UNIVERSITY OF CAUFORNIA SAN DIEGO 3 1822 00695 6528 3NALISM' AND THE ^S OF PHILOSOPHY LIBRARY UN/VERsiry o;' CAUroHNIk SAN D^im presented to the UNIVERSITY LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO by Y^^7^^'Q^%\i Gray P^rry iVmr^l^'V H'' P^LIFORNIA SAN DIEGO [^ 3 1822 00695 6528 Central University Library University of California, San Diego Note: This item is subject to recall after two weeks. Date Due ilUi ^iVi^A)W- jm -iJnggf 0139(1/91) UCSDLib. BY THE SAME AUTHOR CHRIST AND THE DRAMAS OF DOUBT 12mo. Net, $1.00 PERSONALISM AND THE PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY AN APPRECIATION OF THE WORK OF BORDEN PARKER BOWNE BY RALPH TYLER FLEWELLING INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER BY RUDOLF EUCKEN THE METHODIST BOOK CONCERN NEW YORK CINCINNATI Copyright, 1915, by RALPH TYLER FLEWELLING TO B. P. B. WHOSE WORDS OF TRUTH WERE A BEACON LIGHT TO MANY SOULS, AND TO HIS PUPILS WHOSE LOVE ABIDES THROUGH TIME AND CHANGE CONTENTS PAGE Foreword 11 INTRODUCTORY Chapter I The Work of Borden Parker Bowne. By Rudolf Eucken 17 Chapter II The Changing Mood of the Age 32 Dominance of the practical in modern life — The struggle for unity — The present crisis — The new task of philosophy. SECTION I NATURALISM Chapter III The Modern Spell of a Greek Phantom. . . 49 The ancient dream of material unity — The phantom of form and space — Perpetuation of the doctrine through Epicurean and Stoic — Revival and development of the doctrine in modern science — The difficulty of naturalistic explanation. 7 CONTENTS Chapter IV PAGE The Evaded Problems of Spencer's Phil- osophy 59 The much-known Unknowable — The little- known reality — The theory of evolution — The definition of life and mind. Chapter V Bowne as an Antagonist of Naturalism. ... 73 All philosophical values hinge on the definition of reality — Is God immanent Mover or prime Mover? — The personality of the World-Ground — Is Freedom possible in the natural world? SECTION II IDEALISM Chapter VI The Kantian Starting-Point 87 Has the mind a task in experience? — Where can we find a permanent world? — What lies behind the appearance of things? — Can we "prove" the world of spirit? Chapter VII The Absolute Philosophy, Lotze and Bowne 98 Is the world more than knowledge? — Of what does reality consist? — Bowne's debt to Lotze — Bowne's advance on Lotze's sys- tem. 8 CONTENTS SECTION III PRAGMATISM Chapter VIII ^^^^ The Unmetaphysical Pragmatism of Wil- liam James 113 The pragmatic element in the history of philosophy — Can the pragmatic test of truth be maintained? — Are space and time the abiding realities? — Pluralism a confession of failure to unite subject and object — Can pragmatic pluralism reach freedom or solve the problem of evil? Chapter IX Bowne's Pragmatism, "A Step in the De- velopment OF Philosophy" 130 A pragmatic definition of Being — The escape from pluralism and absolutism to world- unity — The ideal nature of time and space — The pragmatic test for religious values. SECTION IV BOWNE AND SOME PRESENT-DAY THINKERS Chapter X Bergson, The Abstractions of an Imper- sonal Philosophy 145 Can knowledge and life be brought together on the empirical basis? — Time as duration 9 CONTENTS PAGE — The "vital impulse" assumed for the sake of freedom — A harmony due to iden- tity of impulsion — His doctrine of knowl- edge. Chapter XI EucKEN — The Return to Spiritual "Verity. . 169 Reality must include more than things, and more than ideas — Truth must have a com- mon validity — Eucken's personal idealism, the realization of the life of the spirit — The absence of the Christological interest. Chapter XII Bowne's Personalism and the Problems of Life 183 Unity possible only through personalism — Personalism and freedom — Personalism and the problem of evil. Bibliography 197 Index 201 10 FOREWORD The essential problems of philosophy are few. Out of three or four fundamental presuppositions flow whole systems of thought. Unless the fountain itself is clear the outflowing streams cannot be kept so. The nature of reality, or being, is the funda- mental principle by which all systems are to be judged. Given the basic attitude toward this problem, it is easy to see what the logical goal will be. Next to the question of reality are those of space and time, and the relation of life to knowledge. These are the main questions about which all others hinge. For this reason these terms will appear frequently in the following pages, as we attempt to trace the leading philo- sophical ideas down to modern times, and to discover their relation to the thought of Bowne. He would have been the last to claim 11 FOREWORD finality for his system. He assumed only to clear away a foundation for accurate thinking, to expose the common sophistries of thought, and to give a basis on which to build. In these positions he felt funda- mentally secure, being not satisfied to speak "after the manner of the scribes." We be- lieve the future will amply justify his confidence. This work was undertaken reluctantly in the sense that the writer knew there were many others who might have performed the task more worthily; with ajacrity, in the consciousness that there was need to point out the place which Bowne's system occu- pies in the history of philosophy, and that more than five years have passed without this being done. This feeling was inten- sified by the expressed desire of Professor Eucken that such a work be undertaken. The author does not aim at an exhaustive discussion, but, rather, at a brief and sug- gestive treatment that shall define for the popular mind the relation of Bowne's thought to other philosophical endeavors. To forestall disappointment it should be 12 FOREWORD said there is need for a more detailed and technical work than is possible within the limits of so small a volume. To make a book that shall be brief and yet clear to the nonprofessional mind, that shall drop technical terms whenever possible and yet satisfy the exacting student, is exceedingly diflScult. The writer makes no pretense of being sufficient for so great a task. If, however, this effort shall succeed in ex- pressing the deep love and respect felt by one whose intellectual horizons were en- larged by the touch of a master in the realm of thought, and shall lead to a re- newed study of that master's work, its purpose will have been achieved. Acknowledgments are due to Zion's Herald for the use of materials first printed therein; to Dr. Marshall Livingstone Per- rin, who transcribed and translated Profes- sor Eucken's chapter, which was one of the American addresses; to Dr. Albert C. Knud- son for valuable criticism; and to Professor Eucken himself, for his generous interest and encouragement. 13 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER I THE WORK OF BORDEN PARKER BOWNE BY RUDOLF EUCKEN I NEVER had the pleasure of a personal acquaintance with Dr. Bowne, and felt the touch of his personality only through our correspondence, which was, indeed, most hearty and intimate. I felt that our rela- tion to each other was close and most friendly. He intended to visit Jena on his way to Constantinople, whither he expected to take a trip in a few months ; but within a week after receiving the letter containing the news of his promised visit I received the announcement of his untimely death. It is a sad pleasure to me, and yet a satis- faction, to be able to give this evidence of my personal admiration for Dr. Bowne, and for his personality as shown in his writings. The first general impression which one receives in taking up his books is a favorable 17 PERSONALISM AND THE one, on account of the concise and definite form in which they are written, so clear in concept and straightforward in expression, not at all confused or indistinct. They are pervaded by an energy and manliness which show no fear, either of criticism on the part of the half-enlightened, or of the dictum of those assuming to be in authority. On the contrary, his words are sympathetic and al- most tender in his desire to recognize what is good in the writings of others, with an unsparing denial of what he considers might do harm. His works show a personal warmth which gives the reader almost the impression of "confessions" on the part of a living and strong personality. This fea- ture is especially to be valued, inasmuch as he himself placed a very high estimate upon personality. He says to the reader, "Above all things be personal in the expression of truth as you see it." Secondly, we find in his writings his own inmost convictions expressed clearly, and the openness of his "confessions" is a marked and fascinating element in them. In reading some philosophers we feel in 18 PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY them what I might call personal untruth, as in Schopenhauer, who preaches a Hindu's self-abnegation and indifference, while we find him personally the genuine epicure. The question arises at once, What have his great ideas made out of a man, if in his own life we find him to be small? On the other hand, I find in Spinoza the expression of his own inner convictions, and I must have respect for him even though I do not agree with his conclusions. In reading Bowne one respects and agrees, for there is no word uttered behind which one does not feel the man. Let us turn now to the content of his works, the central thought. Bowne has often been placed by the side of Lotze, the famous Gottingen professor with whom he studied. There are many points of simi- larity as well as many differences. First, Lotze was a logician, a dialectician; he struggled to overcome the material or else to reconcile it. Lotze's religion we feel rather to be on the fringe of life, and it is a question whether it ever affects the central thought. For this reason it does not exert 19 PERSONALISM AND THE any strong influence upon his philosophy. Bowne, on the contrary, puts rehgion at the very center, and regards it as the crown of being, maintaining that metaphysics and logic are enlightened by the fundamental question of religion, and are to be under- stood only in connection with it. While Bowne makes a definite distinction between religion and ethics, he makes it clear that they are inseparable, and that the one gains worth in the light of the other. The relation between them is that of the deep and underlying to its manifestation. The two should not be studied apart. And, moreover, the keynote of both lies in per- sonality, which gives value to religion as well as to ethics. Studying them further, he maintains that religion includes ethics. This view he bases upon the close connec- tion of religion with every kind of moral progress and advancement. Religion cannot be proved or explained in ordinary words; neither can anything that lies deep in our nature. Aristotle as- serts that the knowledge of anything must be derived from something higher than it- 20 PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY self. Religion, therefore, would have to be proved through something of a still higher nature, and as we have access to nothing higher, it must remain unproved. Conse- quently, we must not try to prove it but to illustrate it; and this we may do by showing that every phenomenon depends closely upon it, and also, that an intelligent being is the established basis of every reality. Hence religion lies at the basis of our life if it is real; and if this be denied, there is nothing to fall back upon. Bowne maintains that any other attempt to ex- plain life is due to bad thinking. The practical application of any tenet is so important in Bowne's philosophy that he takes this truth almost for granted, for by it our very life becomes exalted and val- uable. The proof of religion, then, so far as it can be proved, is the creation of a new life and a new world in a man. Secondly, the content of the world points to a unity in the universe. We must learn to see more unity in the world's phenomena, or, rather, behind them. The reign of law in all existence shows that 21 PERSONALISM AND THE there is interaction among all the elements of nature. What would happen if the world were made up of separate, inde- pendent particles? There would be no mutual interaction. As it is, we know that what happens in A produces a result in B, so that every phenomenon depends strictly upon a cause, and proceeds from something else. If all things were inde- pendent of one another, nothing could re- sult. Again, this unity must rest in mind or spirit, for it is not to be found in the visible; it is to be sought in the invisible. And, once again, no spiritual mind can exist without personality, for otherwise it would be shadowy and vague and have no independent existence of its own. Such a mind must be an active, self-existent prin- ciple, and such a principle must exist; so far Lotze and Bowne advance together. Bowne further adds that this activity in nature must proceed from a God, who shall be considered the active, underlying prin- ciple. As Goethe says in Faust, "Nature is the garment of God." There are two ways of viewing phe- 22 PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY nomena: first, as mere appearance; and, secondly, with some Being behind them as a personal Mind. Now every language has expressions for the visible, but only meta- phors for the spiritual and invisible. Love is inexpressible, and cannot be defined; no more can personality. The manifestation can be described, but this has nothing to depend upon without a deeper basis for its very existence. Bowne maintained, in the face of fierce criticism, that we must be able to force our way to the certainty of some such basis. It is wrong, as well as foolish, to say that we must be content with the visible and be satisfied with leaving the invisible as something incom- prehensible; and it is erroneous to say that we can appreciate only the visible. If we study the life of Luther, shall we regard him merely as a phenomenon, and say he had no real existence? No, indeed. Luther was the true man behind it all, and his acts were the expression of this hidden existence. We must believe in a creative power behind all phenomena or we are not true even to our own subjective lives. 23 PERSONALISM AND THE I should like to recommend to your younger men a good subject for a disserta- tion, and it would be, "Bowne's Philosophy in Relation to that of Kant," together with the objections which Bowne would raise against the latter. Hegel, too, makes a great deal of "thought processes." To all this Bowne replies: "All right, if a personal existence is recognized as a basis for them; otherwise, there is no reality to these proc- esses." Bowne is a sharp critic, not un- kind, not fault-finding, but severely pun- ishing those writers who assume to be contented with the natural, the visible, or with the impersonal spirit. He demands personal spiritual life, and consequently^ a living personal God, out of whom proceeds all power, and who is the active principle from whom all phenomena set forth. An- other thesis that I would suggest to young men is, "Bowne as an Opponent of the Ma- terialists," for, indeed, he was the chief op- ponent of naturalism. Naturalists deny the metaphysical and take the visible as the basis of their so-called metaphysics. This is illogical, as it turns effect into cause. So 24 PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY Bowne criticizes evolutionists for commonly confusing the ideas of cause and effect. The visible, which is, after all, only the effect, is assumed to proceed and develop of itself. Bowne goes farther. He not only makes these truths which he asserts the basis of all real theism; he has developed a metaphysics of theism. He does not simply posit certain truths of theism, but treats all these from a metaphysical stand- point, and this is of great value to-day in the field of philosophy. If we consider the content of religion ac- cording to Bowne and his development of it, we find three leading points which mark the chief directions of his thought: First, religion consists in life, and not in teaching or doctrine; second, the kernel of religion is ethical, and religion is the lodestar of ethics, with which it is inseparably con- nected; third, religion is common to all humanity. I might add as a possible defi- nition of Bowne's standpoint that religion is the spiritual experience of humanity and is manifested in the individual. Concerning the first point, he maintains 25 PERSONALISM AND THE that religion means life, and relates to life as a whole, as well as to the whole life. In German}^ certain phases of this thought have been emphasized separately, but never grasped comprehensively. With Kant reli- gion is a moral matter, and manifested in the individual as will. For Schleiermacher it was a matter of feeling, and showed itself in the emotions; while Hegel maintained that it was a form of intelligence. These elements, which have been separated in Germany, are for Bowne only different fea- tures of one thought. He would have religion embrace all forms of life together, and he maintains that it should influence and ennoble every act and thought. Hence it is impossible to base religion on any fixed doctrine. The fundamental beliefs underlying religion from the start should be maintained, but we must allow the development from time to time of new theologies. While fundamental truths are eternal, man is still developing, and conse- quently these eternal truths must be mani- fested in the different stages of man's de- velopment in different ways. 26 PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY These truths do not become new, but are newly presented. So we find in the education of children that the same truths appear to them in different lights as they grow up. True religion will change its theology, while the underlying ideas are not changeable. There has been too much ab- stract speculation apart from the concrete experiences of life, too much holding to abstract conceptions. Experience is the true teacher, and through her teacliing we can grasp new thoughts and new views wathout endangering the eternal truths by abstract speculation. The old philosophy was established upon the universe as we understand it, and upon this doctrine was built up, and then life was explained ac- cording to that theory; whereas Bowne starts with life, out of which grows the world of experience, and upon this rests the doctrine, which must change as ex- perience changes. Another good thesis would be "Bowne's Definition of Life." James leads us back to the practical. So does Bowne, but with a different meaning, for with him, behind the practical stands 27 PERSONALISM AND THE the metaphysical. This is a new step in the development of philosophy. This "practi- cal" is not that which means useful, nor that which rests upon utilitarian grounds. Still another subject for a thesis would be "The Definition of the Practical as used by Aristotle and Later Philosophers, up to Bowne." This would help to define his position. I would particularly urge the study of Bowne's philosophy, as there is always danger lest tradition, which crystal- lizes soon after a man's death, may put his works in a wrong light. Bowne's contention is that the spiritual basis of life is not new, but it becomes new in its forms of development. God does not develop, but it is man that changes and develops. This is shown characteristically in the development of religious ideas; for instance, since mediaeval times, when the dogmas of Catholicism were universally ac- cepted. The study of theological develop- ment as a manifestation of religion in the varied experiences of humanity cannot but bring all views and doctrines into a clear and healthy relation to one another. 28 PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY Our second point refers to the relation of ethics to rehgion, upon which we have al- ready touched. Bownc, differing from the men of the Illumination period, as well as from Kant, declares that religion is dis- tinctly ethical, that ethics is the mere form of religion. Without the latter, ethics would have no life, content, or character, so that ethics depends wholly upon religion. We must not lose our bearings by a con- sideration of the ethical as such, but regard it as the medium through which religion shines and produces new life, and that the two exert a mutual influence. So Bowne would have us hold no harsh or crude ideas of God's relation to the world. Theologies of the past held that God created the world for his own glory. This was the severe and strict doctrine of the Jesuits, as well as of the Calvinists. Over against this Bowne would have us believe, with modern Chris- tians, that he created the world out of the fulness of his love. All religion and wor- ship would be a form of love, and would mean the worship of a loving Being, not of a tyrant. The Christian should be cheerful 29 PEIiSONALISM AND THE and joyous because his religion should make him so. We should be glad that God created the world and us, and that he will save us. The third point is one that needs em- phasizing, particularly among Protestants, who are apt to view religion too subjec- tively. Bowne urges that there are many ways of arriving at religion. There are some that have the experience of perceiving God's love all at once, whereupon a sudden change comes over the man's whole nature. Such persons are those whose temperament is susceptible to contrasts; but this is only one form of the manifestation of God, and quite dependent upon the individual. There are, on the other hand, many in whom this change takes place more quietly. We must only be sure of a complete turning about, and not judge of the manner, but of the results. Religion leads to lives, not to theologies, for it is based upon the funda- mental principles of life, and not upon temperament or environment. In these ideas of Bowne we find a reconciliation of opposing views, of earnest seriousness and 30 PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY happy enjoyment, of prol)lems and con- flicts, combined with hope and joyous courage. We must sympathize with the many forms of Hfe and experience, with the serious and the merry; and our children should learn that they may combine the liberty of freedom and the soberness of earnest effort, both in their mental and in their spiritual development. Dr. Bowne was a philosopher of America, and as such all America may be proud of him and of his memory. His strong per- sonality showed itself in such vigorous ef- fort; his humor was so happy and flashed forth so frequently in the midst of the most serious work, that moroseness and melancholy were impossible to him. He remained fresh and youthful in spirit to the end. Even in his last letter to me he seemed to be more than ever pervaded with a spirit of youth and joyous living. It is given us to say, as did Goethe of his friend Schiller, *'He belonged to us." 31 PERSONALISM AND THE CHAPTER II THE CHANGING MOOD OF THE AGE Dominance of the Practical in Modern Life In a passage of the "Stones of Venice" Ruskin speaks of the high architectural beauty of the cathedral of Torcello, built by the Venetians as they took refuge from their pursuers, on the half submerged sand dunes of the Adriatic. He says, "The ac- tual condition of the exiles who built the cathedral of Torcello is exactly typical of the spiritual condition which every Chris- tian ought to recognize in himself, a state of homelessness on earth, except so far as he can make the Most High his habitation."^ A more recent writer, speaking of the present age, has said: "When man was doubtful if he would see to-morrow's sun- ' Stones of Venice, vol. ii. p. 13. 32 PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY rise, he built as if not dreaming of a perish- able home. To-day, when he cannot believe that death will touch him, and his orderly life stretches forward as an endless end of the world, he will leave for the amazement of future ages the Crystal Palace and the City Temple and the Peabody Building."^ These descriptions present by vivid con- trast the material basis of the changing mood of the age. Whatever men build, whether it be of brick and stone, institu- tions of government and civilization, or systems of thought and education, the sense of dependence upon the Eternal, the attitude toward the things not seen, will inevitably write itself into all their work. The outward and material circumstances of man's position on the earth will reflect themselves in his philosophy and dictate the mood of his thought. The age of grind- ing poverty, of elemental struggle toward freedom and knowledge, is always an age of faith and optimism. The age of material fullness, when man seems to have almost within his grasp the secrets of the universe, 2 Masterman, In Peril of Change, p. 170. 