mm A REASONABLE RELIGION FREDERIC W. SANDERS RELIGIO DOCTORIS A REASONABLE RELIGION (RELIGIO DOCTORIS) BY FREDERIC W. SANDERS .M. (HARVARD); PH.D. (UNIV. OF CHICAGO) J FELLOW IN SOCIOLOGY (COLUMBIA); HONORARY FELLOW (CLARK U.)j UNIVERSITY LECTURER IN SOCIOLOGY AND PEDAGOGY; ETC., ETC. AUTHOR OF "THE STANDARD OF LIVING IN RELATION TO ECONOMIC THEORY AND LAND NATIONALIZATION"; " REORGANIZATION OF OUR SCHOOLS "; " ESSAYS*'; ETC. WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY G. STANLEY HALL, Ph.D., LL.D. "7 look for the New Teacher that shall . . . show that the Ought, that Duty, is one thing with Science, with Beauty, and with Joy." Emerson. BOSTON JAMES H. WEST CO. .:;> TO CHARLES WILLIAM ELIOT, LL. D. THE LAYMAN IN RELIGION AND IN PHILOSOPHY whose election to the presidency of Harvard College resulted in the creation of the greatest university in the New World THIS TRIBUTE AND APPEAL TO THE SANITY OF THE LAY MIND is DEDICATED 402;;. INTRODUCTION The author of these essays, many years ago my student and friend, a man of culture, personal charm, and with special training in philosophy, lived for some time in the expectation of speedy death. In this con- dition he sought to fortify his own soul by formulating his personal convictions, in non-technical terms, con- cerning the supreme problems of human life. This he was able to do with a candor unalloyed by all prudential considerations as to how utter frankness, so often dangerous to men in his vocation, would affect his future career. Since his partial convalescence he has decid- ed, upon the advice and wish of his friends, wisely and well, as I, and I believe all his readers will think, to make public these meditations, in the modest hope that they will interest and benefit others who are in- clined to face seriously the problems of life, mind, and destiny. In the first essay the argument succinctly stated is that right thinking is necessary to right living, and that, as the ethical idea is the only working hypoth- esis for the right conduct of life, this latter must be based upon a consideration of all the facts that enter into it. The next world must not dominate this, and there must be no "double housekeeping. " Perhaps the writer would not approve the slogan, "One world at a time, gentlemen, and this one now;" but no real good v vi INTRODUCTION here must be sacrificed or even imperiled by the hy- pothesis of immortality, nor must specialization or absorption in business dwarf the sum-total of human nature born in each of us. Making the very most and best of this life and this world, magnifying the here and the now, doing the present duty, is the best way to attain the chief end of man, here or hereafter. In the second essay he urges that, as this is a uni- verse, in which every atom is a part of a stupendous whole, it takes everything to explain anything, ampli- fying the moral of the "flower in the crannied wall." The least event not only has innumerable determinants, but affects the whole, which alone can be the complete cause of the tiniest part or event. The ethical implica- tion is obvious. Not only the life of each individual but his every serious deed affects in some degree the world itself. Probably the author would not say with Rowland Hazard that the ego is a creative first cause, but rather that it is itself a plexus of links in an endless chain, as much caused as causing. His view, at any rate, is not inaccordant with Spinoza's idea sub specie eternitatis. In the next essay we are taught that moral evil is the result of human incapacity. This makes man sel- fish and un- and anti-social. Real knowledge ripened into wisdom is the only cure of both physical and moral ills, and a sound education is the greatest of all healers. In this chapter the author anticipates some of the best precepts and practices of Du Bois and Marcinowski, the first of whom uses careful, coherent thinking as a INTRODUCTION vn cure for subtle brain, and even nerve, troubles, and the latter of whom prescribes philosophies somewhat as physicians do regimens. Lastly, as to the relations between happiness and virtue, we are taught that the joys of sense can con- tribute very little to happiness. Egoism is good, but only so far as it is intelligent. The power to enjoy grows directly as does capacity for sympathy. Even non-moral pleasures may be made means to moral enjoyment. To be true to our own selves brings a joy that abides, for the welfare of society is only the sum of that of the individuals composing it. The value of a sound education is that it makes for virtue, and this is the author's melioristic creed. The greatest happi- ness for us is not beyond the reach of our power to attain it. Love is the highest, and it teaches us the transcendent beauty of the universe. These few catch-phrases may inadequately indicate the general trend, though they by no means do justice to the attractive personal qualities, the happy illustra- tions, or the utter abandon of the ingenuousness of the author. There is no flavor of the study, the library, or the school-room in these pages, but a certain distinct charm of style, almost as if in despite of the abandon, of the unabated seriousness, that pervades these pages. It is this that contributes to their optimism, which is the prevalent tone throughout. Their perusal will leave the reader, as it has left me, sobered, and wond- ering whether, if I were thus impelled to sum up my own fundamental convictions, I could possibly, despite my more years of life and teaching, bring forth con- vii INTRODUCTION elusions so sane and helpful, even now, if the shadow of the Great Reaper fell across my path and prompted me to summon all my resources in the way of philoso- phic contemplation. Who shall say that the writer does not owe more or less of his restoration to health to the mental medicine he has here provided and offers to others? G. Stanley Hall Clark University August, 1913 PREFATORY NOTE In the endeavor to illustrate his thought fully and to forestall possible objections by the utmost fairness to opinions opposed to his own, the author has made three of the following essays so long that he has deemed it wise in the case of these three to add a marginal summary of the argument; but in the shorter essay on Explanation a marginal argument seemed unnecessary and has accordingly been omitted. CONTENTS Introduction by G. Stanley Hall. I A Revery wherein the Following Essays are Conceived 9 II Philosophy and Everyday Life 13 III The Nature of Explanation and the True Interpretation of the Principle of Cause and Effect 55 IV The Problem of Evil 78 V Happiness and Morality 117 RELIGIO DOCTORIS RELIGIO DOCTORIS i A REVERY WHEREIN THE FOLLOWING ESSAYS ARE CONCEIVED It is the first of October, perhaps the last that I shall ever see, for I seem to grow gradually weaker in- stead of stronger, a beautiful, soft Indian Summer day, and as I sit in a little pine grove that commands a wide Thuringian landscape, full of peace and beauty (despite the fact that the nearest large building is a great, ugly barracks), the perception of the beauty of the world, which has so often blessed and cheered my life, and which must be, in large part, the burden of any message I may have for my fellow men, comes to me with renewed freshness and strength. How charming it all is! The little clump of ever- greens near the edge of which I sit with my back against a trunk, so that my head is shielded from the sun, which still shines all about me and increases the balsamic fra- grance which makes a pine wood so delightful, is not quite on the crest of the upland from which my view is obtained; and not far away is a grove of chestnuts sur- rounded on every side by cleared fields, some lying fal- low, while on others the ungarnered crops still stand. This grove is not large, but the trees are strong, healthy and graceful, and in their autumn dress of ruddy brown 9 10 RELIGIO DOCTORIS and bronze and yellow and still with many a splatch of green, both light and dark, the whole stands out most pleasingly against the soft blue sky. There is just a suggestion of haze on the horizon, but the sky is almost cloudless and there is only enough motion in the air to keep it fresh and balmy and to prevent the softness of the day from degenerating into sultriness. Over the crest of the upland peep the tops of some houses and the trees about them, giving a hint of peaceful home life near at hand, that adds to the charm of the scene. In every other direction the slopes and plains and valleys of Thuringia spread out for miles before me; not far away is a little city, and beyond it the landscape, more largely cleared than wooded, is dotted with many quiet little villages. Yes! the world is full of beauty; and beautiful as is the actual world as we know it, sweet as life is to us with all its sorrow and misery, there is far more of potential beauty in life than we have yet realized. Why is it, then, that there is so much unhappiness in life? Can human effort do nothing for the cure of human wretchedness? And if human effort can do anything, what kind of effort? Shall we accomplish our purpose by building railroads and steamships and thus extending the field of civilization? Shall we do it by studying mathematics and physics and chemistry and biology, or perhaps by teaching history and litera- ture? Shall we do it by building churches or schools or by carving statues, painting pictures or composing symphonies? Shall we do it by loving? I, now, what can I do? A REVERY 11 Has not this question, have not these questions dis- turbed the hearts of all of us at times? Why do I sit idly by while my brothers suffer, although I have the prospect of months of life and ability to work before me? Is it really because I feel that nothing that can be done is worth while? No, it is not that; I have the belief, more or less common among civilized men, that all such things as I have mentioned the railroad building, the picture painting, the chemistry and the religious or- ganizations may help to make the world a better dwelling place for man. Is it, then, that I feel that all is being done that can be done, and that there is nothing I can do for my fellow men, now that I am not actively engaged in my profession? Not quite; perhaps all thoughtful and loving men have their moments of exaltation, when they feel that they see some aspect of life more clearly than their fellows, and that it would be well if all the world could share their insight. Why, then, thou dubious friend of man, hast thou not shouted thy wisdom from the housetop? why have not thy brothers, in their moments of exaltation, cried their messages aloud for all men to hear? Probably one thing that keeps those of us silent who have not made literature a profession, is that before we find the opportunity to express ourselves we are likely to have passed the age of thirty-five and to have recovered some of the pristine modesty of childhood, and we remember those fatal words, "There is nothing new under the sun!" And, further than this, I dis- trust preaching; I have long felt that if a man believes himself to be possessed of some truth which he would n RELIGIO DOCTORIS like to impart to his fellows, he should live it rather than preach it. Example is so much better than precept;/ preaching is so cheap ! Yet preaching has its place. We may well grant that he who preaches without at the same time doing his best to live in accordance with his own preaching deserves little consideration, and yet also admit that he who cannot himself climb far may nevertheless point the way up the mountain side. And if my death be real- ly near,as has lately seemed not improbable,perhaps I am justified in trying to utter the truth that is in me, even though I only say imperfectly what may be gathered from the different utterances of those who have already spoken; perhaps under the circumstances it is right for me to try to express the fundamental convictions that have made my life a predominantly happy one (albeit a life in which the struggle for self-support and for the knowledge that should be helpful toward the solution of the problems of existence,has been carried on through- out under physical weakness, and with no dear ones of my own about me to brighten life by the sweet joy of home a joy which, paradoxical as it may seem, per- haps those alone fully appreciate who have it not), and which leave me now serene and happy in the contempla- tion of death, a premature death, before the age of forty, although I am wholly without faith in the be- lief that seems so dear to many of my fellows, the belief in individual personal immortality and in the existence of an Almighty Personal Creator and Ruler of the Universe, who loves us as his children. II PHILOSOPHY AND EVERYDAY LIFE As a man thinketh, so is he Proverb Antithesis is the bane of sound thinking, I some- times think, and therefore of simple, natural, wholesome, contrast and unaffected, large-hearted living. We are Separation. inordinately fond of contrast in every department of life. In the realm of myth our fore- fathers had their good and evil spirits, and we must have our God and our Devil; and even in the ethical and religious thought of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the traditional division of mankind into sheep and goats, into saints and sinners, dies hard, although fortunately for the sanity of our thought, it may indeed to be said to be dying. The subject is an interesting one, and were unlimited time at our disposal hundreds of illustrations could be given of the tendency to sepa- rate that with which life and thought must deal into hard and fast divisions which do not correspond to reality. That at the bottom of this erroneous, this exaggera- tive tendency of mankind there is something reasonable, I do not for a moment question; for I am convinced that no error would live for a day if it did not contain an element of truth. For the purposes of 13 14 RELIGIO DOCTORIS science as well as for the purposes of practical, every- day life, we must of course discriminate. The stage of . . J . division and classification is surely one of Its justification . . . found in its the most important stages of scientific purpose re- * . combination progress; and, m the realm of everyday more perfect life, if the wide-awake farmer would know whole. what crop or crops he can cultivate to the best advantage, and what are the most favorable condi- tions for the cultivation of the most suitable variety of the chosen grain or vegetable or fruit, he must at the outset be able to distinguish clearly between the differ- ent kinds, he must separate the varieties of grain, for instance, plant them by themselves, and carefully ob- serve their respective growths. But important as are distinctions, contrasts and divisions for the various purposes of practical life and for the preliminary stages of science, we should not forget that their significance is limited. For the gourmand edible mushrooms be- long in a class which also includes deer, chicken, fish, oysters, wheat, peaches, radishes, and, if he be a Chinese, bird's nests; while a toadstool, an iron nail, a diamond, a pair of boots, a yacht, a granite boulder, a copper penny, a rattlesnake and a clod of earth are all members of another, contrasted class of non-edibles. For him the division of things into these two classes is of the utmost importance, and the distinction between edible mushrooms and toadstools is, to say the least, funda- mental. But for the botanist this distinction is a very slight one; for him these two things belong to the same general class. For the merchant, again, a still different classification of the things mentioned above would have PHILOSOPHY AND EVERYDAY LIFE 15 to be made, a classification that would as little resemble that of the gourmand as it would that of the botanist. We should bear in mind, however, not alone that the classification of, and the distinctions between, the things we deal with in science and in life have merely a relative, not a permanent and essential value, but also that just as in practical life we distinguish and separate in order that the things thus set apart may be put with other things into some new combination which has for the immediate purpose of the worker a practical value, so too in science, distinctions, divisions and separations are not final ; we separate in thought for the purposes of study, in order that we may recombine all of which the human mind is cognizant into a more orderly , more perfect whole. To regard the various classes of objects and ideas with which we have to do in our thinking and living, as absolutely separate, unrelated things, to lock them up forever in separate, watertight compartments, between which there is no means of communication, is, in the larger meaning of science, highly unscientific, and it leads to deplorable narrow- ness in practical life. This tendency to regard things as finally disposed of when we have given them a name and put them into separate classes, which tendency may perhaps be re- garded as an indication of arrested development in scientific thought, has fostered a high degree of satisfaction in the most positive antitheses; a disposi- tion that has found theoretical expression in the widely accepted philosophy of Kant, and that also showed itself in the manner in which the psychologists of the 16 RELIGIO DOCTORIS last generation talked of the feelings, the intellect and the will as entirely distinct entities, instead of different phases, different aspects of the life, the The purpose . . . lQ st sight of^ activity, of the one being, man. But the cess stops with vagaries of the scholar hurt the world very the positing of * i distinctions be- little as compared with the harm that is tween things, * . the conceptions done when a like false attitude toward real- of which are . . . then developed, ity is taken by men in everyday life, when in isolation, / J * * . * until they have the average man reads life amiss. And become incon- _ . ,__ _ ; sistent with one that he has done and is still domg this, there can be no doubt. We must of course read the world somewhat amiss, so long as we see it only in part, not as a perfect whole. Every thought- ful man must realize how impossible it is that he or his fellows should be free from error in the present stage of human development, to say the least. But it does not follow that we need be quite so wrong-headed as we are; we should not be so if we would keep in mind the knowledge we already have, if we would make a more earnest effort to unify our knowledge, to make of it a consistent whole instead of a collection of facts, or groups of facts (and theories), entirely isolated from one another. Let us remember that so able and lovable a man as the late Professor Henry Drummond only became a real leader of men, a true apostle, a man with a message, when he awoke to the fact, as he himself expressed it in his introduction to "Natural Law in the Spiritual World," that his conceptions of religion and of science ought not to be kept absolutely separate in water-tight compartments of his brain, when he realized that, if his religious and PHILOSOPHY AND EVERYDAY LIFE 17 his scientific ideas were both true, they must have some relation to each other, they must at least be consistent. Most of us are content to go through life holding absolutely contradictory ideas, as that no gentleman will permit another to insult him without Many have resenting the insult, even though to do so come to con- sider that par- cos t him his life; that a Christian must adox and anti- nomies e nor- forgive every injury; and that a Christian truth may be gentleman offers us the highest type of another a no- life, an ideal toward which we should all turn that, de- , Hberateiy ac- strive. Of course to dull, prosaic, matter- cepted and con- sistently foi- of-fact people, who do not know any better lowed out, i n ' would dissipate than to have confidence in their own mental our universe . . into chaos. processes, it must seem either that one can- not be at once a gentleman and a Christian, or else that the conception of gentleman or that of Christian above adopted must be at fault. But why has this not occurred to any of the enthusiastic Christian gentlemen who have held these theories during the last thousand years or so, and who still hold them? For two reasons, I believe. Chiefly because they have very rarely put their theses side by side, as I have done above; but instead, to use Professor Drummond's ex- pression again, have kept them in different water-tight compartments of their brains. In one field of thought, having its own associations, arises the conception of the scrupulous man of honor, who must be ever ready to give his life to keep his honor absolutely untarnished a fantastic notion, if you will, often associated with much that is absurd, but still noble, in that it teaches men to prefer an ideal good to the mere continuance of 18 RELIGIO DOCTORIS physical existence, puts self-respect before length of life, and has helped to keep alive in man's breast his most heroic attribute, courage, the feeling which assures him that death with honor is far more to be desired than the longest life if one must demean himself to enjoy it. In another field of thought, on the other hand, with an entirely different set of associations, arises the conception of Christian humility, self-sacri- fice, and Christ-like forgiveness again a beautiful thought, in so far as it leads a man to put love for God and his brother men before his individual enjoyment of the good things of physical existence. When we analyze these two conceptions that of the Christian and that of the gentleman carefully, we find that there is something in common between them the pre- ference of ideal to material good, and it is not very surprising that they should both be held by the same man so long as he does not put them directly side by I side. But occasionally these two doctrines of forgive- ness and revenge are brought face to face, and still ^their votaries profess allegiance to both! How is this possible? Is it not because our teachers, our acknowl- edged intellectual leaders, have encouraged us to con- sider it not only tolerable, but rather a fine thing, to maintain paradoxes and antinomies, which they have sought to justify by large assertions and vague assump- tions as to the utter separateness of different "worlds of thought"? PHILOSOPHY AND EVERYDAY LIFE 19 Thus it happens that today, after all the world's great prophets and scientists have offered us their gifts, . _x we are in some respects farther from the The effort to m ^ unify our con- truth than in the day when Zarathustra ceptions con- ^ temned as un- or Socrates or Jesus first walked the earth. scientific specu- latjon, unfavor- Because today we will not see life whole. with the study Our educated classes have a pseudo-scien- of details, to which study tific contempt for anything that is general science is ap- and comprehensive and for anyone who, forgetfuiness like Bacon, would take all knowledge for that nothing his province. This is a very natural result apprehended of the rapid progress we have made in the relations, and details of science, in gathering material for therefore that , 1 1 1 * A no department human knowledge. As a generation we of science can , < . . . be safely and are in that most trying stage 01 progress in vated a wUhout" knowledge, when, having gathered together continued refer- # . j ence to and fre- an enormous mass of facts and opinions, we son withSFngs~ are in danger of being swamped by our ma- terial, and like Thoreau's unfortunate who was owned by his farm, who with the title to the ances- tral acres had inherited a clog upon all independent mo- tion and freedom of action, we are not master of, but are mastered by our knowledge. We endeavor to conceal our embarrassment from ourselves by the favorite resort of the pseudo, or perhaps it would be fairer to say the serai-scientist definition; by a parade of sounding terms, by pointing to an imposing array of elaborately defined and delimited fields of human investigation and activity. We speak fluently of science and of com- merce, of art and of nature, of the field of philosophy and the field of industrial activity; and within these 20 RELIGIO DOCTORIS several fields we accord honorable recognition to scores of lesser fields, the field of literature, of music, of paint- ing, of sculpture, the field of chemistry, of geology, of botany, the field of political economy and that of ethnol- ogy, etc. Sometimes, indeed, we mention life, either as the subject-matter of the special science of biology or for the sake of rhetorical contrast, as when we speak of life and art or of philosophy and life. But in so doing, as in our unfortunate antitheses between man _ a and nature or nature and spirit or nature The unity of all * science, art and and history, we only emphasize our lailure philosophy, as .. _ the knowledge, to realize the truth that all of art and expression and . .. . . interpretation science and philosophy are but the inter- pretation of Life, that wonderful physical, emotional, mental and spiritual sentiency and activity of man, through which he finds a world within and about him to which he must adjust his activity, and in which his existence is rich and happy or starved and wretched in proportion as he does adjust himself well or ill thereto; for the purpose of which adjustment he must understand, or interpret to himself aright, this world with which his life has to do! Hence the signi- ficance of art, of science, and of philosophy. In and of themselves they not only have no value, they have no existence, they are but empty terms, hollow sounds. And yet we prate of "art for art's sake." It is rank nonsense, yet men of talent and of such education as the isolation of unphilosophical attitude of our age has made possible gravely discuss, not whether trt for art's sake exists, but whether it is good! But fwhat is art? Can it exist without a content? Is it PHILOSOPHY AND EVERYDAY LIFE 21 not such an expression of something that the artist has himself thought or felt as shall suggest to others a corresponding feeling or idea? And does not this mean that it is an expression of an experience of life, which shall affect the lives of others; and therefore that it has, must have, a value for life? To express something is the life of art; that which, expressing nothing, exists for itself alone, is not art. If we turn to what is called science, we find that the attitude of many of those who are regarded as educated is just as bad. Anecdotes are continually indifference of being told of distinguished votaries of some practical utility, particular branch of science, setting forth their disposition to attribute scientific value to a truth in direct proportion to its practical uselessness. Of course there is some real significance, some glimmer of reason at the bottom of this nonsense, as there is at the bottom of all error. But what is it? In a German market town I have sometimes seen a blindfolded cow quietly hauling a load of produce through a busy street. The simple-minded beast, accustomed to a quiet country life, could not well en- dure the distractions of a thoroughfare, and so performed its immediate duty best when it did not know where it was going or what ivas its relation to what was going on about it. Now the man of science when he has once got- ten upon the track of some uniformity in nature, or even of some mere fact, follows it out patiently, regardless of whether it have any immediate economic value. For the accomplishment of his immediate purpose it may be better that he should not be distracted by considera- m RELIGIO DOCTORIS tions of the practical end of his activity. And so he is justified in putting on blinders, or in other words, in saying to the world: "Do not bother me with your demand for practical results. I am not in the least con- cerned as to whether you can make the slightest eco- I nomic use of the knowledge I am trying to get and with which I busy myself. My business is not to ascertain what is useful, but what is true. The great practical discoveries and inventions about which you make such a to-do, have perhaps as much scientific value as the isolated facts with which men of my calling busy them- selves, but they do not compare in the least in scienti- fic value with the generalizations, the uniformities in nature, the so-called laws of nature, which my fellow- workers have from time to time suggested and estab- lished, and which I am endeavoring to establish, even though these laws of nature be in regard to something for which neither you nor I can perceive the slightest economic value. Go back to your machine shop and attend to your business, and leave me in peace to attend to mine !" Such an attitude on the part of the man of science is reasonable and right enough in fact, but it would not be so if the words we have supposed him to utter were the last words that could be said upon the subject, if they expressed all the justification there was for his position. Back of his assertion that his business is not to ascertain what is useful, but what is true, what is, lies the moral certainty that all knowl- edge is usefxd; that the more facts we have mastered, the greater the possibility of our discovering the habits of the Universe; and that the more perfectly PHILOSOPHY AND EVERYDAY LIFE 23 we understand the Universe the better shall we be able to adjust ourselves to it, the more complete, the richer and happier our lives will be. A fact I discover today may have no apparent use for you or for me today or a decade hence; but it may be that a thousand years hence, to some patient worker in a seemingly quite different field of science, it will prove to be of service, perhaps of slight service, perhaps of great. In a word, sooner or later, here or elsewhere, to me or to some one else, every item of knowledge has the possibility of value, a practical value, a value for life. And that, not "knowledge for the sake of knowledge" (really a meaningless phrase), is the justification for pure scien- tific activity regardless of immediate value. Let us remember that the scientist who prides himself upon the fact that his scientific activity has no value for anything outside of itself or for anybody but the scien- tist, and that it exists for its own sake alone, and is valuable only as science let us remember that such a scientist is after all only priding himself upon the fact that he does his work better in blinders than with a full view of the world in which he moves; and if it really be true that he is regardless of anything outside his special field, and does not care whether his activity has or shall ever have the slightest extrinsic worth, valuing it only as an intellectual exercise, then he is as narrow-minded, as much below the full stature of man, the heir of the ages, and the hereditary interpreter of nature as much below the full stature of man, with his boundless interests, as that shopkeeper who allowed his business to so engross his life that it was said of him that he was born a man and died a grocer ! 24 RELIGIO DOCTORIS Current conception as to the significance of philoso- phy are as artificial, as unintelligent, as false and Philosophy inadequate, as are those in regard to art versus life. an( j sc j ence \y e hear such phrases as "philosophy versus life," as though there were any philosophy other than the attempt to interpret life and its theatre the world; or as though life without philosophy were fit for, nay, were possible for any being but a brute or a vegetable. It is true that the simple- minded man of every-day life, a day-laborer in Europe or America or a savage in the South Sea Islands, may not dignify his theory of life by the name of philosophy, and he may have taken it whole from his father or his priest, but, simple or elaborate, complete or incomplete, consistent or inconsistent, clearly or all but unconscious- ly held, every man not an idiot has, must have some sort of philosophy of life, be it ever so vague and hazy, i Art, science, philosophy alike exist only for the \ interpretation and enlargement of life; and it seems \to me that our most crying need today is, I will not say k true philosophy of life, but, let me rather say, the perception that such a philosophy is a fundamental desideratum. We are prevented from realizing this by causes that have already been suggested. The tendency of the Philosophy re- a & e toward specialization has led us to frans^tndentai lk upon philosophy as a special depart- apStfrwn real nient of human investigation with which tuai lymnasttc" no one Dut tne philosophic specialist has for the few. an y concern> By the almost unanimous consent of the philosophic specialists and the rest PHILOSOPHY AND EVERYDAY LIFE 25 of mankind PHILOSOPHY is regarded as some- thing very abstruse and difficult; and by the great majority of mankind, including not only most of the outer barbarians who have not devoted them- selves to its study, but also no inconsiderable number of those who have formally pursued it, philosophy is furthermore regarded as something quite useless and often as something highly fantastic. Many who pass for educated men shrug their shoulders at the mere mention of philosophy, saying that they would not advise anyone who had not a special predilection for cobweb-spinning and hair-splitting to waste his time upon it, when there is so much to be done in the field of practical effort and demonstrative science. This is hardly to be wondered at when we consider how largely philosophy has been identified with metaphysics, and that the so-called philosophers, with the characteristic abandon of the specialist, cutting themselves loose from the manifold interests of a broad, symmetrical, practical life, which would have kept them sane, have so often launched out into all sorts of fantastic theories having no relation to practical life. But what is philosophy? Various definitions have been offered at different times and in different places, yet I believe that a consensus of the com- Phiiosophy is petent would now recognize the substantial conception 1 ^ correctness of the conception that philoso- reaiity. phy is the t j ieory> not f ^jg or t h a t de- partment of human thought, but the theory Iof the Universe as a whole, and that the aim of philoso- phy is a consistent conception of all that is. The essen- 26 RELIGIO DOCTORIS tial thing in a philosophy is not that it shall give a complete explanation of all that is (that would be universal science), but that it shall so take account of all that is that one's conception of the different elements of human experience which constitute our universe shall be mutually consistent with one another. If one's conception of A and B and C and D, of chemistry and spirit and ether and space and matter and the principle of causality and geology and the development of the human mind and economics and religion and art, are mutually consistent, or, let us say, are not inconsistent with one another, then may his philosophy be sound and true, even though he be very far indeed from having at- tained to a full explanation of the relation of these various objects of contemplation to one another. No one, in the present stage of human knowledge, can reasonably demand that our philosophy shall afford a complete explanation of all that is; but while it need not be com- plete, it must be consistent, the world may well demand of us that our philosophy shall consist of such a con- ception of life and the universe as shall contain no contradictions, and also that it shall not attain a seem- ing consistency by ignoring any part of reality. Phil- osophy is not abstruse theory; it means simply a reason- able conception of that which is. It is the recognition that truth is one, and that no individual truth in the universe can be inconsistent with any other truth. As such it is the touchstone of science, and tells us that if that which we have come to look upon as a truth, or law, of chemical science is really contradictory of or incon- sistent with that which we have regarded as a truth of PHILOSOPHY AND EVERYDAY LIFE 27 mathematics or of history or of religion, then we must renew our investigations and reformulate our theories, for one or both of the supposed truths must be, in part at least, false. Both of the supposed truths may indeed approximate the truth; one may be exactly true and the other may lack little of precise truth; but in so far as they do contradict one another, in so far, we may be sure, the attempted formulation of one or of both truths is, as it then stands, at fault. Let us hold fast to this axiom of common sense, which is fundamental to reason and therefore to philosophy! To disregard, or to juggle with, this self-evident truth, is to make sane thought and sound philosophy impossible, for it is to foreswear reason, and, instead of a universe, to accept chaos. If philosophy be thus understood, I think it will not be questioned that each one of us may and should strive for a true philosophy of life, a consistent philosophy a conception of all that is, a conception of human nature, reality as constituting a universe, not a chaos. We not only may and should; as I have already intimated, we must; all sane minds that have not been grossly misled by those to whom they have felt justified in looking for guidance, do, more or less consciously, reach after a consistent theory of that which is, or, in other words, a philosophy of life. If there is any sense in which the will is free, if volition plays any part in life, then we must strive to under- stand the universe of which we are a part, to get a con- spectus of it, a consistent view of it as a whole, so that we may know how to direct our life in it. But un- 28 RELIGIO DOCTORIS fortunately those to whom, on account of their position, their learning, their mental training and their spiritual experience, the mass of mankind have felt that they could safely look for guidance, have so often been false guides, blind leaders of the blind, that that which serves as a philosophy of life for most of us today is pitifully weak, a thing of shreds and tatters, very often indeed allowing us, almost compelling us, to assert gravely the most contradictory things. It is not my purpose at this time to set forth and defend a particular philosophy of life. My purpose is merely (1) to direct attention to our care- Fauity phiioso- lessness and wrongheadedness to the care- our lives. lessness and wrongheadedness of the so- called educated world as a whole in the matter of a philosophy of life, and (2) to emphasize the fact that this false thought seriously affects our lives. Do you believe that the physical world came into existence about six thousand years ago, as a result of a process of creation effected in six days by illustrations of the personal spirit God, and do you also inconsistency in * . x thought believe in the truths of biology, geology, chemistry and physics as presented by the ablest students of these various sciences and verified in part by your own observation and experiment? Or do you recognize the inconsistency between the former and the latter beliefs, and accept the one rather than the other; and if so, what is the underlying principle in accordance with which you have reached your deter- mination? PHILOSOPHY AND EVERYDAY LIFE 29 Do you believe that your Creator has positively and expressly forbidden you and all pious and obedient children of men to carve a statue or make any physical representation of any natural object to be found on land or sea or of any heavenly being that has been imagined? and do you also believe that the Christian artists who spent their lives in decorating the churches of Europe with paintings and carving of heavenly beings, men, and things, were giving an innocent expression to their religious sentiments; and do you believe that representative art has a legitimate place in human life and in the development oithe human spirit? 