一些从实用主义考量的形而上学的问题

现在,我要举例说明如何运用实用主义的方法理解一些具体的问题,让你们更了解这种方法。我要从最枯燥的开始,我选择的第一个问题便是关于“本体”的问题。大家采用的是本体与特性两者之间陈旧的差异,这种差异就像任何一种人类语言中,主语跟谓语之间的差别一样。现在就拿一截黑板粉笔打比方。不管使用什么样的术语,它的样式、特性、性能、非本质属性或喜好,分别是白色、易碎性、圆柱形、不溶于水等。但是,这些特性的载体是白垩,而它便可称为这些特性赖以存在的本体。同理,这张桌子的特性存在于本体“木头”,我所穿大衣的特性存在于本体“羊毛”等。白垩、木头和羊毛,尽管各不相同,却再次表现出相似的功能。它们自身被认为体现了更根本的本体——物质,它有空间占有性及不可穿透性的特性。同理,我们的思想和情感体现了我们不同灵魂的喜好或性能,灵魂即本体,但不尽如此,因为它们体现了更深层次的本体——“精神”。

如前所示,我们对白垩的认识是白色、易碎性等;我们对木头的认识是可燃性及纤维结构。每种本体都是通过一组特性被认识,只有特性为我们的亲身体验形成了实实在在的“价值”。任何情况下,本体都是透过特性被揭晓认识的;如果把我们与事物的特性分割开来,我们应该无从发现事物的存在;如果上帝一成不变地向我们传达这些特性的信息,结果是,他有时会奇迹般地废除了起支撑作用的本体,而我们也无从辨别什么时候会发生这样的事情,原因是我们的体验本身会纹丝不变。唯名论者因此认为,本体这一概念是虚假的,因为我们喜欢将名字变成事物本身,我们对这个把戏还乐此不疲。自然现象是成类出现的:如白垩类、木头类等。每一类都有自己的名字。名字被我们当作说明一类现象的方式。比如,今天用的体温计应当来源于名为“气候”的事物。气候其实不过是某类日子的指代名称,但它却被当作日子背后的支撑物。总之,我们将名称当作其所指代事物本身,就像名称本身是一种客观存在一样。但唯名论者会说,事物可感知的性能当然不是真的存在于名称本身,而如果不存在于名称,他们便不存在于任何事物中。相反,这些性能之间相互依附、相互联系。我们认为是难以触摸到的本体支撑了这种联系,也解释了这种联系,就像水泥能将一片片的马赛克拼接在一起一样。但是,这种观念必须被摈弃。存在联系这个事实本身是本体这个概念所代表的全部意义。这一事实背后,什么都不存在。

经院哲学将本体概念从常识中剥离,让它有专业而清晰的内涵。没有事物比本体给我们带来更少的实用效应,我们与它有千丝万缕的联系,却被从中隔断。但有一次,经院哲学以实用的态度处理了本体概念,由此证明了本体观的重要性。我指的是关于圣餐之谜的某些争论。本体在这里表现出重大的实用价值。上帝的晚餐餐桌上,因为圣饼的非本质属性是一成不变的,而它也已然成为了耶稣身体的一部分,所以变化肯定只发生在本体上。圣饼作为面包的本体定然消失,而替之以作为圣物的本体,其看得见摸得着的性能却出人意料地没有任何变化。尽管这些性能没有变化,但其间却有相当大的区别,至少表现在,我们这些接受圣饼的人却被“款待”了一顿神性的本体。本体的概念深入生活领域,而且如果你承认不同的本体可以从其非本质属性分离出来,并随后可以相互交换这些属性的话,它将产生巨大的效应。

这只是我唯一知道的对于本体观的实用主义应用;而且显然,只有那些站在客观独立的立场上,相信其“真实存在”的人才会严肃对待。

伯克利对物质本体的批判栩栩如生,让他的名字响彻其后的哲学圈。他对物质概念的处理人尽皆知,只需一提便可。迄今为止,与我们否认熟悉的外部世界不一样的是,伯克利证实了它。经院哲学对于我们触摸不到的物质本体抱有这样的理念:它存在于外部世界的背后,比外部世界更深刻、更真实,而外部世界也需要它的支持。在所有把外部世界贬为非真实存在的人中,伯克利仍是做得最有成效的。他曾说,抛弃本体,相信你能理解也能接触到的上帝,他直接向你传递了这个理性世界,你相信后者,而且你的信任是建立在他的神威之上。伯克利对于物质的批判说到底绝对是实用主义的。通过知觉,如物质的色彩、形状、硬度等,我们了解了物质。这些知觉是这个词表象的价值。把物质当作一种客观存在,它带来的不同在于我们由此能产生知觉;物质不是一种客观存在的话,我们便缺少知觉。这些知觉于是成为了物质的唯一意义。伯克利不否认物质;他只是告诉了我们物质的组成。从知觉的角度看,物质这一术语的内涵不过就这些。

洛克及其后的休谟采用了相似的实用主义手法批判精神本体的概念。在此我只论述洛克如何处理个体身份这一概念。他从体验的角度直接将这个概念缩小到它的实用主义价值方面。他说道,这个概念的意义不过在于“意识”,比如我们在生命中某一时刻记着其他时刻,并觉得这些其他时刻是某个整体或同一个人历史中的一部分。理性主义用灵魂本体的整体性解释了我们生活实践中存在的连续体。但洛克解释道:“假如上帝将意识带走了,灵魂原理会让我们生活得更好吗?假如上帝让不同的灵魂拥有相同的意识,我们的自我意识又会让现状更糟糕吗?”在洛克生活的年代,灵魂的用途就是受奖励或受惩罚。我们可以看看洛克如何从这个角度让这一问题变得有实用价值:

“假设,”他说,“一个人认为他与内斯特 [1] 或瑟赛蒂兹 [2] 拥有一样的灵魂。他是否应该把他们的行为视为自己的行为,而不是曾经存在于历史中的人物的行为?但是,如果让他偶尔发现自己感知到了内斯特的行为,那么,他会把自己和内斯特当作一个人……在这种情形下,个人身份的获得完全仰仗于奖与罚。”也许这样想才是合理的:不应该让任何人回答他一无所知的问题,而是应该让他接受自己的命运,以及无论是受褒奖还是受惩罚的意识。假设,一个人现在因为前世所犯的错误而受到惩罚,他因此而丧失了意识,那么,这样的惩罚与投错胎又有何区别呢?

所以,对于洛克而言,我们的个人身份仅仅存在于真真切切、定义明确的具体事物中。除了这些可信的事实外,它是否也存在于某种精神原理中,这只是一个让人好奇的推测。洛克,尽管有所妥协,默默地容忍了人们相信在意识背后真实地存在着灵魂。但是他的继承者休谟及其后的多数实证派的心理学家们否认了灵魂,除了用以指代我们内心世界中确凿存在的整体。他们让灵魂流回到体验的河流中,通过许多“概念”及其相互间特定的联系,把灵魂拆解成许多具有微观价值的东西。正如我解释的伯克利所说的物质一样,灵魂也只是在这种情形下是好的或真实的,仅此而已。

一提到物质本体便容易暗示具有“物质主义”的教条,但是,作为一种形而上哲学的原则,哲学意义上的物质未必一定与信仰中的物质纠缠在一起。也许从那个意义上,一个人可能会否认物质,就像伯克利过去那样激烈。也许他跟赫胥黎一样是现象论者,但是一个人仍可以是更广泛意义上的物质主义者:用低级事物来解释高级事物,将世界的命运放诸大自然中更盲目的那部分力量上。就是因为这层更广泛的意义,物质主义与唯灵论或有神论意见相左。唯物主义会说,让世界运转起来的是物质世界的定律。唯心论主张,自然只存在于我们的意识中。不管是不是这样,人类天才的最高产物也许来自对事实完全了解的人,他们把事实从其物理条件中解析出来了。无论什么情况,我们的思想总是必须记录大自然,记下它通过未知的物理规律进行操作的情况。这便是当今唯物主义的性质,也许更好的称呼是自然主义。自然主义与有神论,或者说广义上的唯心主义不同。唯心主义会说,思想不仅见证并记录事物,也操控运转事物:世界便如此得以指引,不是通过低级事物的指引而是高级事物。

与平常的待遇一样,这个问题最后成为了更像审美偏好不同而引起的冲突。物质是粗略的、粗糙的、粗笨的、糊涂的;精神是纯洁的、崇高的、高贵的;因为它与宇宙的尊贵是一致的,将重点放在了看起来更高层次的事物上,所以精神必须被认定为统领性的原则。将抽象的原则当作最终的归宿,我们的智者在它面前顶礼膜拜,失去了思想,这是理性主义者最大的失败。就像大家常认为的那样,唯心主义也许只是对于一种抽象的崇拜,对另一种抽象的反感。我记得有位令人尊敬的唯心主义教授总把唯物主义叫作“泥腿子哲学”,认为它因此是可以驳倒的。

对于这类唯心主义,可以简单地予以答复,斯宾塞先生在这点上做得很好。在他的《心理》第一卷后几页写得很精彩,他告诉我们,极其微妙的物质在起作用时与现代科学假设的想象一样快,一样精密,没有一点儿粗糙的痕迹。他表示,神灵这个概念是我们这些凡人设想的概念,它本身太粗糙,无法承载自然世界中发生的精致又精细的事实。物质和神灵这两个名称,他说道,不过是象征符号,指出了他们的对手无法说明的未知现实。

对一个抽象化的异议,一个抽象化的回应便足够了。迄今为止,人们反对唯物论的根源是他们对于物质的厌恶,把物质当作“愚钝的”概念,所以斯宾塞先生从根源上驳斥了这种观点。物质确实是令人难以置信地极其精致。对于任何见过已过世了的孩子或父母的脸庞的人,物质能将那份珍贵保留一段时期,仅凭这一点就能让物质从此变得神圣。不管生命的准则是哪一种,物质的或非物质的,物质总会全力协作,让自己参与到所有不同的生活中。那种让人热爱的化身是物质能做到的事情。

但现在,说完这不景气的理性潮流之后,我们不要停留在原理的问题上,让我们将实用主义的方法应用到问题中去吧。我们所指的物质是什么?世界由物质,抑或神灵主宰,这会给实际生活带来什么样的区别?我想我们会发现,这个问题会因为这种区别而具备了不同的特点。

首先,我想让你们注意到一个令人好奇的事实。对于过去的世界而言,我们认为它是物质的作品还是由神灵制造的,这对它不会产生丝毫区别。

请想象一下,事实上,世界所有的内容都是一次性呈现的,而且不可逆转。假想它在此刻终止了,也没有未来;然后,让有神论者与唯物论者们用他们相左的看法来分析过去的世界。有神论者会说明上帝是如何创造世界的;同样,唯物主义能够一样成功地假设,说明世界是如何从盲目的自然力量中诞生的。然后,让实用主义者在两种理论中取舍。如果世界终止了,他又如何能进行测验?于他而言,概念是能回顾过去经验的东西,是能让我们看到区别的东西。但我们的假设是,既不会有新的经验,也找不到可能的区别。两个理论的结论都已展现,而考虑到我们的假设,这些结论是一回事。实用主义者最终会断言,尽管名字听起来不一样,两个理论的含义是一样的,两者之间的争论纯粹是空话(我料想,两者当然都成功地解释了自然为何物)。

为了真诚地思考这件事,让我们设想,如果上帝确实存在,他创造出了世界,而他的世界又将不复存在,他此时的价值是什么呢?他的价值不会大于世界的价值。在这样一个好坏掺半的结果中,他的创造力可以施展,却不能继续。因为没有未来,因为世界所有的价值和内涵都在情感中得以存储和实现,而情感随着世界来,现在又要随着世界走;因为世界预示未来的功能已不再有更大的意义(就像我们现在生活的真实世界一样);那么,在这种情形下,我们为什么要因此接受算得上是上帝的安排呢。上帝是一种存在,他只创造了地球一次;对此,我们心怀感激,但也仅此而已。但现在,让我们看看相反的假设,即少量的物质通过遵循自身的规律,创造了那个世界,功劳也不小,难道我们不应该对它们同样心怀感激吗?这样做,我们会因为抛弃了上帝创世这个假设,选择物质而有所损失吗?世界会因此让死亡或愚昧有空可钻吗?因为体验只有一次,上帝的存在会让体验变得更生动或丰富吗?

坦白讲,这些问题没有答案。任何一种假设下,实际体验的世界具有一样的细节,就像布朗宁说过的那样,“无论赞与责,结果都一样”。它岿然屹立,难以推翻:就像一件送出去而无法收回的礼物。把世界归为物质的结果,不会让世界减少任何一样东西;同理,将之归为上帝,也不会令世界多一样东西。它们分别是这个世界的上帝,这个世界的原子,而不可能是另一个世界的上帝或原子。如果存在上帝,他做的事情跟原子做的一样——也表现出原子的特征,所以说——上帝应得到的感激与原子应得的是一样的,不多也不少。如果上帝的存在不能给世界的运转带来不同的转机或议题,他自然也不能为世界的崇高添砖加瓦。如果独留原子在舞台上唱独角戏,世界也不会因为上帝的缺席而变得不崇高。剧终谢幕时,不会因声称剧作者是一位杰出的天才,戏变得更好,就像它不会因你把剧作者叫作平庸的作者而变得糟糕一样。

所以,如果无法从我们的假设中推断出关于未来的体验或行为的细节,唯物论与有神论之争便是无聊的、没有意义的。在这场争论中,物质与上帝是一回事——是不多不少地创造了成品世界的力量——对此,理智的人应当对这越界的讨论不予理睬。如此一来,对于看不出来任何具体的、未来可能发生的后果的哲学争论,普通人会本能地,而实证主义者及科学家们则会有意地不予理会。哲学空泛的缺点是我们再熟悉不过的。如果实证主义成立,除非受质疑的理论能产生不同而有实际意义的结果,且不管这些结果是多么复杂、多么遥远,否则对它空泛性的谴责则是正确的。普通人和科学家说他们没发现这样的结果,而如果形而上学者也说没发现,其他人当然有权利反对形而上学者。如果这样,他的理论便只是夸夸其谈、无足轻重;而若因此授予他专家的头衔,就太愚蠢了。

因此,在任何一场真正意义上的形而上学的争辩中,必然涉及现实的议题,不管这些议题多么具有揣摩性,与当下相距多么遥远。要弄明白这点,你需要跟我一起重新回到我们的问题上,让自己置身于现实的世界里,一个有未来的世界,一个在我们讨论的这一刻仍有待完善的世界。在这仍未结束的世界里,唯物论还是有神论,变成了一个非常有实际价值的问题;这个问题值得我们花上几分钟弄明白它。

如果我们认为,迄今为止所有的体验事实都是无意识的原子,按永恒运转的规律,任意组合出来的产物,或者,我们认为这些事实都是上帝赐予的天意,这个过程对我们究竟会产生什么样的区别?对于已经发生的事实而言,确实没什么区别。它们已然发生,被尘封,被定格;不管是原子还是上帝促成了它们,它们带来的好处也已被享用。所以现在,我们的身边存在着许多这样的唯物论者:因为忽视了这一问题未来的方面及实用的方面,他们竭力想消除唯物论这个词给人带来的憎恶之情,甚至是消除这个词本身。他们表示,如果物质能创造这个世界的所有,那么从功能上看,为什么物质不能像上帝一样成为一个神圣的实体?事实上,你们所说的上帝是指与上帝结成的联合体。停,这些人建议我们从这两个说法中任选其一,尽管它们已经对立到了极点。一方面,使用没有任何神学内涵的词;另一方面,使用暗含粗野、愚钝、无知之意的表达。称之为至高无上的神秘、无人知晓的能量、唯一存在的力量,而不是称为上帝或物质,这便是斯宾塞先生敦促我们思考的方向;如果哲学纯粹是“回顾性”的话,他可因此而宣称自己是一名优秀的实用主义者。

但是哲学也是“瞻前性”的,发现了世界曾经是什么,曾经做过什么,曾经创造过什么之后,你仍需要再问一个问题“这个世界会带来什么?”赐予我们一种物质,受其规律的作用,把我们引向成功,让我们的世界比任何时候都接近完美,那么,不管多理智的人都会崇拜它,就像斯宾塞先生崇拜他口中那无人知晓的力量一样。它不仅现在是正当的,而且永远都是正当的,而它也正是我们需要的。上帝能做到的它也能做到,所以它就等同于上帝,它起到的作用跟上帝一样,它存在于一个上帝为多余的却无法正式避免的世界。在这个世界里,宗教的名字应该叫做“宇宙情感”。

但是,让斯宾塞先生的宇宙进化得以进行的物质,就是这种永远接近完善的原理吗?不,确非如此!因为科学已预示,每种宇宙中进化而来的事物,或由这类事物组成的体系,其未来的宿命只能是消亡的悲剧;在将自己束缚于美学原则、忽略这场争议具有实际价值的那一面的时候,斯宾塞先生对于缓和矛盾其实没起到作用。但是,现在让我们应用能产出实际结果的原则,你会看到,唯物论和有神论的争论便立刻具备了极其重要的意义。

有神论与唯物论,若从回溯过去的角度看,都表现平平;若从展望未来的角度看,两者指向的是截然不同的体验观。原因是,根据机械进化理论,物质与运动再分配定律无疑会残忍地再次毁灭两者的作品,让曾经进化的事物重新糅合,尽管他们肯定会感谢有机体曾给我们带来的美妙时光以及我们头脑中构思出的种种理想。得益于进化科学的远见卓识,你们都知道宇宙消亡时刻是幅什么样的景象。还是巴尔弗先生妙笔生花:“我们所生活的体系中的能量会衰退,太阳的辉煌会变得暗淡,地球不再潮起潮落,变得死气沉沉,它无法承载那偶尔打破它静谧的人类。人类将沦入地狱,人类的思想将不复存在。不安分的意识曾经在这暗淡的角落,短暂地打破了宇宙知足的沉默,它也将安息。物质不再有自我意识。‘不朽的丰碑’以及‘不朽的行为’、死亡本身、比死亡还强烈的爱情,所有这些都会经历就像他们从未存在一般的时刻。有相同经历的还包括,人类的劳动、天分、忠诚和苦难经年累月地努力奋斗、希望促成的事物,无论好坏。”

这便是它的痛处,在辽阔宇宙中神游的广大物体中,尽管出现了钻石般的海岸,尽管飘走了令人心醉的云堤,在世界被消解之前,它们会长期驻留——甚至就像现行世界为了我们的快乐而驻步停留一样——但是,当这些转瞬即逝的地球的产物消失的时候,没有任何事物,绝对没有任何事物能够代表它们曾代表的特征,代表它们曾供奉的珍贵。它们死亡了,消失了,从曾存在过的地球和空间中彻底消失了。没有回音;没有回忆;没有留下任何影响,让自己有志同道合的后来者。这种彻底的毁灭和悲剧便是大家现在所理解的科学唯物主义的精髓。低级事物,而非高级事物,才是永恒的力量,或者是我们唯一能亲眼所见的一个进化轮回里最后能存活的力量。对此,斯宾塞先生跟其他人一样确信无疑。所以,真正让我们沮丧的是随它而来的令人郁闷的将来。在这种情形下,为什么他还要与我们争辩,说我们是因为愚蠢的审美情结而拒绝“物质与运动”的“粗犷”,而拒绝他的哲学原则?

