost but retained, and as it were built into the organismto serve as the foundation for future actions. If you cause anydistortion in the growth of a tree and make it crooked, whatever youmay do afterwards to make the tree straight the mark of your {231}distortion is there; it is absolutely indelible; it has become part ofthe 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 ofgold how often it has been melted and cooled in geologic ages, or evenin the last year by the hand of man. Any one who cuts down an oak cantell by the rings in its trunk how many times winter has frozen it intowidowhood, and how many times summer has warmed it into life. A livingbeing must always contain within itself the history, not merely of itsown existence, but of all its ancestors. "

Every painter can tell us how each added line deflects his picture in acertain sense. Whatever lines follow must be built on those first laiddown. Every author who starts to rewrite a piece of work knows howimpossible it becomes to use any of the first-written pages again. Thenew beginning has already excluded the possibility of those earlierphrases and transitions, while it has at the same time created thepossibility of an indefinite set of new ones, no one of which, however, is completely determined in advance. Just so the social surroundingsof the past and present hour exclude the possibility of acceptingcertain contributions from individuals; but they do not positivelydefine what contributions shall be accepted, for in themselves they arepowerless to fix what the nature of the individual offerings shallbe. [6]

{232}

Thus social evolution is a resultant of the interaction of two whollydistinct factors, --the individual, deriving his peculiar gifts from theplay of physiological and infra-social forces, but bearing all thepower of initiative and origination in his hands; and, second, thesocial environment, with its power of adopting or rejecting both himand his gifts. Both factors are essential to change. The communitystagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies awaywithout the sympathy of the community. 

All this seems nothing more than common-sense. All who wish to see itdeveloped by a man of genius should read that golden little work, Bagehot's Physics and Politics, in which (it seems to me) the completesense of the way in which concrete things grow and change is aslivingly present as the straining after a pseudo-philosophy ofevolution is livingly absent. But there are never wanting minds towhom such views seem personal and contracted, and allied to ananthropomorphism long exploded in other fields of knowledge. "Theindividual 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 likenecessary 'laws' where human societies are concerned. Mr. Spencer, atthe opening of his Study of Sociology, makes an onslaught on the'great-man theory' of history, from which a few passages may bequoted:--

"The genesis of societies by the action of great men may be comfortablybelieved so long as, resting in general {233} notions, you do not askfor particulars. But now, if, dissatisfied with vagueness, we demandthat our ideas shall be brought into focus and exactly defined, wediscover the hypothesis to be utterly incoherent. If, not stopping atthe explanation of social progress as due to the great man, we go backa step, and ask, Whence comes the great man? we find that the theorybreaks down completely. The question has two conceivable answers: hisorigin 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? Thenthe origin of the great man is natural; and immediately this isrecognized, he must be classed with all other phenomena in the societythat gave him birth as a product of its antecedents. Along with thewhole generation of which he forms a minute part, along with itsinstitutions, language, knowledge, manners, and its multitudinous artsand appliances, he is a _resultant_. . . . You must admit that thegenesis of the great man depends on the long series of complexinfluences which has produced the race in which he appears, and thesocial state into which that race has slowly grown. . . . Before he canremake his society, his society must make him. All those changes ofwhich he is the proximate initiator have their chief causes in thegenerations he descended from. If there is to be anything like a realexplanation of those changes, it must be sought in that aggregate ofconditions out of which both he and they have arisen. "[7]

Now, it seems to me that there is something which one might almost callimpudent in the attempt which Mr. Spencer makes, in the first sentenceof this extract, to pin the reproach of vagueness upon those whobelieve in the power of initiative of the great man. 

{234}

Suppose I say that the singular moderation which now distinguishessocial, political, and religious discussion in England, and contrastsso strongly with the bigotry and dogmatism of sixty years ago, islargely due to J. S. Mill's example. I may possibly be wrong about thefacts; but I am, at any rate, 'asking for particulars, ' and not'resting in general notions. ' And if Mr. Spencer should tell me itstarted from no personal influence whatever, but from the 'aggregate ofconditions, ' 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 withthat of one who would invoke the zodiac to account for the fall of thesparrow, and the thirteen at table to explain the gentleman's death. It is of little more scientific value than the Oriental method ofreplying to whatever question arises by the unimpeachable truism, "Godis great. " _Not_ to fall back on the gods, where a proximate principlemay be found, has with us Westerners long since become the sign of anefficient as distinguished from an inefficient intellect. 

To believe that the cause of everything is to be found in itsantecedents is the starting-point, the initial postulate, not the goaland consummation, of science. If she is simply to lead us out of thelabyrinth by the same hole we went in by three or four thousand yearsago, it seems hardly worth while to have followed her through thedarkness at all. If anything is humanly certain it is that the greatman's society, properly so called, does not make him before he canremake it. Physiological forces, with which {235} the social, political, geographical, and to a great extent anthropologicalconditions have just as much and just as little to do as the conditionof the crater of Vesuvius has to do with the flickering of this gas bywhich I write, are what make him. Can it be that Mr. Spencer holds theconvergence of sociological pressures to have so impinged onStratford-upon-Avon about the 26th of April, 1564, that a W. Shakespeare, with all his mental peculiarities, had to be bornthere, --as the pressure of water outside a certain boat will cause astream of a certain form to ooze into a particular leak? And does hemean to say that if the aforesaid W. Shakespeare had died of cholerainfantum, another mother at Stratford-upon-Avon would needs haveengendered a duplicate copy of him, to restore the sociologicequilibrium, --just as the same stream of water will reappear, no matterhow often you pass a sponge over the leak, so long as the outside levelremains unchanged? Or might the substitute arise at'Stratford-atte-Bowe'? Here, as elsewhere, it is very hard, in themidst 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 usin no doubt whatever of his precise meaning. This widely informed, suggestive, and brilliant writer published last year a couple ofarticles in the Gentleman's Magazine, in which he maintained thatindividuals 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, notupon any mysterious properties of race, nationality, or any otherunknown and unintelligible abstractions, but simply and solely upon the{236} physical circumstances to which they are exposed. If it be afact, as we know it to be, that the French nation differs recognizablyfrom the Chinese, and the people of Hamburg differ recognizably fromthe people of Timbuctoo, then the notorious and conspicuous differencesbetween them are wholly due to the geographical position of the variousraces. If the people who went to Hamburg had gone to Timbuctoo, theywould now be indistinguishable from the semi-barbarian negroes whoinhabit that central African metropolis;[8] and if the people who wentto Timbuctoo had gone to Hamburg, they would now have beenwhite-skinned merchants driving a roaring trade in imitation sherry andindigestible port. . . . The differentiating agency must be sought in thegreat permanent geographical features of land and sea; . . . These havenecessarily and inevitably moulded the characters and histories ofevery nation upon the earth. . . . We cannot regard any nation as anactive agent in differentiating itself. Only the surroundingcircumstances can have any effect in such a direction. [These twosentences dogmatically deny the existence of the relatively independentphysiological cycle of causation. ] To suppose otherwise is to supposethat the mind of man is exempt from the universal law of causation. There is no caprice, no spontaneous impulse, in human endeavors. Eventastes and inclinations _must_ themselves be the result of surroundingcauses. "[9]

{237}

Elsewhere Mr. Allen, writing of the Greek culture, says:--

"It was absolutely and unreservedly the product of the geographicalHellas, acting upon the given factor of the undifferentiated Aryanbrain, . . . To me it seems a self-evident proposition that nothingwhatsoever can differentiate one body of men from another, except thephysical conditions in which they are set, --including, of course, underthe term _physical conditions_ the relations of place and time in whichthey stand with regard to other bodies of men. To suppose otherwise isto deny the primordial law of causation. To imagine that the mind candifferentiate itself is to imagine that it can be differentiatedwithout a cause. "[10]

This outcry about the law of universal causation being undone, themoment we refuse to invest in the kind of causation which is peddledround by a particular school, makes one impatient. These writers haveno 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, theoutward cycle of visible nature and man, his assertion is simplyphysiologically false. For a national mind differentiates 'itself'whenever a genius is born in its midst by causes acting in theinvisible and molecular cycle. But if Mr. Allen means by 'physicalconditions' the whole of nature, his assertion, though true, forms butthe vague Asiatic {238} profession of belief in an all-enveloping fate, which certainly need not plume itself on any specially advanced orscientific character. 

And how can a thinker so clever as Mr. Allen fail to have distinguishedin these matters between _necessary_ conditions and _sufficient_conditions of a given result? The French say that to have an omelet wemust break our eggs; that is, the breaking of eggs is a necessarycondition of the omelet. But is it a sufficient condition? Does anomelet appear whenever three eggs are broken? So of the Greek mind. To get such versatile intelligence it may be that such commercialdealings with the world as the geographical Hellas afforded are anecessary condition. But if they are a sufficient condition, why didnot the Phoenicians outstrip the Greeks in intelligence? Nogeographical environment can produce a given type of mind. It can onlyfoster and further certain types fortuitously produced, and thwart andfrustrate others. Once again, its function is simply selective, anddetermines what shall actually be only by destroying what is positivelyincompatible. An Arctic environment is incompatible with improvidenthabits in its denizens; but whether the inhabitants of such a regionshall unite with their thrift the peacefulness of the Eskimo or thepugnacity of the Norseman is, so far as the climate is concerned, anaccident. Evolutionists should not forget that we all have fivefingers not because four or six would not do just as well, but merelybecause the first vertebrate above the fishes _happened_ to have thatnumber. He owed his prodigious success in founding a line of descentto some entirely other quality, --we know {239} not which, --but theinessential five fingers were taken in tow and preserved to the presentday. So of most social peculiarities. Which of them shall be taken intow by the few qualities which the environment necessarily exacts is amatter of what physiological accidents shall happen among individuals. Mr. Allen promises to prove his thesis in detail by the examples ofChina, India, England, Rome, etc. I have not the smallest hesitationin predicting that he will do no more with these examples than he hasdone with Hellas. He will appear upon the scene after the fact, andshow that the quality developed by each race was, naturally enough, notincompatible with its habitat. But he will utterly fail to show thatthe particular form of compatibility fallen into in each case was theone necessary and only possible form. 

Naturalists know well enough how indeterminate the harmonies between afauna and its environment are. An animal may better his chances ofexistence in either of many ways, --growing aquatic, arboreal, orsubterranean; small and swift, or massive and bulky; spiny, horny, slimy, or venomous; more timid or more pugnacious; more cunning or morefertile of offspring; more gregarious or more solitary; or in otherways besides, --and any one of these ways may suit him to many widelydifferent environments. 

Readers of Mr. A. R. Wallace will well remember the strikingillustrations of this in his Malay Archipelago:--

"Borneo closely resembles New Guinea not only in its vast size and itsfreedom from volcanoes, but in its variety of geological structure, itsuniformity of climate, and the general aspect of the forest vegetationthat clothes its surface; the Moluccas are the counterpart of thePhilippines {240} in their volcanic structure, their extreme fertility, their luxuriant forests, and their frequent earthquakes; and Bali, withthe east end of Java, has a climate almost as dry and a soil almost asarid as that of Timor. Yet between these corresponding groups ofislands, constructed, as it were, after the same pattern, subjected tothe same climate, and bathed by the same oceans, there exists thegreatest possible contrast when we compare their animal productions. Nowhere does the ancient doctrine that differences or similarities inthe various forms of life that inhabit different countries are due tocorresponding physical differences or similarities in the countriesthemselves, meet with so direct and palpable a contradiction. Borneoand New Guinea, as alike physically as two distinct countries can be, are zoölogically wide as the poles asunder; while Australia, with itsdry winds, its open plains, its stony deserts, and its temperateclimate, yet produces birds and quadrupeds which are closely related tothose inhabiting the hot, damp, luxuriant forests which everywhereclothe the plains and mountains of New Guinea. "

Here we have similar physical-geography environments harmonizing withwidely differing animal lives, and similar animal lives harmonizingwith widely differing geographical environments. A singularlyaccomplished writer, E. Gryzanowski, in the North American Review, [11]uses the instances of Sardinia and Corsica in support of this thesiswith 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-Latincivilization, within easy reach of the Phoenician, the Greek, and theSaracen, with a {241} coast-line of more than a thousand miles, endowedwith obvious and tempting advantages, and hiding untold sources ofagricultural and mineral wealth, have nevertheless remained unknown, unheeded, and certainly uncared for during the thirty centuries ofEuropean 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 nocommerce, timber and ports, but no shipping. They have legends, but nopoetry, beauty, but no art; and twenty years ago it could still be saidthat they had universities, but no students. . . . That Sardinia, withall her emotional and picturesque barbarism, has never produced asingle artist is almost as strange as her barbarism itself. . . . Nearthe focus of European civilization, in the very spot which an _àpriori_ geographer would point out as the most favorable place formaterial and intellectual, commercial, and political development, thesestrange sister islands have slept their secular sleep, like _nodes_ onthe sounding-board of history. "

This writer then goes on to compare Sardinia and Sicily with somedetail. All the material advantages are in favor of Sardinia, "and theSardinian population, being of an ancestry more mixed than that of theEnglish race, would justify far higher expectations than that ofSicily. " Yet Sicily's past history has been brilliant in the extreme, and her commerce to-day is great. Dr. Gryzanowski has his own theoryof the historic torpor of these favored isles. He thinks theystagnated because they never gained political autonomy, being alwaysowned by some Continental power. I will not dispute the theory; but Iwill ask, Why did they not gain it? and answer immediately: Simplybecause no individuals were {242} born there with patriotism andability enough to inflame their countrymen with national pride, ambition, and thirst for independent life. Corsicans and Sardiniansare probably as good stuff as any of their neighbors. But the bestwood-pile will not blaze till a torch is applied, and the appropriatetorches seem to have been wanting. [12]

Sporadic great men come everywhere. But for a community to getvibrating through and through {243} with intensely active life, manygeniuses coming together and in rapid succession are required. This iswhy great epochs are so rare, --why the sudden bloom of a Greece, anearly Rome, a Renaissance, is such a mystery. Blow must follow blow sofast that no cooling can occur in the intervals. Then the mass of thenation grows incandescent, and may continue to glow by pure inertialong after the originators of its internal movement have passed away. We often hear surprise expressed that in these high tides of humanaffairs not only the people should be filled with stronger life, butthat individual geniuses should seem so exceptionally abundant. Thismystery is just about as deep as the time-honored conundrum as to whygreat rivers flow by great towns. It is true that great publicfermentations awaken and adopt many geniuses, who in more torpid timeswould have had no chance to work. But over and above this there mustbe an exceptional concourse of genius about a time, to make thefermentation begin at all. The unlikeliness of the concourse is fargreater than the unlikeliness of any particular genius; hence therarity of these periods and the exceptional aspect which they alwayswear. 