1 Or do you accept the prohibition and deny the innocence of representative art, or reject the prohibition and be- lieve in the propriety of such art? And in either case, what is it in your philosophy of life that leads you to this decision? Do you believe in predestination, of God or Fate or Nature do you believe in necessity, or in free will, in arbitrary choice? Or in both! and why? Do you believe that man's life on earth is, I will not say a pilgrimage through a vale of tears, but merely a 'pren- tice period for the human spirit, incomparably short as compared with the remainder of eternity in which the spirit of man is to live, and that physical life and death concern the body of man alone, his will and his J The Mohammedans, whose sacred scripture contains a prohibi- tion practically identical with that contained in the Hebrew decalogue (and doubtless borrowed from it) take this commandment literally, and have obeyed it, accepting the check to artistic and scientific development that is involved in such obedience. SO RELIGIO DOCTORIS emotional and intellectual activity continuing forever after physical death, unless God shall annihilate them as a punishment for sin or in accordance with a pre- destinated plan determined upon by Him before the birth of the being in question? Or on the other hand, do you believe that man's emotional, intellectual and volitional activity are the inner aspects of his physical existence, with which they are in life associated; that life is one; that feeling, thought and will are the neces- sary concomitants, the natural expression, of life in all the higher organisms, and that they are dependent upon the physical substratum of that life; that thought is the function of brain activity much as digestion is the function of the activity of the alimentary canal, al- though neither thought nor digestion is itself a physical entity? And what is your reason for holding the one rather than the other belief? One may say perhaps that the answer to a number of the questions just proposed is of very little practical importance. But surely a careful con- Reaction of consideration of the subject will show that Sn U 3u y ct? P ' the answer to the last inquiry is of great oSeSmfnt ethical significance. And this is not the of evil. on jy one ^at has important practical bearings. Our discussion of the Problem of Evil must, I think, indicate how great a part the answer to the question of necessity or free will must play in determining our attitude toward evil, our con- duct in the presence of evil, our treatment of the evil- doer. Were evil absolutely fortuitous, without rhyme or reason, so that no amount of study or of foresight PHILOSOPHY AND EVERYDAY LIFE 31 would enable us to diminish it or to avoid it, its ethical significance would be slight indeed. Were evil the result of arbitrary choice and gratuitous malicious volition, we might meet it with vengeance. But if evil is simply the necessary consequence of the imper- fect adaptation of the individual to his immediate environment whether the evil be physical or moral, whether it come directly from external nature or through the agency of a fellow being then to over- come evil we must direct all our efforts to the mastery of science and the development of human nature (to which the mastery of science is a means). 2 This cer- tainly is a very practical conclusion. But leaving the question of determinism versus arbi- trary choice, it seems to me that the whole conduct of life is dependent upon our estimate of the Great practical relative importance of the present, earthlv importance of r i i i i "* our estimate of life as compared with our hypothetical the relative .... m value of our future spiritual existence. To one who present, earthly , existence as confidently believes that through the lm- compared with . , . . , a possible future mortality of the individual soul an eternity existence in a . . .. . 1 world beyond, of existence for his conscious individual self is open to every man who tries to obey the teachings of his religion as to the will of God, and that this earthly life is merely an infinitesimally brief 2 If I were required to give in a few words my own answer to the question of Determinism or Free Will, I should say that the will is subjectively free but objectively determined. That is to say, a man is free to do, can do (within necessary physical limitations, of course), what he wills, what he chooses to do. But if the principle of causality (see my discussion of "The Meaning of Explanation and the True Interpretation of the Principle of Cause and Effect) has any validity, there is some ground, some reason, for the choice that each 32 RELIGIO DOCTORIS prelude thereto, having no other significance than to test his readiness to take the first step toward the eternal life, what does it matter whether he spends his life like an Indian fakir, standing on one leg in the same spot with arms outstretched, or devotes it to picking oakum; whether he dreams it away in a cloister, or lives wholly for the investigation and exposition of the uses of the ablative case in Sanskrit; whether he gives all his waking hours to becoming master of the behaviour of sodium in all possible chemical combina- tions, or to piling up a fortune, or whether instead of all these ideals he tries to live the largest, fullest life of which his nature is capable, mastering as far as possible all that has yet been learned of the wonderful Universe in which he lives, and so exercising all the faculties of his nature physical and mental, emotional and moral as to become as complete and symmetrical a human being as his own natural endowments and the present stage of human progress makes possible? It is true that the last-mentioned course might possibly make the few moments that are to be spent here on earth, preliminary to launching into one's true life in eternity, a little more enjoyable and useful than they would otherwise be; but on the other hand, such a course man in fact makes, i. e. there must be something to determine what he will choose. And in fact his choice in each case is determined by the joint action of heredity and environment by the relation between the present external conditions, the material for choice, and the man himself, as constituted by his whole past history up to the instant of choice and by the life experience of his ancestors and his race a complete knowledge of which (of course an impossibility for any finite being) would enable any third person to predict with absolute certainty the choice that would be made under given conditions. PHILOSOPHY AND EVERYDAY LIFE 33 demands considerable mental as well as physical ac- tivity, and there is no little danger that it might dis- tract one's attention from the future life; and so far as the usefulness of such a course is concerned, it has to do mainly, if not wholly, with the mere earthly well- being of one's fellows, which should not be very highly valued by an Immortal Soul, especially in view of the fact that a cloistered life of prayer and pious medita- tion might contribute to their spiritual welfare, which is infinitely more important! I wish that I could make clear to others how vastly important I feel the antithesis between these two points of view to be; but I hardly expect The dualism to do so, for, while the practical effects of involved in , _._ . "other-world- the difference are really very great, they liness" its great . . . - .. . practical evil, are less obvious than subtile, or, rather, the more obvious differences are not the most important ones. The essence of the difference seems to be this: that those who believe that a man's three score years and ten are but a mere prelude to his eternal existence, all hold that a mans spiritual welfare is entirely distinct from and quite independent of, his physical well-being; for those who so think, the inner life is a thing wholly apart from the outer physical ex- istence; and while care for the latter may in some cases do no harm to the former, and while the lover of men's souls may interest himself also in the well-being of their bodies, yet such interest and the corresponding activity is aside from the true purpose of life. I am not blind to the fact that this point of view, or at least a nominal acceptance of and partial belief in 34 RELIGIO DOCTORIS this theory, has given us many noble and beautiful lives, has given us most of those elder brothers of mankind to whom we look back with The recognition reverence and thankfulness; nor do I of the unity of ' life, of the in- f a jj to see that the other point of view terdependence r of psychic and has been that of many coarse and selfish physical pheno- t " mena, opens the egotists, and' that it sometimes appears mind and heart *^ to every infiu- as the parent of, or at least as the ence, and by mm <. leading us to sponsor for, that mad quest for immediate realize that the *~ *"' i? present alone is enjoyment which destroys the lives ot ours, does the * . utmost for the thousands of the youth of every advanced development of . ... . . ' . the future. civilization. And yet 1 am convinced, not only that the latter is the truer, that it is the true point of view, but also that it is the one that has the most promise for the moral and spiritual welfare of mankind; because while the belief that spirit and body are fundamentally distinct and separate and that our proper concern is with the former alone, has the tendency to justify us in confining our attention to but a part of that which is, to but a fraction of reality, and in moments of spiritual stress is likely to cause us to turn our backs to science and to art, and while from this point of view the life of the Indian fakir, who spends his days in motionless trance, and that of the filthy mediaeval monk, who spent the years in prayer and self-castigation, are logical and proper; the other point of view, on the contrary, the point of view that life is one, that spirit and body are the inner and outer sides of the one being, whose welfare is dependent upon their joint development, this point of view, intelligently held, requires not only PHILOSOPHY AND EVERYDAY LIFE 35 that we shall recognize that the present alone is fully ours, but that we shall consider all that is, that mind and heart be thrown open to every influence; it is based upon the assumption that nothing is too mean to com- mand the reverent attention of man, that nothing is so insignificant that it will not help man to understand himself, the topmost flower upon the tree of life, the heir of the ages, and so contribute to the enrichment and perfection of life. Only by this study of all with which life brings us into relation, of the whole Universe of which man finds himself to be a part, can man learn to live a true ideal aright. The true ethical ideal, which shall upon the whole supplement the instincts man has inherited of human ex- . . , 1 1 1 perience. from his human and subhuman ancestors, shall check and complement them; which shall enable this being that has attained to reason to lead a truly rational life, studying the impulses which stir him and from this study learning to live an ordered life, to which the balancing of one impulse over against another shall give consistency and symmetry and poise, instead of an aimless life of blind instinct, now directed by one, the next moment by another impulse, this true ethical ideal can be no other than a working hypothe- sis as to the right conduct of life, attained as a result of the consideration of all the facts that enter into life. That all ideals are necessarily based upon the real, is a fundamental truth that is generally ignored. Let us remember, not only that an ideal not based upon the real would be worthless, but that it could not exist. We are too prone to talk as though ideals were self- 36 RELIGIO DOCTORIS existent entities, independent of all human experience; as though all that we regard as high ideals had been set in the sky at the beginning of time for man au ideals are to look up toand strive after. But if we based upon ^ reality. leave the realm of poetry and consider But the false seriously what we mean by an ideal, we ideals handed " ^ down to us by shall find that all ideals are based upon tradition are . w based upon the reality and owe their existence to human imperfect ap- . . prehensions of experience. Many of the ideals that have reality that ob- r J tainedinmore been, and that still are, held up before primitive stages . _. _ of civilization, man, have, it is true, very little apparent kinship with reality; they are often fan- tastic and absurd, equally impossible of attainment and undesirable if attained; but this is so, not because they arose independently of reality, but because they were based upon an imperfect apprehension of some partial phase of reality, and not upon a comprehensive study of the whole of reality. What is an ideal? It is 1 is it not? an idea of something worthy of one's attainment. Like all other ideas, it must arise, as a part of human experience, from the reaction of the human mind to the reality with which it is confronted, which forms the content of its consciousness. The savage acquires his ideals as a result of cruder thinking than ours, it may be, but in the same general way that the highly civilized man in the twentieth century acquires his; and the savage is often as ready to suffer to the last extremity for the sake of his (in our opinion) false ideals, as we are for our more elevated ones. But neither the intensity of his conviction nor the completeness of his self-immolating devotion gives the sanction of divine PHILOSOPHY AND EVERYDAY LIFE 37 truth to the savage's ideals nor to ours. Not a few of the ideas and ideals that still exercise a considerable influence among civilized peoples, are based upon the narrow experiences and imperfect apprehensions of reality that characterize a rudimentary stage of civili- zation, and were gradually given a definite formulation by the intellectual leaders of a still very imperfectly civilized people. In all such cases the ideal, itself formulated in an early day, corresponds to a conception of life that arose still earlier; and yet it often happens that the ideal thus formed and thus formulated is insisted upon as that to which man's conduct in the quite different world of a later stage of civilization, with its broader horizons and deeper insights, must conform. Why is it, let us now ask ourselves, that, throughout the course of human history, the ideals of ignorant and child-minded ancestors have controlled the Reasons for conduct or the thought of their much more tok1se e tradi- mature and better informed descendants; tionai ideals. or at j east have const ituted the creed which the latter have felt under moral obligation to confess, even though in their actual conduct they might run counter to it and might often be compelled to do so by the circumstances of the times in which they lived, and even though deep in the recesses of their souls they might not feel it to be true? Partly, \ of course, because of the power of custom, of habit, of I tradition; because of the natural (and proper) disposi- I tion to believe what one is told, especially by his parents : and elders and by those whose lives are, or are sup- \ 38 RELIGIO DOCTORIS posed to be, given to the study and teaching of moral and religious truth. And we are the more completely subject to these traditional ideals when we have no satisfactory and complete substitute for them; when we have not ourselves had the leisure, the inclination or the ability to think out for ourselves a theory of I conduct that, while avoiding the defects of the tradi- I tional one, should have all its real or supposed advan- I tages. Further than this, our deference to a traditional ideal is greatly strengthened by the consideration that it has taken form through the activity of the best and ablest men of that elder day in which it was first formu- lated, and that it has been acknowledged by, and in some measure at least has actually controlled the lives of, the great majority of the best men of succeeding times. And finally, it is generally true that while most of those we honor as men who have tried to do right and to serve their fellows, and who in some mea- sure have succeeded therein, have professed allegiance to the old ethical ideals, a great number of those who have denied its validity have lived badly, their lives deserving disapproval not alone from the standpoint of the old ethical ideal in question, but also from the standpoint of regard for their own health and wellbeing and for the wellbeing of others, indeed, it might often be said, from the standpoint of science, humanity and common sense. Here is the strength of all the old ideals, that, whether or not they be conducive to true progress and adapted to the conditions of life of those among whom they prevail, at any rate, true or false, they are ideals! PHILOSOPHY AND EVERYDAY LIFE 39 For however much the world may outwardly make sport of ideals and idealists, and although it justly contemns the man of one idea, and deeply deplores fanaticism, yet at heart all mankind, and perhaps most of all the practical man of the world, respects the man who by his conduct shows that he has an ideal, in other words, the man whose life follows some plan, or at least has some guiding principle, and thus shows that he is on the human plane, capable of perceiving that which is not immediately present to any one of the five senses, and of working for distant or non-material ends. Bearing all this in mind, we shall perhaps be able to understand the form that the standing quarrel be- tween the conservative idealist and the Blind deference revolutionary realist so often and so un- to tradition and " , moral nihilism fortunately takes. The latter despises alike unsatis- f # 11 factory. the former as a self-deluded fantast, lack- ing in intelligence or in honesty and frank- ness, or in both; while the former shudders at the latter as a conscienceless sensualist, devoid of appreciation of all that is noblest in human life. And far too often both in their adverse judgments are in a measure right; for neither has a philosophy of life arising out of his own thought and feeling and based upon a study of himself and the world. The former is the slave of habit and tradition, shouts the old shibboleths because the majority of the respectable world does so, and for the same reason acts inconsistently therewith in a hundred particulars with perfect serenity; while the latter's thought is mostly negative and destructive, or 40 RELIGIO DOCTORIS at best critical, not constructive. Although the lat- ter professes to believe that nothing exists without an adequate cause, he makes no serious effort to understand the ground of his opponent's error, but contents himself with ridiculing his absurdities and denouncing his inconsistencies. The patent incon- sistency of many of the traditional ideals with one another, with the actual conditions of life, and with healthy human instincts, has induced a revolt, and the rebel has simply thrown the old ideals overboard, instead of attempting to reconstruct them, and has determined to lead a free life which too often means that he proposes to sail without chart or compass, abandoning himself to every impulse (instinctive or reasoned, as the case may be) as it arises, regardless for the time being of all else in life. He is as much a slave to his passions as his opponent is a slave to tradition and habit. The life of the latter is at least brooded over, if not actually controlled, by a vague sense of duty arising from the current traditional con- ceptions of God, of immortality, and of the freedom of the human will, and is further conditioned by the acceptance, in name or in fact, of a body of specific beliefs and rules of action, more or less consistent with one another and with human experience, but coming to him in the main from without, not springing out of his own thought and feeling as his own interpre- tation of life. He is in a large measure the slave of the past, a subject not a citizen of the moral world. But the disciple of the gospel of revolt of whom we have just been speaking, is just as little a citizen of the PHILOSOPHY AND EVERYDAY LIFE 41 f moral world; his attitude is rather that of the anarch- istic nihilist, who, dissatisfied with the moral govern- ment of life as he finds it, proposes, not to substitute a better for it, but to dispense with all moral order. Neither of the adversaries has attained to or even sought for, a true philosophy of life, which must be The life en- based upon a recognition of all that is, and troephSosophy in accordance with which the conduct of moia^and 11 ^e will be controlled by the relations beautiful. ^^ are f oun( } fa su bsist between the individual self and all else in the universe (every part of which is related, directly or indirectly, to every other part). A life thus enlightened by philosophy will neither, be that of a pilgrim sojourning for a brief period in a vale of tribulation, nor that of an adven- turer wielding a free lance in a world of hazard out of which he is trying to carve his fortune; it will be the earnest, loving, moral life of the joint heir of the ages, seeking to make the home that he and his brothers have inherited as beautiful, and the life in that home as noble, as may be possible. A great practical evil of the doctrine that man's life here and now (of which he has certain knowledge) is but a prelude to a future existence (as to "Other-world- ^ # v Hness" leads us which he has no certain knowledge, it to neglect that . . . ? . which is, in the being merely a matter of belief), is that it interest of that & . - , , ,.- which is ima- leads us to look upon actual human lite : gined, treating x '"* 1 human lives as as a means, not as an end in itself, thus a mere means ... . . . to some ulterior violating what Kant rightly declared to be a fundamental ethical principle.* Instead *Kant's insistence upon this point seems to me to go far to make atonement for the injury his philosophy has done to the cause of truth. 42 RELIGIO DOCTORIS of living, largely and truly, men are content to make of all of life of which they have certain knowledge, a mere preparation for a future state of existence. This tendency shows itself not alone in the life of the fakir of the East and the nun of the West and in the narrow and often sour life of the Anglo-Saxon non-conformist of the last three centuries; the influence of this attitude toward life is carried over into purely secular affairs, showing itself in the protest of the conservative against any broadening of the lives of the lower classes, whose duty it is, we are piously assured, to be content in that position in which it has pleased Providence to place them {that is their road to Heaven; and if they get there, what does it matter whether the short stretch of road leading thereto be rough and stony, dark and r arrow, or broad, bright with sunshine and carpeted with flowers!) In- deed this seems to be the fundamental error of the great-hearted Jesus, who by his gospel of love has done so much to bring sweetness and light into the life of mankirid, but who in such utterances as "Blessed are the poor, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven,' ' "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, " and other more or less similar expressions, including perhaps that which the Johannine Gospel attributes to him, "He that loveth his life shall lose it, and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life The spokesman of a transition period in human thought, his masterly expression of that which was felt to be the need of the hour, the acceptance of the verdict of reason without the abandonment of what was regarded as the indispensable foundation of morality, not only satisfied the immediate desire for a presentable theory of thought and life, but discouraged progress in philosophy by leading men to rest content with paradox. PHILOSOPHY AND EVERYDAY LIFE 43 eternal," seems to perpetuate the Buddhist error that self-abnegation has a value in and of itself, apart from any service to others that may be wrought there- through, and to unduly minimize the dignity and importance of the present life in comparison with life in a world beyond; thus leading men to believe, not merely that a narrow and miserable earthly life is a matter of spiritual indifference, but that such a life is indeed to be preferred, inasmuch as the best places in ; Heaven are to be reserved for those who lead a miser- able life on earth. But not only has this religious doctrine been consciously carried over and made a social and political weapon in the hands of the con- servative; it has unconsciously, as it were, entered into the social, political, industrial and scientific life of mankind, exercising a great influence upon the actual organization of society at large and of scientific and educational undertakings, and conditioning the thought of many social theorists. It is largely respon- sible for that widely prevalent ideal which I may call the ant-ideal of society. A child the most beautiful and perfect blossom of the tree of life, springing from its topmost twigs is born into the world; but instead of being allowed to develop freely and naturally, as would be the case with such a blossom upon a tree growing wild, when it would be followed by the fruit in due season, the stock upon which it grows has been committed to the care of the orchardist, whose every effort is to force the fruit, though it be at the expense of the flower. To change our metaphor slightly, I would compare man (not to the flower alone, but) to 44 RELIGIO DOCTORIS the whole plant, and would insist that this human plant should be treated as an end in itself, not as a mere means for the production of fruit, as with the orchard peach tree, nor merely as a means for the production of flowers, as in the case of the garden rose bush. In a German rose garden one finds two sticks from two or three to six or eight feet high, the thicker one being the artificial support and the thinner one the living rose stalk which is fastened to it. At the top of this bare stem is a clump of leaves and large, beautiful and fragrant roses. In an English orchard you may see a stumpy, stocky, close-trimmed something, once destined by Nature to be a tree but now trained against a sunny brick wall; and if you visit it at the right sea- son of the year, you may pluck from this deformed tree a basket of luscious peaches. I am not question- ing the propriety of the gardener's activity, and I am far from disputing that he has been successful in pro- ducing large and beautiful flowers by thus controlling the growth of the plant and subordinating every other function, including the production of fruit, to this one end; nor do I doubt that by torturing the peach tree into the semblance of a vine, by removing many of the blossoms and subordinating everything else in the life of the tree to his one purpose, the orchardist succeeds in producing large, fine, sweet fruit; and I am grateful for both the beautiful roses and the luscious peaches, the superiority of which to the bitter almond from which the peach is believed to have been developed is beyond question. And yet, as I observe the grace and beauty of an unpruned tree, and follow its natural PHILOSOPHY AND EVERYDAY LIFE 45 development throughout the year, now a great pink- brown plume, with swelling buds and tender shoots; later its wide-spreading, graceful boughs adorned with delicate and fragrant blossoms, relieved perhaps by the soft yellow-green of the young leaves; in midsum- mer a mass of richest verdure, in the midst of which the nut clusters or the ripening fruits have begun to show themselves; and still later the foliage, which had become dark, turning light again, as it were in the second childhood of advanced age; and then at last the gorgeous twilight of the tree's annual life, the variegated beauty of the green and bronze and red and yellow of the dying leaves, as I see all this and much more than I can describe of grace and beauty and rich- ness and variety of life in the natural, spontaneous development of a living thing, I can not think it best that man's life should either be so cultivated as to sub- ordinate everything else to the flower, as is the spend- thrift pleasure-seeker's, or, on the other hand, should be pruned and deformed in the present, to force the fruit of the future, as is the life of the religious devotee and, hardly less so, the life of the industrial or scientific specialist, who, being "born a man, dies a grocer" or it may be a mine laborer, a chemist or a philologist. When shall we understand that the learned and dis- tinguished professor of philosophy who at sixty years of age observed for the first time the astonishing fact that there was a generic difference in the shapes of leaves, and that those of the oak and of the chest- nut were not alike,* is an uneducated man, whose *A fact. 46 RELIGIO DOCTORIS culture is pitifully deficient. And such a case is by no means unique, although at first glance it may The lives of appear to be so. What of the gifted educated arid of botanist who has not yet decided whether the rich are narrow and sided as well dw and lop- the current religious ideas of his generation m those of were miraculously revealed to a certain and poverty- P art of the human race some centuries stricken. a g Q or were "invented by an ambitious priesthood," but who takes for granted that the truth is to be found in one or the other of these two crude hypotheses? What of the musical genius who has a vague idea that waving palms grow at the top of the Andes? What of the learned scholar whose historical investigations have made him famous throughout the civilized world, but who believes that all the activity of sub-human beings, from the lowest to the highest, is directed by a mysterious something characteristic of animals and denominated Instinct, while for the guid- ance of man in sublunary affairs there exists a some- thing entirely distinct from and wholly unrelated to instinct, which is denominated Reason, and for the direction of man's spiritual life there is a third, and again an utterly distinct and unrelated something, yclept Intuition? What of the profound student of social institutions who cannot drive a nail without smashing his finger? What of the great physicist who has a notion that several hundred or thousand years ago there was an absolute monarchy at Rome which, as the result of an unusual degree of oppression by the reigning king, was suddenly displaced by a government "of the people, for the people and by the people," PHILOSOPHY AND EVERYDAY LIFE 47 similar to that which prevails in the United States today, which republican government had a long and prosperous existence until an ambitious citizen named Julius Caesar took advantage of a frontier war, in which he commanded the army of the republic, to win the favor of his soldiers and then with their assistance overthrow the loyal adherents of liberty, equality and fraternity, whose leader was named Brutus, and sub- stitute a second absolute monarchy for the republic, whereupon Rome became an empire (because the people had a traditional prejudice against the name kingdom) and so continued until the pope converted to Christianity the last Emperor, who then resigned his throne to the Vicar of God upon earth? What of the rich, accomplished nobleman, courteous and dig- nified, who eats and drinks, gambles, dances, makes love, fights and patronizes art from one year's end to the other, but who has no interest in economic indus- try, in science or in philosophy? What of the painter I who does not know whether the land in which he ex- hibits his artistic ability is a despotism or a constitu- tional state? What of the business man who is never at ease out of his office and who cannot understand how grown men can waste their time in out-of-door recreations; or of the scholar who spends his whole life in his study? When shall we understand that all of these alike are half -educated, uncultured fractions of men, who, instead of realizing their glorious human birthright, have become mere cogs in a social machine! The cases I have just given are typical of the dis- torted, unsymmetrical, fractional lives that our brethren 48 RELIGIO DOCTORIS in all ranks of society are leading today. It is pitiful, it is almost maddening to see the heir of the ages thus ignore his birthright, and live a stranger in his own home, deriving little or no enjoyment from the untold wealth that nature, science and art lay at his feet; a pauper in a palace; too poor in spirit to open his eyes to the beauty that lies all about him, or to enjoy the actual mastery of the resources of life that belong to him as a man! There are a number of reasons for this unfortunate state of affairs, one being the notion that it is necessary Supposed justi- to tne constitution of civilized society that ?hese?r!mped men should be fitted for the performance SunifnHvesIn of different functions, head-workers and ofY'compilx 8 hand-workers, students of literature, of civilization. biology, of astronomy, of history, of paint- ing, of economics, of brick-making, of psychology, etc., and that, division of labor being the condition of progress, the more complete the division the better, and therefore a head-worker should not be expected to have the ability to use his hands, nor a handworker to * have the capacity to reason on abstract questions; for art is long and time is fleeting, and "the shoemaker should stick to his last. " Even if we did not know it to be the Divine Will that some men should in this life be hewers of wood and drawers of water, while others should be similarly confined to their possibly more elevated but still limited functions, we are told, the requirements of civilization, the law of progress, the survival of the fittest make imperative narrow specialization. No man today, it is said, can hope to know all that has PHILOSOPHY AND EVERYDAY LIFE 49 been discovered in the different departments of art and science or to take part in all the different kinds