不,拒绝唯物主义的理由不是因为它拥有什么,而是因为它缺少什么。如若因为它本身,因为它的粗犷而抱怨它,今天看来是件可笑的事情。粗犷是指结果的粗犷——我们现在已明白这点。相反,我们对它抱怨是因为它缺少的东西——缺少对我们更理想化利益的永恒承诺,缺少对我们最遥远希望的满足。

另一方面,对上帝的信仰,在清晰度上不管比盛行于机械哲学中的数学理念逊色多少,至少,在实际生活中比它们强很多倍,因为它许诺了一个永恒存留的理想秩序。一个有上帝存在的世界,由上帝拍板定案的世界,可能会有冰火两重天,但我们仍然相信他不会忘记我们曾经的理想,相信他会让它们在别的地方得以实现;所以,只要有他在,悲剧只是暂时的,不会是全部,海难和死亡并不是最终的命运。对于永恒存在的道德秩序的需求是我们内心最深处所需要的。但丁和华兹华斯之类的诗人们,在生活中信仰这种秩序,并将他们诗歌中那非同寻常、振奋人心、平复伤痛的力量归功于这一事实。因此,唯物论与有神论两者的差异存在于它们在情感与实用性方面不同的吸引力,存在于我们对具体的希望和期望态度的调节中,存在于两者的差异所带来的具体而微妙的后果中——而不是吹毛求疵地追究物质内部本质的抽象特征,或上帝形而上的抽象特性。唯物论只意味着否定了道德秩序的永恒性,因而切断了最终的希望;唯心论意味着对永恒存在的道德秩序的肯定,因而放飞了希望。诚然,对于能够感受到的人们,这个问题真真切切地存在着;只要人类的本质不变,这个问题会引发一场关于物质的严肃的哲学论辩。

但是也许,你们中仍然会有人为两者进行辩护。即使承认了唯物论与唯心论关于未来世界的预测是不同的,你也会对这个不同不以为然,以为它离我们太过遥远,有理智的人是不会放在心上的。理智的人的本质,你可能会说,在于观察更近的事物,而不会因世界另一端之类的幻想而忧心忡忡。那我只能说,你这么说对人类的本性是不公平的。宗教中的忧思不会因为不理性这个词而被摈弃。绝对的事物、末日的事物、重叠交织的事物,这些真的都是哲学所关注的;所有才智超群的人都会认真对待这些事物,最“近视”的人不过是更浅薄而已。

在当下,对这场辩论中引起争论的事实,我们自然思考得不够仔细。但是各种形式中的唯心主义信念都关乎一个理想世界,而唯物主义的太阳则掉落在了失望的海洋里。记住我对上帝的阐述:它赐予了我们道德大假。任何宗教观都能做到这点。它不仅鼓舞了我们的艰难时日,也带走了我们的欢乐、粗心和信任,它让这一切显得正当。它把正当性的理由说得很含糊,这样才能更真切。信仰上帝,由此相信能拯救未来的种种事实,它们的精确特征必须用科学没完没了的方法计算出来:研究上帝,只需研究他的创造物。但在此之前,我们可以享受上帝带来的好处,如果有的话。我个人认为,上帝存在的证据主要来自个人内部世界的具体体验。当他们让你有了上帝,他的名字至少意味着能享受道德大假。你要记住我昨天所讲的,真理是如何沦落及如何相互牵连的。“上帝”的真实性必须经得起我们相信的其他真理的考验。只有当所有的真理都融为整体之后,我们才能树立对上帝最终的看法。让我们一起期待着,它们能相互妥协。

让我跳过去谈一个非常相关的哲学问题:自然的设计问题。从远古时代开始,人们就相信,自然中存在的某些事实能证明上帝的存在。在设计上,许多事实看起来明显你中有我,我中有你,相互照应。所以,啄木鸟的嘴、舌、爪、尾等都能让它完美地适应森林,而森林的树皮里还藏有虫子供它享用。我们的眼睛完美地适应了光照规律,让光线在我们的视网膜处形成清晰的图案。有人认为,不同物种之间的相互照应恰恰证明了设计的存在,而设计者总被大家当作宠爱人类的神。

这些论断的第一步是,证明设计确实存在。为此,要把大自然翻个底朝天,以找到不同事物相互协调的结论。比如,我们的眼睛生长于黑暗的子宫,光线源于太阳,但是它们是多么协调啊!它们就是为对方而生。视力是设计的目的,光线与眼睛都是为了得到视力而设计出来的,但它们之间又是相互独立的。

想想我们的祖先对此毫无疑问的态度,又看看在达尔文理论之后,这个观点日渐式微的现状,真让人感觉怪异。达尔文启发我们的思想,让我们认识到,只要偶发事件有时间整合自我,它就有能量制造“适者”。他举例说明,自然浪费了大量时间创造出最终因为不适应而被淘汰的产品。他也强调,如果真的存在设计,因为生物的适应性变化数量庞大,所以它只能证明,创造者是一个邪恶而非善良的设计者。至此,所有的理解都跟看问题的视角有关。要吃到树皮下的食物,啄木鸟在身体上需要做出剧烈的调整,从这点看,设计者当然很邪恶。

为了接受达尔文所说的事实,但也是为了让这些事实显得有神的意志,神学家到现在都在拓宽自己的思路。过去,这是一个目的与手段的问题,一个非此即彼的问题。这个问题就像一个人会说:“我的鞋当然是为适应我的脚而设计的,所以它们不可能是机器生产出来的。”我们知道两者都是成立的:鞋本身是机器生产出来的,但设计的目的是为了合脚。神学家只需要这样把上帝的设计范围扩大就行了。同理,足球比赛中,球队的目标并不仅仅是为了把球踢进某个球门(如果是这样的话,它们只需在某个黑漆漆的晚上起床,把球放在那儿即可),而是在某个固定的条件体系下完成这个动作——包括游戏的规则及对方球员等条件;因此,我们可以说,上帝的目标不仅仅是创造人类、庇护人类,而是通过自然庞大的体系所产生的作用,来达到这个目的。没有大自然惊人的规律和反作用力量,我们可以推测,人类的创造和完善对上帝来说是个了无生趣的议题。

这一点抛弃了老套的轻视人类作用的看法,挽救了关于设计的争辩。设计者不再是年迈的,长得像人的神灵。他设计的范围太广泛,让我们人类无从理解。弄明白有哪些设计已让我们难以应付,相比之下,再去弄清楚设计者是谁的问题,起不了什么作用。我们能够艰难地理解一个思想广袤无垠的人,并在真实世界里那好坏掺半、令人奇怪的组合体中,发现他的设计理念。或者更精确地说,我们压根不可能理解它。“设计”这个词本身起不到任何作用,也解释不了什么。它是最空洞的原理。是否存在设计,这个老生常谈的问题很无聊。真正的问题是,世界为何物。它是否有设计者——这个问题的答案只有通过研究所有自然界的具体事物才能得到。

记住,不管自然界可能已经生产,或正在生产着什么,它的生产手段必须充足,必须能适应它的生产活动。不管自然界产品的特点是什么,从适者生存到上帝创世说的争议最终总是适用的。比如,近期培雷火山的爆发,需要动用所有以前的历史知识,把受损的房屋、人类、动物的陈尸、沉没的轮船、火山灰等都组合在一起,放置在那骇人的地理位置上。法国必须作为马提尼克岛的宗主国出现。我们国家也必须参与其中,派遣船只。如果上帝的目的仅此而已,影响设计达几个世纪的手段便显示出了极致的智慧,还包括我们发现已然成形的事物,不管它们处于何种状态,是存在于历史还是自然中。因为事物的组成部分总是必须具备某种具体的合力,不管是处于混乱还是和谐的状况。当我们观察即将发生的事情时,必须出现正好能使其产生的条件。因此,我们总是能够说,在任何可理解的世界里,对任何可理解的特征来说,整个宇宙体系就是设计出来,创造出来的。

那么从实用主义角度看,“设计”这个抽象的词就是个空壳子。它本身没有任何重要性,它也无法执行什么任务。何为设计?设计者又是谁?这只是些严肃的问题。对具体事实进行探讨,也只能得到大概的答案。同时,在等待事实向我们揭晓答案的漫长过程中,对那些坚持认为存在设计者,设计者还是神灵的人,他们从这些理念中得到的实际好处,与上帝、灵魂或绝对这些词给我们带来的效果是一样的。如果“设计”仅仅作为高于事物、作用于事物之后的理性原则,供人顶礼膜拜的话,它一文不名。但如果我们将它具化成有神论的话,却能成为一个带来希望的词。当我们带着这样的观念进行实践时,我们对未来会更有信心。如果让万物运转起来的不是一股盲目的力量,而是有形可见的力量,我们有理由相信未来会更好。对未来抱有隐隐的信心,这是目前为止,设计和设计者这对词中存在的能让人辨别出来、具有实用价值的含义。这也是最重要的含义,如果巨大的信心是正确而非错误的,是更好而非更糟的选择。这些内容是这组词至少需要包含的正确成分。



现在让我们继续另一个饱受争议的命题:自由意志的问题。大多数人都是因为追随理性主义的潮流而信奉它的。它是一条原则,一种赋予人类的积极的才能或美德,人类的尊严也借此莫名其妙地得以提升。正是因为这一点,人类应该相信它。决定论者对此持否定态度,他们宣称人类个体没创造任何事物,而仅仅将过去宇宙中的整体推动力传播到未来,在过去的宇宙中,人类不过是个渺小的存在。决定论者贬低人类的价值。若剥去人类这个有创意的原则,人类便没那么值得赞美。我以为,你们中有一半人天生信奉自由意志,对它作为一项关乎尊严的原则进行崇拜很大程度上与你的忠诚有关。

但自由意志也曾被人从实用主义角度进行讨论,而且令人没有料到的是,论辩双方对它的实用主义解读是一样的。你知道,在伦理问题的争议中,责任一词起了很大的作用。若要审判人的行为,人们会设想,伦理学的着眼点在于一套有关美德与过失的规章。因为我们总对罪与罚感兴趣,我们也很想知道过去的法学与神学对此产生了什么样的影响。“该责怪谁?可以惩罚谁?上帝会惩罚谁?”——这些让人关注的事情,在人类的宗教历史上总像噩梦般萦绕左右。

所以,自由意志说与决定论都遭人诟病,被认为是荒唐的,因为在反对者的眼中,两者似乎都豁免了行动施与者们对于善行或恶行应承担的责任。这是多么离奇的自相矛盾啊!自由意志有新奇性的内涵,即为过去移植从未涉及过的内容。如果我们的行为是命中注定的,如果我们仅仅将过去的世界嫁接到未来,就像自由意志论者们所说的那样,那么我们怎么可能因为任何事情受到赞美或指责呢?我们应该只是“代理人”,而不是“委托人”,而我们宝贵的责任和义务又在何处呢?

但是,如果存在自由意志,它又体现在哪里呢?决定论者们会重新回到这个问题上。如果一个“自由的”行为是纯粹崭新的行为,不是来自之前的我,而是无中生有,自动追踪到我的身上,那么,过去的我又怎么可能为这个行为承担责任?我又如何拥有固定的身份,长期地接受别人给予的表扬或指责呢?当非命运论者们荒谬的信条将内在必要性这条细线拔断之后,我那生命的念珠便散落成一地的滚珠。富乐顿和麦格塔格两位先生最近高举这个论点,奋力追打这些滚珠。

如果是从个人偏好出发,也许还可以,但若相反的话,那就太可鄙了。因为,我来问你,除了别的原因,对于有现实识别力的男人、女人或小孩,当他们用尊严或归罪论之类的原则做借口时,应不应该感到羞耻?可以放心地让介于两者之间的天性与功利来承担惩罚与奖赏这样的社会事务。如果一个人施善行,我们表扬他,如果是恶行,我们便要惩罚他——不管怎么说,这与理论上看他的行为是由过去的自己发出的,还是严格意义上讲完全崭新的行为,相去甚远。让我们的道德规范在“善”这个问题上绕来绕去,既不现实,又让人可怜——上帝自己就能知道我们的善,如果我们有善行的话。自由意志假想的真正前提的确是务实的,但这与行使可鄙的权利,惩罚对曾经鼓噪一时的观点的讨论没有关系。

切实地看,自由意志意味着这个世界上存在崭新的力量,意味着有权期望未来不是一味地重复、模仿过去,不管是核心还是表象。那种模仿整个世界都存在,谁能对此进行否认呢?整体上“自然的统一性”是每条较低层次规律中预设的条件。但是,自然也许只是大体上统一而已;对于因为对世界过去历史的了解而有悲观情怀的人来说,他们也许会自然而然地奉自由意志论为上品。它至少支持进步的可能性,而决定论者让我们相信,我们这种可能性的观念是人类的无知造成的,而主宰世界的则是存在于事物之间的必要性及不可能性。

因此,自由意志论是关于希望的普遍宇宙观理论,就像绝对、上帝、神灵或设计一样。如果抽象地对待,这些概念会变得毫无内涵可言,说明不了任何情况;在一个从创立起到现在,已显然日臻完美的世界里,若如此对待,它们不可能保留一丁点儿实用的价值。如果世界已经是一片极乐天地,在我看来,对纯粹的存在、单纯的宇宙情感和快乐抱有的欣喜之情会让人们对那些猜测失去兴趣。我们对于宗教玄学的兴趣来源于这样一个事实:以实证方法推知的未来让我们觉得不安全,未来需要有更好的保障。如果过去与现在都是美好的,谁不希望未来也能一样?谁会期望自由意志呢?谁不会说,像赫胥黎所说的,“让我像时钟一样,只要每天上紧发条,就肯定能走得准,而我并不需要什么更好的自由。”在一个原本就完美的世界里,“自由”只是意味着可能变糟糕,谁会头脑发昏,希望这样的结局呢?让世界维持现状而不走样成为乐观主义精神世界测试完美的试金石。当然人类唯一的理性断言是,事物有可能变得更好。不需要我说,这种可能性,指的是我们有充足的理由来展望未来。

除非自由意志是一种起宽慰作用的教义,否则它会变得毫无意义,如果是这样,它与其他宗教教义的地位相当。它们撑起了过去的废墟,补救了以前的破败。我们的精神,被关闭在这理智与经验的小院子里,总对着灯塔上的智者说:“导航者啊,如果哪天夜晚有任何希望出现了,就告诉我。”智者于是给了精神这些代表希望的词语。

除了这一务实的意义外,上帝、自由意志、设计等这些词空洞无物。尽管它们本身是无光的,或者被当作唯智论,但是当我们在生命黑漆漆的丛林里,心想着它们的时候,我们的周围便有了光亮。如果你停下脚步,琢磨这些词,细想它们的定义,认为这才是智者的最终目标,你这又是在干什么呢?不过是傻傻地盯着一个自负的骗子!“上帝是实体,以惊人的力量存在于那里,是必要的,唯一的,无限的,完美的,简洁的,无毒能侵的,无可限量的,聪明的”等,——这里的定义真的启发性吗?这一长串夸张的形容词里存在的意义几乎为零。只有实用主义能从中解读出积极的意义,要做到那一点,她只需对唯智论的观点完全不理不睬。“上帝在天堂;人间也太平!”——这才是你神学理论的真正核心,而对此,你无须理性主义者下定义。

为什么我们大家,理性主义者和实用主义者们不应该承认这点呢?实用主义非但不是将眼睛盯在眼前的这一亩三分地,就像她常遭受的指责一样,相反,她对未来世界是高瞻远瞩的。

那么,让我们来看看所有这些终端的问题是如何出现转机的;从回顾原理,比如erkennntnisstheoretische Ich(认识论中的自我)、上帝、Kausalitätsprinzip (因果性原则)、设计、自由意志,它们自欺欺人,被当作令人敬畏并高于事实的事物,——看着,我要宣布,实用主义如何改变了重点,并自己从中找出事实来。对我们所有人都真正重要的是,这个世界将会变成什么模样?哲学的重心也因此必须改变。地球上的万物,长期被笼罩在更高级别物种的荣耀中,它们必须恢复自己的权利。以这种方式改变重点意味着,哲学问题的思考要落到不像从前那么抽象的人身上,落到风格更科学化、个人化却仍然有宗教信仰的人身上。这是一场堪与新教改革媲美的“权威坐席”的改变。就像在教皇信徒们看来,新教教义只是一场充满无序和疑惑的混乱,在哲学圈中的极端理性主义者眼中,实用主义常被视为哲学上的垃圾。但在新教国度里,生活之路,蜿蜒前行,直达终点。我斗胆认为,哲学的新教运动一样会取得辉煌成就。


[1]  特洛伊战争中希腊的贤明长老。——译者注

[2]  荷马史诗《伊利亚特》中的一名希腊士兵,喜欢骂人。——译者注

On a Certain Blindness

in Human Beings

William James





On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings

Our judgments concerning the worth of things, big or little, depend on the feelings the things arouse in us. Where we judge a thing to be precious in consequence of the idea we frame of it, this is only because the idea is itself associated already with a feeling. If we were radically feelingless, and if ideas were the only things our mind could entertain, we should lose all our likes and dislikes at a stroke, and be unable to point to any one situation or experience in life more valuable or significant than any other.

Now the blindness in human beings, of which this discourse will treat, is the blindness with which we all are afflicted in regard to the feelings of creatures and people different from ourselves.

We are practical beings, each of us with limited functions and duties to perform. Each is bound to feel intensely the importance of his own duties and the significance of the situations that call these forth. But this feeling is in each of us a vital secret, for sympathy with which we vainly look to others. The others are too much absorbed in their own vital secrets to take an interest in ours. Hence the stupidity and injustice of our opinions, so far as they deal with the significance of alien lives. Hence the falsity of our judgments, so far as they presume to decide in an absolute way on the value of other persons’ conditions or ideals.

Take our dogs and ourselves, connected as we are by a tie more intimate than most ties in this world; and yet, outside of that tie of friendly fondness, how insensible, each of us, to all that makes life significant for the other! - we to the rapture of bones under hedges, or smells of trees and lamp-posts, they to the delights of literature and art. As you sit reading the most moving romance you ever fell upon, what sort of a judge is your fox-terrier of your behavior? With all his good will toward you, the nature of your conduct is absolutely excluded from his comprehension. To sit there like a senseless statue, when you might be taking him to walk and throwing sticks for him to catch! What queer disease is this that comes over you every day, of holding things and staring at them like that for hours together, paralyzed of motion and vacant of all conscious life? The African savages came nearer the truth; but they, too, missed it, when they gathered wonderingly round one of our American travellers who, in the interior, had just come into possession of a stray copy of the New York Commercial Advertiser, and was devouring it column by column. When he got through, they offered him a high price for the mysterious object; and, being asked for what they wanted it, they said; ‘For an eye medicine,’ - that being the only reason they could conceive of for the protracted bath which he had given his eyes upon its surface.

The spectator’s judgment is sure to miss the root of the matter, and to possess no truth. The subject judged knows a part of the world of reality which the judging spectator fails to see, knows more while the spectator knows less; and, where-ever there is conflict of opinion and difference of vision, we are bound to believe that the truer side is the side that feels the more, and not the side that feels the less.

Let me take a personal example of the kind that befalls each one of us daily: -

Some years ago, while journeying in the mountains of North Carolina, I passed by a large number of ‘coves,’ as they call them there, or heads of small valleys between the hills, which had been newly cleared and planted. The impression on my mind was one of unmitigated squalor. The settler had in every case cut down the more manageable trees, and left their charred stumps standing. The larger trees he had girdled and killed, in order that their foliage should not cast a shade. He had then built a log cabin, plastering its chinks with clay, and had set up a tall zigzag rail fence around the scene of his havoc, to keep the pigs and cattle out. Finally, he had irregularly planted the intervals between the stumps and trees with Indian corn, which grew among the chips; and there he dwelt with his wife and babes - an axe, a gun, a few utensils, and some pigs and chickens feeding in the woods, being the sum total of his possessions.

The forest had been destroyed; and what had ‘improved’ it out of existence was hideous, a sort of ulcer, without a single element of artificial grace to make up for the loss of Nature’s beauty. Ugly, indeed, seemed the life of the squatter, scudding, as the sailors say, under bare poles, beginning again away back where our first ancestors started, and by hardly a single item the better off for all the achievements of the intervening generations.

Talk about going back to nature! I said to myself, oppressed by the dreariness, as I drove by. Talk of a country life for one’s old age and for one’s children! Never thus, with nothing but the bare ground and one’s bare hands to fight the battle! Never, without the best spoils of culture woven in! The beauties and commodities gained by the centuries are sacred. They are our heritage and birthright. No modern person ought to be willing to live a day in such a state of rudimentariness and denudation.

Then I said to the mountaineer who was driving me, ‘What sort of people are they who have to make these new clearings?’ ‘All of us,’ he replied. ‘Why, we ain’t happy here, unless we are getting one of these coves under cultivation.’ I instantly felt that I had been losing the whole inward significance of the situation. Because to me the clearings spoke of naught but denudation, I thought that to those whose sturdy arms and obedient axes had made them they could tell no other story. But, when they looked on the hideous stumps, what they thought of was personal victory. The chips, the girdled trees, and the vile split rails spoke of honest sweat, persistent toil and final reward. The cabin was a warrant of safety for self and wife and babes. In short, the clearing, which to me was a mere ugly picture on the retina, was to them a symbol redolent with moral memories and sang a very pæan of duty, struggle, and success.

I had been as blind to the peculiar ideality of their conditions as they certainly would also have been to the ideality of mine, had they had a peep at my strange indoor academic ways of life at Cambridge.



Wherever a process of life communicates an eagerness to him who lives it, there the life becomes genuinely significant. Sometimes the eagerness is more knit up with the motor activities, sometimes with the perceptions, sometimes with the imagination, sometimes with reflective thought. But, wherever it is found, there is the zest, the tingle, the excitement of reality; and there is ‘importance’ in the only real and positive sense in which importance ever anywhere can be.

Robert Louis Stevenson has illustrated this by a case, drawn from the sphere of the imagination, in an essay which I really think deserves to become immortal, both for the truth of its matter and the excellence of its form.

‘Toward the end of September,’ Stevenson writes, ‘when school-time was drawing near, and the nights were already black, we would begin to sally from our respective villas, each equipped with a tin bull’s-eye lantern. The thing was so well known that it had worn a rut in the commerce of Great Britain; and the grocers, about the due time, began to garnish their windows with our particular brand of luminary. We wore them buckled to the waist upon a cricket belt, and over them, such was the rigor of the game, a buttoned top-coat. They smelled noisomely of blistered tin. They never burned aright, though they would always burn our fingers. Their use was naught, the pleasure of them merely fanciful, and yet a boy with a bull’s-eye under his top-coat asked for nothing more. The fishermen used lanterns about their boats, and it was from them, I suppose, that we had got the hint; but theirs were not bull’s-eyes, nor did we ever play at being fishermen. The police carried them at their belts, and we had plainly copied them in that; yet we did not pretend to be policemen. Burglars, indeed, we may have had some haunting thought of; and we had certainly an eye to past ages when lanterns were more common, and to certain story-books in which we had found them to figure very largely. But take it for all in all, the pleasure of the thing was substantive; and to be a boy with a bull’s-eye under his top-coat was good enough for us.

‘When two of these asses met, there would be an anxious “Have you got your lantern?” and a gratified “Yes!” That was the shibboleth, and very needful, too; for, as it was the rule to keep our glory contained, none could recognize a lantern-bearer unless (like the polecat) by the smell. Four or five would sometimes climb into the belly of a ten-man lugger, with nothing but the thwarts above them, - for the cabin was usually locked, - or chose out some hollow of the links where the wind might whistle overhead. Then the coats would be unbuttoned, and the bull’s-eyes discovered; and in the chequering glimmer, under the huge, windy hall of the night, and cheered by a rich steam of toasting tinware, these fortunate young gentlemen would crouch together in the cold sand of the links, or on the scaly bilges of the fishing-boat, and delight them with inappropriate talk. Woe is me that I cannot give some specimens! … But the talk was but a condiment, and those gatherings themselves only accidents in the career of the lanternbearer. The essence of this bliss was to walk by yourself in the black night, the slide shut, the top-coat buttoned, not a ray escaping, whether to conduct your footsteps or to make your glory public, - a mere pillar of darkness in the dark; and all the while, deep down in the privacy of your fool’s heart, to know you had a bull’s-eye at your belt, and to exult and sing over the knowledge.

‘It is said that a poet had died young in the breast of the most stolid. It may be contended rather that a (somewhat minor) bard in almost every case survives, and is the spice of life to his possessor. Justice is not done to the versatility and the unplumbed childishness of man’s imagination. His life from without may seem but a rude mound of mud: there will be some golden chamber at the heart of it, in which he dwells delighted; and for as dark as his pathway seems to the observer, he will have some kind of bull’s-eye at his belt.

… ‘There is one fable that touches very near the quick of life, - the fable of the monk who passed into the woods, heard a bird break into song, hearkened for a trill or two, and found himself at his return a stranger at his convent gates; for he had been absent fifty years, and of all his comrades there survived but one to recognize him. It is not only in the woods that this enchanter carols, though perhaps he is native there. He sings in the most doleful places. The miser hears him and chuckles, and his days are moments. With no more apparatus than an evil-smelling lantern, I have evoked him on the naked links. All life that is not merely mechanical is spun out of two strands, - seeking for that bird and hearing him. And it is just this that makes life so hard to value, and the delight of each so incommunicable. And it is just a knowledge of this, and a remembrance of those fortunate hours in which the bird has sung to us, that fills us with such wonder when we turn to the pages of the realist. There, to be sure, we find a picture of life in so far as it consists of mud and of old iron, cheap desires and cheap fears, that which we are ashamed to remember and that which we are careless whether we forget; but of the note of that time-devouring nightingale we hear no news.

… ‘Say that we came [in such a realistic romance] on some such business as that of my lantern-bearers on the links, and described the boys as very cold, spat upon by flurries of rain, and drearily surrounded, all of which they were; and their talk as silly and indecent, which it certainly was. To the eye of the observer they are wet and cold and drearily surrounded; but ask themselves, and they are in the heaven of a recondite pleasure, the ground of which is an ill-smelling lantern.

‘For, to repeat, the ground of a man’s joy is often hard to hit. It may hinge at times upon a mere accessory, like the lantern; it may reside in the mysterious inwards of psychology … It has so little bond with externals … that it may even touch them not, and the man’s true life, for which he consents to live, lie together in the field of fancy … In such a case the poetry runs underground. The observer (poor soul, with his documents!) is all abroad. For to look at the man is but to court deception. We shall see the trunk from which he draws his nourishment; but he himself is above and abroad in the green dome of foliage, hummed through by winds and nested in by nightingales. And the true realism were that of the poets, to climb after him like a squirrel, and catch some glimpse of the heaven in which he lives. And the true realism, always and everywhere, is that of the poets: to find out where joy resides, and give it a voice far beyond singing.

‘For to miss the joy is to miss all. In the joy of the actors lies the sense of any action. That is the explanation, that the excuse. To one who has not the secret of the lanterns the scene upon the links is meaningless. And hence the haunting and truly spectral unreality of realistic books … In each we miss the personal poetry, the enchanted atmosphere, that rainbow work of fancy that clothes what is naked and seems to ennoble what is base; in each, life falls dead like dough, instead of soaring away like a balloon into the colors of the sunset; each is true, each inconceivable; for no man lives in the external truth among salts and acids, but in the warm, phantasmagoric chamber of his brain, with the painted windows and the storied wall.’

These paragraphs are the best thing I know in all Stevenson. ‘To miss the joy is to miss all.’ Indeed, it is. Yet we are but finite, and each one of us has some single specialized vocation of his own. And it seems as if energy in the service of its particular duties might be got only by hardening the heart toward everything unlike them. Our deadness toward all but one particular kind of joy would thus be the price we inevitably have to pay for being practical creatures. Only in some pitiful dreamer, some philosopher, poet, or romancer, or when the common practical man becomes a lover, does the hard externality give way, and a gleam of insight into the ejective world, as Clifford called it, the vast world of inner life beyond us, so different from that of outer seeming, illuminate our mind. Then the whole scheme of our customary values gets confounded, then our self is riven and its narrow interest fly to pieces, then a new centre and a new perspective must be found.

The change is well described by my colleague, Josiah Royce: -

‘What, then, is our neighbor? Thou hast regarded his thought, his feeling, as somehow different from thine. Thou hast said, “A pain in him is not like a pain in me, but something far easier to bear.” He seems to thee a little less living than thou; his life is dim, it is cold, it is a pale fire beside thy own burning desires … So, dimly and by instinct hast thou lived with thy neighbor, and hast known him not, being blind. Thou hast made [of him] a thing, no Self at all. Have done with this illusion, and simply try to learn the truth. Pain is pain, joy is joy, everywhere, even as in thee. In all the songs of the forest birds; in all the cries of the wounded and dying, struggling in the captor’s power; in the boundless sea where the myriads of water-creatures strive and die; amid all the countless hordes of savage men; in all sickness and sorrow; in all exultation and hope, everywhere, from the lowest to the noblest, the same conscious, burning, wilful life is found, endlessly manifold as the forms of the living creatures, unquenchable as the fires of the sun, real as these impulses that even now throb in thine own little selfish heart. Lift up thy eyes, behold that life, and then turn away, and forget it as thou canst; but, if thou hast known that, thou hast begun to know thy duty.’

*

This higher vision of an inner significance in what, until then, we had realized only in the dead external way, often comes over a person suddenly; and, when it does so, it makes an epoch in his history. As Emerson says, there is a depth in those moments that constrains us to ascribe more reality to them than to all other experiences. The passion of love will shake one like an explosion, or some act will awaken a remorseful compunction that hangs like a cloud over all one’s later day.

This mystic sense of hidden meaning starts upon us often from non-human natural things. I take this passage from ‘Obermann,’ a French novel that had some vogue in its day: ‘Paris, March 7. - It was dark and rather cold. I was gloomy, and walked because I had nothing to do. I passed by some flowers placed breast-high upon a wall. A jonquil in bloom was there. It is the strongest expression of desire: it was the first perfume of the year. I felt all the happiness destined for man. This unutterable harmony of souls, the phantom of the ideal world, arose in me complete. I never felt anything so great or so instantaneous. I know not what shape, what analogy, what secret of relation it was that made me see in this flower a limitless beauty … I shall never enclose in a conception this power, this immensity that nothing will express; this form that nothing will contain; this ideal of a better world which one feels, but which it would seem that nature has not made.’

Wordsworth and Shelley are similarly full of this sense of a limitless significance in natural things. In Wordsworth it was a somewhat austere and moral significance, - a ‘lonely cheer.’

To every natural form, rock, fruit, or flower,

Even the loose stones that cover the highway,

I gave a moral life: I saw them feel

Or linked them to some feeling: the great mass

Lay bedded in some quickening soul, and all

That I beheld respired with inward meaning.

‘Authentic tidings of invisible things!’ Just what this hidden presence in nature was, which Wordsworth so rapturously felt, and in the light of which he lived, tramping the hills for days together, the poet never could explain logically or in articulate conceptions. Yet to the reader who may himself have had gleaming moments of a similar sort the verses in which Wordsworth simply proclaims the fact of them come with a heart satisfying authority: -

Magnificent
The morning rose, in memorable pomp,

Glorious as ere I had beheld. In front

The sea lay laughing at a distance; near

The solid mountains shone, bright as the clouds,

Grain-tinctured, drenched in empyrean light;

And in the meadows and the lower grounds Was all the sweetness of a common dawn, -

Dews, vapors, and the melody of birds,

And laborers going forth to till the fields.



Ah! need I say, dear Friend, that to the brim

My heart was full; I made no vows, but vows

Were then made for me; bond unknown to me

Was given, that I should be, else sinning greatly,

A dedicated Spirit. On I walked,

In thankful blessedness, which yet survives.

As Wordsworth walked, filled with his strange inner joy, responsive thus to the secret life of nature round about him, his rural neighbors, tightly and narrowly intent upon their own affairs, their crops and lambs and fences, must have thought him a very insignificant and foolish personage. It surely never occurred to any one of them to wonder what was going on inside of him or what it might be worth. And yet that inner life of his carried the burden of a significance that has fed the souls of others, and fills them to this day with inner joy.

Richard Jefferies has written a remarkable autobiographic document entitled The Story of my Heart. It tells, in many pages, of the rapture with which in youth the sense of the life of nature filled him. On a certain hill-top he says: -

‘I was utterly alone with the sun and the earth. Lying down on the grass, I spoke in my soul to the earth, the sun, the air, and the distant sea, far beyond sight … With all the intensity of feeling which exalted me, all the intense communion I held with the earth, the sun and sky, the stars hidden by the light, with the ocean, - in no manner can the thrilling depth of these feelings be written, - with these I prayed as if they were the keys of an instrument … The great sun, burning with light, the strong earth, - dear earth, - the warm sky, the pure air, the thought of ocean, the inexpressible beauty of all filled me with a rapture, an ecstasy, an inflatus. With this inflatus, too, I prayed … The prayer, this soul-emotion, was in itself, not for an object: it was a passion. I hid my face in the grass. I was wholly prostrated, I lost myself in the wrestle, I was rapt and carried away … Had any shepherd accidentally seen me lying on the turf, he would only have thought I was resting a few minutes. I made no outward show. Who could have imagined the whirlwind of passion that was going on in me as I reclined there!’

Surely, a worthless hour of life, when measured by the usual standards of commercial value. Yet in what other kind of value can the preciousness of any hour, made precious by any standard, consist, if it consist not in feelings of excited significance like these, engendered in some one, by what the hour contains?

Yet so blind and dead does the clamor of our own practical interests make us to all other things, that it seems almost as if it were necessary to become worthless as a practical being, if one is to hope to attain to any breadth of insight into the impersonal world of worths as such, to have any perception of life’s meaning on a large objective scale. Only your mystic, your dreamer, or your insolvent tramp or loafer, can afford so sympathetic an occupation, an occupation which will change the usual standards of human value in the twinkling of an eye, giving to foolishness a place ahead of power, and laying low in a minute the distinctions which it takes a hard-working conventional man a lifetime to build up. You may be a prophet, at this rate; but you cannot be a worldly success.

Walt Whitman, for instance, is accounted by many of us a contemporary prophet. He abolishes the usual human distinctions, brings all conventionalisms into solution, and loves and celebrates hardly any human attributes save those elementary ones common to all members of the race. For this he becomes a sort of ideal tramp, a rider on omnibus-tops and ferry-boats, and, considered either practically or academically, a worthless, unproductive being. His verses are but ejaculations - things mostly without subject or verb, a succession of interjections on an immense scale. He felt the human crowd as rapturously as Wordsworth felt the mountains, felt it as an overpoweringly significant presence, simply to absorb one’s mind in which should be business sufficient and worthy to fill the days of a serious man. As he crosses Brooklyn ferry, this is what he feels: -



Flood-tide below me! I watch you, face to face;

Clouds of the west! sun there half an hour high! I see you also face to face.

Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes! how curious you are to me!

On the ferry-boats, the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home, are more curious to me than you suppose;

And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence, are more to me, and more in my meditations, than you might suppose.

Others will enter the gates of the ferry, and cross from shore to shore;

Others will watch the run of the flood-tide;

Others will see the shipping of Manhattan north and west, and the heights of Brooklyn to the south and east;

Others will see the islands large and small;

Fifty years hence, others will see them as they cross, the sun half an hour high.

A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years hence, others will see them,

Will enjoy the sunset, the pouring in of the flood-tide, the falling back to the sea of the ebb-tide.

It avails not, neither time or place - distance avails not.

Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt;

Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd;

Just as you are refresh’d by the gladness of the river and the bright flow, I was refresh’d;

Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the swift current, I stood, yet was hurried;

Just as you look on the numberless masts of ships, and the thick-stemmed pipes of steamboats, I looked.

I too many and many a time cross’d the river, the sun half an hour high;

I watched the Twelfth-month sea-gulls - I saw them high in the air, with motionless wings, oscillating their bodies,

I saw how the glistening yellow lit up parts of their bodies, and left the rest in strong shadow,

I saw the slow-wheeling circles, and the gradual edging toward the south.

Saw the white seals of schooners and sloops, saw the ships at anchor,

The sailors at work in the rigging, or out astride the spars;

The scallop-edged waves in the twilight, the ladled cups, the frolicsome crests and glistening;

The stretch afar growing dimmer and dimmer, the gray walls of the granite store-houses by the docks;

On the neighboring shores, the fires from the foundry chimneys burning high … into the night,

Casting their flicker of black … into the clefts of streets.

These, and all else, were to me the same as they are to you.



And so on, through the rest of a divinely beautiful poem. And, if you wish to see what this hoary loafer considered the most worthy way of profiting by life’s heaven-sent opportunities, read the delicious volume of his letters to a young car-conductor who had become his friend: -



‘NEW YORK , Oct. 9, 1868.

Dear Pete, - It is splendid here this forenoon - bright and cool. I was out early taking a short walk by the river only two squares from where I live … Shall I tell you about [my life] just to fill up? I generally spend the forenoon in my room writing, etc., then take a bath fix up and go out about twelve and loafe somewhere or call on someone down town or on business, or perhaps if it is very pleasant and I feel like it ride a trip with some driver friend on Broadway from 23rd Street to Bowling Green, three miles each way. (Every day I find I have plenty to do, every hour is occupied with something.) You know it is a never ending amusement and study and recreation for me to ride a couple of hours on a pleasant afternoon on a Broadway stage in this way. You see everything as you pass, a sort of living, endless panorama - shops and splendid buildings and great windows: on the broad sidewalks crowds of women richly dressed continually passing, altogether different, superior in style and looks from any to be seen anywhere else - in fact a perfect stream of people - men too dressed in high style, and plenty of foreigners - and then in the streets the thick crowd of carriages, stages, carts, hotel and private coaches, and in fact all sorts of vehicles and many first class teams, mile after mile, and the splendor of such a great street and so many tall, ornamental, noble buildings many of them of white marble, and the gayety and motion on every side: you will not wonder how much attraction all this is on a fine day, to a great loafer like me, who enjoys so much seeing the busy world move by him, and exhibiting itself for his amusement, while he takes it easy and just looks on and observes.’



Truly a futile way of passing the time, some of you may say, and not altogether creditable to a grown-up man. And yet, from the deepest point of view, who knows the more of truth, and who knows the less, - Whitman on his omnibus-top, full of the inner joy with which the spectacle inspires him, or you, full of the disdain which the futility of his occupation excites?

When your ordinary Brooklynite or New Yorker, leading a life replete with too much luxury, or tired and careworn about his personal affairs, crosses the ferry or goes up Broadway, his fancy does not thus ‘soar away into the colors of the sunset’ as did Whitman’s, nor does he inwardly realize at all the indisputable fact that this world never did anywhere or at any time contain more of essential divinity, or of eternal meaning, than is embodied in the fields of vision over which his eyes so carelessly pass. There is life; and there, a step away, is death. There is the only kind of beauty there ever was. There is the old human struggle and its fruits together. There is the text and the sermon, the real and the ideal in one. But to the jaded and unquickened eye it is all dead and common, pure vulgarism, flatness, and disgust. ‘Hech! it is a sad sight!’ says Carlyle, walking at night with some one who appeals to him to note the splender of the stars. And that very repetition of the scene to new generations of men in secula seculorum [‘world without end’], that eternal recurrence of the common order, which so fills a Whitman with mystic satisfaction, is to a Schopenhauer, with the emotional anaesthesia, the feeling of ‘awful inner emptiness’ from out of which he views it all, the chief ingredient of the tedium it instils. What is life on the largest scale, he asks, but the same recurrent inanities, the same dog barking, the same fly buzzing, forevermore? Yet of the kind of fibre of which such inanities consist is the material woven of all the excitements, joys, and meanings that ever were, or ever shall be, in this world.

To be rapt with satisfied attention, like Whitman, to the mere spectacle of the world’s presence, is one way, and the most fundamental way, of confessing one’s sense of its unfathomable significance and importance. But how can one attain to the feeling of the vital significance of an experience, if one have it not to begin with? There is no receipt which one can follow. Being a secret and a mystery, it often comes in mysteriously unexpected ways. It blossoms sometimes from out of the very grave wherein we imagined that our happiness was buried. Benvenuto Cellini, after a life all in the outer sunshine, made of adventures and artistic excitements, suddenly finds himself cast into a dungeon in the Castle of San Angelo. The place is horrible. Rats and wet and mould possess it. His leg is broken and his teeth fall out, apparently with scurvy. But his thoughts turn to God as they have never turned before. He gets a Bible, which he reads during the one hour in the twenty-four in which a wandering ray of daylight penetrates his cavern. He has religious visions. He sings psalms to himself, and composes hymns. And thinking, on the last day of July, of the festivities customary on the morrow in Rome, he says to himself: ‘All these past years I celebrated this holiday with the vanities of the world: from this year henceforward I will do it with the divinity of God. And then I said to myself, “Oh, how much more happy I am for this present life of mine than for all those things remembered!”’

But the great understander of these mysterious ebbs and flows is Tolstoï. They throb all through his novels. In his ‘War and Peace,’ the hero, Peter, is supposed to be the richest man in the Russian empire. During the French invasion he is taken prisoner, and dragged through much of the retreat. Cold, vermin, hunger, and every form of misery assail him, the result being a revelation to him of the real scale of life’s values. ‘Here only, and for the first time, he appreciated, because he was deprived of it, the happiness of eating when he was hungry, of drinking when he was thirsty, of sleeping when he was sleepy, and of talking when he felt the desire to exchange some words … Later in life he always recurred with joy to this month of captivity, and never failed to speak with enthusiasm of the powerful and ineffaceable sensations, and especially of the moral calm which he had experienced at this epoch. When at daybreak, on the morrow of his imprisonment, he saw [I abridge here Tolstoï’s description] the mountains with their wooded slopes disappearing in the grayish mist; when he felt the cool breeze caress him; when he saw the light drive away the vapors, and the sun rise majestically behind the clouds and cupolas, and the crosses, the dew, the distance, the river, sparkle in the splendid, cheerful rays, - his heart overflowed with emotion. This emotion kept continually with him, and increased a hundred-fold as the difficulties of his situation grew graver … He learnt that man is meant for happiness, and that this happiness is in him, in the satisfaction of the daily needs of existence, and that unhappiness is the fatal result, not of our need, but of our abundance … When calm reigned in the camp, and the embers paled, and little by little went out, the full moon had reached the zenith. The woods and the fields roundabout lay clearly visible; and, beyond the inundation of light which filled them, the view plunged into the limitless horizon. Then Peter cast his eyes upon the firmament, filled at that hour with myriads of stars. “All that is mine,” he thought. “All that is in me, is me! And that is what they think they have taken prisoner! That is what they have shut up in a cabin!” So he smiled, and turned in to sleep among his comrades.’

The occasion and the experience, then, are nothing. It all depends on the capacity of the soul to be grasped, to have its life-currents absorbed by what is given. ‘Crossing a bare common,’ says Emerson, ‘in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear.’

Life is always worth living, if one have such responsive sensibilities. But we of the highly educated classes (so called) have most of us got far, far away from Nature. We are trained to seek the choice, the rare, the exquisite exclusively, and to overlook the common. We are stuffed with abstract conceptions, and glib with verbalities and verbosities; and in the culture of these higher functions the peculiar sources of joy connected with our simpler functions often dry up, and we grow stone-blind and insensible to life’s more elementary and general goods and joys.

The remedy under such conditions is to descend to a more profound and primitive level. To be imprisoned or shipwrecked or forced into the army would permanently show the good of life to many an over-educated pessimist. Living in the open air and on the ground, the lopsided beam of the balance slowly rises to the level line; and the over-sensibilities and insensibilities even themselves out. The good of all the artificial schemes and fevers fades and pales; and that of seeing, smelling, tasting, sleeping, and daring and doing with one’s body, grows and grows. The savages and, children of nature, to whom we deem ourselves so much superior, certainly are alive where we are often dead, along these lines; and, could they write as glibly as we do, they would read us impressive lectures on our impatience for improvement and on our blindness to the fundamental static goods of life. ‘Ah! my brother,’ said a chieftain to his white guest, ‘thou wilt never know the happiness of both thinking of nothing and doing nothing. This, next to sleep, is the most enchanting of all things. Thus we were before our birth, and thus we shall be after death. Thy people, … when they have finished reaping one field, they begin to plough another; and, if the day were not enough, I have seen them plough by moonlight. What is their life to ours, - the life that is as naught to them? Blind that they are, they lose it all! But we live in the present.’

The intense interest that life can assume when brought down to the non-thinking level, the level of pure sensorial perception, has been beautifully described by a man who can write, - Mr W. H. Hudson, in his volume, ‘Idle Days in Patagonia.’

‘I spent the greater part of one winter,’ says this admirable author, ‘at a point on the Rio Negro, seventy or eighty miles from the sea.

… ‘It was my custom to go out every morning on horseback with my gun, and, followed by one dog, to ride away from the valley; and no sooner would I climb the terrace, and plunge into the gray, universal thicket, than I would find myself as completely alone as if five hundred instead of only five miles separated me from the valley and river. So wild and solitary and remote seemed that gray waste, stretching away into infinitude, a waste untrodden by man, and where the wild animals are so few that they have made no discoverable path in the wilderness of thorns … Not once nor twice nor thrice, but day after day I returned to this solitude, going to it in the morning as if to attend a festival, and leaving it only when hunger and thirst and the westering sun compelled me. And yet I had no object in going, - no motive which could be put into words; for, although I carried a gun, there was nothing to shoot, - the shooting was all left behind in the valley … Sometimes I would pass a whole day without seeing one mammal, and perhaps not more than a dozen birds of any size. The weather at that time was cheerless, generally with a gray film of cloud spread over the sky, and a bleak wind, often cold enough to make my bridle-hand quite numb … At a slow pace, which would have seemed intolerable under other circumstances, I would ride about for hours together at a stretch. On arriving at a hill, I would slowly ride to its summit, and stand there to survey the prospect. On every side it stretched away in great undulations, wild and irregular. How gray it all was! Hardly less so near at hand than on the haze-wrapped horizon where the hills were dim and the outline obscured by distance. Descending from my outlook, I would take up my aimless wanderings again, and visit other elevations to gaze on the same landscape from another point; and so on for hours. And at noon I would dismount, and sit or lie on my folded poncho for an hour or longer. One day in these rambles I discovered a small grove composed of twenty or thirty trees, growing at a convenient distance apart, that had evidently been resorted to by a herd of deer or other wild animals. This grove was on a hill differing in shape from other hills in its neighborhood; and, after a time, I made a point of finding and using it as a resting-place every day at noon. I did not ask myself why I made choice of that one spot, sometimes going out of my way to sit there, instead of sitting down under any one of the millions of trees and bushes on any other hillside. I thought nothing about it, but acted unconsciously. Only afterward it seemed to me that, after having rested there once, each time I wished to rest again, the wish came associated with the image of that particular clump of trees, with polished stems and clean bed of sand beneath; and in a short time I formed a habit of returning, animal like, to repose at that same spot.

‘It was, perhaps, a mistake to say that I would sit down and rest, since I was never tired; and yet, without being tired, that noon-day pause, during which I sat for an hour without moving, was strangely grateful. All day there would be no sound, not even the rustling of a leaf. One day, while listening to the silence, it occurred to my mind to wonder what the effect would be if I were to shout aloud. This seemed at the time a horrible suggestion, which almost made me shudder. But during those solitary days it was a rare thing for any thought to cross my mind. In the state of mind I was in, thought had become impossible. My state was one of suspense and watchfulness; yet I had no expectation of meeting an adventure, and felt as free from apprehension as I feel now while sitting in a room in London. The state seemed familiar rather than strange, and accompanied by a strong feeling of elation; and I did not know that something had come between me and my intellect until I returned to my former self, - to thinking, and the old insipid existence [again].

‘I had undoubtedly gone back ; and that state of intense watchfullness or alertness, rather, with suspension of the higher intellectual faculties, represented the mental state of the pure savage. He thinks little, reasons little, having a surer guide in his [mere sensory perceptions]. He is in perfect harmony with nature, and is nearly on a level, mentally, with the wild animals he preys on, and which in their turn sometimes prey on him.’

For the spectator, such hours as Mr Hudson writes of form a mere tale of emptiness, in which nothing happens, nothing is gained, and there is nothing to describe. They are meaningless and vacant tracts of time. To him who feels their inner secret, they tingle with an importance that unutterably vouches for itself. I am sorry for the boy or girl, or man or woman, who has never been touched by the spell of this mysterious sensorial life, with its irrationality, if so you like to call it, but its vigilance and its supreme felicity. The holidays of life are its most vitally significant portions, because they are, or at least should be, covered with just this kind of magically irresponsible spell.



And now what is the result of all these considerations and quotations? It is negative in one sense, but positive in another. It absolutely forbids us to be forward in pronouncing on the meaninglessness of forms of existence other than our own; and it commands us to tolerate, respect, and indulge those whom we see harmlessly interested and happy in their own ways, however unintelligible these may be to us. Hands off; neither the whole of truth nor the whole of good is revealed to any single observer, although each observer gains a partial superiority of insight from the peculiar position in which he stands. Even prisons and sick-rooms have their special revelations. It is enough to ask of each of us that he should be faithful to his own opportunities and make the most of his own blessings, without presuming to regulate the rest of the vast field.

The Tigers in India

There are two ways of knowing things, knowing them immediately or intuitively, and knowing them conceptually or representatively. Altho such things as the white paper before our eyes can be known intuitively, most of the things we know, the tigers now in India, for example, or the scholastic system of philosophy, are known only representatively or symbolically.

Suppose, to fix our ideas, that we take first a case of conceptual knowledge; and let it be our knowledge of the tigers in India, as we sit here. Exactly what do we mean by saying that we here know the tigers? What is the precise fact that the cognition so confidently claimed is known-as, to use Shadworth Hodgson’s inelegant but valuable form of words?

Most men would answer that what we mean by knowing the tigers is having them, however absent in body, become in some way present to our thought; or that our knowledge of them is known as presence of our thought to them. A great mystery is usually made of this peculiar presence in absence; and the scholastic philosophy, which is only common sense grown pedantic, would explain it as a peculiar kind of existence, called intentional inexistence, of the tigers in our mind. At the very least, people would say that what we mean by knowing the tigers is mentally pointing towards them as we sit here.

But now what do we mean by pointing, in such a case as this? What is the pointing known-as, here?

To this question I shall have to give a very prosaic answer - one that traverses the prepossessions not only of common sense and scholasticism, but also those of nearly all the epistemological writers whom I have ever read. The answer, made brief, is this: The pointing of our thought to the tigers is known simply and solely as a procession of mental associates and motor consequences that follow on the thought, and that would lead harmoniously, if followed out, into some ideal or real context, or even into the immediate presence, of the tigers. It is known as our rejection of a jaguar, if that beast were shown us as a tiger; as our assent to a genuine tiger if so shown. It is known as our ability to utter all sorts of propositions which don’t contradict other propositions that are true of the real tigers. It is even known, if we take the tigers very seriously, as actions of ours which may terminate in directly intuited tigers, as they would if we took a voyage to India for the purpose of tigerhunting and brought back a lot of skins of the striped rascals which we had laid low. In all this there is no self-transcendency in our mental images taken by themselves. They are one phenomenal fact; the tigers are another; and their pointing to the tigers is a perfectly commonplace intra-experiential relation, if you once grant a connecting world to be there. In short, the ideas and the tigers are in themselves as loose and separate, to use Hume’s language, as any two things can be; and pointing means here an operation as external and adventitious as any that nature yields. [1]

I hope you may agree with me now that in representative knowledge there is no special inner mystery, but only an outer chain of physical or mental intermediaries connecting thought and thing. To know an object is here to lead to it through a context which the world supplies. All this was most instructively set forth by our colleague D. S. Miller at our meeting in New York last Christmas, and for re-confirming my sometime wavering opinion, I owe him this acknowledgment.

Let us next pass on to the case of immediate or intuitive acquaintance with an object, and let the object be the white paper before our eyes. The thought-stuff and the thing-stuff are here indistinguishably the same in nature, as we saw a moment since, and there is no context of intermediaries or associates to stand between and separate the thought and thing. There is no ‘presence in absence’ here, and no ‘pointing,’ but rather an allround embracing of the paper by the thought; and it is clear that the knowing cannot now be explained exactly as it was when the tigers were its object. Dotted all through our experience are states of immediate acquaintance just like this. Somewhere our belief always does rest onultimate data like the whiteness, smoothness, or squareness of this paper. Whether such qualities be truly ultimate aspects of being, or only provisional suppositions of ours, held-to till we get better informed, is quite immaterial for our present inquiry. So long as it is believed in, we see our object face to face. What now do we mean by ‘knowing’ such a sort of object as this? For this is also the way in which we should know the tiger if our conceptual idea of him were to terminate by having led us to his lair?

This address must not become too long, so I must give my answer in the fewest words. And let me first say this: So far as the white paper or other ultimate datum of our experience is considered to enter also into some one else’s experience, and we, in knowing it, are held to know it there as well as here; so far, again, as it is considered to be a mere mask for hidden molecules that other now impossible experiences of our own might some day lay bare to view; so far it is a case of tigers in India again - the things known being absent experiences, the knowing can only consist in passing smoothly towards them through the intermediary context that the world supplies. But if our own private vision of the paper be considered in abstraction from every other event, as if it constituted by itself the universe (and it might perfectly well do so, for aught we can understand to the contrary), then the paper seen and the seeing of it are only two names for one indivisible fact which, properly named, is the datum, the phenomenon, or the experience. The paper is in the mind and the mind is around the paper, because paper and mind are only two names that are given later to the one experience, when, taken in a larger world of which it forms a part, its connections are traced in different directions. [2] To know immediately, then, or intuitively, is for mental content and object to be identical. This is a very different definition from that which we gave of representative knowledge; but neither definition involves those mysterious notions of self-transcendency and presence in absence which are such essential parts of the ideas of knowledge, both of philosophers and of common men.


[1] A stone in one field may ‘fit,’ we say, a hole in another field. But the relation of ‘fitting,’ so long as no one carries the stone to the hole and drops it in, is only one name for the fact that such an act may happen. Similarly with the knowing of the tigers here and now. It is only an anticipatory name for a further associative and terminative process that may occur.

[2] What is meant by this is that ‘the experience’ can be referred to either of two great associative systems, that of the experiencer’s mental history, or that of the experienced facts of the world. Of both of these systems it forms part, and may be regarded, indeed, as one of their points of intersection. One might let a vertical line stand for the mental history; but the same object, O, appears also in the mental

history of different persons, represented by the other vertical lines. It thus ceases to be the private property of one experience, and becomes, so to speak, a shared or public thing. We can track its outer history in this way, and represent it by the horizontal line. [It is also known representatively at other points of the vertical lines, or intuitively there again, so that the line of its outer history would have to be looped and wandering, but I make it straight for simplicity’s sake.] In any case, however, it is the same stuff that figures in all the sets of lines.

Is Life Worth Living?

When Mr Mallock’s book with this title appeared some fifteen years ago, the jocose answer that ‘it depends on the liver ’ had great currency in the newspapers. The answer which I propose to give tonight cannot be jocose. In the words of one of Shakespeare’s prologues, -

I come no more to make you laugh; things now,

That bear a weighty and a serious brow,

Sad, high, and working, full of state and woe, -

must be my theme. In the deepest heart of all of us there is a corner in which the ultimate mystery of things works sadly; and I know not what such an association as yours [The Harvard Young Man’s Christian Association] intends, nor what you ask of those whom you invite to address you, unless it be to lead you from the surfaceglamour of existence, and for an hour at least to make you heedless to the buzzing and jigging and vibration of small interests and excitements that form the tissue of our ordinary consciousness. Without further explanation or apology, then, I ask you to join me in turning an attention, commonly too unwilling, to the profounder bass-note of life. Let us search the lonely depths for an hour together, and see what answers in the last folds and recesses of things our question may find.

I.

With many men the question of life’s worth is answered by a temperamental optimism which makes them incapable of believing that anything seriously evil can exist. Our dear old Walt Whitman’s works are the standing text-book of this kind of optimism. The mere joy of living is so immense in Walt Whitman’s veins that it abolishes the possibility of any other kind of feeling: -

To breathe the air, how delicious!
To speak, to walk, to seize something by the hand! …
To be this incredible God I am! …
0 amazement of things, even the least particle!
0 spirituality of things!
I too carol the Sun, usher’d or at noon, or as now, setting;
I too throb to the brain and beauty of the earth and of all the growths of the earth …



I sing to the last the equalities, modern or old,
I sing the endless finales of things,
I say Nature continues - glory continues.
I praise with electric voice,
For I do not see one imperfection in the universe,
And I do not see one cause or result lamentable at last.

So Rousseau, writing of the nine years he spent at Annecy, with nothing but his happiness to tell: -

How tell what was neither said nor done nor even thought, but tasted only and felt, with no object of my felicity but the emotion of felicity itself! I rose with the sun, and I was happy; I went to walk, and I was happy; I saw ‘Maman,’ and I was happy; I left her, and I was happy. I rambled through the woods and over the vine-slopes, I wandered in the valleys, I read, I lounged, I worked in the garden, I gathered the fruits, I helped at the indoor work, and happiness followed me everywhere. It was in no one assignable thing; it was all within myself; it could not leave me for a single instant.



If moods like this could be made permanent, and constitutions like these universal, there would never be any occasion for such discourses as the present one. No philosopher would seek to prove articulately that life is worth living, for the fact that it absolutely is so would vouch for itself, and the problem disappear in the vanishing of the question rather than in the coming of anything like a reply. But we are not magicians to make the optimistic temperament universal; and alongside of the deliverances of temperamental optimism concerning life, those of temperamental pessimism always exist, and oppose to them a standing refutation. In what is called ‘circular insanity,’ phases of melancholy succeed phases of mania with no outward cause that we can discover; and often enough to one and the same well person life will present incarnate radiance today and incarnate dreariness tomorrow, according to the fluctuations of what the older medical books used to call ‘the concoction of the humors.’ In the words of the newspaper joke, ‘it depends on the liver.’ Rousseau’s ill-balanced constitution undergoes a change, and behold him in his latter evil days a prey to melancholy and black delusions of suspicion and fear. Some men seem launched upon the world even from their birth with souls as incapable of happiness as Walt Whitman’s was of gloom, and they have left us their messages in even more lasting verse than his, - the exquisite Leopardi, for example; or our own contemporary, James Thomson, in that pathetic book, The City of Dreadful Night, which I think is less well-known than it should be for its literary beauty, simply because men are afraid to quote its words, - they are so gloomy, and at the same time so sincere. In one place the poet describes a congregation gathered to listen to a preacher in a great unillumined cathedral at night. The sermon is too long to quote, but it ends thus: -

‘O Brothers of sad lives! they are so brief;
A few short years must bring us all relief:

Can we not bear these years of laboring breath?
But if you would not this poor life fulfil,
Lo, you are free to end it when you will,

Without the fear of waking after death.’ -



The organ-like vibrations of his voice
Thrilled through the vaulted aisles and died away;
The yearning of the tones which bade rejoice

Was sad and tender as a requiem lay:
Our shadowy congregation rested still,
As brooding on that ‘End it when you will.’
Our shadowy congregation rested still,

As musing on that message we had heard,
And brooding on that ‘End it when you will,’

Perchance awaiting yet some other word;
When keen as lightning through a muffled sky
Sprang forth a shrill and lamentable cry: -



‘The man speaks sooth, alas! the man speaks sooth;

We have no personal life beyond the grave;
There is no God; Fate knows nor wrath nor ruth:

Can I find here the comfort which I crave?



‘In all eternity I had one chance,

One few years’ term of gracious human life, -
The splendors of the Intellect’s advance,

The sweetness of the home with babes and wife;



‘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, -



‘My Brother, my poor Brothers, it is thus:
This life holds nothing good for us,

But it ends soon and nevermore can be;
And we knew nothing of it ere our birth,
And shall know nothing when consigned to earth:

I ponder these thoughts, and they comfort me.’

‘It ends soon, and never more can be,’ ‘Lo, you are free to end it when you will,’ - these verses flow truthfully from the melancholy Thomson’s pen, and are in truth a consolation for all to whom, as to him, the world is far more like a steady den of fear than a continual fountain of delight. That life is not worth living the whole army of suicides declare, - an army whose roll-call, like the famous evening gun of the British army, follows the sun round the world and never terminates. We, too, as we sit here in our comfort, must ‘ponder these things’ also, for we are of one substance with these suicides, and their life is the life we share. The plainest intellectual integrity, - nay, more, the simplest manliness and honor, forbid us to forget their case.



‘If suddenly,’ says Mr Ruskin, ‘in the midst of the enjoyments of the palate and lightnesses of heart of a London dinner-party, the walls of the chamber were parted, and through their gap the nearest human beings who were famishing and in misery were borne into the midst of the company feasting and fancy free; if, pale from death, horrible in destitution, broken by despair, body by body they were laid upon the soft carpet, one beside the chair of every guest, - would only the crumbs of the dainties be cast to them; would only a passing glance, a passing thought, be vouchsafed to them? Yet the actual facts, the real relation of each Dives and Lazarus, are not altered by the intervention of the house-wall between the table and the sick-bed, - by the few feet of ground (how few!) which are, indeed, all that separate the merriment from the misery.’

II.

To come immediately to the heart of my theme, then, what I propose is to imagine ourselves reasoning with a fellow-mortal who is on such terms with life that the only comfort left him is to brood on the assurance, ‘You may end it when you will.’ What reasons can we plead that may render such a brother (or sister) willing to take up the burden again? Ordinary Christians, reasoning with would-be suicides, have little to offer them beyond the usual negative, ‘Thou shalt not.’ God alone is master of life and death, they say, and it is a blasphemous act to anticipate his absolving hand. But can we find nothing richer or more positive than this, no reflections to urge whereby the suicide may actually see, and in all sad seriousness feel, that in spite of adverse appearances even for him life is still worth living? There are suicides and suicides (in the United States about three thousand of them every year), and I must frankly confess that with perhaps the majority of these my suggestions are impotent to deal. Where suicide is the result of insanity or sudden frenzied impulse, reflection is impotent to arrest its headway; and cases like these belong to the ultimate mystery of evil, concerning which I can only offer considerations tending toward religious patience at the end of this hour. My task, let me say now, is practically narrow, and my words are to deal only with that metaphysical tedium vitœce [life weariness] which is peculiar to reflecting men. Most of you are devoted, for good or ill, to the reflective life. Many of you are students of philosophy, and have already felt in your own persons the scepticism and unreality that too much grubbing in the abstract roots of things will breed. This is, indeed, one of the regular fruits of the over-studious career. Too much questioning and too little active responsibility lead, almost as often as too much sensualism does, to the edge of the slope, at the bottom of which lie pessimism and the nightmare or suicidal view of life. But to the diseases which reflection breeds, still further reflection can oppose effective remedies; and it is of the melancholy and Weltschmerz [world-weariness] bred of reflection that I now proceed to speak.

Let me say, immediately, that my final appeal is to nothing more recondite than religious faith. So far as my argument is to be destructive, it will consist in nothing more than the sweeping away of certain views that often keep the springs of religious faith compressed; and so far as it is to be constructive, it will consist in holding up to the light of day certain considerations calculated to let loose these springs in a normal, natural way. Pessimism is essentially a religious disease. In the form of it to which you are most liable, it consists in nothing but a religious demand to which there comes no normal religious reply.

Now, there are two stages of recovery from this disease, two different levels upon which one may emerge from the midnight view to the daylight view of things, and I must treat of them in turn. The second stage is the more complete and joyous, and it corresponds to the freer exercise of religious trust and fancy. There are, as is well known, persons who are naturally very free in this regard, others who are not at all so. There are persons, for instance, whom we find indulging to their heart’s content in prospects of immortality; and there are others who experience the greatest difficulty in making such a notion seem real to themselves at all. These latter persons are tied to their senses, restricted to their natural experience; and many of them, moreover, feel a sort of intellectual loyalty to what they call ‘hard facts,’ which is positively shocked by the easy excursions into the unseen that other people make at the bare call of sentiment. Minds of either class may, however, be intensely religious. They may equally desire atonement and reconciliation, and crave acquiescence and communion with the total soul of things. But the craving, when the mind is pent in to the hard facts, especially as science now reveals them, can breed pessimism, quite as easily as it breeds optimism when it inspires religious trust and fancy to wing their way to another and a better world.

That is why I call pessimism an essentially religious disease. The nightmare view of life has plenty of organic sources; but its great reflective source has at all times been the contradiction between the phenomena of nature and the craving of the heart to believe that behind nature there is a spirit whose expression nature is. What philosophers call ‘natural theology’ has been one way of appeasing this craving; that poetry of nature in which our English literature is so rich has been another way. Now, suppose a mind of the latter of our two classes, whose imagination is pent in consequently, and who takes its facts ‘hard’; suppose it, moreover, to feel strongly the craving for communion, and yet to realize how desperately difficult it is to construe the scientific order of nature either theologically or poetically, - and what result can there be but inner discord and contradiction? Now, this inner discord (merely as discord) can be relieved in either of two ways: The longing to read the facts religiously may cease, and leave the bare facts by themselves; or, supplementary facts may be discovered or believed-in, which permit the religious reading to go on. These two ways of relief are the two stages of recovery, the two levels of escape from pessimism, to which I made allusion a moment ago, and which the sequel will, I trust, make more clear.

III.

Starting then with nature, we naturally tend, if we have the religious craving, to say with Marcus Aurelius, ‘O Universe! what thou wishest I wish.’ Our sacred books and traditions tell us of one God who made heaven and earth, and, looking on them, saw that they were good. Yet, on more intimate acquaintance, the visible surfaces of heaven and earth refuse to be brought by us into any intelligible unity at all. Every phenomenon that we would praise there exists cheek by jowl with some contrary phenomenon that cancels all its religious effect upon the mind. Beauty and hideousness, love and cruelty, life and death keep house together in indissoluble partnership; and there gradually steals over us, instead of the old warm notion of a man-loving Deity, that of an awful power that neither hates nor loves, but rolls all things together meaninglessly to a common doom. This is an uncanny, a sinister, a nightmare view of life, and its peculiar unheimlichkeit, or poisonousness, lies expressly in our holding two things together which cannot possibly agree, - in our clinging, on the one hand, to the demand that there shall be a living spirit of the whole; and, on the other, to the belief that the course of nature must be such a spirit’s adequate manifestation and expression. It is in the contradiction between the supposed being of a spirit that encompasses and owns us, and with which we ought to have some communion, and the character of such a spirit as revealed by the visible world’s course, that this particular death-in-life paradox and this melancholybreeding puzzle reside. Carlyle expresses the result in that chapter of his immortal ‘Sartor Resartus’ entitled ‘The Everlasting No.’ ‘I lived,’ writes poor Teufelsdröckh, ‘in a continual, indefinite, pining fear; tremulous, pusillanimous, apprehensive of I knew not what: it seemed as if all things in the heavens above and the earth beneath would hurt me; as if the heavens and the earth were but boundless jaws of a devouring monster, wherein I, palpitating, lay waiting to be devoured.’

This is the first stage of speculative melancholy. No brute can have this sort of melancholy; no man who is irreligious can become its prey. It is the sick shudder of the frustrated religious demand, and not the mere necessary outcome of animal experience. Teufelsdröckh himself could have made shift to face the general chaos and bedevilment of this world’s experiences very well, were he not the victim of an originally unlimited trust and affection towards them. If he might meet them piecemeal, with no suspicion of any whole expressing itself in them, shunning the bitter parts and husbanding the sweet ones, as the occasion served, and as the day was foul or fair, he could have zigzagged toward an easy end, and felt no obligation to make the air vocal with his lamentations. The mood of levity, of ‘I don’t care,’ is for this world’s ills a sovereign and practical anaesthetic. But, no! something deep down in Teufelsdröckh and in the rest of us tells us that there is a Spirit in things to which we owe allegiance, and for whose sake we must keep up the serious mood. And so the inner fever and discord also are kept up; for nature taken on her visible surface reveals no such Spirit, and beyond the facts of nature we are at the present stage of our inquiry not supposing ourselves to look.

Now, I do not hesitate frankly and sincerely to confess to you that this real and genuine discord seems to me to carry with it the inevitable bankruptcy of natural religion naively and simply taken. There were times when Leibnitzes with their heads buried in monstrous wigs could compose Theodicies, and when stall-fed officials of an established church could prove by the valves in the heart and the round ligament of the hip-joint the existence of a ‘Moral and Intelligent Contriver of the World.’ But those times are past; and we of the nineteenth century, with our evolutionary theories and our mechanical philosophies, already know nature too impartially and too well to worship unreservedly any God of whose character she can be an adequate expression. Truly, all we know of good and duty proceeds from nature; but none the less so all we know of evil. Visible nature is all plasticity and indifference, - a moral multiverse, as one might call it, and not a moral universe. To such a harlot we owe no allegiance; with her as a whole we can establish no moral communion; and we are free in our dealings with her several parts to obey or destroy, and to follow no law but that of prudence in coming to terms with such of her particular features as will help us to our private ends. If there be a divine Spirit of the universe, nature, such as we know her, cannot possibly be its ultimate word to man. Either there is no Spirit revealed in nature, or else it is inadequately revealed there; and (as all the higher religions have assumed) what we call visible nature, or this world, must be but a veil and surface-show whose full meaning resides in a supplementary unseen or other world.

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

‘“Wherefore, like a coward, dost thou forever pip and whimper, and go cowering and trembling? Despicable biped! … Hast thou not a heart; canst thou not suffer whatsoever it be; and, as a Child of Freedom, though outcast, trample Tophet itself under thy feet, while it consumes thee? Let it come, then; I will meet it and defy it!” And as I so thought, there rushed like a stream of fire over my whole soul; and I shook base Fear away from me forever …

‘Thus had the Everlasting No pealed authoritatively through all the recesses of my being, of my Me; and then was it that my whole Me stood up, in native God-created majesty, and recorded its Protest. Such a Protest, the most important transaction in life, may that same indignation and Defiance, in a psychological point of view, be fitly called. The Everlasting No had said: “Behold, thou art fatherless, outcast, and the Universe is mine;” to which my whole Me now made answer: “I am not thine, but Free, and forever hate thee!” From that hour,’ Teufelsdröckh-Carlyle adds, ‘I began to be a man.’



And our poor friend, James Thomson, similarly writes: -

Who is most wretched in this dolorous place?

I think myself; yet I would rather be

My miserable self than He, than He
Who formed such creatures to his own disgrace.



The vilest thing must be less vile than Thou

From whom it had its being, God and Lord!

Creator of all woe and sin! abhorred,
Malignant and implacable! I vow
That not for all Thy power furled and unfurled,

For all the temples to Thy glory built,

Would I assume the ignominious guilt
Of having made such men in such a world.

We are familiar enough in this community with the spectacle of persons exulting in their emancipation from belief in the God of their ancestral Calvinism, - him who made the garden and the serpent, and pre-appointed the eternal fires of hell. Some of them have found humaner gods to worship, others are simply converts from all theology; but, both alike, they assure us that to have got rid of the sophistication of thinking they could feel any reverence or duty toward that impossible idol gave a tremendous happiness to their souls. Now, to make an idol of the spirit of nature, and worship it, also leads to sophistication; and in souls that are religious and would also be scientific the sophistication breeds a philosophical melancholy, from which the first natural step of escape is the denial of the idol; and with the downfall of the idol, whatever lack of positive joyousness may remain, there comes also the downfall of the whimpering and cowering mood. With evil simply taken as such, men can make short work, for their relations with it then are only practical. It looms up no longer so spectrally, it loses all its haunting and perplexing significance, as soon as the mind attacks the instances of it singly, and ceases to worry about their derivation from the ‘one and only Power.’

Here, then, on this stage of mere emancipation from monistic superstition, the would-be suicide may already get encouraging answers to his question about the worth of life. There are in most men instinctive springs of vitality that respond healthily when the burden of metaphysical and infinite responsibility rolls off. The certainty that you now may step out of life whenever you please, and that to do so is not blasphemous or monstrous, is itself an immense relief. The thought of suicide is now no longer a guilty challenge and obsession.

This little life is all we must endure;

The grave’s most holy peace is ever sure, -

says Thomson; adding, ‘I ponder these thoughts, and they comfort me.’ Meanwhile we can always stand it for twenty-four hours longer, if only to see what tomorrow’s newspaper will contain, or what the next postman will bring.

But far deeper forces than this mere vital curiosity are arousable, even in the pessimistically-tending mind; for where the loving and admiring impulses are dead, the hating and fighting impulses will still respond to fit appeals. This evil which we feel so deeply is something that we can also help to overthrow; for its sources, now that no ‘Substance’ or ‘Spirit’ is behind them, are finite, and we can deal with each of them in turn. It is, indeed, a remarkable fact that sufferings and hardships do not, as a rule, abate the love of life; they seem, on the contrary, usually to give it a keener zest. The sovereign source of melancholy is repletion. Need and struggle are what excite and inspire us; our hour of triumph is what brings the void. Not the Jews of the captivity, but those of the days of Solomon’s glory are those from whom the pessimistic utterances in our Bible come. Germany, when she lay trampled beneath the hoofs of Bonaparte’s troopers, produced perhaps the most optimistic and idealistic literature that the world has seen; and not till the French ‘milliards’ were distributed after 1871 did pessimism overrun the country in the shape in which we see it there to-day. The history of our own race is one long commentary on the cheerfulness that comes with fighting ills. Or take the Waldenses, of whom I lately have been reading, as examples of what strong men will endure. In 1485 a papal bull of Innocent VIII enjoined their extermination. It absolved those who should take up the crusade against them from all ecclesiastical pains and penalties, released them from any oath, legitimized their title to all property which they might have illegally acquired, and promised remission of sins to all who should kill the heretics.



‘There is no town in Piedmont,’ says a Vaudois writer, ‘where some of our brethren have not been put to death. Jordan Terbano was burnt alive at Susa; Hippolite Rossiero at Turin; Michael Goneto, an octogenarian, at Sarcena; Vilermin Ambrosio hanged on the Col di Memo; Hugo Chiambs, of Fenestrelle, had his entrails torn from his living body at Turin; Peter Geymarali of Bobbio in like manner had his entrails taken out in Lucerna, and a fierce cat thrust in their place to torture him further; Maria Romano was buried alive at Rocca Patia; Magdalena Fauno underwent the same fate at San Giovanni; Susanna Michelini was bound hand and foot, and left to perish of cold and hunger on the snow at Sarcena: Bartolomeo Fache, gashed with sabres, had the wounds filled up with quicklime, and perished thus in agony at Fenile; Daniel Michelini had his tongue torn out at Bobbo for having praised God; James Baridari perished covered with sulphurous matches which had been forced into his flesh under the nails, between the fingers, in the nostrils, in the lips, and all over the body, and then lighted; Daniel Rovelli had his mouth filled with gunpowder, which, being lighted, blew his head to pieces; … Sara Rostignol was slit open from the legs to the bosom, and left so to perish on the road between Eyral and Lucerna; Anna Charbonnier was impaled, and carried thus on a pike from San Giovanni to LaTorre.’



Und dergleichen mehr! [And so on and so forth!] In 1630 the plague swept away one-half of the Vaudois population, including fifteen of their seventeen pastors. The places of these were supplied from Geneva and Dauphiny, and the whole Vaudois people learned French in order to follow their services. More than once their number fell, by unremitting persecution, from the normal standard of twenty-five thousand to about four thousand. In 1686 the Duke of Savoy ordered the three thousand that remained to give up their faith or leave the country. Refusing, they fought the French and Piedmontese armies till only eighty of their fighting men remained alive or uncaptured, when they gave up, and were sent in a body to Switzerland. But in 1689, encouraged by William of Orange and led by one of their pastor-captains, between eight hundred and nine hundred of them returned to conquer their old homes again. They fought their way to Bobi, reduced to four hundred men in the first half year, and met every force sent against them; until at last the Duke of Savoy, giving up his alliance with that abomination of desolation, Louis XIV, restored them to comparative freedom, - since which time they have increased and multiplied in their barren Alpine valleys to this day.

What are our woes and sufferance compared with these? Does not the recital of such a fight so obstinately waged against such odds fill us with resolution against our petty powers of darkness, - machine politicians, spoilsmen, and the rest? Life is worth living, no matter what it bring, if only such combats may be carried to successful terminations and one’s heel set on the tyrant’s throat. To the suicide, then, in his supposed world of multifarious and immoral nature, you can appeal - and appeal in the name of the very evils that make his heart sick there - to wait and see his part of the battle out. And the consent to live on, which you ask of him under these circumstances, is not the sophistical ‘resignation’ which devotees of cowering religions preach: it is not resignation in the sense of licking a despotic Deity’s hand. It is, on the contrary, a resignation based on manliness and pride. So long as your would-be suicide leaves an evil of his own unremedied, so long he has strictly no concern with evil in the abstract and at large. The submission which you demand of yourself to the general fact of evil in the world, your apparent acquiescence in it, is here nothing but the conviction that evil at large is none of your business until your business with your private particular evils is liquidated and settled up. A challenge of this sort, with proper designation of detail, is one that need only be made to be accepted by men whose normal instincts are not decayed; and your reflective, would-be suicide may easily be moved by it to face life with a certain interest again. The sentiment of honor is a very penetrating thing. When you and I, for instance, realize how many innocent beasts have had to suffer in cattlecars and slaughter-pens and lay down their lives that we might grow up, all fattened and clad, to sit together here in comfort and carry on this discourse, it does, indeed, put our relation to the universe in a more solemn light. ‘Does not,’ as a young Amherst philosopher (Xenos Clark, now dead) once wrote, ‘the acceptance of a happy life upon such terms involve a point of honor?’ Are we not bound to take some suffering upon ourselves, to do some self-denying service with our lives, in return for all those lives upon which ours are built? To hear this question is to answer it in but one possible way, if one have a normally constituted heart.

Thus, then, we see that mere instinctive curiosity, pugnacity, and honor may make life on a purely naturalistic basis seem worth living from day to day to men who have cast away all metaphysics in order to get rid of hypochondria, but who are resolved to owe nothing as yet to religion and its more positive gifts. A poor halfway stage, some of you may be inclined to say; but at least you must grant it to be an honest stage; and no man should dare to speak meanly of these instincts which are our nature’s best equipment, and to which religion herself must in the last resort address her own peculiar appeals.

IV.

And now, in turning to what religion may have to say to the question, I come to what is the soul of my discourse. Religion has meant many things in human history; but when from now onward I use the word I mean to use it in the supernaturalist sense, as declaring that the so-called order of nature, which constitutes this world’s experience, is only one portion of the total universe, and that there stretches beyond this visible world an unseen world of which we now know nothing positive, but in its relation to which the true significance of our present mundane life consists. A man’s religious faith (whatever more special items of doctrine it may involve) means for me essentially his faith in the existence of an unseen order of some kind in which the riddles of the natural order may be found explained. In the more developed religions the natural world has always been regarded as the mere scaffolding or vestibule of a truer, more eternal world, and affirmed to be a sphere of education, trial, or redemption. In these religions, one must in some fashion die to the natural life before one can enter into life eternal. The notion that this physical world of wind and water, where the sun rises and the moon sets, is absolutely and ultimately the divinely aimed-at and established thing, is one which we find only in very early religions, such as that of the most primitive Jews. It is this natural religion (primitive still, in spite of the fact that poets and men of science whose good-will exceeds their perspicacity keep publishing it in new editions tuned to our contemporary ears) that, as I said a while ago, has suffered definitive bankruptcy in the opinion of a circle of persons, among whom I must count myself, and who are growing more numerous every day. For such persons the physical order of nature, taken simply as science knows it, cannot be held to reveal any one harmonious spiritual intent. It is mere weather, as Chauncey Wright called it, doing and undoing without end.

Now, I wish to make you feel, if I can in the short remainder of this hour, that we have a right to believe the physical order to be only a partial order; that we have a right to supplement it by an unseen spiritual order which we assume on trust, if only thereby life may seem to us better worth living again. But as such a trust will seem to some of you sadly mystical and execrably unscientific, I must first say a word or two to weaken the veto which you may consider that science opposes to our act.

There is included in human nature an ingrained naturalism and materialism of mind which can only admit facts that are actually tangible. Of this sort of mind the entity called ‘science’ is the idol. Fondness for the word ‘scientist’ is one of the notes by which you may know its votaries; and its short way of killing any opinion that it disbelieves in is to call it ‘unscientific.’ It must be granted that there is no slight excuse for this. Science has made such glorious leaps in the last three hundred years, and extended our knowledge of nature so enormously both in general and in detail; men of science, moreover, have as a class displayed such admirable virtues, - that it is no wonder if the worshippers of science lose their head. In this very University, accordingly, I have heard more than one teacher say that all the fundamental conceptions of truth have already been found by science, and that the future has only the details of the picture to fill in. But the slightest reflection on the real conditions will suffice to show how barbaric such notions are. They show such a lack of scientific imagination, that it is hard to see how one who is actively advancing any part of science can make a mistake so crude. Think how many absolutely new scientific conceptions have arisen in our own generation, how many new problems have been formulated that were never thought of before, and then cast an eye upon the brevity of science’s career. It began with Galileo, not three hundred years ago. Four thinkers since Galileo, each informing his successor of what discoveries his own lifetime had seen achieved, might have passed the torch of science into our hands as we sit here in this room. Indeed, for the matter of that, an audience much smaller than the present one, an audience of some five or six score people, if each person in it could speak for his own generation, would carry us away to the black unknown of the human species, to days without a document or monument to tell their tale. Is it credible that such a mushroom knowledge, such a growth overnight as this, can represent more than the minutest glimpse of what the universe will really prove to be when adequately understood? No! our science is a drop, our ignorance a sea. Whatever else be certain, this at least is certain, - that the world of our present natural knowledge is enveloped in a larger world of some sort of whose residual properties we at present can frame no positive idea.

Agnostic positivism, of course, admits this principle theoretically in the most cordial terms, but insists that we must not turn it to any practical use. We have no right, this doctrine tells us, to dream dreams, or suppose anything about the unseen part of the universe, merely because to do so may be for what we are pleased to call our highest interests. We must always wait for sensible evidence for our beliefs; and where such evidence is inaccessible we must frame no hypotheses whatever. Of course this is a safe enough position in abstracto. If a thinker had no stake in the unknown, no vital needs, to live or languish according to what the unseen world contained, a philosophic neutrality and refusal to believe either one way or the other would be his wisest cue. But, unfortunately, neutrality is not only inwardly difficult, it is also outwardly unrealizable, where our relations to an alternative are practical and vital. This is because, as the psychologists tell us, belief and doubt are living attitudes, and involve conduct on our part. Our only way, for example, of doubting, or refusing to believe, that a certain thing is, is continuing to act as if it were not. If, for instance, I refuse to believe that the room is getting cold, I leave the windows open and light no fire just as if it still were warm. If I doubt that you are worthy of my confidence, I keep you uninformed of all my secrets just as if you were unworthy of the same. If I doubt the need of insuring my house, I leave it uninsured as much as if I believed there were no need. And so if I must not believe that the world is divine, I can only express that refusal by declining ever to act distinctively as if it were so, which can only mean acting on certain critical occasions as if it were not so, or in an irreligious way. There are, you see, inevitable occasions in life when inaction is a kind of action, and must count as action, and when not to be for is to be practically against; and in all such cases strict and consistent neutrality is an unattainable thing.

And, after all, is not this duty of neutrality where only our inner interests would lead us to believe, the most ridiculous of commands? Is it not sheer dogmatic folly to say that our inner interests can have no real connection with the forces that the hidden world may contain? In other cases divinations based on inner interests have proved prophetic enough. Take science itself! Without an imperious inner demand on our part for ideal logical and mathematical harmonies, we should never have attained to proving that such harmonies lie hidden between all the chinks and interstices of the crude natural world. Hardly a law has been established in science, hardly a fact ascertained, which was not first sought after, often with sweat and blood, to gratify an inner need. Whence such needs come from we do not know: we find them in us, and biological psychology so far only classes them with Darwin’s ‘accidental variations.’ But the inner need of believing that this world of nature is a sign of something more spiritual and eternal than itself is just as strong and authoritative in those who feel it, as the inner need of uniform laws of causation ever can be in a professionally scientific head. The toil of many generations has proved the latter need prophetic. Why may not the former one be prophetic, too? And if needs of ours outrun the visible universe, why may not that be a sign that an invisible universe is there? What, in short, has authority to debar us from trusting our religious demands? Science as such assuredly has no authority, for she can only say what is, not what is not; and the agnostic ‘thou shalt not believe without coercive sensible evidence’ is simply an expression (free to any one to make) of private personal appetite for evidence of a certain peculiar kind.

Now, when I speak of trusting our religious demands, just what do I mean by ‘trusting’? Is the word to carry with it license to define in detail an invisible world, and to anathematize and excommunicate those whose trust is different? Certainly not! Our faculties of belief were not primarily given us to make orthodoxies and heresies withal; they were given us to live by. And to trust our religious demands means first of all to live in the light of them, and to act as if the invisible world which they suggest were real. It is a fact of human nature, that men can live and die by the help of a sort of faith that goes without a single dogma or definition. The bare assurance that this natural order is not ultimate but a mere sign or vision, the external staging of a many-storied universe, in which spiritual forces have the last word and are eternal, - this bare assurance is to such men enough to make life seem worth living in spite of every contrary presumption suggested by its circumstances on the natural plane. Destroy this inner assurance, however, vague as it is, and all the light and radiance of existence is extinguished for these persons at a stroke. Often enough the wild-eyed look at life - the suicidal mood - will then set in.

And now the application comes directly home to you and me. Probably to almost every one of us here the most adverse life would seem well worth living, if we only could be certain that our bravery and patience with it were terminating and eventuating and bearing fruit somewhere in an unseen spiritual world. But granting we are not certain, does it then follow that a bare trust in such a world is a fool’s paradise and lubberland, or rather that it is a living attitude in which we are free to indulge? Well, we are free to trust at our own risks anything that is not impossible, and that can bring analogies to bear in its behalf. That the world of physics is probably not absolute, all the converging multitude of arguments that make in favor of idealism tend to prove; and that our whole physical life may lie soaking in a spiritual atmosphere, a dimension of being that we at present have no organ for apprehending, is vividly suggested to us by the analogy of the life of our domestic animals. Our dogs, for example, are in our human life but not of it. They witness hourly the outward body of events whose inner meaning cannot, by any possible operation, be revealed to their intelligence, - events in which they themselves often play the cardinal part. My terrier bites a teasing boy, for example, and the father demands damages. The dog may be present at every step of the negotiations, and see the money paid, without an inkling of what it all means, without a suspicion that it has anything to do with him; and he never can know in his natural dog’s life. Or take another case which used greatly to impress me in my medical-student days. Consider a poor dog whom they are vivisecting in a laboratory. He lies strapped on a board and shrieking at his executioners, and to his own dark consciousness is literally in a sort of hell. He cannot see a single redeeming ray in the whole business; and yet all these diabolicalseeming events are often controlled by human intentions with which, if his poor benighted mind could only be made to catch a glimpse of them, all that is heroic in him would religiously acquiesce. Healing truth, relief to future sufferings of beast and man, are to be bought by them. It may be genuinely a process of redemption. Lying on his back on the board there he may be performing a function incalculably higher than any that prosperous canine life admits of; and yet, of the whole performance, this function is the one portion that must remain absolutely beyond his ken.

Now turn from this to the life of man. In the dog’s life we see the world invisible to him because we live in both worlds. In human life, although we only see our world, and his within it, yet encompassing both these worlds a still wider world may be there, as unseen by us as our world is by him; and to believe in that world may be the most essential function that our lives in this world have to perform. But ‘may be! may be!’ one now hears the positivist contemptuously exclaim; ‘what use can a scientific life have for maybes?’ Well, I reply, the ‘scientific’ life itself has much to do with maybes, and human life at large has everything to do with them. So far as man stands for anything, and is productive or originative at all, his entire vital function may be said to have to deal with maybes. Not a victory is gained, not a deed of faithfulness or courage is done, except upon a maybe; not a service, not a sally of generosity, not a scientific exploration or experiment or text-book, that may not be a mistake. It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all. And often enough our faith beforehand in an uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result come true. Suppose, for instance, that you are climbing a mountain, and have worked yourself into a position from which the only escape is by a terrible leap. Have faith that you can successfully make it, and your feet are nerved to its accomplishment. But mistrust yourself, and think of all the sweet things you have heard the scientists say of maybes, and you will hesitate so long that, at last, all unstrung and trembling, and launching yourself in a moment of despair, you roll in the abyss. In such a case (and it belongs to an enormous class), the part of wisdom as well as of courage is to believe what is in the line of your needs, for only by such belief is the need fulfilled. Refuse to believe, and you shall indeed be right, for you shall irretrievably perish. But believe, and again you shall be right, for you shall save yourself. You make one or the other of two possible universes true by your trust or mistrust, - both universes having been only maybes, in this particular, before you contributed your act.

Now, it appears to me that the question whether life is worth living is subject to conditions logically much like these. It does, indeed, depend on you the liver. If you surrender to the nightmare view and crown the evil edifice by your own suicide, you have indeed made a picture totally black. Pessimism, completed by your act, is true beyond a doubt, so far as your world goes. Your mistrust of life has removed whatever worth your own enduring existence might have given to it; and now, throughout the whole sphere of possible influence of that existence, the mistrust has proved itself to have had divining power. But suppose, on the other hand, that instead of giving way to the nightmare view you cling to it that this world is not the ultimatum. Suppose you find yourself a very wellspring, as Wordsworth says, of -

Zeal, and the virtue to exist by faith

As soldiers live by courage; as, by strength

Of heart, the sailor fights with roaring seas.

Suppose, however thickly evils crowd upon you, that your unconquerable subjectivity proves to be their match, and that you find a more wonderful joy than any passive pleasure can bring in trusting ever in the larger whole. Have you not now made life worth living on these terms? What sort of a thing would life really be, with your qualities ready for a tussle with it, if it only brought fair weather and gave these higher faculties of yours no scope? Please remember that optimism and pessimism are definitions of the world, and that our own reactions on the world, small as they are in bulk, are integral parts of the whole thing, and necessarily help to determine the definition. They may even be the decisive elements in determining the definition. A large mass can have its unstable equilibrium overturned by the addition of a feather’s weight; a long phrase may have its sense reversed by the addition of the three letters n-o-t. This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it, from the moral point of view; and we are determined to make it from that point of view, so far as we have anything to do with it, a success.

Now, in this description of faiths that verify themselves I have assumed that our faith in an invisible order is what inspires those efforts and that patience which make this visible order good for moral men. Our faith in the seen world’s goodness (goodness now meaning fitness for successful moral and religious life) has verified itself by leaning on our faith in the unseen world. But will our faith in the unseen world similarly verify itself? Who knows?

Once more it is a case of maybe; and once more maybes are the essence of the situation. I confess that I do not see why the very existence of an invisible world may not in part depend on the personal response which any one of us may make to the religious appeal. God himself, in short, may draw vital strength and increase of very being from our fidelity. For my own part, I do not know what the sweat and blood and tragedy of this life mean, if they mean anything short of this. If this life be not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight, - as if there were something really wild in the universe which we, with all our idealities and faithfulnesses, are needed to redeem; and first of all to redeem our own hearts from atheisms and fears. For such a half-wild, half-saved universe our nature is adapted. The deepest thing in our nature is this Binnenleben [‘inner life’] (as a German doctor lately has called it), this dumb region of the heart in which we dwell alone with our willingnesses and unwillingnesses, our faiths and fears. As through the cracks and crannies of caverns those waters exude from the earth’s bosom which then form the fountain-heads of springs, so in these crepuscular depths of personality the sources of all our outer deeds and decisions take their rise. Here is our deepest organ of communication with the nature of things; and compared with these concrete movements of our soul all abstract statements and scientific arguments - the veto, for example, which the strict positivist pronounces upon our faith - sound to us like mere chatterings of the teeth. For here possibilities, not finished facts, are the realities with which we have actively to deal; and to quote my friend William Salter, of the Philadelphia Ethical Society, ‘as the essence of courage is to stake one’s life on a possibility, so the essence of faith is to believe that the possibility exists.’



These, then, are my last words to you: Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact. The ‘scientific proof’ that you are right may not be clear before the day of judgment (or some stage of being which that expression may serve to symbolize) is reached. But the faithful fighters of this hour, or the beings that then and there will represent them, may then turn to the faint-hearted, who here decline to go on, with words like those with which Henry IV greeted the tardy Crillon after a great victory had been gained; ‘Hang yourself, brave Crillon! we fought at Arques, and you were not there.’

What Pragmatism Means

Some years ago, being with a camping party in the mountains, I returned from a solitary ramble to find every one engaged in a ferocious metaphysical dispute. The corpus of the dispute was a squirrel - a live squirrel supposed to be clinging to one side of a tree-trunk; while over against the tree’s opposite side a human being was imagined to stand. This human witness tries to get sight of the squirrel by moving rapidly round the tree, but no matter how fast he goes, the squirrel moves as fast in the opposite direction, and always keeps the tree between himself and the man, so that never a glimpse of him is caught. The resultant metaphysical problem now is this: Does the man go round the squirrel or not? He goes round the tree, sure enough, and the squirrel is on the tree; but does he go round the squirrel? In the unlimited leisure of the wilderness, discussion had been worn threadbare. Everyone had taken sides, and was obstinate; and the numbers on both sides were even. Each side, when I appeared, therefore appealed to me to make it a majority. Mindful of the scholastic adage that whenever you meet a contradiction you must make a distinction, I immediately sought and found one, as follows: ‘Which party is right,’ I said, ‘depends on what you practically mean by “going round” the squirrel. If you mean passing from the north of him to the east, then to the south, then to the west, and then to the north of him again, obviously the man does go round him, for he occupies these successive positions. But if on the contrary you mean being first in front of him, then on the right of him, then behind him, then on his left, and finally in front again, it is quite as obvious that the man fails to go round him, for by the compensating movements the squirrel makes, he keeps his belly turned towards the man all the time, and his back turned away. Make the distinction, and there is no occasion for any farther dispute. You are both right and both wrong according as you conceive the verb “to go round” in one practical fashion or the other.’

Although one or two of the hotter disputants called my speech a shuffling evasion, saying they wanted no quibbling or scholastic hair-splitting, but meant just plain honest English ‘round,’ the majority seemed to think that the distinction had assuaged the dispute.

I tell this trivial anecdote because it is a peculiarly simple example of what I wish now to speak of as the pragmatic method. The pragmatic method is primarily a method of settling metaphysical disputes that otherwise might be interminable. Is the world one or many? - fated or free? - material or spiritual? - here are notions either of which may or may not hold good of the world; and disputes over such notions are unending. The pragmatic method in such cases is to try to interpret each notion by tracing its respective practical consequences. What difference would it practically make to any one if this notion rather than that notion were true? If no practical difference whatever can be traced, then the alternatives mean practically the same thing, and all dispute is idle. Whenever a dispute is serious, we ought to be able to show some practical difference that must follow from one side or the other’s being right.

A glance at the history of the idea will show you still better what pragmatism means. The term is derived from the same Greek word , meaning action, from which our words ‘practice’ and ‘practical’ come. It was first introduced into philosophy by Mr Charles Peirce in 1878. In an article entitled ‘How to Make Our Ideas Clear,’ in the ‘Popular Science Monthly’ for January of that year, Mr Peirce, after pointing out that our beliefs are really rules for action, said that, to develop a thought’s meaning, we need only determine what conduct it is fitted to produce: that conduct is for us its sole significance. And the tangible fact at the root of all our thoughtdistinctions, however subtle, is that there is no one of them so fine as to consist in anything but a possible difference of practice. To attain perfect clearness in our thoughts of an object, then, we need only consider what conceivable effects of a practical kind the object may involve - what sensations we are to expect from it, and what reactions we must prepare. Our conception of these effects, whether immediate or remote, is then for us the whole of our conception of the object, so far as that conception has positive significance at all.

This is the principle of Peirce, the principle of pragmatism. It lay entirely unnoticed by any one for twenty years, until I, in an address before Professor Howison’s philosophical union at the university of California, brought it forward again and made a special application of it to religion. By that date (1908) the times seemed ripe for its reception. The word ‘pragmatism’ spread, and at present it fairly spots the pages of the philosophic journals. On all hands we find the ‘pragmatic movement’ spoken of, sometimes with respect, sometimes with contumely, seldom with clear understanding. It is evident that the term applies itself conveniently to a number of tendencies that hitherto have lacked a collective name, and that it has ‘come to stay.’

To take in the importance of Peirce’s principle, one must get accustomed to applying it to concrete cases. I found a few years ago that Ostwald, the illustrious Leipzig chemist, had been making perfectly distinct use of the principle of pragmatism in his lectures on the philosophy of science; though he had not called it by that name.

‘All realities influence our practice,’ he wrote me, ‘and that influence is their meaning for us. I am accustomed to put questions to my classes in this way: In what respects would the world be different if this alternative or that were true? If I can find nothing that would become different, then the alternative has no sense.’

That is, the rival views mean practically the same thing, and meaning, other than practical, there is for us none. Ostwald in a published lecture gives this example of what he means. Chemists have long wrangled over the inner constitution of certain bodies called ‘tautomerous.’ Their properties seemed equally consistent with the notion that an instable hydrogen atom oscillates inside of them, or that they are instable mixtures of two bodies. Controversy raged, but never was decided. ‘It would never have begun,’ says Ostwald, ‘if the combatants had asked themselves what particular experimental fact could have been made different by one or the other view being correct. For it would then have appeared that no difference of fact could possibly ensue; and the quarrel was as unreal as if, theorizing in primitive times about the raising of dough by yeast, one party should have invoked a “brownie,” while another insisted on an “elf” as the true cause of the phenomenon.’

It is astonishing to see how many philosophical disputes collapse into insignificance the moment you subject them to this simple test of tracing a concrete consequence. There can be no difference anywhere that doesn’t make a difference elsewhere - no difference in abstract truth that doesn’t express itself in a difference in concrete fact and in conduct consequent upon that fact, imposed on somebody, somehow, somewhere, and somewhen. The whole function of philosophy ought to be to find out what definite difference it will make to you and me, at definite instants of our life, if this world-formula or that world-formula be the true one.

There is absolutely nothing new in the pragmatic method. Socrates was an adept at it. Aristotle used it methodically. Locke, Berkeley, and Hume made momentous contributions to truth by its means. Shadworth Hodgson keeps insisting that realities are only what they are ‘known as.’ But these forerunners of pragmatism used it in fragments: they were preluders only. Not until in our time has it generalized itself, become conscious of a universal mission, pretended to a conquering destiny. I believe in that destiny, and I hope I may end by inspiring you with my belief.

Pragmatism represents a perfectly familiar attitude in philosophy, the empiricist attitude, but it represents it, as it seems to me, both in a more radical and in a less objectionable form than it has ever yet assumed. A pragmatist turns his back resolutely and once for all upon a lot of inveterate habits dear to professional philosophers. He turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns towards concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action and towards power. That means the empiricist temper regnant and the rationalist temper sincerely given up. It means the open air and possibilities of nature, as against dogma, artificiality, and the pretence of finality in truth.

At the same time it does not stand for any special results. It is a method only. But the general triumph of that method would mean an enormous change in what I called in my last lecture the ‘temperament’ of philosophy. Teachers of the ultra-rationalistic type would be frozen out, much as the courtier type is frozen out in republics, as the ultramontane type of priest is frozen out in protestant lands. Science and metaphysics would come much nearer together, would in fact work absolutely hand in hand.

Metaphysics has usually followed a very primitive kind of quest. You know how men have always hankered after unlawful magic, and you know what a great part in magic words have always played. If you have his name, or the formula of incantation that binds him, you can control the spirit, genie, afrite, or whatever the power may be. Solomon knew the names of all the spirits, and having their names, he held them subject to his will. So the universe has always appeared to the natural mind as a kind of enigma, of which the key must be sought in the shape of some illuminating or power-bringing word or name. That word names the universe’s principle, and to possess it is after a fashion to possess the universe itself. ‘God,’ ‘Matter,’ ‘Reason,’ ‘the Absolute,’ ‘Energy,’ are so many solving names. You can rest when you have them. You are at the end of your metaphysical quest.

But if you follow the pragmatic method, you cannot look on any such word as closing your quest. You must bring out of each word its practical cash-value, set it at work within the stream of your experience. It appears less as a solution, then, than as a program for more work, and more particularly as an indication of the ways in which existing realities may be changed.

Theories thus become instruments, not answers to enigmas, in which we can rest. We don’t lie back upon them, we move forward, and, on occasion, make nature over again by their aid. Pragmatism unstiffens all our theories, limbers them up and sets each one at work. Being nothing essentially new, it harmonizes with many ancient philosophic tendencies. It agrees with nominalism for instance, in always appealing to particulars; with utilitarianism in emphasizing practical aspects; with positivism in its disdain for verbal solutions, useless questions and metaphysical abstractions.

All these, you see, are anti-intellectualist tendencies. Against rationalism as a pretension and a method pragmatism is fully armed and militant. But, at the outset, at least, it stands for no particular results. It has no dogmas, and no doctrines save its method. As the young Italian pragmatist Papini has well said, it lies in the midst of our theories, like a corridor in a hotel. Innumerable chambers open out of it. In one you may find a man writing an atheistic volume; in the next some one on his knees praying for faith and strength; in a third a chemist investigating a body’s properties. In a fourth a system of idealistic metaphysics is being excogitated; in a fifth the impossibility of metaphysics is being shown. But they all own the corridor, and all must pass through it if they want a practicable way of getting into or out of their respective rooms.

No particular results then, so far, but only an attitude of orientation, is what the pragmatic method means. The attitude of looking away from first things, principles, ‘categories,’ supposed necessities; and of looking towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts.

So much for the pragmatic method! You may say that I have been praising it rather than explaining it to you, but I shall presently explain it abundantly enough by showing how it works on some familiar problems. Meanwhile the word pragmatism has come to be used in a still wider sense, as meaning also a certain theory of truth. I mean to give a whole lecture to the statement of that theory, after first paving the way, so I can be very brief now. But brevity is hard to follow, so I ask for your redoubled attention for a quarter of an hour. If much remains obscure, I hope to make it clearer in the later lectures.

One of the most successfully cultivated branches of philosophy in our time is what is called inductive logic, the study of the conditions under which our sciences have evolved. Writers on this subject have begun to show a singular unanimity as to what the laws of nature and elements of fact mean, when formulated by mathematicians, physicists and chemists. When the first mathematical, logical, and natural uniformities, the first laws, were discovered, men were so carried away by the clearness, beauty and simplification that resulted, that they believed themselves to have deciphered authentically the eternal thoughts of the Almighty. His mind also thundered and reverberated in syllogisms. He also thought in conic sections, squares and roots and ratios, and geometrized like Euclid. He made Kepler’s laws for the planets to follow, he made velocity increase proportionally to the time in falling bodies; he made the law of the sines for light to obey when refracted; he established the classes, orders, families and genera of plants and animals, and fixed the distances between them. He thought the archetypes of all things, and devised their variations; and when we rediscover any one of these his wondrous institutions, we seize his mind in its very literal intention.

But as the sciences have developed farther the notion has gained ground that most, perhaps all, of our laws are only approximations. The laws themselves, moreover, have grown so numerous that there is no counting them; and so many rival formulations are proposed in all the branches of science that investigators have become accustomed to the notion that no theory is absolutely a transcript of reality, but that any one of them may from some point of view be useful. Their great use is to summarize old facts and to lead to new ones. They are only a man-made language, a conceptual shorthand, as some one calls them, in which we write our reports of nature; and languages, as is well known, tolerate much choice of expression and many dialects.

Thus human arbitrariness has driven divine necessity from scientific logic. If I mention the names of Sigwart, Mach, Ostwald, Pearson, Milhaud, Poincaré, Duhem, Ruyssen, those of you who are students will easily identify the tendency I speak of, and will think of additional names.

Riding now on the front of this wave of scientific logic Messrs. Schiller and Dewey appear with their pragmatistic account of what truth everywhere signifies. Everywhere, these teachers say, ‘truth’ in our ideas and beliefs means the same thing that it means in science. It means, they say, nothing but this, that ideas (which themselves are but parts of our experience) become true just in so far as they help us to get into satisfactory relation with other parts of our experience, to summarize them and get about among them by conceptual short-cuts instead of following the interminable succession of particular phenomena. Any idea upon which we can ride, so to speak; any idea that will carry us prosperously from any one part of our experience to any other part, linking things satisfactorily, working securely, simplifying, saving labor; is true for just so much, true in so far forth, true instrumentally. This is the ‘instrumental’ view of truth taught so successfully at Chicago, the view that truth in our ideas means their power to ‘work’, promulgated so brilliantly at Oxford.

Messrs. Dewey, Schiller and their allies, in reaching this general conception of all truth, have only followed the example of geologists, biologists and philologists. In the establishment of these other sciences, the successful stroke was always to take some simple process actually observable in operation - as denudation by weather, say, or variation from parental type, or change of dialect by incorporation of new words and pronunciations - and then to generalize it, making it apply to all times, and produce great results by summating its effects through the ages.

The observable process which Schiller and Dewey particularly singled out for generalization is the familiar one by which any individual settles into new opinions. The process here is always the same. The individual has a stock of old opinions already, but he meets a new experience that puts them to a strain. Somebody contradicts them; or in a reflective moment he discovers that they contradict each other; or he hears of facts with which they are incompatible; or desires arise in him which they cease to satisfy. The result is an inward trouble to which his mind till then had been a stranger, and from which he seeks to escape by modifying his previous mass of opinions. He saves as much of it as he can, for in this matter of belief we are all extreme conservatives. So he tries to change first this opinion, and then that (for they resist change very variously), until at last some new idea comes up which he can graft upon the ancient stock with a minimum of disturbance of the latter, some idea that mediates between the stock and the new experience and runs them into one another most felicitously and expediently.

This new idea is then adopted as the true one. It preserves the older stock of truths with a minimum of modification, stretching them just enough to make them admit the novelty, but conceiving that in ways as familiar as the case leaves possible. An outrée explanation, violating all our preconceptions, would never pass for a true account of a novelty. We should scratch round industriously till we found something less eccentric. The most violent revolutions in an individual’s beliefs leave most of his old order standing. Time and space, cause and effect, nature and history, and one’s own biography remain untouched. New truth is always a go-between, a smoother-over of transitions. It marries old opinion to new fact so as ever to show a minimum of jolt, a maximum of continuity. We hold a theory true just in proportion to its success in solving this ‘problem of maxima and minima.’ But success in solving this problem is eminently a matter of approximation. We say this theory solves it on the whole more satisfactorily than that theory; but that means more satisfactorily to ourselves, and individuals will emphasize their points of satisfaction differently. To a certain degree, therefore, everything here is plastic.

The point I now urge you to observe particularly is the part played by the older truths. Failure to take account of it is the source of much of the unjust criticism levelled against pragmatism. Their influence is absolutely controlling. Loyalty to them is the first principle - in most cases it is the only principle; for by far the most usual way of handling phenomena so novel that they would make for a serious rearrangement of our preconception is to ignore them altogether, or to abuse those who bear witness for them.

You doubtless wish examples of this process of truth’s growth, and the only trouble is their superabundance. The simplest case of new truth is of course the mere numerical addition of new kinds of facts, or of new single facts of old kinds, to our experience - an addition that involves no alteration in the old beliefs. Day follows day, and its contents are simply added. The new contents themselves are not true, they simply come and are. Truth is what we say about them, and when we say that they have come, truth is satisfied by the plain additive formula.

But often the day’s contents oblige a rearrangement. If I should now utter piercing shrieks and act like a maniac on this platform, it would make many of you revise your ideas as to the probable worth of my philosophy. ‘Radium’ came the other day as part of the day’s content, and seemed for a moment to contradict our ideas of the whole order of nature, that order having come to be identified with what is called the conservation of energy. The mere sight of radium paying heat away indefinitely out of its own pocket seemed to violate that conservation. What to think? If the radiations from it were nothing but an escape of unsuspected ‘potential’ energy, pre-existent inside of the atoms, the principle of conservation would be saved. The discovery of ‘helium’ as the radiation’s outcome, opened a way to this belief. So Ramsay’s view is generally held to be true, because, although it extends our old ideas of energy, it causes a minimum of alteration in their nature.

I need not multiply instances. A new opinion counts as ‘true’ just in proportion as it gratifies the individual’s desire to assimilate the novel in his experience to his beliefs in stock. It must both lean on old truth and grasp new fact; and its success (as I said a moment ago) in doing this, is a matter for the individual’s appreciation. When old truth grows, then, by new truth’s addition, it is for subjective reasons. We are in the process and obey the reasons. That new idea is truest which performs most felicitously its function of satisfying our double urgency. It makes itself true, gets itself classed as true, by the way it works; grafting itself then upon the ancient body of truth, which thus grows much as a tree grows by the activity of a new layer of cambium.

Now Dewey and Schiller proceed to generalize this observation and to apply it to the most ancient parts of truth. They also once were plastic. They also were called true for human reasons. They also mediated between still earlier truths and what in those days were novel observations. Purely objective truth, truth in whose establishment the function of giving human satisfaction in marrying previous parts of experience with newer parts played no role whatever, is nowhere to be found. The reasons why we call things true is the reason why they are true, for ‘to be true’ means only to perform this marriage-function.

The trail of the human serpent is thus over everything. Truth independent; truth that we find merely; truth no longer malleable to human need; truth incorrigible, in a word; such truth exists indeed superabundantly - or is supposed to exist by rationalistically minded thinkers; but then it means only the dead heart of the living tree, and its being there means only that truth also has its paleontology, and its ‘prescription,’ and may grow stiff with years of veteran service and petrified in men’s regard by sheer antiquity. But how plastic even the oldest truths nevertheless really are has been vividly shown in our day by the transformation of logical and mathematical ideas, a transformation which seems even to be invading physics. The ancient formulas are reinterpreted as special expressions of much wider principles, principles that our ancestors never got a glimpse of in their present shape and formulation.

Mr Schiller still gives to all this view of truth the name of ‘Humanism,’ but, for this doctrine too, the name of pragmatism seems fairly to be in the ascendant, so I will treat it under the name of pragmatism in these lectures.

Such then would be the scope of pragmatism - first, a method; and second, a genetic theory of what is meant by truth. And these two things must be our future topics.

What I have said of the theory of truth will, I am sure, have appeared obscure and unsatisfactory to most of you by reason of its brevity. I shall make amends for that hereafter. In a lecture on ‘common sense’ I shall try to show what I mean by truths grown petrified by antiquity. In another lecture I shall expatiate on the idea that our thoughts become true in proportion as they successfully exert their go-between function. In a third I shall show how hard it is to discriminate subjective from objective factors in Truth’s development. You may not follow me wholly in these lectures; and if you do, you may not wholly agree with me. But you will, I know, regard me at least as serious, and treat my effort with respectful consideration.

You will probably be surprised to learn, then, that Messrs. Schiller’s and Dewey’s theories have suffered a hailstorm of contempt and ridicule. All rationalism has risen against them. In influential quarters Mr Schiller, in particular, has been treated like an impudent schoolboy who deserves a spanking. I should not mention this, but for the fact that it throws so much sidelight upon that rationalistic temper to which I have opposed the temper of pragmatism. Pragmatism is uncomfortable away from facts. Rationalism is comfortable only in the presence of abstractions. This pragmatist talk about truths in the plural, about their utility and satisfactoriness, about the success with which they ‘work,’ etc., suggests to the typical intellectualist mind a sort of coarse lame second-rate makeshift article of truth. Such truths are not real truth. Such tests are merely subjective. As against this, objective truth must be something non-utilitarian, haughty, refined, remote, august, exalted. It must be an absolute correspondence of our thoughts with an equally absolute reality. It must be what we ought to think unconditionally. The conditioned ways in which we do think are so much irrelevance and matter for psychology. Down with psychology, up with logic, in all this question!

See the exquisite contrast of the types of mind! The pragmatist clings to facts and concreteness, observes truth at its work in particular cases, and generalizes. Truth, for him, becomes a class-name for all sorts of definite working-values in experience. For the rationalist it remains a pure abstraction, to the bare name of which we must defer. When the pragmatist undertakes to show in detail just why we must defer, the rationalist is unable to recognize the concretes from which his own abstraction is taken. He accuses us of denying truth; whereas we have only sought to trace exactly why people follow it and always ought to follow it. Your typical ultraabstractionist fairly shudders at concreteness: other things equal, he positively prefers the pale and spectral. If the two universes were offered, he would always choose the skinny outline rather than the rich thicket of reality. It is so much purer, clearer, nobler.

I hope that as these lectures go on, the concreteness and closeness to facts of the pragmatism which they advocate may be what approves itself to you as its most satisfactory peculiarity. It only follows here the example of the sister-sciences, interpreting the unobserved by the observed. It brings old and new harmoniously together. It converts the absolutely empty notion of a static relation of ‘correspondence’ (what that may mean we must ask later) between our minds and reality, into that of a rich and active commerce (that any one may follow in detail and understand) between particular thoughts of ours, and the great universe of other experiences in which they play their parts and have their uses.

But enough of this at present. The justification of what I say must be postponed. I wish now to add a word in further explanation of the claim I made at our last meeting, that pragmatism may be a happy harmonizer of empiricist ways of thinking with the more religious demands of human beings.

*

Men who are strongly of the fact-loving temperament, you may remember me to have said, are liable to be kept at a distance by the small sympathy with facts which that philosophy from the present-day fashion of idealism offers them. It is far too intellectualistic. Old fashioned theism was bad enough, with its notion of God as an exalted monarch, made up of a lot of unintelligible or preposterous ‘attributes’; but, so long as it held strongly by the argument from design, it kept some touch with concrete realities. Since, however, Darwinism has once for all displaced design from the minds of the ‘scientific,’ theism has lost that foothold; and some kind of an immanent or pantheistic deity working in things rather than above them is, if any, the kind recommended to our contemporary imagination. Aspirants to a philosophic religion turn, as a rule, more hopefully nowadays towards idealistic pantheism than towards the older dualistic theism, in spite of the fact that the latter still counts able defenders.

But, as I said in my first lecture, the brand of pantheism offered is hard for them to assimilate if they are lovers of facts, or empirically minded. It is the absolutistic brand, spurning the dust and reared upon pure logic. It keeps no connexion whatever with concreteness. Affirming the Absolute Mind, which is its substitute for God, to be the rational presupposition of all particulars of fact, whatever they may be, it remains supremely indifferent to what the particular facts in our world actually are. Be they what they may, the Absolute will father them. Like the sick lion in Esop’s fable, all footprints lead into his den, but nulla vestigia retrorsum [‘no tracks lead back out’]. You cannot redescend into the world of particulars by the Absolute’s aid, or deduce any necessary consequences of detail important for your life from your idea of his nature. He gives you indeed the assurance that all is well with Him, and for his eternal way of thinking; but thereupon he leaves you to be finitely saved by your own temporal devices.

Far be it from me to deny the majesty of this conception, or its capacity to yield religious comfort to a most respectable class of minds. But from the human point of view, no one can pretend that it doesn’t suffer from the faults of remoteness and abstractness. It is eminently a product of what I have ventured to call the rationalistic temper. It disdains empiricism’s needs. It substitutes a pallid outline for the real world’s richness. It is dapper, it is noble in the bad sense, in the sense in which to be noble is to be inapt for humble service. In this real world of sweat and dirt, it seems to me that when a view of things is ‘noble,’ that ought to count as a presumption against its truth, and as a philosophic disqualification. The prince of darkness may be a gentleman, as we are told he is, but whatever the God of earth and heaven is, he can surely be no gentleman. His menial services are needed in the dust of our human trials, even more than his dignity is needed in the empyrean.

Now pragmatism, devoted though she be to facts, has no such materialistic bias as ordinary empiricism labors under. Moreover, she has no objection whatever to the realizing of abstractions, so long as you get about among particulars with their aid and they actually carry you somewhere. Interested in no conclusions but those which our minds and our experiences work out together, she has no a priori prejudices against theology. If theological ideas prove to have a value for concrete life, they will be true, for pragmatism, in the sense of being good for so much. For how much more they are true, will depend entirely on their relations to the other truths that also have to be acknowledged.

What I said just now about the Absolute, of transcendental idealism, is a case in point. First, I called it majestic and said it yielded religious comfort to a class of minds, and then I accused it of remoteness and sterility. But so far as it affords such comfort, it surely is not sterile; it has that amount of value; it performs a concrete function. As a good pragmatist, I myself ought to call the Absolute true ‘in so far forth,’ then; and I unhesitatingly now do so.

But what does true in so far forth mean in this case? To answer, we need only apply the pragmatic method. What do believers in the Absolute mean by saying that their belief affords them comfort? They mean that since, in the Absolute, finite evil is ‘overruled’ already, we may, therefore, whenever we wish, treat the temporal as if it were potentially the eternal, be sure that we can trust its outcome, and, without sin, dismiss our fear and drop the worry of our finite responsibility. In short, they mean that we have a right ever and anon to take a moral holiday, to let the world wag in its own way, feeling that its issues are in better hands than ours and are none of our business.

The universe is a system of which the individual members may relax their anxieties occasionally, in which the don’t-care mood is also right for men, and moral holidays in order, - that, if I mistake not, is part, at least, of what the Absolute is ‘known-as,’ that is the great difference in our particular experiences which his being true makes, for us, that is his cash-value when he is pragmatically interpreted. Farther than that the ordinary lay-reader in philosophy who thinks favorably of absolute idealism does not venture to sharpen his conceptions. He can use the Absolute for so much, and so much is very precious. He is pained at hearing you speak incredulously of the Absolute, therefore, and disregards your criticisms because they deal with aspects of the conception that he fails to follow.

If the Absolute means this, and means no more than this, who can possibly deny the truth of it? To deny it would be to insist that men should never relax, and that holidays are never in order.

I am well aware how odd it must seem to some of you to hear me say that an idea is ‘true’ so long as to believe it is profitable to our lives. That it is good, for as much as it profits, you will gladly admit. If what we do by its aid is good, you will allow the idea itself to be good in so far forth, for we are the better for possessing it. But is it not a strange misuse of the word ‘truth,’ you will say, to call ideas also ‘true’ for this reason?

To answer this difficulty fully is impossible at this stage of my account. You touch here upon the very central point of Messrs. Schiller’s, Dewey’s and my own doctrine of truth, which I can not discuss with detail until my sixth lecture. Let me now say only this, that truth is one species of good, and not, as is usually supposed, a category distinct from good, and co-ordinate with it. The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite, assignable reasons. Surely you must admit this, that if there were no good for life in true ideas, or if the knowledge of them were positively disadvantageous and false ideas the only useful ones, then the current notion that truth is divine and precious, and its pursuit a duty, could never have grown up or become a dogma. In a world like that, our duty would be to shun truth, rather. But in this world, just as certain foods are not only agreeable to our taste, but good for our teeth, our stomach, and our tissues; so certain ideas are not only agreeable to think about, or agreeable as supporting other ideas that we are fond of, but they are also helpful in life’s practical struggles. If there be any life that it is really better we should lead, and if there be any idea which, if believed in, would help us to lead that life, then it would be really better for us to believe in that idea, unless, indeed, belief in it incidentally clashed with other greater vital benefits.

‘What would be better for us to believe!’ This sounds very like a definition of truth. It comes very near to saying ‘what we ought to believe’: and in that definition none of you would find any oddity. Ought we ever not to believe what it is better for us to believe? And can we then keep the notion of what is better for us, and what is true for us, permanently apart?

Pragmatism says no, and I fully agree with her. Probably you also agree, so far as the abstract statement goes, but with a suspicion that if we practically did believe everything that made for good in our own personal lives, we should be found indulging all kinds of fancies about this world’s affairs, and all kinds of sentimental superstitions about a world hereafter. Your suspicion here is undoubtedly well founded, and it is evident that something happens when you pass from the abstract to the concrete that complicates the situation.

I said just now that what is better for us to believe is true unless the belief incidentally clashes with some other vital benefit. Now in real life what vital benefits is any particular belief of ours most liable to clash with? What indeed except the vital benefits yielded by other beliefs when these prove incompatible with the first ones? In other words, the greatest enemy of any one of our truths may be the rest of our truths. Truths have once for all this desperate instinct of self-preservation and of desire to extinguish whatever contradicts them. My belief in the Absolute, based on the good it does me, must run the gauntlet of all my other beliefs. Grant that it may be true in giving me a moral holiday. Nevertheless, as I conceive it, - and let me speak now confidentially, as it were, and merely in my own private person, - it clashes with other truths of mine whose benefits I hate to give up on its account. It happens to be associated with a kind of logic of which I am the enemy, I find that it entangles me in metaphysical paradoxes that are inacceptable, etc., etc. But as I have enough trouble in life already without adding the trouble of carrying these intellectual inconsistencies, I personally just give up the Absolute. I just take my moral holidays; or else as a professional philosopher, I try to justify them by some other principle.

If I could restrict my notion of the Absolute to its bare holiday-giving value, it wouldn’t clash with my other truths. But we can not easily thus restrict our hypotheses. They carry supernumerary features, and these it is that clash so. My disbelief in the Absolute means then disbelief in those other supernumerary features, for I fully believe in the legitimacy of taking moral holidays.

You see by this what I meant when I called pragmatism a mediator and reconciler and said, borrowing the word from Papini, that she ‘unstiffens’ our theories. She has in fact no prejudices whatever, no obstructive dogmas, no rigid canons of what shall count as proof. She is completely genial. She will entertain any hypothesis, she will consider any evidence. It follows that in the religious field she is at a great advantage both over positivistic empiricism, with its anti-theological bias, and over religious rationalism, with its exclusive interest in the remote, the noble, the simple, and the abstract in the way of conception.

In short, she widens the field of search for God. Rationalism sticks to logic and the empyrean. Empiricism sticks to the external senses. Pragmatism is willing to take anything, to follow either logic or the senses and to count the humblest and most personal experiences. She will count mystical experiences if they have practical consequences. She will take a God who lives in the very dirt of private fact - if that should seem a likely place to find him.

Her only test of probable truth is what works best in the way of leading us, what fits every part of life best and combines with the collectivity of experience’s demands, nothing being omitted. If theological ideas should do this, if the notion of God, in particular, should prove to do it, how could pragmatism possibly deny God’s existence? She could see no meaning in treating as ‘not true’ a notion that was pragmatically so successful. What other kind of truth could there be, for her, than all this agreement with concrete reality?

In my last lecture I shall return again to the relations of pragmatism with religion. But you see already how democratic she is. Her manners are as various and flexible, her resources as rich and endless, and her conclusions as friendly as those of mother nature.