{244}

It is folly, then, to speak of the 'laws of history' as of somethinginevitable, which science has only to discover, and whose consequencesany one can then foretell but do nothing to alter or avert. Why, thevery laws of physics are conditional, and deal with _ifs_. Thephysicist does not say, "The water will boil anyhow;" he only says itwill boil if a fire be kindled beneath it. And so the utmost thestudent of sociology can ever predict is that _if_ a genius of acertain sort show the way, society will be sure to follow. It mightlong ago have been predicted with great confidence that both Italy andGermany would reach a stable unity if some one could but succeed instarting the process. It could not have been predicted, however, thatthe _modus operandi_ in each case would be subordination to a paramountstate rather than federation, because no historian could havecalculated the freaks of birth and fortune which gave at the samemoment such positions of authority to three such peculiar individualsas Napoleon III. , Bismarck, and Cavour. So of our own politics. It iscertain now that the movement of the independents, reformers, orwhatever one please to call them, will triumph. But whether it do soby converting the Republican party to its ends, or by rearing a newparty on the ruins of both our present factions, the historian cannotsay. There can be no doubt that the reform movement would make moreprogress in one year with an adequate personal leader than as now inten without one. Were there a great citizen, splendid with every civicgift, to be its candidate, who can doubt that he would lead us tovictory? But, at present, we, his environment, who sigh for him andwould 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 vitalimportance of individual initiative, is, then, an utterly vague andunscientific conception, a lapse from modern scientific determinisminto the most ancient oriental fatalism. The lesson of the analysisthat we have made (even on the completely deterministic hypothesis withwhich we started) forms an appeal of the most stimulating sort to theenergy of the individual. Even the dogged resistance of thereactionary conservative to changes which he cannot hope entirely todefeat is justified and shown to be effective. He retards themovement; deflects it a little by the concessions he extracts; gives ita resultant momentum, compounded of his inertia and his adversaries'speed; and keeps up, in short, a constant lateral pressure, which, tobe sure, never heads it round about, but brings it up at last at a goalfar to the right or left of that to which it would have drifted had heallowed it to drift alone. 

I now pass to the last division of my subject, the function of theenvironment in _mental_ evolution. After what I have already said, Imay be quite concise. Here, if anywhere, it would seem at first sightas if that school must be right which makes the mind passively plastic, and the environment actively productive of the form and order of itsconceptions; which, in a word, thinks that all mental progress mustresult from {246} a series of adaptive changes, in the sense alreadydefined of that word. We know what a vast part of our mental furnitureconsists of purely remembered, not reasoned, experience. The entirefield of our habits and associations by contiguity belongs here. Theentire field of those abstract conceptions which were taught us withthe language into which we were born belongs here also. And, more thanthis, there is reason to think that the order of 'outer relations'experienced by the individual may itself determine the order in whichthe general characters imbedded therein shall be noticed and extractedby his mind. [14] The pleasures and benefits, moreover, which certainparts of the environment yield, and the pains and hurts which otherparts inflict, determine the direction of our interest and ourattention, and so decide at which points the accumulation of mentalexperiences shall begin. It might, accordingly, seem as if there wereno room for any other agency than this; as if the distinction we havefound so useful between 'spontaneous variation, ' as the producer ofchanged forms, and the environment, as their preserver and destroyer, did not hold in the case of mental progress; as if, in a word, theparallel with darwinism might no longer obtain, and Spencer might bequite right with his fundamental law of intelligence, which says, "Thecohesion between psychical states is proportionate to the frequencywith which the relation between the answering external phenomena hasbeen repeated in experience. "[15]

{247}

But, in spite of all these facts, I have no hesitation whatever inholding firm to the darwinian distinction even here. I maintain thatthe 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 theregion of intelligence which man possesses in common with the brutes. And I can easily show that throughout the whole extent of those mentaldepartments which are highest, which are most characteristically human, Spencer's law is violated at every step; and that as a matter of factthe new conceptions, emotions, and active tendencies which evolve areoriginally produced in the shape of random images, fancies, accidentalout-births of spontaneous variation in the functional activity of theexcessively instable human brain, which the outer environment simplyconfirms or refutes, adopts or rejects, preserves ordestroys, --selects, in short, just as it selects morphological andsocial variations due to molecular accidents of an analogous sort. 

It is one of the tritest of truisms that human intelligences of asimple order are very literal. They are slaves of habit, doing whatthey have been taught without variation; dry, prosaic, andmatter-of-fact in their remarks; devoid of humor, except of the coarsephysical kind which rejoices in a practical joke; taking the world forgranted; and possessing in their faithfulness and honesty the singlegift 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 ofinanimate matter than of the steadfastness of a human will capable ofalternative choice. When we descend to the brutes, all thesepeculiarities are intensified. No reader of Schopenhauer can forgethis frequent allusions to the _trockener ernst_ of dogs and horses, norto their _ehrlichkeit_. And every noticer of their ways must receive adeep 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 ofthoughts of concrete things patiently following one another in a beatentrack of habitual suggestion, we have the most abrupt cross-cuts andtransitions from one idea to another, the most rarefied abstractionsand discriminations, the most unheard-of combinations of elements, thesubtlest associations of analogy; in a word, we seem suddenlyintroduced into a seething caldron of ideas, where everything isfizzling and bobbing about in a state of bewildering activity, wherepartnerships can be joined or loosened in an instant, treadmill routineis unknown, and the unexpected seems the only law. According to theidiosyncrasy of the individual, the scintillations will have onecharacter or another. They will be sallies of wit and humor; they willbe flashes of poetry and eloquence; they will be constructions ofdramatic fiction or of mechanical device, logical or philosophicabstractions, business projects, or scientific hypotheses, with trainsof experimental consequences based thereon; they will be musicalsounds, or images of plastic beauty or picturesqueness, or visions ofmoral harmony. But, whatever their {249} differences may be, they willall agree in this, --that their genesis is sudden and, as it were, spontaneous. That is to say, the same premises would not, in the mindof another individual, have engendered just that conclusion; although, when the conclusion is offered to the other individual, he maythoroughly accept and enjoy it, and envy the brilliancy of him to whomit first occurred. 

To Professor Jevons is due the great credit of having emphaticallypointed out[16] how the genius of discovery depends altogether on thenumber of these random notions and guesses which visit theinvestigator's mind. To be fertile in hypotheses is the firstrequisite, and to be willing to throw them away the moment experiencecontradicts them is the next. The Baconian method of collating tablesof instances may be a useful aid at certain times. But one might aswell expect a chemist's note-book to write down the name of the bodyanalyzed, or a weather table to sum itself up into a prediction ofprobabilities of its own accord, as to hope that the mere fact ofmental confrontation with a certain series of facts will be sufficientto make _any_ brain conceive their law. The conceiving of the law is aspontaneous variation in the strictest sense of the term. It flashesout of one brain, and no other, because the instability of that brainis 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 badflashes, the triumphant hypotheses and the absurd conceits, are on anexact equality in respect of their origin. Aristotle's absurd Physicsand his immortal Logic flow from one source: the forces that producethe one produce the other. {250} When walking along the street, thinking of the blue sky or the fine spring weather, I may either smileat some grotesque whim which occurs to me, or I may suddenly catch anintuition of the solution of a long-unsolved problem, which at thatmoment was far from my thoughts. Both notions are shaken out of thesame reservoir, --the reservoir of a brain in which the reproduction ofimages in the relations of their outward persistence or frequency haslong ceased to be the dominant law. But to the thought, when it isonce engendered, the consecration of agreement with outward relationsmay come. The conceit perishes in a moment, and is forgotten. Thescientific hypothesis arouses in me a fever of desire for verification. I read, write, experiment, consult experts. Everything corroborates mynotion, which being then published in a book spreads from review toreview and from mouth to mouth, till at last there is no doubt I amenshrined in the Pantheon of the great diviners of nature's ways. Theenvironment _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 atparticular moments into particular ideas and combinations are matchedby their equally spontaneous permanent tiltings or saggings towardsdeterminate directions. The humorous bent is quite characteristic; thesentimental one equally so. And the personal tone of each mind, whichmakes it more alive to certain classes of experience than others, moreattentive to certain impressions, more open to certain reasons, isequally the result of that invisible and unimaginable play of theforces of growth within the nervous system which, irresponsibly to the{251} environment, makes the brain peculiarly apt to function in acertain way. Here again the selection goes on. The products of themind with the determined aesthetic bent please or displease thecommunity. We adopt Wordsworth, and grow unsentimental and serene. Weare fascinated by Schopenhauer, and learn from him the true luxury ofwoe. The adopted bent becomes a ferment in the community, and altersits tone. The alteration may be a benefit or a misfortune, for it is(_pace_ Mr. Allen) a differentiation from within, which has to run thegauntlet of the larger environment's selective power. CivilizedLanguedoc, taking the tone of its scholars, poets, princes, andtheologians, fell a prey to its rude Catholic environment in theAlbigensian crusade. France in 1792, taking the tone of its St. Justsand 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 in1872. 

Mr. Spencer, in one of the strangest chapters of his Psychology, [17]tries to show the necessary order in which the development ofconceptions in the human race occurs. No abstract conception can bedeveloped, according to him, until the outward experiences have reacheda certain degree of heterogeneity, definiteness, coherence, and soforth. 

"Thus the belief in an unchanging order, the belief in _law_, is abelief of which the primitive man is absolutely incapable. . . . Experiences such as he receives furnish but few data for the conceptionof uniformity, whether as displayed in things or in relations. . . . Thedaily {252} impressions which the savage gets yield the notion veryimperfectly, and in but few cases. Of all the objects around, --trees, stones, hills, pieces of water, clouds, and so forth, --most differwidely, . . . And few approach complete likeness so nearly as to makediscrimination difficult. Even between animals of the same species itrarely happens that, whether alive or dead, they are presented in justthe same attitudes. . . . It is only along with a gradual development ofthe arts . . . That there come frequent experiences of perfectly straightlines admitting of complete apposition, bringing the perceptions ofequality and inequality. Still more devoid is savage life of theexperiences which generate the conception of the uniformity ofsuccession. The sequences observed from hour to hour and day to dayseem anything but uniform, difference is a far more conspicuous traitamong them. . . . So that if we contemplate primitive human life as awhole, we see that multiformity of sequence, rather than uniformity, isthe notion which it tends to generate. . . . Only as fast as the practiceof the arts develops the idea of measure can the consciousness ofuniformity become clear. . . . Those conditions furnished by advancingcivilization which make possible the notion of uniformitysimultaneously make possible the notion of _exactness_. . . . Hence theprimitive man has little experience which cultivates the consciousnessof what we call _truth_. How closely allied this is to theconsciousness which the practice of the arts cultivates is implied evenin language. We speak of a true surface as well as a true statement. Exactness describes perfection in a mechanical fit, as well as perfectagreement between the results of calculations. "

The whole burden of Mr. Spencer's book is to show the fatal way inwhich 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 figureamong the 'relations' external to the mind. Surely they are so, afterthey have been manufactured; but only because of the preservative powerof the social environment. Originally all these things and all otherinstitutions were flashes of genius in an individual head, of which theouter environment showed no sign. Adopted by the race and become itsheritage, they then supply instigations to new geniuses whom theyenviron to make new inventions and discoveries; and so the ball ofprogress rolls. But take out the geniuses, or alter theiridiosyncrasies, and what increasing uniformities will the environmentshow? We defy Mr. Spencer or any one else to reply. 

The plain truth is that the 'philosophy' of evolution (as distinguishedfrom our special information about particular cases of change) is ametaphysical creed, and nothing else. It is a mood of contemplation, an emotional attitude, rather than a system of thought, --a mood whichis old as the world, and which no refutation of any one incarnation ofit (such as the spencerian philosophy) will dispel; the mood offatalistic pantheism, with its intuition of the One and All, which was, and is, and ever shall be, and from whose womb each single thingproceeds. Far be it from us to speak slightingly here of so hoary andmighty a style of looking on the world as this. What we at presentcall scientific discoveries had nothing to do with bringing it tobirth, nor can one easily conceive that they should ever give it its_quietus_, no matter how logically incompatible with its spirit theultimate phenomenal distinctions which {254} science accumulates shouldturn out to be. It can laugh at the phenomenal distinctions on whichscience is based, for it draws its vital breath from a regionwhich--whether above or below--is at least altogether different fromthat in which science dwells. A critic, however, who cannot disprovethe truth of the metaphysic creed, can at least raise his voice inprotest against its disguising itself in 'scientific' plumes. I thinkthat all who have had the patience to follow me thus far will agreethat the spencerian 'philosophy' of social and intellectual progress isan obsolete anachronism, reverting to a pre-darwinian type of thought, just as the spencerian philosophy of 'Force, ' effacing all the previousdistinctions 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 inthe 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 separateplace, and its author no more invokes the environment when he talks ofthe adhesions of gemmules than he invokes these adhesions when he talksof the relations of the whole animal to the environment. _Divide etimpera!_

[3] It is true that it remodels him, also, to some degree, by itseducative influence, and that this constitutes a considerabledifference between the social case and the zoölogical case, I neglectthis 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 presentlyquote, admits that a set of people who, if they had been exposed agesago to the geographical agencies of Timbuctoo, would have developedinto negroes might now, after a protracted exposure to the conditionsof 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 geographicalfactor utterly vanishes before the ancestral factor. The differencebetween Hamburg and Timbuctoo as a cause of ultimate divergence of tworaces is as nothing to the difference of constitution of the ancestorsof the two races, even though as in twin brothers, this differencemight be invisible to the naked eye. No two couples of the mosthomogeneous race could possibly be found so identical as, if set inidentical environments, to give rise to two identical lineages. Theminute divergence at the start grows broader with each generation, andends with entirely dissimilar breeds. 

[9] Article 'Nation Making, ' in Gentleman's Magazine, 1878. I quotefrom the reprint in the Popular Science Monthly Supplement December, 1878, pages 121, 123, 126. 

[10] Article 'Hellas, ' in Gentleman's Magazine, 1878. Reprint inPopular 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 thatprecedes) I seem to be crossing the heavily shotted bows of Mr. Galton, for whose laborious investigations into the heredity of genius I havethe greatest respect. Mr. Galton inclines to think that genius ofintellect and passion is bound to express itself, whatever the outwardopportunity, and that within any given race an equal number of geniusesof each grade must needs be born in every equal period of time; asubordinate race cannot possibly engender a large number of high-classgeniuses, etc. He would, I suspect, infer the suppositions I go on tomake--of great men fortuitously assembling around a given epoch andmaking it great, and of their being fortuitously absent from certainplaces and times (from Sardinia, from Boston now, etc. )--to beradically vicious. I hardly think, however, that he does justice tothe great complexity of the conditions of _effective_ greatness, and tothe way in which the physiological averages of production may be maskedentirely during long periods, either by the accidental mortality ofgeniuses in infancy, or by the fact that the particular geniuses bornhappened not to find tasks. I doubt the truth of his assertion that_intellectual_ genius, like murder, 'will out. ' It is true that certaintypes are irrepressible. Voltaire, Shelley, Carlyle, can hardly beconceived leading a dumb and vegetative life in any epoch. But takeMr. Galton himself, take his cousin Mr. Darwin, and take Mr. Spencer:nothing is to me more have died 'with all their music in them, ' knownonly to their friends as persons of strong and original character andjudgment. What has started them on their career of effective greatnessis simply the accident of each stumbling upon a task vast, brilliant, and congenial enough to call out the convergence of all his passionsand powers. I see no more reason why, in case they had not fallen inwith their several hobbies at propitious periods in their life, theyneed necessarily have hit upon other hobbies, and made themselvesequally great. Their case seems similar to that of the Washingtons, Cromwells, and Grants, who simply rose to their occasions. But apartfrom these causes of fallacy, I am strongly disposed to think thatwhere transcendent geniuses are concerned the numbers anyhow are sosmall that their appearance will not fit into any scheme of averages. That is, two or three might appear together, just as the two or threeballs nearest the target centre might be fired consecutively. Takelonger epochs and more firing, and the great geniuses and near ballswould on the whole be more spread out. 