of human activity; human civilization is much too far advanced for that and the present accumulations of human science immeasurably too vast. On the con- trary it is only by means of the greatest diligence that one can hope to gain even a practical working mastery of that one little department of science or art in which he is to do his work. So, a' God's name, select your line of endeavor and get to work in it as quickly as possible, and, once having selected your specialty, stick to it! It is specialization, or in other words the division of labor, that distinguishes civilization from savagery; only for the lower stages of civilization is it possible for every normal individual to do and know all that the race does and knows. If you wish retrogression to take the place of progress, then by all means let every man try to know everything for himself and do everything for himself. Let us have feeble amateurism instead of the mighty strides of science, dilettanteism in the place of art ; first a stationary instead of a progres- sive civilization, then retrogression, and finally the silly enthusiast's ideal a return to the state of nature, i. e. savagery! Now, that there is an abundance of truth in what has just been set forth, no thoughtful and candid man will deny; and yet in so far as the attempt is therein made to invalidate the contention that men do not live broadly and largely enough, do not in their lives take sufficient account of all that is, do not see to it that their lives are as broadly human as they should 50 RELIGIO DOCTORIS be, it is misleading and fallacious. Carrying the pur- port of the implied argument to its logical conclusion, specialization should be pushed farther and justification farther, until different parts of the com- Ir^mintumad munity should be bred for certain "points " by 5 ?he M fac? nd alone, so that we might have a veritable Site* possible 6 human ant-heap the ideal of industry and general *taT- d of the division of labor ! But, unf ortunate- daMstslf only ty> w ^ tn tne ants an ^ termites the division oflodolngwwe of labor is carri ed so far that individual realized. integrity and completeness of life is entirely sacrificed. To say nothing of the slaves of these insect communities, the great majority of the true-born members themselves have become so physical- ly specialized that they have ceased to be complete, normal animals, and have become mere workers, they have lost sexual capacity and can only be nurses, not mothers. Let us beware of setting such an ideal before ourselves. If my conception of humanity is true, we cannot but regard as evil specialization that is carried so far as to regard the individual man as a mere means, ceasing to regard him as an end in himself. Because we should not expect an historian to make with his own hands a modern locomotive, it does not follow that he should be so manually awkward and physically undeveloped that he could not sharpen a pencil or drive a nail without cutting his finger or bruising his thumb, and could not carry a hod of coal up one flight of steps without fainting from exhaustion. Because it is unreasonable to expect a machinist to classify, and describe the life-history of, any microscopic organism PHILOSOPHY AND EVERYDAY LIFE 51 that may happen to be shown him, it does not follow that he should be so ignorant of biology as to believe that the only methods of reproduction are those with which he is familar in the case of the chick and the kitten. As a life-long student of education, I assert that it is entirely possible for a normal youth of, say, nineteen to have had such a physical training and mental equipment as shall give him a fair understanding of himself and of the general nature of the world of which he is a part, in its physical, chemical, biological and psychic aspects; fit him to live a large, human life in that world; and make it impossible that he should ever become a mere machine for the production of some specialty, however earnestly he may devote himself to his particular vocation: and indeed some- i thing approaching this can be accomplished for the lad 1 of fourteen. I am no enemy of the division of labor, I but I do plead for a broad and human foundation for specialization; and I venture the assertion that the historian who has some knowledge of biology will be a - far more intelligent, and hence a more useful, historical I specialist, than his brother historian who could not spare a few hours out of his life to learn anything that had not a direct and obvious bearing upon his specialty. I grant that the broadly educated and physically developed student of history, who has retained a healthy craving for fresh air and exercise, who has some insight into the processes of nature that are going on in the world about him and into the principles of physics in accordance with which the wonderful machines that do man's work have been constructed, 52 RELIGIO DOCTORIS who takes not an historical interest alone but a truly aesthetic enjoyment in the world's great works of art, and to whom history is not an end in itself, a finality, but a means of assisting men to understand the present constitution of society, and thus a help to him in his endeavor to improve the condition of mankind in the present and the future I grant that such a man will not be so likely to give ten hours a day to his specialty, as the historian who knows nothing but the records of the past and cares for nothing else; but I believe that five hours of historical work each day from the former will be worth more to the world than the The more com- ten hours of the latter; I know that the jShyricanmd 8 former's life will be worth more to himself iSr^^moS" than the latter's, will be a larger, truer, w^rka? a h spec- more human and happier life, and, being iaiist will be. thj^ I am convinced that it will bless the world more. For what, after all, is the I benefit of civilization if it is not to enable men and Women to live larger, sweeter, happier lives? What is the advantage of progress, what the good of science and of art, if no one is to take time to enjoy them? I am reminded of the story of the prosperous Illinois farmer who worked very hard so that he might be able to add a neighboring strip of land to his already large farm. Although every one may know the story, it will do no harm to repeat it until everyone has seriously considered the moral. Asked why he wanted the additional land, he answered that he would thereby be enabled to raise more corn; and when the benefit to come from this was inquired into, he stated that PHILOSOPHY AND EVERYDAY LIFE 53 | he could then fatten more hogs. "And what good will that do you?" "With the proceeds of the sale of the hogs," he replied, "I can buy more land." "And then?" Why then of cokirse I can raise more corn and fatten more hogs and buy more land!" But what has this to do with the antithesis between the view that regards life on earth as a mere preliminary to eternal existence, and that which looks Siegecf fistifi- upon our earthly existence, here and now, ni^ow umito! as t he great fact of life, the only existence !iyesiies u th a e n of wnich we > as individuals, have certain eSwy e is- knowledge? Just this: that back of the foSmdMby is justification set forth in the preceding ness e " worIdli " paragraph for the philosophy of life that finds it proper to disregard man's natural craving for largeness and completeness of life, and to make the individual man a mere cog in a social ma- chine, and back of all other possible justifications for such a treatment of human life, is the notion that after all it does not much matter whether man's earthly life be large and full and free or narrow and deformed "I'm but a pilgrim here, Heaven is my home!" With- out the support of this idea, the other justifications for the confinement and distortion of human life would not, I believe, have stood as many hours as they have centuries. In this " other- worldliness " lies the root of the mischief! Nothing therefore, in my opinion, stands more in the way of true human progress pro- gress in sweetness and light, that is, progress in right living, not necessarily progress in the acquisition of material goods nor even in the advancement of isolated 54 RELIGIO DOCTORIS branches of science than the failure to estimate life here and now at its proper value, a failure that seems to be due to the fact that we have treated the hypothesis of immortality as the most significant fact of human existence. From the practical point of view, then, I maintain that philosophy is of the utmost importance, even more important for us all today than what mSSsLeif w ^ call science. For "What shall it profit j.?oi h of k^o^i-" a man though he gain the whole world and wtfdom! l se h* s own life?" What good is there in adding to our knowledge of the laws of nature if we do not thereby get any assistance in living larger and happier (that is, better) lives? WTiat we need most of all is, not the accumulation of items of information, but that which shall convert our knowl- edge into ivisdom, and that is philosophy. Ill THE NATURE OF EXPLANATION THE TRUE INTERPRETATION OF THE PRINCIPLE OF CAUSE AND EFFECT "Flower in the crannied wall, I pluck you out of the crannies; Hold you here, root and all, in my hand, Little flower but if I could understand What you are, root and all, and all in all, I should know what God and man is." Tennyson Every normal child is an animated interrogation point. Every young vertebrate, to go no lower in the scale of life, is full of curiosity. Curiosity is indeed the sign manual of intelligence. And yet, although from the cradle to the grave we are continually demanding and offering explanations, we rarely ask ourselves the simple fundamental question, what the true nature of an explanation is. Notwithstanding that this question is the fundamental one for philosophy, the conception which the professed students of philosophy have held as to the true function of explanation has often been as vague and unintelligent as that of the child or the un- educated man or woman; and, worse than this, the failure to grasp the true meaning of explanation has too often been concealed under a somewhat pretentious traditional classification of causes, which has served to 55 56 RELIGIO DOCTORIS keep the layman from recognizing the legitimate limita- tions of explanation, and has even tended to prevent the student of physical science from clearly formulating to himself what a legitimate scientific explanation is. The devotee of physical science, however, although he may never have formulated the idea, has a pretty definite notion of what is meant by the explanation of a physical phenomenon; and it is to him that we may best look for guidance in the attempt to get a clear idea of what is accomplished by an explanation. Has anything ever been satisfactorily explained to you? "Yes," says one man; "hundreds, thousands of things have been explained to me." "No," says another, answering in the spirit of Tennyson's apos- trophe to the flower in the crannied wall; "I have had partial explanations of myriads of things, some more and some less complete, but I have never yet received a complete explanation of anything. " Comparing these two answers, I think we shall see in what sense it is true that anything can be explained, and what the legitimate f miction of explanation is. Every one will doubtless admit that both answers are true. The latter is the exact, philosophical answer; the former is the practical one. The child, the practical man of affairs, the student of science has learned the explanation of hundreds and thousands of things, and has perhaps, in turn, explained hundreds of things to others. In what have these explanations consisted? Always simply in this : in showing the relations of the thing in question: in bringing out the relations of the several parts of the thing to one another and to the whole, or in showing THE NATURE OF EXPLANATION 57 the connection of this thing with other things. If the matter is at all complex and the explanation is at all far-reaching, it may embrace both of these processes. The explanation of a map or chart or of a state con- stitution may consist primarily in the former process, bringing out clearly the relations of the parts. The explanation of such a natural phenomenon as a fall of snow or the Gulf Stream consists primarily in showing the relation of the thing as a whole to other facts of nature. Yet it should go without saying that a thorough understanding of the snow storm or of the Gulf Stream requires a full knowledge of all that is included under the term snow or Gulf Stream, itself, no less than a knowledge of the precedent natural phenomena which, as we say, stand in a causal relation to the phenomenon under consideration. And, on the other hand, al- though the explanation of a state constitution may be primarily concerned with a clear exposition of its vari- ous parts and their mutual relations, yet the explana- tion would be quite meaningless if one had no knowl- edge of the relations of government to human well-being and social progress; and, in like manner, the exposition of the relations of the various parts of a chart to one another would constitute no practical enlargement of knowledge if the meanings of the symbols therein used i. e. their relation to the actual phenomena of life and nature were not understood. In other words, then, whether the relations to which our attention be called be primarily internal relations or external relations, every explanation really involves both kinds of rela- tions, and the bringing clearly to consciousness the rela^ 58 RELIGIO DOCTORIS tions of the thing in question is what is meant by explain- ing it. But the relations of everything are really infinite. The whole of human knowledge is a complex unity with ragged edges reaching out into the unknown. The Universe, so far as we know it at all, we know as an infinitely vast whole, every part of which is directly or indirectly related to every other. In proportion as we grasp these relations, does the world become to us a true cosmos, a veritable Universe; in proportion as we are ignorant of them, does the world remain for us chaotic. Thus there is literal truth in the poetic con- ception that Reason which some of the Greeks and some modern philosophers have deified is the creator of the Cosmos, which it forms out of Chaos. But what is the bearing of the infinitude of relations for every- thing that exists, for every object of consciousness, upon the question before us, the scope of explanation? Obviously this, that a complete explanation of anything is impossible so long as we do not know everything. As Tennyson has so beautifully suggested, if we knew all that there is to know about the simplest little flower, we should have reached the ultimate explanation of all that is, the last secret of the universe would be un- locked, and we should be divine in knowledge and doubtless also in power. If anyone says that he knows all that there is to know about anything, he must be regarded either as one who has spoken carelessly or as a pretentious dunce. Perhaps that which most dis- tinguishes the scientific thinker from the unscientific layman, is that while the latter is liable to feel that he THE NATURE OF EXPLANATION 59 knows a great many things perfectly, or at any rate that somebody knows all that there is to know about a certain thing, the true scientist is ever conscious that he has but the beginnings of knowledge concerning that with which he is best acquainted, and in reference to which the world may look to him as master. A com- plete explanation of the most ordinary human event requires not only a perfect knowledge of the contem- porary conditions, the natural environment in which the event takes place., but also of the constitution, psychic and physical, and therefore of the life and race history, of the individual or individuals concerned; and either line of investigation takes us back to the ultimate facts of existence, to primary physical, chemical and biological laws, and requires a complete knowledge of the process of evolution. But we need not take such a complex matter as an event in human life; a perfect knowledge of the simplest natural object conceivable, says a quartz pebble lying on a beach, would lead us to the fundamental laws of existence, and require such a knowledge of the temporal and spacial development of nature that we should have the key to the knowledge of all that is. So long, then, as men's knowledge is finite, a perfect explanation of anything is impossible. Although, however, a complete knowledge of any- thing has never yet been attained by man, he has attain- ed to a practical explanation an explanation that goes far enough to answer his immediate purpose in the case of untold myriads of things. He has an im- perfect knowledge of the properties of wood, stone and iron, of the ordinary processes of inanimate nature, and 60 RELIGIO DOCTORIS of the relations of the heavenly bodies to one another; of the physical constitution, emotional nature and in- tellectual methods of living beings; of the physical and biological development of the globe he inhabits, and of the course of human history; of the conventional signi- ficance of a large body of gestures, sounds and marks: and the more perfect his knowledge the more fully does he apprehend the relations of these various kinds of knowledge to one another, the more do they tend to constitute a unity of knowledge, having for its object a universe of being, and not a mere "job lot" of isolated items of information. The explanation of any new ob- ject of inquiry consists in showing the relations it bears to the things, processes or laws with which one has some previous familiarity. The foregoing discussion may seem to be but the unnecessary setting forth of a very "simple thing" in a very "solemn way"; but the corollaries of the truth as to the function and limitations of explanation seem to me to be sufficiently important to justify some prosi- ness in emphasizing just what the function and limita- tions are. One corollary is that the positing of first or final causes is not explanation. In so far as any relation between the subject of inquiry and anything of which we have some previous knowledge is shown, a step is taken toward explaining the former, it is partially explained. But to refer the matter in question at once to an assumed ultimate or first cause, is not to explain it, but to avoid an explanation of it. If you desire an explanation of some wonderful structure, your desire THE NATURE OF EXPLANATION 61 is certainly not satisfied when you are told that John Smith or Thomas Edison or God made it. That tells you nothing as to the processes, laws and materials of which John or Thomas or God availed himself in form- ing it; does not help you to connect it with and incor- porate it into such knowledge of the Universe as you already have. You know that Smith or Edison did not create it by a "Hey, presto!" out of nothing. And if you could be induced to believe that God did so create it, the one significant effect of this miraculous verbal ex- planation would be that, although you might still value the thing in question for its function, your interest in it as a structure would be almost if not quite extinguished, since it would, by the hypothesis, have no relation to the laws and processes of nature as to which you had gained some knowledge, and hence a close study of it would do nothing to complete your previous knowledge except by putting along side of it a disconnected fact. To name anything as the "cause" of something else, then, is not to explain the latter, except in so far as the term used to denote the cause may bring to mind such phenomena as serve to connect the alleged effect with so much of the Universe as is already partly understood. This fact suggests the second important corollary of the true nature of explanation, to wit : that, accurately , scientifically and philosophically speaking, no one fact is the cause of any other fact, except in the merely verbal sense that the statement of the alleged causal fact may really include within itself the effect; as when, for instance, one says that the death of a senator from Vermont was the cause of a vacancy in Vermont's 62 RELIGIO DOCTORIS senatorial representation. In a scientific and philoso- phical, as distinguished from a verbal sense, no single thing can be regarded as the cause of any phenomenon, however simple. If we are accurate, we shall always have to do with causes rather than a single cause. Everything that contributes to the event in question is a part of its cause; the attempt to distinguish between the various conditions of an event and its one true cause, is a vain one, and eminently unphilosophical, notwithstanding the eminence of some of those who have maintained it. Philosophically and scientifically considered, all the necessary conditions are a part of the cause, and the alleged true cause is but one, perhaps the most prominent, of these conditions. In popular language, however, we speak of a single cause for an event, simply because the thing alleged is that part of the cause which has practical interest for us. It may be well to illustrate the multiplicity of cir- cumstances which unite to cause an event, by one or two simple illustrations that will at the same time show how unsafe a guide in this matter is popular speech, which, according to the point of view, may fix upon any one of a half dozen different conditions as the cause of an event. A man is found dead, the cause of his death not being at first known. An autopsy is held; and the physicians conducting the autopsy are interested to know whether the cause of his death was an injury to the heart, the lungs, the liver, or some other organ or organs. The pious daughter who ordered the autopsy was concerned to prove that the loved father had not committed the THE NATURE OF EXPLANATION 63 sin of "self-murder." A preliminary investigation brings out the fact that the death was caused by some quick-acting poison which was probably not adminis- tered by the deceased himself, and circumstances point to the probability that he was murdered by a recently discharged servant. The toxicologist who examines the stomach is not interested to know whether John Smith or Peter Brown caused the death of the deceased, but whether it was poison A or poison B or poison C. Finally we have three different causes alleged. The physicians who conducted the autopsy solemnly an- nounce that the cause of the death was heart failure. The chemist says strychnine was the cause of the death. The court declares that the death was caused by William Jones, a former valet of the deceased. Only one cause is alleged by each of these authorities respectively, and yet the different answers are all consistent with one another, differing only by reason of the point of view. Popular usage justifies us in speaking of that, as the cause of an event, which is of primary importance from the special point of view of the moment. In the case just presented, the answers might be united by saying that the deceased's death was caused by the act of William Jones in stopping the action of the heart by administering a dose of strychnine. But such a state- ment does not by any means exhaust all that might be said as to the cause of the death. Take another case. John appears with a scarred face, minus his eyebrows. What caused this? It appears that James thought his gun was not loaded, when it actually contained a charge of powder, and that he 64 RELIGIO DOCTORIS pointed it at John's face and pulled the trigger. A half dozen things might be alleged as the cause of the scarred face, James' careless folly, the pulling of the trigger by James, the presence of powder in the gun, the explosive nature of the powder, the fact that the gun was pointed at John, the fact that the muzzle was within a foot of John's face, etc. But no one of these things alone would have produced the scars on John's face; it took all of them together to produce the scarring of John's face. And in fact, if we had to account for the scarring of John's face to one who knew nothing to start with (if such a case were conceivable), there would be no end to the facts that we should have to allege as contributing causes of the event in question, the power of a human being, such as James, to produce motion by an impulse of the will; the delicacy and sus- ceptibility of the human skin to the influence of fire, etc., etc. All these and numberless other facts were necessary to the production of the effect in question, were a part of that which caused it, and no one of them alone, and no number of them together, could have caused the event, while one single element was lacking. Among other necessary conditions was a certain brief period of time between the pulling of the trigger and the impact of the flame and powder upon John's face. Had every other condition been fulfilled, had the mouth of the gun been within a foot of John's face when the trigger was pulled, but had it been possible to remove John's face or to interpose a screen before the expira- tion of the extremely short length of time necessary for the passage of the flame and powder to John's face, THE NATURE OF EXPLANATION 65 the event under discussion, the scarring of John's face, would not have taken place. There is a point to be observed here which is of more importance than it may at first seem. Philosophers have disputed as to whether the cause actually precedes the effect (as is popularly assumed) or is simultaneous with it. Kant rightly, as it seems to me maintained that cause and effect are simultaneous. Of course a part of the cause the pointing of the gun at John's face, for example, or the administration of the poison in our other illustration precedes the effect; but a part of the cause is not the cause; everything that contributes to the result in question must take place before the cause is complete; and when the last requisite for the completion of the cause is at hand, we have the effect; in other words, the effect does not follow the completion of the cause, but is simultaneous with it. You cannot cause a lemonade to be produced by any amount of lemon, water and sugar, so long as they re- main apart. A lemon, a glass of water and a spoonful of sugar no more make a lemonade than a box of nails, a can of milk and a sack of salt. It is the proper combination of the lemon juice, water and sugar that makes the lemonade; and when this combination takes place -mot after it has taken place, but just as soon as it takes place you have the lemonade. Let it be re- peated then, an effect does not, in strict accuracy, fol- low its cause, but is simultaneous with the completion of the cause. The apprehension of this truth may enable us to go a step farther, and assert that, in a strict physical sense, 66 RELIGIO DOCTORIS as contradistinguished from an historical sense, the completed cause and the effect are identical. This may seem too extreme a statement, and perhaps re- quires a little further explanation, after which it may be enforced by an illustration sho ing that in fact popular usage suggests that this is true by sometimes naming as cause that which is at other times named as the effect, and vice versa. In order to understand and realize the justification for the statement that cause and effect are actually identical, we must emphasize that not only is it true that- the completed cause and the effect are simultaneous, but that, conversely, nothing that is really prior to the effect can properly be con- sidered the cause thereof. To revert to our illustration, the charging of the gun with powder, the intention on James's part to startle John by pointing a gun at him, the actual aiming of the gun at John's face, even the pulling of the trigger no one of these things was the cause of the scarring of John's face; for either or all of these things might have taken place and John's face might still be as unscarred as ever. It was not the previous pointing of the gun at John's face, but the fact that when the powder and flame issued from the gun they came in contact with John's face, together with the other necessary conditions, that caused the scarring of his face. The effect upon John's face would have been the same, whether John had just moved to the point at which the gun happened to be pointed, or the gun had just been pointed at the spot where John's face happened to be. It was the actual concurrence of all the conditions necessary to produce the effect that THE NATURE OF EXPLANATION 6? caused it, not the previous circumstances that led to the concurrence. The concurrence of all the necessary conditions for the production of the effect might have been brought about in a different way, John, for instance, being blind and deaf, might have inadvert- ently stepped between James and his intended target at the very moment the gun was being discharged, and, however brought about, the concurrence of the same conditions would have had yes, would have been the same effect. The simultaneous concurrence of all the necessary conditions produces the event, is its cause; but it is also true that this concurrence of the contributing elements constitutes the event, i. e. is the effect. For in a strictly scientific, physical sense, the effect which was caused by the conjunction of the conditions referred to above was not the scarred face which John now has, but the scarring of Johns face which then took place. If the accident took place two years ago, the present scarred appearance of John's face is the result, not of the accident alone, but of the accident plus all that has since taken place in connection with John's face; and as a matter of fact the passage of two years in which the healing power of nature has had time to work will doubtless have brought about a very visible improvement in the appearance of the scarred face. The same thing might be said if the event took place two months or two weeks ago, although in the latter cases the change in the appearance of John's face would naturally not be so great as it would be if two years had elapsed since the act of scarring took place. If the accident had taken place only two seconds 68 RELIGIO DOCTORIS ago, even though we might be unable to detect any difference between the present appearance of John's face and its appearance at the moment the event took place, yet the same reasoning would hold; it would be equally true that the scarred face which John would now present would not be wholly the effect of the con- junction of circumstances that we designate as the accident that scarred John's face, but which we might perhaps with increased accuracy designate as the accidental scarring of John's face. The scarring of John's face was the event in question, and this term designates at once cause and effect. Anything actually prior to the event was not the cause; at most it was something less than the cause, an element contributing to the cause. Anything actually subsequent to the event is not the effect; at least it is something more than the effect, something doubtless which results from the effect but in which there is an addition thereto; it is the effect as modified, appreciably or inappreciably, by the subsequent passage of time and the events that have taken place therein. This coalescence or identity of cause and effect, from the strictly physical point of view, is indeed in a measure recognized in popular speech. Take the use of the word "accident" (which from the etymological point of view is a better term than "event" to describe the coincidence of cause and effect in a given occurrence) for illustration. While one newspaper may say, "An unfortunate accident occurred yesterday, the unsightly scarring of our young townsman John Johnson's face by the carelessness of his brother James;" another THE NATURE OF EXPLANATION 69 newspaper account may read, "An accident on Beacon street was caused yesterday by the folly that has pro- duced so many similar occurrences, the supposition ot loaded'; " and a third journal may 'dent which took place yesterday on ed Master John Johnson a serious i this third account it will be ob- iident is spoken of as the cause; in the accident appears as the effect; ?ount the accident is (most properly as the whole occurrence (i. e. cause further illustration of the inter- Le conceptions of cause and effect fact that both terms in strictness ent phenomena, but to different Le occurrence, the term "cause" irious elements of the occurrence dly considered, when considered as l "effect" describing the occurrence sidered, when considered as being), lether the fire causes the wood to mses the fire to burn. The owner jine wood, which is piled up in the 70 RELIGIO DOCTORIS us that the combustion of oxygen is the cause of fire. A sanitary engineer, delivering a lecture on house ventilation, tells us that fire causes the combustion of oxygen, and therefore when there is a fire in the room the importance of keeping up the supply of fresh air is at a maximum. The fact of course is that "fire" and "the combustion of oxygen" are different expressions for what is at bottom the same phenomenon. In short, it is not only true, as we have previously seen, that now one and now another necessary condition is regarded as the cause of a given occurrence, the singling out of this, that or the other condition as the cause being determined by the point of view or by the special purpose in mind, but, further than this, that which from one point of view is regarded as the cause may from another point of view be considered as the effect, and vice versa. The toxicologist says that strych- nine caused a particular death; the court of justice declares that a murderer named William Jones caused the death in question. The chemist says that the com- bustion of oxygen causes fire; the sanitary engineer tells us that fire causes the combustion of oxygen. In answer to the assertion that nothing which is prior to an event can constitute its cause, but that it is the actual concurrence of the conditions necessary to the event which causes it, and that the event would happen whether this concurrence of conditions were brought about in one way or another, there is, I believe, but one line of attack, and that I am quite ready to wel- come if only it be followed to its legitimate conclusion. It may be said that the actual scarring of John's face THE NATURE OF EXPLANATION 71 at ten minutes and thirty seconds past four on the ninth of October, 1890, in a room in the second story of No. 32 Beacon street, by the explosion from a gun pointed at John by James, etc., etc., is a particular historical event, and that we have to do with that par- ticular event, with the effect that was then and there actually produced, and not with any might-have-beens; that one of the concurrent conditions that brought about this particular effect was the relative position of the mouth of the gun and John's face at the moment of the explosion, and that as a matter of fact that relative position had been brought about by the fact that James had just previously pointed the gun at John, and had kept it so pointed until the explosion took place; that therefore, while it is true that the effect did not take place until the actual concurrence at the given moment of time of all the necessary conditions, the relative position of John's face and the mouth of the gun, the delicate texture of John's skin, the atmospheric medium in which the explosion was possible, the actual explosion, the contact of powder and flame with John's face, etc., etc., which concurrence of conditions actual- ly constituted the effect, yet, this concurrence having as a matter of fact been brought about by the pointing of the gun at John's face by James (among other con- ditions precedent), and by the previous intention on James's part to startle John by so aiming a gun at him, etc., the actual particular historical event in question would not have occurred, would not have been the event that it was (although of course a similar event might have been brought about in a different way), 72 RELIGIO DOCTORIS had not these particular previous events taken place. And since the actual event under discussion would not have happened without these previous events, these previous events do in fact bear a causal relation to it. Hence the intention of James, the pointing of the gun, etc., though not proximate causes, yet enter into the chain of cause and effect as true, although slightly remote, causal elements. It would seem then from this discussion, that while from what may be designated as the standpoint of proximate causation, or actual efficiency, only the con- currence of conditions existing at the moment the effect comes into existence constitute its cause (for it is these as they stand, regardless of how they were brought about, out of which the effect is constituted), yet from what may be designated as the historical point of view, i. e. in so far as the effect in question is an event in time, all that actually led to the conditions that do