33 PERSONALISM AND THE the ultimate triumph over poverty, ig- norance, and the brute forces of nature, is the age when pessimism and despair range deepest. The human spirit is so constituted that when man must take up an heroic struggle, in which life and the most precious interests are daily put in jeopardy, his dreams and faiths exalt him to the skies. When these material things and the external forms for which he fought seem forever assured, he is plunged into doubt and morbid self-examination by his unsatisfied soul. To understand the philosophical mood of our own age it is necessary to keep in mind the dominating elements in our material progress. The prevalence of scientific in- vestigation and the growth of the scientific spirit have given us a hitherto unknown environment for our thought. With the mastery of physical forces the old horror of nature has passed. With it has gone a great deal that was merely tradition, preju- dice, and superstition. Beyond the borders of childhood we live in no magic world. Laws of nature are to us as an open book 34 PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY and in many minds the only book possessing any authority. Even the common man feels that he has deciphered, or will have deciphered for him in the near future, the last of nature's secrets. There is to be nothing left at which to wonder. We are amazed no longer at the vastness of the universe, at its marvelously interlocking processes, or at its hints of Final Purpose; but, rather, at ourselves that we know so much. In the spirit of Goldsmith's lines, we can say of man that Still the wonder grows That one small head can carry all he knows. The most startling discoveries in nature provoke but a momentary enthusiasm. We are masters of nature. With the pa'ssing of the old feeling toward nature has come a new acquaintance among the peoples of the earth. Nothing is per- haps more startling than the adoption by pagan and strange bloods of modern inven- tions, the latest philosophies and schemes of education. That which has been the product of generations of struggle is sud- 35 PERSONALISM AND THE denly appropriated by men of other races and civilizations. We are chagrined at the ease and adaptabihty at our own game of genius and invention of these strange and long-despised peoples. Whether we wish it or not, they represent mighty forces to be reckoned with. The overcoming of space and time sets them in our own dooryard. Tokyo, Peking, and Calcutta are nearer than London, Paris, and New York were yesterday. We are reminded of their thought in every review, of their deeds in the morning paper, and we eat of their products at every breakfast table. A new world of human relationships has dawned upon us, in which we are burdened with a responsibility which we cannot escape. The resources of science have been put at the service of the industrial world. The discoveries of the past generation have revolutionized the world of commerce and labor. The comforts and luxuries of life have vastly increased. Great fortunes have resulted, and with them an overwhelming eagerness to discover the sesame of wealth. The contribution of science to this new 36 PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY world of material things has elevated scien- tific dogma into unquestioned power. The gravest criticism and deepest slur, that according to the average man can be cast, is the criticism and the slur of being unscien- tific. Little room is left for the aesthetic, the idealistic, or the spiritual. To such an age it has seemed, speaking in the words of Noyes's "Resurrection," that Love was too small, too human to be found In that transcendent source whence love was born; We talked of "forces": heaven was crowned With philosophic thorn. The demands made upon all departments of life have thus become intensely practical and utilitarian. What does it accomplish? How great are the returns? These are the questions that are constantly asked, not only in the world of economics, but also in the worlds of philosophy and religion. The demand of pragmatism is the demand of the modern spirit elevated into a test for truth. And this demand is not without its basis of sanity and justice. Men are 37 PERSONALISM AND THE wearied of theories and systems which ap- pear divorced from every practical interest. But too often the pragmatic question is made so individuaHstic and so fragmentary that truth becomes a mere utihty for the moment and occasion only. To all of this is added the feeling that in our fullness and material prosperity we have no need to be comforted either by phil- osophy or religion. The former contents itself too largely with the explanation of the material, and the latter approaches an unredeemed world with a timidity that leaves no place for authoritative appeal. The indecision and blindness of a great multitude is voiced in Swinburne's "Watch in the Night": I halt and hearken behind If haply the hours will go back And return to the dear dead light, To the watch fires and stars that of old Shone where the sky now is black. The Struggle for Unity The main streams of philosophic thought, materialism, and idealism have run their 38 PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY course, and neither has been able to bring philosophic peace, except in the minds of their most extreme partisans. To the former has been given the popular role by reason of her close allegiance with practical science, and the inability of the average man to sense the problems that hedge her way. To common sense, all the ways of materialism are pleasantness, and all her paths are peace. The world is just what it appears to be. Material atoms are con- jured up to impinge upon nerves; and mind, thought, and purpose are the easy result of mechanical forces. Memory fol- lows the grooves plowed in the brain by yesterday's experience, while other mem- ories await the expectant call, filed carefully away, according to the best modern business methods, in their appropriate pigeonholes. When all is so easily imagined, he would seem to be only a fool who would question. In this system nothing is denied the im- agination and only the facts are wanting. On such a theory everything becomes as sun-clear, from the first accidental jiggling of atoms to the philosopher at the other end 39 PERSONALISM AND THE of the line, as the continuous juvenile tragedy of The House that Jack Built. Un- fortunately for the comfort of materialism, the barrenness of the supposed solution is coming to the attention of her own dis- ciples, and we have the old garment patched with the new cloth of pragmatism and Creative Evolutions. These reach the sol- emn decision that "universe" is a term of delusion and must yield to pluralism or at least to dualism. Nor has professional idealism been more fortunate in the endeavor to unite the sundered sides of consciousness. The world of materialism has been one in which matter was all and spirit nothing, but the world of idealism has been one in which the reality of matter has been altogether denied. She has been no more able to command men with authority than has her opponent. The material world bulks so large in the com- mon experience that it is ever difficult to convince men that The solid earth, the round sun, And all the visible world of sight and sound. Are but the phantasmagoria of a dream. 40 PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY Thus the ancient battle between ma- teriaHsm and idealism has raged since the days of the Greek philosophers, and not until our own generation have the con- flicting arguments been sufficiently sifted and analyzed to show that neither bald materialism nor absolute idealism can pre- sent a possible solution to the enigma of the universe. The Present Crisis We have to-day the natural successors of idealism, who cling to the thought of unity, thrust out by time and criticism from the ancient peace of an absolutism whose only ultimate reality is the divine Spirit, hard pressed to answer the problem of evil. If all we see is the manifestation of the Divine, whence comes evil in the world? This is the insistent question cast at the spokes- men of idealism. Thinking men are impa- tient of any denial of the reality of pain, evil, or sorrow, in an effort to save the character of God. The sense of suffering and injustice is more acute than ever in the history of the world. A God that will 4il PERSONALISM AND THE cause suffering, pain, and evil they will repudiate. Even that human being seems a monster who will not do his best to alle- viate misery of every sort. How much more will they despise a Supreme Being so obtuse to moral responsibility as to create men for pain! The supreme question of the age for idealism as well as for Theism is how to maintain a Moral Causal Intelli- gence in the face of existent evil and suffering. It might be thought that, in view of these conditions, the way of the materialists would be easy. A cursory examination will show, however, that it is no longer possible for materialism to imagine that she speaks in terms of universe. Even the most obtuse materialist is to-day forced to admit a power and a reality, which, whether he knows or not, is not provided for in his system. He has before him the expedient of a dualism somewhat after the fashion of Mr. Bergson's, or he may resort with Mr. James to a pluralistic world. But such a universe falls more and more, the farther we search, into a disjointed and ever-dissolving 42 PROBLEMS OF riULOSOrilY individualism in which all realities disappear at the touch like Apples of Sodom. The lack of order and purpose is mistaken for freedom, and much dilated upon. The tum- brils daily cart the Theists to the slaughter in the interests of the new-found emancipa- tion, and there is not missing the grim joy of the populace at the effectiveness of the guillotine of freedom. Still there is ever present at the feast of joy a lurking Ban- quo's ghost of Purposive Intelligence that refuses to keep decently buried; the Great Perhaps, for which the heart of man cries out like a lonely child in the night. Just when we're safest there's a sunset touch, A fancy from a flower-bell, some one's death, A chorus-ending from Euripides — And that's enough for fifty hopes and fears As old and new at once as nature's self To rap and knock and enter in our soul. The New Task of Philosophy The new task of philosophy is the recon- ciliation of these contrasting views. Much critical work has already been done which makes repetition unnecessary. There is a 43 PERSONALISM AND THE generally clear recognition of the real issues at stake. The individual mood toward one or the other side will greatly influence the result in any particular case, but yet there is reason to hope that we can come to an understanding of the issues involved, if we cannot unite in a common explanation. It is true that the old, old questions of the nature of reality, of Creative Purpose and evil, of unity or diversity, of freedom or necessity, will remain; but in the coming age we shall approach them from a new angle and see them in a new light. While we cannot expect to settle them, we may hope to work toward a solution. We may find a standpoint from which life may go on without despair or the eclipse of faith in the things of the spirit. In the realization of this new task of philosophy we believe that the future will have to reckon with the work of one of our foremost philosophers whom Rudolf Eucken is pleased to call a 'Svorld philosopher." His purpose was to show how the contrast- ing and apparently irreconcilable questions might find solution and common ground in 44 PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY the recognition of personality. Eucken de- clares that "we need something eternal to bind the different ages together, but this eternal has grown dim amid our doubts and struggles."^ This is true f.or history and for individual thought as well. This need Bowne would meet with his doctrine of personalism. To show the implications of this theory with relation to the different phases of thought is the purpose of this volume. Because we believe that the case for faith has not been closed, nor its last word spoken, we come to the task in the mood of Swinburne's lines: The tides and the hours run out, And the seasons of death and of doubt, The night watches bitter and sore. Even the clamors and confusions of war- ring peoples will confirm the prophecy of our Lord, and be but the birth-pangs of a better world. The night ebbs away and across the hills lies the dawn. ^ Christianity and the New Idealism, p. 38. 45 SECTION I NATURALISM CHAPTER III THE MODERN SPELL OF A GREEK PHANTOM The Ancient Dream of Material Unity Whatever it may imply, the human mind has ever shown a remarkable thirst to achieve unity. The apparent relation- ships in a world of great diversity make possible the belief that all things proceed from the same source. The world of things is assumed to be a universe and the mind of man has never been able permanently to rest in any other assumption. Unity is sought, whether in a material protoplasm from which all things have developed, or in a final ground of divine Thought or Purpose. Between the two ideas the philo- sophical world has been divided from early times into the opposing camps of material - 49 PERSONALISM AND THE ism and idealism. The search of the early Greek school was for this primal essence of things. Certain conclusions then reached have exerted an overwhelming influence in the scientific thought of our own age. It is interesting to glance at the movement in its beginnings. The great contribution of Greek philosophy to modern science was the theory that the material world is made up of atoms. With Leucippus, the founder of the theory, the atoms were countless, infinite in variety, imperceptibly small, hav- ing only the quality of filling space. They were in motion from eternity, and so held within them all the possibilities of pro- ducing the visible world. The importance of this theory for science lay in the fact that all qualitative differences could be ac- counted for by varying the quantities and combination of atoms. To the thoughtful it is at once apparent that with the materialist the atom is en- dowed with that magic and with those undiscoverable powers which the idealist ascribes to a World-Soul, or Divine Intelli- gence. In the case of the materialist the 50 PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY unaccountable powers of the fabled atom are overlooked in the beginning because they seem insignificant, yet when some real explanation is needed they are marshaled in such masses as to become suddenly visible, and sufficient to account for any result. Of course what has actually taken place is a flight of the imagination. Whether it has represented truly the order of nature we are left in confused doubt if we be un- imaginative souls. Protagoras added to the atomism of Leucippus the further doctrine that per- ception itself rests upon the motion of atoms, and that perceiving and thinking are psychologically identical. All percep- tions that come to us are true for us, just as they appear. Hence the famous maxim loved by the modern Humanist, "Man is the measure of all." Perceptions, under this scheme, are only relatively true. There can be no universal standard of truth. However, it must be noted that in this system perception is something other than the perceiving subject, and is likewise some- thing apart from the object perceived. This 51 PERSONALISM AND THE discrepancy, though apparent, remains un- answered. So soon in our search for ma- teriahstic unity have we happened on a divided world. The Phantom of Form and Space With Democritus, the system of material- ism is at last in full flower. Observing the relativity of Protagoras' scheme of percep- tion, Democritus transcends it to assert the possibility of knowledge of the real through thought. Both Democritus and Plato were in this sense rationalistic, but Plato's ra- tionalism took an ethical turn. He sought the knowledge of the true Being as a means to virtue. His philosophy grew out of ethical need. With Plato perception ap- plies only to the corporeal world and can give opinions only. Thought, on the other hand, leads us to a higher and ultimate truth and knowledge of the True Being. Democritus kept to the way of material- ism. "Pure Form," with Plato, had been a general term corresponding to logical spe- cies, but Democritus meant by this term 52 PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY atom forms. To the motion of atoms he refers perception and all mental activities whatsoever. The mind, or soul, or what- ever may be named as the perceiving sub- ject, consists of atoms which differ from other atoms only in fineness, as the atoms of fire were said to be finer than those of other substances. In a perceiving being the fire atoms were assumed to exist in about the proportion of one in three. By this simple and easy speculation was laid the basis of later materialism with its knowing and purposive monads, corpuscular attrac- tions and repulsions, atomic loves and hates, vital sparks and elans vitaux, which at least to the advocates of the system are suffi- cient to account for the world and all that dwell therein. "Thus the prejudice in favor of what may be perceived or imaged (a?i- schaulich), as if spatial form and motion were something simpler, more comprehen- sible in themselves, and less of a problem than qualitative character and alteration, is made the principle for the theoretical ex- planation of the world. "^ ^ Windelband, History of Philosophy, p. 111. 53 PERSONALISM AND THE Perpetuation of the Doctrine Through Epicurean and Stoic The theories of Democritus passed on through the Epicureans in so far as they involved atomism and mechanism. But Epicurus was weak in his conception of the necessary causation of mechanical forces. He differed from Democritus in denying altogether the existence of purpose in mat- ter. He held that the causeless deviation of atoms was suflScient to explain the worlds. Such a statement of the doctrine would have been of little use to the scientific age that was coming, but fortunately the Stoics pre- served that which the Epicureans lacked of Democritus' doctrine. Through their pan- theistic conception of the Deity as the "vital principle" they arrived at belief in an absolute causal necessity. Thus they continued that which the Epicureans had lost in the shuffle — the idea of a universal reign of law.^ When at last the long reign of Neoplaton- ism and scholasticism was ended by the shock of discovery and renaissance, it was 2 Sc. Windelband, History of Philosophy, p. 183. 54 PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY the complementary ideas of mechanical cau- sation and reign of law that proved so potent to the new generation of scientiiSc investigators. Revival and Development of the Doctrine in Modern Science The tool had been preserved, and was ready when the syllogistic form of reason- ing introduced by Aristotle had spent its force and had shown its inadequacy to deal singlehanded with practical problems. The world had grown tired of the weary round of dialectic. The reaction was for that reason all the more intense. But the tool was yet to be perfected. Bruno led the way by his conception of the monad, which in truly Hylozoistic fashion he endowed with potentiality. He affirmed the homogeneity of the universe, and declared that all qualitative determina- tions must be traced to quantitative changes. Bacon, casting off the rigors of scholastic method, declared that induction from par- ticular experiences is the only true method of science. 55 PERSONALISM AND THE Galileo contributed an insistence upon the application of the mathematical prin- ciple to scientific investigation, with this difference: instead of applying it to Being he appHed it to Becoming, or change. Thus with his brilliant contemporaries he laid the foundations for modern astronomy. Descartes made a contribution of greatest importance in that while he insisted on the certainty afforded by induction, he also de- manded that the principle thus attained should by the method of composition afford explanation to the whole round of ex- perience. The Difficulty of Naturalistic Explanation Why, then, should we remain unsatisfied with a principle which in the material world has so proved its practical worth .^ Why should Greek atomism, lying at the basis of the modern discovery of nature, receive the unworthy title of "phantom"? For this reason: while it has furnished an invaluable method of procedure in investigation, its leading postulates are yet unproved. Many 56 PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY of them remain as much in the rcahn of the imagination as tliey did in the crude theories of the sixth century before Christ. The weakness of the supporters of naturahsm has in the main been their inabihty to recognize the possible truth and vahie of the theory for physics, without reviving the ghost of ancient speculation and insisting that it has equal force for metaphysics. Whatever the attempt of materialism to explain life and mind, whether through the Hylozoistic endowment of atoms with sense or the hiding of the fact of self-directing personality under the verbiage of "states of consciousness," it can do no more than ex- plain half the world. For the thinking mind, burdened with the explanation of its own consciousness and volition, seeking to know its rightful place in the universe and to understand itself, the half world ex- plained by naturalism is the half that is least important. It needs ever to be kept in mind that knowledge of the laws of change, of precedence and sequence, while giving us sure ground on which to build our human expectations, tells us nothing of the 57 PERSONALISM AND THE essence of that which acts. As a method of science atomism is to be judged solely by its value as a guide upon the road, not to metaphysical explanation, but to the human mastery of physical forces. It is good so long as it proves valuable, and only to that extent. Perhaps the most humorous thing in the history of philosophy — if humor can ever be said to invade so dreary a realm — is the attempt of naturalism to account for thought and will, decrying the vagueness and abstraction of the idealist, and at the same moment introducing into its concep- tion of the atom the illusory, magical, and abstract powers which it condemns in the God of its opponents. One inevitably re- verts to the picture of Faust traveling the Pharsalian fields in the Walpurgis Night, with Homonculus speaking to him out of a bottle. The materialist may prefer a God whose magic powers can all be confined in a test tube, but there will always remain some who cannot discover folly in believing in a God both immanent and transcendent, after the manner of Sidney Lanier, '*My God is great, my God is strong." 58 PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY CHAPTER IV THE EVADED PROBLEMS OF SPENCER'S PIHLOSOPHY It would seem unnecessary to take much space for examination of the now generally discredited system of Herbert Spencer. Be- cause he was the spokesman for the natural- istic school; because he long held sway over the popular mind as the representative of scientific thinking; and because it was Bowne who early called attention to the metaphysical inconsistencies of his position, we enter here upon a brief discussion of his work. The naturalistic school itself now sees the untenability of Spencer's favorite positions. By no one of any school has he been more sharply arraigned than by Mr. Bergson. But this arraignment comes forty years after the clean-cut criticisms of the young Bowne. Bowne's criticisms were offered at 59 PERSONALISM AND THE a time when the empirical philosophy was both in physics and metaphysics in the ascendant. It was then an unpopular thing to venture criticism. Forgiveness was never accorded him in the minds of some for his sacrilegious daring in the presence of this idol of their thought. To take an attitude of criticism seemed at the time opposed to all that judgment and right sense science and reality dictated. The possession of clearer ideas by the philosophical world to-day upon the proper limits of scientific investigation is doubtless in some measure due to the pitiless criticism and construc- tive thought of Bowne. The Much-Known Unknowable One secret of Spencer's popularity lay in his apparent reconciliation of science and religion in a time of intense bitterness. He was essentially monistic, and yet, while yielding the claims of empirical science, seemed to leave place for a Divine Creative Power. It is true that he left to the reli- gious a poor sort of God, but at the mo- ment they were glad to be left anything. 