[13] Since this paper was written, President Cleveland has to a certainextent met the need. But who can doubt that if he had certain otherqualities which he has not yet shown, his influence would have beenstill more decisive? (1896. )

[14] That is, if a certain general character be rapidly repeated in ourouter experience with a number of strongly contrasted concomitants, itwill be sooner abstracted than if its associates are invariable ormonotonous. 

[14] Principles of Psychology, i. 460. See also pp. 463, 464, 500. Onpage 408 the law is formulated thus: The _persistence_ of theconnection in consciousness is proportionate to the _persistence_ ofthe outer connection. Mr. Spencer works most with the law offrequency. 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, --oneby Mr. Grant Allen, entitled the 'Genesis of Genius, ' in the AtlanticMonthly, vol. Xlvii. P. 351; the other entitled 'Sociology and HeroWorship, ' by Mr. John Fiske, _ibidem_, p. 75. The article whichfollows is a rejoinder to Mr. Allen's article. It was refused at thetime by the Atlantic, but saw the day later in the Open Court forAugust, 1890. It appears here as a natural supplement to the foregoingarticle, on which it casts some explanatory light. 

Mr. Allen's contempt for hero-worship is based on very simpleconsiderations. A nation's great men, he says, are but slightdeviations from the general level. The hero is merely a specialcomplex of the ordinary qualities of his race. The petty differencesimpressed upon ordinary Greek minds by Plato or Aristotle or Zeno, arenothing at all compared with the vast differences between every Greekmind and every Egyptian or Chinese mind. We may neglect them in aphilosophy of history, just as in calculating the impetus of alocomotive we neglect the extra impetus given by a single piece ofbetter coal. What each man adds is but an infinitesimal fractioncompared with what he derives from his parents, or {256} indirectlyfrom his earlier ancestry. And if what the past gives to the hero isso much bulkier than what the future receives from him, it is whatreally calls for philosophical treatment. The problem for thesociologist is as to what produces the average man; the extraordinarymen 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 amiabilityand be as conciliatory as possible, I will not cavil at his facts ortry to magnify the chasm between an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Napoleonand the average level of their respective tribes. Let it be as smallas Mr. Allen thinks. All that I object to is that he should think themere _size_ of a difference is capable of deciding whether thatdifference be or be not a fit subject for philosophic study. Trulyenough, the details vanish in the bird's-eye view; but so does thebird's-eye view vanish in the details. Which is the right point ofview for philosophic vision? Nature gives no reply, for both points ofview, being equally real, are equally natural; and no one naturalreality _per se_ is any more emphatic than any other. Accentuation, foreground, and background are created solely by the interestedattention of the looker-on; and if the small difference between thegenius and his tribe interests me most, while the large one betweenthat tribe and another tribe interests Mr. Allen, our controversycannot be ended until a complete philosophy, accounting for alldifferences 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 whatlittle there {257} is, _is very important_. " This distinction seems tome to go to the root of the matter. It is not only the size of thedifference which concerns the philosopher, but also its place and itskind. An inch is a small thing, but we know the proverb about an inchon a man's nose. Messrs. Allen and Spencer, in inveighing againsthero-worship, are thinking exclusively of the size of the inch; I, as ahero-worshipper, attend to its seat and function. 

Now, there is a striking law over which few people seem to havepondered. It is this: That among all the differences which exist, theonly ones that interest us strongly are those _we do not take forgranted_. We are not a bit elated that our friend should have twohands and the power of speech, and should practise the matter-of-coursehuman virtues; and quite as little are we vexed that our dog goes onall fours and fails to understand our conversation. Expecting no morefrom the latter companion, and no less from the former, we get what weexpect and are satisfied. We never think of communing with the dog bydiscourse of philosophy, or with the friend by head-scratching or thethrowing of crusts to be snapped at. But if either dog or friend fallabove or below the expected standard, they arouse the most livelyemotion. On our brother's vices or genius we never weary ofdescanting; to his bipedism or his hairless skin we do not consecrate athought. _What_ he says may transport us; that he is able to speak atall leaves us stone cold. The reason of all this is that his virtuesand vices and utterances might, compatibly with the current range ofvariation in our tribe, be just the opposites of what they are, whilehis zoölogically human attributes cannot possibly go astray. There{258} is thus a zone of insecurity in human affairs in which all thedramatic interest lies; the rest belongs to the dead machinery of thestage. This is the formative zone, the part not yet ingrained into therace's average, not yet a typical, hereditary, and constant factor ofthe social community in which it occurs. It is like the soft layerbeneath the bark of the tree in which all the year's growth is goingon. Life has abandoned the mighty trunk inside, which stands inert andbelongs almost to the inorganic world. Layer after layer of humanperfection separates me from the central Africans who pursued Stanleywith cries of "meat, meat!" This vast difference ought, on Mr. Allen'sprinciples, to rivet my attention far more than the petty one whichobtains 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 inme no cannibalistic waterings of the mouth, I am free to confess that Ishall feel very proud if I do not publicly appear inferior to Mr. Allenin the conduct of this momentous debate. To me as a teacher theintellectual gap between my ablest and my dullest student counts forinfinitely more than that between the latter and the amphioxus: indeed, I never thought of the latter chasm till this moment. Will Mr. Allenseriously say that this is all human folly, and tweedledum andtweedledee?

To a Veddah's eyes the differences between two white literary men seemslight indeed, --same clothes, same spectacles, same harmlessdisposition, same habit of scribbling on paper and poring over books, etc. "Just two white fellows, " the Veddah will say, "with noperceptible difference. " But what a difference to the literary menthemselves! Think, Mr. Allen, of {259} confounding our philosophiestogether merely because both are printed in the same magazines and areindistinguishable to the eye of a Veddah! Our flesh creeps at thethought. 

But in judging of history Mr. Allen deliberately prefers to placehimself at the Veddah's point of view, and to see things _en gros_ andout of focus, rather than minutely. It is quite true that there arethings and differences enough to be seen either way. But which are thehumanly important ones, those most worthy to arouse our interest, --thelarge distinctions or the small? In the answer to this question liesthe whole divergence of the hero-worshippers from the sociologists. AsI said at the outset, it is merely a quarrel of emphasis; and the onlything I can do is to state my personal reasons for the emphasis Iprefer. 

The zone of the individual differences, and of the social 'twists'which by common confession they initiate, is the zone of formativeprocesses, the dynamic belt of quivering uncertainty, the line wherepast and future meet. It is the theatre of all we do not take forgranted, the stage of the living drama of life; and however narrow itsscope, 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 largeit may be, is a dead and stagnant thing, an achieved possession, fromwhich all insecurity has vanished. Like the trunk of a tree, it hasbeen built up by successive concretions of successive active zones. The moving present in which we live with its problems and passions, itsindividual rivalries, victories, and defeats, will soon pass over tothe majority and leave its small deposit on this static mass, to makeroom for fresh actors and a newer play. {260} And though it may betrue, as Mr. Spencer predicts, that each later zone shall fatally benarrower than its forerunners; and that when the ultimate lady-liketea-table elysium of the Data of Ethics shall prevail, such questionsas the breaking of eggs at the large or the small end will span thewhole scope of possible human warfare, --still even in this shrunken andenfeebled generation, _spatio aetatis defessa vetusto_, what eagernessthere will be! Battles and defeats will occur, the victors will beglorified and the vanquished dishonored just as in the brave days ofyore, the human heart still withdrawing itself from the much it has insafe possession, and concentrating all its passion upon thoseevanescent possibilities of fact which still quiver in fate's scale. 

And is not its instinct right? Do not we here grasp therace-differences _in the making_, and catch the only glimpse it isallotted to us to attain of the working units themselves, of whosedifferentiating action the race-gaps form but the stagnant sum? Whatstrange inversion of scientific procedure does Mr. Allen practise whenhe teaches us to neglect elements and attend only to aggregateresultants? On the contrary, simply because the active ring, whateverits bulk, _is elementary_, I hold that the study of its conditions (bethese never so 'proximate') is the highest of topics for the socialphilosopher. If individual variations determine its ups and downs andhair-breadth escapes and twists and turns, as Mr. Allen and Mr. Fiskeboth admit, Heaven forbid us from tabooing the study of these in favorof the average! On the contrary, let us emphasize these, and theimportance of these; and in picking out from history our heroes, andcommuning with their {261} kindred spirits, --in imagining as stronglyas possible what differences their individualities brought about inthis world, while its surface was still plastic in their hands, andwhat whilom feasibilities they made impossible, --each one of us maybest fortify and inspire what creative energy may lie in his ownsoul. [1]

This is the lasting justification of hero-worship, and the pooh-poohingof it by 'sociologists' is the ever-lasting excuse for popularindifference to their general laws and averages. The differencebetween an America rescued by a Washington or by a 'Jenkins' may, asMr. Allen says, be 'little, ' but it is, in the words of my carpenterfriend, 'important. ' Some organizing genius must in the nature ofthings have emerged from the French Revolution; but what Frenchman willaffirm it to have been an accident of no consequence that he shouldhave had the supernumerary idiosyncrasies of a Bonaparte? What animal, domestic or wild, will call it a matter of no moment that scarce a wordof sympathy with brutes should have survived from the teachings ofJesus of Nazareth?

The preferences of sentient creatures are what _create_ the importanceof topics. They are the absolute and ultimate law-giver here. And Ifor my part cannot but consider the talk of the contemporarysociological school about averages and general laws and predeterminedtendencies, with its obligatory undervaluing of the importance ofindividual {262} differences, as the most pernicious and immoral offatalisms. Suppose there is a social equilibrium fated to be, whose isit to be, --that of your preference, or mine? There lies the questionof 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 del'Imitation, Étude Sociologique (2me Édition, Paris, Alcan, 1895), isthe best possible commentary on this text, --'invention' on the onehand, and 'imitation' on the other, being for this author the two solefactors of social change. 

{263}

ON SOME HEGELISMS. [1]

We are just now witnessing a singular phenomenon in British andAmerican philosophy. Hegelism, so defunct on its native soil that Ibelieve but a single youthful disciple of the school is to be countedamong the privat-docenten and younger professors of Germany, and whoseolder champions are all passing off the stage, has found among us sozealous and able a set of propagandists that to-day it may really bereckoned one of the most powerful influences of the time in the higherwalks of thought. And there is no doubt that, as a movement ofreaction against the traditional British empiricism, the hegelianinfluence represents expansion and freedom, and is doing service of acertain kind. Such service, however, ought not to make us blindlyindulgent. Hegel's philosophy mingles mountain-loads of corruptionwith its scanty merits, and must, now that it has becomequasi-official, make ready to defend itself as well as to attackothers. It is with no hope of converting independent thinkers, butrather with the sole aspiration of showing some chance youthfuldisciple that there _is_ another point of view in philosophy that Ifire this skirmisher's shot, which may, I hope, soon be followed bysomebody else's heavier musketry. 

{264}

The point of view I have in mind will become clearer if I begin with afew preparatory remarks on the motives and difficulties ofphilosophizing in general. 

To show that the real is identical with the ideal may roughly be setdown as the mainspring of philosophic activity. The atomic andmechanical conception of the world is as ideal from the point of viewof some of our faculties as the teleological one is from the point ofview of others. In the realm of every ideal we can begin anywhere androam over the field, each term passing us to its neighbor, each membercalling for the next, and our reason rejoicing in its glad activity. Where the parts of a conception seem thus to belong together by inwardkinship, where the whole is defined in a way congruous with our powersof 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 withoutit. Arbitrary, foreign, jolting, discontinuous--are the adjectives bywhich we are tempted to describe it. And yet from out the bosom of ita partial ideality constantly arises which keeps alive our aspirationthat the whole may some day be construed in ideal form. Not only dothe materials lend themselves under certain circumstances to aestheticmanipulation, but underlying their worst disjointedness are three greatcontinua in which for each of us reason's ideal is actually reached. Imean the continua of memory or personal consciousness, of time and ofspace. In {265} these great matrices of all we know, we are absolutelyat home. The things we meet are many, and yet are one; each is itself, and yet all belong together; continuity reigns, yet individuality isnot lost. 

Consider, for example, space. It is a unit. No force can in any waybreak, wound, or tear it. It has no joints between which you can passyour 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 ahole you must drive something else through. But what can you drivethrough space except what is itself spatial?

But notwithstanding it is this very paragon of unity, space in itsparts contains an infinite variety, and the unity and the variety donot contradict each other, for they obtain in different respects. Theone is the whole, the many are the parts. Each part is one again, butonly one fraction; and part lies beside part in absolute nextness, thevery picture of peace and non-contradiction. It is true that the spacebetween two points both unites and divides them, just as the bar of adumb-bell both unites and divides the two balls. But the union and thedivision are not _secundum idem_: it divides them by keeping them outof the space between, it unites them by keeping them out of the spacebeyond; so the double function presents no inconsistency. Self-contradiction in space could only ensue if one part tried to oustanother from its position; but the notion of such an absurdity vanishesin the framing, and cannot stay to vex the mind. [2] Beyond the partswe see or think at any {266} given time extend further parts; but thebeyond 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 isrationality and transparency incarnate. The same may be said of theego and of time. But if for simplicity's sake we ignore them, we maytruly say that when we desiderate rational knowledge of the world thestandard set by our knowledge of space is what governs our desire. [3]Cannot the breaks, the jolts, the margin of foreignness, be exorcisedfrom 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, wefind the continuity ruptured on every side. A fearful jolting begins. Even if we simplify the world by reducing it to its mechanical barepoles, --atoms and their motions, --the discontinuity is bad enough. Thelaws of clash, the effects of distance upon attraction and repulsion, all seem arbitrary collocations of data. The atoms themselves are somany independent facts, the existence of any one of which in no wiseseems to involve the existence of the rest. We have not banisheddiscontinuity, we have only made it finer-grained. And to get eventhat degree of rationality into the universe we have had to butcher agreat part of its contents. The secondary qualities we stripped offfrom the reality and swept into the dust-bin labelled 'subjectiveillusion, ' still _as such_ are facts, and must themselves berationalized in some way. 