in fact constitute the effect in question, stand in a causal relation to it. The reason that this latter point of view is commonly disregarded (even in scientific discussion) for that of proximate or immediate causation, is that it leads so far as to be practically unmanageable for ordinary purposes. A moment's reflection shows us that the chain of causation thus presented is an endless chain. To follow it logically is to go back to the be- ginning of time, if time have a beginning; and spacially it would carry us to the boundaries of the Universe, if the Universe had limits. If then we regard the Uni- verse as infinite (and if by the Universe we mean the totality of existence I do not see how we can possibly THE NATURE OF EXPLANATION 73 regard it as finite; for to suppose something beyond, outside of all that is, is a contradiction in terms), we are logically led to regard causation as infinite. That the chain of causation reaches into infinity from the standpoint of time, I have perhaps already sufficiently indicated: each event in history happens as it does because of the existing conditions, which are them- selves the result of previous conditions, and these of still earlier ones, and so on ad infinitum. That the chain of cause and effect likewise reaches into infinity in space may perhaps be suggested by several finite illus- trations. If you stick your finger into a globe of slight elasticity and of moderate size, you may be actually able to perceive by the senses that you have affected every part of the body. The perfectly spherical form is destroyed, not only by the change in the immediate neighborhood of your finger, but by a change through- out the substance; you may be able to detect by vision alone a slight protuberance at the most distant point of the globe, the point antipodal to that at which your finger is placed, which protuberance must prevent that half of the surface of the globe of which it is the centre from having a perfectly hemispherical outline. To take another illustration, we have learned that in ac- cordance with the law of gravity the apple and you and I are attracted to the surface and toward the centre of the earth, and that similarly the moon is attracted toward the earth, the earth toward the sun, etc. We must not, however, forget that this is but half of the truth. It is equally true that the earth attracts the sun, and the moon the earth, and that even the apple 74 RELIGIO DOCTORIS exerts an attractive force, not only upon the body of the earth, but upon the sun and upon the most distant star in the Universe. It is true that the attractive power which a tiny apple exerts upon a star of the first magnitude millions of millions of miles distant from it may be so immeasurably minute as to be quite negli- gable for most scientific, as well as for practical, pur- poses. So is the disturbance of the water on the shore of the antarctic continent that is caused by dropping a pebble into the middle of the Pacific Ocean. But although the tendency to produce ripples which in the form of an ever-expanding ring shall extend to the boundaries of the surface of any liquid into which a body is dropped, may be counteracted by any one of a thousand other disturbances of the liquid, and, in view of the smallness of the object dropped into the liquid, may be so weak that under the most favorable condi- tions possible it would have been imperceptible a few feet from the point at which the object was dropped, yet if the laws of physics are valid, if the falling of a mountain into the calmest inland lake would cause the slightest disturbance of its surface an inch beyond that part of the water which the falling mass should actually strike, we know that, however immeasureably small it may be, the gentle dropping of a tiny shell into the vastest and stormiest of seas must produce some effect throughout the vast ocean, even to the most distant shores. We must not forget that though anything be immeasureably small it nevertheless exists, and that to counterbalance a force is not to annihilate it. The least amount of energy exerted anywhere tends to reach THE NATURE OF EXPLANATION 75 through the Universe; and if I am not made uncomfort- able by the disturbance of the surface of the earth pro- duced by the crawling over it of an insect at the anti- podes, it is not because the impact of its tiny feet upon the grain of earth upon which it steps does not produce a disturbance which is communicated to the next grain and to the circumambient air and so on to all the solids and liquids and gases in the Universe, but only because, on the one hand, millions of other impulses from other sources are crossing the path of that set in motion by our insect's footfall, and counteracting it, and, on the other hand, my senses are not delicate enough to per- ceive the disturbance of the earth produced by my tiny fellow being's promenade, even if the impulse should come directly to me without obstruction or counteraction. As already said, the exertion of energy anywhere produces or tends to produce an effect every- where; it is as though the Universe were a vast drum- head, the whole of which must be affected by the slight- est depression of any part, or as though it were a vast body of liquid, the dropping of a grain of sand into which must produce waves of motion throughout its whole extent. In other words, given the indestructibility of energy and the continuity of space and time, and you have the principle of cause and effect. The practical importance of the illustrations I have used to bring out this truth will perhaps be found in the fact that they point to the erroneousness of the general habit of conceiving of causality under the analogy of a straight line in which successive points, A, B, C, D, E, etc., represent links in the chain of cause and effect, 76 RELIGIO DOCTORIS B being the effect of A and the cause of C, which is itself the cause of D, of which E is the effect, etc. I would suggest that we should rather accustom our- selves to think of causality under the analogy of a spherical surface, which, having neither beginning nor end, has no absolute centre, but any point upon which may be assumed as a centre, i. e., either as effect, since, being connected by continuous lines with every other point upon the surface of the sphere, it may be regarded as the point toward which they all converge; or as cause, inasmuch as, being connected by continuous lines with every other point upon the surface of the sphere, it may be considered as the centre of radiation from which they all converge. This, as we have al- ready seen, corresponds to the fact in reference to modi- fications of a spherical surface: a disturbance at any point of such a surface constituting a centre of radiation from which every other point on the surface must re- ceive a more or less disturbing impulse; and the con- verse of course being equally true, the modification at any given point being conceivable as the effect of the modification of the whole, since each point is a centre of convergence for continuous lines from every other point upon the surface. I hope that this analogy may help to make clear the fundamental truth that (inasmuch as the only reason- able hypothesis is, that all that exists constitutes a Universe, i. e., a connected whole) no occurrence can take place in any region of the Universe without affect- ing in some measure everything else that exists in the Universe; the obverse of which truth is that no pheno- THE NATURE OF EXPLANATION 77 menon can occur in any part of the Universe except in connection with i. e. as a part of, a modification of the whole. This means that every occurrence has some measure of direct or indirect causal relation to every- thing else that is either contemporaneous with or sub- sequent to it, and is at the same time in some measure an effect of everything else that is either contemporan- eous with or prior to it. Everything that exists in the present stands in the double relation of a partial cause and a partial effect of everything else that now exists, while it is an effect of everything that has ever existed in the past and a part of the cause of everything that will ever take place in the future. // takes everything to account for anything; nothing less than the Universal Whole may be posited as the true and complete cause of the slightest conceivable occurrence. The underlying meaning of cause and effect is not that which is indi- cated by the term "proximate cause," nor is it that which the theologian has in mind when he speaks of a "first cause" it is neither creation nor succession, but concomitant variation. To look for causes and to trace effects is to investigate responsive, or correspond- ing, changes in the great whole of which we ourselves and all else that is are parts, a fact which points back to the first truth that I endeavored to bring to clear consciousness in this essay, that explanation does not consist in naming a creative first cause, but in showing the relations of the thing to be explained, its relations to other parts of the Universe and the relations of its various parts to one another. IV THE PROBLEM OF EVIL This world's no blot for us, Nor blank; it means intensely and means good: To find its meaning is my meat and drink. Robert Browning All the world's thinkers that have ever seriously tried to understand the wonderful world of which we Evil is are a part, have had to ponder over the imperfection. p roD lem of evil; and the thought expended upon this subject has not been without result. With more or less clearness it is beginning to be perceived that evil is not a positive malignant force (as seems at one time to have been believed), but that it is merely negative, that evil is but another aspect of imper- fection. This is a truth so simple that it has gained wide acceptance; and yet the relation of this truth to others, its many important corollaries, its bearing upon the conduct of life, upon the ethical ideas that men should set before themselves and the practical ends for which they should work, are generally so little con- sidered that it may well be worth while to dwell upon this truth at some length; and I am the more strongly impelled to invite the attention of others to the implica- tions contained in this interpretation of evil, because 78 THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 79 their consideration has done so much to make my own life happier and more serene, going far toward ban- ishing hate from my life, widening my sympathies, and giving me the patience in the presence of individual evils that comes from the recognition of their tempor- ary necessity and confidence in their ultimate disap- pearance. The recognition of evil as incidental to imperfection, in the sense of incompleteness, means, for one thing, that notwithstanding the potential loveli- Man suffers ness ai *d actual beauty of the world, life iu? imperfect 01 nas so much of ugliness, physical and ?he P conditions moral, not because of man's rebellion Jlusl'oTdivfne against and disobedience to God, as our disfavor. religious teachers for the last two or three thousand years have taught us, not be- cause of the wrath (just or unjust) of superhuman beings against man, as has been taught by religious teachers of all races from the earliest times, but simply because of our incomplete development, and especially because of our backwardness in bringing the knowledge we have to bear upon human conduct. I sometimes think that he who could convince his fellows of this simple truth would deserve to rank among the world's greatest benefactors. We have Only when we J , . understand the a number ot wise sayings such as, What s source of evil , _ .. , . . can we do much well begun is half done, A wrong con- to overcome it. _ . . . . . . ,, . fessed is halt redressed, etc., more or less directly pointing to the truth that when we have looked any difficulty fairly in the face we have gone halfway toward overcoming it. When the physician has cor- 80 RELIGIO DOCTORIS rectly diagnosed his case he is on the right road toward effecting a cure, and only then! Until he knows what the evil is that he must meet, all his science, all his skill, are unavailing, save at the utmost to afford some slight alleviation of the patient's sufferings, while the disease itself continues its destructive ravages. Such temporary' alleviation of the world's evil, it seems to me, is all that the world's physicians have so far effected. I do not mean that the condition of human life in the world is no better today than it was aeons ago. No; just as when physical disease attacks a previously healthy human body and is blunderingly treated by patient and physician, the disease may run its course without a fatal termination, and the vix medicatrix nature? the recuperative power of nature may ultimately restore the body to a fair degree of health, so in the life of humanity at large the vix medi- catrix natures, the natural healthful activity of man, groping toward the light almost unconsciously but in accordance with a healthy instinct, has brought about true betterment. But I do mean that obedience to the prescriptions of humanity's professed physicians the prophets, the philosophers, the statesmen, the teachers of mankind has done too little toward help- ing us to better living. And this is true partly, indeed, because we ourselves and our nurses the priests and pastors, the political administrators and pedagogues have not followed the physician's instructions care- fully, and have again and again misinterpreted them and shifted the emphasis from the essential to the acci- dental, but also and in larger measure, I think THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 81 because the physicians themselves have failed to diag- nose the disease correctly and have given so imperfect expression to such insight as they have had. True as has been most of the religious teaching of the world when poetically considered and considered with reference to the time and place of its The transfer- utterance, yet the tendency of the priests mation of the ' " " r utterances of f a n a g es t convert the prophet's poetic the world's great # . Z. religious and utterance of spiritual truth into literal ethical teachers r ; . into literal and dogma, and to give definite expression to dogmatic form- . , . , . . uiaries, to be the reverence and aspirations ol mankmd treated as in- fallible and bv liturgic rules and formulae, which, im- final revela- . tions; and the perfect and inadequate to start with, must neglect of sci- . . . ence have re- inevitably be quite outgrown by the tarded man's . . . . conquest of evil, thought and feeling of a later day this tendency has brought it about over and over again that, after a generation or two, the teachings of the world's great prophets have been transformed into a heavy burden upon the human soul, instead of an inspiration, a clog upon human progress rather than a light upon the path of humanity. That this should be so causes no surprise to him who has attentively studied human society. A church, a priesthood, or whatever be the name for the organiza- tion that has especially in charge the religion of a tribe, a nation, or a community, is by its very nature funda- mentally conservative; it is controlled by tradition. It exists to conserve, to hand down the religious teach- ing of a previous generation; and however large-hearted and large brained individual members of the guild may be, the inevitable effect of their vocation upon a body 82 RELIGIO DOCTORIS of men whose chief duty in life is to preserve, and mag- nify the importance of, the product of the past, is to make them unduly conservative, narrow, and incapable of comprehending the present and so adapting their own lives and the lives of their disciples to it as to get its fullest blessing. This is by no means true of ecclesiastic organizations alone. While the influences may be somewhat stronger in the case of religious guilds, the tendency toward ossification is one against which all organizations need to guard themselves; they tend to become wooden and formal, bound hand and foot by tradition, or else, in- stead of a means toward an end, to become an end in themselves and to exist for their own sake, i. e. for the private benefit of the members. The political ma- chines, with their meaningless party cries and mercen- ary motives, which are so rapidly developed out of public spirited movements for the furtherance of seri- ous reforms, may be mentioned in illustration of this. And anyone who has observed at all closely the tend- ency to uniformity in the mental attitude of members of the legal profession, even in the United States where the lawyer is both barrister and solicitor, is consulted in reference to business undertakings of all sorts, is brought into contact with men of every class, and is thus exposed to various influences and has a very wide experience of life any one who has observed this ten- dency on the part of members of the legal guild to do their thinking within certain fixed grooves, must realize that the fact that it shows itself at all among a body of men exposed to such a variety of broadening THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 83 influences as are the American lawyers, gives striking evidence of the strength of the tendency toward non- progressive fixity of thought that is exerted by the mere fact of membership in a body committed to the conservation of any tradition. But let us return to the church. If we would esti- mate aright the value of the Christian church in the ^ . . twentieth century, I think we should first Christian . church of un- frankly recognize that so much of its told value for / e . . inspiration to doctrine as has to do with miracles has noble living but .111 1 weak as a di- little power over our middle and upper for the con : classes i. e. over those who have received a fairly broad education. Yet, though this be granted, it remains true that the moral worth of the church to civilized society to-day is inestimably great. For it is the one great influence that still keeps before us, with our myriad of special interests, the -truth that, not public applause nor riches nor power nor railroad building nor shoemaking nor the uses of the ablative case nor painting nor music nor geology nor astronomy, but a righteous i. e. a wholesome, manly life is our chief concern. And where the inex- pressibly great and inspiring thought of Jesus himself, that love, a love that shall embrace every living being with fraternal warmth and shall reach to the Soul of All that Is, is the secret of life, where this is not ob- scured by ecclesiastical embroidery, the church will continue to be our greatest source of inspiration to noble living. But mankind wants more than inspiration, it wants direction. Men must soon weary of the eternal cry, 84 RELIGIO DOCTORIS "Be good, be good!" however earnestly and lovingly it may be uttered, if they are not shown how to be good, how to express their love for God and man. Your heart may be full of love for a drowning man, but if you do not know how to swim and have not the presence of mind to throw him a life-belt or a rope, your love serves him very little. And the church has not taught us how to swim. In the matter of directing human activity to good purpose the Christian church is not adequate to the needs of the day. Of all the teachers of antiquity, Socrates perhaps came nearest to leading the world to right living, through his doctrine of the practical identity of virtue and wisdom. But partly because his own ignorance of and disregard for physical science led him to take ac- count of ethical science alone, to the exclusion of physi- cal science, and so to make his teaching in regard to wisdom very one-sided and incomplete; partly because his imperfect psychology made it impossible for him to explain his doctrine to the satisfaction of the hard- headed literal objectors, who insisted that a man might know what was right and still not do it, and that wis- dom and virtue were therefore essentially different; and in large part because his early disciples and ad- mirers were unprepared for, and incapable of a sym- pathetic appreciation of this part of his doctrine, it has come about that the very heart of his teaching, that which entitles him to be called a great philosopher, has been unappreciated and neglected, and his really philosophical utterances have been passed by for his poetical ones, with the natural result that the world THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 85 soon sank back into the dualism and supernaturalism from which his wonderfully pregnant thought might have aroused it. That the evil that exists in the world is merely the result, or, let me rather say, the concomitant, of im- perfect development, and that the suffer- The funda- ing of mankind is due to man's imperfect mental import- . , x ance of recog- adjustment to his environment, that is, mzing that man %_** > . suffers evil to his failure to conduct his hie in harmony solely because , _ i . i of his imperfect with the general course of nature, which adjustment to . . the natural failure is largely due to an imperfect conditions of 11*11 life. knowledge of the laws of nature, is not so likely to be challenged as untrue as it is to be disregarded as a platitude having no practical significance. Yet the thought and activity of a life that, measured by experience, must be counted a fairly long one, has convinced me, not only that the foregoing statement is true, but that its recognition and appreciation by mankind is of immense practical importance. First of all, the recognition of the truth is of vast importance because of its effect upon our of this truth frame of mind. If it were understood and with mtich of accepted as true, I am morally certain that evil we suffer the burdens of life, although in every other greatly lighten respect unchanged, would not weigh one the burden of , lp , ., ., , , the objective hall so heavily upon us as they do now! remain.be- To those who have devoted no especial cause t 1 1 attention to psychology this may seem an extraordinary statement, but by those who have thought- fully observed the phenomena of human consciousness, 86 RELIGIO DOCTORIS my meaning will, I think, be readily grasped. The justi- fication for my contention is, as I have just intimated, to be found in the nature of the human mind, a. impersonal and is two-fold. In the first place, we are evil troubles us . x much less than so constituted that impersonal evil does personal evil. * "' not trouble us so much as the mtentional b. We readily , . reconcile our- infliction of evil upon us; and m the sec- selves to the . . ... .. . inevitable. ond place, we readily reconcile ourselves to anything (however contrary it may be to our previous desires) as to which we are fully convin- ced that it was quite unavoidable and that it can- not be altered. "Man does not live by bread alone." He is a being of sentiment, not a mere vegetable; and how- ever bright the sun may shine, however balmy the air he breathes and wholesome the food he eats, if he has lost the companionship of someone he loves, or, having the physical companionship, if he has lost confidence in, or the confidence of, one who has been and perhaps still is dear to him, he may be very miserable. Probably not many of us have ever clearly recog- nized how heavily upon the lives of earnest, conscien- tious, religious-minded men and women responsibly f nas rested a something which may perhaps a r burdra that not inaptly be designated as a feeling of stfrits^reas^n responsibility for God (!), and how much of ^u!ttfying S aii * tne sadness and heaviness of life is due ti& to this unrecognized burden. denyng n the e j ? us! That the universe itself and the laws in neL a o"ourGod. accordance with which it must develop are the creation of the will of a personal THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 87 being, capable of love toward, if not also of hatred for, his human creatures, is still generally accepted, with more or less distinct consciousness, not alone by pro- fessed Christians but also by non-Christian theists. And furthermore, whether or not we be willing to admit it, there are for most of us, if not for all, moments when we cannot quite banish from our minds a sus- picion, let me say, that if Smith had been able to create conscious beings, and had done so for his own pleasure and satisfaction, and had subjected them to such a lot as that to which it appears God has subjected some of his creatures, we should not look upon Smith's conduct with approval. Some of those who have faced this consciousness have revolted from their traditional faith, and have said, either there is no personal creator of the world, or else the being that, having a will and affections, has formed the world, is not, as asserted, cannot be, at once all-loving > all-powerful and all-good. At the other extreme stand those who, shrinking in horror from this suspicion that that for which they are ex- pected to give praise and glory to God would in another being seem unrighteous, treat the suspicion as a sug- gestion of the Devil, and will trample under foot reason, with which, according to their theory, God or the Devil with God's permission has endowed them, rather than abate a tittle of their traditional faith. More interesting, perhaps, than either of these ex- treme classes, is that great intermediate one, which feels that, if all is of God, then reason must have been given us for guidance, not as a snare and deception; 88 RELIGIO DOCTORIS and that we can only worship God truly when we worship him with out whole being, cultivating to the utmost all the talents he has given us, and living, alike with body, mind, and soul, a life that shall do God honor. The thought, the hope, the faith which they have received as a blessed inheritance from the fathers, that underlying all that is are the everlasting arms of an all-powerful, all-just and loving Father, who watches over the world he has made and doeth all things well, this faith is for this class, in and for itself, over and above its traditional claims upon their allegiance, too precious to surrender, so long as its possibility is not absolutely precluded by reason. To the members of this fundamentally religious, not bigoted, but truly conservative class of thinking and loving men and women, the occasional suspicion of which I have spoken is a burden of varying weight. Upon the hearts of some, the less elastic and less san- guine, it rests heavily most of the time, and its shadow is always upon them; for others the ever-abiding, blind perhaps, but strong and loving faith in the all-em- bracing goodness of God, is a perennial spring of hope- fulness and joy which soon banishes the troublesome spectre, even though the latter may present itself for a moment now and then; while for all, even for those whose hopes and desires would never be able to over- come the verdict of their reason, there is still always the refuge, that although we may not be able to reconcile what we see of the conduct and the government of the world to our best ideas of justice and of love, yet "now we see darkly," we see but in part, our minds are THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 89 finite, and only if we saw and understood all that is in other words, if our minds had infinite power* would we be in a position to judge; if we understood the uni- verse of God more perfectly, that of which we are now most inclined to disapprove might seem to us most beautiful and good. But however it may be met, and, as I have sug- gested, there are various more or less radical and more or less satisfactory ways of meeting it, we must, I think, admit that more or less frequently and with more or less clearness and impressiveness, according to circumstances, this painful thought does come to the minds of all religious-minded men and women (and we are all more or less religious-minded); and it is a burden upon the hearts of all theists to whom it Comes, whether its effect be to make them wrathful and rebellious, or merely to prevent them from feeling that absolute confidence in the perfection of God which they so greatly desire to feel, or to cause them sorrow that they are thereby prevented from justifying satis- factorily to their fellow men the ways of God. For, however much we may say that God's ways are not our ways and that we should not presume to think of justifying God, the psychological fact remains that every theist does feel the responsibility of trying to justify, either to himself or to others or to both, God's dealings with men; and he is likely to feel the necessity the more intensely, the higher his own life is. There is one particular moral evil arising from the pressure upon man's life of this burden of responsibility for God, which is too serious to be passed over with- 90 RELIGIO DOCTORIS out special mention. It is essentially the same evil as that which so frequently arises from human hero- Thenecessit worship, so tampering with our ethical of justifying standards that they shall not condemn our that which one a believes God to hero. When we feel that it is desirable have done sometimes to justify that of which the undoctored makes men in- . . .,. teiiectuaUy conscience of civilized man does not ap- dishonest and . r untrue to their prove, the temptation to which too many own ethical in- r .,,. . . sight and moral ol us yield is to stretch the conscience and instincts. . . revise the ethical standard to nt the case in hand; and although this be done with the most devout intention and under pressure of a reverent sense of religious obligation to find that good which we be- lieve our father and creator, our God, has done, yet the inevitable result is to obscure our judgment in regard to right and wrong and lower our ethical standard, even in those human matters in which the agency of God is not directly in question. The feeling of responsibility for God, then, is one of the things that tends to intensify the pain men suffer from the evil in the world, and even to increase the objective evil. But even did this feeling not exist it would still be true that for most men under most circumstances (not to make our statement too sweeping) the belief that evil which befalls him has been directed against him by the free will of some other being or beings would make his pain thereunder greater. Even supposing that he fully recognizes that the being who has inflicted the evil upon him whether that being be God, the magistracy of the state, an earthly parent, or some private individual was perfectly justified THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 91 in thus punishing him, that feeling will cany with it a pang of conscience, a sorrow that he has deserved this punishment, which is something additional to the pain which the punishment itself, as an objective event, inflicts. But in most cases that just presented is not the frame of mind of the person who suffers evil. He may, if his humility be great, feel that, even though he cannot tell why he is so dealt with, he must have com- mitted some offence so grave as to deserve this evil as a retribution; and so he is made additionally miserable by the thought that he has done something, though he knows not what, to deserve evil. But oftener, general- ly, the man who suffers evil which he believes to have been willed by some other being, feels that some one is treating him harshly; and resentment therefor greatly increases the mental disturbance which the evil causes him. I am not seeking to justify the frame of mind just referred to, but merely to present it as a psychological fact. We are altogether too much inclined our n proneness to look for personal causes at all times, and to assume per- ,. , , , , j , . sonai causation, our discontent at any untoward event is greatly increased by the assumption that John or Eliza (or, at any rate, God)* is responsible therefor; for then we become discontented, not alone with the objective evil itself, but also with John or *There are, I believe, a few truly religious souls for whom evil is in a measure mitigated by the thought that it comes from God, the father of goodness and love, and hence must be a blessing in disguise. But, unfortunately, there are not many who feel so. This view is similar in its results to that (as it seems to me) more scientific view which regards the evil in the world as the world's growing pains, so to m RELIGIO DOCTORIS Eliza or at least with the relation between John or Eliza (or God) and ourselves. An attentive observer of human nature can hardly have failed to notice that if any little thing goes wrong in the house, the shop, the playground, the ship of state, or anywhere else, the first thought of four persons out of five will be to fix the responsibility therefor upon some individual; although in fact it may be the veriest chance so far as individual human agency is concerned, or may be the joint result of the activity of so many that it is highly unreasonable to hold any one individual responsible for it. It is an unlovely, indeed a very disagreeable trait, but it is one very generally found in human nature, that thus leads one to find fault with some individual whenever anything happens to displease one, and that leads us to make a mountain of a molehill if we think we can fix the responsibility upon some person, when we would pass the event with hardly a moment's vexation if there were no possibility of holding any person responsible or no possibility of holding any one but ourselves responsible. This disposition shows it- self in the child, who will set up a lusty roar if he falls down when some one is pursuing him or if he bumps his head against another child's, when he would take very quietly an injury twice as severe for which there was no possibility of holding any one but himself speak, and as such ultimately beneficent (although not benevolent) for the great whole of which we are a part, just as the obstruction to the direct course of a bullet which is made by the rifling of a gun, so leads it to the outlet that it finally emerges with a power and effectiveness that have been increased by the tortuous path it has been compelled to take. THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 93 responsible. I recall an instance of this in a four-year- old who was a great cry-baby when anything befell him for which he could contrive to suggest that his nurse or someone else was in part responsible; but who took without a whimper a very severe bump on the head when he fell head-first from a table upon which he had been forbidden to climb. This disposition also exhibits itself in the serene, matter-of-fact acceptance of the mischance when the housewife herself happens to let a plate fall, and in the great distress she evinces when the maid (carelessly, of course) drops one. The reason for this tendency to fix the responsibility for every mischance upon some personal agency, is an interesting psychological question. I am inclined to believe that, while it is today in large measure merely a habit, one might say a tradition, among thoughtless people, it arose very largely indeed from the general tendency among uncivilized men to look for personal causes for all events, and that it owes its continuance to the common belief that ultimately everything has a personal cause, to wit, God's will. The point of view which is almost unconsciously taken seems to be about as follows: if I cannot fix the responsibility for this evil upon John or Henry or Eliza, upon some individual or individuals other than myself, then I must allow that I am myself, partly at least, responsi- ble for it; if not directly, then at least indirectly, in so far that it is a judgment upon me for my past sins; so, in order to prevent others from holding me in any way responsible, I must hasten to fix the responsibility upon some one else. It seems very probable that the Devil 94 RELIGIO JDOCTORIS owed his influential position in mediaeval society to this habit of mind on the part of our ancestors. The foregoing discussion has doubtless made clear what I mean by stating as a psychological fact that we are more pained by untoward events for which we feel that some person is responsible than by impersonal evil. To represent the truth in one simple little illus- tration; if we receive a blow from some object acci- dentally falling upon us, our sense of injury is slight, our mental distress is measured by the extent of the physical discomfort resulting therefrom; but if the blow has been deliberately given us by someone, our sense of injury, our mental perturbation, is great, and may last for days and weeks, even for years, after the direct physical effects of the blow have entirely disap- peared. There remains to be considered, however, another, different, albeit kindred, reason why the evil that exists in the world would cause us less to h ?eSnd?e S8 suffering, if instead of regarding it as necesrityaaa- caused or permitted by an omnipotent, ilti^be^feL 16 " personal God, who could withhold it if he would, we recognize it as the necessary consequence of the imperfect adaptation of the various parts of the Universe to one another, resulting from the incomplete state of the evolution of the world-energy (which, so far as we have certain knowledge, has only developed into consciousness and reason in the lives of those higher animals of which man is incomparably the highest); and that reason is found in the further psychological fact that man is ever ready to reconcile THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 95 himself to that of the inevitable necessity of which he is convinced. Let one be convinced that a thing is absolutely inevitable and unchangeable, and his readi- ness and ability to reconcile and adapt himself to it is surprisingly great. Our students of psychology have not given to this interesting phenomenon of human consciousness the attention that it deserves, and we do not know how far it may go. I am inclined to think that the only limitation the principle has is found in man's physical endurance; and that however destruc- tive of that which had previously contributed to his joy and comfort, contrary to his previous desires, and subversive of his previous plans and purposes in life, anything that befalls one may be, one can nevertheless, within the limits of his physical power and endurance, and will reconcile himself thereto with unaffected serenity of mind, if only he be convinced, first, that it was absolutely necessary, could not possibly have been avoided, and, secondly, that it cannot possibly be un- done. But even if this should prove to be somewhat too strong a statement of the psychological fact in question, any observant student of human nature must soon convince himself that the principle is a very far- reaching one indeed. It should be noted that while the facility with which man reconciles himself to the necessary and inevitable might be expected to contribute to the peace of mind and happiness of theists no less than of non-theists, there are beliefs associated with theism* that stand in *It will doubtless be understood that the term theism is used in the sense of belief in a personal God. 96 RELIGIO DOCTORIS the way. Generally the theist believes in miraculous intervention and in the power of prayer to influence God to remove evil, and so it is not easy for him to recognize that any event is absolutely inevitable; and while it is true that the thorough-going predestinarian, who has no doubt that what happens to him was in- tended from the beginning by God and is irrevocable, shows something of the composure of mind that the recognition of the inevitable gives, yet his peace of mind is disturbed by the thought of the fearfulness of God's ways and by a carking, albeit unacknowledged, doubt as to whether God's dealings with man are really merciful and just, or perhaps it would be better to say, by sorrow that God's justice and mercy are not recognizably the same as justice and mercy on the part of man. But supposing that it should be freely admitted that the weight of evil would not press so heavily upon us, that our hearts would be lighter and the Jf h t e he e S tion world for us would be brighter, if we could evUresuu U s?r a om believe that no evil was ever intelligently Xt n eadL n ptao"n designed, that no part of the evil we find and^ki'en- in life has been planned either by God or wouid^not' y a Devil or by a brother man consciously thl y e wi^ e from an( * intelligently choosing to do wrong TS SieHo ra t ner than to do right, but that, instead, put us b onThe ld a11 that affects us as evil arises out of the X> h e from the" fact that we have not yet reached that themselves!