60 PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY Spencer repudiated with warmth the charge of being a inateriahst and strove to keep his thought free from it. Nevertheless, the logic of his doctrine of mind inevitably landed him there, though unwilling and protesting. The loophole by which he hoped to admit the Divine Being, and so save the cause of religion, is the very one through which the Purposive Intelligence is compelled to make his escape from the system. To admit God at all was to make him so vaguely indefinite as not to be able to interfere with the natural world. Relieved of this responsi- bility, there was nothing left that was of any consequence to our thought of the Divine. Spencer declared for the phenomena of experience as the only source of knowledge. When we go back of these we hit at once upon the absolute, are lost in an infinite regress, and are told that the absolute can never be a cause. Concerning this absolute we can make no affirmation, and, therefore, he applies to it the term "Unknowable." Thus he seems at first to be determined to 61 PERSONALISM AND THE confine himself to the actions and interac- tions of the phenomenal world, and science and religion seem placed on an equal foot- ing regarding the Unknowable. As soon, however, as religion has been consigned to the region of pure mystery we discover a strange and unaccountable activity in the Unknowable. We were told to reject reli- gious assumptions regarding the Unknow- able because they involved an infinitude of time, which was unthinkable. Once we are well freed from the religious realm, how- ever, we are no longer to be constrained by such considerations. We begin to be able to affirm many things of the Unknowable. In the words of John Stuart Mill, which Bowne was fond of quoting, we begin to possess "a prodigious amount of knowledge concerning the Unknowable." We find that it is omnipresent in time and space; that it is related to the system of experience; ''Coexistences and sequences in experience point to coexistences and sequences in the fundamental reality." We learn that the Unknowable is subject to time and change; that it is one, eternal, power, reality, the 62 PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY cause of phenomena, persistent, and inde- structible, "The infinite and eternal energy on which all things depend and from which all things forever proceed." Though we have not been allowed to affirm anything of the Unknowable for religious faith, yet such afiirmation becomes the mainstay of the system of physics. In the religious realm we were ordered to reject all con- clusions requiring an infinitude of time, but in the physical realm we are commanded to invoke such an infinitude in order to ac- count for the system. We are to pass to this by aflSrming an indestructibility of matter, and an ever-persistent force, which, indeed, phenomena will not enable us to prove, but which we must imagine. It is true that Spencer tries to save the absolute, after having banished it from his kingdom, by saying that we have an in- definite consciousness of it. Examination shows that an indefinite consciousness is worth nothing for any practical purpose, is nothing more than a form of words. We feel again as Wordsworth expressed him- self: 63 PERSONALISM AND THE I'd rather be A pagan suckled in a creed outworn; So might I, standing on this pleasant lee. Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn. The Little-Known Reality A similar negativing indefiniteness at- tends Spencer's account of reality. We have seen how unsafe and improper he considers it to affirm anything like per- sonahty or purpose of the Unknowable. Inasmuch as the fundamental reahty bulks back on the Unknowable, we can affirm nothing except certain coexistences and se- quences which are witnessed in phenomena. All knowledge is thus made relative to the individual who perceives in any given case. There is, indeed, no power assigned by which the individual can recognize simi- larity in phenomena, or reason from indi- vidual experiences to general laws. Memory is unaccounted for because no personality is provided to relate "faint states of con- sciousness." Dependent, as we are, upon an Unknowable of which we can affirm nothing, it is difficult to see how we can be 64 PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY certain at all that there is a world of things corresponding to our perceptions. At this point he meets, according to Bowne, with a double problem. He is forced to rescue science from the skeptical conclusions of his know-nothing argument. At the same time he is compelled to state a doctrine of phenomena and of knowledge which will provide a foundation for science and save his system from materialism and atheism. To escape agnosticism he calls back the cashiered and discredited notions of matter, force, motion, time, and space, treating them as if there had never been any doubt of their standing and making them the foundation on which to build. The other half of the problem he meets by asserting the relative nature of reality, defining it as "persistence in consciousness." Reality is, then, the effect produced in us by the fundamental reality, or the Un- knowable. In this case Bowne raises a question. Would the Unknowable be able to do anything in our absence? If so, then these relative realities are something more than effects in us, and the definition is 65 PERSONALISM AND THE inadequate. If the relative realities do not exist in our absence, then reality is a mere subjectivity, as illusive as a dream. Spencer makes his final appeal to the claims of the persistence of force and the indestructibility of matter. By persistence of force he declares himself to mean "the persistence of some cause that transcends our knowledge and conception." Thus we are brought back as a last resort to the much-known Unknowable about which we can affirm nothing. The assumed law of the indestructibility of matter would seem likewise insufficient as a basis for a doc- trine of phenomena. It may be sufficiently accurate as a working basis in the physical realm, but it cannot be accurately demon- strated even there. In the case of the wedge or the lever we determine the exact amount of power, resistance, friction, and heat, and on paper write an equation which is sufficiently correct for practical purposes. But, speaking with the exactitude required by a law of indestructibility, there are losses in the process that we cannot compute nor include. Our equation is an approximation 6G PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY of the fact. We speak of the transmutation of friction, weight of falHng water, or energy of steam into electrical power, light, or heat, and can come sufficiently near for practical purposes, but along the way much has to go unaccounted for. We cannot turn the processes backward and get the first terms of our equation. In other words, science can secure a practical working basis after the law of indestructibility. It cannot do more. In the end we find that Spencer cannot meet his problem without assuming for his persistence of force and indestructibility of matter that very infinitude of time against which he has warned us in the religious realm. He cannot prove these laws in any given case, but he can imagine that they might be true if they were given an infinite time in which to work. The Theory of Evolution Spencer's theory of evolution, though not originating with him, and advanced first in the early Greek philosophy, was the part of his system which gave him the widest 67 PERSONALISM AND THE reading and popularity. In his statement of the theory we find much philosophical unsoundness. The main support of his definition of evolution lies in his dependence upon the fallacy of the universal. This is the fallacy which vitiates general statements and makes for half-truths. It is a part of the busy- body's statement, "Every one is saying,'* when the exact truth is that the busybody is saying. If we can multiply atoms suffi- ciently to make impossible the tracing of any individual atom, and can multiply to an indefinite length the time in which they have to work, we can observe without wonder any imagined result. The point at issue is further lost in the words with which Spencer covers up the gap from the inor- ganic to the organic, from organic to sentient, from sentient to reasoning being. This is done by employing a word in slightly different senses, and so the gulf is bridged, linguistically speaking. But never yet hath eye seen nor ear heard how or when one single atom was led across the gulf to become a living soul. 68 PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY Moreover, if we are compelled to assume with Spencer the logical equivalence of cause and effect, the definition has no meaning. If I must say of any effect that all of its elements were already contained in its cause, the passing from one to the other is no progress. It cannot explain the elements of novelty which enter in. It would certainly be inadequate to explain the emergence of the present world from the original dance of atoms. Mr. Bergson has directed his sharpest shafts at this con- ception of evolution. He compares it to putting together a puzzle picture, all the parts of which have been previously fitted and prepared, and then with childish im- agination assuming that a creative progress has been made. The Definition of Life and Mind It is Spencer's doctrine of mind that ex- poses the materialistic trend of his phil- osophy. Judged from his doctrine of mat- ter, Spencer rightly claimed not to be a materialist. Judged from his doctrine of mind, materialism was his inevitable goal. 69 PERSONALISM AND THE According to the statement of the evolu- tion formula, life is to be defined in terms of matter and motion. These in turn are but the symbols of the Unknowable. Here Bowne calls attention to the fact that the atoms may be chemically regrouped, and can also be summoned forth in sufficient numbers to cause considerable masses. Bowne asks, however, what chemical dis- tribution can be made which will be more than a distribution or combination of chemicals. So long as it is a chemical com- bination it can be resolved into its con- stituent elements. Borrowing a word from the biological realm to cover the dis- crepancy between chemical atom and living protoplasm is not an actual but a verbal process. We are not told how matter or motion becomes something essentially dif- ferent — that is, a living organism. In like manner, in his theory of mind Spencer is satisfied with bridging verbally the gap between an affection of the nerves and a consciousness of the external world. He does this by asserting a double face to all nervous action. But it is useless to talk 70 PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY of a double-faced character for nervous ac- tion. We would still be bound to explain how an affection of the auditory nerve can be more than pleasurable or painful, soft or harsh, faint or vivid. Whence comes the mental content.^ There must be some- thing more than the affection of a nerve, or I should not recognize the voice I hear as my mother's, to say nothing of the attendant thought and memory which stir into consciousness all the springs of loyalty and affection. How shall I judge whether a sharp affection of my nerves is the "Soldier's Chorus" or a toothache.^ The "face" of nervous action by which I come to knowledge tells me nothing about the other "face" at all, but speaks directly of that outside world which impinges upon consciousness. If I say the effects pro- duced in me are only the attendants upon certain nervous affections, I have yet to show how I can consider my consciousness a true picture of what I seem to see. I must further explain how in this system of fleeting experiences, the factors of ex- perience are by good fortune related each 71 PERSONALISM AND THE to each, or how the memory of yesterday can persist with any real meaning for to-day. We are shut up to a world of nervous action. The structure that we build thereon is without common validity or verification. With or against our wills, if we cling to Spencer's system, we come to haven in a universe purely materialistic, from which even the Unknowable is powerless to save us. 72 PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY CHAPTER V BOWNE AS AN ANTAGONIST OF NATURALISM All Philosophical Values Hinge on THE Definition of Reality The real import of any system of thought eventually rests with its doctrine of reality. In regard to the nature of reality we have noted the two great antagonistic streams of thought. Under the first category are in- cluded those thinkers who assume matter as the basal reality. It makes little dif- ference whether they proceed uj^on the theory of magical and metaphysical atoms endowed with energy, motion, and force, or whether they conceal the metaphysical drift of their arguments by the assumption of vital impulses, reactions, affinities, selec- tion, or what not. In the end the sufficiency of all such theories will be found to lie in the ignoring of a part of the problem. Disaster is avoided only by refusal to carry the 73 PERSON ALISM AND THE problem to its logical conclusion. Such is the end of all materialism. Plato attempted to meet the tide of ma- terialistic thought by raising the barrier of ideal knowledge. To him the universal was the true reality. The universally true was forever beyond the cavil or denial of indi- viduals. He thus erected in thought an idealism that through Neoplatonism pro- foundly influenced Christian theology for centuries. Aristotle, his pupil, noted the impassable gulf in Plato's world between the ideal and the actual and attempted to bridge it. He declared that reality could not exist as a general term, but must be found in con- crete and particular instances. As Aristotle labored to bring together the universal and the particular, and to let the Platonic idealism down to earth, so Bowne aimed to join the sundered sides of philosophic thought. Knowing the importance of the doctrine of reality to the future implica- tions of his system, he stated his definition with unusual care. Reality with Bowne was active and causal, that which can act or be 74 PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY acted upon. He thus made possible the assumption of the reahty of thought with- out falhng prey to the phenomenahsm of the absokite ideahst. The naturaHst, by assuming an atomic causation for all mental perception, invests each idea, right or wrong, with fundamental validity. He leaves no room, either, for the substantiation of mental possessions that come by the way of reflection. He is not only faced by the problem of error; he is at loss to account for all reflective knowledge. From the opposite direction, the absolute idealist encounters difficulty with the prob- lem of evil. If thought in man is simply a reflection of God's thought, the burden of all evil and malicious thinking, error, su- perstition, and baseless fears is laid upon the Infinite Mind. Now if, as with Bowne, the essence of reality is simply causal activity, no such difliculties arise. The world of things de- pends upon the causal activity of a Divine Personality. The mutual relations and in- teractions of the world spring from the unity of the Supreme Will. The mind of 75 PERSONALISM AND THE man grasps a true world because both thinker and thing are included in the one creative harmony. We have an inkling of how this may be in the causal efficiency of the human personality, which is able to penetrate matter and to make matter con- form to it. This may, indeed, be a great mystery to the materialist, but it is a truth which no man can doubt without the overthrow of confidence in the reality of his own experience. It might seem that while Bowne has by this process escaped the problem of error, he has not been so fortunate with the problem of evil. And yet the problem of evil, that crux of theism, as the problem of error is the nightmare of materialism, ceases to maintain so great a tyranny. Dr. Bowne would have been far from claiming for his system the solution of the problem. But under the order of Personalism evil is no longer the necessary expression of the fundamental reality, nor is it loaded upon the Divine Will. It is, rather, an attendant upon the granting of freedom to responsible human personalities, it being more dear to 76 PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY the Divine to secure moral character than to create an otherwise perfect but morally irresponsible world. It is at least thinkable that to a God of moral capacity an unmoral world would be imperfect. If at the end of long disciplines he can bring mankind up to a moral perfection that is true because voluntary, might that not be the perfect world that should satisfy the divine thought? This mingling of human and divine personality and purpose has been thus beautifully expressed by Alfred Noyes in his poem "Creation": When he is older he shall be My friend and walk here at My side Or — when he wills — grow young with Me, And, to that happy world where once We died. Descending through the calm, blue weather. Buy life once more with our immortal breath. And wander through the little fields together. And taste of Love and Death. Is God Immanent Mover or Prime Mover? Naturalism can secure nothing more than a phenomenal world. If the stirring of atoms gives us perception, and chemical or 77 PERSONALISM AND THE molecular change in the cells of the brain is alone responsible for ideas, we are still at loss to explain how molecular changes can give us thought and a knowledge of the world of relations. What we really have is an affection of the nerves. When we attempt to reason from these nervous affections to a world of relations we have no reason to assume that we have more than phenomena. We have no means of proving our world to be a real one. The reason is that moving from the materialistic standpoint we have not assumed a ground sufficiently in- clusive to take in the thinker and the thing. We are at an equal loss on the naturalis- tic plane to trace effects to a first cause. We cannot follow the series far until we discover that we are involved in an infinite regress. Each effect demands a preceding cause. The earliest cause becomes more troublesome for explanation than the latest. In despair we may be led to affirm with Spencer that the first cause is the Unknow- able. Then we are compelled to face the question of how the knowable can spring from the unknowable. Aristotle attempted 78 PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY to solve this deadlock by positing a Divine Will as the Prime Mover. ^ Such a world would find its unity in a primal impulse, but would fall victim to a doctrine of necessity only less rigid than that of naturalism. Bowne meets this problem by assuming that the fundamental causal ac- tivity is not a Prime Mover, but an Imma- nent Mover continually manifesting himself in the on-going of the world. Such a con- ception does not conflict with the laws of natural science, for Bowne draws a careful distinction between phenomenal and effi- cient causality. Natural science is built upon the laws of sequence in phenomena. We can aflSrm the order in which events will occur without making any metaphysical as- sumptions at all. The efficient cause of the action and interaction of the natural order is the Divine Personality establishing his own laws of procedure. The Personality of the World-Ground At this point we find Bowne going beyond the thought of Aristotle to affirm personal- ' Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book xi, chap. vii. 79 PERSONALISM AND THE ity in the Divine Being. This thought would have been »repugnant to Aristotle, but his failure to affirm it made impossible the maintenance of a moral order and of per- sonal immortality. This fact is most clearly brought out by Eucken. He says: "Aris- totle affirms the existence of a transcendent Deity as the source of reason, and as the origin of motion, which from eternity to eternity pervades the universe. But he denies to this Deity any activity within the world; concern with external things, not to say petty human affairs, would destroy the completeness of the Deity's life. So God, or pure intelligence, himself unmoved, moves the world by his mere being; any further development of things arises from their own nature. Here, accordingly, there is no moral order of the world, and no Providence. Likewise there can be no hope of a personal immortality.' In contrast with Aristotle, Bowne de- clares that "Causal explanation must be in terms of personality or it must vanish altogether." This view is strictly in accord • The Problem of Human Life, p. 47. 80 PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY with all that we know of causation. Prece- dences and sequences in phenomena could give to individual atoms no knowledge of the meaning of the processes of which they are a part. Phenomenal causes would be confined to the effects which they them- selves produced, and in any case we would be forced to an infinite regress. In human personality alone we have introduced into experience of causation that which is an uncaused cause of phenomena. The human personality, being able to relate a succession of causes and effects to itself, and standing outside the mechanical circle, becomes meas- urably an efficient cause. But the human personality in order to preserve the in- tegrity of its own thought bulks back on an eternal thinking Personality through which it finds its synthesis with the world of things and persons. Thus the human per- sonality, introducing an unaccounted factor into the realm of nature, gives a hint of the place of the Divine Personality in this order. If this uncaused and purposive per- sonal element be left out, we can have no eflficient causation and no real progress. On 81 PERSONALISM AND THE the Impersonal plane the effect must be already contained in the cause, and there can be no progress. To say that the effect is only potentially contained in the cause is to introduce the new factor surreptitiously under the cover of a word. Any World- Ground capable of real causation, not itself involved in the atomic flux, must be per- sonal as well as intelligent. Is Freedom Possible in the Natural World? As has already been pointed out, any system of mechanical explanation falls in- evitably into difficulty with the problem of evil, as well as with the problem of error. If all thinking and action is caused by atomic motion, then we are bound to a system of necessity, and moral action be- comes impossible. The criminal in his crirup is then simply fulfilling the necessary result of affections of his nerves. He is much to be pitied, but not at all to be blamed. Every sort of error and ex- travagance is given an equal footing with truth and sanity. Only a little reflection 82 PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY serves to show how deeply this theory would cut into every demand of the moral order. By positing all causal efficiency as arising from personality, place is left for the existence of error and evil without offending the human sense of moral obligation or erecting error into the plane of truth, or of burdening the Deity with responsibility for evil. It is impossible to explain the prob- lem of evil in any general way that will give satisfaction, because man is a moral being and so constituted that the existence of evil is forever an offense; and because, further, the problem can be met only on the arena of action and solved only in the individual life. It is possible to hold such a view as not to offend the most treasured instincts of the heart. This Bowne has done by reason of his definition of reality and by the assumption of personality in the World-Ground. 83 SECTION II IDEALISM CHAPTER VI THE KANTIAN STARTING-POINT Has the Mind a Task in Experience? Kant's great contribution to the world of thought was his discovery that the mind has a task in experience. He affirmed truly when he declared that his work would make as great a change in the outlook of philosophy as had the discoveries of Coper- nicus in the field of astronomy. Hitherto the mind had been regarded as the passive recipient of impressions, a tablet on which the world of external things could write itself. Kant showed that every ex- perience was due to the constitutive ac- tivity of the mind itself, as well as to the impressions of the outside world. Time and space had been conceived as fundamental realities which could exist apart from all intelligence. He aimed to show how they were but the forms under which the think- ing mind relates the world of tilings and events to itself and to each other. This 87 PERSONALISM AND THE power of the mind to bring a real contribu- tion of its own to experience will be ap- parent if we consider how the world of nature yields a decidedly richer content to the biologist than to the man ignorant of her processes. She speaks to the trained mind a thousand things unnoticed by the untrained, and every addition to the mental capital increases the synthesizing power of the beholder. That space is a necessary form of think- ing, an intuition rather than an acquirement of experience, is to be illustrated in many ways. In dreams, though there is no actual space, the mind works under the space form. In traveling distances during the uncon- sciousness of sleep, and even for places never seen, the mind proceeds to construct ideas of them under the form of space. Time is likewise a law of intelligence rather than an entity in itself. As space is the form under which we relate a world of diversity to ourselves and each other, so time is the form under which we relate the world of experiences to the abiding self. Without this contribution of the self which 88 PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY survives the changes there could be no sense of time. In other words, it is because there is an element of timelessness in the thinker that he gets the idea of the passage of time. Time being the form under which intelligence acts, the mind by its own con- stitutive activity is able to grasp and assign a meaning to historic periods of which ex- perience could tell it nothing. The weakness in Kant's position lay in the fact that he took account only of the subjective side of this activity of the mind. It is well enough for me to say that time and space are only the forms under which I think, but are they peculiar to me.^^ Do they not exist apart from my thinking.'' How may I be sure that the time and space which I think will correspond to that which others think .^ Kant's failure to answer these questions vitiated his system. It becomes at once apparent that both time and space must possess some objective validity to free them from the disjunctive caprice of the individual and make possible a world united in space and time relations. This Kant did not give us. 89 PERSONALISM AND THE "We cannot impose mental forms upon the world of experience unless that world itself be adapted to those forms. "^ It is interesting to note how Bowne, affirming the ideal nature of space and time, yet avoided the logical impasse to which Kant was brought. Bowne was too close to the practical in his thinking not to see that the forms of time and space must be true for the object of thought as well as for the thinker. To him space and time gain a validity which makes them universal for all intelligent beings through a Supreme Personal Intelligence who creates and up- holds all. The world of things and of intel- ligences correspond each to each because all are comprehended in a Supreme Intelligence from which they acquire their meaning and reality. Where Can We Find a Permanent World? Of course Kant was not blind to the necessity of asserting somewhere an objec- tive validity. He clearly saw that a purely subjective world would be one in which * Bowne, Kant and Spencer, p. 150. 90 PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY every man would make his own world and no two worlds would correspond. It was necessary to point out some principle that would possess permanence and give unity. This permanent principle he attempted to introduce under what he called the analogies of experience.^ In this portion of the Critique Kant becomes perilously involved in his search for the permanent in phe- nomena. To find this principle of per- manence he all but affirms an independent and back-lying existence for things in themselves. To the mind of Bowne the problem of permanence could never be solved in this crude fashion. "On the im- personal plane there is no possibility of combining permanence with change, least of all by a mere analysis of the notion of change. On that plane we cannot reserve anything in the world of change as an abiding element, for as soon as it becomes changeless it no longer explains change, and when it explains change it passes into the changing, and changes through and through. The problem here can be solved only as we 2 Kant, Critique, tr. by Muller, p. 144. 91 PERSONALISM AND THE carry it up to the plane of personality, and find the permanence of experience in the world of meaning and in the self-conscious intelligence which founds and administers the world of meanings under the forms of change."^ What Lies Behind the Appearance of Things? The same subjectivity that oppressed Kant in the consideration of time and space troubled him likewise in his attempt to find the abiding real. This difiiculty was in part due to his failure to discriminate be- tween two possible definitions of the term "subjective." We may mean by the term that which is peculiar to the individual alone, or we may mean that which is true for intelligence anywhere and has no exist- ence apart from it. If Kant had kept this truth in mind when afiirming the subjec- tivity or phenomenal nature of reality, all might have been well. But failing to draw the distinction, he made the system of ex- perience the fiction of the individual. Kant's ' Bowne, Kant and Spencer, pp. 99, 100. 92 PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY only escape would have been to affirm a back-lying and independent Cause. It was only thus he could have saved his system from solipsism. Phenomena are not masks or appearances of any kind, existing only for the individual. They are the things that exist for human intelligences every- where and derive their common meaning through a supreme intelligence by which they exist. We apprehend them through our own intelligence, but they do not de- pend upon our intelligence for their exist- ence; and since they must depend upon intelligence for existence, it only remains that we affirm a back-lying intelligence as their cause and presupposition.* But Kant does not discover the high road out of his subjectivism. For him things in succession imply causal relations, and as the causal relations in things must be something independent of the mind of the onlooker, there must be in phenomena a residuant reality beyond that which the mind is able to perceive. Thus he has resort to a doc- trine of noumena. The end of this way is * Bowne, Kant and Spencer, p. 124. 93 PERSONALISM AND THE an impossible dualism, for it erects a reality which is not only independent of individual intelligence, but which is beyond all intelligence, being of a different and un- knowable nature. This dualism into which Kant unwittingly falls is to be avoided by distinguishing between causal and phenom- enal reality. Phenomenal reality is the noted succession of appearances, common to all. We can mark the preexistences and successions which universally hold in the world of experience, and we can formulate the law of their procedure without granting them a causal efficiency or saying anything about their metaphysical ground. Causal reality, in contrast, deals not with the order of succession, but with the ground of being itself. Can We "Prove" the World of Spirit? Kant's purpose was to prove that it is impossible from the common data of ex- perience to arrive at affirmations respecting God and immortality. He did this, not from hostility, but from friendliness to faith. Naturalism had shown the inadequacy of 94 PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY tlie so-called "proofs" of the Divine exist- ence. It went farther, for, assuming its ability to account for everything in heaven and in earth, it also asserted the non- existence of everything not dreamt of in its philosophy. What Kant did was to make room for faith by showing that religious convictions lie outside the province of the naturalistic speculation. It could neither be proved nor disproved on the basis of natural- ism. Kant thus claims the honor of over- throwing all materialistic and atheistic teaching by showing its attempt at religious explanation to be outside its possible field. The religious world of to-day has come to realize that there can be no "proofs" for God and immortality, in the sense that was so much sought after in Kant's day. We realize now that the great argument for God is the practical interest. We affirm the existence of God because he is a neces- sity for all sane thinking and his existence is demanded by the moral and religious interests of life. This practical argument possesses much more force for the present day than the old "proofs." What is said 95 PERSONALISM AND THE for the doctrine of God can likewise be said for immortality and all the fundamental re- ligious truths. They stand forever because they are written into the very nature of the human spirit. In his contention Kant was true to the facts. The apprehension of God is an act of faith. Spiritual truths are gained in the exercise of faith and the spiritual powers. Bowne, in a lecture commenting on Kant's showing of the impossibility of an intel- lectual demonstration of the existence of God, declared that the apprehension of God could be reached only by faith, and then added this significant word: "By way of mere speculation we cannot attain to dem- onstration in any field. There is no way of stopping where Kant stops." The outcome of Kant's "antinomies of thought" after verbose and tedious discus- sion is closely allied to this pragmatic judgment upon the deeper religious values. Bowne thus sums up his argument: "Con- viction must be reached in life itself, and this has always, with scantiest exception, led the race to theistic faith, not, indeed, as 96 PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY something that can be speculatively demon- strated or against which any cavil or objec- tion is impossible, but something which represents the line of least resistance for human thought. The intelligent world points to an intelligent author, the moral world to a moral author, the rational world to a rational author. This is the conclusion which the race has drawn and the conclusion in which it increasingly rests, the conclusion which it holds with more and more confidence as the ground of all its hope and the security of its efforts, whether in the field of science and cogni- tion or of morality and religion. . . . As- suming the legitimacy of life and of our human instincts, we may ask ourselves what life implies; and Kant says it implies God, freedom, and immortality, as postulates without which the mind would fall into discord with itself and life would lose itself in inner contradiction. We may then hold these postulates, not as something given by the speculative reason, but as something rooted in life."^ ^ Bowne, Kant and Spencer, pp. 212, 213. 97 PERSONALISM AND THE CHAPTER VII THE ABSOLUTE PHILOSOPHY, LOTZE AND BOWNE Is THE World More than Knowledge? LoTZE was the first to successfully refute the absolute idealism of Hegel. Neverthe- less, he was himself to be counted among the idealists. He hoped to harmonize the differences between modern scientific thought and that romantic idealism which had so largely characterized the meta- physics of the preceding generation. The interaction of things in an intelligible uni- verse was to him the best evidence of essen- tial unity between mind and matter. He believed that Hegel had indicated a great goal. He did not believe with Hegel that all truth can be deduced from reflection. It was Lotze's aim to grant perception, or empirical knowledge of nature, its place in thought. 98 PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY "His philosophy is a persistent defense of perception against reflection, of the concrete particular against pale and vacant general ideas; it is a powerful protest against in- justice to the individuality and uniqueness which he found at the core of every fact. Thought with its abstract conceptions and unsubstantial universals seemed to him poor and thin as compared with the facts and events of the real world; every general law seemed to him to fall short of reaching the core and essence of anything actual."^ In particular was Lotze opposed to the closed system of idealism where everything was so ordered in the eternal thought that there could by no possibility enter in any factors which had not already been de- termined before the world was, and which relegated freedom to the realm of shadow and make-believe. He believed that history was something more "than a translation in time of the eternally complete content of an ordered world." He concluded, then, that the world is something more than an eternal thought; that it contains a ca- ' Jones, Philosophy of Lotze, p. 9. 99 PERSONALISM AND THE pacity for freedom and a possibility for the introduction of the unique, which is an irresistible demand of the human spirit. By his incisive criticisms he laid bare the deceptive generalities of the extreme He- gelian position and made necessary a drastic modification of its thought. Of What Does Reality Consist .^^ Hegelianism thought to reach reality by reflection and without the aid of experience. Lotze, on the other hand, held steadfastly to the importance of experience and main- tained that we can understand it only as we grasp its inner continuity. He raised the question of the ultimate nature of reality by asserting that in a united uni- verse of relations and correspondences ca- pable of being apprehended it must be either material or spiritual. If we are to allow the reality of anything outside matter, the conclusion is foregone — the ultimate nature of being is spiritual. But if we are to understand reality, we need to know more than the elements into which it is divisible, more than the laws under which it acts; we 100 PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY must know also its destination. Laws in themselves are nothing more than the for- mulated sequence of events, the tabulated data of experience. They can give us little concerning the ground of their activity. We must go back of the law to the apparent aim of the uniformity and therein catch a glimpse of the controlling purpose. Thus he introduces into his system the idea of value. He now proceeds to describe reality as the realized law of procedure. It is that in which the Infinite Purpose is realizing itself. So far Lotze has scarcely escaped the absolute idealism which he aimed to super- sede. His world of reality remains phe- nomenal in spite of his protestations. This phenomenalism he endeavored to avoid by looking toward the Good as the supreme end. "The objectivity of knowledge consists in this, that it is not a meaningless play of illusion, but that it presents to us a world whose several parts are linked and ordered according to the prescription of that which is alone real in the world, namely, the good."- 2 Quoted by Stahlin, Kant, Lotze and Ritschl, p. 141. 101 PERSONALISM AND THE Thus with Lotze the Supreme Good is the ultimate ReaHty in whose existence all other realities find their ground. Bowne's Debt to Lotze There are many well-defined correspond- ences between the systems of Lotze and Bowne. There are many points at which Bowne would gladly have owned his obli- gation to his teacher. An examination of these correspondences will be of moment to those who are interested in Bowne's phi- losophy. They were at one in the insistence upon the difference between the practical field of science and the speculative field of meta- physics, in which both hark back to Kant. They held that science is properly limited to the order of coexistence and sequence in phenomena with reference to the practical issues. To metaphysics alone is assigned the realm of efficient causality. The scien- tist may learn from experience with phe- nomena the laws of their action and interaction, but when he goes back of phenomena to discuss the nature of reality 102 PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY or being, he has left the realm of science for that of philosophy. Both discerned the folly of an attempt to understand nature simply by a method of classification. They called attention to the emptiness of such endeavors so far as the problem of reality is concerned. Classifica- tion is a method of intelligence the better to handle its materials. Classification in no wise changes the things classified or reveals their back-lying reality. Both philosophers pointed out the as- tounding claims of atomism to an eflSciency which in the end would endow each separate atom with a purpose, wisdom, and knowl- edge of other atoms far superior to human intelligence, and with a proclivity for peace remarkable in this, that in a divided world of innumerable atoms there should be any working in relations at all. Instead of naturalism being free from the dark realm of magic and unaccountable powers, she is rather the high priestess of superstition with her powerful demiurges of atoms. They saw the impossibility of assuming the absentee God of absolute idealism. 103 PERSONALISM AND THE Such a God would find himself, at the best, working at cross purposes in a disjointed world, and gradually realizing his thought through the slow-struggling intelligence of man and accomplishing his own moral char- acter in the slower moving ebb and flow of the tides of human action. They saw that neither pluralism which springs from atomism nor the pantheism which springs from Absolutism was suffi- cient to explain the world and leave place on the one hand for individuality and on the other for freedom. They were alike in recognizing the ab- surdities which left Absolutism in the clouds. Lotze felt himself to be sufficiently definite when he referred everything to the Supreme Good. Bowne went on to declare that the world of experience can be maintained as real only as it is grounded in a Supreme Personality from whom all things forever proceed. Bowne possessed Lotze's view concerning the barren round of mechanical causation assumed by materialism, in which there can be no possibility of progress, no chance for 104. PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY the introduction of unique factors of ad- vance. They were one likewise in recogni- tion of the- corresponding weakness of an Absolute who contained all in himself, and in whom was buried also all possibility of human freedom, that novelty that forever spells progress in the history of the indi- vidual and the race. Bowne's Advance on Lotze's System It is only fair to say that Bowne received many of the features of his system from Lotze. In the clearness of his critical faculties he was remarkably like Lotze. It is also fair to say that Bowne overcame the weaknesses inherent in Lotze's system and carried it out to a more logical con- clusion. In his definition of reality, Lotze is need- lessly vague. His shortest and most direct definition of reality is that it is the realized law of procedure. This definition points to- ward activism, but it is not thoroughgoing enough. Its reality is still phenomenal, existing only in the absolute purpose. What he was aiming for was a reality whose real- 105 PERSONALISM AND THE ness lay in the very act of a Divine Purpose realizing itself. Bowne's definition of reality was not only more clear and simple, but also more pro- found. With him reality is that which can act or be acted upon. Thus he makes way for matter and mind and God. Lotze pointed out the fact that we must discover some continuity behind the ebb and flow of matter and even of human experience if we are to find out the meaning of the world. Bowne carried the thought up to secure footing and made the relation of thought and thing clear. He affirmed that the desired continuity can be found alone in personality. Personality is the only power of which we are conscious that can join the sundered experiences of time and space into a unity and look upon all from the standpoint of the one. Thus alone, he argues, is unity possible in the world. The universe finds its unity in the thought of a Supreme Personality, himself the unchang- ing cause of change. Thus Lotze's vague Purpose of the Su- preme Good, which he considers the funda- 106 PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY mental reality, gives way to a Person who is also the World-Ground. Both the ma- terial universe and the individual mind fall into step because both proceed from the same source. Our intelligences were made for the true understanding of the world. What the general mind reports is true be- cause the world was made for our intelli- gence. In this way the idea with which Lotze began was given a new and richer and more powerful content. If Lotze had thus completed his system, he would have been free from the criticism of one of the most skillful and friendly critics, who declared that his cardinal de- fect lay at this point. This writer says: "He may, like the ordinary consciousness, maintain the necessity of nature, and the freedom of men, and the omnipresence of God; he may give man all his own way, which is essential to morality, and God all His own way, which is essential to religion, and thus permit both these forces which mold the higher destinies of mankind to exist together. But he must also strive to reconcile them. Truth for him must not be 107 PERSONALISM AND THE a thing of aspects and phases merely; he must not agree with the common con- sciousness in its f ragmen tariness."^ Herein is the chief point of difference be- tween Lotze and Bowne. Lotze stops short of asserting personahty of the World- Ground and leaves the fundamental reality only less vague than Hegel's absolute. Bowne presses on to the assertion of per- sonality in the World-Ground with all that such an assertion implies. He thus carries the metaphysical problem up into religion and is able thereby to bring about that very reconciliation between science and religion which was Lotze's own aim. Bowne's position is well disclosed in a passage in his last work touching the ideal- ist position, in which he says: "Being in this world is nothing more than having a certain form and type of experience with certain familiar conditions. Passing out of this world into another would mean simply not a transition through space, but passing into a new form and type of experience dif- ferently constituted from the present. And ' Jones, Philosophy of Lotze, p. 13. 108 PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY how many of these systems are possible or to what extent this change might go is altogether beyond us. Of course these many systems would all be objectively founded; that is, they would be rooted in the will and purpose of the Creator, and they would also be one in the sense that the creative purpose would comprise them all in one plan; but they would not be one in the sense of being phases or aspects of one absolute reality. They would be stages in God's unfolding plan, but not aspects of the static universe. This static universe is a phantom of ab- stract thought. The only reality is God and his progressively unfolding plan and purpose and work, and the world of finite spirits. In this case also we should have a relativity but not an illusion, a validity of knowledge within the sphere which finds its ground and warrant in the plan and pur- pose of the Creator."* * Bowne, Kant and Spencer, pp. 145, 146. 109 SECTION III PRAGMATISM CHAPTER VIII THE UNMETAPHYSICAL PRAGMA- TISM OF WILLIAM JAMES The Pragmatic Element in the History OF Philosophy Protagoras is said to have been the originator of the watchword of pragmatism — "Man is the measure of all things." The phrase and the doctrine have unpleasant connections, however, for Protagoras and the Sophists to whose school he belonged meant thereby all that the word "sophism" has come to imply in modern life. In the words of Eucken, "Man the measure of all things," meant for them "A renunciation of all universally valid standards, a surrender of truth to man's momentary caprice and fluctuating inclinations. In other words, it implied that everything may be turned this way or that and differently judged, accord- ing to the point of view; that what appears 113 PERSONALISM AND THE as the right may be represented as the wrong, and conversely; and that any cause may be championed according to the neces- sities of the case or to one's whim. In this manner Hfe is gradually degraded into a means of the profit, the self-indulgence, even the sport of the single individual, who acknowledges no restraints, feels no re- spect; . . . thus the good yields to the profitable; all valuations become relative. . . . Such a doctrine of relativity . . . raised to a sovereign position, . . . becomes the deadly enemy of everything great and true."i The pragmatic movement came in Greece after the climax of her brilliant age had passed. The touch of disorganization and decay had struck into her civilization. Old faiths and old institutions were breaking before an incoming tide of individualism. That system which had such questionable origin with the Sophists became with the Stoics a judgment by moral values, and here perhaps reached its highest and noblest influence. It appears in the sensualistic ^ Eucken, The Problem of Human Life, p. 14. 114 PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY system of Epicurus, to whom the criterion of truth becomes the sensation of pleasure as contrasted with pain.^ We again see the pragmatic postulate in the teachings of Pyrrho and the new acad- emy. They hold it as the foundation of knowledge. Arcesilaus named probabilism as the only rule of practical life. Carneades introduced the idea of degrees of proba- bility. To the eclectics, that was truth which appeared to be true. In the end, when both scientific and deductive truth have been rid of all reality, we reach the reaction of neo-platonism with its affirma- tion of truth by revelation alone. Modern pragmatism applies the thought of value, not primarily to the moral and aesthetic, as did the Stoics, but to reality itself. Davidson has called attention to the fact that the new element in modern prag- matism is to bring knowledge as well as aesthetics and ethics to the test of practical value.^ The modern pragmatists do not by ^ Compare Janet and Seailles, History of the Problems of Philosophy, p. 103. 8 The Stoic Creed, p. 256. 115 PERSONALISM AND THE any means agree in the phase of the system which is most important. Mr. Pierce re- vived the name for modern philosophy. r. C. S. Schiller is interested in giving the movement a particularly subjectivistic turn. James has pursued the line of Realism. Because of the extended influence of the latter, and the commonness with which his name is associated with the term "prag- matism," we shall confine ourselves to the discussion of his particular system. Can the Pragmatic Test of Truth Be Maintained.^ In the chapter on "The Notion of Truth," in his volume on pragmatism, James justly balks at the vague abstractions of the defi- nition of truth given by the rationalists. He quotes Taylor's definition, "Truth is the system of propositions which have an uncon- ditional claim to be recognized as valid," and also Rickert's statement that "Truth is a name for all those judgments which we find ourselves under obligations to make by a kind of imperative duty." These defini- tions of truth James declares "unutterable 116 PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY triviality." While we sympathize with him in his revolt from any attempt at making truth a mere abstraction, we cannot be blind to the commission of the same error of abstraction by James himself when he substitutes "vcrify-able" for "verify-cation" under exigency. What both James and his rationalist opponents are aiming for is an independent norm of truth. This fact James desired to conceal while the rationalists openly admitted it. By "verify-able" James means that there is a common-to-all which makes it possible for the individual to com- pare his judgment with the common judg- ment of others. Thus only can he push the borders of knowledge past his individual experiences to truths imparted by others and which he might verify if circumstances permitted. He could better have shown the error of the rationalist definition of truth by calling attention to its fallacy of the ab- stract. He would also have secured the desired concreteness by open acknowledg- ment of a common-to-all in human ex- perience by which the individual can verify his own conclusions respecting phenomena. 117 PERSONALISM AND THE But Mr. James tells us that there is no such thing as truth independent, and by this, if he is consistent, he means truth in- dependent of concrete individual experience. He declares, "The pragmatist clings to facts and concreteness, observes truth at its work in particular cases, and generalizes." He does not, however, show us the "value" of this generalization in a world in which truth is to be found only in concrete individual cases. How is the pragmatist to possess any certainty that his intellectual effort of synthesis represents any corresponding real- ity? Indeed, it could not apart from a higher and uniting intelligence. Again he says, "True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate, and verify. False ideas are those we cannot." Here, moving on the individualistic plane, are certain difficulties that give no promise of solution. The jungle-dweller who is told for the first time that the earth is round might be utterly unable either to assimilate, validate, corroborate, or verify the state- ment. Would his inability in this respect justify him in putting the conception of 118 PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY rotundity in the region of false ideas? Would the truth thereby be imperiled? Still there are some who profess to believe that the roundness of the earth would re- main presumably beyond question. It would seem to come perilously close to being a truth independent of this man's concrete individual experience. It might conceivably be beyond the concrete indi- vidual experience of any dweller upon the earth, as in the days before the rotundity of the earth was discovered. Was or was it not true? Would the earth continue round in the absence of human life and intelligence? Evidently, the chief pragmatist himself was troubled with evil dreams, for a few pages later he declares that "verify -ability" will do as well as "verify -cation" anyway. Here he jumps again from the particular to the general without sensing it. If he would rescue truth from the uncertainties of indi- vidual experiences, he could do so by posit- ing a Personality as the World-Ground. He could thus have saved his pragmatism and have maintained his ground against ration- alism. 119 PERSONALISM AND THE Respecting his definition of truth as that which serves an end or a purpose, Davidson^ very justly calls attention to the fact that purpose or end implies an intellectual ele- ment at utter variance with the pragmatic claim that it is not man's intellect or reason which determines reality and truth, but his will and his feelings. So the pragmatic definition of truth, while attempting to avoid the abstractions of ab- solute idealism, becomes the prey of a solipsistic individualism, because, spurning the assistance of metaphysics, it has no intelligent ground. At any rate, the serious- minded cannot be satisfied with a test of value for truth which shall be merely human and relative. "We have outgrown the standard of a welfare merely human, and all the values of such a welfare cannot blind us to their narrowness and emptiness."^ Are Space and Time the Abiding Realities.'* Unwilling to affirm any continuity which falls outside the realm of concrete indi- * The Stoic Creed, p. 263. ^ Eucken, Knowledge and Life, p. 83. 120 PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY vidual experience, because that would be untrue to pragmatism, James is forced to seek some continuity which will hold his disunited and pluralistic world together long enough to consider the situation. This con- tinuity he gains in a thoroughly naturalistic way by assuming time and space as the abiding realities. "Space and time are thus vehicles of continuity by which the world's parts hang together,"^ One must think of space and time both as objectively real. Of them he says: "Just as atoms, not half or quarter atoms, are the minimum of matter that can be, and every finite amount of matter contains a finite number of atoms, so any amounts of time, space, change, etc., which we might assume would be composed of a finite number of minimal amounts of time, space, and change."^ One scarcely knows whether to be more surprised at the naive boldness in presenting such crudities or the uncritical state of the mind that could formulate them. In the first place, the unseeable and imaginary • James, Pragmatism, p. 134. ^ Some Problems of Philosophy, p. 154. 121 PERSONALISM AND THE atom is reduced in words to finite and ponderable reality. Then such subjective ideas as space and time are spoken of as if they could be reckoned in the same way. If there is any meaning, it would seem as if one might trade a chunk of his space for another's time, and so prolong life by re- ducing the dimensions of his "verify-able" world. The resulting mystification regarding the nature of time is shown in his view of the verification of history by the individual. He says: "The stream of time can be re- mounted only verbally, or verified indirectly by the present prolongations or effects of what the past harbored. Yet if they agree with these verbalities and effects, we can know that our ideas of the past are true. As true as past time itself was, so true was Julius Csesar, so true were antediluvian monsters, all in their proper dates and settings."^ Truth being confined to concrete indi- vidual experience by Mr. James's funda- mental postulate, it would seem easier to * Pragmatism, pp. 214, 215. 12g PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY take his say-so for the foregoing than to attempt to reach any consistent ground for such a view of time. The fact is that time is nothing apart from an abiding personaHty to relate its flowing events each to each and all to some unmoving center. But once this is granted, the disunited world in time and space falls into wondrous unity which would be quite upsetting to the pluralistic mind, which the pluralistic mind will not acknowledge but without which it cannot think. He should have become aware that the "connecting medium" was no less than personality when he talks about the relationships of life breaking up into little worlds, or a multi- tude of small systems. Pluralism a Confession of Failure to Unite Subject and Object Being unable from the empirical stand- point to found any real unity, James turns to pluralism as a means of escape from the insistent problems arising out of the con- trast between mind and matter, subject and object. The mere thought of any essential 123 PERSON ALISM AND THE unity seems repugnant. He says, "If our intellect had been as much interested in disjunctive as it is in conjunctive relations, philosophy would have equally successfully celebrated the world's disunion."^ "Ay, there's the rub . . . what dreams!" Why is the intellect not equally interested in establishing a disjunctive world? The rea- son is a very good one. It is because it is as mentally impossible to seriously think a disjunctive world as to think a topsy-turvy world. If we can find no higher unity, it will inevitably be this, that there is a world of various relations all of which are grasped by our intelligence and are thought of as *'our" world. Even pragmatists are driven to this common expedient before they can tell us what pragmatism and pluralism are. The fact that the world can be understood by us is a principle of unity in itself, which must be removed before pluralism can be admitted. Unity does not depend, as the pragmatists seem to think, upon chemical spatial and social interaction between given individuals. The apple does not quarrel • Pragmatism, p. 137. 124 PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY with the banana because both cannot grow on the same tree nor in the same chmate. They are not for that reason parts of other and disunited worlds. They both find a unity in the comprehension of very ordinary mortals as being in the same world and in spite of diversity yielding obedience to the same laws. Can Pragmatic Pluralism Reach Free- dom OR Solve the Problem of Evil.^^ One reason that Mr. James assigned for denying a unitary world was to save some place in it for novelty and innovation. ^° The effort to escape the meshes of absolut- ism on the one hand, and to avoid the necessities of empiricism on the other, so as to gain a place in the world for freedom, is a laudable one. But here pluralism offers only a false hope. The common example of absolute innovation in our world is that which is introduced by the free human spirit. The moment a free intelligence is posited as the world ground we have our freedom and not in any otherwise. ^^ Some Problems in Philosophy, p. 132. 125 PERSONALISM AND THE In similar manner pluralism congratulates itself on having escaped the problem of evil. It escapes it in the sense that having neither God nor absolute the presence of the prob- lem need not be accounted for as a moral obligation. But in the very same terms whereby it escapes the problem it also makes void all moral responsibility in the individual. If that is truth which the indi- vidual sees at the moment — and we must hold pluralistic pragmatism to its principles here — then any independent norm of right moral action is as ridiculous as the abstrac- tions of idealism. The maintenance of laws and the punishment of offenders against such ideal right is involved in the same category. What the individual sees for the moment is the true and the good. The individual cannot be blamed for not seeing other than as it presents itself to him. Along with the heralded escape from the problem of evil has come likewise the escape from moral responsibility. One is reminded of what Professor Eucken says of the moral degradation which followed in the wake of the sophistic pragmatism and 126 PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY which was quoted in the early part of this chapter. Of course Mr. James did not intend this result, for in another place he criticizes materialism because it rules out the moral order of the world.^^ Yet with all his love for a disunited world, Mr. James seems to tell us of a certain sort of unity, a unity of nature that is coming to pass gradually in proportion as we verify our ideas. It would be difficult to explain such a unity except as a subjective and in- tellectual one, as the mind reaches conclu- sions, classifies and generalizes its knowl- edge. But we have already been warned to abhor all intellectualism, so that even this poor attempt at unity would seem to be denied to a consistent pragmatist. The whole subject of pluralism has thus been summed up by a recent writer, who says: "As regards pragmatism, it does not furnish us with a pluralistic universe, but " Pragmatism, pp. 105-107. For a discussion of the rela- tion of the Scholastic Free Thinkers to Pragmatism in judging religion by its utility, politically, morally, and socially, and the afErmation that this is the necessary outcome of any pragmatism not theistically grounded, see Lange, History of Materialism, vol. i, pp. 222fr. 127 PERSONALISM AND THE with a thinker who interrupts his thinking, an experimenter who breaks off his experi- ment, whenever it suits his feehngs. Prag- matistic thought resembles the artist's thought, in so far as both not only build for the Heart's Desire, but also (as Omar Khayyam forgot to mention) break off and sweep away its own construction whenever the logical necessities, that is, the 'peculiari- ties independent of his wishes, begin to bore or annoy it. The pluralistic pragmatist takes advantage of the fact (for even he must build with facts!) that we need not always think on and 07i, that there are other subjects and other points of view; in short, that although the independent universe rolls on in its established manner, with or without the music of the spheres and the hymn of Goethe's archangels, human attention can turn upon its ear and for a while dream of its own juicy cabbages or intoxicating efful- gent roses. "^^ In commenting on Plato's search for the absolute, Eucken has given in clear state- ment the argument against all such prag- '2 Vernon Lee, Vital Lies, vol. ii, pp. 171, 172. 128 PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY matic schemes of life. "Every human un- dertaking wliich seeks to be self-sufficient, and to avoid all responsibility to superior authority, he looks upon as petty and neces- sarily inadequate. Dominated by a hollow show of independence, such efforts can never produce more than the appearance of virtue and happiness, which is rendered repulsive by its self-complacency. . . . However much that is problematic may remain in Plato's Doctrine of Ideas, the latter dis- closes a great truth which we cannot re- linquish. And that is the recognition of the fact that there is a realm of truth beyond the likes and dislikes of men; that truths are valid, not because of our consent, but inde- pendently of it, and in a sphere raised above all human opinion and power. Such a conviction is the foundation of the inde- pendence of science, and of the secure upbuilding of civilization; only a self- dependent truth can provide laws and norms which elevate human existence be- cause they unite it."^^ ^^ Eucken, Problem of Human Life, pp. 18-21. 129 PERSONALISM AND THE CHAPTER IX BOWNE'S PRAGMATISM, "A STEP IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF PHIL- OSOPHY" A Pragmatic Definition of Being F. C. S. Schiller, in attacking the abso- lutist idea of God from the pragmatic standpoint, declares that the pragmatic de- pendence of meaning on purpose "negatives the notion that truth can depend on how things would appear to an all-embracing, or 'absolute' mind. For such a mind could have no purpose. It could not, that is, select part of its content as an object of special interest to be operated upon or aimed at. In human minds, on the other hand, meaning is always selective and purposive."^ Bowne is equally antagonistic to the closed system of the absolutist. He too re- * Schiller, Humanism, p. 10. 130 PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY fused to accept a pantheistic God appearing in all his creations and depending upon them for his own being, hence thinking evil with their evil thoughts and bound to a hideous and unethical world which really is himself. But we must take note of what Schiller's interpretation does to the system. With him truth becomes thoroughly indi- vidualistic. One man's "truth" is on as secure a footing as another's. One man's illusions, he being the judge of his truth, are as valid as the most plausible conclu- sions of another. Schiller seems to feel that there cannot be an independent norm of truth, apart from Absolutism. In the en- deavor to get away from all ideas of truth as an abstraction he makes void the value of concrete and particular truth. Bowne retains his pragmatism, and shows the emptiness of the absolute position with- out surrendering truth that shall be valid for all. He does this through his definition of being. We have already noted his defini- tion of the real as that which can act or be acted upon. The definition of being nat- urally follows. It is neither an Abstract 131 PERSONALISM AND THE Supreme Idea, nor an Unknowable sub- stance as the base of phenomena. Being is impHed in the capacity for intelHgent causal action, or the capacity of being intelligently acted upon. He would join with the prag- matists in saying that there is no being apart from purpose, meaning, by that, in- telligent purpose. All that exists, then, is the result or manifestation of a supreme active or purposive intelligence and includes the world of lesser intelligences. It has no meaning apart from this intelligence, which is its ground. Mind can understand the movement of matter because both proceed from the same ground. The mind grasps the meaning of the world because it owns a kinship with the intelligence that creates the world. It is itself purposive and self- directing within the world-order. This definition of being escapes the pantheistic conclusion of absolutism and also avoids the mechanical determinism of empiricism. All being is, then, according to Bowne, essentially causal and active.^ In reaching this conclusion he guards his position by a * For discussion see Bowne, Metaphysics, p. 17. 132 PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY very important discrimination between phe- nomenal or inductive as contrasted with metaphysical efficiency, which is the imma- nent causality of a Fundamental Unitary Being. Phenomenal causality refers to the laws of change in phenomena which give us the anticipated order of events of science. These may be studied, classified, and veri- fied without reference to their metaphysical ground. Metaphysical efficiency has refer- ence to that Supreme Intelligent Purpose by which all things subsist, and which must be affirmed if there is to be any true knowl- edge or if the sundered sides of conscious- ness are to be united.^ The Escape from Pluralism and Absolutism to World-Unity Convinced that there can be no unity without a closed system, with no real free- dom and no novelty, the pluralists have rushed to the maintenance of a disjunctive universe. But a disjunctive universe is as much of an impossibility to thought in a sane and intelligible world as a universe 3 Ibid., pp. 83-90. 133 PERSONALISM AND THE absolutely predetermined by a Supreme Idea or by the mechanical necessities of materialism. The refuge taken in a pluralis- tic universe is simply the attempt to flee from one irrationality to a greater. We find pluralism unable to reconcile change and identity on its impersonal plane. The demon of determinism may be momentarily exorcised, but with the resulting return of seven other demons worse than itself. In maintaining a pluralistic universe the plu- ralist does not make it disjunctive enough to be consistent. Unless he preserves a certain amount of unity, the unity of a mind able to grasp the fleeting events of time and the baffling appearances of change, all knowledge would be meaningless. Even pluralism would become a jargon of words. The baseless fears of pluralism spring from a failure adequately to define the meaning of unity. Bowne^ points out the fact that the only real unity of which we are directly aware is the unity of the free and conscious self. The self survives the passing events of experience, relates them to itself under * Metaphysics, p. 91. 134 PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY the forms of time and space, and makes itself the center of a multitudinous and rapidly changing world. That there is any higher unity than this synthesis of the world by the individual is due to the fact that one is not alone in the universe of intelligence, but is surrounded by a world of self-conscious intelligences which are themselves comprehended in synthesis by a Supreme Personal Intelligence. Through self-conscious and self-acting personality alone can the world be brought into sub- stantial unity. The experiences of the in- dividual, then, become something more than peculiar to himself and valid for more than himself. Living in a world of intelligences, which is maintained by intelligence, his idea of truth must conform, not only to the common-to-all, but, higher than this, to the order of an intelligible world. Thus at a single stroke are we rid of the conflict be- tween mind and matter, noumena and phe- nomena, and the disjointed and illogical world of pluralism. This is done also with- out resort to an idealism which, though grand in its conception, is death to the 135 PERSONALISM AND THE maintenance of freedom and individuality. How strongly Bowne felt toward the out- come of such a system may be judged by his own words: *'When we consider life at all reflectively, we come upon two facts. First, we have thoughts and feelings and volitions; and these are our own. We also have a measure of self-control, or the power of self -direction. Here, then, in experience we find a certain selfhood and a relative independence. This fact constitutes us real persons, or, rather, it is the meaning of our personality. The second fact is that we cannot regard this life as self-sufficient and independent. How the life is possible we do not know; we only know that it is. How the two facts are put together is altogether beyond us. We only know that we cannot interpret life without admitting both, and that to deny either lands us in contradiction and nonsense. It is no doubt fine, and in some sense it is correct, to say that God is in all things; but when it comes to saying that God is all things, and that all forms of thought and feeling and conduct are his, then reason 136 PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY simply commits suicide. God thinks and feels in what we call our thinking and feel- ing; and hence he blunders in our blunder- ing and is stupid in our stupidity. He contradicts himself also with the utmost freedom; for a deal of his thinking does not hang together from one person to another, or from one day to another in the same person. Error, folly, and sin are all made divine; and reason and conscience as having authority vanish. The only thing that is not divine in this scheme is God; and he vanishes into a congeries of contradictions and basenesses."^ The Ideal Nature of Time and Space Next to his doctrine of a Supreme Intel- ligence as the World-Ground, Bowne is most likely to be denied standing as a Prag- matist because of his position regarding the ideal nature of time and space. Pragma- tism of the James type is very prone to fly at anything which bears the suggestion of idealism. Such pragmatism approaches the problems from a realistic if not from a ^ Bowne, Metaphysics, p. 102. 137 PERSONALISM AND THE materialistic standpoint. Nevertheless, the question of the nature of time and space is a momentous one for the cause of pluralistic pragmatism. We have already seen, with Mr. James, how purely objective is their explanation. Space is a sort of entity exist- ing for itself, and time is of similar nature, to be spoken of as if it possessed extension. Mr. James seems to indicate that we are sure of the events of history because time as an enduring entity pokes itself somewhat like a pole into the present. Seeing one end, the present, we can be sure there is another end, though out of sight. It is not surprising that the pragmatists are unwilling to sur- render space and time to idealism, for on these two hang all the unity that is left them, and by their own confession some unity is necessary even to a pluralistic universe. But to consider the question of history, what is there in my present that reminds me of the historic character, Julius Csesar, or compels me to believe that any such person ever lived .^ What realistic way is there of being sure that he existed in his 138 PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY time as I in mine? To arrive at such a conclusion I must rationalize and relate, and this is strictly forbidden by the pragmatic doctrine. Indeed, I can have no idea of the time that has elapsed since Caesar's day, being myself confined to my threescore years and ten. But I relate events to my own personality in time, and by imagina- tion I relate other events and other days of which I am told, in some sort of consistent order to that time into which my own life falls. By the same token I am able to relate my present time to a fancied order yet to come, and obtain a belief in it only second to that which obtains concerning that which is told me as liistory. Without a unitary personality the fleeting facts and changes of our human life could not be related. To-day would have no in- telligible relation to yesterday, only that an abiding personality superior to the events, possessing a certain timelessness, relates them to itself. Likewise can we think of the events of history only as they might be the related experiences of a unitary being itself above their flux and change. 139 PERSONALISM AND THE The Pragmatic Test for Religious Values James, speaking of the pragmatic test as applied to religion, says: "If theological ideas prove to have a concrete value for 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. . . . The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good too for definite assignable rea- sons."^ Permission to exist in the prag- matic scheme is of little value to religion, however, in a many sundered world. With- out a fundamental intelligence, capable also of moral qualities, with a care for moral law binding on all moral creatures, one's theo- logical beliefs — indeed, one's ideal of the good — becomes momentary and individual. The belief which is found to be true for one man will be found equally false for another. There could be under such a system no common moral imperative to receive the 8 Pragmatism, pp. 73, 76. 140 PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY sanction of all moral beings. Yet this is one of the common experiences in life. Bowne applied the pragmatic test to re- ligion, but from a very different standpoint. Affirming a moral governor of the world, he yet held that the test of theological opinion, of so-called religious experience, must ever lie in actual life. "How does it work in life?" was a question proper to any religious belief whatever. By the practical answer must the theory stand or fall. On the other hand, those beliefs that have been found contributing toward a higher civilization, a nobler moral order, a clearer conception of duty and the greatest good to the race, carry with them their own cre- dentials, which cannot be speculatively overthrown. 141 SECTION IV BOWNE AND SOME PRESENT-DAY THINKERS CHAPTER X BERGSON, THE ABSTRACTIONS OF AN IMPERSONAL PHILOSOPHY Can Knowledge and Life Be Brought Together on the Empirical Basis? Bergson approaches the problems of phi- losophy from the standpoint of empiricism. He denies the conclusions of idealism and at the same time opposes the claims of materialism. He says: "We maintain as against materialism, that perception over- flows infinitely the cerebral state; but we have endeavored to establish as against idealism, that matter goes in every direc- tion beyond our representation of it, a representation which the mind has gathered out of it, so to speak, by an intelligent choice. Of these two opposite doctrines, the one attributes to the body and the other to the intellect a true power of creation, the first insisting that our brain begets represen- 145 PERSONALISM AND THE tation and the second that our understand- ing designs the plan of nature. And against these two doctrines we invoke the same tes- timony, that of consciousness, which shows us our body as one image among others and our understanding as a certain faculty of dissociating, of distinguishing, of opposing logically, but not of creating or of con- structing."^ He states the problem of philosophy to be the bringing together of the sundered sides of consciousness, matter and mind, life and knowledge, and discloses the fatal flaw in the Spencerian system: "It is necessary that these two inquiries, theory of knowledge and theory of life, should join each other. . . . Together they may solve by a method more sure, brought nearer to experience, the great problems that philosophy poses. For if they should succeed in their common enterprise, they would show us the formation of the intel- lect, and thereby the genesis of that matter of which our intellect traces the general configuration. They would dig to the very 1 Matter and Memory, p. 236. 146 PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY root of nature and of mind. They would substitute for the false evolutionism of Spencer — which consists of cutting up pres- ent reality already evolved, into little bits no less evolved, and then recomposing it with these fragments, thus positing in ad- vance everything that is to be explained — a true evolutionism, in which reality would be followed in its generation and its growth."^ Of being, Bergson says, *'Being, in our- selves, is becoming, progress and growth."^ Being is, then, a part of the act of con- sciousness, matter and mind conjoined in perception. The consciousness, freighted with all its past, comes to the act of per- ception in the present. This activity, the consonance of being and knowing, is the very essence of reality. What Bergson is seeking after is some- thing more than mechanical causation that would make thought the mere product of material forces, while, on the other hand, he seeks to establish a world which shall '^ Creative Evolution, p. xiii, f. 2 Sc. Le Roy, Philosophy of Bergson, p. 38. 147 PERSONALISM AND THE not be dependent on the individual judg- ment. A world of mechanical causation is a closed system and negates the reality of knowledge. A world which must search for its reality in a Divine Idea alone takes away all possibility of novelty or unique- ness. Bergson sees that there is a factor of which neither side has taken account, the factor of novelty, without which there can be no progress or evolution. This factor he introduces under the name of "vital im- pulse," which he makes the seat of reality. Does he, then, reach the goal for which he has striven — the unity of mind and matter, of knowledge and life? He has if we are to accept his word as the final authority in the matter. But his position contains certain important implications that vitiate the system. Time as Duration To escape the Spencerian snare of me- chanical explanation, Bergson gives to the idea of time as duration the leading role in his philosophy. Instead of time being, on the one hand, an external reality upon 148 PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY which are strung successive experiences, or, on the other, a relating of experiences by an abiding personahty as with Bowne, Bergson takes a position less clear, that the indi- vidual contains within himself the past at any moment. Duration is not a mere suc- cession of appearances, but hitnself, his in- dividuality. His stock illustration of this is the rolling snowball: "My mental state," he says, "as it advances on the road of time, is continually swelling with the dura- tion which it accumulates; it goes on in- creasing — rolling upon itself, as a snowball on the snow."^ "The past follows us at every instant; all that we have thought, felt, and willed from our earliest infancy is there, leaning over the present which is about to join it, pressing against the portals of consciousness that would fain leave it outside. . . . What are we, in fact, what is our character, if not the condensation of the history we have lived from our birth — nay, even before our birth, since we bring with us prenatal dispositions."^ * Creative Evolution, p. 2. ^ Creative Evolution, pp. 4, 5. 149 PERSON ALISM AND THE To understand the implication of this doctrine it is necessary to pause and ask ourselves a few pertinent questions. Granted that time is but a bastard space, and is nothing apart from experience. Is it not something apart from my individual experience.^ Granted that I derive my sense of duration from my own past states. What gives me power to go beyond my individual experience.^ If time is nothing apart from individual experiences, how can any two of us come by the same calendar? Why does my time coincide with yours .'^ Why is my sense of time greater, the fewer the experiences that fill my day, and shorter, the more multiplied these ex- periences.'^ If this duration is myself and at the same time a consciousness, why is it that all memories are not with me at the same moment, and all are not equally at my command? How does attention come in to fix some events indelibly in my mind while I may deliberately choose to reject others? Is not this power of choice, this principle of freedom, something apart from the mere consciousness, possessing in itself the power 150 PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY of direction? How, having never ex- perienced it in consciousness, can I exer- cise the historical sense? To avoid the deadlock raised by such questions as these, we are told of racial memories passed along from generation to generation. Much language is used to de- scribe an imaginary stream or current of life. We have been warned to beware of abstraction in speaking of life, but now it seems expedient to say: "At a certain mo- ment, at certain points in space, a visible current has taken rise; this current of life, traversing the bodies it has organized one after another, passing from generation to generation, has become divided amongst spe- cies and distributed amongst individuals without losing anything of its force. "^ Thus have we fallen into that very fallacy of abstraction against which Bergson had warned us. If there is a racial memory which flows along with and is a part of this current of life, just what is it, speaking concretely? It remains to be proved that we can inherit * Creative Evolution, p. 26. 151 PERSONALISM AND THE the intellectual ideas of our ancestors. More's the pity for many of us. But it seems reasonable to say that there can be no experience apart from an experiencing intelligence. How, then, can the expe- riences of my own immediate ancestors, not to mention those of my cousins and my aunts, become the property of my con- sciousness until they are grasped through an effort of my intelligence.'^ Here it is evident our progress was only verbal. Further: if time is duration, we must ask, "For whom?" Events can be gathered up and related only by a consciousness which not only endures, but is also a self- relating personality. This personality can relate itself to events outside of its ex- perience only as they and it jBnd relation through a higher, self-relating Personality, which is not fragmentary, but which knows all. The '*Vital Impulse" Assumed for the Sake of Freedom To free the individual from becoming a mere mechanism whose present is the pro- 152 PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY duct of past states, and to give place to initiative, Bergson introduces the factor which he calls the "vital impulse." He says: "The role of life is to insert some indetermination into matter. Indetermi- nate, i. e., unforeseeable, are the forias it creates in the course of its evolution."^ It is the "vital impulse" which gives rise to new possibilities. It is the source and ex- planation of evolution. Instead of a closed mechanical universe, we have one in which any miracle may occur. While avoiding a universe of mechanism on the one hand, and a fore-ordered w^orld on the other, he seems to choose a world in which God him- self cannot know what is going to happen. It is difficult to see how in such a scheme it is possible to preserve any order of nature whatever. All purpose, order, or pre- dictableness is especially horrifying as im- plying a closed system and an absence of freedom. The "vital impulse" raised to the power of a self-directive intelligent person- ality would give ground, not only for freedom, but also for the usual order of ^ Creative Evolution, p. 126. 153 PERSONALISM AND THE phenomena. The very order of occurrence would be based upon such a Supreme Will. By gaining freedom without such a Per- sonality Bergson undoes the possibility of a unitary world of relations. This con- clusion has been very well brought out by the criticism of a well-known writer: "If for the magic power of types invoked by Aristotle we substituted, with M. Bergson, the magic power of the ^elan vital," that is, of evolution in general, we should be re- ferring events not to finer, more familiar, more pervasive processes, but to one all- embracing process, unique and always in- complete. Our understanding would end in something far vaguer and looser than what our observation began with. Aris- totle at least could refer particulars to their specific types, as medicine and social science are still glad enough to do, to help them in guessing and in making a learned show be- fore the public. But if divination and eloquence — for science is out of the ques- tion — were to invoke nothing but a fluid tendency to grow, we should be left with a flat history of phenomena and no means of 154 PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY prediction or even classification. All knowl- edge would be reduced to gossip, infinitely diffuse, perhaps enlisting our dramatic feel- ings, but yielding no intellectual mastery of experience, no practical competence, and no moral lesson. The world would be a serial novel, to be continued forever, and all men mere novel readers."^ A Harmony Due to Identity of Impulsion Having rejected both radical mechanism and radical finalism, Bergson attributes those harmonies in nature that have fur- nished materials for the teleological argument of theology to an identity of impulsion rather than to an aspiration after any future goal existent in the mind of a Creator. He says: "If the evolution of life is something other than a series of adapta- tions to accidental circumstances, so also it is not the realization of a plan. A plan is given in advance. It is represented, or at least represen table, before its realization."^ * Santayana, Winds of Doctrine, p, 68. * Creative Evolution, p. 52. 155 PERSONALISM AND THE Such harmony, he conchides, would be won only at the expense of freedom. *'If, on the contrary, the unity of life is to be found solely in the impetus that pushes it along the road of time, the harmony is not in front, but behind."^" At this point we ought to stop and take inventory of our ideas to be saved from being swept along on the wave of undefined terms. What do we mean by unity of life.'^ Is the "impetus" something that survives the passage of time and events. If there is to be a continuity in an impetus, something must keep its identity. Just what would the identity of a changing impetus be.^^ We cannot have identity without something to be identical. To have consciousness of change there must be an abiding element that survives change. Personality is the only reality in life which we can actually posit as causing or experiencing change and yet itself maintaining its identity. Is the "vital impulse," then, an unchanging per- sonality? If it is not (and we are given no such clue to its nature), then all must have 1" Creative Evolution, p. 103. 156 PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY been set going in some past time. In that case we have not escaped from the closed system Bergson seeks to avoid, but have, rather, fallen back into the pit. If it is not a personality, and yet acts in the present in lives so diverse as Mr. Bergson's and mine, of what does the unity consist.'^ Out of this positing of the "vital im- petus" grows Bergson's definition of God: "God has nothing of the already made; he is unceasing life, action, freedom. Creation, so conceived, is not a mystery; we expe- rience it ourselves when we act freely."^^ By this definition he hopes to escape the dilemma just mentioned. This is because he senses the fact that his problem cannot be met on the impersonal plane. It remains to inquire if the God of his definition is suffi- cient for the need. To provide the necessary impetus we have a growing, changing, be- coming God. The question at once arises as to how a becoming God, who is himself a part of the general movement, could, with a constantly changing mind, outlook, and purpose, furnish an identity of impulsion. " Creative Evolution, pp. 104, 105. 157 PERSONALISM AND THE Where are we to find the looked-for har- mony? Will the harmony be for this day, this hour, or this minute? It includes all? Then we cannot avoid pantheism, and every kind of impulse, criminal and saintly, the strange gamut of human heroism and beastliness, are a part of God and issue from the "vital impetus." We have crawled in by the cellar window to find ourselves once more in the pent-up quarters of Abso- lutism, out of the front door of which we recently marched with drums beating and banners flaunting. What Eucken says of the spiritual life is here equally applicable to the thought of a becoming God: "Spirit- ual life must never be understood as an entire Becoming — as a mere Process — for, if this were the case. Truth would become the mere slave of its age; and such a state of things would mean an inner destruction of Truth. "^2 In the same way a becoming God falls prey to his own creation, is no God. But Bergson's object in positing a God is to provide a ground of duration which shall 12 Eucken, Knowledge and Life, p. 228. 158 PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY include all human experiences of duration. We have already noted the timeless element necessary to all consciousness of change. If we are to have a God who will be a real Ground, he must himself be more than a creation of time, else there is nothing in the thought of duration as Bergson employs the term. But we cannot admit the assump- tion of a God not a creation of time without being led far afield from Bergson's stand- point. Bowne has well expressed the rela- tion of the Supreme Being to time in his discussion of the Kantian philosophy: "The bringing of the present with the resultant time judgment into relation to activity greatly modifies the subject. We call those things present which we possess in the certain immediacy of consciousness, and if we possessed all our experiences in a similar immediacy, the whole experience would be present in the same sense. There would still be a certain order of arrangement among the factors of experience which could not arbitrarily be modified, but all the mem- bers of the series would be equally present to the consciousness. If, now, there were a 159 PERSONALISM AND THE being who could retain all the facts of his experience in the same immediacy, he would have no past. And, further, if such a being were in full possession of himself, so as to be under no law of development and possessing no unrealized potentialities, he would also have no future, at least so far as his own existence might be concerned. His present world would be all-embracing, and his now would be eternal. These considerations modify our judgment of the subjectivity of time very profoundly. Taking up once more the question, Are we in time.^ we see that it has several meanings and the an- swers must vary to correspond. If it means, Are things and events in a real time which flows on independently of them.f' the answer must be, No. If it means, Does our ex- perience have the temporal form.'^ the an- swer must be. Yes. If we further inquire about the possibility of transcending tem- poral limitations, it is clear that this can be affirmed only of the Absolute Being, for only in him do we find that complete self- possession which the transcendence of time would mean. Nontemporality, then, in the 160 PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY concrete sense cannot be reached by passing behind the world of phenomena into the world of noumena, but, rather, and only by rising above the sphere of the finite into the absolute self-possession of the infinite. "^^ Bergson lacks what Bowne had so clearly, a Personal World-Ground, himself the un- changing Cause of change. Bergson leaves out of reckoning that purpose which makes humanity great. For man is indeed great in the universe and the lord of all only as be- hind his little and short-sighted purpose lies a deeper Purpose which is also a Person. In this connection my attention has been called to a letter written by Mr. Bergson to Father Joseph de Tonquedec, S. J., and quoted in a recent review of Bergson's philosophy :^^ "I speak of God (pp. 268-272 of L'Evo- lution Creatrice) as of the source whence issue successively, by an effect of his free- dom, the 'currents' or 'impulses' each of which will make a world; he therefore, re- 1^ Bowne, Kant and Spencer, pp. 158, 159. " Ruhe and Paul, Henri Bergson, an Account of his Life and_PhiIosophy, p. 42. 161 PERSONALISM AND THE mains distinct from them, and it is not of him that we can say that 'most often it turns aside' or it is 'at the mercy of the materiahty that it has been bound to adopt.' "... Again he is quoted as saying: "From all this emerges clearly the idea of a God, Creator and free, the generator of both matter and life, whose work of creation is continued on the side of life by the evolu- tion of species and the building up of human personalities. From all this emerges, conse- quently, a refutation of monism and of pantheism in general. "^^ The reply to this is that if Mr. Bergson wishes to hold to this conception of God, he must modify his system. He here assumes that God is made free by fiat. This state- ment does not remove the yoke of necessity which must ever hang about the neck of a Being whose mind, thought, and moral character are in process of becoming — that is, who is himself a creature of time. It is not enough to affirm that God always ex- isted. We must go still further and ask what he was at first. In the case of a be- ^ Ibid., p. 44. 162 PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY coming God he may not have been God in the beginning. He may have grown to that estate. Mental and moral perfection and timelessness, in other words, are neces- sary to our thought of God. A lesser Being may be a blind demiurge, but possessing no personality, becomes inevitably the victim of his own world. If Mr. Bergson wishes to avoid a pantheistic God, it devolves upon him to modify his philosophy, and to so clear his definitions that a pantheistic God will not be implied. His Doctrine of Knowledge We must not leave this brief review of Bergson's system without looking at his doctrine of intelligence and intuition as contrasting forms of knowledge. He sug- gests that intuition really gets nearer to life, while intellect is, by the nature of the mind, bound to the rigors of geometrical ex- planation. The knowledge gained by in- tuition is, however, intensive, and applicable only in a realm of limited life. But intelli- gence is able to transcend itself: "There are things that intelligence alone is able to 163 PERSONALISM AND THE seek, but which, by itself, it will never find. These things instinct alone could find; but it will never seek them."^® Intuition leads us to the very inwardness of life. Intelligence, however, had the abil- ity to turn inward on itself and to "awaken the potentialities of intuition which slumber within it."^^ Intuition "is a lamp almost extinguished, which only glimmers now and then, for a few moments at most. But it glimmers wherever a vital interest is at stake. On our personality, on our liberty, on the place we occupy in the whole of nature, on our origin, and perhaps also on cur destiny, it throws a light feeble and vacillating, but none the less pierces the darkness of the night in which the intellect leaves us. . . . Philosophy introduces us thus into the spiritual life. And it shows us at the same time the relation of the life of the spirit to that of the body. ... A philosophy of intuition will be a negation of science, will be sooner or later swept away by science, if it does not resolve to see the '^ Creative Evolution, p. 151. " Ibid., p. 182. 164 PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY life of the body just where it really is, on the road that leads to the life of the spirit. But it will then no longer have to do with definite living beings. Life as a whole from the initial impulsion that thrust it into the world will appear as a wave which rises, and which is opposed by the de- scending movement of matter. On the greater part of its surface, at different heights, the current is converted by matter into a vortex. At one point alone it passes freely, dragging with it the obstacle which will weigh on its progress, but will not stop it. At this point is humanity; it is our privileged situation. On the other hand, this rising wave is consciousness, and, like all consciousness, it includes potentialities without number which interpenetrate and to which consequently neither the category of unity nor that of multiplicity is appropriate, made as they both are for inert matter. The matter that it bears along with it and in the interstices of which it inserts itself, alone can divide it into distinct individuali- ties. On flows the current, running through human generations, subdividing itself into 165 PERSONALISM AND THE individuals. This subdivision was vaguely indicated in it, but could not have been made clear without matter. Thus souls are continually being created, which neverthe- less, in a certain sense, preexisted. . . . All the living hold together, and all yield to the same tremendous push. The animal takes its stand on the plant, man bestrides ani- mality, and the whole of humanity, in space and in time, is one immense army galloping beside and before and behind each of us in an overwhelming charge able to beat down every resistance and clear the most formid- able obstacles, perhaps even death."^^ It seems a pity to disturb the grandeur of words that for abstraction would do credit to the absolute philosophy itself. Out of the mazes two pertinent questions arise. The first has respect to the intuitive nature of religion and its contrast with anything in- tellectual. If intuitive knowledge is closer to life, and religion is grasped by intuition alone, why does not the savage possess the highest form of religion .^^ To ask this ques- tion is to perceive its answer. To follow " Creative Evolution, pp. 269-271. 166 PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY reason in religion instead of blind impulse is to be moral and to attain the highest reaches of character. Religion without the intellectual content has ever proved un- worthy and inadequate. Furthermore, if we are to posit any reality in "the life of the spirit," we must provide some ground for it in the "vital impulse" with its essence of Becoming. If we do this, we shall have a God who is only growing from wickedness to righteousness, and we obtain a reversal of moral standards and responsibilities. The second question arises out of the statement that the life of the spirit will "no longer have to do with definite living being." We at once ask what such a life of the spirit would mean, and what it would amount to if it meant anything. By the definition it could mean nothing for human beings; and if it meant anything to God or to the "vital impulse," we would have no means of ascer- taining. All of which goes to show that we have been regaled with a form of words and a sound of wisdom. That Bergson has done a real service to philosophy by calling attention to intelli- 167 PERSONALISM AND THE gence and intuition as contrasting forms of knowledge cannot be gainsaid. The idea is vast in its possibility of explaining the ab- normalities of genius, the uniqueness of Jesus, the authority of divine revelation, and the possibility of revelation to those who, untrained in the schools, are yet open to the deepest voices of our being. Berg- son's proclamation of the value of the common intuitions, the possibility of the possession of the deepest insights by the unlettered, is one of the things that have drawn to him great popular attention. But that his ideas lack the metaphysical ground- ing that would make them most effective must be admitted. The truth of this state- ment will never be more evident than upon comparison of the abstractions of Berg- son's impersonalism with the directness of Bowne's personalism. 168 PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY CHAPTER XI EUCKEN— THE RETURN TO SPIRITUAL VERITY So many excellent expositions and reviews of the important work of this leading thinker of the present time have already appeared that it is here unnecessary to do more than touch upon the few leading features of his system in order to gather the affinity and relation- ship of his thought with that of Bowne. The two thinkers possess essential fea- tures in common. There was between them the warmest personal regard and mutual appreciation. Their harmony was arrived at quite independently, though both had been pupils of Lotze. We are told that the young Eucken was not favorably impressed with Lotze, and after a short time at Got- tingen passed on to another university. On the other hand, Bowne is most often known for his likeness to his former teacher. The similarities between Bowne and Eucken, however, lie, rather, along the line of the 169 PERSONALISM AND THE positions to which Bowne advanced inde- pendently of Lotze. The strength of the latter lay, rather, in his dialectic and in his power of clear criticism than in construc- tiveness and advance. Reality Must Include More Than Things, and More Than Ideas Eucken opposes the pretensions of the naturalistic school to include the whole world in the experience of phenomena, which leads direct to skepticism and the denial of knowledge. He also takes issue with the Absolute Philosophy, which would confine all truth to vague and shadowy ideas. He will not deny reality to the ob- jective world, nor will he allow that the world of thought is of itself complete. He points, rather, to the value of the ideal as something toward which man may bend his energies in achievement. It is possible for intellect to arrive at great and inspiring ideals, but these find content and value only as they are achieved. He points out the impossibility of moral victory and of progress in history and civilization, if man 170 PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY is to be left at the dead level of a phenomenal and disunited world. It is the power of intellectual synthesis which enables man to apprehend truth and then by actual strug- gle to make the truth his own in character. In this "activism" Euckcn would unite the subjective and objective worlds, the clue to whose relationship he finds in the life of the spirit. The spiritual in man is thus seen as something not so indefinite as to be a mere bringer of individual peace and comfort, as has often been the case with the followers of absolutism. Nothing is really had apart from struggle and the realization of the ideal in life. Spiritual truth, from being a wandering child of intellect or emotion, be- comes a fundamental fact, the fundamental reality, for in its outworking it is the highest expression of man's very being. Truth Must Have a Common Validity Though insisting that ideal truth must find its value and verification in actual liv- ing, Eucken would resent being classed as a pragmatist according to the type of William James. He saves his pragmatic test of the 171 PERSONALISM AND THE reality of the ideal from falling into the pluralistic confusion of the latter by assert- ing the universal validity of truth. Truth has an authoritative validity far above the power of individual thought or caprice. James' repugnance to all general ideas and to all absolute standards led him to a view of truth which made it the victim of the individual notion, the individual himself being the sole judge of what is useful, good, and, therefore, true. No one has shown more clearly than Eucken the absurdity and worthlessness of a truth whose only norm is its utility for the individual on a given occasion. To make the truth thus the prey of individual choices, of individual standards of judgment and states of civiliza- tion, is to destroy its own inner character. So while bringing all ideals to the pragmatic test of action, he would claim for them a validity outlasting the moment of realiza- tion by a single individual. The great norms of truth lift themselves up like mountains in the moral consciousness of men as some- thing worthy to be achieved, and will ever so lift themselves, independent of the moral 172 PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY failure to achieve, either on the part of any one man, or of any class of men, or of an epoch or an age. Thus Eucken assumes theism as the very ground of truth. "We look at nature very differently from our forefathers. It no longer seems to us a realm of soulful harmony and blessed peace, but, rather, a complex riddle, the arena on which a perpetual struggle for existence is being enacted. Men too, in the wild vortex of political and social struggles, lose the romantic glory of former days ; and even the exaltation of personality so usual to-day, of its grandeur, dignity, and so on — unless grounded on something greater and deeper — becomes merely a hollow and irrelevant phrase, especially in an age which so forces upon our notice the smallness and self- seeking of man. As things stand the only choice is between theism and atheism."^ Eucken's Personal Idealism, the Reali- zation OF THE Life of the Spirit It will be readily seen that Eucken's in- terests lie naturally with idealism in that he 1 Eucken, Can We Still Be Christians? p. 144. 173 PERSONALISM AND THE defends and maintains the necessity of the ideal to all true progress. He does not thereby, however, commit himself to that system of necessity in which intellectualism finds itself. Reality lies, not in the Divine as a passive thing, but, rather, in its realization, in its springing into action in the concrete. At the same time that he thus makes place for freedom and initiative he escapes that pantheism into which abso- lute idealism inevitably falls. The only dif- ference here between Eucken and Bowne is one of emphasis rather then essence. Bowne brings his thought to great clear- ness and definiteness by gathering it up into his definition of personality. The difference is not constitutional. It has been Bowne's distinctive task to develop the idea of per- sonality. Eucken's peculiar work has been to emphasize the place and reality of the life of the spirit. The Absence of the Christological Interest There is at one point an essential differ- ence between Bowne and Eucken. This is 174 PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY at the point which affects the Christological interest, which is a very important part of Bowne's system. With Eucken, the appear- ance of the Deity in a historic point of time, speaking hkewise an eternal message, is un- thinkable. The realization of the moral idea agrees inevitably with a slow advance toward such an ideal. The ideal itself is affected by its reahzation. Any revelation of a perfect ideal in a historic personality seems to him to put a stop to struggle and progress. To him such revelation is incon- gruous with imperfect human comprehen- sion and achievement. Eucken himself tells us of the impossibility of the atheistic stand- point and assumes theism as the necessary moral grounding of the ideal which lifts it above the individual judgments and ca- prices of men to universal validity. To Bowne this very view would demand the incarnation for its completion. Eucken has spoken of love as a manifestation of this universally valid moral ideal. Yet it would be impossible in a world of pain and error, of human vanity and failure, of ruthless and crushing brute force, to conceive of love as 175 PERSONALISM AND THE the possession of the Supreme Moral Being unless we had been directed to it through the life of Jesus himself. The incarnation becomes in the experience of man the most effective spur to the realization of that ideal. The deity of Jesus hinges upon this moral necessity. We have again and again in human history the example of men in a supreme self-renunciation giving their lives for the realization of the higher moral aims and happiness of their fellow men. What shall we conclude concerning a magnified personality, the abode of absolute ideals, who can do no more than give advice by which to offset the disheartening evils and the crushing sorrows of the world .^^ Without an incarnation man would himself be cap- able of a moral grandeur and outlook of which God would give no evidence. The incarnation is necessary to save the thought of moral perfection in God. An incarnation past or an incarnation to come would seem to Bowne to be implied by the demands of thought. "If God had filled space and time with inanimate worlds, that would have revealed 176 PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY only power and skill. If he had filled the world with pleasure-giving contrivances, that would have revealed benevolence. If he had sent us prophets and teachers at no real cost to himself, that too would be something; but it would not greatly stir our hearts toward God. Our love would go out to the prophets and teachers themselves, for the toil and pain would fall on them. In all beneficence of this sort God would appear simply as a rich man who out of his abundance scatters bounty to the needy, but at no cost to himself. A certain grati- tude would indeed be possible, but along this line God would forever remain morally below the moral heroes of our race. Their gifts cost. They put themselves and their hearts into their work. They attain to the morality of self-sacrifice, and this is in- finitely beyond the morality of any giving that does not cost. And there must ever be a higher moral possibility until we reach the revelation of God in self-sacrifice, until God becomes the chief of burden-bearers and the leader of all in self-abnegation. . . . Thus the power of God's revelation has 177 PERSONALISM AND THE its chief source in the incarnation. And we may be perfectly sure that no lower con- ception of God will permanently command the minds and hearts of men. We should not have reached the conception ourselves, but now that it has been revealed to us, we see that something of the kind is a moral necessity if we are to think the highest thought of God. And there is a peculiar dialectic in human thought whereby we are compelled to think of God as perfect or not at all. An imperfect God is none. As soon as a higher conception emerges we must adopt it into our thought of God or see our faith in him fade out until it vanishes alto- gether. A fairly good God we cannot abide. We can be satisfied with nothing less than the supreme and the perfect. Hence it is that the Christian thought of God wins its way. It is the only one worthy of God or man. '• How God could empty himself to become a partaker in human toils and sorrows will remain, of course, inexplicable. It will also remain bej^ond our comprehension how a * Bowne, Studies in Christianity, pp. 96, 104. 178 PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY timeless personality could reveal himself to any part of his world in any degree, or, in revealing the moral ideal to man, consent to work under the limitations of time. The particular ground of this difficulty is in the confusing of the power world with the space and time world. If, however, the debate should rage about the thought of the possession by the historic Jesus in the flesh of all the divine powers and attributes in order to establish his Deity, we have recourse to the theory of the Kenosis. We believe his deity is sufficiently verified by the revelation of perfect moral character which formed the supreme object of his revelation. The deity of Jesus is proved neither by genealogy nor miracle in themselves. The character and personality of Jesus is the world's great miracle. The most con- vincing test for the present age is to be found in the essentially universal master- ship of the character of Jesus, and his ability to satisfy the moral and spiritual demands of all classes and conditions of men. No other man, prophet or hero, ever lived that could 179 PERSONALISM AND THE for any length of time, for all races of man, fuliBll in his own character their highest ideal of the character of God. Eucken speaks of him as classified with other great geniuses. Viewed from the single standpoint of his teaching of moral truth, this might be. One might come with transcendent spirit- ual insight to do for the realm of religion what Shakespeare and Mozart have done in the realm of literature and music. But great genius has too often been common- place in morals and in ideals. There is no certainty that a future age may not produce a greater master than either. The love and the passion of Jesus, his revelation of the moral character of God, can never be transcended so long as humanity shall re- tain its essential nature. But Jesus is much more than the teacher of a truth which has not been transcended. In the case of spirit- ual revelation, the personality of the teacher is quite as important as his message. Not only are his truths compelling for all classes of men, his personality has never been transcended as the supreme goal of man's achievement. He thus remains undimmed 180 PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY above the march of ages, and every moral advance of the race but serves to increase the appreciation in which he is held. The actual test between Jesus and other geniuses is to be found in his character, in himself. His deity is to be read in the universal compulsion and validity of his order of life. Incarnation is the easiest and most satisfying explanation of the character of Jesus. All others break down. Disagreement with his Christological views is likely to blind the eyes of many of the most conscientious to the greatness and the importance to religion of the work of Rudolf Eucken. He easily represents the supreme philosophical message of our day, and his constructive work and leadership promises to wield a profound influence in the cause of faith. His voice comes to liis time like that of one of the Hebrew prophets, when the age engrossed in the pursuit of material things was forgetting that it had a soul at all. He speaks to an age that in its scientific thinking has steadily barred out the spiritual as an illusion and a dream. He speaks to a world of philosophy which 181 PERSONALISM AND THE to a large degree has lost its way in the meshes of skepticism and materialism. And his word is ever for the reality of the higher things of the spirit, in behalf of the neces- sity for the moral regeneration of man, and the life that is lived in conscious harmony with God. He shows in phrases of beauty and convincing power that though a man possess the whole world, if he loses his own soul he has utterly failed. For back of all our getting and enjoying the fundamental truth of life is the spiritual. Adapting an old, old thought, the chief end of man is the realization of God. 182 PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY CHAPTER XII BOWNE'S PERSONALISM AND THE PROBLEMS OF LIFE At the risk of repetition, it may be well to touch upon the relation of Personalism to some of the problems of life. Bowne saw, as few others, how impossible it is to account for an intelligible and orderly world, for knowledge and for spiritual reality, on the plane of the impersonal. This was his distinctive contribution to philosophy. So clear was his criticism along this line that all metaphysical thinking will be forced to take account of it. Unity Possible Only Through Personalism Personalism is the most reasonable solu- tion of the problem of unity. A unity ob- tained by assuming a unitary substance must inevitably negate the reality of knowl- edge, mind, and spirit. A unity which is won by lifting time and space into realities 183 PERSONALISM AND THE independent of all intelligence, involves confusion no less than that of materialism. Time as duration cannot be thought with- out a clearly defined personality which is more than consciousness, more than memory, self-directing and free. Change and identity are irreconcilable except through an abiding Personality surviving above their fluctua- tions. A unity obtained by assuming an Absolute of whose thought the world is but the outworking, ends in a pantheism fatal to all freedom or individuality. If instead of naming a vague Absolute as the ground of all things, we assume a free Personality upholding the world of things, and the world of spirits endowed by him with a freedom akin to his own, then all is well. There exists, then, no insoluble problem of how the mind can grasp matter or of how its knowledge can represent reality. It is no longer necessary to attempt the tracing of matter and motion and molecular change into the brain cells to account for an idea of beauty or an aspiration of the soul after God. We note for scientific or pathological purposes the physical changes and the psy- 184 PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY chological results, but we no longer dream that we have grasped all the faetors in the process, nor do we relegate to the realm of unreality all that our investigation fails to explain. We think truly of the world of matter because the world of matter is founded in an Intelligence related to our own. The mind and the world are by their very nature prepared to correspond and co- operate, and both find synthesis and agree- ment in that intelligent Personality which is able to grasp all and to act in all. There is no longer a conflict between science and religion, because the laws of nature are seen as the self-imposed ways of the Divine in bringing forth the order of change. Natural laws are not erected into an independent system in which God is a slave, for they are but the uniformities of his activity. The deductions which we draw from the order of sequence are not to be given a causal efficiency. Personalism and Freedom We thus come to the problem of freedom and necessity. Freedom is not provided for 185 PERSONALISM AND THE in any naturalistic scheme whatever. This is not alone because of innate or a priori ideas which cannot be traced to experience. It is not merely inability to trace the products of reflection to appropriate nervous excitations. The power of self -directing per- sonality to introduce its own will as a new factor into the order of nature is too evident in common experience to be overlooked. This introduction of purpose to modify the natural processes is something of which nature herself is evidently incapable. The mechanical system of causation would not only deprive man of individuality, but would preclude the possibility of moral action. The outcome of absolutism of the extreme type is very close to that of materialism despite their wide difference of spirit and of aim. Absolutism, seeing in all a manifesta- tion of the Divine Idea, cannot escape mak- ing God a moral monster, responsible for the weaknesses, errors, and sins of men. By the same token man would be no longer morally responsible, because he would not be free. He would be but the unresisting tool 186 PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY through which the Divine works somctiraes good and sometimes ill. On the personal plane we can affirm a good and perfect God who has given to man a personality measurably like his own, free to act in accordance with or against the Divine will. Moral action is of like nature in God and man, being voluntarily chosen in distinction from wrong. Man becomes thus morally responsible, and his freedom to make a confusion of God's world is a gift to which he is to be held strictly to account. He is no longer to be considered as giving forth the thoughts and activities to which he is compelled by physical en- vironment, nor is he an automaton, finding all his thoughts of holiness or wickedness inspired by the Eternal, the manifestations of whose thought under the absolutist scheme, they would be. Personalism and the Problem of Evil The schools of idealism and of material- ism find equal difficulty when they face the problem of evil. If one were compelled to choose between the two, the dilemma which 187 PERSONALISM AND THE they present is this: either a God who is as responsible for evil as he is for good, or a world that is essentially unmoral. In either case it would be impossible to hold to indi- vidual moral responsibility. No doubt if all the wrong that springs from immoral think- ing and acting were eliminated, the great mass of evil that depresses man and creates his problem would be done away. Still there would remain the mysteries of pain and death, and for these it would at first seem almost impossible to clear the Infinite Personality. This point is the rock on which theism is supposed to wreck itself. One thing is certain: there can be no satisfactory solution for human spirits along the line of blind, purposeless, impersonal causation. If our sorrows, griefs, and ills are not for discipline after some manner, we have simply to cry into the dark. We may not be able to satisfy our minds, but we certainly cannot satisfy our souls except through assuming a divine purpose which works good in our behalf through pain. When to the demand of our spirits we add the consciousness of our limitations in 188 PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY knowledge and our lack of understanding of disciplines which have afterward proved the most substantial blessings, we can see how an Intelligence not bound to the temporal form of experience, seeing the end from the beginning, in view of the moral discipline attained, might account the whole course as very good. Why discipline should be neces- sary is a question bound up with that of the attainment of character. That it is neces- sary is a commonplace of experience. If the further question of the suffering of the innocent for the guilty is invoked, we can only say that, in such a case, suffering is a contribution to the moral progress of the world. Voluntarily accepted, it becomes to the sufferer, by that strange mystery of personality, the deepest and most satisfying joy that life can give. If to this thought should be added the thought of the Creator of all entering with moral fullness into human life and giving himself for the moral welfare of his creatures, we should at once make possible the maintenance of theism in the face of the problem of evil. This as- sumption would also be in strict keeping 189 PERSONALISM AND THE with the deepest facts of religion and of Hfe. In the world around us we begin to see On every side Great hints of Him go by — Souls that are hourly crucified On some new Calvary! In flower and dust, in chaff and grain. He binds Himself and dies! We live by His eternal pain. His hourly sacrifice.^ What of death, that last but not most inexplicable of mysteries? No man who has had wide experience of life is unaware that in a world of physical and moral in- firmity there frequently arise situations to which death itself is a welcome relief. Here, as before, there is no explanation on the impersonal plane. The world has too often witnessed the cynicism and moral flabbiness of those who assume that there is no sur- vival of death. That assumption has long been proved as not the road that leads to high moral achievement and the enrich- ment of life with things most precious. So * Noyes, "Vicisti Galileae," Collected Poems, vol. i, p. 244. 190 PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY much there is for the practical side of the argument. On the theoretical side is still another consideration. In our knowledge we are shut up to the present order of existence. We cannot look at life from the standpoint of any other order. It might be that to see it from another order would transmute death into blessed good fortune, the thing most to be desired. It might indeed, be found that *'Death is but a change of key. In life the golden melody." On the personal plane, then, if we can trust the wisdom of the Supreme Personal Intelli- gence, even the last of the dark problems, if not finding abstract solution, may yet find one sufficient for the individual need. Even Henley, with liis sense of pessimism, could come to look on death with complacency as the benediction of a departing day, thrilled with the sense of the triumphing night, Night with her train of stars And her great gift of sleep. In this mood he could pray with a steady courage, 191 PERSONALISM AND THE "So be my passing! My task accomplished and the long day done. My wages taken, and in my heart Some late lark singing." Here too he came to look for the solution of earthly misunderstanding and irrecon- cilable ills as voiced in lines said to have been addressed to Robert Louis Steven- son: O Death and Time they chime and chime Like bells at sunset falling! They end the song, they right the wrong. They set the old echoes calling: For Death and Time bring on the prime Of God's own chosen weather. And we lie in the peace of the Great Release As once in the grass together. It is not only impossible to face the prob- lem of evil with any satisfaction apart from the personalistic view. The problem can never be solved in the abstract. It must be solved in each particular case as it arises. In some cases this seems quite im- possible, but in most death comes as a benevolence to the individual, second only to birth itself. For, after all, the value of 192 PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY a life is not determined by its length, but by its realization of the highest things. Let the great winds their worst and wildest blow. Or the gold weather mellow round us slow: We have fulfilled ourselves, and we can dare And we can conquer. Personality is surely the richest gift of man, and who can deny that it is likewise the supreme possession of God.'^ Mr. James has said in his Pluralistic Uni- verse: "A man's vision is the great fact about him. A philosophy is the expression of a man's intimate character, and all the definitions of the universe are but the de- liberately adopted reactions of human char- acters upon it." This was particularly true of Bowne. It, as much as his philosophy, was the source of his deep and widening influence. Men gathered from east and west to hear his teaching with varying preparation and adaptability for philosoph- ical endeavor. The intellectual rewards which they carried away were as varied as the men who came, but all had this in common: each was certain that he had felt 193 PERSONALISM AND THE the touch of a master spirit. They were one in a feehng of exaltation and inspira- tion. Wherever they have gone to the various tasks of business or professional life, or social ministry, they have gone even to the ends of the earth in a new, high sense of the greatness and meaning of life and with a loyalty that time cannot dim. If two such meet in the antipodes, the common meeting ground is "Did you take Bowne's work.^^" The underlying sig- nificance of all this is the inspiration of an unusual personality, a mind that rang so true that it satisfied the most questioning youth, a vision and an insight which lifted the student into the heights and enabled him to grasp the relations of life to the world, to man, and to God. Accused by the shallow-minded of heresy, the strong re- ligious tone of all Bowne's teaching was its predominant characteristic. This was the very point most criticized by his philo- sophical contemporaries, to whom the rec- ognition of religious verity was a sign of philosophical weakness. The religious note was never wanting as he unfolded to his 194 PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY eager students the thought of the great minds of the centuries. Never did he fail to draw them in perspective to the thought of One who was his Master. We "Watched the great hills, like clouds arise and set; And one named Olivet" was never missing from the horizon. For this reason he was at the close of life fitted as perhaps no other man of his time for great constructive religious and intellectual leadership. lie was already be- ginning to influence profoundly the thought of the Orient as he had already influenced many in the West. It was his distinction to be almost better known in Germany than at home. His loyalty to an institution kept him from entering into that large measure of recognition that might have come to him earlier. So far as human judgment can dis- cern, he is gone too soon. But his work will live. It was done so truly, so conscien- tiously, so greatly, that its influence is certain to deepen with the passing years. This will prove true in that age which we feel is just at hand, when men will more 195 PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY generally recognize the inadequacy of great thinking which is lacking in reverence and respect for the profounder realities and problems of our mortal life. There is that in the work of Bowne that answers to the deepest spiritual questionings, and in death as in life he can await the judgment of the years unhumiliated and unafraid. 196 BIBLIOGRAPHY Included in this list are the titles which have been found most helpful in the particular field covered. It does not aim to be exhaustive. General Adamson, Development of Modern Philosophy. Bowne, Metaphysics. Bowne, Personalism. Bowne, Philosophy of Theism. Bowne, Studies in Christianity. Bowne, The Essence of Religion. Bowne, Theory of Thought and Knowledge. Caird, Problems of Philosophy at the Present Time. Dewmg, Introduction to the History of Modern Philosophy. Eucken, The Problem of Human Life. Hoffding, History of Modern Philosophy. Janet and Sailles, History of the Problems of Philosophy. Klilpe, Philosophy of the Present in Germany. Pfleiderer, Philosophy and Development of Religion. Windelband, History of Philosophy. 197 BIBLIOGRAPHY Ancient Philosophy Adamson, Development of Greek Philosophy. Aristotle, Logic. Aristotle, Metaphysics. Eucken, Fundamental Concepts of Modern Thought. Eucken, Life's Basis and Life's Ideal. Gompers, Greek Thinkers. Materialism Bowne, Kant and Spencer. Eucken, The Truth of Religion. Hoffding, Influence of the Conception of Evolution. Lange, History of Materialism. Kant Bowne, Kant and Spencer. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason. Stahlin, Kant, Lotze, and Ritschl (Reply to Lange, Materialism) . Lotze Caspari, Hermann Lotze, etc., pp. 4 and 53. Falckenberg, Hermann Lotze. Jones, Critical Account of the Philosophy of Lotze. Kiilpe, Philosophy of the Present in Germany (Lotze chapter). Lotze, Metaphysics. Lotze, Microcosmus. Pfleiderer, Lotze's philosophische Weltanschauung nach ihren Grundzugen. (Sympathetic treat- ment.) 198 BIBLIOGRAPHY Schiller, Humanism (Reference to Lotze). Seth, Development from Kant to Hegel. Pragmatism Bawden, Principles of Pragmatism, Berthelot, Un Romantisme utilitaire (Volume II contains exhaustive treatment of Bergson's Pragmatism). Davidson, The Stoic Creed. De Laguna, Dogmatism and Evolution. Haldane, Pathway to Reality. James, Essays in Radical Empiricism. James, Pluralistic Universe. James, Pragmatism. James, Problems of Philosophy. James, Will to Believe. Jourdain, Theory of the Infinite in Modern Thought. Lyman, Influence of Pragmatism on Theology. Parker, Plato and Pragmatism (short essay, but very good). Schiller, Humanism. Schiller, Riddles of the Sphinx (3rd edition). Schinz, Anti-pragmatism. Vernon Lee, Vital Lies. Bergson Bergson, Creative Evolution. Bergson, Introduction to Metaphysics (Article, Metaphysical and Moral Revelation, January, '03). 199 BIBLIOGRAPHY Bergson, Matter and Memory. Bergson, The Immediate Data of Consciousness. Bergson, Time and Free Will. Hermann, Eucken and Bergson. James, Pluralistic Universe, Chapter VI. Le Roy, New Philosophy of Bergson. Ruhe and Paul, Henri Bergson, An Account of His Life and Personality. Solomon, Bergson. Eucken Eucken, Life's Basis and Life's Ideal. Eucken, Main Currents of Modern Thought. Eucken, Problem of Human Life. Eucken, The Life of the Spirit. Eucken, The Truth of Religion. Gibson, Eucken's Philosophy of Life. Hermann, Eucken and Bergson. 200 INDEX Arcesilaus, pragmati.st, 115 Aristotle's attempt to reconcile universal and particular, 74; relation to Plato, 74; hostile to doctrine of Divine Per- sonality, 79f.; Divine Will as Prime Mover, 78f.; view of knowledge, 20f. Atomism, as basis of perception, 51ff., 77f., 184f., Bacon's contribution to, 55; begins with Lcucippus, 50; as a method of science, 58, 184f.; a phantom of thought, 52f., 56, 73; of Epicurus, 54; of Stoics, 54f; restricted value, 57 Bergson, his abstractness, 151, 167; a becoming God impos- sible, 157f., 160-162; criticism of Spencer, 59, 69, 146f.; definition of Being, 147f.; reality, as "vital impulse," 147f.; statement of problem of philosophy, 145f.; time as duration, 148ff., 158f. Bowne, advance on Aristotle's World-Ground, 79; advance from Lotze's position, 105ff.; in definition of reality, 105; affirming Personality fundamental, 106-108; avoids deter- minism of empiricism, 132f.; his central thought, 19, 183f.; compared with Lotze, 19, 22; limits realm of physics, 103; denies explanation by classification, 103; refuses astound- ing claims of atomism, 103; denies absentee God, 103f.; points emptiness of mechanical causation, 104 Bowne's criticism of Spencer, 59, 60; debt to Lotze, 102; definition of Being, 131f.; definition of reality, 74f., 83, 106, 108f.; definition of religion, 25, 29, 141; personality, 193-196; Eucken's estimate of, 18fT., 24, 30; philosophical aim, 11; idea of ethics, 20, 141; metaphysical theism, 25; opposition to absolutism, 130f.; opposition to naturalism, 24; pragmatism, 130-141; religious interest, 20; sincerity, 19f.; starting point, life, 25-27; theism, 25; view of the incarnation, 176ff.; view of the practical, 27f.; view of time and space, 137ff., 159flF. Bruno, conception of monads, 55 201 INDEX Carneades's pragmatism, 115 Causation, cfBcient and phenomenal, 57, 79, 81, 94, 133; explained in terms of personality, 80f., 133 Cause and effect, 78, 133 Change and personality, 91, 134, 139, 155f., 184 Common-sense view of the world, 39 Creative evolution, 40, 105-167 Deity of Jesus, moral necessity, 176-181, 189f. Democritus, relation to materialism, 52 Descartes, theory of induction, 56 Doubt and prosperity, 38 Dualism of Kant, 94 Epicurus' atomism, 54 Error, the problem of naturalism, 75, 82 Error, problem of, met by personalism, 75, 83. Eucken quoted, 11, 80, on pragmatism, 113, 128f. Eucken and Bowne, pupils of Lotze, 169 Eucken, relation to Bowne, 15, 169f., 174f. Eucken's "activism" to solve philosophical antithesis, 171; difficulty with the idea of incarnation, 175f.; particular contribution, 174, 180f.; supreme message, 181f.; view of truth, 170f. Evil, problem of idealism, 75 Evil, problem of, not avoided by pluralism, 125f.; met by personalism, 76, 83, 187-193 Evolutionist confusion of cause and effect, 25 Fallacy of the universal, 68; main support of Spencer, 68; in Bergson, 151 Faust, Walpurgis Night, 58 First Cause not reached by naturalism, 78 Freedom, attended by error and evil, 76; dependent on per- sonality, 82f., 125, 152f., 185ff.; not reached by pluralism, 125; through activism, in Eucken, 174 202 INDEX Galileo's application of malhomatical principle, 56 God, as Immanent Mover, Howne's view, 71), 159ff., 184f.; as Prime Mover, Aristotle's view, 78f.; Bergson's view, 161f.; becoming God of Bergson, not tenable, 157ff., 162; behind phenomena, 23, 161, IS'tf.; chief argument for, the prac- tical interest, 95f. ; underlying principle of the world, 22, 29, 161 Greek philosophy, contribution to science, 50 Hegel's absolute idealism, 98, 100; doctrine of thought processes, 24; view of religion, 26 Henley quoted, 190, 191, 192 Hylozoism, 55, 57 Idealism, inadequate for explanation, 39, 40; must answer problem of evil, 41 Immanence, Divine, 79 Incarnation, Bowne's view, 176fif.; Eucken's exception to, 174f.; necessary to thought, 175f., 189 Indestructibility of matter a working postulate, 66 Intuition, value to religion, 166-168 Intuitional and reflective knowledge, 164-167 James, William, pragmatism, 116-129; guilty of abstract- ness, 117 Kant's contribution, constitutive activity of mind, 87; dual- ism, 94; effort for objective validity fails, 90f.; subjectivism, 92f.; view of reality, 93; view of time and space, 87; saw only subjective side, 89 Lee, Vernon, quoted, 127f. Leucippus, founder of atomism, 50 Lotze compared with Bowne, 19, 22, 105ff.; opposed to absolutism, 99f. Lotze's aim, 19, 98f.; definition of reality, 101; idealism, 98, 101; relation to Hegel, 98, 100; religion, 19 203 INDEX "Man the measure of all," 51, 113 Masterman, quoted, 31 Material basis of modern philosophy, 33 Materialism, its abstraction completed in Democritus, 52; its doctrine of reality, 73; ignores metaphysical factors, 73; inadequate for explanation, 38ff., 56f., 77f.; its moral insufficiency, 82; of Spencer indicated in his doctrine of mind, 69; use of atomic theory, 50, 73, 75, 77f. Matter, indestructibility of, working postulate, 66 Mechanical view of thought process, 39, 82 Memory, racial, emptiness of theory, 150f.; unaccounted for by Spencer, 64, 71f. Mill, John Stuart, quoted, 62 Mind, constitutive activity, Kant's discovery, 87f. Naturalism, cannot provide for freedom, 185ff.; its abstract- ness, 58; based on visible, 24; inadequate for explanation, 38-40, 56f., 185ff.; possesses only phenomenal world, 77f.; present attitude toward Spencer, 59 Nature, new feeling toward, 35 Neoplatonism, influence of, 74 Nervous action, as "double-faced," 70 Novelty as a factor in evolution, 69; attempted in Bergson's "elan vital," 147f., 155ff. Noyes, Alfred, quoted, "Resurrection," 37; "Creation," 77; "Vicisti Galileae," 190 Optimism, attendant on struggle, 33 Pain, modern attitude toward, 41f. Pantheism of Stoics, 54; untenable, 136f. Perception, more than nervous affection, 78, 184; Bergson's view of, 145 Permanence, problem of, 91f. Personalism and freedom, 185ff.; related to problems of life, 183-196; solution of philosophical antithesis, 44f., 134f., 183f.; and problems of error and evil, 83; and problems of space and time, 90, 106, 137ff., 184 204 INDEX Personality, and change, 91, 134, 139, 155f., 184; divine, as eflScient cause, 79, 81, 133, 135; keynote to religion and ethics, 20; novel factor in causation, 80f. Pessimism, fruit of material fullness, 33 Phenomena, demand intelligent Cause, 93 Phenomena, two contrasting views, 23 Phenomenal and efficient causation, 57 Phenomenalism of Lotze, 101 Philosophy, influenced by circumstances, 33; its new task, 43ff. Plato, ethical nature of his rationalism, 52; his doctrine of Ideas, 129; relation to Aristotle, 74; resistance of mate- rialism, 74; "true being," 52 Pluralism, failure to unite subject and object, 123ff., 133f.; insufficiency, 42f., 133f.; outcome of materialism, 40, 42; unable to meet problem of evil, 126 Pragmatic attempt at unity through space and time, 121, 133f., 137ff.; doctrine of unity, 127, 133; judgment of religious values, 96, 140ff.; pluralism and freedom, 125, 133f.; test of truth, 116f., 118f., 120, 129, 130f., 140ff. Pragmatism, misuse of, 38; moral influence of, 113f., 126, 140f.; in modern life, 37f., 40; of Bowne, 130-141; of Pyrrho and the new academy, 115; of the Sophists, 113 Pragmatists, ancient, 114f.; modern, 115f. Problems, essential to philosophy, 10; Bergson's statement of them, 145f. Protagoras, a pragmatist, 113; perception due to atomic action, 51 "Pure Form" in Democritus; system, 52; in Plato's thought, 52 Purposive intelligence, the bugbear of pluralism, 43 Pyrrho, a pragmatist, 115 Rationalistic definitions of truth, 116f. Reality, Bergson's definition, 74f.; Bowne's definition, 101; Eucken's definition, 174f.; Kant's view of, 93; Lotze's definition, 101; Spencer's account of, 64f.; fundamental definition of philosophy, 10, 73 Reality of pain and evil, 41 205 INDEX Religion and ethics, their relation, 20, 25, 29 Religion, the basis of life, 21; in relation to theology, 27, 29; Kant's view of, 26, 29, 94f.; not subject to ordinary proof, 20f., 94f., 97; not wholly subjective, 30 ; the spiritual experience of humanity, 25 Ruskin quoted, 32 Schiller, F. C. S., on the Absolute, view of truth, 130 Schopenhauer, personal untruth, 19 Schleiermacher's view of religion, 26 Science, relation to modern life, 35; relation to modern philosophy, 34f. Space and time made the fundamental realities in pragmatism, 121, 137ff.; as forms of thought, 87f.; must possess objective validity, 89f. Spencer and modern naturalism, 59 Spencer's appeal to "persistence of force," 66; definition of life, 69; denial of materialism, 61; doctrine of mind, 69f. ; doctrine of reality, 64f.; doctrine of the Unknowable, 6 If., 78; empiricism, 61; materialism indicated by doctrine of mind, 69; relativity, 65; relation to theism and religion, 60; theory of evolution, 67; supported by fallacy of universal, 68 Spinoza, personal sincerity, 19 Spiritual basis of life, 28 Spiritual, incapable of expression in language, 23 Spirituality, impossible apart from personality, 22 Stoics, preservation of atomism, 54 Swinburne, quoted, "watch in the night," 38, 45 Time as "bastard space," 150f.; as "duration," 148-152; with God as ground of its "duration," 158ff.; impossible except to abiding intelligence, 88, 122, 138f.; 152, 159f. Time and space as forms of thought, 87f.; ideal yet objectively valid, 137£F., 150f.; as viewed by Bowne, 137f. Truth, universal validity of, in Eucken's view, 170f. 206 INDEX Unity, by "activism," Euckcn's solution, 170f. ; found only in mind and spirit, 22; necessary even to pluralism, 124, 134; possible through personality, 134f., 153f., 156f., 183f.; by primal impulse; Aristotle's view, 78f.; Bergson's view, 147f, 154ff.; problem of, 21, 49f., 133f., 147f., 156f., 170f., 183f.; struggle for, 38, 49; in Greek thought, 50 Utilitarianism, demanded in life, 37 "Vital impulse," Bergson's necessary factor of evolution, 152ff.; Bergson's ground of being, 147f. World-Ground must be personal, 81f. 207 « Mii) li'lih