But when we deal with facts believed to be purely subjective, we arefarther than ever from the goal. We have not now the refuge ofdistinguishing between the 'reality' and its appearances. Facts ofthought being the only facts, differences of thought become the onlydifferences, and identities of thought the only identities there are. Two thoughts that seem different are different to all eternity. We canno longer speak of heat and light being reconciled in any _tertiumquid_ like wave-motion. For motion is motion, and light is light, andheat heat forever, and their discontinuity is as absolute as theirexistence. Together with the other attributes and things we conceive, they make up Plato's realm of immutable ideas. Neither _per se_ callsfor the other, hatches it out, is its 'truth, ' creates it, or has anysort 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 almostwholly discontinuous _inter se_. Each only says, "I am that I am, " andeach says it on its own account and with absolute monotony. Thecontinuities of which they _partake_, in Plato's phrase, the ego, space, and time, are for most of them the only grounds of union theypossess. 

It might seem as if in the mere 'partaking' there lay a contradictionof the discontinuity. If the white must partake of space, the heat oftime, 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 theaxioms: no feeling except as occupying some space and time, or as amoment in some ego; no motion but of something moved; no thought but ofan object; no time without a previous time, --and the like. But theyare limited in number, and they obtain only between excessively broadgenera of concepts, and leave quite undetermined what thespecifications of those genera shall be. What feeling shall fill_this_ time, what substance execute _this_ motion, what qualitiescombine in _this_ being, are as much unanswered questions as if themetaphysical axioms never existed at all. 

The existence of such syntheses as they are does then but slightlymitigate the jolt, jolt, jolt we get when we pass over the facts of theworld. Everywhere indeterminate variables, subject only to these fewvague enveloping laws, independent in all besides. --such seems thetruth. 

In yet another way, too, ideal and real are so far {269} apart thattheir conjunction seems quite hopeless. To eat our cake and have it, to lose our soul and save it, to enjoy the physical privileges ofselfishness and the moral luxury of altruism at the same time, would bethe ideal. But the real offers us these terms in the shape of mutuallyexclusive alternatives of which only one can be true at once; so thatwe must choose, and in choosing murder one possibility. The wrench isabsolute: "Either--or!" Just as whenever I bet a hundred dollars on anevent, there comes an instant when I am a hundred dollars richer orpoorer without any intermediate degrees passed over; just as mywavering between a journey to Portland or to New York does not carry mefrom Cambridge in a resultant direction in which both motions arecompounded, say to Albany, but at a given moment results in theconjunction of reality in all its fulness for one alternative andimpossibility in all its fulness for the other, --so the bachelor joysare utterly lost from the face of being for the married man, who musthenceforward find his account in something that is not them but is goodenough to make him forget them; so the careless and irresponsibleliving in the sunshine, the 'unbuttoning after supper and sleeping uponbenches in the afternoon, ' are stars that have set upon the path of himwho in good earnest makes himself a moralist. The transitions areabrupt, absolute, truly shot out of a pistol; for while manypossibilities are called, the few that are chosen are chosen in alltheir sudden completeness. 

Must we then think that the world that fills space and time can yieldus no acquaintance of that high and perfect type yielded by empty spaceand time themselves? Is what unity there is in the world {270} mainlyderived 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, orknow from some fractions the others before the others have arrived?Are there real logically indeterminate possibilities which forbid therebeing any equivalent for the happening of it all but the happeningitself? Can we gain no anticipatory assurance that what is to comewill have no strangeness? Is there no substitute, in short, for lifebut the living itself in all its long-drawn weary length and breadthand thickness?

In the negative reply to all these questions, a modest common-sensefinds no difficulty in acquiescing. To such a way of thinking thenotion of 'partaking' has a deep and real significance. Whoso partakesof a thing enjoys his share, and comes into contact with the thing andits other partakers. But he claims no more. His share in no wisenegates the thing or their share; nor does it preclude his possessionof reserved and private powers with which they have nothing to do, andwhich are not all absorbed in the mere function of sharing. Why maynot the world be a sort of republican banquet of this sort, where allthe qualities of being respect one another's personal sacredness, yetsit at the common table of space and time?

To me this view seems deeply probable. Things cohere, but the act ofcohesion itself implies but few conditions, and leaves the rest oftheir qualifications indeterminate. As the first three notes of a tunecomport many endings, all melodious, but the tune is not named till aparticular ending has actually come, --so the parts actually known ofthe universe may comport many ideally possible complements. But as{271} the facts are not the complements, so the knowledge of the one isnot the knowledge of the other in anything but the few necessaryelements 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 totalperspective, with all mere possibilities abolished, should there everhave been anything more than that act? Why duplicate it by the tediousunrolling, inch by inch, of the foredone reality? No answer seemspossible. On the other hand, if we stipulate only a partial communityof partially independent powers, we see perfectly why no one partcontrols the whole view, but each detail must come and be actuallygiven, before, in any special sense, it can be said to be determined atall. This is the moral view, the view that gives to other powers thesame freedom it would have itself, --not the ridiculous 'freedom to doright, ' which in my mouth can only mean the freedom to do as _I_ thinkright, but the freedom to do as _they_ think right, or wrong either. After all, what accounts do the nether-most bounds of the universe oweto me? By what insatiate conceit and lust of intellectual despotism doI arrogate the right to know their secrets, and from my philosophicthrone to play the only airs they shall march to, as if I were theLord'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!_ somethingto 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 theypartake, alter our actions so as to meet them. 

There are 'bounds of ord'nance' set for all things, where they mustpause or rue it. 'Facts' are the bounds of human knowledge, set forit, not by it. 

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Now, to a mind like Hegel's such pusillanimous twaddle sounds simplyloathsome. Bounds that we can't overpass! Data! facts that say, "Hands off, till we are given"! possibilities we can't control! abanquet of which we merely share! Heavens, this is intolerable; such aworld is no world for a philosopher to have to do with. He must haveall or nothing. If the world cannot be rational in my sense, in thesense of unconditional surrender, I refuse to grant that it is rationalat all. It is pure incoherence, a chaos, a nulliverse, to whosehaphazard 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 onceget her teeth on any part, the whole shall inevitably become her preyand feed her all-devouring theoretic maw. Naught shall be but thenecessities she creates and impossibilities; freedom shall mean freedomto obey her will, ideal and actual shall be one: she, and I as herchampion, will be satisfied on no lower terms. 

The insolence of sway, the _hubris_ on which gods take vengeance, is intemporal and spiritual matters usually admitted to be a vice. ABonaparte and a Philip II. Are called monsters. But when an_intellect_ is found insatiate enough to declare that all existencemust bend the knee to its requirements, we do not call its owner amonster, but a philosophic prophet. May not this be all wrong? Isthere any one of our functions exempted from the common lot ofliability to excess? And where everything else must be contented withits part in the universe, shall the theorizing faculty ride rough-shodover the whole?

I confess I can see no _à priori_ reason for the exception. He whoclaims it must be judged by the {273} consequences of his acts, and bythem alone. Let Hegel then confront the universe with his claim, andsee 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 oflight and color, and a few other serial things; so too do potatoes callfor salt, and cranberries for sugar, in the taste of one who knows whatsalt and sugar are. But on the whole there is nought to soften theshock of surprise to his intelligence, as it passes from one quality ofbeing to another. Light is not heat, heat is not light; and to him whoholds the one the other is not given till it give itself. Real beingcomes moreover and goes from any concept at its own sweet will, with nopermission asked of the conceiver. In despair must Hegel lift vainhands of imprecation; and since he will take nothing but the whole, hemust throw away even the part he might retain, and call the nature ofthings 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 notjolt passage? Is friction other than a kind of lubrication? Is not achasm a filling?--a queer kind of filling, but a filling still. Whyseek for a glue to hold things together when their very falling apartis the only glue you need? Let all that negation which seemed todisintegrate the universe be the mortar that combines it, and theproblem stands solved. The paradoxical character of the notion couldnot 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 hiscareer is that of a philosophic desperado, --one series of outrages uponthe chastity of thought. 

And can we not ourselves sympathize with his mood in some degree? Theold receipts of squeezing the thistle and taking the bull by the hornshave many applications. An evil frankly accepted loses half its stingand all its terror. The Stoics had their cheap and easy way of dealingwith evil. _Call_ your woes goods, they said; refuse to _call_ yourlost blessings by that name, --and you are happy. So of theunintelligibilities: call them means of intelligibility, and whatfurther do you require? There is even a more legitimate excuse thanthat. In the exceedingness of the facts of life over our formulas liesa standing temptation at certain times to give up trying to sayanything adequate about them, and to take refuge in wild and whirlingwords which but confess our impotence before their ineffability. ThusBaron Bunsen writes to his wife: "Nothing is near but the far; nothingtrue but the highest; nothing credible but the inconceivable; nothingso real as the impossible; nothing clear but the deepest; nothing sovisible as the invisible; and no life is there but through death. " Ofthese ecstatic moments the _credo quia impossibile_ is the classicalexpression. Hegel's originality lies in his making their moodpermanent and sacramental, and authorized to supersede all others, --notas a mystical bath and refuge for feeling when tired reason sickens ofher intellectual responsibilities (thank Heaven! that bath is alwaysready), but as the very form of intellectual responsibility itself. 

{275}

And now after this long introduction, let me trace some of Hegel's waysof applying his discovery. His system resembles a mouse-trap, in whichif you once pass the door you may be lost forever. Safety lies in notentering. Hegelians have anointed, so to speak, the entrance withvarious considerations which, stated in an abstract form, are soplausible as to slide us unresistingly and almost unwittingly throughthe fatal arch. It is not necessary to drink the ocean to know that itis salt; nor need a critic dissect a whole system after proving thatits premises are rotten. I shall accordingly confine myself to a fewof the points that captivate beginners most; and assume that if theybreak down, so must the system which they prop. 

First of all, Hegel has to do utterly away with the sharing andpartaking business he so much loathes. He will not call contradictionthe glue in one place and identity in another; that is toohalf-hearted. Contradiction must be a glue universal, and must deriveits credit from being shown to be latently involved in cases that wehitherto supposed to embody pure continuity. Thus, the relations of anego with its objects, of one time with another time, of one place withanother place, of a cause with its effect, of a thing with itsproperties, and especially of parts with wholes, must be shown toinvolve contradiction. Contradiction, shown to lurk in the very heartof coherence and continuity, cannot after that be held to defeat them, and must be taken as the universal solvent, --or, rather, there is nolonger any need of a solvent. To 'dissolve' things in identity was thedream of earlier cruder schools. Hegel will show that their verydifference is their identity, and that {276} in the act of detachmentthe detachment is undone, and they fall into each other's arms. 

Now, at the very outset it seems rather odd that a philosopher whopretends that the world is absolutely rational, or in other words thatit can be completely understood, should fall back on a principle (theidentity of contradictories) which utterly defies understanding, andobliges him in fact to use the word 'understanding, ' whenever it occursin his pages, as a term of contempt. Take the case of space we usedabove. The common man who looks at space believes there is nothing init to be acquainted with beyond what he sees; no hidden machinery, nosecrets, nothing but the parts as they lie side by side and make thestatic whole. His intellect is satisfied with accepting space as anultimate genus of the given. But Hegel cries to him: "Dupe! dost thounot see it to be one nest of incompatibilities? Do not the unity ofits wholeness and the diversity of its parts stand in patentcontradiction? Does it not both unite and divide things; and but forthis strange and irreconcilable activity, would it be at all? Thehidden dynamism of self-contradiction is what incessantly produces thestatic appearance by which your sense is fooled. "

But if the man ask how self-contradiction _can_ do all this, and howits dynamism may be seen to work, Hegel can only reply by showing himthe space itself and saying: "Lo, _thus_. " In other words, instead ofthe principle of explanation being more intelligible than the thing tobe explained, it is absolutely unintelligible if taken by itself, andmust 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 creatingparadoxes and impossibilities where none were suspected, is a strangecandidate for the honor of being a complete rationalizer of the world. 

The principle of the contradictoriness of identity and the identity ofcontradictories is the essence of the hegelian system. But whatprobably washes this principle down most with beginners is thecombination in which its author works it with another principle whichis by no means characteristic of his system, and which, for want of abetter name, might be called the 'principle of totality. ' Thisprinciple says that you cannot adequately know even a part until youknow of what whole it forms a part. As Aristotle writes and Hegelloves to quote, an amputated hand is not even a hand. And as Tennysonsays, --

 "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 orremote, 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, anacquaintance with every other thing, actual and potential, near andremote, is needed; so that it is quite fair to say that omnisciencealone can completely know any one thing as it stands. Standing in aworld of relations, that world must be known before the thing is fullyknown. This doctrine is of course an integral part of empiricism, anintegral part of common-sense. Since when could good men not apprehendthe passing hour {278} in the light of life's larger sweep, --not growdispassionate the more they stretched their view? Did the 'law ofsharing' so little legitimate their procedure that a law of identity ofcontradictories, forsooth, must be trumped up to give it scope? Outupon the idea!

Hume's account of causation is a good illustration of the way in whichempiricism may use the principle of totality. We call something acause; but we at the same time deny its effect to be in any latent waycontained in or substantially identical with it. We thus cannot tellwhat its causality amounts to until its effect has actually supervened. The effect, then, or something beyond the thing is what makes the thingto be so far as it is a cause. Humism thus says that its causality issomething adventitious and not necessarily given when its otherattributes are there. Generalizing this, empiricism contends that wemust everywhere distinguish between the intrinsic being of a thing andits relations, and, among these, between those that are essential toour knowing it at all and those that may be called adventitious. Thething as actually present in a given world is there with _all_ itsrelations; for it to be known as it _there_ exists, they must be knowntoo, and it and they form a single fact for any consciousness largeenough to embrace that world as a unity. But what constitutes thissingleness of fact, this unity? Empiricism says, Nothing but therelation-yielding matrix in which the several items of the world findthemselves embedded, --time, namely, and space, and the mind of theknower. And it says that were some of the items quite different fromwhat they are and others the same, still, for aught we can see, anequally unitary world might be, provided each {279} item were an objectfor consciousness and occupied a determinate point in space and time. All the adventitious relations would in such a world be changed, alongwith the intrinsic natures and places of the beings between which theyobtained; but the 'principle of totality' in knowledge would in no wisebe affected. 

But Hegelism dogmatically denies all this to be possible. In the firstplace it says there are no intrinsic natures that may change; in thesecond it says there are no adventitious relations. When the relationsof 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 theworld 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 therest. The proof lies in the _hegelian_ principle of totality, whichdemands that if any one part be posited alone all the others shallforthwith _emanate_ from it and infallibly reproduce the whole. In the_modus operandi_ of the emanation comes in, as I said, that partnershipof the principle of totality with that of the identity ofcontradictories which so recommends the latter to beginners in Hegel'sphilosophy. To posit one item alone is to deny the rest; to deny themis to refer to them; to refer to them is to begin, at least, to bringthem 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 simplythat the one item is the rest {280} of the universe is as false andone-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, aswell. Thus the truth refuses to be expressed in any single act ofjudgment 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 overthis apparent formula of brotherhood is that we distinguish, or try todistinguish, the respects in which the world is one from those in whichit is many, while all such stable distinctions are what he mostabominates. The reader may decide which procedure helps his reasonmost. For my own part, the time-honored formula of empiricistpluralism, that the world cannot be set down in any single proposition, grows less instead of more intelligible when I add, "And yet thedifferent propositions that express it are one!" The unity of thepropositions is that of the mind that harbors them. Any one whoinsists that their diversity is in any way itself their unity, can onlydo so because he loves obscurity and mystification for their own puresakes. 