^ 18 state of development in which there is perfect equilibrium between the individual man and the rest of nature, that, in other words, human THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 97 nature (physical, emotional and mental) is still im- perfectly adapted to its environment, that as yet neither instinct nor reason nor both together have fitted us for a life of perfect harmony with all that is, supposing that we are convinced that life would be happier if this were accepted as true, can we accept it, what are the reasons for supposing it to be true? And if true, has the truth any value for us other than that just discussed; in addition to making it easier for us to endure the necessary evils of life, and doing away with some of their unnecessary incidents, will it afford us any help in doing away with the evils themselves? It seems to me that to both of these questions we may give an affirmative answer. That all physical evils with which the agency of man has no direct connection, may be stated in terms of imperfect harmony between the indi- Physicai vidual and his environment will doubtless be admitted without question. Indeed this needs but to be understood to be accepted; it may be said to be one of those propositions that is true by definition. Such suffering as comes from cold in winter, heat in summer, toothache, strangula- tion from falling into the water, scarlet fever, etc., are evidently results of imperfect adjustment between the human system and its actual environment; and as humanity progresses it generally suffers less and less from these evils. When civilized man lives far from the equator he may not be able to change the natural climate to suit himself, nor to change his sensitiveness 98 RELIGIO DOCTORIS to cold to suit the natural climate; but by means of suitable shelter and clothing he produces a sort of artificial climate, a medium, so to speak, The so-caiied between raw external nature and raw man. "mastery *.'*, nature" is it- But in all such cases, it is important to self, in the last r analysis, a nat- remember that, however "artificial" the ural phenome- non; it is no less means of overcoming the evils of nature a triumph of , . nature than a may be, they are in the last analysis also triumph over % i nature. natural, man, himself a part of nature, overcomes the possibilities for evil in nature by means of such a knowledge of nature as en- ables him to counteract one natural force by means of another; his knowledge of the properties of wood and stone and other forms of matter, of furs and fleeces and the textile products of plants, of combustion, etc., en- ables him to be warm and comfortable in a cold climate, to pass safely over the stormy sea, to provide himself with a new set of teeth, to destroy the fever bacilli, etc. When, however, we come to moral, to spiritual as distinct from physical evil, the truth of our contention may not at first seem quite so clear: but a JJi al little reflection will show us that the state- ment made above with reference to physi- cal evil is no less true here. What is the difference between the malefactor and the good citizen, between the immoral and the moral man? Is it not what the etymology of the last pair of words implies, that the former's conduct of life is not in harmony with the mores, or approved customs that govern the conduct of the latter and of society at large? Human communities have found that certain habits THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 99 of life are conducive to wellbeing, because they keep the individual in harmony with that important part of his immediate environment which consists of society itself, and, largely through the medium of society, with his larger environment of external nature; and the representative majority keep in the main to these habits of life, while those who are below the normal level evidence their imperfect social developement by their failure to move in harmony with their fellows along these lines of least resistance of which society at large has come to avail itself. And in like manner the difference between the high and beautiful life of the morally superior man and the comparatively petty life of the ordinary, passably good citizen, is that, over and above the conventional morality which society at large recognizes, the deeper insight or more perfect instincts of the moral seer, the "beautiful soul," serve to adjust his life to a more perfect harmony with the life of the universe at large than is possible for those who have not gotten beyond the generally accepted, the conventional morality of society (which of necessity always repre- sents, not the highest wisdom of today, but the wisdom of an earlier, less perfectly enlightened day). This, of course, means that moral evil, no less than physical, is the concomitant of imperfect development, of incom- plete adaptation between the individual and the rest of the cosmic whole, or, more particularly, of so much thereof as constitutes his immediate environment. Assuming now the truth of our proposition, that all evil (moral as well as physical) is simply the natural expression of imperfection, the necessary result of 100 RELIGIO DOCTORIS incomplete adaptation between the individual and the universe at large, particularly between the individual and that part of the universe which constitutes his more immediate environment, what is the benefit to mankind that may be expected from the acceptance of this truth, in addition to the benefits already re- ferred to, arising from the facts (1) that impersonal evil is more tolerable than that which we believe to have been intentionally inflicted upon us, and (2) that we find it quite easy to reconcile ourselves to anything we recognize as absolutely inevitable? The great benefit to be derived from a lively realiza- tion of the truth of our proposition, is that suggested if we recog- above when attention was called to the as Z toevitw^ th ^ act tnat natural physical evils are over- ?uch d a S iSow- or come by means of such a knowledge of IfiSlerse a^a nature as enables man to avoid the un- e V nabi e e a us , tS uld favorable effects of the operation of some wi d a?non- as one force in external nature by availing moral evil. himself of other forces which will counter- act it. Evidently, then, the more thorough man's knowledge of nature, the more perfectly is he prepared to meet every possible physical evil. But we too generally fail to recognize that the extension of knowl- edge, as it lays a broader and surer foundation for wis- dom, contributes also to virtue,- that in proportion as we have come to understand our own natures better, and our relations to the rest of mankind and to nature external to man, in so far have our sympathies been widened, our spirits exalted and our moral lives streng- thened and beautified. The full recognition of the truth THE PROBLEM -OF -EVIL . Ka of our proposition then, would, I believe, so enlarge and improve our educational ideals and so stimulate us in the search for truth throughout the whole realm of existence as to ensure results that would soon do away with a large part of the moral no less than of the physical evil from which the most highly civilized races of mankind still suffer. The immense improvements in physical comfort that have already been effected among civilized men as the progress of science has enlarged the bound- Supematuraiis- aries of human knowledge are so widely tard^our^ro- recognized that it is unnecessary to argue quest'o/e^by tne general proposition that the extension that eI oniy a tJ ng f science contributes to human wellbeing. Srai^dtfia?" Why is {t then that a11 f civilized man- nSoinglbo kind is not eagerly devoting itself to the sp?ri?fn? acquisition of knowledge since the ex- naturai science, tension of science is but another name for the so-called mastery of nature which en- ables man to bring about a more and more perfect adaptation between his own life and the course of nature external to himself and thus bring happiness to himself by the avoidance and conquest of evil? Why? Chiefly because of the wide-spread dualistic misinter- pretation of life in accordance with which "nature" and "spirit" are brought into contrast as though they were the designation of hostile realms, and the expres- sion "the conquest of nature" is so misunderstood that men become blind to the unquestionable fact that every "conquest of nature" is at the same time a con- quest by nature that the so-called subjection and 102 RELIGIO DOCTORIS mastery of nature consists in nothing else than the advancement of human wellbeing by availing one's self of such natural forces as may be adapted to the purpose of counteracting the possibility of evil which might come to man from other natural forces if not thus counteracted. But according to the mischievous dualistic conception, man has to do with two different worlds, the world of spirit, of which he is a citizen, and the material world, in which he is temporarily domiciled but with which his spirit is or should be at war; the latter, the material world, is the world of nature; and inasmuch as the natural, or material, world is not only utterly distinct from but immeasurably inferior to the world of spirit, such an understanding of the universe as may come from a study of natural phenomena, while it may be good enough in itself, so far as it goes, has yet to do with a very insignificant part of the life of man. Here, in this false antithesis between the natural and the spiritual, is the fundamental error which is doing , . a incalculable mischief to mankind, immeas- Psychic and social laws of urably retarding human progress and nature differ * , f . , . , T1 ., from physical distorting our educational ideas. While a and chemical . laws merely growing number of those whom we regard in that the for- , , . - , mer are more as educated men are commg to confess the therefore more truth in words, only a very few indeed difficult to for- .. _ J t _ J . _ . muiate and realize the meaning of the words, that the spiritual is no less natural than the material; that nature is all-inclusive, embracing the mental and the moral, no less than the physical and material! The laws of individual mental and spiritual develop- THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 103 merit and of social progress are much more complex, it is true, and therefore more difficult to grasp, than those physical and biological uniformities in nature which have been clearly recognized and which we are accustomed to designate as laws of nature; but the former are just as necessary and just as natural as the latter. When men shall recognize this unity of all that is, the inter-relation and interdependence of all phe- nomena, psychical and material, they will make mighty strides in the advancement of human wellbeing (spirit- ual no less than material) through the mastery of nature; for they will then realize the fundamental im- portance of continually collating all knowledge and of gaining a conception of nature as a whole; they will see that for spiritual progress and moral uplift, as well as for mental growth and physical comfort, the inter- pretation of the universe in all its aspects, physical and psychical, is essential. But lest this should sound very vague, and therefore almost meaningless so far as the problem of moral evil is concerned, let me illustrate what I have in mind by specific reference to moral evil; and we may then, perhaps, be able to see how a knowledge of nature, in this case of human nature, and primarily of the human mind, by enabling us to understand the source of the evil, would help us to prevent its repeti- tion. Let us begin by asking ourselves what "moral evil," "wrong," is what makes it wrong? To say, as we often do, that it is the violation of conscience that con- stitutes the wrongfulness of conduct, does not carry us 104 RELIGIO DOCTORIS far; and yet even this answer may help us to get a clear mental picture of that which most of us are content to leave in the realm of feeling. Let us observe first that this criterion of wrong, the violation of conscience, makes the matter purely subjective or personal, not objective and general. We have but to remember the training of the not wholly uncivilized Spartans to see that, if this conception be true, theft and secret violence, if inflicted upon outsiders or the subject population, would seem not to be wrong, since these things the conscience of the Spartan lad was trained to approve. And indeed the classics of the childhood and youth of all civilized races, of our own Teutonic ancestors (whose Paradise consisted in getting drunk every night and committing manslaughter all day) no less than of the early Greeks and of the Jews of the time of the "Judges," as well as what we know of savage and barbarous races of modern times, show us that that of which conscience approves or disapproves varies widely with changing circumstances. The savage and the half-civilized man often have the most glowing sense of self-satisfaction in those very deeds which our civilization finds most abhorrent and of which our con- sciences most disapprove. We know that there are peoples* among whom he who would have the favor of Heaven and win the approbation of his own conscience must first kill a certain number of his fellow beings it matters little how or under what circumstances, so they be not members of his own clan. Yet even though the uncivilized man dies happy after committing some * "The head-hunters," for instance. THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 105 deed which seems to us atrociously cruel, in the con- sciousness that he has crowned an honorable life with a deed that will insure him high rank in the world beyond, we cannot convince ourselves that what he has done is therefore good, 'the approval of conscience is not in the last analysis a satisfactory criterion of good and evil. It is true that we may be generous enough to recognize that the individual savage is not to be blamed for what impresses us as a veritably devilish deed, since he has been bred to think such conduct praiseworthy; some of us may even go so far as to say that sub- jectively considered the deed was good, that it was right for him, although it would be very wrong for us; but although it is true that there are men of feeling who have become so bewildered that they have given up the attempt to define right and wrong, good and evil, in other than subjective terms, and have rashly de- clared that there is no other criterion than the individual conscience, and that therefore it is right in the moral sense good that the man of undeveloped or badly trained conscience should do the thing that commends itself to him as good, although it may bring suffering to many innocent fellowbeings, that when each one does that which is good in his own sight, all do well, still the saving common sense which prevails with the great majority of civilized men rejects this doctrine as imperfect and inadequate, if not fundamentally false. Generally when we say that that is right which has the approval of conscience, we mean that it should have the approval of our conscience, and that means, in the last analysis, my conscience, i. e. the conscience 106 RELIGIO DOCTORIS of the individual who is considering the deed in question. It is doubtless true that as regards many things, or at least as regards a few matters of fund- canduct h m con- amental importance for practical morality, hun^experi- mv conscience agrees with your conscience, l^beHendaTto 4 tne consciences of civilized men will give bejg n well ~ a unanimous verdict in so far there is a common conscience among civilized men. But, on the other hand, who has failed to observe that, when it comes to particulars, even among members of the same family circle, and still more among those whose life experiences have been widely different, the verdicts of conscience are quite different? The con- science of your most honored friend or of your dearly loved wife may lead him or her to disapprove of that which you earnestly regard as right; or, on the other hand, they may approve of something which you can- not but consider wrong. Now whence comes this similarity and this variety this general likeness of moral judgment, yes, and of moral instinct, among people having a common civilization, together with unlikeness of moral instinct and judgment as between people on different planes of civilization, and further unlikeness in many particulars among people who in a general sense share the same high civilization? It is significant that the difference in moral judgment last referred to shows itself in a noteworthy degree only among the more highly civilized races; that the con- sciences of a dozen individuals taken at random from a savage race will be in more perfect agreement than the consciences of a dozen individuals similarly taken from THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 107 some European people. Does this not clearly point to the fact that man's judgments as to right and wrong, whether instinctive or deliberate, are the result of the race and individual experiences as to that which fur- thers wellbeing? And if it be asked, "Whose well- being.. my own, my neighbor's, my family's, that of my tribe or nation, that of mankind, that of the world, or that of God?" I think we may answer: Primarily that of the social-political unit, the horde or tribe or nation, but ultimately that of the individual, to whose continuous wellbeing the wellbeing of the society in which he lives is of fundamental importance. If it be true that our moral conceptions have their origin in the experiences of the race and of the individ- ual, as indicated above, we can readily understand that the morality of the savage, with his narrow life, should be quite different from that of the civilized man, with his broad horizon. The child of civilized parents probably inherits certain instincts which make him, to start with, a better man i. e. a more beneficent as well as a more pleasant and urbane human being than his savage cousin; over and above this there are the traditional moral judgments of the society into which he is born, which are likely to be impressed upon him so early in life that they seem almost instinctive; and finally there is his own judgment of what is beauti- ful and good, to direct his moral life. But in view of the fact that the members of a so-called civilized com- munity are by no means all upon exactly the same plane of civilization, that indeed every so-called civiliz- ed state still has various grades of civilization repre- 108 RELIGIO DOCTORIS sented in its population, some of the denizens of the slums of our great centres of culture, and sometimes also the inhabitants of the more remote and isolated country regions, being nearer barbarism than true civilization; and in view of the further fact that the variety and complexity of civilized life tends to foster differentiation, we should expect that all the elements above referred to as entering into morality instinct, tradition, and individual judgment would differ some- what, both in their content and in their relative weight, with the different members of a civilized society; although the second, the moral tradition, may be ex- pected to be pretty uniform in its operation. That which, for generations, within a given society had been regarded as good or as evil, is likely to impress itself reasonably early even upon the more unfortunate members of the community, who have been born and reared in homes of vice, ignorance and poverty. I am sometimes disposed to sum up the truth as to moral evil in the statement that it is the result of human ignorance; but I should rather say that it ahJaysfiSuri- is the result of human incapacity, although SJrfaSd iT^" m most cases, but not in all, the incapacity wU^Som would be gone if the ignorance of the by?SSSiwe wrongdoer were overcome. The wise man it e i f s~dS L knows that his own highest good, his own a. Either to happiness, is dependent upon the wellbeing of society at large, and this again upon that of its individual members. If then it should occur to him to do aught against the interests of society (and every injury to an individual is an indirect attack THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 109 against society, since it is an action hostile to that which society seeks to effect, the wellbeing of the individual members who compose it, and tends to weaken the social structure), he would be checked by the consideration that such conduct would, in the long run, be an attack upon himself; that he would be weakening the social bond, upon which he himself de- pends for the great part of that which makes life valu- able. Indeed for one who has gained so much insight into human nature as to recognize that our highest happiness arises from human sympathy, or, in other words, that the pleasures of life which give man his greatest happiness are moral pleasures, the same con- clusion is reached without the necessity of considering that somewhat vague entity yclept "socie- b. or to the ty" in the chain of reasoning. The man unsymmetncal " . development oi moral insight knows at once that he of the human . faculties. who does evil to another robs himself of that high joy which comes from sympathy with the wellbeing of others, and at the same time so dulls his own sensibilities as to make him less capable of experiencing the finer joys of life in the future. The man who is without sympathy for others may still enjoy a beefsteak, a yacht, even the sweet fragrance of the rose; but is or is not the happiness of loving greater than these pleasures? And does not every ungenerous deed we do, either hurt us because we love, or coarsen us more and more and so tend to incapaci- tate us for the love and sympathy which make life rich and beautiful? 110 RELIGIO DOCTORIS But let us now consider the kind of moral evil that is attributable to the undue strength of the lower ani- mal passions, rather than to mental dull- Analysis of the ness. Take the case of manslaughter. Of crime of one in whose na- the three elements which contribute to ture the lower . . qualities over- morality instinct, social tradition, and balance the higher. individual ethical opinion, the first alone seems to be powerful enough to make murder and manslaughter uncommon crimes in highly civilized societies. The adult product of a high civiliza- tion is pretty sure to have an instinctive repugnance to human bloodshed. While the savage kills joyously, the civilized man kills, if at all, with an inward protest. Although it exerts a great influence however, this in- fluence is by no means strong enough in the breasts of all who live among civilized people to keep them from taking human life. But those in whom the instinctive repugnance to the taking of human life is not strong, may yet be prevented from the commission of such a deed by the social tradition that murder and man- slaughter are damnable crimes, worthy of the direst penalty, even though these persons be too unintel- ligent to form a clear mental picture of the evils that result from such a deed, and thus of forming for them- selves a deliberate judgment as to its wrongfulness. Nevertheless such crimes do occur. Let us take the case of a young man who in a passion of rage and jealousy has stabbed his own brother to the heart. Here neither a personal judgment of the wrongfulness of such a deed, the traditional acceptance of its wicked- ness, nor an instinctive repugnance to human bloodshed THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 111 have prevented the commission of the crime. Some- one may suggest that he was "out of himself" by- reason of drunkenness and passion; but upon investi- gation it appears that he had drunk no liquor. Passion then, we conclude, must have overpowered his reason and his humanity. We find that he was subject to violent outbreaks of passion when his will was crossed. It appears that the animal instinct of destructiveness, carried to the limit of his physical powers, against anything that might stand in the way of the satis- faction of his immediate desires, has in this case over- powered every other influence and made this man a fratricide. Now let us not forget that this instinc- tive impulse which leaves no room for paltering or hesitation, but prompts to an immediate physical attack upon that which stands in one's way, is in itself a valuable possession for man as well as for the lower animals. It is the basis of physical courage and also of that which distinguishes the man of action from the mere dreamer. But on the lower, more purely animal planes of life, this instinct is more valuable, goes farther toward making the individual successful, and plays a much greater part in the sum total of existence, than is the case on the higher planes of culture, where the crafty Ulysses becomes a more potent factor in society than the impetuous Achilles. Bearing this in mind, it becomes evident that the crime in question was a result of imperfect development of the criminal's nature into harmony with the conditions of civilized life. In his case a valuable trait of animal and even of human nature, which in moderation is regarded as a 112 RELIGIO DOCTORIS virtue among civilized men, and which even as it ex- isted in his nature would probably have been reckoned a virtue in a savage community, had been insufficiently balanced by the higher, later-developed traits that characterize the more perfectly developed products of civilization, in whom reflection, humanity and brother- ly love would have so restrained jealousy and destruc- tiveness as to have made the crime in question impos- sible. The normal civilized man is one in whom the various qualities that go to make up human nature as we know it (and in which both destructiveness and the physical passions of lust have their legitimate place) are sym- metrically developed and balanced. He is not without combativeness and destructiveness, but reason and conscience lead him to combat and destroy that which is really evil; he is not without sexual lust, but this is melted into the higher feeling of love, which makes him gentle and considerate as well as eager. In the abnormal man upon whom civilization has not yet done its work, although he may be found in a civilized community, the qualities that characterize developed humanity are not symmetrically developed; some one or more (and naturally these are likely to be the lower, i. e. the older, more fundamental traits, which he has in common with the lower animals) have an over- powering sway. This may be due to unfortunate training or lack of training; to the fact that his child- hood and youth were passed among low-natured men and women, without the advantages of mental or moral education. In this case he is -certainly to be THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 113 pitied rather than to be blamed. But it is also possible that he may have an inherently low nature, which no attempt at moral culture has been able to overcome. He may have had advantages, but have failed to re- spond to them. Although brought up among kind, wise and loving people, he may have remained always cruel, violent and untrustworthy. What are we to think of such a case? Is it possible that in the twentieth century, in the full light of biological, psychological and pathological science, any thoughtful and educated man can believe that the explanation is simply that the immoral person in question has wickedly and de- liberately preferred evil to good? Is it not clear that what we have to do with is a case of abnormal develop- ment or of lack of development, and that the being in question is more or less a moral idiot? Such a case is in fact a case of moral atavism. In physical characteristics, in form, coloring and features, etc., as well as in tastes and inclinations, it is not unusual to find that a person strik- ingly resembles a grandparent or perhaps a much more remote ancestor, the resemblance between these re- moter kinsmen being much greater than that between father and son or between any of the intermediate members of the ancestral line. Hardly anything is more interesting or more puzzling than the way in which now one and now another strain of the ancestral blood predominates in the progeny. In the field of artificial breeding it sometimes happens that from an egg produced by the mating of two birds of the same well-marked, highly developed artificial variety, will 114 RELIGIO DOCTORIS come a bird resembling in all observable respects the simple wild pigeons that were the ancestors of the fancy breed. These cases of atavism we know as facts, although the biologists have not yet been able to ex- plain them fully. The study of embryology has shown us how, beginning at the moment of conception, each human life seems to repeat in its own development that of the ancestral animal stock out of which the genus Homo has developed. The occasional birth of human monstrosities shows us how some slight pre- natal influence may arrest or disturb the course of this development, and give us an early type instead of a late one. Such biological facts as these suggest the natural explanation for the case of irremediably perverse, "bad" natures, when found in families Evil natures are to be ex- most oi whose members have nne moral pected. dispositions. And the fact already re- ferred to, that in the population of every so- called civilized state there are really many grades of civilization represented, and the further fact that vicious surroundings, bad environment, will go far to neutralize or destroy the hard- won gains of generations of moral culture, leave no ground for surprise that there should be thousands of low natures, of "bad" persons, in every society. But let us not forget the cheering fact that the hope- lessly bad cases are exceptional. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred in the case of perverse natures, careful treatment, the right education at the hands of wise, patient and sympathetic men and women, THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 115 will make of these unpromising characters not an- gels, not even strong and noble men and women, if we are to take the very best of humanity as SSbfedV the standard, but still fairly lovable men Hjamhowtfef an d women and tolerably respectable citi- 5o2ai? xcep " zens, as the average rims. It may well be that the ordinary home and school training of the day, which suffices to make of the average child an average man or woman, will not make a respectable man of the exceptionally evil-disposed child, however good the intentions and sincere the love of the parents and teachers. The education of a difficult nature takes wisdom as well as love, tact as well as good intentions; and the mere fact that good and well-meaning parents, who have succeeded with their other children, have yet failed to overcome the evil in one of these perverse natures, should by no means lead us to despair of such cases. Education, then, in the broad sense that denotes such a development of human nature as shall be made possible, on the one hand, by affording to Evil, moral and tne youth of each generation the greatest SJercome^in be possible opportunity for the exercise and m?nshau by 85 symmetrical development of all the various kno e wdfe h o1 faculties of human nature (physical, men- anHniu^n, tal and emotional) and, on the other fee? Sntroi er " nan d> by presenting to our youth such an over nature. epitome of the knowledge and wisdom thus far gained by the human race as shall put them abreast of their times, and thus make possible for each generation the most rapid progress in the 116 RELIGIO DOCTORIS arts and sciences and in philosophy, this true educa- tion is the means by which we are to meet and over- come evil, both physical and moral. So long as we are ignorant, imperfect, finite beings, mere men and women, not gods, we shall not wholly vanquish it; but let us be serious students of the great book of nature, seeking to understand ourselves and the wonderful universe in which we live, at once with the wholesome, open- minded curiosity of the little child and with the earnest- ness and judgment of mature and educated men and women, and we may be sure that each generation will make certain and considerable progress in the conquest of evil of every kind! HAPPINESS AND MORALITY To thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man. Shakespeare Perhaps in popular estimation no two things stand farther apart than ethics and egoism. When, however, one substitutes morality and happiness for Practical out- these terms, the breach does not appear du?t e inte C iH-~ to De so great. While ethical and egoistic IfthSbyShfcii conduct seem to a great part of mankind tiv^wouid^e" * De opposed to each other, happiness and the S Smef ly morality are regarded by most as merely different, not necessarily antagonistic. With the exception of a class of narrow-minded ascetics whose conception of life is generally discredited today, the civilized world recognizes that one may be moral without being quite miserable, and that the enjoyment of a moderate amount of happiness now and then in the course of a lifetime is not in and of itself conclusive proof of wickedness. Unfortunately not very much more than this has gained general acceptance, although an earnest and thoughtful consideration of the sub- ject, a careful examination of what is involved in these two terms, must convince a candid mind that the rela- 117 118 RELIGIO DOCTORIS tion of these two things, morality and happiness, is much closer than is usually supposed; and inasmuch as happiness is admittedly that for which egoism seeks, and morality is but the popular name for ethical con- duct, this means that the relation between ethics and egoism is an intimate one so intimate, I venture to maintain, that the practical outcome of conduct directed by either of these principles would be substantially identical. Let me hasten to add that this is no merely academic question. It is one of great practical importance both for our happiness and for our virtue. Were that a recognition which I shall endeavor to make clear wouw s tend h to generally understood, I do not mean bSter and 0th accepted as a logical theorem, but appre- happier. ciated, felt to be true (for a mere intellect- ual acquiescence in anything, without the feeling of its truth, is not knowledge, in the full sense of the term, is not understanding), we should be both better and happier than we are. To many the proposition I have advanced as to the practical identity of intelligent egoistic and ethical con- duct will seem absurdly false, if not the direct opposite of the truth. To others it may seem quite possible that the terms involved should be so conceived that the proposition would have a certain logical validity of a theoretical sort; but even those who admit this will in most cases, I fear, feel that it would be undesirable to proclaim this as a truth (even though, in a certain sense, it should be one), lest the selfishness of ordinary human- ity should take hold of the alleged truth from the HAPPINESS AND MORALITY 119 wrong side and find in it an excuse for self-indulgence and vice. I am anxious, at the outset, to emphasize the fact that I regard this supposed danger as unsubstantial and to state my earnest conviction that, on the con- trary, the improvement in the morality of the average man and woman that would come from the under- standing of this proposition makes it our duty to bring this truth to recognition. Before proceeding further let me call attention to the fact that the proposition advanced above is both theoretically and practically different from Distinction historic utilitarianism. Theoretically the between our utilitarianism of Bentham had no more to thesis and historic utiii- do with egoism than idealism has; it tanamsm, ... which is a differed, it is true, from theological and theory of social *^ duty, according transcendental theories of ethics in frank- to which the . . , in ^ ^ i happiness of jy positing human well being as both the a minority of , * r , , individuals may immediate and the ultimate ethical aim, be sacrificed to . . . . . the good of the the ethical ideal; but it was not egoistic majority. . . . wellbeing, not the happiness of the indi- vidual, but the wellbeing of the mass, "the greatest good of the greatest number, " that con- stituted the ethical ideal of this school. The theory was indeed less individualistic, less egoistic, than the ethics of the churches, which made the ethical pur- pose consist in the salvation of the individual's soul. Although many of the ablest of the utilitarians may have been personally convinced that the happiness of the individual would in the main be best realized by his striving for the greatest good of the greatest num- ber the theory itself was a theory of social duty, not of 120 RELIGIO DOCTORIS individual happiness, and was entirely consistent with the possibility that the happiness of a minority of individ- uals might have to be sacrificed to the wellbeing of the majority. And the later utilitarians, influenced by the study of biology, to which the general acceptance of the doctrine of evolution has caused more and more importance to be attributed by the ethical philosopher, have exhibited a very marked tendency to regard the good of the society, or of the race, and that of the in- dividual as very different things. This seems to be the dominant ethical conception of the present time, the point of agreement for those who in other respects en- tertain quite different views. Notwithstanding the fact that Herbert Spencer is generally supposed to have believed that the truest ethical progress is to be at- tained by allowing to the individual the largest freedom in seeking his own happiness, a careful reading of his works brings to light three distinct ethical aims, the good of the race, the good of the family, and the good of the individual, which, according to him, are not identical, but are to be brought into equilibrium by means of his formula of justice. He points out that the sacrifice of the individual for the sake of the race may be necessary, and directs attention to the fact that the good of the race is largely concerned with posterity; a lead that has been followed by his critic, Mr. Benjamin Kidd, in whose ethical teaching the central thought seems to be the antithesis between present and future good, i. e. between the good of the race, of posterity, and the happiness of the individual that is now in being. And the last named gentleman seems to think that not HAPPINESS AND MORALITY 121 that which helps us to enjoy life is good, but only that conduct which shall contribute to the wellbeing of a posterity whose interests are, in his opinion, largely op- posed to ours. While this apparent disregard for the happiness of those who now people the earth may seem to be antipodal to the doctrine of utilitarianism, which declares the greatest good of the greatest number to be the ethical ideal, yet from the point of view that the present generation is a minority as compared with the generations that are yet to come, it may still be regarded as having for its end the greatest good of the greatest number; and further than this, as I have intimated, it has in fact an historical connection with the utilitarian- ism of Bentham. The erroneousness of this idea of a fundamental opposition either between that which gives Pleasure and that which is Right, or between the ant P ago S ^sm be- gd of the individual and of the social pi!San?and whole, or between the interests of the living twee? toe go e o"d an( * of posterity (and in one form or an- SriandtiEtJf ther the opposition seems to be main- tweeifthe hf-" tamed by most of the thinkers of our day), terestsofthe j g^H endeavor to show. Let us first living and those ?iis P e sterity ' see k to understand what is meant by egoistic and what by ethical conduct. By egoistic conduct I mean such conduct on the part of an individual as is adopted by him for the purpose of securing to himself the greatest happiness possible. I would call attention, in passing, to the fact that the definition would be equally correct if we should sub- stitute the word " pleasure " for " happiness. " It seems however, that to most persons the term "pleasure" 122 RELIGIO DOCTORIS suggests only the lower, sensuous pleasures, and not at all the higher and more ideal pleasures, which spring from the imagination and the social affections and which find their satisfaction in the realization of beauty, in the establishment of truth, and in generous acts of private and public service. It is unfortunate that in the minds of so many the term pleasure should have such a limited connotation; for the limitation is an improper one and it has been the source of much mis- understanding as well as of great injustice toward many high-minded Epicureans of ancient and modern times. The term happiness is of course subject to the same improper limitation; but as a matter of fact it is not so often nor so greatly misunderstood. Egoistic conduct, then, having as its controlling principle the happiness of the individual du?t iS detoed. whose conduct it is, what is ethical or moral conduct? A short and seemingly simple answer is that ethical conduct has for its controlling principle duty, righteous- ness or goodness. But the simplicity of this answer is specious. The truth is brought out in the Difficulty of accompanying essay on the Problem of Evil conduct. (pp. 103, 104), that if by duty obedience to conscience is meant, then ethical conduct is a purely subjective conception, subject to immeas- urable variation according to the different views of in- dividuals : man-slaughter and drunkenness being highly ethical from the standpoint of men on the plane of the early Teutons; total abstinence and polygamy being right for the Muslim; celibacy and the mortification of the flesh having the approval of the conscience of HAPPINESS AND MORALITY 123 the Indian fakir and the mediaeval Christian saint; vegetarianism and the subordination of human beings to a host of sacred animals being righteousness for the Brahmin; and while the confession of one's sins to a priest is regarded as an imperative duty by all Chris- tians outside of the Protestant folds, the Greek Catholic Church insists that these confessions shall be heard by married priests alone, while the Roman Catholic Church is equally positive that only a celibate may re- ceive confessions. To say that ethical conduct has goodness for its aim, leaves us quite in the dark as to the criterion for right- eousness or goodness. It is a serious error to regard goodness as an absolute conception, a substantive thing, an idea complete in itself. Goodness is in itself an incomplete term, and must have a complement ex- pressed or implied. As some one has cleverly said, if a man or a thing is not good for something, he or it must be good for nothing. What is it then, let us ask ourselves again, that makes ethical or moral conduct good? for what is it good? A study of human development offers us an answer to this question, an answer that is indeed suggested by the etymology of both the Greek and the Morality con- Latin term. The nouns from which the sidered in the ... light of history, adjectives ethical and moral are derived signify habitual conduct, manner, or tradi- tional custom. Ethical or moral conduct, then, meant originally conduct that was in conformity to the usages of the community, of the horde, clan, tribe, city or state, and which was accordingly hallowed by tradi- tion and supported by the sanction of religion. In an 124 RELIGIO DOCTORIS early stage of human development ethical, or moral, had indeed a like significance with religious; since nothing seems to be better established than that among primitive people everywhere conduct is strictly con- trolled by tradition, and that the religious sanction attaches itself to every traditional usage "the tyran- ny of fashion" was in early times no mere fa con de parler, but a veritable political and religious control. Then, indeed, the innovator who would do things in an unconventional way was not merely frowned upon by the best society and condemned for "bad form"; he was held to be guilty of sacrilege, and was liable to the punishment of outlawry and death. Having found in traditional usage the historical foundation of ethics, if we now ask ourselves, further, what reasonable justification there is for traditional sanction as the foundation of ethics, an answer is not lacking. It is given us in the biological theory of the survival of the fittest. Those individuals and those social groups survive and multiply whose conduct is adapted to their actual environment, that is, whose actual reactions to the stimuli afforded by their sur- roundings (reactions that have reference not alone to nature external to man, but also to other members of the same group and to members of other social groups) are of such a nature as to favor the continued existence of the individuals or the races that react in this particular way. All knowledge, let us remember, rests largely on empiricism; and that primitive man should be the empiricist par excellence is but natural. At a very early stage of civilization the more intelligent members of the social group seem to have found that HAPPINESS AND MORALITY 125 the integrity and permanence of the group was main- tained when its individuals acted in a particular way; such conduct, they may have reasoned, propitiated the powerful spirits upon whose favor their prosperity was dependent; such conduct would therefore be regarded at once as an economic necessity, a political obligation, and a religious duty. As it is not to be expected that the unscientific mind of primitive society should discrim- inate nicely between the essential and the accidental, the conception of moral obligation naturally attached itself to much that was merely accidental, and had no real value in the struggle for existence, even for the time and place in which the custom was established. Hence the meaninglessness of not a few of the moral and religious customs prescribed among uncivilized people. Even today we have not gotten wholly past the stage when, to adopt Charles Lamb's delightful little allegory, we think it necessary to burn down a hut every time we would enjoy the delicious flavor of roast pig. Of course the time would be likely to come when changing conditions (perhaps arising from the very growth and prosperity of the community dXnge S V morai that was the result of its scrupulously fhauheySay religious observance of the earlier tradi- SfSSfcS- tional morality) would be such that the sipJ5esthe e ' traditional morality would no longer be tragedy 01 9d f r the society ; its traditional morality might have been adapted to the prosperity of a small savage band of hunters and fishers, but might not be adapted to the economy of a considerable 126 RELIGIO DOCTORIS tribe of men that had entered upon the pastoral stage of human development. But inasmuch as the tradi- tional morality has the sanction of religion, the read- justment to the new condition is no easy matter. To the priests and elders and to those most under the influence of tutelage the children and the women, it may be a deviation from the customs of the ancestors, from the traditional morality, will seem to be grievous sacrilege: while for the men in the prime of life whose activity is most closely associated with the changing conditions, the leaders in war and industry and trade, whose life has been touched by conditions outside of the traditional circle, who have been affected by con- tact with strange peoples having different customs, who perhaps have been compelled by force of strange circumstances to depart from some tradition of con- duct, and who have nevertheless reaped good instead of evil therefrom, for these the traditional morality will not have such an irresistible power and mastery. Hence arises what is perhaps the most tragic element in human history, the struggle between the traditional morality that is no longer adapted to the actual con- ditions of life, but with which all the associations of history, of piety and patriotism, of poetry and duty, are interwoven, and the practical ethics that has its basis in the necessities of life as it is at the given time and place, but which has not yet received the sanction of religion nor been hallowed by tradition, and, though it be really higher, more generous and magnanimous, more humane, more spiritual, than the traditional morality, yet generally seems to the conservatives, and often even to many of those who in practice adopt HAPPINESS AND MORALITY 127 it, either an immoral, base and ugly utilitarianism, or as when Christian ethics were struggling against the ethnic religions of the ancient world a fanatical and impious idealism. When in the struggle of the new ethics against the old the new fails to win the day, the society decays. When, on the other hand, the new con- without such ception of ethics really makes headway, change m moral . ^ _ " . conceptions it may do so either by a gradual modinca- society would . J i , . decay; but the tion of the old, with the more vital elements change may he . . . so gradual as of which the new is combined into a new almost to escape - . . observation. whole, which yet comes into existence so gradually that the extent of the change is not clearly apparent (as in the case of the development of Jewish ethics from the crude and cruel particularism, associated with religious hentheism, presented in the book of Judges, to the broad humanitarianism, as- sociated with true monotheism, which we find in the second Isaiah and in the teachings of Jesus), or by a seemingly revolutionary process in which the new is substituted for the old (as in the case of the apparent conquest of the ethics of classical and of Teutonic and Celtic heathendom by the ethics of the brotherhood of man contained in Christianity, in which case however, as a matter of fact, much of the old was really smuggled into the new; the religion which took its name from the apostle of love having been actually propa- gated by the swords of Chlodwig and Karl the Great, and many heathen practices and heathen views having become a part of the tradition of the Christian Church). A careful study of history shows us that the ethical system of every progressive people undergoes continual 128 RELIGIO DOCTORIS modification, but the change in moral ideas is generally so gradual as to be unobserved by the great number of those among whom it takes place. No attentive and candid student of history, however, would main- tain that the ethics actually taught in the homes (by precept or example), or even the teaching of the official hierarchy of the Christian Church, was the same in the first, the fourth, the fifteenth, and the nineteenth century. There are of course certain conceptions that are common to all of these periods ; but neverthe- less the Christianity of the first century and that of the fourth were very different, and either of these was quite different from either Roman or Protestant Chris- tianity in the fifteenth century. Both the theology and the accepted ethics of these different epochs were different, and the ethical conceptions that prevailed at any one of these periods were dissimilar from those of today. As a child under Protestant instruction I was given the impression that religious persecution and physical punishment for heresy were peculiar to Roman Catholic Christianity; and that the reason they are not widely practised by Catholics today is that the Romanists are not now strong enough to venture on such drastic measures. When later I studied history for myself and learned that Protestants also persecuted and killed in the name of religion, and' indeed that, at a period generations later than the Reformation era, it was in Protestant communities that the pitifully cruel and absurd witchcraft trials and executions took place, I realized that it was neither Romanism nor Protest- HAPPINESS AND MOLALITY 129 antism as such that caused these evils, but an unen- lightened moral consciousness characteristic of the particular stage of civilization in question for which, it must of course be granted, the actual teachings of the clergy of both the mother and the daughter church were not without responsibility, but which nevertheless was not an essential part of either form of Christianity. The Presbyterian layman with whom I was in conver- sation yesterday professes to believe just what Calvin taught, but it would be impossible to gain his consent to the execution of an atheist or an alleged witch, much less of a Unitarian or a Quaker, upon religious grounds; and although Cardinal Vaughan, of England, and Archbishop Ireland, of the United States, are among the stanchest pillars of the mother Church, and profess that Catholic truth is one and unchangeable, we are perfectly confident that neither religious execu- tion nor inquisitorial torture would receive their ap- proval or would be possible in any part of the world over which their influence might extend. It is well for us to recognize the fact that from a purely theoretical point of view it is not difficult to reconcile religious persecutions with the faith professed by the civilized world. Let us remember that the idle hermit and the active philanthropist, the militant crusader, the cruel inquisitor, the intolerant Puritan and the non-resistant Quaker, each found the justifica- tion for his life and conduct in the vast and various treasury of Scripture from which the several Christian- ities of the last two thousand years have been minted. We read in these Scriptures that the inhabitants of Palestine were driven from their homes by Jehovah's 130 RELIGIO DOCTORIS people in accordance with his instructions; and that according to the command of the God of Israel, as set forth in Deuteronomy, not only the men of the heathen cities were to be dispossessed and killed, but the women and the children were to be put to the sword. And Jesus himself is reported to have said that he came not to bring peace but a sword; that brother should rise up against brother and son against father. We also read in the New Testament that it is better to cut off the offending hand and pluck out the offending eye than to risk the loss of Heaven. Since, then, the matter of fundamental importance is represented to be the salvation of the immortal soul, not the mundane wellbeing of the short-lived human body, it is easy to see how a faithful, conscientious Christian, believing his own creed to be the true rendering of that religious truth which God through his early prophets and through his son Jesus Christ and the church established by him had given to men for their guidance, and loving the immortal souls of his brother-men more than their perishable bodies, should feel bound to torture these bodies to the last extremity if there were no other way of bringing them to the acceptance of spiritual truth, and to destroy the bodies of a few thousands if thereby their souls could be brought back to God or the souls of millions of others could thus be prevented from going astray. This point of view and this line of con- duct is just as consistent with the letter of the Christian Scriptures and the traditions of the Christian Church as is that conception of the gospel of love which you and I believe to be a truer interpretation of Jesus' thought; and so the good Christians of the day in which the HAPPINESS AND MORALITY 131 public temper was habituated to violence very natural- ly appealed to it to bring about the conquest of the Right. But the gentler tone of mind and the more _ .._. sensitive natures of a period in which the The higher ...... morality of the predominance of industrialism over mih- last hundred F years as com- tarism has made peace the normal condi- pared with that , i i i of the earlier tion and war the exception, lead us now to Christian cen- , x turies, is due to shrink from such practices as inhuman, a better under- * standing of and we turn to other texts for guidance men's place in . . . , nature rather and construe our religious authorities dii- carefui study of ferently. It is practically impossible for men upon our present stage of civilization to feel (whatever they may say they think) that body and soul are so utterly distinct that I can love the soul while I torture the body to death. And the difference in point of view is not, I believe, due to a more careful study of the Scriptures on our part, but to a larger knowledge of nature, and a correspondingly truer feel- ing as to the unity of life, and a deeper and more genuine sympathy with all that is. But after all, stronger than all our theories, whether based upon the severe or the gentle passages of Scrip- ture, whether based upon authority at all it is custom that or upon an earnest study of things as they actually con- " . trois morality, are (as we find them) and the attempt m our philosophy of life to mirror the laws of universal existence, stronger for the guidance of in- dividual human conduct than all our theories is habit. it is this, the customs of the race and of the community, rather than the teachings of our priests or philosophers, that makes our morality what it is. And this it comes about that the more flagrant forms of violence being 132 RELIGIO DOCTORIS inconsistent with the habits of life of an advanced in- dustrial civilization, the weight of tradition upon such a civilization would need to be extraordinarily heavy to keep it from so bringing its theoretical ethics into line with its practical morality, upon this point, as to de- nounce methods of physical violence. The foregoing hasty review of the etymology of the words ethical and moral, and of the origin and develop- ment of morality itself, should help us to Ethical conduct understand the modern significance of the may now be defined as that terms. Etymologically, morality is what which is con- . ^ i n ducive to the is customary; historically, it means the welfare of man- . ; kind. kind of conduct that, having proven favor- able to the wellbeing of society, became customary and was recognized as good. As society has widened, that is, as men have entered more and more largely into amicable relations with those outside of their immediate kindred and beyond their immediate neighborhood, morality has become higher. Ethics being the science or theory of morality, the significance of ethical and moral may for our present purpose be regarded as identical, and we may conclude that for civilized man in the twentieth century ethical conduct is such as is conducive to the welfare of mankind. In the light of the definitions at which we have ar- rived I would now restate my belief that, although Restatement moral conduct be philanthropic conduct of thesis. having for its end the best interests of mankind, while egoistic conduct has for its purpose the highest happiness or, if you will, the greatest pleasure - of the individual actor, yet the intelligent pursuit of either of these ends achieves also the other. HAPPINESS AND MORALITY 133 I need hardly insist upon the fact indicated by Aristotle and developed and emphasized again and again, especially by Herbert Spencer and ?**"? e \^ e the evolutionary sociologists of the last individual's * welfare is uiti- half century, that man is so thoroughly ent upon that a "political animal," so pre-eminently a of society, im- . .... . moral conduct social being, that his individual welfare is is hostile to his own interests, dependent upon the prosperity of the particular human community of which he is a member upon its ability to maintain itself in the struggle for existence with other groups and other races of men and animals and with the hardships of external nature, its success in turning the raw material of nature into means of enjoyment, in other words, upon the degree of intelligence and virtue it exhibits in the ac- quisition of wealth and in rendering its wealth ser- viceable for the happiness and development of its members and their posterity. In the long run, then, it is beyond question that immoral conduct (i. e., con- duct hostile to the best interests of society) will be destructive of the individual's possibilities of happiness. But while this is admitted, for what it may be worth, it is by no means regarded as conclusive of that for which I would contend. The answer is made that the individual in his pursuit of happiness is not primarily concerned with what is true in the long run, but with the present. It may be true that his opportunities for happiness would not be as great as they are if the conduct of his fore-runners and contemporaries had not been and were not moral, and that much of the possibility for happiness on the part of posterity may 134 RELIGIO DOCTORIS be destroyed by immoral conduct on his part and on that of his contemporaries; but he may say that he will take now the goods the gods (*. e. his. ancestors and his contemporaries) have provided, and will let the future take care of itself. "Tomorrow, didst thou say? Methought I heard Horatio say Tomorrow. Go to; I will not hear of it! , 'Tis a period nowhere to be found In all the hoary record of the past, except, perchance, In the fool's calendar. Or if the poet's authority should not appear to be sufficient to justify his selfish immorality, he may insist upon the fact that he owes nothing to posterity, which, as Mark Twain has put it, has never done any- thing for us; and as regards his predecessors, he may maintain that it is now out of his power to pay the debt he owes to them for the good he now enjoys. But while we would of course admit that there is a measure of sound philosophy in the preference of a certain present to an uncertain future, it ducfwhkhhis remains true that as a matter of fact no Szels hostue normal member of the genus Homo sapiens, of themselves! especially in his civilized state, can shut ent?of C socSyi ou ^ fr m hi s consideration the immediate iT il pmitshed n b P y t " f uture - The present for him is a relative moral Smduc?" term; an d ^ ne knew, for example, that would be hostile indulgence in his favorite drink would with- to the happmess # of the perpetra- m the next ten minutes bring on an ex- tor himself. , cruciating attack of gout which would last for weeks, it is safe to say that he would not (if he were still sober) take the drink, even though it be freely granted that he might yield to the temptation if, in- HAPPINESS AND MORALITY 135 stead of the certainty of an almost immediate penalty, there were only an exceedingly strong probability that in the course of no very long period of time he would have to suffer severely for his intemperance. Applying this vividness of appreciation of the proximate future which is a part of the mental constitution of normal civilized man to the matter in hand, we see that the inexpediency of immoral selfishness, even from the point of view of the egoist's happiness, is greater than it may at first have appeared to be. For he has to reckon, not alone with a vague entity yclept Society, but with his contemporaries, with his neighbors. Con- duct upon his part hostile to the welfare of society and this is the essence of immorality is pretty sure to draw upon himself the unfavorable attention of his fellows, as soon as they realize that his conduct is in- jurious to their interests; and the chances are that they will be able to make it so uncomfortable for him that he will have to abandon the course of immorality upon which he might have been disposed to proceed, and, selfish as he may be at heart, will lead a tolerably moral life, just because it is necessary to his own comfort and happiness to keep on decent terms with his fellows. Immorality is always an evidence of deficient under- standing either on the part of the individual, as we immorality is see especially in the case of the flagrant drficlent under- malefactors who, because of the natural on th^part'of 6 * obtuseness of their sensibilities or their orVa^olfaT 1 intellect or because of their unfortunate group. bringing-up, are too ignorant to realize how much more true happiness there would be in 136 RELIGIO DOCTORIS an honorable, temperate life, in harmony with the best aspirations of society, than is possible to the dis- eased debauchee or the hunted outlaw, or on the part of society at large or of an influential section of it, as is the case when the public opinion of society or of a class permits certain forms of vice, such as mis- treatment of members of one class by another, intem- perance in work or in recreation, unscrupulousness in business transactions, political corruption, etc. There is an enormous amount of such ignorance, not total ignorance, but fatally inadequate knowledge, and to it the immorality of our day is mustwted C by e mainly due. For the great bulk of our po meal corrup- g^^ business and political immorality, society itself is responsible; in that society at large, or that part of it with which the wrongdoer has most to do, has no adequate sense of the injury to humanity that arises from these forms of vice, and hence no adequate sense of their immorality. There may be formal recognition that the conduct in question is not ideal, that it is not in accordance with the highest conception of virtue; but in that important section of the community to which the wrongdoer is, and feels himself to be, primarily responsible, there is no clear idea of why it is wrong and no real feeling of its moral turpitude. This is quite evident in that widespread kind of immorality illustrated by political corruption, the subordination of official duty to private ends. It exists and flourishes, not because of the extraordinary wickedness of those who happen to be most active in it, but because of the general sentiment throughout society HAPPINESS AND MORALITY 137 that, while it would of course be wrong for a public steward to embezzle outright a thousand dollars of the money committed to his care, and to put it into his own pocket without giving a cent's equivalent therefor, yet it would be an entirely different thing for the same man to avail himself of the power of his position to appoint his son or daughter or the nephew of a friend at a salary of fifteen hundred dollars to spend an hour a day some six months in the year in doing poorly that for which he or she is incompetent or for the doing of which there is no real necessity. For while it is crimi- nal to steal outright, it's a man's right and duty to do all he can for his family and friends; and the man who doesn't do anything for his friends when he is in a position of influence and of course there's no particu- lar credit in giving to a friend what he could have gotten on his own merits, even from a stranger is either cold-hearted, mean and selfish, or else he's a victim of an extravagant kid-glove and silk-stocking Sunday- school morality that unfits a man for practical life and especially for the practice of the good old homely virtue of loyalty to ones friends. We may denounce public corruption very strongly, but so long as the point of view just set forth is that which the majority of active voters actually take, and which nine tenths of us tend to take when the matter has a personal interest for us, when the question is as to making a place for our nephew or letting a contract at a high price to our uncle we do not really feel that these practices are iniquitous; and until we do so feel, our alleged knowl- edge of their wrongfulness is a mere formal, not a real knowledge. 