Where you meet with a contradiction among realities, Herbart used tosay, it shows you have failed to make a real distinction. Hegel'ssovereign method of going to work and saving all possiblecontradictions, lies in pertinaciously refusing to distinguish. Hetakes what is true of a term _secundum quid_, treats it as true of thesame term _simpliciter_, and then, of course, applies it to the term_secundum aliud_. A {281} good example of this is found in the firsttriad. This triad shows that the mutability of the real world is dueto the fact that being constantly negates itself; that whatever _is_ bythe same act _is not_, and gets undone and swept away; and that thusthe irremediable torrent of life about which so much rhetoric has beenwritten has its roots in an ineluctable necessity which lies revealedto our logical reason. This notion of a being which forever stumblesover its own feet, and has to change in order to exist at all, is avery picturesque symbol of the reality, and is probably one of thepoints that make young readers feel as if a deep core of truth lay inthe system. 

But how is the reasoning done? Pure being is assumed, withoutdeterminations, being _secundum quid_. In this respect it agrees withnothing. Therefore _simpliciter_ it is nothing; wherever we find it, it is nothing; crowned with complete determinations then, or _secundumaliud_, 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 theconclusion is strictly true, however comical it seems. Man within theclothes is naked, just as he is without them. Man would never haveinvented the clothes had he not been naked. The fact of his being cladat all does prove his essential nudity. And so in general, --the formof any judgment, being the addition of a predicate to a subject, showsthat the subject has been conceived without the predicate, and thus bya strained metaphor may {282} be called the predicate's negation. Welland good! let the expression pass. But we must notice this. Thejudgment has now created a new subject, the naked-clad, and allpropositions regarding this must be judged on their own merits; forthose true of the old subject, 'the naked, ' are no longer true of thisone. For instance, we cannot say because the naked pure and simplemust not enter the drawing-room or is in danger of taking cold, thatthe naked with his clothes on will also take cold or must stay in hisbedroom. Hold to it eternally that the clad man _is_ still naked if itamuse you, --'tis designated in the bond; but the so-calledcontradiction is a sterile boon. Like Shylock's pound of flesh, itleads to no consequences. It does not entitle you to one drop of hisChristian blood either in the way of catarrh, social exclusion, or whatfurther results pure nakedness may involve. 

In a version of the first step given by our foremost AmericanHegelian, [4] we find this playing with the necessary form of judgment. Pure being, he says, has no determinations. But the having none isitself a determination. Wherefore pure being contradicts its own self, and so on. Why not take heed to the _meaning_ of what is said? Whenwe make the predication concerning pure being, our meaning is merelythe denial of all other determinations than the particular one we make. The showman who advertised his elephant as 'larger than any elephant inthe world except himself' must have been in an hegelian country wherehe was afraid that if he were less explicit the audience woulddialectically proceed to say: {283} "This elephant, larger than any inthe world, involves a contradiction; for he himself is in the world, and so stands endowed with the virtue of being both larger and smallerthan himself, --a perfect hegelian elephant, whose immanentself-contradictoriness can only be removed in a higher synthesis. Showus the higher synthesis! We don't care to see such a mere abstractcreature as your elephant. " It may be (and it was indeed suggested inantiquity) that all things are of their own size by being both largerand smaller than themselves. But in the case of this elephant thescrupulous showman nipped such philosophizing and all its inconvenientconsequences 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 "toknow a limit is already to be beyond it. " "Stone walls do not a prisonmake, nor iron bars a cage. " The inmate of the penitentiary shows byhis grumbling that he is still in the stage of abstraction and ofseparative thought. The more keenly he thinks of the fun he might behaving outside, the more deeply he ought to feel that the wallsidentify him with it. They set him beyond them _secundum quid_, inimagination, 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 assuch, is also to know the infinite. " Expressed in this abstract shape, the formula is as insignificant as it is unobjectionable. We can capevery word with a negative particle, and the word _finished_immediately suggests the word _unfinished_, and we know the two wordstogether. 

But it is an entirely different thing to take the knowledge of aconcrete case of ending, and to say that it virtually makes usacquainted with other concrete facts _in infinitum_. For, in the firstplace, the end may be an absolute one. The _matter_ of the universe, for instance, is according to all appearances in finite amount; and ifwe knew that we had counted the last bit of it, infinite knowledge inthat respect, so far from being given, would be impossible. Withregard to _space_, it is true that in drawing a bound we are aware ofmore. But to treat this little fringe as the equal of infinite spaceis ridiculous. It resembles infinite space _secundum quid_, or in butone respect, --its spatial quality. We believe it homogeneous withwhatever spaces may remain; but it would be fatuous to say, because onedollar 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 asnumerically 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 spaceconstitutes its only _worth_; and that there is nothing true, good, orbeautiful to be known {285} in the spaces beyond which is not alreadyknown in the fringe. This introduction of a eulogistic term into amathematical question is original. The 'true' and the 'false' infiniteare about as appropriate distinctions in a discussion of cognition asthe 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 spacesis due to the knowledge of what they may carry in them, it then appearsmore than ever absurd to say that the knowledge of the fringe is anequivalent for the infinitude of the distant knowledge. The distantspaces even _simpliciter_ are not yet yielded to our thinking; and ifthey 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 thisknowledge of the finite, which remains the ignorance it always was, till the infinite by its own act has piece by piece placed itself inour hands. 

Here Hegelism cries out: "By the identity of the knowledges of infiniteand finite I never meant that one could be a _substitute_ for theother; nor does true philosophy ever mean by identity capacity forsubstitution. " This sounds suspiciously like the good and the naughtyinfinite, or rather like the mysteries of the Trinity and theEucharist. To the unsentimental mind there are but two sorts ofidentity, --total identity and partial identity. Where the identity istotal, the things can be substituted wholly for one another. Wheresubstitution 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 theCatholic will tell you that when he believes in the {286} identity ofthe wafer with Christ's body, he does not mean in all respects, --sothat he might use it to exhibit muscular fibre, or a cook make it smelllike baked meat in the oven. He means that in the one sole respect ofnourishing his being in a certain way, it is identical with and can besubstituted for the very body of his Redeemer. 

'The knowledge of opposites is one, ' is one of the hegelian firstprinciples, of which the preceding are perhaps only derivatives. Hereagain Hegelism takes 'knowledge' _simpliciter_, and substituting it forknowledge in a particular respect, avails itself of the confusion tocover other respects never originally implied. When the knowledge of athing is given us, we no doubt think that the thing may or must have anopposite. This postulate of something opposite we may call a'knowledge of the opposite' if we like; but it is a knowledge of it inonly that one single respect, that it is something opposite. No numberof opposites to a quality we have never directly experienced could everlead us positively to infer what that quality is. There is a joltbetween the negation of them and the actual positing of it in itsproper shape, that twenty logics of Hegel harnessed abreast cannotdrive us smoothly over. 

The use of the maxim 'All determination is negation' is the fattest andmost full-blown application of the method of refusing to distinguish. Taken in its vague confusion, it probably does more than anything elseto produce the sort of flicker and dazzle which are the first mentalconditions 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 ofself-negation. Whence finally the conclusion is drawn that assertionsare universally self-contradictory. As this is an important matter, itseems worth while to treat it a little minutely. 

When I measure out a pint, say of milk, and so determine it, what do Ido? I virtually make two assertions regarding it, --it is this pint; itis not those other gallons. One of these is an affirmation, the othera negation. Both have a common subject; but the predicates beingmutually exclusive, the two assertions lie beside each other in endlesspeace. 

I may with propriety be said to make assertions more remotestill, --assertions of which those other gallons are the subject. As itis 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 thepints. " Here we have the same predicate; but the subjects areexclusive of each other, so there is again endless peace. In bothcouples of propositions negation and affirmation are _secundum aliud_:this is _a_; this is n't not-_a_. This kind of negation involved indetermination cannot possibly be what Hegel wants for his purposes. The table is not the chair, the fireplace is not the cupboard, --theseare literal expressions of the law of identity and contradiction, thoseprinciples of the abstracting and separating understanding for whichHegel has so sovereign a contempt, and which his logic is meant tosupersede. 

And accordingly Hegelians pursue the subject further, saying there isin every determination an element of real conflict. Do you not indetermining the milk to be this pint exclude it forever from the chanceof being those gallons, frustrate it from {288} expansion? And so doyou not equally exclude them from the being which it now maintains asits own?

Assuredly if you had been hearing of a land flowing with milk andhoney, and had gone there with unlimited expectations of the rivers themilk would fill; and if you found there was but this single pint in thewhole country, --the determination of the pint would exclude anotherdetermination which your mind had previously made of the milk. Therewould be a real conflict resulting in the victory of one side. Therivers would be negated by the single pint being affirmed; and asrivers and pint are affirmed of the same milk (first as supposed andthen as found), the contradiction would be complete. 

But it is a contradiction that can never by any chance occur in realnature or being. It can only occur between a false representation of abeing and the true idea of the being when actually cognized. The firstgot 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 pintnever says, "I am the gallons. " It never tries to expand; and so thereis no chance for anything to exclude or negate it. It thus remainsaffirmed absolutely. 

Can it be believed in the teeth of these elementary truths that theprinciple _determinatio negatio_ is held throughout Hegel to imply anactive contradiction, conflict, and exclusion? Do the horse-carsjingling outside negate me writing in this room? Do I, reader, negateyou? Of course, if I say, "Reader, we are two, and therefore I amtwo, " I negate you, for I am actually thrusting a part into the seat ofthe whole. {289} The orthodox logic expresses the fallacy by sayingthe we is taken by me distributively instead of collectively; but aslong as I do not make this blunder, and am content with my part, we allare safe. In _rerum naturâ_, parts remain parts. Can you imagine oneposition in space trying to get into the place of another position andhaving to be 'contradicted' by that other? Can you imagine yourthought of an object trying to dispossess the real object from itsbeing, and so being negated by it? The great, the sacred law ofpartaking, the noiseless step of continuity, seems something that Hegelcannot possibly understand. All or nothing is his one idea. For himeach point of space, of time, each feeling in the ego, each quality ofbeing, is clamoring, "I am the all, --there is nought else but me. "This clamor is its essence, which has to be negated in another actwhich gives it its true determination. What there is of affirmative inthis determination is thus the mere residuum left from the negation byothers of the negation it originally applied to them. 

But why talk of residuum? The Kilkenny cats of fable could leave aresiduum in the shape of their undevoured tails. But the Kilkenny catsof existence as it appears in the pages of Hegel are all-devouring, andleave no residuum. Such is the unexampled fury of their onslaught thatthey get clean out of themselves and into each other, nay more, passright through each other, and then "return into themselves" ready foranother round, as insatiate, but as inconclusive, as the one that wentbefore. 

If I characterized Hegel's own mood as _hubris_, the insolence ofexcess, what shall I say of the mood he ascribes to being? Man makesthe gods in his {290} image; and Hegel, in daring to insult thespotless _sôphrosune_ of space and time, the bound-respecters, inbranding as strife that law of sharing under whose sacred keeping, likea strain of music, like an odor of incense (as Emerson says), the danceof the atoms goes forward still, seems to me but to manifest his owndeformity. 

This leads me to animadvert on an erroneous inference which hegelianidealism makes from the form of the negative judgment. Every negation, it says, must be an intellectual act. Even the most _naïf_ realismwill hardly pretend that the non-table as such exists _in se_ after thesame fashion as the table does. But table and non-table, since theyare given to our thought together, must be consubstantial. Try to makethe position or affirmation of the table as simple as you can, it isalso the negation of the non-table; and thus positive being itselfseems after all but a function of intelligence, like negation. Idealism is proved, realism is unthinkable. Now I have not myself theleast objection to idealism, --an hypothesis which voluminousconsiderations make plausible, and whose difficulties may be clearedaway any day by new discriminations or discoveries. But I object toproving by these patent ready-made _à priori_ methods that which canonly be the fruit of a wide and patient induction. For the truth isthat our affirmations and negations do not stand on the same footing atall, and are anything but consubstantial. An affirmation sayssomething about an objective existence. A negation says something_about an affirmation_, --namely, that it is false. There are nonegative predicates or falsities in nature. Being makes no falsehypotheses that have {291} to be contradicted. The only denials shecan be in any way construed to perform are denials of our errors. Thisshows plainly enough that denial must be of something mental, since thething denied is always a fiction. "The table is not the chair"supposes the speaker to have been playing with the false notion that itmay have been the chair. But affirmation may perfectly well be ofsomething having no such necessary and constitutive relation tothought. Whether it really is of such a thing is for harderconsiderations to decide. 

If idealism be true, the great question that presents itself is whetherits truth involve the necessity of an infinite, unitary, and omniscientconsciousness, or whether a republic of semi-detached consciousnesseswill do, --consciousnesses united by a certain common fund ofrepresentations, but each possessing a private store which the othersdo not share. Either hypothesis is to me conceivable. But whether theegos be one or many, the _nextness_ of representations to one anotherwithin them is the principle of unification of the universe. To bethus consciously next to some other representation is the condition towhich each representation must submit, under penalty of being excludedfrom this universe, and like Lord Dundreary's bird 'flocking allalone, ' and forming a separate universe by itself. But this is only acondition of which the representations _partake_; it leaves all theirother 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 andhair, flesh and fell, all appurtenances and belongings, --is {292} onlythe 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 whichrepresentations exert upon one another is compulsion to submit to theconditions of entrance into the same universe with them--the conditionsof continuity, of selfhood, space, and time--under penalty of beingexcluded. But what this universe shall be is a matter of fact which wecannot decide till we know what representations _have_ submitted tothese its sole conditions. The conditions themselves impose no furtherrequirements. In short, the notion that real contingency and ambiguitymay be features of the real world is a perfectly unimpeachablehypothesis. Only in such a world can moral judgments have a claim tobe. For the bad is that which takes the place of something else whichpossibly might have been where it now is, and the better is that whichabsolutely might be where it absolutely is not. In the universe ofHegel--the absolute block whose parts have no loose play, the pureplethora of necessary being with the oxygen of possibility allsuffocated out of its lungs--there can be neither good nor bad, but onedead level of mere fate. 