138 RELIGIO DOCTORIS The bearing of this upon the relation between egoistic and ethical conduct is that not egoism, the desire to please one's self, to gain happiness for one's self, but only dense stupidity, would lead an individual to adopt a line of conduct of the unquestionable immorality of which the society in which he lived was fully convinced and thoroughly aware. He may indeed be allowed to get pleasure for himself by doing things that his neighbors say are not consistent with the ideal of a perfect Christian gentleman; but selfishness itself, regard for his own happiness, will work to keep him from bumping his head against a stone wall, by doing those things of the injuriousness of which to themselves as the constituents of society (i. e., of the immorality of which) his fellows have a lively conviction. But even though this also be admitted; though it be granted not only that in the long run the happiness of the individual is dependent upon the good of society, or in other words, that egoistic satisfaction is dependent upon morality, but also that the immediate, present happiness of each individual is dependent upon respect for so much of the moral law as to the truth of which his fellows are unquestionably convinced and as to the obligation of which they are thoroughly in earnest, it may still be said that it remains true that egoism may lead to immorality, either because society itself (as has been suggested in the foregoing discussion) has an inadequate understanding of the moral turpitude of certain kinds of conduct, or because the individual, lacking the intelligence or the education that would enable him to foresee for himself that there is more HAPPINESS AND MORALITY 139 happiness in morality than in immorality, is too insen- sible to feel the lighter, and too stupid to anticipate the heavier punishments that society will certainly inflict upon him for his immorality. This is perfectly true. My contention is not that egoism produces moral conduct, but that it does so in proportion as it is intelligent; that if the while egoism pure egoist were perfectly intelligent and such produce thoroughly informed, he would be perfectly morality, it will , . % i do so in pro- moral: that wisdom and virtue go together, portion as it is _ . . . . . intelligent. the truest wisdom being mconsistent with anything but the highest virtue or, to state the truth in negative and somewhat rough terms, that the knave is pro tanto a fool. Happiness and morality are by no means the same thing, but the former is conditioned by the latter; if you would have the greatest happiness you must practice the highest virtue. I cannot prove this, because happiness is a feeling, and psychological states do not readily lend themselves to mathematical measurement. I have, The greatest however, already gone two thirds of the pleasures are * SSfharSr wa ^ towar d establishing its truths by mere- st ath rings in ^ ca ^ n S attention to the almost self- Thesegiveus evident facts, first, that the individual's most pleasure # ' at the moment opportunities for pleasure are dependent 3.QQ 3.1SO 13. St longest. upon the welfare of society, and, secondly, that conduct clearly recognized as hostile to the welfare of society will bring immediate punish- ment upon the head of the wrongdoer. But the most important consideration is that which cannot be proven 140 RELIGIO DOCTORIS to exist if the mere statement does not carry conviction, to wit, that the greatest pleasures are moral pleasures; that our highest happiness is dependent upon sympathy and has its springs in the social affections and the imagination, through which it becomes possible to enter into the life of that which is outside of our own skins; that, for instance, the glow of pleasure which tingles in our every nerve at the contemplation of some noble, generous and loving deed, or, even sweeter per- haps, the joy which is ours at being ourselves able to express our sympathy for others or for another by some signal service, this glow of happiness, this joyous exultation, is not only brighter, keener, higher, stronger at the moment than the greatest non-moral or purely sensuous pleasure, but it also lasts longer, and con- stitutes a permanent addition to our happiness. The purely sensuous pleasures add little to our happi- ness as compared with moral pleasures; first, as just intimated, because of their comparative impermanence; a taste, a smell, a physical contact, unless accompanied by some human or social i. e., some potentially moral association, having little or no power of revival. Even the pleasures from sights and sounds less purely sensuous as they are, and more dependent upon the constructive imagination are not infrequently de- pendent also upon human and moral associations for the permanence of the impression they produce. Fur- ther than this, there is the other fact mentioned above, that, as compared with moral pleasures, sensuous pleas- ures have less power to make us happy even while we are enjoying them. There are few human beings, I HAPPINESS AND MORALITY 141 believe, that get greater pleasure from the sense of smell than I. The fragrance of some flowers gives me pleasure so exquisite as to be almost intoxicating. And yet in a garden filled with the most delicate perfumes I believe it would be possible for me to be quite miser- able (by reason of the moral, the human, content of my consciousness). But however hard fate may have dealt with one, I do not believe that it is possible for any one to be quite miserable at the moment of doing a generous deed; perhaps this can also be said of the moment in which one recognizes a generous action on the part of another. Whether the egoist's most desired pleasures be those of the senses, as the satisfaction of his gluttonous and lustful appetites, the stimulus of intoxi- ?ouid y bJ Ud er cants, the indulgence in luxurious idleness, penSVmomi or whether they be the satisfaction of his woufdpVesJm- vanity, by making a parade of wealth and pleasure from magnificence in dress and surroundings w!?avorite fr m before his fellows, or whether he be ambi- hemLht^e^oo tious as well as vain, desiring to win the he might be too weak to e himself f< these hig\ pleasures ** for rt applause of the public as an artist or to himself for Sasu?il her & am anc * wield real power over his fellows, I feel confident that if the evildoer could once be made acquainted with moral pleasures by being brought to experience them, he would get more happi- ness from them than from his favorite vices. I do not, however, maintain that he would thereafter lead a uniformly virtuous life; for a low, undeveloped or distorted nature might well be too weak to persevere in the effort necessary to secure these higher and greater 142 RELIGIO DOCTORIS pleasures when the lesser ones to which he was habitu- ated were within easy reach. Still for the student of human nature who is also a lover of his kind (as every earnest student must be), nothing is more touching nor more hopeful than the outcropping of a long dormant but living germ of moral feeling in the lives of the most vicious a phenomenon that has again and again been observed. The pleasure which a brutal, selfish criminal sometimes exhibits at having been surprised into be- coming a benefactor and bringing joy into the life of some other human being, some innocent child per- haps, seems to be really greater, even for his low nature, than that which he gets from indulgence in his favorite vice; and it is by bringing habitual evildoers to feel the satisfaction of playing a beneficent part in the life of some fellow being or in the promotion of some public interest, that the most successful reformatory work has been done. When in the narrow mind of the self-centered egoist a perception is at last awakened of the pleasure which comes from moral conduct when it is adopted, not under protest, because one must do so, nor yet as a matter of habitual routine, but from the exhilarating joy of working with and for others (thus contributing to the good of that large whole of which his individual physical life is itself a part) then even he finds to his surprise that his greatest hap- piness, his highest pleasure, comes from the satisfaction of his moral instincts. But even if this could not be shown, if, on the con- trary, it were proven that strongly immoral natures were so incapable of deriving pleasure from any other HAPPINESS AND MORALITY 143 than immoral and non-moral pleasures, that egoism must with them always be immoral in its outcome, it would still be true that for normal individuals the thies 6 are y Se a " greatest happiness is to be found in moral JompfnmienT pleasures. Let us remember that no progressTmd simple sensuous pleasure is in itself im- fhe S eSotSSai s moral; it is at most unmoral, although ty^inteiiectua 1 /" indulgence in it may be immoral when it PSSJSJbJ 1 can on ly De na d by ignoring others or by mommy. 6 * destroying the balance, the fine temper, of one's own life. As man advances be- yond the brute and the savage in complexity of organization, emotional sensitiveness and responsive- ness, and intellectual power, the sources of possible pleasure which lie open to him are ever increasing, but they are dependent upon the enlargement of his sympathe- tic capacity, his increased ability to feel an interest in, and so in some measure to understand, what lies outside his immediate self, his growing power to recog- nize the relation between himself and all else that exists. For sympathy (in the large sense in which, for the lack of a better, I use the term) is as truly the condition of intellectual, as it is of emotional and moral, development. We cannot begin to understand a new object presented to our consciousness until we have recognized some- thing in it akin to something that we have already made our own: it must be akin to some part of our present mental furniture or it cannot be added thereto; it must remain incomprehensible, outside of our ken. It is to me a wonderfully illuminating thought that in sympathy we have the means and the measure of all 144 RELIGIO DOCTORIS human growth, physical, intellectual, moral, and he- donistic. In proportion as members of little clans feel their oneness with men outside the clan, do petty hordes grow into great and powerful tribes. In pro- portion as man recognizes the community of life be- tween himself and the rest of the organic world, and thus becomes able to interpret each in the light of the other, and in proportion as he recognizes that the fundamental principles in accordance with which his own nature develops, and which his own mental pro- cesses reflect, regulate also the orderly transformations of the whole Universe, organic and inorganic, in tnat measure does his intellectual horizon expand. And just as it is the recognition of our community of nature with that which is external to and beyond our individual selves, upon which our wisdom is based, so is it out of the recognition of the corresponding community of interest that our morality develops. And, finally, through this physical, intellectual and moral develop- ment by means of which all that is becomes a part of our life, do we attain that richness of life which we name happiness. The more perfectly we come to recog- nize that that of which we are a part, and in harmony with which we must therefore order our individual lives, is not merely a household, a family or a class, a district or a country, mankind, or even the organic world or the world of spirit; but that nothing less than all of the Universe is the whole in the perfection of which we are to find our own happiness, the more successful we shall be in living beautiful, happy lives. But for our present purpose it is only necessary to recog- HAPPINESS AND MORALITY 145 nize that wide sympathy is at once the natural out- growth of intellectual progress and the basis of morality; when we have apprehended this truth we cannot fail to see that man's progress in civilization must in the long run be a moral progress. When it was stated above that a normal man needs but to experience moral pleasures to prize them above all others, this assertion was not intended SfJfJSSS" to carry with it the implication that he tSS&t us es wno has tested moral pleasure becomes JSKSoS* indifferent to purely sensuous and other buTSSiihe non-moral pleasures. The being of whom potential" 6 this were true would not be a normal man. former, to >ur he Food and drink and a woman's embraces blhdgSened are tiH necessary to the complete happi- moStttS- 11 " ness of civilized man; and the smell of pleasures. 01 * 1 sweet odours, the hearing of agreeable sounds, and, in general, the due exercise of all the faculties of his nature non-moral as well as moral contribute to his well-being. And it is also true that with advancing civilization comes the possi- bility of a higher degree of pleasure from certain non- moral sources than could have been enjoyed at a lower stage of human development: such intellectual pleasures as are afforded by the advancement of science, and many of our higher aesthetic pleasures, play a much greater part in civilized, than they could in primitive life; and the love of power can find opportunities for gratification in the great world of civilization that would be quite impossible in the narrow circle of savage life. But ail these non-moral pleasures are themselves 146 RELIGIO DOCTORIS means to moral enjoyment; and the intelligent man, knowing of these moral possibilities, will naturally seek to enhance his happiness by going on to the moral pleasures to which the non-moral ones may contribute. The man of vigorous intellect and fine artistic taste, the possessor of power over his fellows, can double the satisfaction he draws from these advantages by using them to bring happiness to his fellows. Every pleasure can be enhanced by a moral association; and the man of real wisdom, whose mind has been enlarged and whose feelings have been deepened by even so inadequate a knowledge of the Universe as is possible for us today, must inevitably grasp after these moral pleasures. Even our pleasure in food and drink, in fragrant odours and sweet sounds, is increased by having some one to participate with us in the enjoyment of them. And if this be true of the lower, sensuous pleasures, how much more true it is of the higher ones! How slight the pleasure of solving a physical or mathematical problem the solution of which has no practical value to any human being, as compared with the exhilaration of solving a problem the solution of which is of direct service to one's fellow beings! And what is true in this case is true throughout all non-moral pleasures may be enhanced by moral associations. The notion that if men were allowed to please them- selves their lives would be essentially immoral, is fun- damentally false. The unnatural monster supposed is as untrue to life as the inert being the economists used to talk about, known as the economic man, from whose constitution they had omitted one of the HAPPINESS AND MORALITY 147 strongest traits of human nature, characteristic indeed of most, if not all, highly organized being, the love of exercise, the natural impulse to exercise hS?iS^s S in is the faculties of one's nature and especially dse of e ln e th e e" to engage in that kind of activity in which na C ture! S an f d h his one's physical or mental condition fits one SSSSSla'Si. to succeed. Of the Frankenstein product SrthY/rlsuT 6 f the economist's laboratory, on the con- Slfeiy a kee f P ing trary, it was supposed that he would never Sd m?rves s in ^ hand or foot except for the purpose of Son^eiSSEd-" picking up a dollar, and that the extent of shin S5?!? 1 * 1 n ^ s activity would be in inverse proportion be 1 TJ^gnhed to tne square of his distance from the gold outsM?of n him- ^ ne on ^ v roagnet . which could overcome happiness de- n * s nier tia) and in direct proportion to its mands moral volume! The fact is, nevertheless, that achievement. the normal human being, far from being inert, delights in exercise, although of course this healthy instinct may be crushed out of an over- worked drudge, and although a being endowed with intellect and feelings would soon lose zest for physical exercise carried on purely for its own sake. And this last mentioned consideration is not without bearing upon the relations of egoism to morality. While man's physical nature demands the exercise of various muscles and nerves, his intellectual and emotional nature de- mands the achievement of some farther result than that of merely keeping in healthy condition the muscles and nerves brought into play. The most enthusiastic lover of nature and of physical exercise will have less zest for a walk through a charming countryside, blessed 148 RELIGIO DOCTORIS with the purest of air, but through which he has rambled day after day, for weeks and months, merely as a physical recreation, than he will for a new walk over a road much less agreeable in itself but at the end of which there is some special thing for him to accomplish. All sensuous and non-moral pleasures in the world soon pall and lose most of their charm if he who may enjoy them is not arriving at something, if he cannot persuade himself that he is doing, accomplishing some- thing. This is a psychological fact that needs but to be stated to be recognized as true. The observation, if not the experience, of almost every adult must con- firm this. But there is another fact of the truth of which my observation has convinced me, although it may not at first blush seem so indisputable as the preceding one; and that is that the man with whom we are acquainted (I know not whether it could be asserted of his remote ancestor living in a very small group, in whom the social instinct was less developed) not only feels the need of accomplishing something, but sooner or later he becomes very much bored if what he accomplishes has no value for any one but himself. He must not only accomplish something, but must accom- plish something the value of which will be recognized by someone besides himself (or, in other words, some- thing which has a moral worth). It is true that the inventor or scientific discover may continue to labor away at that to which no one of his contemporaries attributes any value; but this is unquestionably a hardship for him, depriving him of the pleasure and stimulus that contemporary appre- HAPPINESS AND MORALITY 149 ciation would give; and he finds the satisfaction which sustains him in his work in the thought that, when he shall have succeeded, his work will have a value for posterity if not for his contemporaries. It is true also that the less socially developed being sometimes con- trives for a while to quiet this altruistically-working part of his egoism by petting a dog or by making pre- sents to his mistress. But this rudimentary altruism never suffices for the normal, the average man. Sooner or later the altruistic-instinct-which-makes-a-part-of- of-his-egoism must lead him to more truly social and moral activity. The rule is that however deeply in- fatuated and completely lost in his mistress the de- voted lover may be, after he has once won her he begins to take interest in other things. And it is well for his happiness in his marriage that this is so, since other- wise he could not hold his wife's love. For the love of a human being is much more than lust. The latter is non-moral but the former is a moral emotion. There must be moral worth as well as physical charm in what we love. However gallant a cavalier, and though he were in his own person a veritable Adonis, no man could hold the love of the most ordinary woman, much less of a superior one, if his mind and heart were so con- tracted, his moral nature so undeveloped, that he cared nothing for the interests of mankind or for aught in the Universe outside of his lady's boudoir. Take it from what point we may, however we ap- proach the subject, the truth always reappears that since he is a social being, man is also a moral being, and that in proportion as he is really true to his own 150 RELIGIO DOCTORIS interests will he be true to those of mankind, will he be loyal to morality. "To thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man." It seems quite clear to me that the true interests of the individual man and of the whole of which he is a part whether that whole be family, race, SesSofttie nat i n > mankind or the universe do not individual and conflict; and that the same thing is true of the whole of which he is a as between one of these lesser wholes and part are identi- . cai. so are the the larger whole that mcludes it, as be- interests of all . lesser wholes in tween the people of a city and those of the nature with the f i greater whole state, or as between the people of one of which they . i # . are a part. nation and the commonwealth 01 nations with which it has relations. So far as one of the units is purely artificial or accidental, and there- fore temporary, and its interests do not properly re- present those of its constituent parts, there may of course be a conflict. Thus it is possible that the inter- ests of an artificial state, such as the conglomerate known as the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, might not be identical with the best interests of the commonwealth of civilized nations of which it is one of the constituent parts; but the true interests of the people of Austria, Hungary, Bohemia, Bosnia, etc., would nevertheless be found to be in agreement with the true interests of Europe and the civilized world as a whole. But our interest is primarily in the relation between the wellbeing of the individual man and that of the whole of mankind, or of a part thereof considered as HAPPINESS AND MORALITY 151 a social group. Here, while there may be a conflict between the seeming, the superficially estimated inter- ests, there can be no conflict between the true, the higher interests. As bearing upon this question, we must not forget that it is from his higher sensibilities, including his moral affections and his appreciation of Not in mere moral beauty, that man derives his great- eStenceTbuf est happiness; and one of the corollaries iSe^hipp*!- of this is tnat ** is not in length of days, ness found. but - m f u u ness f Hf e , that we find our happiness. Hence it is that even when the good of his fellows demands that an individual shall give up some selfish pleasure, the very renunciation of the lower pleasure, which cannot be innocently enjoyed at the expense of his fellows' welfare, opens the way into a larger and nobler, and therefore a hap- pier life, of which perhaps the selfish egoist had not previously dreamed. And further than this there is the consideration, too often ignored by the preacher of self-sacrifice, that a seeming good to the social whole attained of n the e individu- ^ v to great a sacrifice of individual inter- ai is hostile to es t s is not really for the ultimate advance- the good of J those for whom ment of the social whole itself. And it the sacrifice is made. goes without saying that the same thing is true as regards the sacrifice of one in- dividual for another. This is the truth that the in- dividualistic school of social philosophers have felt so deeply that they have not always been able to express it with due moderation. Take an extreme case. A 152 RELIGIO DOCTORJS community might be raised from grinding poverty into a high degree of comfort and prosperity by redu- cing its numbers nearly one half. The shortest and most effective way to do this might be to kill the inferior nine-twentieths of the population. But the instinct of humanity which would prevent such a drastic course is justified also by considerations of expediency, when expediency is considered in its highest which is its truest sense. For "man does not live by bread alone, " and a material prosperity acquired at the cost of one's finer sensibilities could not but degrade the community it was intended to benefit, and in large measure unfit its members for the highest human development, the most beautiful lives. Sooner or later it would be found that the seeming benefit carried with it a curse, and that the community would really have made greater progress in civilization and happiness had it not taken "the short cut." On the other hand, it is probably true that had a fairly prosperous com- munity lost in a single generation, not nine twentieths, but ten twentieths of its population, and these not the inferior, but the better, the abler, the braver and more magnanimous half, in the course of a struggle against barbarous and blood-thirsty foes that had only been prevented from annihilating or enslaving the communi- ty by the sacrifice of its noblest sons,- who had willing- ly laid down their lives in this cause, in this case the existence of the remnant, that had thus been preserved by the splendid courage and perseverance and the noble deaths of its best citizens, would be so lifted up and inspired by the contemplation of the heroism of HAPPINESS AND MORALITY 153 its departed brethren, and the feeling of fellowship with them, that this inferior half of the original com- munity would rise to a plane of material and spiritual civilization and a condition of happiness that would be not inferior to, and possibly even higher than that which would have been attained by the whole com- munity had it not had this baptism of fire. In this latter case, although half, and that the abler half of the community, is gone, and has in one sense sacrificed itself for the community, yet in the absolute sense, because this sacrifice was a voluntary one, it was no sacrifice i. e. it was only a sacrifice of lower to higher satisfactions (the only sense in which voluntary sacri- fice has any worth, or indeed any meaning). Those who sacrificed their lives for the cause were happier, in their life and death considered as a whole, than had they lived longer but as part of an enslaved com- munity. Thus it becomes more and more evident, the more earnestly and thoroughly we study the conditions of . life and the constitution of the Universe, The Universe m is essentially that we live in a moral world, i. e. y in a constitution; world in which the noblest conduct brings i.e. the interests . of both the about the greatest happmess, not alone individual and , . - the whole of ior the world at large but for the individual which it is a . part, of both the actor. Ihe true interests ol the part and greater unit, the whole are identical. The old parable that temperate of the belly and the members applies here. the good of Neither the highest development of the never regard- individual nor that of society is found in the sacrifice of the other, but the interests of both the part and the whole, of the less and the greater 154 RELIGIO DOCTORIS unity are found in that moderate endeavor for the good of both which is never regardless of either. The master mariners of the ship of state must never consider any one of the crew as a mere instrument for the accom- plishment of the voyage. The success of the voyage must be considered with reference to the good of every soul on board. It is right that as individuals we should try to live healthy and joyous lives, not ashamed to seek our own happiness (as the morbid school of ethi- cists would have us), but considerate also of the happi- ness of others as well as of ourselves, and remembering that the surest foundation for our own individual happiness is the happiness and wellbeing of mankind and indeed of all in the universe that has life, so far as the higher development of life is not conditioned by the destruction of lower forms. No man can be happy alone. Not he who stands far above his fellows on the top of a pillar is the happy man, but he whose position is at the apex of a human pyramid, and who therefore has companions who are almost on an equality with him in richness of life, while these again are in direct sympathetic relations with still larger numbers who are only a little less noble and happy than themselves, and so on down to the humblest, the least gifted of our brethren. That seeming elevation which would lift a man out of touch with his fellows, and make com- munications with them difficult or impossible, would be conducive neither to his own happiness nor to human progress. It is only as we can pull others up with us, share with them the benefits of our elevation, that our elevation is desirable either for ourselves or for mankind. Picture to yourself the situation of an unusually gifted HAPPINESS AND MORALITY 155 savage educated to a plane of intellectual and moral culture that makes him regardless of the superstitions of his own people and makes him writhe at the con- templation of the cruelty and grossness of their lives, if he were left alone on an island with no companions but his savage fellow tribesmen. If there are none standing at intermediate stages between the low savag- ery, ignorance and superstitions of the average tribes- man and the level of our poor civilized native, there will be little that he can do for his kinsmen save to afford them a feast. And if they do not promptly put an end to his troubles by eating this sacrilegious traitor to the traditions of his people, how sad and lonely his life must be! Something of the tragedy of such a lot may be seen in the case of our more highly educated and refined Indians and Negroes, who by their culture and our race feeling are largely cut off from true social intercourse both with their own race and with ours. It is only when their education is so true and broad that they know how to keep in touch with the less educated members of their race, and to reach down to them and draw them up, that they find their intellectual and aesthetic superiority a blessing. As regards our contention that intelligent egoism must be moral, there is one point of view that has hardly been suggested, which seems conclusive. Immorality is always intem- Whatever be the particular instance of perance, and as , ... such necessari- immorality, it is in every case at bottom ly hostile to the . *' * health and intemperance on the part of the wrongdoer, happiness of those who it is a disturbance 01 that fine balance of life which is dependent upon such exercise of and enjoyment from each of the faculties of our 156 RELIGIO DOCTORIS nature as shall be consistent with the largest possible exercise and enjoyment of all; and as such it is of course prejudicial to happiness. There is still another aspect of the relation between happiness and morality, to which I would now direct attention. If we make a further refine- Egoistic and ment than we have so far made, and con- hedonistic, _ . . . altruistic and tine the term egoistic to conduct the mo- moral distin- . . p . . . guished. live, or intention, of which is to procure the pleasure or happiness of the individual, and use the term hedonistic, or pleasure-giving, for such conduct as actually achieves pleasure or happiness for the individual, regardless of the intention that directed it; and if similarly we make a distinction be- tween altruistic, on the one hand, and ethical or moral, on the other, using the former term, altru- craductmay ls ^ to describe conduct that has for its SSSIS 8 motive the welfare of mankind, and the "egrfst ^con- latter, moral, for conduct that actually con- sc a ious a aitru?stic duces to the welfare of mankind (regard- lfsslu^cessfui less of the motive that led to it), we moSa St * sha11 find ' J think > that " altruistic " conduct than the spon- - 1S f or j^ ^q p rac tises it more pleasure- taneous egoism ^ ^ of^normai na- giving, or hedonistic (in the sense in which we have just agreed to use that term), than consciously "egoistic" conduct. And I should not be surprised to find that the converse were also largely true, to wit, that conscious altruistic striving is less "moral" (beneficent to human welfare at large) in its results than sane and healthy, but, being natural and spontaneous, largely unconscious egoism. HAPPINESS AND MORALITY 157 At any rate, as regards the last suggestion, I have observed that the sane and healthy, cheerful, uncon- scious egoist, who lives his or her own life joyously, with hardly a thought of philanthropy or moral obliga- tion, is often the sunshine of a community, making the lives of others happier and more wholesome; while the conscientious but, alas! conscious altruist, controlled by an overmastering sense of duty, who is ever anxious to serve you and the world, is not only often felt to be a sad affliction, but often seems in fact to exercise a less beneficent influence upon society than his careless brother. This may be because the spontaneous activi- ty of a normal nature will usually take a proper direc- tion, and our instincts are often a better guide than reasonings that are based, as the latter must gener- ally be, upon incomplete, imperfect premises. The conscious ethicist is continually asking us to pause and consider whether the proposed conduct be really right; and even though we finally decide to act according to the original impulse, it is no longer with the same joyous spontaneity; and the constant cross-examination of our impulses tends, I think, to produce a morbid lack of confidence in our own natures, which is preju- dicial to healthy morality. Further than this, the being who is always preferring others to himself, who de- lights in self-sacrifice, is an unpleasant companion to the normally moral nature, which would prefer "turn about" in the matter of making sacrifices for the com- mon good, and would rather share his pleasures with the morbid altruist than enjoy them at his expense; while at the same time the conduct of this self-sacrificing 158 RELIGIO DOCTORIS individual cultivates the habit of selfishness in those who are naturally inclined to be inconsiderate of others. Again, though the cheerful egoist could hardly be induced to spend an hour in a sick-room, and at the mere suggestion makes a wry face and tells you that sick-rooms do not agree with his constitution and that he would become an invalid himself if he had to stay in one; while the conscientious altruist, whose private affairs may make it much more difficult for him to spare the time, willingly spends half a day with the invalid, makes every effort to cheer and amuse without fatiguing him, and anxiously seeks to anticipate every wish and supply every want, yet how often it happens that when our light-hearted egoist does drop into the sick- room, and with no more than a genial greeting and a pleasant word to the invalid chats for a few minutes with the attendant about something in which he him- self (the egoist) happens to be interested, the atmos- phere of the sick-room is transformed by his cheery presence, the invalid is taken out of himself and experi- ences a mild exhilaration; and when the doctor visits him he is surprised to find the improvement in the condition of the patient who had received so little bene- fit from the kind and thoughtful devotion of the con- scientious altruist. Perhaps the explanation is in the fact that the very anxiety of the latter to serve and please impresses upon the patient that he is an invalid whom this good person is here to help, while the cheer- ful confidence of the light-hearted egoist in the pleasant- ness of life, and the fact that he shows no especial interest in the patient, have the tonic effect, upon the HAPPINESS AND MORALITY 159 self-centered invalid, of a breath of fresh air from the great world without. Indeed I believe that those always interest and help us most who lead their own lives, not those who try to live ours. I do not wish to overemphasize the truth suggested by such facts as the above. But that they are facts, I think the experience and observation of every adult will have assured him; and they seem to me to suggest that a too lively consciousness of duty and of the obligation to serve others may have a tendency to defeat its own purpose and may really be less effective in blessing mankind than the spontaneous, uncon- sciously egoistic activity of normal, healthy members of society, primarily intent upon pursuing their own interest and enjoying life in their own way. I say "normal, healthy members of society;" for to such beings, as I think I have already sufficiently pointed out, conduct that would evidently be seriously harmful to others would in general give more pain than pleasure, and such conduct they would spontaneously avoid. But it is doubtless true, nevertheless, that the egoism of a being below the normal level of the society of which he is a member tends to be destructive to the best interests of that society, by reason of the insensitiveness of the moral nature of such an egoist. It should go without saying that the extent to which egoistic conduct is conducive to the highest interests of mankind is dependent upon the soundness and sweetness of the egoist's nature. Although the egoism of a healthy, happy, innocent child, who in his enjoy- ment of life exhibits little or no regard for others except 160 RELIGIO DOCTORIS as they contribute to that enjoyment, is generally tonic in its effect upon us and makes life brighter for us, yet our pleasure is certainly increased if the child's nature is not only sunny but sweet, if it has so fine a moral nature that it finds a great deal of its pleasure in pleasing; and it is probably true that the cheerful egoist's visit to the sick-room would be even more beneficial if his disposition were not only bright and joyous but so loving and kind that his presence would bring home to others, not only the physical beauty, and the opportunity for enjoyment associated therewith, which the world has to offer us, but also the wealth of love its human hearts contain. In other words, egoism is beneficial to the world at large in proportion as the egoist's nature approximates to the ideal of the Schone Seele, the beautiful soul that does instinctively and spontaneously that which is most conducive to the highest welfare of mankind. But even though the egoist's nature be far below this ideal, if he be intelli- gent and well informed his egoism will tend toward morality. Let us remember that as the welfare of society is dependent upon the wellbeing of the members who compose it, and as it would be very un- If h ain s e pro- mg economical of time and effort, and hence one's d attMldSg prejudicial to individual and general wel- SSftatL&te! 8 fare > for Mrs - A to P refer the making of Mrs. B's bed to the making of her own (it certainly would not be practical for Mrs. A to drink Mrs. B's coffee for her, however altruistically disposed she might be), morality itself confirms the naive point HAPPINESS AND MORALITY 161 of view of the individual, which makes himself the center of the world of which he is a part. Society does not hold you individually responsible for the welfare of society at large, although it of course expects you to do nothing actually hostile to it and, more than this, to help it along as far as you can do this consistently with your primary duty. But it does hold you individually responsible for the welfare of one particular member, yourself, and in somewhat less degree for that of those most immediately dependent upon you. It demands that you shall keep that one individual in the highest state of health and wellbeing possible, and that you shall not allow him or those who may naturally look to him for support to become a charge upon public or private charity. Even if egoistic inclinations, then, were not in that direction, a man's first duty would be to himself. The greater one's worth to society, i. e. the better he is the more imperative is this duty to himself. The conductor of a polar expedition or the competent leader of any body of men exposed to diffi- culties requiring exceptional caution, experience, wis- dom and courage on the part of the leader, upon whom the welfare of a ship-full or perhaps of hundreds and even thousands of human beings depends, is bound to