But I have tired the reader out. The worst of criticising Hegel isthat the very arguments we use against him give forth strange andhollow sounds that make them seem almost as fantastic as the errors towhich they are addressed. The sense of a universal mirage, of aghostly unreality, steals over us, which is the very moonlit atmosphereof Hegelism itself. What wonder then if, instead of {293} converting, our words do but rejoice and delight, those already baptized in thefaith of confusion? To their charmed senses we all seem children ofHegel together, only some of us have not the wit to know our ownfather. Just as Romanists are sure to inform us that our reasonsagainst Papal Christianity unconsciously breathe the purest spirit ofCatholicism, so Hegelism benignantly smiles at our exertions, andmurmurs, "If the red slayer think he slays;" "When me they fly, I amthe wings, " etc. 

To forefend this unwelcome adoption, let me recapitulate in a fewpropositions the reasons why I am not an hegelian. 

1. We cannot eat our cake and have it; that is, the only realcontradiction there can be between thoughts is where one is true, theother 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 merenegation can be the instrument of a positive advance in thought. 

3. The continua, time, space, and the ego, are bridges, because theyare without chasm. 

4. But they bridge over the chasms between represented qualities onlypartially. 

5. This partial bridging, however, makes the qualities share in acommon world. 

6. The other characteristics of the qualities are separate facts. 

7. But the same quality appears in many times and spaces. Genericsameness of the quality wherever found becomes thus a further means bywhich the jolts are reduced. 

8. What between different qualities jolts remain. {294} Each, as faras the other is concerned, is an absolutely separate and contingentbeing. 

9. The moral judgment may lead us to postulate as irreducible thecontingencies of the world. 

10. Elements mutually contingent are not in conflict so long as theypartake of the continua of time, space, etc. , --partaking being theexact opposite of strife. They conflict only when, as mutuallyexclusive possibilities, they strive to possess themselves of the sameparts of time, space, and ego. 

11. That there are such real conflicts, irreducible to anyintelligence, and giving rise to an excess of possibility overactuality, is an hypothesis, but a credible one. No philosophy shouldpretend to be anything more. 

NOTE. --Since the preceding article was written, some observations onthe effects of nitrous-oxide-gas-intoxication which I was prompted tomake by reading the pamphlet called The Anaesthetic Revelation and theGist of Philosophy, by Benjamin Paul Blood, Amsterdam, N. Y. , 1874, have made me understand better than ever before both the strength andthe weakness of Hegel's philosophy. I strongly urge others to repeatthe experiment, which with pure gas is short and harmless enough. Theeffects will of course vary with the individual. Just as they vary inthe same individual from time to time; but it is probable that in theformer case, as in the latter, a generic resemblance will obtain. Withme, as with every other person of whom I have heard, the keynote of theexperience is the tremendously exciting sense of an intensemetaphysical illumination. Truth lies open to the view in depthbeneath depth of almost blinding evidence. The mind sees all thelogical relations of being with an apparent subtlety and instantaneityto which its normal consciousness offers no parallel; only as sobrietyreturns, the feeling of insight fades, and one is left staring vacantlyat a few disjointed words and phrases, as one stares at acadaverous-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 tolookers-on, but the subjective rapture of which probably constitutes achief part of the temptation to the vice, --is well known. The centreand periphery of things seem to come together. The ego and itsobjects, the _meum_ and the _tuum_, are one. Now this, only athousandfold enhanced, was the effect upon me of the gas: and its firstresult was to make peal through me with unutterable power theconviction that Hegelism was true after all, and that the deepestconvictions of my intellect hitherto were wrong. Whatever idea orrepresentation occurred to the mind was seized by the same logicalforceps, and served to illustrate the same truth; and that truth wasthat every opposition, among whatsoever things, vanishes in a higherunity in which it is based; that all contradictions, so-called, are butdifferences; that all differences are of degree; that all degrees areof a common kind; that unbroken continuity is of the essence of being;and that we are literally in the midst of _an infinite_, to perceivethe existence of which is the utmost we can attain. Without the _same_as a basis, how could strife occur? Strife presupposes something to bestriven about; and in this common topic, the same for both parties, thedifferences merge. From the hardest contradiction to the tenderestdiversity of verbiage differences evaporate; _yes_ and _no_ agree atleast in being assertions; a denial of a statement is but another modeof stating the same, contradiction can only occur of the samething, --all opinions are thus synonyms, are synonymous, are the same. But the same phrase by difference of emphasis is two; and here againdifference and no-difference merge in one. 

It is impossible to convey an idea of the torrential character of theidentification of opposites as it streams through the mind in thisexperience. I have sheet after sheet of phrases dictated or writtenduring the intoxication, which to the sober reader seem meaninglessdrivel, but which at the moment of transcribing were fused in the fireof infinite rationality. God and devil, good and evil, life and death, I and thou, sober and drunk, matter and form, black and white, quantityand quality, shiver of ecstasy and shudder of horror, vomiting andswallowing, inspiration and expiration, fate and reason, great andsmall, extent and intent, joke and earnest, tragic and comic, and fiftyother {296} contrasts figure in these pages in the same monotonous way. The mind saw how each term _belonged_ to its contrast through aknife-edge moment of transition which _it_ effected, and which, perennial and eternal, was the _nunc stans_ of life. The thought ofmutual implication of the parts in the bare form of a judgment ofopposition, as 'nothing--but, ' 'no more--than, ' 'only--if, ' etc. , produced a perfect delirium of theoretic rapture. And at last, whendefinite ideas to work on came slowly, the mind went through the mere_form_ of recognizing sameness in identity by contrasting the same wordwith 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 differentdegrees of difference and no difference. 

This phrase has the true Hegelian ring, being in fact a regular _sichals sich auf sich selbst beziehende Negativität_. And true Hegelianswill _überhaupt_ be able to read between the lines and feel, at anyrate, what _possible_ ecstasies of cognitive emotion might have bathedthese tattered fragments of thought when they were alive. But for theassurance of a certain amount of respect from them, I should hardlyhave ventured to print what must be such caviare to the general. 

But now comes the reverse of the medal. What is the principle of unityin all this monotonous rain of instances? Although I did not see it atfirst, I soon found that it was in each case nothing but the abstract_genus_ of which the conflicting terms were opposite species. In otherwords, although the flood of ontologic _emotion_ was Hegelian throughand through, the _ground_ for it was nothing but the world-oldprinciple that things are the same only so far and no farther than they_are_ the same, or partake of a common nature, --the principle thatHegel most tramples under foot. At the same time the rapture ofbeholding a process that was infinite, changed (as the nature of theinfinitude was realized by the mind) into the sense of a dreadful andineluctable fate, with whose magnitude every finite effort isincommensurable and in the light of which whatever happens isindifferent. This instantaneous revulsion of mood from rapture tohorror is, perhaps, the strongest emotion I have ever experienced. Igot it repeatedly when the inhalation was continued long enough toproduce incipient nausea; and I cannot but regard it as the normal andinevitable outcome of the {298} intoxication, if sufficientlyprolonged. A pessimistic fatalism, depth within depth of impotence andindifference, reason and silliness united, not in a higher synthesis, but in the fact that whichever you choose it is all one, --this is theupshot of a revelation that began so rosy bright. 

Even when the process stops short of this ultimatum, the reader willhave noticed from the phrases quoted how often it ends by losing theclue. Something 'fades, ' 'escapes;' and the feeling of insight ischanged into an intense one of bewilderment, puzzle, confusion, astonishment. I know no more singular sensation than this intensebewilderment, with nothing particular left to be bewildered at save thebewilderment itself. It seems, indeed, _a causa sui_, or 'spiritbecome its own object. '

My conclusion is that the togetherness of things in a common world, thelaw of sharing, of which I have said so much, may, when perceived, engender a very powerful emotion, that Hegel was so unusuallysusceptible to this emotion throughout his life that its gratificationbecame his supreme end, and made him tolerably unscrupulous as to themeans he employed; that _indifferentism_ is the true outcome of everyview of the world which makes infinity and continuity to be itsessence, and that pessimistic or optimistic attitudes pertain to themere accidental subjectivity of the moment; finally, that theidentification of contradictories, so far from being theself-developing process which Hegel supposes, is really aself-consuming process, passing from the less to the more abstract, andterminating either in a laugh at the ultimate nothingness, or in a moodof vertiginous amazement at a meaningless infinity. 

[1] Reprinted from Mind, April, 1882. 

[2] The seeming contradiction between the infinitude of space and thefact that it is all finished and given and there, can be got over inmore than one way. The simplest way is by idealism, whichdistinguishes between space as actual and space as potential. Foridealism, space only exists so far as it is represented; but allactually represented spaces are finite; it is only possiblyrepresentable spaces that are infinite. 

[3] Not only for simplicity's sake do we select space as the paragon ofa rationalizing continuum. Space determines the relations of the itemsthat enter it in a far more intricate way than does time; in a far morefixed way than does the ego. By this last clause I mean that if thingsare in space at all, they must conform to geometry; while the being inan ego at all need not make them conform to logic or any other mannerof rationality. Under the sheltering wings of a self the matter ofunreason can lodge itself as safely as any other kind of content. Onecannot but respect the devoutness of the ego-worship of some of ourEnglish-writing Hegelians. But at the same time one cannot helpfearing lest the monotonous contemplation of so barren a principle asthat of the pure formal self (which, be it never so essential acondition of the existence of a world of organized experience at all, must notwithstanding take its own _character_ from, not give thecharacter to, the separate empirical data over which its mantle iscast), one cannot but fear, I say, lest the religion of thetranscendental ego should, like all religions of the 'one thingneedful, ' 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 methe other day, "is always the unclassified residuum. " Round about theaccredited and orderly facts of every science there ever floats a sortof dust-cloud of exceptional observations, of occurrences minute andirregular and seldom met with, which it always proves more easy toignore than to attend to. The ideal of every science is that of aclosed and completed system of truth. The charm of most sciences totheir more passive disciples consists in their appearing, in fact, towear just this ideal form. Each one of our various _ologies_ seems tooffer a definite head of classification for every possible phenomenonof the sort which it professes to cover; and so far from free is mostmen's fancy, that, when a consistent and organized scheme of this sorthas once been comprehended and assimilated, a different scheme isunimaginable. No alternative, whether to whole or parts, can anylonger be conceived as possible. Phenomena unclassifiable within thesystem are therefore paradoxical {300} absurdities, and must be helduntrue. When, moreover, as so often happens, the reports of them arevague and indirect; when they come as mere marvels and oddities ratherthan as things of serious moment, --one neglects or denies them with thebest of scientific consciences. Only the born geniuses let themselvesbe worried and fascinated by these outstanding exceptions, and get nopeace till they are brought within the fold. Your Galileos, Galvanis, Fresnels, Purkinjes, and Darwins are always getting confounded andtroubled by insignificant things. Any one will renovate his sciencewho will steadily look after the irregular phenomena. And when thescience is renewed, its new formulas often have more of the voice ofthe exceptions in them than of what were supposed to be the rules. 

No part of the unclassified residuum has usually been treated with amore contemptuous scientific disregard than the mass of phenomenagenerally called _mystical_. Physiology will have nothing to do withthem. Orthodox psychology turns its back upon them. Medicine sweepsthem out; or, at most, when in an anecdotal vein, records a few of themas 'effects of the imagination, '--a phrase of mere dismissal, whosemeaning, in this connection, it is impossible to make precise. All thewhile, however, the phenomena are there, lying broadcast over thesurface of history. No matter where you open its pages, you findthings recorded under the name of divinations, inspirations, demoniacalpossessions, apparitions, trances, ecstasies, miraculous healings andproductions of disease, and occult powers possessed by peculiarindividuals over persons and things in their neighborhood. We supposethat 'mediumship' {301} originated in Rochester, N. Y. , and animalmagnetism with Mesmer; but once look behind the pages of officialhistory, in personal memoirs, legal documents, and popular narrativesand books of anecdote, and you will find that there never was a timewhen these things were not reported just as abundantly as now. Wecollege-bred gentry, who follow the stream of cosmopolitan cultureexclusively, not infrequently stumble upon some old-establishedjournal, or some voluminous native author, whose names are never heardof in _our_ circle, but who number their readers by thequarter-million. It always gives us a little shock to find this massof human beings not only living and ignoring us and all our gods, butactually reading and writing and cogitating without ever a thought ofour canons and authorities. Well, a public no less large keeps andtransmits from generation to generation the traditions and practices ofthe occult; but academic science cares as little for its beliefs andopinions as you, gentle reader, care for those of the readers of theWaverley and the Fireside Companion. To no one type of mind is itgiven to discern the totality of truth. Something escapes the best ofus, --not accidentally, but systematically, and because we have a twist. The scientific-academic mind and the feminine-mystical mind shy fromeach other's facts, just as they fly from each other's temper andspirit. Facts are there only for those who have a mental affinity withthem. When once they are indisputably ascertained and admitted, theacademic and critical minds are by far the best fitted ones tointerpret and discuss them, --for surely to pass from mystical toscientific speculations is like passing from lunacy to sanity; but onthe other hand if there is {302} anything which human historydemonstrates, it is the extreme slowness with which the ordinaryacademic and critical mind acknowledges facts to exist which presentthemselves as wild facts, with no stall or pigeon-hole, or as factswhich threaten to break up the accepted system. In psychology, physiology, and medicine, wherever a debate between the mystics and thescientifics has been once for all decided, it is the mystics who haveusually proved to be right about the _facts_, while the scientifics hadthe better of it in respect to the theories. The most recent andflagrant example of this is 'animal magnetism, ' whose facts werestoutly dismissed as a pack of lies by academic medical science theworld over, until the non-mystical theory of 'hypnotic suggestion' wasfound for them, --when they were admitted to be so excessively anddangerously common that special penal laws, forsooth, must be passed tokeep all persons unequipped with medical diplomas from taking part intheir production. Just so stigmatizations, invulnerabilities, instantaneous cures, inspired discourses, and demoniacal possessions, the records of which were shelved in our libraries but yesterday in thealcove headed 'superstitions, ' now, under the brand-new title of 'casesof hystero-epilepsy, ' are republished, reobserved, and reported with aneven too credulous avidity. 

Repugnant as the mystical style of philosophizing maybe (especiallywhen self-complacent), there is no sort of doubt that it goes with agift for meeting with certain kinds of phenomenal experience. Thewriter of these pages has been forced in the past few years to thisadmission; and he now believes that he who will pay attention to factsof the sort dear to mystics, {303} while reflecting upon them inacademic-scientific ways, will be in the best possible position to helpphilosophy. It is a circumstance of good augury that certainscientifically trained minds in all countries seem drifting to the sameconclusion. The Society for Psychical Research has been one means ofbringing science and the occult together in England and America; andbelieving that this Society fulfils a function which, though limited, is destined to be not unimportant in the organization of humanknowledge, I am glad to give a brief account of it to the uninstructedreader. 

According to the newspaper and drawing-room myth, soft-headedness andidiotic credulity are the bond of sympathy in this Society, and generalwonder-sickness its dynamic principle. A glance at the membershipfails, however, to corroborate this view. The president is Prof. HenrySidgwick, [2] known by his other deeds as the most incorrigibly andexasperatingly critical and sceptical mind in England. The hard-headedArthur Balfour is one vice-president, and the hard-headed Prof. J. P. Langley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, is another. Suchmen as Professor Lodge, the eminent English physicist, and ProfessorRichet, the eminent French physiologist, are among the most activecontributors to the Society's Proceedings; and through the catalogue ofmembership are sprinkled names honored throughout the world for theirscientific capacity. In fact, were I asked to point to a scientificjournal where hard-headedness and never-sleeping suspicion of sourcesof error might be seen in their full bloom, {304} I think I should haveto fall back on the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research. The common run of papers, say on physiological subjects, which onefinds in other professional organs, are apt to show a far lower levelof critical consciousness. Indeed, the rigorous canons of evidenceapplied 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 noexperiences based on mere eyesight could ever have a chance to beadmitted as true, if such an impossibly exacting standard of proof wereinsisted on in every case. 

The S. P. R. , as I shall call it for convenience, was founded in 1882by a number of gentlemen, foremost among whom seem to have beenProfessors 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 systematicexperimentation with hypnotic subjects, mediums, clairvoyants, andothers; 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 deliberatecontrol. Professor Sidgwick, in his introductory address, insistedthat the divided state of public opinion on all these matters was ascandal to science, --absolute disdain on _à priori_ groundscharacterizing what may be called professional opinion, whileindiscriminate credulity was too often found among those who pretendedto have a first-hand acquaintance with the facts. 

As a sort of weather bureau for accumulating {305} reports of suchmeteoric phenomena as apparitions, the S. P. R. Has done an immenseamount of work. As an experimenting body, it cannot be said to havecompletely fulfilled the hopes of its founders. The reasons for thislie in two circumstances: first, the clairvoyant and other subjects whowill allow themselves to be experimented upon are few and far between;and, secondly, work with them takes an immense amount of time, and hashad to be carried on at odd intervals by members engaged in otherpursuits. The Society has not yet been rich enough to control theundivided services of skilled experimenters in this difficult field. The loss of the lamented Edmund Gurney, who more than any one else hadleisure to devote, has been so far irreparable. But were there noexperimental work at all, and were the S. P. R. Nothing but aweather-bureau for catching sporadic apparitions, etc. , in theirfreshness, I am disposed to think its function indispensable in thescientific organism. If any one of my readers, spurred by the thoughtthat so much smoke must needs betoken fire, has ever looked into theexisting literature of the supernatural for proof, he will know what Imean. This literature is enormous, but it is practically worthless forevidential purposes. Facts enough are cited, indeed; but the recordsof them are so fallible and imperfect that at most they lead to theopinion that it may be well to keep a window open upon that quarter inone's mind. 

In the S. P. R. 's Proceedings, on the contrary, a different lawprevails. Quality, and not mere quantity, is what has been mainly keptin mind. The witnesses, where possible, have in every reported casebeen cross-examined personally, the collateral facts {306} have beenlooked up, and the story appears with its precise coefficient ofevidential worth stamped on it, so that all may know just what itsweight as proof may be. Outside of these Proceedings, I know of nosystematic attempt to _weigh_ the evidence for the supernatural. Thismakes the value of the volumes already published unique; and I firmlybelieve that as the years go on and the ground covered grows stillwider, the Proceedings will more and more tend to supersede all othersources of information concerning phenomena traditionally deemedoccult. Collections of this sort are usually best appreciated by therising generation. The young anthropologists and psychologists whowill soon have full occupancy of the stage will feel how great ascientific scandal it has been to leave a great mass of humanexperience to take its chances between vague tradition and credulity onthe one hand and dogmatic denial at long range on the other, with nobody of persons extant who are willing and competent to study thematter with both patience and rigor. If the Society lives long enoughfor the public to become familiar with its presence, so that anyapparition, or house or person infested with unaccountable noises ordisturbances of material objects, will as a matter of course bereported to its officers, we shall doubtless end by having a mass offacts concrete enough to theorize upon. Its sustainers, therefore, should accustom themselves to the idea that its first duty is simply toexist from year to year and perform this recording function well, though no conclusive results of any sort emerge at first. All ourlearned societies have begun in some such modest way. 

But one cannot by mere outward organization make much progress inmatters scientific. Societies can {307} back men of genius, but cannever take their place. The contrast between the parent Society andthe American Branch illustrates this. In England, a little group ofmen with enthusiasm and genius for the work supplied the nucleus; inthis country, Mr. Hodgson had to be imported from Europe before anytangible progress was made. What perhaps more than anything else hasheld the Society together in England is Professor Sidgwick'sextraordinary gift of inspiring confidence in diverse sorts of people. Such tenacity of interest in the result and such absolute impartialityin discussing the evidence are not once in a century found in anindividual. His obstinate belief that there is something yet to bebrought to light communicates patience to the discouraged; hisconstitutional inability to draw any precipitate conclusion reassuresthose who are afraid of being dupes. Mrs. Sidgwick--a sister, by theway, of the great Arthur Balfour--is a worthy ally of her husband inthis matter, showing a similarly rare power of holding her judgment insuspense, and a keenness of observation and capacity for experimentingwith human subjects which are rare in either sex. 

The _worker_ of the Society, as originally constituted, was EdmundGurney. Gurney was a man of the rarest sympathies and gifts. Although, like Carlyle, he used to groan under the burden of hislabors, he yet exhibited a colossal power of dispatching business andgetting through drudgery of the most repulsive kind. His two thickvolumes on 'Phantasms of the Living, ' collected and published in threeyears, are a proof of this. Besides this, he had exquisite artisticinstincts, and his massive volume on 'The Power of Sound' was, when itappeared, the most important {308} work on aesthetics in the Englishlanguage. He had also the tenderest heart and a mind of raremetaphysical power, as his volumes of essays, 'Tertium Quid, ' willprove to any reader. Mr. Frederic Myers, already well known as one ofthe most brilliant of English essayists, is the _ingenium praefervidum_of the S. P. R. Of the value of Mr. Myers's theoretic writings I willsay a word later. Dr. Hodgson, the American secretary, isdistinguished by a balance of mind almost as rare in its way asSidgwick's. He is persuaded of the reality of many of the phenomenacalled spiritualistic, but he also has uncommon keenness in detectingerror; and it is impossible to say in advance whether it will give himmore satisfaction to confirm or to smash a given case offered to hisexamination. 

It is now time to cast a brief look upon the actual contents of theseProceedings. The first two years were largely taken up withexperiments in thought-transference. The earliest lot of these weremade with the daughters of a clergyman named Creery, and convincedMessrs. Balfour Stewart, Barrett, Myers, and Gurney that the girls hadan inexplicable power of guessing names and objects thought of by otherpersons. Two years later, Mrs. Sidgwick and Mr. Gurney, recommencingexperiments with the same girls, detected them signalling to eachother. It is true that for the most part the conditions of the earlierseries had excluded signalling, and it is also possible that thecheating may have grafted itself on what was originally a genuinephenomenon. Yet Gurney was wise in abandoning the entire series to thescepticism 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 areexperiments recorded with upwards of thirty other subjects. Three wereexperimented upon at great length during the first two years: one wasMr. G. A. Smith; the other two were young ladies in Liverpool in theemployment of Mr. Malcolm Guthrie. 

It is the opinion of all who took part in these latter experiments thatsources of conscious and unconscious deception were sufficientlyexcluded, and that the large percentage of correct reproductions by thesubjects of words, diagrams, and sensations occupying other persons'consciousness were entirely inexplicable as results of chance. Thewitnesses of these performances were in fact all so satisfied of thegenuineness of the phenomena, that 'telepathy' has figured freely inthe papers of the Proceedings and in Gurney's book on Phantasms as a_vera causa_ on which additional hypotheses might be built. No merereader can be blamed, however, if he demand, for so revolutionary abelief, a more overwhelming bulk of testimony than has yet beensupplied. Any day, of course, may bring in fresh experiments insuccessful picture-guessing. But meanwhile, and lacking that, we canonly point out that the present data are strengthened in the flank, soto speak, by all observations that tend to corroborate the possibilityof other kindred phenomena, such as telepathic impression, clairvoyance, or what is called 'test-mediumship. ' The wider genuswill naturally cover the narrower species with its credit. 

Gurney's papers on hypnotism must be mentioned next. Some of them areless concerned with establishing new facts than with analyzing oldones. But omitting these, we find that in the line of pure {310}observation Gurney claims to have ascertained in more than one subjectthe following phenomenon: The subject's hands are thrust through ablanket, which screens the operator from his eyes, and his mind isabsorbed in conversation with a third person. The operator meanwhilepoints with his finger to one of the fingers of the subject, whichfinger alone responds to this silent selection by becoming stiff oranaesthetic, as the case may be. The interpretation is difficult, butthe phenomenon, which I have myself witnessed, seems authentic. 

Another observation made by Gurney seems to prove the possibility ofthe subject's mind being directly influenced by the operator's. Thehypnotized subject responds, or fails to respond, to questions asked bya third party according to the operator's silent permission or refusal. Of course, in these experiments all obvious sources of deception wereexcluded. But Gurney's most important contribution to our knowledge ofhypnotism was his series of experiments on the automatic writing ofsubjects who had received post-hypnotic suggestions. For example, asubject during trance is told that he will poke the fire in six minutesafter waking. On being waked he has no memory of the order, but whilehe is engaged in conversation his hand is placed on a _planchette_, which immediately writes the sentence, "P. , you will poke the fire insix minutes. " Experiments like this, which were repeated in greatvariety, seem to prove that below the upper consciousness the hypnoticconsciousness persists, engrossed with the suggestion and able toexpress itself through the involuntarily moving hand. 

Gurney shares, therefore, with Janet and Binet, the {311} credit ofdemonstrating the simultaneous existence of two different strata ofconsciousness, ignorant of each other, in the same person. The'extra-consciousness, ' as one may call it, can be kept on tap, as itwere, by the method of automatic writing. This discovery marks a newera in experimental psychology, and it is impossible to overrate itsimportance. But Gurney's greatest piece of work is his laborious'Phantasms of the Living. ' As an example of the drudgery stowed awayin the volumes, it may suffice to say that in looking up the proofs forthe alleged physical phenomena of witchcraft, Gurney reports a carefulsearch through two hundred and sixty books on the subject, with theresult of finding no first-hand evidence recorded in the trials exceptthe confessions of the victims themselves; and these, of course, arepresumptively due to either torture or hallucination. This statement, made in an unobtrusive note, is only one instance of the care displayedthroughout the volumes. In the course of these, Gurney discusses aboutseven hundred cases of apparitions which he collected. A large numberof these were 'veridical, ' in the sense of coinciding with somecalamity happening to the person who appeared. Gurney's explanation isthat the mind of the person undergoing the calamity was at that momentable 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 thelikelihood of such veridical hallucinations being due to mere chance, Gurney instituted the 'census of hallucinations, ' which has beencontinued with the result of obtaining answers from over twenty-fivethousand persons, asked {312} at random in different countries whether, when in good health and awake, they had ever heard a voice, seen aform, or felt a touch which no material presence could account for. The result seems to be, roughly speaking, that in England about oneadult in ten has had such an experience at least once in his life, andthat of the experiences themselves a large number coincide with somedistant event. The question is, Is the frequency of these latter casestoo great to be deemed fortuitous, and must we suppose an occultconnection between the two events? Mr. And Mrs. Sidgwick have workedout this problem on the basis of the English returns, seventeenthousand in number, with a care and thoroughness that leave nothing tobe desired. Their conclusion is that the cases where the apparition ofa person is seen on the day of his death are four hundred and fortytimes too numerous to be ascribed to chance. The reasoning employed tocalculate this number is simple enough. If there be only a fortuitousconnection between the death of an individual and the occurrence of hisapparition to some one at a distance, the death is no more likely tofall on the same day as the apparition than it is to occur on the sameday with any other event in nature. But the chance-probability thatany individual's death will fall on any given day marked in advance bysome other event is just equal to the chance-probability that theindividual will die at all on any specified day; and the nationaldeath-rate gives that probability as one in nineteen thousand. If, then, when the death of a person coincides with an apparition of thesame person, the coincidence be merely fortuitous, it ought not tooccur oftener than once in nineteen thousand cases. As a matter offact, {313} however, it does occur (according to the census) once inforty-three cases, a number (as aforesaid) four hundred and forty timestoo great. The American census, of some seven thousand answers, givesa remarkably similar result. Against this conclusion the only rationalanswer that I can see is that the data are still too few; that the netwas not cast wide enough; and that we need, to get fair averages, farmore than twenty-four thousand answers to the census question. Thismay, of course, be true, though it seems exceedingly unlikely; and inour own twenty-four thousand answers veridical cases may possibly haveheaped themselves unduly. 

The next topic worth mentioning in the Proceedings is the discussion ofthe physical phenomena of mediumship (slate-writing, furniture-moving, and so forth) by Mrs. Sidgwick, Mr. Hodgson, and 'Mr. Davey. ' This, sofar as it goes, is destructive of the claims of all the mediumsexamined. 'Mr. Davey' himself produced fraudulent slate-writing of thehighest order, while Mr. Hodgson, a 'sitter' in his confidence, reviewed the written reports of the series of his other sitters, --allof them intelligent persons, --and showed that in every case they failedto see the essential features of what was done before their eyes. ThisDavey-Hodgson contribution is probably the most damaging documentconcerning 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 MadameBlavatsky's friends make light of it, it is a stroke from which herreputation will not recover. 

{314}

Physical mediumship in all its phases has fared hard in theProceedings. The latest case reported on is that of the famous EusapiaPaladino, who being detected in fraud at Cambridge, after a brilliantcareer of success on the continent, has, according to the draconianrules of method which govern the Society, been ruled out from a furtherhearing. The case of Stainton Moses, on the other hand, concerningwhich Mr. Myers has brought out a mass of unpublished testimony, seemsto escape from the universal condemnation, and appears to force upon uswhat Mr. Andrew Lang calls the choice between a moral and a physicalmiracle. 

In the case of Mrs. Piper, not a physical but a trance medium, we seemto have no choice offered at all. Mr. Hodgson and others have madeprolonged study of this lady's trances, and are all convinced thatsuper-normal powers of cognition are displayed therein. These are_primâ facie_ due to 'spirit-control. ' But the conditions are socomplex that a dogmatic decision either for or against thespirit-hypothesis must as yet be postponed. 

One of the most important experimental contributions to the Proceedingsis the article of Miss X. On 'Crystal Vision. ' Many persons who lookfixedly into a crystal or other vaguely luminous surface fall into akind of daze, and see visions. Miss X. Has this susceptibility in aremarkable degree, and is, moreover, an unusually intelligent critic. She reports many visions which can only be described as apparentlyclairvoyant, and others which beautifully fill a vacant niche incurknowledge of subconscious mental operations. For example, looking intothe crystal before breakfast one morning she reads in printedcharacters of the {315} death of a lady of her acquaintance, the dateand other circumstances all duly appearing in type. Startled by this, she looks at the 'Times' of the previous day for verification, andthere among the deaths are the identical words which she has seen. Onthe same page of the Times are other items which she remembers readingthe day before; and the only explanation seems to be that her eyes theninattentively observed, so to speak, the death-item, which forthwithfell into a special corner of her memory, and came out as a visualhallucination when the peculiar modification of consciousness inducedby 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 anddiscussed by Messrs. Myers and Podmore. They form the best ghostliterature I know of from the point of view of emotional interest. Asto the conclusions drawn, Mrs. Sidgwick is rigorously non-committal, while Mr. Myers and Mr. Podmore show themselves respectively hospitableand inhospitable to the notion that such stories have a basis ofobjectivity 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 longseries of articles by Mr. Myers on what he now calls the 'subliminalself, ' 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 ofallied phenomena is a conviction which he expresses in the followingterms:--

{316}

"Each of us is in reality an abiding psychical entity far moreextensive than he knows, --an individuality which can never expressitself completely through any corporeal manifestation. The selfmanifests itself through the organism; but there is always some part ofthe self unmanifested, and always, as it seems, some power of organicexpression in abeyance or reserve. "

The ordinary consciousness Mr. Myers likens to the visible part of thesolar spectrum; the total consciousness is like that spectrum prolongedby the inclusion of the ultra-red and ultra-violet rays. In thepsychic spectrum the 'ultra' parts may embrace a far wider range, bothof physiological and of psychical activity, than is open to ourordinary 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 anylanguage to consider the phenomena of hallucination, hypnotism, automatism, double personality, and mediumship as connected parts ofone whole subject. All constructions in this field must beprovisional, and it is as something provisional that Mr. Myers offersus his formulations. But, thanks to him, we begin to see for the firsttime what a vast interlocked and graded system these phenomena, fromthe rudest motor-automatisms to the most startling sensory-apparition, form. Quite apart from Mr. Myers's conclusions, his methodicaltreatment of them by classes and series is the first great step towardovercoming the distaste of orthodox science to look at them at all. 

{317}

One's reaction on hearsay testimony is always determined by one's ownexperience. Most men who have once convinced themselves, by what seemsto them a careful examination, that any one species of the supernaturalexists, begin to relax their vigilance as to evidence, and throw thedoors of their minds more or less wide open to the supernatural alongits 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, seemsinsufferably tedious. And it is so; few species of literature are moretruly dull than reports of phantasms. Taken simply by themselves, asseparate facts to stare at, they appear so devoid of meaning and sweep, that, even were they certainly true, one would be tempted to leave themout of one's universe for being so idiotic. Every other sort of facthas some context and continuity with the rest of nature. These aloneare contextless and discontinuous. 

Hence I think that the sort of loathing--no milder word will do--whichthe very words 'psychical research' and 'psychical researcher' awakenin so many honest scientific breasts is not only natural, but in asense 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 sillymarvelling at so many detached prodigies. And such prodigies! Soscience simply falls back on her general _non-possumus_; and most ofthe would-be critics of the Proceedings have been contented to opposeto the phenomena recorded the simple presumption that in some way orother the reports _must_ be {318} fallacious, --for so far as the orderof nature has been subjected to really scientific scrutiny, it alwayshas been proved to run the other way. But the oftener one is forced toreject an alleged sort of fact by the use of this mere presumption, theweaker does the presumption itself get to be; and one might in courseof time use up one's presumptive privileges in this way, even thoughone started (as our anti-telepathists do) with as good a case as thegreat induction of psychology that all our knowledge comes by the useof our eyes and ears and other senses. And we must remember also thatthis undermining of the strength of a presumption by reiterated reportof facts to the contrary does not logically require that the facts inquestion should all be well proved. A lot of rumors in the air againsta business man's credit, though they might all be vague, and no one ofthem amount to proof that he is unsound, would certainly weaken the_presumption_ of his soundness. And all the more would they have thiseffect if they formed what Gurney called a fagot and not a chain, --thatis, if they were independent of one another, and came from differentquarters. Now, the evidence for telepathy, weak and strong, taken justas it comes, forms a fagot and not a chain. No one item cites thecontent of another item as part of its own proof. But taken togetherthe items have a certain general consistency; there is a method intheir madness, so to speak. So each of them adds presumptive value tothe lot; and cumulatively, as no candid mind can fail to see, theysubtract presumptive force from the orthodox belief that there can benothing in any one's intellect that has not come in through ordinaryexperiences of sense. 

But it is a miserable thing for a question of truth {319} to beconfined to mere presumption and counter-presumption, with no decisivethunderbolt of fact to clear the baffling darkness. And, sooth to say, in talking so much of the merely presumption-weakening value of ourrecords, I have myself been wilfully taking the point of view of theso-called 'rigorously scientific' disbeliever, and making an _adhominem_ plea. My own point of view is different. For me thethunderbolt _has_ fallen, and the orthodox belief has not merely hadits presumption weakened, but the truth itself of the belief isdecisively overthrown. If I may employ the language of theprofessional logic-shop, a universal proposition can be made untrue bya particular instance. If you wish to upset the law that all crows areblack, you must not seek to show that no crows are; it is enough if youprove one single crow to be white. My own white crow is Mrs. Piper. In the trances of this medium, I cannot resist the conviction thatknowledge appears which she has never gained by the ordinary waking useof her eyes and ears and wits. What the source of this knowledge maybe I know not, and have not the glimmer of an explanatory suggestion tomake; but from admitting the fact of such knowledge I can see noescape. So when I turn to the rest of the evidence, ghosts and all, Icannot carry with me the irreversibly negative bias of the 'rigorouslyscientific' mind, with its presumption as to what the true order ofnature ought to be. I feel as if, though the evidence be flimsy inspots, it may nevertheless collectively carry heavy weight. Therigorously scientific mind may, in truth, easily overshoot the mark. Science means, first of all, a certain dispassionate method. Tosuppose that it means a certain set of {320} results that one shouldpin 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 ofcredulity. 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! Asa matter of fact, the trances I speak of have broken down for my ownmind the limits of the admitted order of nature. Science, so far asscience denies such exceptional occurrences, lies prostrate in the dustfor me; and the most urgent intellectual need which I feel at presentis that science be built up again in a form in which such things mayhave a positive place. Science, like life, feeds on its own decay. New facts burst old rules; then newly divined conceptions bind old andnew together into a reconciling law. 

And here is the real instructiveness of Messrs. Myers and Gurney'swork. They are trying with the utmost conscientiousness to find areconciling conception which shall subject the old laws of nature tothe smallest possible strain. Mr. Myers uses that method of gradualapproach which has performed such wonders in Darwin's hands. WhenDarwin met a fact which seemed a poser to his theory, his regularcustom, as I have heard an able colleague say, was to fill in all roundit with smaller facts, as a wagoner might heap dirt round a big rock inthe 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, andseeks to show that these are but extreme manifestations of a {321}common truth, --the truth that the invisible segments of our minds aresusceptible, under rarely realized conditions, of acting and beingacted upon by the invisible segments of other conscious lives. Thismay not be ultimately true (for the theosophists, with their astralbodies and the like, may, for aught I now know, prove to be on thecorrecter trail), but no one can deny that it is in good scientificform, --for science always takes a known kind of phenomenon, and triesto extend its range. 

I have myself, as American agent for the census, collected hundreds ofcases of hallucination in healthy persons. The result is to make mefeel that we all have potentially a 'subliminal' self, which may makeat any time irruption into our ordinary lives. At its lowest, it isonly the depository of our forgotten memories; at its highest, we donot know what it is at all. Take, for instance, a series of cases. During sleep, many persons have something in them which measures theflight of time better than the waking self does. It wakes them at apreappointed hour; it acquaints them with the moment when they firstawake. It may produce an hallucination, --as in a lady who informs methat at the instant of waking she has a vision of her watch-face withthe hands pointing (as she has often verified) to the exact time. Itmay 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 donot openly attend. A lady taking her lunch in town finds herselfwithout her purse. Instantly a sense comes over her of rising from thebreakfast-table and hearing her purse drop upon the floor. On reachinghome she finds {322} nothing under the table, but summons the servantto 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 youdid n't know you 'd dropped it. " The same subconscious something mayrecollect what we have forgotten. A lady accustomed to takingsalicylate of soda for muscular rheumatism wakes one early wintermorning with an aching neck. In the twilight she takes what shesupposes to be her customary powder from a drawer, dissolves it in aglass of water, and is about to drink it down, when she feels a sharpslap 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 morphinepowders awoke in this quasi-explosive way. A like explanation offersitself as most plausible for the following case: A lady, with littletime to catch the train, and the expressman about to call, is excitedlylooking for the lost key of a packed trunk. Hurrying upstairs with abunch of keys, proved useless, in her hand, she hears an 'objective'voice distinctly say, "Try the key of the cake-box. " Being tried, itfits. 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 herservants who has become ill over night. She is startled at distinctlyreading over the bedroom door in gilt letters the word 'small-pox. 'The doctor is sent for, and ere long pronounces small-pox to be thedisease, although the lady says, "The thought of {323} the girl'shaving small-pox never entered my mind till I saw the apparentinscription. " Then come other cases of warning; for example, that of ayouth sitting in a wagon under a shed, who suddenly hears his deadmother's voice say, "Stephen, get away from here quick!" and jumps outjust in time to see the shed-roof fall. 

After this come the experiences of persons appearing to distant friendsat or near the hour of death. Then, too, we have the trance-visionsand utterances, which may appear astonishingly profuse and continuous, and maintain a fairly high intellectual level. For all these higherphenomena, it seems to me that while the proximate mechanism is that of'hallucination, ' it is straining an hypothesis unduly to name anyordinary subconscious mental operation--such as expectation, recollection, or inference from inattentive perception--as the ultimatecause that starts it up. It is far better tactics, if you wish to getrid of mystery, to brand the narratives themselves as unworthy oftrust. The trustworthiness of most of them is to my own mind far fromproved. And yet in the light of the medium-trance, which is proved, itseems as if they might well all be members of a natural kind of fact ofwhich we do not yet know the full extent. 

Thousands of sensitive organizations in the United States to-day liveas steadily in the light of these experiences, and are as indifferentto modern science, as if they lived in Bohemia in the twelfth century. They are indifferent to science, because science is so callouslyindifferent to their experiences. Although in its essence science onlystands for a method and for no fixed belief, yet as habitually taken, both by its votaries and outsiders, it is {324} identified with acertain fixed belief, --the belief that the hidden order of nature ismechanical exclusively, and that non-mechanical categories areirrational ways of conceiving and explaining even such things as humanlife. Now, this mechanical rationalism, as one may call it, makes, ifit becomes one's only way of thinking, a violent breach with the waysof 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 viewof life to distinguish it from the impersonal and mechanical, and theromantic view of life to distinguish it from the rationalistic view, have been, and even still are, outside of well-drilled scientificcircles, the dominant forms of thought. But for mechanicalrationalism, personality is an insubstantial illusion. The chronicbelief of mankind, that events may happen for the sake of theirpersonal significance, is an abomination; and the notions of ourgrandfathers 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 absolutelybaseless, a mass of sheer _un_truth. 

Now, of course, we must all admit that the excesses to which theromantic and personal view of nature may lead, if wholly unchecked byimpersonal rationalism, are direful. Central African Mumbo-jumboism isone of unchecked romanticism's fruits. One ought accordingly tosympathize with that abhorrence of romanticism as a sufficientworld-theory; one ought to understand that lively intolerance of theleast grain of romanticism in the views of life of other people, whichare such characteristic marks of those who {325} follow the scientificprofessions to-day. Our debt to science is literally boundless, andour gratitude for what is positive in her teachings must becorrespondingly immense. But the S. P. R. 's Proceedings have, it seemsto me, conclusively proved one thing to the candid reader; and that isthat the verdict of pure insanity, of gratuitous preference for error, of superstition without an excuse, which the scientists of our day areled by their intellectual training to pronounce upon the entire thoughtof the past, is a most shallow verdict. The personal and romantic viewof life has other roots besides wanton exuberance of imagination andperversity 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 thannow--at most times it would have been much more easy--for advocateswith a little industry to collect in its favor an array of contemporarydocuments as good as those which our publications present. Thesedocuments all relate to real experiences of persons. These experienceshave three characters in common: They are capricious, discontinuous, and not easily controlled; they require peculiar persons for theirproduction; their significance seems to be wholly for personal life. Those who preferentially attend to them, and still more those who areindividually subject to them, not only easily may find, but arelogically bound to find, in them valid arguments for their romantic andpersonal conception of the world's course. Through my slightparticipation in the investigations of the S. P. R. I have becomeacquainted with numbers of persons of this sort, for whom the very word'science' has become a name of reproach, for reasons that I now bothunderstand {326} and respect. It is the intolerance of science forsuch phenomena as we are studying, her peremptory denial either oftheir existence or of their significance (except as proofs of man'sabsolute innate folly), that has set science so apart from the commonsympathies of the race. I confess that it is on this, its humanizingmission, that the Society's best claim to the gratitude of ourgeneration seems to me to depend. It has restored continuity tohistory. It has shown some reasonable basis for the most superstitiousaberrations of the foretime. It has bridged the chasm, healed thehideous rift that science, taken in a certain narrow way, has shot intothe human world. 

I will even go one step farther. When from our present advancedstandpoint we look back upon the past stages of human thought, whetherit be scientific thought or theological thought, we are amazed that auniverse which appears to us of so vast and mysterious a complicationshould 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 thematerialists of the last century or that of the Bridgewater treatisesof our own, it always looks the same to us, --incredibly perspectivelessand short. Even Lyell's, Faraday's, Mill's, and Darwin's consciousnessof their respective subjects are already beginning to put on aninfantile and innocent look. Is it then likely that the science of ourown day will escape the common doom; that the minds of its votarieswill never look old-fashioned to the grandchildren of the latter? Itwould be folly to suppose so. Yet if we are to judge by the analogy ofthe past, when our science once becomes old-fashioned, it will be morefor its omissions of fact, for its {327} ignorance of whole ranges andorders of complexity in the phenomena to be explained, than for anyfatal lack in its spirit and principles. The spirit and principles ofscience are mere affairs of method; there is nothing in them that needhinder science from dealing successfully with a world in which personalforces are the starting-point of new effects. The only form of thingthat we directly encounter, the only experience that we concretelyhave, is our own personal life. The only complete category of ourthinking, our professors of philosophy tell us, is the category ofpersonality, every other category being one of the abstract elements ofthat. And this systematic denial on science's part of personality as acondition of events, this rigorous belief that in its own essential andinnermost nature our world is a strictly impersonal world, may, conceivably, as the whirligig of time goes round, prove to be the verydefect that our descendants will be most surprised at in our ownboasted science, the omission that to their eyes will most tend to makeit look perspectiveless and short. 

[1] This Essay is formed of portions of an article in Scribner'sMagazine for March, 1890, of an article in the Forum for July, 1892, and of the President's Address before the Society for PsychicalResearch, published in the Proceedings for June, 1896, and in Science. 

[2] Written in 1891. Since then, Mr. Balfour, the present writer, andProfessor 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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