guard his own life and health with exceptional care. Under normal circumstances the general who takes the troop-leader's place in the front line of battle is recreant to his duty. But while such cases may bring more clearly before us the primary moral duty to one's self that one's position in society imposes upon him, this duty exists in all cases. Even those who have the 162 RELIGIO DOCTORIS least capacity for serving others, who are physically or intellectually too weak, have still the primary duty of taking care of themselves to the extent of their power, of doing all that they can to relieve society from the burden of caring for them. Whether or not it be true, however, that conscious altruistic striving is in general less productive of whole- some morality than the spontaneous activity of normal, healthy natures, instinctively seeking the satisfaction of their impulses, it seems to be the unanimous opinion of all observers that the individual himself attains less happiness when his conduct is controlled by the deliber- ate purpose of securing pleasure for himself than when he is working for some moral end with an enthusiasm in which he forgets himself. Nothing is more trite though it is not the less true for all its triteness than the observation that the conscious pleasure-seeker is apt to be the most discontented of human beings. The conscious effort to extract the maximum of pleasure from life and from every experience therein, and to reject all possible experiences that do not promise a large quantum of pleasure, generally begets a restless frame of mind, which leads its possessor to hurry from one occupation to another because he feels a nervous dread of wasting his time on the matter he has just taken in hand when perhaps something else might give him more pleasure. Imagine a butterfly that has no sooner alighted upon one flower than he is attracted to another, and so flits hungrily from one to another the long day through, without getting the honey from any of them, and you have a picture of this frame of HAPPINESS AND MORALITY 163 mind. Or perhaps the unfortunate result of this ner- vous anxiety to get at the pleasure-giving elements in human experience and to reject everything else, may be even better pictured by likening the too eager pleasure-seeker to one who tears a rose to pieces to get at its fragrance, and thus destroys the possibility of fragrance as well as the visual beauty that he might otherwise have enjoyed. In the discussion just preceding we have come dan- gerously near to paradox. We have, on the one hand, suggested the possibility that conscious altruism may achieve less for morality (or the best ideal conduct, interests of man) than the instinctive. both from the \ / standpoint of unconscious egoism of normal, healthy morality and ^ from that of natures; and have asserted, on the other happiness, is m % that of the hand, that conscious egoistic effort will do "Beautiful D Soul," which, l ess for the happiness of the individual loving to do .1.1 that which is than self -forgetting ethical activity on his best for all, " 1 does good in- part. Have we not said here that ethical stmctively and r , spontaneously, conduct probably produces less wellbemg not under the . . , , , compulsion than egoistic conduct, and then asserted of a sense of . . duty. that egoistic conduct produces less well- being than ethical conduct? No, we have not: and that we have not been guilty of a paradox is true, not merely because in the first place we spoke of the wellbeing of the social whole and in the second place of the wellbeing of the individual actor, but be- cause (although my imperfect choice of terms may have failed to make this as clear as it should be made)there is a difference between the conscious altruism spoken of in the former hypothesis and the self-forgetting 164 RELIGIO DOCTORIS ethical activity referred to in the later assertion. By the former term I sought to express the self-conscious subordination of self to others from a sense of duty; and by the latter, the spontaneous attempt to achieve a moral end because of one's inclination thereto, not from any sense of duty or with any sense of self-sacri- fice. What both limbs of the seeming paradox have really agreed in suggesting is the truth of the ideal of the beautiful soul, Schiller's sctione Seele, as against the more widely accepted notion of Kant, that there is no moral worth in any conduct that is not adopted in obedience to the sense of duty. This Kantian notion seems anything but true. On the contrary, the study of life seems to show us that love, not duty, is the source of that which is best; and that pleasure is the natural accompaniment of the free exercise of our facul- ties (physical, mental and emotional), and is great, rising into happiness, in proportion as we live largely, not spending all our strength in the exercise of one or a very few of the activities possible for us, but living up to the possibilities of our manhood by such a tem- perate exercise of each of the faculties of our nature as shall make possible the largest exercise of all, and thus enable us to enter into the most sympathetic relations with all that the Universe contains. It would seem that for those who are neither the mere means to a high civilization, from the actual participation in which they x As was largely the case with the lower class of slaves in Greece, and as is in a measure the case with the drudge of today, the hardships of whose position largely prevent the widening of the intellectual horizon and the accompanying enlargement of one's sympathies which are characteristic of true civilization. HAPPINESS AND MORALITY 165 are very largely excluded, nor its mere parasites? the egotistic impulse will tend to produce moral conduct in proportion as the civilization in which the individual participates is high ; not only because the material and non-moral means of enjoyment demanded by a civilized man are dependent upon the wellbeing of the society in which he lives, and his fellows are disposed to resent and punish anything that they understand to be hostile to the general welfare, but also because the highest (i. e., the greatest) pleasure (f6r a civilized human being, at any rate) comes from the gratifica- tion of our social affections, which lead us to take de- light in producing happiness, and the satisfaction of our intellectual cravings for knowledge, which make us truthseekers. It is in the central importance of love, of sympathetic interest, as at once the source of our greatest happi- ness and the most efficient motive in producing what is morally best, that we find the explanation of the fact that in the case of the individual who is consciously striving to obtain self-gratification, whose conduct has as its deliberate purpose the production of pleasure 2 As is characteristically the case with many Oriental princes of our own day, whose wealth and power enable them to attain a super- ficial acquaintance with western civilization and to appropriate many of its material advantages, while they are prevented from making its higher gains their own by the self-sufficiency which arises out of their traditions of irresponsible lordship over a more or less completely enslaved population and out of their lack of true moral and intellec- tual culture, since no one can appropriate the best i. e. the emotional and intellectual elements of a civilization in which his own emotional and intellectual life is not a factor* and as is true in less degree of some who are born in the midst of a high civilization but who are shut off by adventitious circumstances (extraordinary eminence in wealth and social position perhaps) from a living sympathy with it. 166 RELIGIO DOCTORIS for himself, not only is his pleasure diminished by his morbid attention to the emotions that are to be aroused within him by his action, this morbid attention to the result to be attained being hostile to that free play of the faculties to which pleasure is incident, but his constant attention to himself really makes it impossible that he should feel, to any considerable extent, those emotions that are the sources of the highest pleasure. If he gazes at a beautiful landscape, not because it is beautiful, but because, being beautiful, he expects it to give him pleasure, he can but half enjoy the land- scape, since his attention is divided between it and himself; and so it is if he works at a problem in physics not because he craves to know What the truth of the matter is, but because he believes that this exercise of his intellectual faculties should give him pleasure; and still more true is it that if he undertakes some service to humanity, not because his love of his fellows irre- sistibly impels him to it, but because he is intellectu- ally convinced that he will derive pleasure from serving his fellows, he gets but a faint shadow of the pleasure that would have accompanied activity of the same sort objectively considered, but that from the subjec- tive point of view would have differed immeasurably from this, in that it would be prompted by love of his fellows instead of by the selfish desire to enjoy the pleasure of contemplating one's self in the light of a philanthropist. Is not this the teaching of the First Epistle to the Corinthians? "Though I give my body to be burned, and have not love, it profiteth me noth- ing!" A European sold into slavery by pirates may HAPPINESS AND MORALITY 167 under compulsion render valuable service to the com- munity in which he is placed. He has served humanity but he has no tithe of the pleasure in this achievement that he would have had in a similar service freely per- formed for fellow beings whom he loved. And the ser- vice to humanity of the man who adopts "philan- thropy," not from love to his fellows, but because he is convinced that this is the road to happiness for him- self, is lacking in the essential element of joy-giving power the love of the action itself as truly as, al- though doubtless in less degree than, the service of the slave. Far be it from me to say, however, that moral con- duct deliberately adopted by a cool-headed egoist for the pleasure it will give him, will wholly fail of the desired effect. If a man has sufficient culture to forsee the hedonistic value of such conduct, it is un- questionable, not only that the contemplation of the beautiful landscape and the work upon the solution of the problem in physics, but also that the "philan- thropic" conduct, will give him real and considerable pleasure, and the last will probably give him the greatest pleasure; for it is inconceivable that a man to whom such a means of achieving pleasure should com- mend itself, should be wholly devoid of affection for his fellows, as impossible as that he should be wholly lacking in aesthetic taste and intellectual curiosity; but the pleasure he will get will be but a fraction of what it would have been had he forgotten himself and done these things for the love of doing them. The above considerations will help us to understand 168 RELIGIO DOCTORIS how it is that the recipient of a benefit may possibly be less helped by it when it was prompted by altruisic considerations, by the thought that it was right to confer this benefit, by the sense of duty on the part of the benefactor, than by a benefit that should come as an incident to the natural satisfaction of the bene- factor's egoistic impulses. The caresses and thought- ful attentions of an adult who feels that it is her duty to do everything in her power to lighten the burdens of life for an unfortunate young woman who is so de- formed as to be no less an object of horror than of pity to most of her fellow beings, including even the kind friend whose strong sense of duty alone enables her to so far overcome her physical repulsion as to caress the unfortunate and remain in her presence, these caresses and attentions will probably contribute less to the happiness of the deformed creature than the caresses and awkward services of a little child who caresses and waits on the unfortunate just because she, the child, really loves to be snuggled in the arms of the hunch- back and to listen to her fairy tales. The child's motive is egoistic, its purpose hedonistic, its aesthetic sensibilities in the direction in question are so little developed that the deformed girl seems to it only a little queer and interesting; and as it thoroughly enjoys being petted and made much of and entertained with beautiful stories, it runs away from its nurse and into the arms of the hunchback at every opportunity; and this purely egoistic conduct on its part probably gives our unfortunate the happiest moments of her life, a pleasure that cannot be produced by the deft services HAPPINESS AND MORALITY 169 and kind caresses of the friend who is actuated by a purely ethical motive, and who disregards the natural impulses of a nature peculiarly sensitive to the repul- siveness of physical ugliness, in order to contribute to the welfare of the society in which she lives. The truth seems to be that conduct moral in its out- come that is mainly altruistic in its motive, and not accompanied by lively hedonistic satisfaction, succeeds less perfectly in producing its moral result than con- duct likewise having a moral outcome but achieved without conscious altruistic intent, for much the same reason that conduct hedonistic in its outcome, but which was the result of deliberate egoistic calculation, is less perfectly hedonistic than conduct having a some- what similar hedonistic outcome but springing from self -forgetting ethical impulses. The reason is that that is best done which is done for the love of doing it (and not for the love either of self or of others), as an end in itself, not as the means to some ulterior end; that is most perfectly done which is done instinctively and spontaneously rather than deliberately as the result of a process of ratiocination; that conduct is most pro- ductive of happiness, both for the actor and for man- kind, which is reasonable (i. e. y in harmony with the laws of nature and tending to produce the desired result) rather than reasoned. For although the extent to which man can adapt means to an end is the evidence of his superiority over the lower animals, which, with little reasoning power, must generally go to the wall when their instincts are inadequate and fail to meet the situation in which they find themselves; and al- 170 RELIGIO DOCTORIS though the exercise of this power (as of all the other faculties of his nature) affords its peculiar pleasure, which in this case is a very high one; yet the exercise of the reason in the conscious adaptation of means to a desired end is essentially a method of meeting such new difficulties in man's environment as his constitution is not yet perfectly adapted to: and this means that the conscious adaptation of means to an end is an evidence of the imperfection of man's adaptation to the situation which confronts him; for he is never perfect master of the situation till he meets it instinctively, without hav- ing to think out the suitable line of conduct (just as the pianist is not master of his instrument so long as he must think what parts of the keyboard he must strike to produce a given combination of sounds and how he must manage his hands to strike these notes). Thus again we are brought to the conclusion that ideal conduct, both from the moral and from the hedon- istic standpoint, is only possible for the in proportion sch'one Seele, the beautiful soul that does to man's intel- ligence and to instinctively what is right because it finds his knowledge . . , , -^ m of the actual its happiness in such conduct. But while conditions of , rtr life will his con- the ideal oi the beautiful soul may never duct, objective- u _ i ly considered, be perfectly realized, let us not forget approach that , , i of the beautiful that all reasonable conduct approximates soul, whether . _ his motive be to it, whether it proceeds from the stand- the sense of , . . . duty or the de- point of morality Or OI happiness. Al- ness, though he who seeks to do good be- cause it is his duty and not because he loves to do good, is less perfect, less loving and wise, than he of the beautiful soul whose natural HAPPINESS AND MORALITY 171 love of the good leads him to perfect action, and al- though therefore the former's ethical conduct will give him less happiness, and will less perfectly achieve the moral good sought for, than the conduct of the latter, yet this striving of an intelligent being for moral ends must benefit mankind to some extent, and it is also true that this beneficence of a moral being must give no little pleasure to the benefactor himself, must tend to make him happy. The man who so acts will learn the meaning of the teaching that he who is ready to lose his life shall find it. And on the other hand, al- though he whose conduct is directed by the search for personal happiness, and to whom the good of the rest of the world is a secondary matter, may experience something of the truth of the saying that he who would save his life shall lose it, inasmuch as his pleasure in all that he does and experiences will be greatly diminish- ed by his morbid attention to himself and his own emotions, yet in proportion to his intelligence must he seek his happiness along moral lines, and, doing so, he will both secure some pleasure for himself and accom- plish something for the moral wellbeing of the world. In other words, in proportion to a man's intelligence and to his knowledge of the actual conditions of life will his conduct, objectively considered, approach that of the "beautiful soul," whether his motive be the sense of duty or the desire for happiness. If this be true, and of its truth I feel as sure as of my own existence, what a helpful truth it is for humanity, and how important it is that mankind should be educated to appreciate it! What a burden its re- 172 RELIGIO DOCTORIS cognition would lift from the heart of many a sad-faced preacher of duty, and what an illumination it would throw upon the path of the seeker after Hence the im- happiness! When, instead of resting our portance of ex- - . , , ,. . ercising all our faith upon the tradition of our ancestors faculties m the . effort to gain and making of our practical hie a waver- the most per- . . f ect comprenen- mg, unworthy compromise between the verse. acceptance of the selfish maxims of a superficial empiricism, on the one hand, and obedience to an alleged miraculous revelation, on the other, we shall awaken to the importance and the dignity of life here and now and shall look existence frankly in the face, not seeking for miraculous guidance nor depending upon authority, even though it be the authority of the wisest and best, the noblest and most loving being that ever walked the earth, but rather going ourselves to the fountain of truth and source of all true inspiration, and seeking in the great Book of Nature, wherein, and wherein alone, it is written in characters of living light, the revelation of the nature and will of that Eternal Existence in which we live and move and have our being, then and only then shall we learn to live aright! Then, among other things, we shall learn for. our- selves (and what we learn for ourselves we act upon) that the truth expressed in the New Testa- tor* theright ves ment with such poetic force is a truth for Jowe^neier every-day life, finding its realization here nappfnes^n so ^d now, that he who shall strive for the wiafes 6 ?^ 11 " ri S nt witn a11 nis heart, will not sacrifice his happiness by so doing, but will increase it; and that he who would enjoy life to the uttermost HAPPINESS AND MORALITY 173 will not have to throw his finer scruples aside, but that his life will be rich and happy in proportion as he is true to his highest spiritual insights. Many of us have gotten far enough to admit this as an abstract intellectual truth, but few of us have yet come to feel its truth so deeply that we are ready to trust the guidance of our lives to it. Practically we are infidels; this is one of the truths as to which we feel, with George Eliot's Mr. Brooke, that "it won't do to carry it too far." "A man who would succeed in life," we say, "must not be too scrupulous." But what is success? In what shall we succeed by stifling our finest feelings? In gaining material wealth, the possession of which we have neither the wisdom nor the virtue to enjoy properly: or in gaining the reputa- tion of power, without the reality, since we may not wield for moral ends the brittle sceptre that has been acquired and is held upon condition of pandering to the evil in our fellows? Surely that only is worthy of the name of success which makes life richer, larger, nobler, sweeter, and this we can achieve only in pro- portion as we develop the best that is in us, not, like the foolish ascetic, wholly ignoring the fundamental physical demands of our nature, or seeking to crucify the flesh in the interest of the spirit, but exercising our lower (that is, our more purely physical) faculties in such moderation as shall be consistent with the exer- cise and development of the highest faculties of our nature, that thus we may attain to that large sympathy with all that is which shall make us wise, loving and fearless. 174 RELIGIO DOCTORIS I am no optimist. Whether or not this is the best of all possible worlds, seems to me a silly, meaningless question. We have not to do with a didui3 ma"y number of possible worlds but with the ftSsfoSanT* one Universe as it is. But my study of fstencl h of e evii reality, of psychological law on the one condition of a nan d and of physical law on the other, has tencefSfe Sni" made me a meliorist. Evil exists; and so hap"i?r er the d ^ on S as conscious individuals have a part pit d h1 r es and y the to P la y in the Universe I am disposed to Ks. moral our tlimk that ** must exist: since evil is tne name we give to relations wherein one is not in complete harmony with his environment, and life itself in all its myriad functions seems but to be the continual re-adaptation of the individual to the sur- rounding conditions, without which constant necessity for re-adaptation life would lose its meaning we would have only that negative state of existence for which the Buddhist has given us the name Nirvana. Let us not forget that happiness comes to us from the exer- cise of the faculties of our nature (physical, emotional and intellectual), and in no other way. Not by getting into a luxurious alcove in which he shall be secure from the turmoil of life, not in standing on an elevated platform and viewing the struggle of life from a safe distance, but through the most active participation in life, does man find his happiness. Evil exists, and no man, I think, may expect perfect satisfaction; but the Universe is so constituted that in the struggle for existence which is life itself and not an evil, although, conditioned by the existence of evil we shall be the HAPPINESS AND MORALITY 175 more successful the wider our outlook, the more com- pletely our conduct brings us into harmony with all that is, the more perfect our co-operation with others, in a word, the more moral our lives. My meliorism is further supported by the conviction that those who are not yet high enough in the scale of being to be instinctively virtuous will be- nares e Ee- w come more virtuous in proportion as their whHtmore e ~ intelligence is (symmetrically) developed mrm*M they an d their knowledge becomes wider and TherTts no e ei- deeper. Such increase in knowledge and proposuion^that wisdom will indubitably be accompanied a^videS^of by more perfect emotional responsiveness. ilgenS; whin" Most of the immoral conduct that is not suit^nnca- 16 " mere ly the instinctive expression of racial controi f r self " naD its acquired in an earlier day, when such conditions were more beneficial than harmful, results from an imperfect comprehension of the evil it may cause, from a failure to understand why the conduct is wrong, from the undeveloped condition of the imaginative power and emotional sensitiveness of the wrong-doer, who is really incapable of picturing to himself distant or remote evil, either to others or to himself, with sufficient vividness to give it appreciable magnitude in comparison with the immediate good to himself that occupies the foreground of his conscious- ness. The harm he does to others and the eventual injury to himself often appear to him of no greater weight than the killing of a few mosquitoes would to a humane man who should thus defend himself against the ravages of the little pests. In each case the evil is 176 RELIGIO DOCTORIS regarded by its perpetrators as a necessary evil, a mere trifle in comparison with the good which the perpe- trator is thereby enabled to attain for himself. It does not seem to me that we need be morally dis- couraged even though it be admitted that there are men who find more pleasure in the gratification of their lower, non-moral appetites, yes, in the intemperate, and therefore immoral, gratification of their animal appetites, than in any kind of moral activity. It goes without saying that anything that a man does which gives him any pleasure, gives him more pleasure than that which he does not do ! As yet these men have not had the experience of moral conduct that would ac- quaint them with the pleasure to be derived therefrom. Even if we should compel them to conduct moral in its outcome, it would not be altruistic conduct on their part; and so long as they should act in this way under com- pulsion, they could not derive that emotional satis- faction from the doing of the thing in question which gives to moral conduct its highest hedonistic value, and it would doubtless take considerable time for them to learn the practical physical advantage to themselves of having conducted themselves morally. It may, however, at first, seem fatal to our melioristic convic- tion, to have to admit that men of relatively high (but certainly warped) intellectual power, and having un- usual knowledge along certain lines, or a knowledge of the world at large that is really quite wide but not profound, seem sometimes to prefer to moral conduct the gratification of their ambition or of some of their animal passions, even at the expense of others. But HAPPINESS AND MORALITY 177 even such a case is largely one of ignorance, of an un- fortunate habit as to the direction in which to look for happiness, and partly also a case of deficient intelli- gence. If the knowledge of reality possessed by these men, exact as it may be so far as it goes, were wider, or if, wide as it may be, it were profounder; if their intelli- gence, instead of being highly developed along certain lines alone, were thoroughly sane, symmetrical and healthy; or if they could once be gotten into the habit of moral conduct, so that they should know from ex- perience the happiness to be derived therefrom, it seems to me certain that they would prefer the moral to the immoral life. The moral outlook for man is, then, a hopeful one; for it is true, as Socrates maintained, that men may be made more moral by education, if only that f?rm 1 an , hope- term be understood in its true sense, may S be C LSe n the development and cultivation, not of SSe e 3ucati b on. the intellect alone, but of the physical, emotional and intellectual nature, by pro- viding suitable exercise for the health and efficiency of the body, and by enlarging the intellectual horizon and strengthening and purifying the emotions, while guid- ing them into right channels, through the presentation to our young of such an outline and synopsis of human achievements in art and science as shall give them an approximately true Weltanschauung, as shall give them a fairly adequate idea of what has so far been learned as to the individual man's relations to the several wholes of which he is a part, the family, the race, the state, the commonwealth of civilized nations, mankind, 178 RELIGIO DOCTORIS the organic world, the Universe itself, and as to the nature of that Universe, its variety and its beauty, its wonderful complexity and yet its uniformity as exhibited in the laws of nature. Such an education alone one that shall care for the body and feed the mind can contribute to healthy moral development. Morality that is purely traditional, or that has to be taught directly as such, and that does not find its confirmation in the feelings that spring out of a knowledge of the Universe and of our relations to the various parts of this all-embracing whole, is necessarily inferior, and is likely to be either wooden or fantastic. The idea of "teaching morality" by itself, of awakening healthy moral sentiment that shall not be based upon a sym- pathetic appreciation of the relation of the individual to society and to the Universe outside mankind (and for this it is necessary to know not a little about that Universe), is like plucking a flower from root and stem and expecting it to live and grow. The blossom may retain its fragrance for a time, but its vitality is gone. And so it is with the morality of precept that does not spring out of, and find its support in, our own feeling of oneness with the life outside our little individual selves, that comes from a sympathetic knowledge of the world of which we are a part. "Schooling," it is true, may make one more capable of committing crime, as it is likely to increase one's ability in many directions; it is indubitable that a knowledge of penmanship is a con- dition for the commission of the crime of forgery. But he would be a fool as well as a most pitiable coward, that would therefore forbid children to be taught to write. HAPPINESS AND MORALITY 179 And whatever may be true of "schooling," the educa- tion that makes for wisdom makes also for virtue, while it makes no less for happiness. Here I would emphasize again the truth that virtue never really demands a sacrifice of happiness! At most it only demands the sacrifice of the lesser to the greater pleasure. The man who gives up a fortune and a commanding position in society, and with it the possibility of marrying the woman he loves, and lives in poverty, because of conscientious scruples, is happier than he could have been without his own self-respect. Not alone virtue, but his happiness demanded that he should be able to enjoy his own self-respect and hold his head erect before God and man. He is, it may well be, less happy than he would have been could he have had at once self-respect, wealth, and the life- companionship of her who was to him the dearest of women. But that was out of his power, and he chose that which would give him, not the greatest happiness conceivable (with which ethical choice has nothing to do!) but the greatest happiness possible for him. So it is always. Even though one's nature be low, the virtuous course will not involve in the case of such a one a sacri- fice of happiness. The business partner of the man of whom we have just spoken, who having a lower, less sensitive nature, chose to keep the fortune that was in his possession but to which he had no moral right, also chose, no doubt, what seemed to him at the time to promise the greatest happiness possible for him. But had he foreseen that no amount of pleasure purchased at the expense of self-respect is equal to that which 180 RELIGIO DOCTORIS self-respect gives, he would have chosen the other alter- native; and had he done so he would have been happier than it will now be possible for him to be. He may be sleeker and fatter than his former partner, but he can never know the happiness that the other will enjoy. A low nature can never enjoy the height of happiness that is possible for a high nature. It may also be true that the former is saved by his more insensitive nature from suffering as keenly as the latter can. But to this it may be answered that we measure men and things rather by their positive qualities than by means of negatives, and that no noble nature would forgo its sensitive responsiveness to that which is most beautiful and best, in order to be rid of its sensitiveness to evil. A man will not change places with a polyp for the sake of the latter's cold-blooded incapacity for agony (and ecstacy!). Let us bear in mind, when the unrighteous seem to triumph, that a clam, even at high tide, is in- capable of the happiness possible for a higher animal such as the dog; that a hog can never be as happy as a man! One thing more. We have already seen that the conception of ethical conduct develops with the growth of knowledge and the widening of human Morality be- relations. To the savage, that is moral the greater the which subserves the wellbeing of his petty whole becomes . . . . * .. of which man tribe; no human being outside the tribe self as a part, has any moral claims upon him. As tribes confederate, the sense of moral responsibil- ity spreads outside, to take in the members of the fed- eration; and gradually it extends in some measure to HAPPINESS AND MORALITY 181 all of the same race, and at length to mankind and to our fellow members of the animal kingdom. But this extension is imperfect. The most highly civilized peoples of today still feel, as a rule, a very limited moral obligation in reference to foreign peoples. The discussions of national policy in reference to commerce and industry, which appear in high-class magazines as well as in the daily press, make this limited sense of fellowship and of moral obligation very evident. Yet althoujgh the conception of morality varies with time, place, and people, and sometimes departs considerably from the root idea and becomes quite fantastic, it may still be fairly asserted that the underlying meaning of moral conduct is, that which is conducive to the high- est wellbeing of the whole of which one is a part; and therefore our morality will be higher and broader accord- ing as our conception of that whole expands. Only the members of the highest races recognize their fellowship with all mankind, and only a few of the most cultivated individuals of the moralitvand h*g ner races have any adequate sense of the highest hap- the fact that the whole of which they are piness require . t the recognition a part is nothing less than the Universe of our unity ^ with all that is. itself, past, present and future. Until a better education, with the wider knowledge, deeper thought, and more sensitive feeling incident thereto, makes us all more conscious of the largeness of our true self and the infinity of our interests, no very high morality can prevail. But even though we are still as a rule too dull of apprehension to perceive the evil to ourselves therein, it remains true that one acts in 182 RELIGIO DOCTORIS hostility to his own hedonistic interests (or, in other words, decreases his own possibilities of happiness) who inflicts an unnecessary injury upon any living be- ing, though that being live at the antipodes, whether it be by directly or indirectly bringing evil upon him or by depriving him of an opportunity he would other- wise have had; and that he also injures himself who unnecessarily does aught that shall diminish the beauty and perfection even of inanimate nature, though it be in that part of the world most distant from that in which he himself dwells! The corollaries of this truth are infinite. It means that selfishness (not the seeking of one's own good; that is innocent and right; but the seeking Love, which is of one's own good in disregard of all else sympathy, is -*,- - the secret both a nd at the expense of the good of others), of happiness, whether it be individual, local, or national, never "pays." Some day we shall see clearly that the "public-spirited townsman," for in- stance, who secures for his own town a public institu- tion that the interest of the state demand should be located elsewhere, is not only not a good citizen, but that he has injured his fellow townsmen as well as the people of the state at large and himself; and similarly that a national policy that is injurious to the people of other nations is hostile to the true interests of the citizens of the nation that adopts it, interferes with the most healthy and symmetrical development on their part, and decreases their happiness. For love is the law of life, the law of development (physical, mental and emotional), the law at once of morality and ofhappi- HAPPINESS AND MORALITY 183 ness; and only as we love largely, sympathizing more and more fully with all that is, can we attain, either for ourselves or for those that are nearest to us, to the fullness of happiness that might be ours in the realiza- tion of the Beauty of the Universe! UNIVEESTTY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY, BERKELEY THIS BOOK IS DUE ON THE LAST DATE STAMPED BELOW Books not returned on time are subject to a fine of 50c per volume after the third day overdue, increasing to $1 00 per volume after the sixth day. Books not in demand may be renewed if application is made before expiration of loan period. ===== Mi 85 1923 DEC * tw& 10m-4,'23 YB 225C! 4929 UNIVERS.TY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY