CORNELL . UNIVERSITY LIBRARY BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND GIVEN IN 1891 BY HENRY WILLIAMS SAGE The original of tliis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924029067746 WILLIAM JAMES AND OTHER ESSAYS ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK • BOSTON - CHICAGO SAN FRANCISCO MACMILLAN & CO., Limited LONDON • BOMBAY ■ CALCUTTA MELBOURNE THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. TORONTO WILLIAM JAMES AFD OTHER ESSAYS ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE BY JOSIAH ROYCE, LL.D., Litt.D. PROFESSOR OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY AT HARVARD UNIVERSITY Wefa gorft THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1912 All rights reserved OOPTEIOHT, 1911, By THE MAOMILLASr C0MPA2TT. JMILLASr compa: Set up and electrotyped. Published November, 1911. Reprinted June, igiz. ' J. 8. Cashing Co. — Berwick & Smith Co. Horwood, Mass., U.S.A. PREFACE In previous works, and most systematically in the two volumes entitled " The World and the Individual," I have set forth and de- fended a form of philosophical Idealism. The essays collected in the present volume contain further illustrations and applications of this doctrine. They are all papers pre- pared for special occasions. The earliest in order of time was written in 1906. The lat- est, my address upon William James, was prepared in June of the present year. Each one of these essays can be understood inde- pendently. The justification for bringing them together in a single volume is expressed by the phrase "philosophy of life," used on my title-page. That is, each essay contains an interpretation of some problem that is, in my opinion, of vital interest for any one who PREFACE wants to form sound ideals for the conduct of life. The discourse upon William James deals with some of his ideals, and incidentally indi- cates my own. The address upon recent dis- cussions of the problems of truth explains why I cannot accept some of the positions of recent pragmatism, and why the frequent identification of the idealistic theory of truth with " barren intellectualism " appears to me erroneous. Since, in my opinion, the intel- lect and the will, logic and life, reason in the formation of ideas and reason in the guidance of conduct, have extremely intimate rela- tions, which some recent discussions have both richly illustrated and waywardly ob- scured, the review of the problem of truth, although the most technical of the papers in this volume, seems to me to concern an issue that is as practical and vital as any other. As to the defense of the concept of " absolute truth " which the paper contains, I may at once say that "the absolute" seems to me personally not something remote, unpractical. PREFACE inhuman, but the most pervasive and omni- present and practical, as it is also the most inclusive of beings. "Absolute truth" has therefore a distinctly and intensely practical import. Of the other essays, the one on Christian- ity is a fragment of a study that I propose to carry out more fully at an early date. The essay on " Loyalty and Insight " summarizes the position that I have defended and illus- trated in my " Philosophy of Loyalty," pub- lished in 1908, and brings the ethical doctrine there presented into touch with metaphysical idealism by means of a very summary indica- tion of the thought which we owe to Kant's " Deduction of the Categories." How near that thought also is to the vital interests of daily life, I am never weary of trying to illus- trate at a time when it is fashionable in this country to belittle the office of thought, and to make light of Kant. The final discourse on " Immortality " approaches the familiar problem in a fashion different from that chosen for the purposes of PREFACE my "Ingersoll lecture" on the same topic (published by the Riverside Press in 1900), and thus forms a sort of supplement to the Ingersoll lecture. The present way of deal- ing with the concept of immortality also gives me the opportunity to sketch anew some of my general idealistic theses, and incidentally to repudiate the frequent and groundless assertion that my own form of idealism regards time as " unreal," or the absolute as "timeless," or the universe as a " block." Since each of these papers is intended to be comprehensible by itself, I am obliged, in each, to state, more or less dogmatically, opin- ions which I have discussed and attempted to justify in former writings. Dogma, as such, has no place in philosophy. But the present book is no systematic treatise ; and is to be judged, I hope, in the light of its own decidedly practical purpose, and of its accompanying limitations. I have ventured to make the honored name of William James part of my title. The first PREFACE essay is a tribute to his memory. The others show, I hope, that, if I often oppose his views, I owe to him, as teacher, and as dear friend, an unfailing inspiration, far greater than he ever knew, or than I can well put into words. JOSIAH ROYCE. Cambridge, Mass. Oct. 5, 1911. IX CONTENTS ESSAY I PAOE William James and the Philosophy of Life 3 ESSAY II Loyalty and Insight 49 ESSAY III What is Vital in Christianity? ... 99 ESSAY IV The Problem of Truth in the Light of Recent Discussion 187 ESSAY V Immortality 257 xi ESSAY I Wn.T.TAM JAMES AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE ESSAY I WILLIAM JAMES AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF LIFEi FIFTY years since, if competent judges were asked to name the American think- ers from whom there had come novel and notable and typical contributions to general philosophy, they could in reply mention only two men — Jonathan Edwards and Ralph Waldo Emerson. For the conditions that determine a fair answer to the question, "Who are your representative American philoso- phers ? " are obvious. The philosopher who can fitly represent the contribution of his nation to the world's treasury of philosophical ideas must first be one who thinks for himself, fruitfully, with true independence, and with successful inventiveness, about problems of philosophy. And, secondly, he must be a man who gives utterance to philosophical ideas 1 Phi Beta Kappa Oration delivered at Harvard Univer- sity, June, 1911. WILLIAM JAMES which are characteristic of some stage and of some aspect of the spiritual life of his own people. In Edwards and in Emerson, and only in these men, had these two conditions found their fulfillment, so far as our American civilization had yet expressed itself in the years that had preceded our civil war. Edwards, in his day, made articulate some of the great interests that had molded our early religious life. The thoughts which he most discussed were indeed, in a sense, old, since they largely concerned a traditional theology. Yet both in theology and general philosophy, Edwards was an originator. For he actually redis- covered some of the world's profoundest ideas regarding God and humanity simply by read- ing for himself the meaning of his own religious experience. With a mysterious power of phil- osophical intuition, even in his early youth, he observed what, upon the basis of what we know to have been his range of philosophical reading, we could not possibly have expected him to observe. If the sectarian theological creed that he defended was to our minds nar- 4 AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE row, what he himself saw was very far-reach- ing and profound. For he viewed rehgious problems with synoptic vision that enabled him to reconcile, in his own personal way, some of the greatest and most tragic conflicts of the spiritual world, and what he had to say con- sequently far transcended the interests of the special theological issues which he discussed. Meanwhile, he spoke not merely as a thinker, but as one who gave voice to some of the central motives and interests of our colonial religious life. Therefore he was, in order of time, the first of our nationally representative philosophers. Another stage of our civilization — a later phase of our national ideals — found its representative in Emerson. He too was in close touch with many of the world's deepest thoughts concerning ultimate problems. Some of the ideas that most influenced him have their far-off historical origins in oriental as well as in Greek thought, and also their nearer foreign sources in modern European philosophy. But he transformed whatever he assimilated. He invented upon the basis 5 WILLIAM JAMES of his personal experience, and so he was himself no disciple of the orient, or of Greece, still less of England and of Germany. He thought, felt, and spoke as an American. Fifty years ago, I say, our nation had so far found these two men to express each his own stage of the philosophy of our national civilization. The essence of a philosophy, in case you look at it solely from a historical point of view, always appears to you thus : A great philosophy expresses an interpretation of the life of man and a view of the universe, which is at once personal, and, if the thinker is representative of his people, national in its significance. Edwards and Emerson had given tongue to the meaning of two different stages of our American culture. And these were thus far our only philosophical voices. To-day, if we ask any competent foreign critic of our philosophy whether there is any other name to be added to these two classic American philosophers, we shall re- ceive the unanimous answer: "There is to- day a third representative American philos- AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE oplier. His name is William James." For James meets the two conditions just men- tioned. He has thought for himself, fruit- fully, with true independence, and with suc- cessful inventiveness. And he has given utterance to ideas which are characteristic of a stage and of an aspect of the spiritual life of this people. He, too, has been widely and deeply aflfected by the history of thought. But he has reinterpreted all these historical influences in his own personal way. He has transformed whatever he has assimilated. He has rediscovered whatever he has received from without; because he never could teach what he had not himself experienced. And, in addition, he has indeed invented effectively and richly. Moreover, in him certain char- acteristic aspects of our national civilization have found their voice. He is thus the third in the order of time among our representa- tive American philosophers. Already, within a year of his death, he has begun to acquire something of a classic rank and dignity. In future this rank and dignity will long increase. 7 WILLIAM JAMES In one of James's latest utterances he indeed expressed, with characteristic energy, a cer- tain abhorrence of what he called classical tendencies in philosophical thought. But I must repeat the word : Fortune not unjustly replies, and will reply to James's vigorous protest against every form of classicism, by making him a classic. Thus, then, from the point of view of the competent foreign students of our philosophy, the representative American philosophers are now three and only three — Edwards, Emer- son, James. And of these three there can be little ques- tion that, at the present time, the most widely known abroad is James. Emerson has indeed found a secure place in the minds of the Eng- lish-speaking lovers of his type of thought everywhere; and has had an important part in the growth of some modern German ten- dencies. But James has already won, in the minds of French, of German, of Italian, and of still other groups of foreign readers, a posi- tion which gives him a much more extended 8 AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE range of present influence than Emerson has ever possessed. It is my purpose, upon the present occa- sion, to make a few comments upon the sig- nificance of William James's philosophy. This is no place for the discussion of technical mat- ters. Least of all have I any wish to under- take to decide, upon this occasion, any con- troversial issues. My intentions as I address you are determined by very simple and obvious considerations. William James was my friend from my youth to the end of his beneficent life. I was once for a brief time his pupil. I long loved to think of myself as his disciple ; although perhaps I was always a very bad disciple. But now he has just left us. And as I address you I remember that he was your friend also. Since the last annual meeting of this assembly he has been lost to us all. It is fitting that we should recall his memory to-day. Of personal reminiscences, of bio- graphical sketches, and of discussions relating to many details of his philosophy, the litera- ture that has gathered about his name during 9 WILLIAM JAMES the few months since we lost him has been very full. But just as this is no occasion for technical discussion of his philosophy, so too I think this is no place to add new items to the literature of purely personal reminiscence and estimate of James. What I shall try to do is this : I have said that James is an Ameri- can philosopher of classic rank, because he stands for a stage in our national self-con- sciousness — for a stage with which historians of our national mind must always reckon. This statement, if you will permit, shall be my text. I shall devote myself to expound- ing this text as well as I can in my brief time, and to estimating the significance of the stage in question, and of James's thought in so far as it seems to me to express the ideas and the ideals characteristic of this phase of our na- tional life. In defining the historical position which William James, as a thinker, occupies, we have of course to take account, not only of 10 AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE national tendencies, but also of the general interests of the world's thought in his time. William James began his work as a philos- opher, during the seventies of the last cen- tury, in years which were, for our present purpose, characterized by two notable move- ments of world-wide significance. These two movements were at once scientific in the more special sense of that term, and philosophical in the broad meaning of that word. The first of the movements was concerned with the elaboration — the widening and the deepen- ing — of the newer doctrines about evolution. This movement had indeed been preceded by another. The recent forms of evolutionary doctrine, those associated with the names of Darwin and of Spencer, had begun rapidly to come into prominence about 1860. And the decade from 1860 to 1870, taken together with the opening years of the next decade, had constituted what you may call the storm- and-stress period of Darwinism, and of its allied tendencies, such as those which Spencer represented. In those years the younger 11 WILLIAM JAMES defenders of the new doctrines, so far as tney appealed to the general public, fought their battles, declared their faith, out of weakness were made strong, and put to flight the armies of the theologians. You might name, as a closing event of that storm-and-stress period, Tyndall's famous Belfast address of 1874, and the warfare waged about that address. Haeckel's early works, some of Huxley's most noted polemic essays, Lange's "History of Materialism," the first eight or nine editions of Von Hartmann's "Philosophy of the Un- conscious," are documents characteristic of the more general philosophical interests of that time. In our country, Fiske's "Cosmic Philosophy" reflected some of the notable features that belonged to these years of the early conquests of evolutionary opinion. Now in that storm-and-stress period, James had not yet been before the public. But his published philosophical work began with the outset of the second and more important period of evolutionary thought — the period of the widening and deepening of the new 12 AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE ideas. The leaders of thought who are char- acteristic of this second period no longer spend their best efforts in polemic in favor of the main ideas of the newer forms of the doctrine of evolution. In certain of its main outlines — outlines now extremely familiar to the pub- lic — they simply accept the notion of the natural origin of organic forms and of the general continuity of the processes of devel- opment. But they are concerned, more and more, as time goes on, with the deeper meaning of evolution, with the study of its factors, with the application of the new ideas to more and more fields of inquiry, and, in case they are philosophers, with the reinter- pretation of philosophical traditions in the light of what had resulted from that time of storm and stress. James belongs to this great second stage of the evolutionary movement, to the move- ment of the elaboration, of the widening and deepening of evolutionary thought, as opposed to that early period of the storm and stress. We still live in this second stage of evolu- 13 WILLIAM JAMES tionary movement. James is one of its most inventive philosophical representatives. He hardly ever took part in the polemic in favor of the general evolutionary ideas. Accepting them, he undertook to interpret and apply them. And now, secondly, the period of James's activity is the period of the rise of the new psychology. The new psychology has stood for many other interests besides those of a technical study of the special sciences of the human and of the animal mind. What is technical about psychology is indeed impor- tant enough. But the special scientific study of mind by the modern methods used in such study has been a phase and a symptom of a very much larger movement — a movement closely connected with all that is most vital in recent civilization, with all the modern forms of nationalism, of internationalism, of socialism, and of individualism. Human life has been complicated by so many new per- sonal and social problems, that man has needed to aim, by whatever means are pos- 14 AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE sible, towards a much more elaborate knowl- edge of his fellow man than was ever possible before. The results of this disposition ap- pear in the most widely diverse sciences and arts. Archaeology and ethnology, history and the various social sciences, dramatic art, the novel, as well as what has been called psychi- cal research — in a word, all means, good and bad, that have promised either a better knowl- edge of what man is or a better way of por- traying what knowledge of man one may pos- sess — have been tried and molded in recent times by the spirit of which recent tech- nical psychology is also an expression. The psychological movement means then some- thing that far transcends the interests of the group of sciences to which the name psychol- ogy now applies. And this movement as- sumed some of its most important recent forms during the decade in which James began to publish his work. His own contributions to psychology reflect something of the manifold- ness and of the breadth of the general psycho- logical movement itself. If he published the 15 WILLIAM JAMES two great volumes entitled "Psychology," lie also wrote "The Varieties of Religious Experience," and he played his part in what is called "psychical research." These then are James's two principal offices when you consider him merely in his most general relations to the thought of the world at large in his time. He helped in the work of elaborating and interpreting evolutionary thought. He took a commanding part in the psychological movement. II But now it is not of these aspects of James's work, significant as they are, that I have here especially to speak. I must indeed thus name and emphasize these wider relations of his thought, to the world's contemporary thought. But I do so in order to give the fitting frame to our picture. I now have to call attention to the features about James which make him with all his universality of interest, a repre- sentative American thinker. Viewed as an American, he belongs to the movement which 16 AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE has been the consequence, first, of our civil war, and secondly, of the recent expansion, enrichment, and entanglement of our social life. He belongs to the age in which our nation, rapidly transformed by the occupation of new territory, by economic growth, by immigration, and by education, has been at- tempting to find itself anew, to redefine its ideals, to retain its moral integrity, and yet to become a world power. In this stage of our national consciousness we still live, and shaU plainly have to live for a long time in the fu- ture. The problems involved in such a civili- zation we none of us well understand; least of all do I myself understand them. And James, scholar, thinker, teacher, scientific and philosophical writer as he was, has of course only such relation to our national move- ment as is implied by the oflSce that he thus fulfills. Although he followed with keen in- terest a great variety of political and social controversies, he avoided public life. Hence, he was not absorbed by the world of afifairs, although he was always ready to engage gen- c 17 WILLIAM JAMES erously in the discussion of practical reforms. His main office with regard to such matters was therefore that of philosophical interpreter. He helped to enlighten his fellows as to the relations between the practical problems of our civilization and those two world-wide movements of thought of which I have just spoken. Let me call attention to some of the re- sults of James's work as interpreter of the problems of the American people. I need not say that this work was, to his own mind, mainly incidental to his interest in those prob- lems of evolutionary thought and of psychol- ogy to which I just directed your attention. I am sure that James himself was very little conscious that he was indeed an especially representative American philosopher. He certainly had no ambition to vaunt himself as such. He worked with a beautiful and hearty sincerity upon the problems that as a fact interested him. He knew that he loved these problems because of their intense hu- man interest. He knew, then, that he was 18 AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE indeed laboring in the service of mankind. But he so loved what he called the concrete, the particular, the individual, that he natu- rally made little attempt to define his office in terms of any social organism, or of any such object as our national life, viewed as an entity. And he especially disliked to talk of causes in the abstract, or of social movements as I am here characterizing them. His world seemed to him to be made up of individuals — men, events, experiences, and deeds. And he always very little knew how important he himself was, or what vast inarticulate social forces were finding in him their voice. But we are now viewing James from without, in a way that is of course as imperfect as it is inevitable. We therefore have a right at this point to attribute to him an office that, as I believe, he never attributed to himself. And here we have to speak first of James's treatment of religious problems, and then of his attitude towards ethics. Our nation since the civil war has largely lost touch with the older forms of its own religious 19 WILLIAM JAMES life. It has been seeking for new embodi- ments of the religious consciousness, for creeds that shall not be in conflict with the modern man's view of life. It was James's office, as psychologist and as philosopher, to give a novel expression to this our own national variety of the spirit of religious unrest. And his volume, "The Varieties of Eeligious Ex- perience," is one that, indeed, with all its wealth of illustration, and in its courageous enterprise, has a certain classic beauty. Some men preach new ways of salvation. James simply portrayed the meaning that the old ways of salvation had possessed, or still do possess, in the inner and personal experience of those individuals whom he has called the religious geniuses. And then he imdertook to suggest an hypothesis as to what the whole religious process might mean. The hypoth- esis is on the one hand in touch with cer- tain tendencies of recent psychology. And in so far it seems in harmony with the modern consciousness. On the other hand it ex- presses, in a way, James's whole philosophy 20 AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE of life. And in this respect it comes into touch with all the central problems of hu- manity. The result of this portrayal was indeed magical. The psychologists were aided towards a new tolerance in their study of religion. The evolution of religion appeared in a new light. And meanwhile many of the faithful, who had long been disheartened by the later forms of evolutionary naturalism, took heart anew when they read James's vigorous appeal to the religious experience of the individual as to the most authoritative evidence for religion. "The most modern of thinkers, the evolutionist, the psycholo- gist," they said, "the heir of all the ages, has thus vindicated anew the witness of the spirit in the heart — the very source of inspira- tion in which we ourselves have always be- lieved." And such readers went away re- joicing, and some of them even began to write christologies based upon the doctrine of James as they understood it. The new gospel, the glad tidings of the subconscious, 21 WILLIAM JAMES began to be preached in many lands. It has even received the signal honor of an official papal condemnation. For my own part. I have ventured to say elsewhere that the new doctrine, viewed in one aspect, seems to leave religion in the comparatively trivial position of a play with whimsical powers — a prey to endless psy- chological caprices. But James's own ro- bust faith was that the very caprices of the spirit are the opportunity for the building up of the highest forms of the spiritual life; that the unconventional and the individual in religious experience are the means whereby the truth of a superhuman world may become most manifest. And this robust faith of James, I say, whatever you may think of its merits, is as American in type as it has already proved eflFective in the expression which James gave to it. It is the spirit of the frontiers- man, of the gold seeker, or the home builder, transferred to the metaphysical and to the religious realm. There is our far-off home our long-lost spiritual fortune. Experience 22 AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE alone can guide us towards the place where these things are ; hence you indeed need ex- perience. You can only win your way on the frontier in case you are willing to live there. Be, therefore, concrete, be fearless, be experi- mental. But, above all, let not your abstract conceptions, even if you call them scientific conceptions, pretend to set any limits to the richness of spiritual grace, to the glories of spiritual possession, that, in case you are duly favored, your personal experience may reveal to you. James reckons that the tribulations with which abstract scientific theories have beset our present age are not to be compared with the glory that perchance shall be, if only we open our eyes to what experience itself has to reveal to us. In the quest for the witness to whom James appeals when he tests his religious doctrine, he indeed searches the most varied literature ; and of course most of the records that he consults belong to foreign lands. But the book called "The Varieties of Religious Ex- perience" is full of the spirit that, in our 23 WILLIAM JAMES country, has long been eflfective in the forma- tion of new rehgious sects ; and this volume expresses, better than any sectarian could express, the recent efforts of this spirit to come to an understanding with modern naturalism, and with the new psychology. James's view of religious experience is mean- while at once deliberately unconventional and intensely democratic. The old-world types of reverence for the external forms of the church find no place in his pages; but equally foreign to his mind is that barren hostility of the typical European freethinkers for the church with whose traditions they have broken. In jlanies!^ eyes, the forms, the external organizations of the religious world simply wither; it is the individual that is more and more. And James, with a democratic contempt for social appearances, seeks his religious geniuses everywhere. World-renowned saints of the historic church receive his hearty sympathy ; but they stand upon an equal footing, in his esteem, with many an obscure and ignorant revivalist 24 AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE with faith healers, with poets, with sages, with heretics, with men that wander about in all sorts of sheepskins and goatskins, with chance correspondents of his own, with whom- soever you will of whom the world was not and is not worthy, but who, by inner experience, have obtained the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. You see, of course, that I do not believe James's resulting philosophy of religion to be adequate. For as it stands it is indeed chaotic. But I am sure that it can only be amended by taking it up into a larger view, and not by rejecting it. The spirit tri- umphs, not by destroying the chaos that James describes, but by brooding upon the face of the deep until the light comes, and with light, order. But I am sure also that we shall always have to reckon with James's view. And I am sure also that only an Ameri- can thinker could have written this survey, with all its imconventional ardor of appre- ciation, with all its democratic catholicity of sympathy, with all its freedom both from 25 WILLIAM JAMES ecclesiastical formality and from barren free- thinking. I am sure also that no book has better expressed the whole spirit of hopeful unrest, of eagerness to be just to the modern view of life, of longing for new experience, which characterizes the recent American re- ligious movement. In James's book, then, the deeper spirit of our national religious life has found its most manifold and characteris- tic expression. Ill I must next turn to the other of the two aspects of James's work as a thinker that I mentioned above ; namely, to his ethical influence. Since the war, our transformed and restless people has been seeking not only for religious, but for moral guidance. What are the principles that can show us the course to follow in the often pathless wilderness of the new democracy ? It fre- quently seems as if, in every crisis of our greater social affairs, we needed somebody to tell us both our dream and the interpre- 26 AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE tation thereof. We are eager to have life, and that abundantly. But what life? And by what test shall we know the way of life ? The ethical maxims that most readily meet the popular demand for guidance in such a country, and at such a time, are maxims that combine attractive vagueness with an equally winning pungency. They must seem obviously practical ; but must not appear excessively rig- orous. They must arouse a large enthusiasm for action, without baffling us with the sense of restraint, or of wearisome self-control. They must not call for extended reflection. De- spite their vagueness they must not appear abstract, nor yet hard to grasp. The way- faring man, though a fool, must be sure that he at least will not err in applying our moral law. Moral blunders must be natural only to opponents, not to ourselves. We must be self-confident. Moreover, our moral law must have an athletic sound. Its first office is to make us "good sports." Only upon such a law can we meditate day and night, in case the "game" leaves us indeed any time 27 WILLIAM JAMES for meditation at all. Nevertheless, these popular maxims will of course not be meant as mere expressions of blind impulse. On the contrary, they will appeal to highly in- telligent minds, but to minds anxious for relief from the responsibility of being too thoughtful. In order to be easily popular they must be maxims that stir the heart, not precisely indeed like the soimd of a trumpet, but more like the call of the horn of an automobile. You will have in mind the watchwords that express some of the popular ethical counsels thus suggested. One of these watchwords has of late enabled us to abbreviate a well-known and surely a highly intelligent maxim, to something that is to-day used almost as a mere interjection. It is the watchword, "EflBciency" ! Another expression of the same raotive takes shape in the equally familiar advice, "Play the game." Now I do not mean to make light of the real significance of just such moral max- ims, for awakening and inspiring just our people in this day. The true value of these 28 AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE maxims lies for us in three of their character- istic features. First, they give us counsel that is in any case opposed to sloth. And sloth on every level of our development re- mains one of the most treacherous and mortal enemies of the moral will. Secondly, they teach us to avoid the dangers to which the souls of Hamlet's type fall a prey. That is, they discourage the spirit that reflectively divides the inner self, and that leaves it divided. They warn us that the divided self is indeed, unless it can heal its deadly wound, by fitting action, a lost soul. And thirdly, they emphasize courage. And cour- age, — not, to be sure, so much the courage that faces one's rivals in the market place, or one's foes on the battlefield, as the courage that fits us to meet our true spiritual enemies, — the courage that arises anew from despair and that undertakes, despite all tribulations, to overcome the world — such courage is one of the central treasures of the moral life. Because of these three features, the max- ims to which I refer are, in all their vagueness, 29 WILLIAM JAMES vehicles of wisdom. But they express them- selves in their most popular forms with a willfulness that is often more or less comic, and that is sometimes tragic. For what they do not emphasize is the significance of self- possession, of lifting up our eyes to the hills whence cometh our help, of testing the life that now is by the vision of the largest life that we can in ideal appreciate. These popu- lar maxims also emphasize results rather than ideals, strength rather than cultivation, tem- porary success rather than wholeness of life, the greatness of "Him that taketh a city," rather than of "Him that ruleth his spirit." They are the maxims of unrest, of impatience, and of a certain humane and generous un- scrupulousness, as fascinating as it is dan- gerous. They characterize a people that is indeed earnestly determined to find itself, but that so far has not found itself. Now one of the most momentous problems regarding the influence of James is presented by the question : How did he stand related to these recent ethical tendencies of our na- 30 AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE tion ? I may say at once that, in my opinion, he has just here proved himself to be most of all and in the best sense our national phil- osopher. For the philosopher must not be an echo. He must interpret. He must know us better than we know ourselves, and this is what indeed James has done for our American moral consciousness. For, first, while he really made very little of the formal oflSce of an ethical teacher and seldom wrote upon technical ethical controversies, he was, as a fact, profoundly ethical in his whole influence. And next, he fully understood, yet shared in a rich measure, the motives to which the ethical maxims just summarized have given expression. Was not he himself restlessly active in his whole temperament.'' Did he not love individual enterprise and its free expression ? Did he not loathe what seemed to him abstractions ? Did he not insist that the moralist must be in close touch •with concrete life ? As psychologist did he not emphasize the fact that the very essence of conscious life lies in its active, yes, in its 31 WILLIAM JAMES creative relation to experience ? Did he not counsel the strenuous attitude towards our tasks? And are not all these features in harmony with the spirit from which the ath- letic type of morality just sketched seems to have sprung ? Not only is all this true of James, but, in the popular opinion of the moment, the doctrine called pragmatism, as he expounded it in his Lowell lectures, seems, to many of his foreign critics, and to some of those who think themselves his best followers here at home, a doctrine primarily ethical in its force, while, to some minds, pragmatism seems also to be a sort of philosophical generalization of the efficiency doctrine just mentioned. To be sure, any closer reader of James's "Pragmatism" ought to see that his true in- terests in the philosophy of life are far deeper than those which the maxims "Be efficient" and "Play the game" mostly emphasize. And, for the rest, the book on pragmatism is explicitly the portrayal of a method of phil- osophical inquiry, and is only incidentally 32 AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE a discourse upon ethically interesting mat- ters. James himself used to protest vigor- ously against the readers who ventured to require of the pragmatist, viewed simply as such, any one ethical doctrine whatever. In his book on "Pragmatism" he had ex- pounded, as he often said, a method of phi- losophizing, a definition of truth, a criterion for interpreting and testing theories. He was not there concerned with' ethics. A pragmatist was free to decide moral issues as he chose, so long as he used the pragmatic method in doing so; that is, so long as he tested ethical doctrines by their concrete re- sults, when they were applied to life. Inevitably, however, the pragmatic doc- trine, that both the meaning and the truth of ideas shall be tested by the empirical consequences of these ideas and by the prac- tical results of acting them out in life, has seemed both to many of James's original hearers, and to some of the foreign critics just mentioned, a doctrine that is simply a characteristic Americanism in philosophy — D 33 WILLIAM JAMES a tendency to judge all ideals by their prac- tical efficiency, by their visible results, by their so-called "cash values." James, as I have said, earnestly protested against this cruder interpretation of his teach- ing. The author of "The Varieties of Reli- gious Experience" and of "The Pluralistic Universe" was indeed an empiricist, a lover of the concrete, and a man who looked forward to the future rather than backward to the past; but despite his own use, in his "prag- matism" of the famous metaphor of the "cash values" of ideas, he was certainly not a thinker who had set his affections upon things below rather than upon things above. And the "consequences" upon which he laid stress when he talked of the pragmatic test for ideas were certainly not the merely worldly con- sequences of such ideas in the usual sense of the word "worldly." He appealed always to experience; but then for him experience might be, and sometimes was, religious ex- perience — experience of the unseen and of the superhuman. And so James was right 34 AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE in his protest against these critics of his later doctrine. His form of pragmatism was in- deed a form of Americanism in philosophy. And he too had his fondness for what he re- garded as eflSciency, and for those who "play the game," whenever the game was one that he honored. But he also loved too much those who are weak in the eyes of this present world — the religious geniuses, the unpopu- lar inquirers, the noble outcasts. He loved them, I say, too much to be the dupe of the cruder forms of our now popular eflSciency doctrine. In order to win James's most en- thusiastic support, ideas and men needed to express an intense inner experience along with a certain unpopularity which showed that they deserved sympathy. Too much worldly success, on the part of men or of ideas, easily alienated him. Unworldliness was one of the surest marks, in his eyes, of spiritual power, if only such unworldliness seemed to him to be joined with interests that, using his favorite words, he could call "concrete" and "important." 35 WILLIAM JAMES In the light of such facts, all that he said about judging ideas by thifir "consequences" must be interpreted, and therefore it is indeed unjust to confound pragnialism with the cruder worship of efficiency. IV Yet, I repeat, James's philosophy of life was indeed, in its ethical aspects, an ex- pression of tlie better spirit of our people. He understood, he shared, and he also tran- scended the American spirit. And just that is what most marks him as our national phi- losopher. If ,>'ou want to estimate his phi- losophy of life in its best form, you must read or re-read, not tlie "Pragmatism," but the essays contained in the volume entitled "The Will to Believe." May I still venture, as I close, to men- tion a few features of the doctrine that is embodied in that volume ? The main ques- tion repeatedly considered in these essays of James is explicitly tlie question of an empiricist, of a man a\'erse to abstractions 36 AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE and of an essentially democratic thinker, who does not believe that any final formu- lation of an ideal of human life is possible until the last man has had his experience of life, and has uttered his word. But this empiricism of the author is meanwhile the empiricism of one who especially empha- sizes the central importance of the active life as the basis of our interpretation of ex- perience. Herein James dififers from all tradi- tional positivists. Experience is never yours merely as it comes to you. Facts are never mere data. They are data to which you re- spond. Your experience is constantly trans- formed by your deeds. That this should be the case is determined by the most es- sential characteristics of your consciousness. James asserts this latter thesis as psycholo- gist, and has behind him, as he writes, the vast mass of evidence that his two psycho- logical volumes present. The simplest per- ception, the most elaborate scientific theory, illustrate how man never merely finds, but also always cooperates in creating his world. 37 WILLIAM JAMES No doubt then life must be estimated and guided with constant reference to experience, to consequences, to actual accomplishments, to what we Americans now call eflBciency. But on the other hand efficiency itself is not to be estimated in terms of mere data. Our estimate of our world is not to be forced upon us by any mere inspection of consequences. (What makes life worth living is not what you (find in it, but what you are ready to put into it by your ideal interpretation of the meaning that, as you insist, it shall possess for you. This ideal meaning is always for you a mat- ter of faith not to be imposed coercively upon another, but also never to be discovered by watching who it is that wins, or by merely feeling your present worldly strength as a player of the game. Your deeper ideals al- ways depend upon viewing life in the light of larger unities than now appear, upon view- ing yourself as a coworker with the universe for the attainment of what no present human / game of action can now reveal. For this /'radical empiricist" then present experience 38 AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE always points beyond itself to a realm that no human eye has yet seen — an empirical realm of course, but one that you have a right to interpret in terms of a faith that is itself active, but that is not merely worldly and athletic. The philosophy of action thus so imperfectly suggested by the few phrases that I have time to use can best be inter- preted, for the moment, by observing that the influence of Carlyle in many passages of this volume is as obvious as it is by our author independently reinterpreted and transformed. Imagine Carlyle transformed into a repre- sentative American thinker, trained as a naturalist, deeply versed in psychology, de- prived of his disposition to hatred, open- minded towards the interests of all sorts and conditions of men, still a hero worshiper, but one whose heroes could be found in the obscurest lovers of the ideal as easily as in the most renowned historical characters ; let this transformed Carlyle preach the doctrine of the resolute spirit triumphant through creative action, defiant of every degree of 39 WILLIAM JAMES mortal suffering. Let him proclaim "The Everlasting Yea" in the face of all the doubts of erring human opinion : and herewith you gain some general impression of the relations that exist between "Sartor Resartus" and "The Will to Beheve." The ethical maxims which are scattered through these pages volimtarily share much of the vagueness of our age of tentative ethical effort. But they certainly are not the maxims of an impressionist, of a roman- ticist, or of a partisan of merely worldly effi- ciency. They win their way through all such attitudes to something beyond — to a reso- lute interpretation of human hfe as an oppor- tunity to cooperate with the superhuman and the divine. And they do this, in the author's opinion, not by destroying, but by 1 fulfilling the purposes and methods of the sciences of experience themselves. Is not every scientific theory a conceptual reinter- pretation of our fragmentary perceptions, an active reconstruction, to be tried in the service of a larger life ? Is not our trust in 40 AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE a scientific theory itself an actoffaith? Moreover, these ethical maxims are here gov- erned, in James's exposition, by the repeated recognition of certain essentially absolute truths, truths that, despite his natural hor- ror of absolutism, he here expounds with a finished dialectic skill that he himself, espe- cially in his later polemic period, never seemed to prize at its full value. The need of active faith in the unseen and the superhuman he foimds upon these simple and yet absolutely true principles, principles of the true dialec- tics of life: First, every great decision of practical life requires faith, and has irrevocable consequences, consequences that belong to the whole great world, and that therefore have endless possible importance. Secondly, since action and belief are thus inseparably bound together, our right to believe depends upon our right, as active beings, to make decisions. Thirdly, our duty to decide hfe's greater issues is determined by the absolute truth that, in critical cases, the will to be doubtful and not to decide is itself a decision, and is 41 WILLIAM JAMES hence no escape from our responsible moral position. And this our responsible position is a position that gives us our place in and for all future life. The world needs our deeds. We need to interpret the world in order to act. We have a right to interpret the uni- verse so as to enable us to act at once de- cisively, courageously, and with the sense of the inestimable preciousness and responsibil- ity of the power to act. In consequence of all these features of his ethical doctrine a wonderful sense of the deep seriousness and of the possibly divine significance of every deed is felt in James's every ethical counsel. Thus it is that, while fully comprehending the American spirit which we have sketched, he at once expresses it and transforms it. He never loved Fichte; but there is much of the best of the ethical ideal- ism of Fichte in "The Will to Believe." Many of you have enjoyed James's delight- fully skillful polemic against Hegel, and against the external forms, phrases, and appearances of the later constructive idealists. I have no 42 AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE wish here to attempt to comment upon that polemic; but I can assure you that I my- self learned a great part of my own form of absolute idealism from the earliest ex- pressions that James gave to the thoughts contained in "The Will to Believe." As one of his latest works, "The Pluralistic Universe," still further showed, he himself was in spirit an ethical_idealist_to the core. Nor was he nearly so far in spirit even from Hegel as he supposed, guiltless as he was of Hegel's categories. Let a careful reading of "The Plurahstic Universe" make this fact manifest. Meanwhile, what interests us is that, in "The Will to Believe," as well as in "The Pluralistic Universe," this beautifully mani- fold, appreciative, and humane mind, at once adequately expressed, and, with true moral idealism, transcended the caprices of recent American ethics. To this end he lavishly used the resources of the naturalist, of the humanist, and of the ethical dialectician. He saw the facts of human life as they are, 43 WILLIAM JAMES and he resolutely lived beyond them into the realm of the spirit. He loved the concrete, but he looked above towards the larger realm of universal life. He often made light of the abstract reason, but in his own plastic and active way he uttered some of the great words of the universal reason, and he has helped his people to understand and to put into practice these words. I ask you to remember him then, not only as the great psychologist, the radical empiricist, the pragmatist, but as the in- terpreter of the ethical spirit of his time and of his people — the interpreter who has pointed the way beyond the trivialities which he so well understood and transcended towards that "Eule of Reason" which the prophetic maxim of our supreme court has just brought afresh to the attention of our people. That "Rule of Reason," when it comes, will not be a mere collection of abstractions. It will be, as James demanded, something concrete and practical. And it will indeed appeal to our faith as well as to our discursive logi- 44 AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE cal processes. But it will express the trans- formed and enlightened American spirit as James already began to express it. Let him too be viewed as a prophet of the nation that is to be. 45 ESSAY II LOYALTY AND INSIGHT ESSAY II LOYALTY AND INSIGHT ^ UPON an occasion like this, when the chil- dren, the servants, and the friends of this institution meet for their annual festival, there is one word that best expresses the spirit of the occasion. It is the word "loyalty," — loyalty to your College, to its ideals, to its life, and to the unity and effectiveness of this life. And amongst the ideals that inspire the life of your College, and make that life ef- fective and united, there is one which is prom- inent in all your minds, whatever your spe- cial studies, your practical aims, or your hopes. It is the ideal of furthering, in all your minds, what we may call insight, — the ideal of learning to see life as it is, to know the world as we men need to know it, and to guide our purposes as we ought to guide them. It is ' Commencement Addiess delivered at Simmons College, Boston, in June, 1910. ;E 49 LOYALTY AND INSIGHT also the ideal of teaching to others the art of just such insight. These two words, then, "loyalty" and "in- sight," name, one of them, the spirit in which, upon such occasions as this, we all meet ; the other, the ideal that determines the studies and the researches of any modern institution of learning. Upon each day of its year of work your College says to its children and to its serv- ants and to its community : "Let us know, let us see, let us comprehend, let us guide life by wisdom, and in turn let us discover new wis- dom for the sake of winning new life." But upon a day like the present one, the work of the year being laid aside, your College asks and receives your united expression of loyalty to its cause. Perhaps some of you may feel that for just this moment you have left behind, at least temporarily, the task of winning insight. You enjoy, for the hour, the fruits of toil. Study and research cease, you may say, for to-day, while the spirit of loyalty finds its own free expression and takes content in its holiday. I agree that the holidays and the working 50 LOYALTY AND INSIGHT days have a diflferent place in our lives. But it is my purpose in this address to say some- thing about the connections between the spirit which rules this occasion — the spirit of loyalty — and the ideal by which ^the year's work has to be guided, — the ideal of further- ing true insight. The loyalty that now fills your minds is merely one expression of a cer- tain spirit which ought to pervade all our lives — not only in our studies, but in our homes, in our ofiices, in our political and civic life — not merely upon holidays, or upon other great occasions, but upon our working days; and most of all when our tasks seem commonplace and heavy. And, on the other hand, the insight which you seek to get when- ever, in the academic world, you work in the laboratory or in the field, in the library or in the classroom or alone in your study, the in- sight that you try both to embody in your practical life and to enrich through your re- searches, — just this insight, I say, is best to be furthered by a right cultivation of the spirit of loyalty. 51 LOYALTY AND INSIGHT I suppose that when I utter these words, you will easily give to them a certain general as- sent. But I want to devote this address to making just such words mean more to you than at first sight they may appear to mean. First, then, let me tell you what I myself mean by the term "loyalty." Then let me deal with my principal thesis, which is that the true spirit of loyalty is not merely a proper accompaniment of all serious work, but is an especially important source of a very deep insight into the meaning of life, and, as I personally believe, into the nature of the whole universe. Three sorts of persons, I have noticed, are fond of using the term "loyalty." These are quite different types of persons; or, in any case, they use the word upon very dif- ferent occasions. But these very diflferences are to my mind important. The first type of those who love to use the term "loyalty" consists of those who employ it to express a certain glow of enthusiastic devotion, the type of the lovers, of the students when the 52 LOYALTY AND INSIGHT athletic contests are near, of the partisans in the heat of a political contest, or of the friends of an institution upon a day like this. To such persons, or at least at such moments, loyalty is conceived as something brilliantly emotional, as a passion of devotion. The second class of those who are fond of the word "loyalty" are the warriors and their admirers. To such persons loyalty means a willingness to do dangerous service, to sacrifice life, to toil long and hard for the flag that one fol- lows. But for a third type of those who em- ploy the word, loyalty especially means steady, often unobtrusive, fidelity to more or less formal obligations, such as the business world and the workshop impose upon us. Such persons think of loyalty as, first of all, faithful- \ ness in obeying the law of the land, or in I executing the plans of one's official superiors, ; or in serving one's employer or one's client or one's chief, or one's fraternity or other social union. In this sense the loyal servant may i be obscure and unemotional. But he is trust- worthy. Now, a word which thus so forcibly 53 LOYALTY AND INSIGHT appeals to the lovers who want to express their passionate devotion, and also to the soldiers who want to name that obstinate following of the flag which makes victory possible ; a word which business men also sometimes use to characterize the quietly and industriously faithful employee who obeys orders, who betrays no secrets, and who regards the firm's interest as his own ; — well, such a word, I think, is not as much ambiguous as deep in its meaning. For, after all, loyal emotions, loyal sacrifice of life, loyal steadiness in obscure service, are but various symptoms of a certain spirit which lies beneath all its various ex- pressions. This spirit is a well-known one. All the higher life of society depends upon it. It may manifest itself as enthusiasm upon an occasion like this, or as contempt for death upon the battle field, or as quiet service when the toil of life is grim, or as the cool fidelity that pursues the daily routine of office or of workshop or of kitchen with a steady persist- ence and with a simple acceptance of tradi- tional duties or of the day's toil. But the 54 LOYALTY AND INSIGHT spirit thus manifested is not exhausted by any of its symptoms. The appearances of loyalty are manifold. Its meaning is one. And I myself venture to state what the true spirit of loyalty is by defining the term thus : By loyalty I mean the thoroughgoing, the voluntary, and the practical devotion of a self to a cause. And by a cause I mean some- thing of the nature that the true lover has in mind when he is wisely devoted to his love; that the faithful member of a family serves when the family itself is the cause dear to him ; that the member of a fraternity, or the child of a college, or the devoted professional man, or the patriot, or the martyr, or the faithful workman conceives when he thinks of that to which he gives his life. As all these illus- trations suggest, the cause to which one can be loyal is never a mere detached in- dividual, and never a mere collection of indi- viduals ; nor is it ever a mere abstract prin- ciple. This cause, whether in the church or the army or the workshop, in the home or in the friendship, is some sort of unity whereby I 55 LOYALTY AND INSIGHT many persons are joined in one common life. I The cause to which a loyal man is devoted is j of the nature of an institution, or of a home I life, or of a fraternity, wherein two or more I persons aim to become one ; or of a religion, wherein the unity of the spirit is sought : through the communion of the faithful. Loyalty respects individuals, but aims to bring j.them together into one common life. Its 1 command to the loyal is : "Be 'one undivided soul of many a soul.'" It recognizes that, when apart, individuals fail; but that when they try to unite their lives into one common higher selfhood, to live as if they were the expressions, the instruments, the organs of one ideally beautiful social group, they win '' the only possible fulfillment of the meaning of human existence. Through loyalty to such a cause, through devotion to an ideally united social group, and only through such loyalty, can the problems of human personality be solved. By nature, and apart from some cause to which we are loyal, each of us is but a mass of caprices, a chaos of distracting pas- 56 LOYALTY AND INSIGHT sions, a longing for happiness that is neve: fulfilled, a seeking for success which neve attains its goal. Meanwhile, no merely cus tomary morality ever adequately guides ou: lives. Mere social authority never meets ou: needs. But a cause, some unity of man;; lives in one, some call upon the individual t( give himself over to the service of an idealizec community, — this gives sense to life. This when we feel its presence, as we do upon thii occasion, we love, as the lovers love the com mon life of friendship that is to make then one, or as the mothers delight in the life tha is to unite themselves and their children in th< family, or as the devout feel that througl their communion in the life of their churcl they become one with the Divine Spirit. Foi such a cause we can make sacrifices, such ai the soldier makes in following the flag. Fo: what is the fortune of any detached self ai compared with the one cause of the wholi country? And just such a voluntary de votion to a cause can ennoble the routine o the humblest daily business, in the oflSce, ii 57 LOYALTY AND INSIGHT the household, in the school, at the desk, or in the market place, if one only finds the cause that can hold his devotion — be this cause his business firm or his profession or his house- hold or his country or his church, or all these at once. For all these causes have their value in this : that through the business firm, or the household, or the profession, or the spirit- ual community, the lives of many human selves are woven into one, so that our fortunes and interests are no longer conceived as de- tached and private, but as a giving of ourselves in order that the social group to which we are devoted should live its own united life. With this bare indication of what I mean by loyalty, I may now say that of late years I have attempted to show in detail, in various discussions of our topic, that the spirit of loyalty, rightly understood, and practically applied, furnishes an adequate solution for all the problems of the moral life. The whole moral law can be summed up in the two com- mandments : first, Be loyal ; and secondly. So choose, so serve, and so unify the life causes 58 LOYALTY AND INSIGHT to which you yourself are loyal that, througl: your choice, through your service, througl your example, and through your dealings wit! all men, you may, as far as in you lies, helf other people to be loyal to their own causes may avoid cheating them of their opportunitie; for loyalty ; may inspire them with their owi best type of loyalty; and may so best serv( the one great cause of the spread of loyaltj amongst mankind. Or, if I may borrow ant adapt for a worthy end Lincoln's immorta words, the moral law is this : Let us so live so love, and so serve that loyalty "of th< people, by the people, for the people, shal not perish from the earth," but shall prospei and abound. The scheme of life thus suggested is, I be- lieve, adequate. I next want to tell whai bearing the spirit of loyalty has upon insight The insight that all of us most need anc desire is an insight, first, into the business o: life itself, and next into the nature and mean ing of the real world in which we live. Oui forefathers used to center all their views o 59 LOYALTY AND INSIGHT life and of the world about their religion. Many of the leading minds of to-day center their modern insight about the results of science. In consequence, what I may call the general problems of insight, and the views of life and of the world which most of us get from our studies, have come of late to appear very different from the views and the prob- lems which our own leading countrymen a century ago regarded as most important. The result is that the great problem of the philosophy of life to-day may be defined as the effort to see whether, and how, you can cling to a genuinely ideal and spiritual inter- pretation of your own nature and of your duty, while abandoning superstition, and while keep- ing in close touch with the results of modem knowledge about man and nature. Let me briefly indicate what I mean by this problem of a modern philosophy of life. From the modern point of view great stress has been laid upon the fact that man, as we know man, appears to be subject to the laws of the natural world. Modern knowledge 60 LOYALTY AND INSIGHT makes these laws appear very far-reaching, very rigid, and very much of the type that we call mechanical. We have, therefore, most of us, learned not to expect miraculous interferences with the course of nature as aids in our human conflict with destiny. We have been taught to regard ourselves as the products of a long process of natural evolution. We have come to think that man's control over nature has to take the general form which our industrial arts illustrate, and which our recent contests with disease, such as the wars with tuberculosis and with yellow fever, ex- emplify. Man, we have been led to say, wins his way only by studying nature and by ap- plying his carefully won empirical knowledge to the guidance of his arts. The business of life — so we have been moved to assert — must therefore be guided simply by an union of plain common sense with the scientific study of nature. The real world, we have been disposed to say, is, on the whole, so far as we can know it, a mechanism. Therefore the best ideal of life involves simply the more or 61 LOYALTY AND INSIGHT less complete control of this mechanism for useful and humane ends. Such, I say, is one very commonly accepted result to which modern knowledge seems to have led men. The practical view of life and of its business which expresses this result has been, for many of us, twofold. First, we have been led to this well-known precept : If you want to live wisely, you must, at all events, avoid superstition. That is, you must not try to guide human life by dealing with such supernatural powers, good and evil, as the mythologies of the past used to view as the controlling forces of human destiny. You must take natural laws as you find them. You must believe about the real world simply what you can confirm by the verdict of human experience. You must put no false hopes either in magic arts or in useless appeals to the gods. You must, for instance, fight tuberculosis not by prayer, but by knowing the conditions that produce it and the natu- ral processes that tend to destroy its germs. And so, in general, in order to live well and 62 LOYALTY AND INSIGHT wisely you must be a naturalist and not a supernaturalist. Or in any case you must conform your common sense not to the im- agination that in the past peopled the dream world of humanity with good and evil spirits, but to the carefully won insight that has shown us that our world is one where natural law reigns unyielding, defying equally our magic arts and our prayerful desires for divine aid. But secondly, side by side with this decidedly positive advice, many of us have been brought to accept a practical attitude towards the world which has seemed to us negative and discouraging. This^ second attitude may be expressed in the sad precept : Hope not to find this world in any universal sense a world of ideal values. Nature is indifferent to values. Values are human, and merely hu- man. Man can indeed give to his own life much of what he calls value, if he uses his natural knowledge for human ends. But when he sets out upon this task, he ought to know that, however sweet and ideal human companionship may be as it exists among 63 LOYALTY AND INSIGHT men, humanity as a whole must fight its battle with nature and with the universe substan- tially alone, comfortless except for the com- forts that it wins precisely as it builds its houses ; namely, by using the mechanisms of nature for its own purposes. The world happens, indeed, to give man some power to control natural conditions. But even this power is due to the very fact that man also is one of nature's products, — a product pos- sessing a certain stability, a certain natural plasticity and docility, a limited range of natural initiative. As a rock may deflect a stream, so man, himself a natural mechanism, may turn the stream of nature's energies into paths that are temporarily useful for human purposes. But from the modern point of view the ancient plaint of the Book of Job remains true, both for the rock and for the man : " The waters wear away stones, And the hope of frail man thou destroyest." In the end, our relations to the universe thus seem to remain relations to an essentially 64 LOYALTY AND INSIGHT foreign power, which cares for our ideals as the stormy sea cares for the boat, and as the bacteria care for the human organism upon which they prey. If we ourselves, as prod- ucts of nature, are sufficiently strong mecha- nisms, we may be able to win, while life lasts, many ideal goods. But just so, if the boat is well enough built, it may weather one or another passing storm. If the body is well knit, it may long remain immune to disease. Yet in the end the boat and the human body fail. And in no case, so this view asserts, does the real world essentially care for or help or encourage our ideals. Our ideals are as foreign to the real natural world as the interests of the ship's company are to the ocean that may tolerate, but also may drown them. Be free from superstition, then; and next avoid false hopes. Such are the two theses that seem to embody for many minds the essentially modern view of things and the essential result for the philosophy of life of what we have now learned. But hereupon the question arises whether F 65 LOYALTY AND INSIGHT this is indeed the last word of insight ; whether this outcome of modern knowledge does in- deed tell the whole story of our relations to the real world. That this modern view has its own share of deeper truth we all recognize. But is this the whole truth ? Have we no access whatever to any other aspect of reality than the one which this naturalistic view em- phasizes ? And again, the question still arises : Is there any place left for a religion that can be free from superstition, that can accept just so much of the foregoing modern results as are indeed established, and that can yet supplement them by an insight which may show the universe to be, after all, something more than a mechanism ? In sum, are we merely stones that deflect the stream for a while, until the waters wear them away ? Or are there spiritual hopes of humanity which the mechanism of nature cannot destroy ? Is the philosophy of life capable of giving us something more than a naturalism — hu- manized merely by the thought that man, being, after all, a well-knit and plastic 66 LOYALTY AND INSIGHT mechanism, can for a time mold nature to his ends ? So much for the great problem of modern insight. Let us turn to consider the relation of the spirit of loyalty to this problem. What light can a study of the spirit of loyalty, as I just defined loyalty, — what light, I say, can such a study throw upon this problem ? Very little — so some of you may say; for any discussion of the spirit of loy- alty can tell us nothing to make nature's mechanism more comprehensible. One who favors loyalty as a way of solving life's prob- lems tells us about a certain ideal of human life, — an ideal which, as I have asserted, does tend to solve our personal moral problems precisely in so far as we are able to express this ideal in our practical lives. In order to be loyal you indeed have no need to be- lieve in any of the well-known miracles of popular tradition. And equally, in order to be loyal, you have no need, first, to decide whether nature is or is not a mechanism; or whether the modern view of reality, as just summarized, is or is not adequate; or whether the gods 67 LOYALTY AND INSIGHT exist; or whether man is or is not one of nature's products and temporarily well-knit and plastic machines. Our doctrine of loyalty is founded not upon a decision about nature's supposed mechanism, but upon a study of man's own inner and deeper needs. It is a doctrine about the plan and the business of human life. It seems, therefore, to be neu- tral as to every so-called conflict between science and religion. But now, in answer to these remarks, I have to show that the doctrine of loyalty, once rightly understood, has yet a further application. It is a doctrine that, when more fully interpreted, helps us toward a genuine insight, not only into the plan of life, but into the nature of things. The philosophy of loyalty has nothing to say against precisely so much of naturalism as is indeed an estab- lished result of common sense and of the scien- tific study of nature. The theory of the loyal life involves nothing superstitious — no trust in magic, no leaning upon the intervention of such spiritual agencies as the old mytholo- 68 LOYALTY AND INSIGHT gies conceived. And yet, as I shall insist, nobody can understand and practice the loyal spirit without tending thereby to get a true view of the nature of things, a genuine touch with reality, which cannot be gained without seeing that, however much of a mechanism nature may appear to be, the real world is something much more than a mechanism, and much more significant than are the waters which wear away stones. Let me indicate what I mean by repeating in brief my doctrine of loyalty — with ref- erence to the spirit which it involves, and with reference to the view of the realities of human life which it inevitably includes. Whoever is loyal has found some cause, I have said, — a cause to which, by his inner interests, he is indeed attracted, so that the cause is fascinating to his sentiments. But the cause is also one to which the loyal man is meanwhile practically and voluntarily de- voted, so that his loyalty is no mere glow of enthusiasm, but is an affair of his deeds as well as of his emotions. Loyalty I therefore 69 LOYALTY AND INSIGHT defined as the thoroughgoing and practical devotion of a self to a cause. Why loyalty is a duty; how loyalty is possible for every normal human being; how it can appear early in youth, and then grow through life; how it can be at once faithful to its own, and yet can constantly enlarge its scope;; how it can become universally human in its interests without losing its concreteness, and without failing to keep in touch with the personal af- fections and the private concerns of the loyal person; how loyalty is a virtue for all men, however humble and however exalted they may be; how the loyal service of the tasks of a single possibly narrow life can be viewed as a service of the cause of universal loyalty, and so of the interests of all humanity ; how all special duties of life can be stated in terms of a duly generalized spirit of loyalty; and how moral conflicts can be solved, and moral divisions made, in the light of the principle of loyalty ; — all this I have asserted, al- though here is indeed no time for adequate discussion. But hereupon I want to concen- 70 LOYALTYiAND INSIGHT trate our whole attention, not upon the con- sequences and appHcations of the doctrine of loyalty, but upon the most central character- istic of the loyal spirit. This central charac- teristic of the loyal spirit consists in the fact that it conceives and values its cause as a reality, as an object that has a being of its own ; while the type of reality which belongs to a cause is different from the type of reality which we ascribe either to a thing in the phys- icalworldortoa law of nature. A cause is never I a mere mechanism. It is an essentially spirit- j ual reality. If the loyal human being is right i in the account which he giv.es of his cause, then the real world contains beings which are not mere natural objects, and is subject to laws which, without in the least running counter to the laws of outer nature, are the laws of an essentially spiritual realm, whose type of being is superior to that possessed by i the order of nature which our physical sciences \ study and which our industrial arts use. '-, Either, then, loyalty is altogether a service | of myths, or else the causes which the loyal | 71 LOYALTY AND INSIGHT serve belong to a realm of real being which is above the level of mere natural fact and nat- ural law. In the latter case the real world is not indifferent to our human search for values. The modern naturalistic and me- chanical views of reality are not, indeed, false within their own proper range, but they are inadequate to tell us the whole truth. And reality contains, further, and is characterized by, an essentially spiritual order of being. I have been speaking to persons who, as I have trusted, well know, so far as they have yet had time to learn the lessons of life, some- thing of what loyalty means. Come, then, let us consider what is the sort of object that you have present to your mind when you are loyal to a cause. If your cause is a reality, what kind of a being is it ? If causes are realities, then in what sort of a real world do you live ? I have already indicated that, while loy- alty always includes personal affections, while you can never be loyal to what you take to be a merely abstract principle, nevertheless, 72 LOYALTY AND INSIGHT it is equally true that you can never be gen- uinely loyal merely to an individual human being, taken just as this detached creature. You can, indeed, love your friend, viewed just as this individual. But love for an in- dividual is so far just a fondness for a fascinat- ing human presence, and is essentially papri- cipus, whether it lasts or is transient. You can be, and should be, loyal to your friendship, to the union of yourself and your friend, to that ideal comradeship which is neither of you alone, and which is not the mere double- ness that consists of you and your friend taken as two detached beings who happen to find one another's presence agreeable. Loyalty to a friendship involves your willingness actively and practically to create and main- tain a life which is to be the united life of yourself and your friend — not the life of your friend alone, nor the life of yourself and your friend as you exist apart, but the common life, the life above and inclusive of your dis- tinctions, the one life that you are to live as friends. To the tie, to the unity, to the com- 73 I I LOYALTY AND INSIGHT mon life, to the union of friends, you can be loyal. Without such loyalty friendship con- sists only of its routine of more or less at- tractive private sentiments and mere meetings, each one of which is one more chance experi- ence, heaped together with other chance ex- periences. But with such true loyalty your friendship becomes, at least in ideal, a new life, — a life that neither of you could have alone ; a life that is not the mere sum of your separate and more or less pleasant private lives ; a life that is not a mere round of sepa- rate private amusements, but that belongs to a new type of dual yet unified personality. Nor are you loyal to your friendship merely as to an abstraction. You are loyal to it as to the common better self of both of you, a self that lives its own real life. Either such a loyalty to your friendship is a belief in myths, or else such a type of higher and unified dual personality actually possesses a reality of its own, — a reality that you cannot adequately describe by reporting, as to the taker of a census, that you and your friend are two 74 LOYALTY AND INSIGHT creatures, with two distinct cases of a certain sort of fondness to be noted down, and with each a separate life into which, as an incident, some such fondness enters. No ; were a cen- sus of true friendship possible, the census taker should be required to report : Here are indeed two friends ; but here is also the ideal and yet, in some higher sense, real life of their united personaUty present, — a life which belongs to neither of them alone, and which also does not exist merely as a parcel of fragments, partly in one, partly in the other of them. It is the life of their common personality. It is a new spiritual person on a higher level. Or again, you are loyal to some such union as a family or a fraternity represents. Or you are loyal to your class, your college, your com- munity, your country, your church. In all these cases, with endless variety in the details, your loyalty has for its object each time, not merely a group of detached personalities, but some ideally significant common life; an union of many in one; a community which also has the value of a person, and which, 75 LOYALTY AND INSIGHT nevertheless, cannot be found distributed about in a collection of fragments found inside the detached lives of the individual members of the family, the club, the class, the college, the country, the church. 'If this common life to which you are loyal is a reality, then the real human world does not consist of separate creatures alone, of the mere persons who flock in the streets and who live in the dififerent houses. The human world, if the loyal are right, contains personality that is not merely shut up within the skin, now of this, now of that, human creature. It contains personal- ities that no organism confines within its bounds ; that no single life, that no crowd of detached lives, comprises. Yet this higher sort of common personality, if the loyal are right, is as real as we separate creatures are real. It is no abstraction. It lives. It loves, and we love it. We enter into it. It is ours, and we belong to it. It works through us, the fellow servants of the common cause. Yet we get our worth through it, — the goal of our whole moral endeavor. 76 LOYALTY AND INSIGHT For those who are not merely loyal, but also enlightened, loyalty, never losing the definiteness and the concreteness of its devo- tion to some near and directly fascinating cause, sees itself to be in actual spiritual unity i with the common cause of all the loyal, who- ever they are. The great cause for all the loyal is in reality the cause of the spread and the furtherance of the cause of the universal : loyalty of all mankind : a cause which nobody can serve except by choosing his own nearer and more immediately appreciated cause, — the private cause which is directly his own, — his family, his community, his friendship, his calling, and the calling of those who serve with him. Yet such personal service — your special life cause, your task, your vocation — is your way of furthering the ends of uni- versal humanity. And if you are enlight- ened, you know this fact. Through your loyalty you, then, know yourself to be kin to all the loyal. You hereupon conceive the loyal as one brotherhood, one invisible church, for which and in which you live. The spirit 77 LOYALTY AND INSIGHT dwells in this invisible church, — the holy spirit that wills the unity of all in fidelity and in service. Hidden from you by all the nat- ural estrangements of the present life, this common life of all the loyal, this cause which is the one cause of all the loyal, is that for which you live. In spirit you are really sun- dered from none of those who themselves live in the spirit. All this, I say, is what it is the faith of all the loyal to regard as the real life in which we live and move and have our being, precisely in so far as men come to understand what loyalty is. Thus, then, in general, to be loyal I is to believe that there are real causes. And to be universally loyal is to believe that the one cause of loyalty itself, the invisible church of all the loyal, is a reality ; something as real as we are. But causes are never detached human beings ; nor are causes ever mere crowds, heaps, collections, aggregations of , human beings. Causes are at once personal I (if by person you mean the ordinary human j individual in his natural character) and super- 78 LOYALTY AND INSIGHT personal. Persons they are, because only,' where persons are found can causes be defined. I Superpersonal they are, because no mere in- \ dividual human creature, and no mere pairs or groups or throngs of human beings, can ever constitute unified causes. You cannot be loyal to a crowd as a crowd. A crowd can shout, as at a game or a political convention. But only some sort of organized unity of social life can either do the work of an unit or hold the effective loyalty of the enlightened worker who does not merely shout with the throng. And so when you are really loyal to your coun- try, your coimtry does not mean to you merely the crowd, the mass of your separate fellow citizens. Still less does it mean the mere or- gans, or the separate servants of the country, — the customhouse, the War Department, the Speaker of the House, or any other office or official. When you sing "My country, 'tis ■ of thee," you do not mean, "My post office, 'tis of thee," nor yet, "My fellow citizens, 'tis of you, just as the creatures who crowd the street and who overfill the railway cars," that 79 LOYALTY AND INSIGHT I sing. If the poet continues in his own song to celebrate the land, the "rocks and rills," the "woods and templed hills," he is still speaking only of symbols. What he means is the country as an invisible but, in his opinion, perfectly real spiritual unity. General Nogi, in a recent Japanese publication about Bu- shido, expressed his own national ideal beau- tifully in the words : "Here the sovereign and the people are of one family and have together endured the joys and sorrows of thotf|ands of years." It is that sort of being wbgreof one speaks when one expresses true loyalty to the country. The country is the spiritual entity that is none of us and all of us, — none of us because it is our unity; all of us because in it we all find our patriotic unity. Such, then, is the idea that the loyal have of the real nature of the causes which they serve. I repeat. If the loyal are right, then the real world contains other beings than mechanisms and individual human and animal minds. It contains spiritual unities which are as real as we are, but which certainly do 80 LOYALTY AND INSIGHT not belong to the realm of a mere nature mechanism. Does not all this put the prob- lems of our philosophy of life in a new light ? But I have no doubt that you may at once reply : All this speech about causes is after all merely more or less pleasing metaphor. As a fact, human beings are just individual natural creatures. They throng and struggle for existence, and love and hate and enjoy and sorrow and die. These causes are, after all, mere dreams, or at best entities by cour- tesy. There are, literally speaking, no such supernatural entities as we have just de- scribed. The friends like to talk of being one; but there are always two or more of them, and the unity is a pretty phrase. The country is, in the concrete, the collection of the coun- trymen, with names, formulas, songs, and so on, attached, by way of poetical license or of convenient abbreviation or of pretty fable. The poet really meant simply that he was fond of the landscape, and was not wholly averse to a good many of his countrymen, and was in any case fond of a good song. Loy- G 81 LOYALTY AND INSIGHT alty, like the rest of human life, is an illusion. Nature is real. The unity of the spirit is a fancy. This, I say, may be your objection. But herewith we indeed stand in the presence of a certain very deep philosophical problem con- cerning the true definition of what we mean by reality. Into this problem I have neither time nor wish to enter just now. But upon one matter I must, nevertheless, stoutly in- sist. It is a matter so simple, so significant, so neglected, that I at once need and fear to mention it to you, — need to mention it, because it puts our philosophy into a position that quite transforms the significance of that whole modern view of nature upon which I have been dwelling since the outset of this lecture; fear to mention it, because the fact that it is so commonly neglected shows how hard to be understood it has proved. That disheartening view of the foreign and mechanical nature of the real world which our sciences and our industrial arts have im- pressed upon the minds of so many of us ; that 82 LOYALTY AND INSIGHT contempt for superstition ; that denial of the supernatural, which seems to the typical mod- ern man the beginning of wisdom ; — to what is all this view of reality due ? To the results, and, as I believe, to the really important re- sults, of the modern study of natural science. But what is the study of natural science ? Practically considered, viewed as one of the great moral activities of mankind, the study of science is a very beautiful and humane ex- pression of a certain exalted form of loyalty. Science is, practically considered, the outcome of the absolutely devoted labors of countless seekers for natural truth. But how do we human beings get at what we call natural truth ? By observation, — so men say, — and by experience. But by whose experi- ence ? By the united, by the synthesized, by the revised, corrected, rationally criticized, above all by the common, experience of many individuals. The possibility of science rests upon the fact that human experience may be progressively treated so as to become more and more an unity. The detached individual 83 LOYALTY AND INSIGHT records the transit of a star, observes a precipi- tate in a test tube, stains a preparation and examines it under a microscope, collects in the field, takes notes in a hospital — and loyally contributes his little fragment of a report to the ideally unified and constantly growing totality called scientific human ex- perience. In doing this he employs his mem- ory, and so conceives his own personal life as an unity. But equally he aims — and herein consists his scientific loyalty — to bring his personal experience into unity with the whole course of human experience in so far as it bears upon his own science. The collection of mere data is never enough. It is in the unity of their interpretation that the achieve- ments of science lie. This unity is conceived in the form of scientific theories ; is verified by the comparative and critical conduct of experiments. But in all such work how mani- fold are the presuppositions which we make when we attempt such unification ! Here is no place to enumerate these presuppositions. Some of them you find discussed in the text- 84 LOYALTY AND INSIGHT books of the logic of science. Some of them are instinctive, and almost never get discussed at all. But it is here enough to say that we all presuppose that human experience has, or can by the loyal efforts of truth seekers be made to possess, a real unity, superior in its nature and significance to the nature and significance of any detached observer's experience, more gen- uinely real than is the mere collection of the experiences of any set of detached observers, how- ever large. The student of natural science is loyal to the cause of the enlargement of this organized and criticized realm of the common human experience. Unless this unity of hu- man experience is a genuine reality, unless all the workers are living a really common life, unless each man is, potentially at least, in a live spiritual unity with his fellows, science itself is a mere metaphor, its truth is an illu- sion, its results are myths. For science is conceived as true only by conceiving the ex- periences of countless observers as the shar- ing of a common realm of experience. If, as we all believe, the natural sciences do throw 85 LOYALTY AND INSIGHT a real, if indeed an inadequate, light upon the nature of things, then they do so because no one man's experience is disconnected from the real whole of human experience. They do so because the cause to which the loyal study of science is devoted, the cause of the enlarge- ment of human experience, is a cause that has a supernatural, or, as Professor Miinsterberg loves to say, an over-individual, type of reality, j Mankind is not a mere collection of detached I individuals, or man could possess no knowl- I edge of any unity of, scientific truth. If men are really only many, and if they have no such unity of conscious experience as loyalty every- where presupposes, then the cause of science also is a vain illusion, and we have no unified knowledge of nature, only various private fancies about nature. If we know, however ill, nature's mechanism, we do so because hu- man experience is not merely a collection of detached observations, but forms an actual spiritual unity, whose type is not that of a mechanism, whose connections are ideally significant, whose constitution is essentially 86 LOYALTY AND INSIGHT that which the ideal of unified truth requires. So, then, I insist, the dilemma is upon our hands. Either the sciences constitute a pro- gressive, if imperfect, insight into real truth — and then the cause of the unity of human ex- perience is a real cause that really can be served exactly as the lover means to be loyal to his friendship and the patriot to his country; and then also human life really possesses such unity as the loyal presuppose — or else none of this is so. But then loyalty and science alike deal with metaphors and with myths. In the first case the spiritual unity of the life that we lead is essentially vindicated. Causes such as the loyal serve are real. The cause of science also is real. But in that case an essentially spiritual realm, that of the rational unity of human experience, is real ; and pos- sesses a grade both of reality and of worth which is superior to the grade of reality that the phenomena of nature's mechanism ex- hibit to us. In the other case the sciences whose results are supposed to be discouraging and unspiritual vanish, with all their facts, 87 LOYALTY AND INSIGHT into the realm of fable, together with the world that all the loyal, including the faithful followers of the sciences, believe to be real. I have here no time to discuss the paradoxes of a totally skeptical philosophy. It is enough to say that such a total skepticism is, indeed, self-refuting. The only rational view of life depends upon maintaining that what the loyal always regard as a reality, namely, their cause, is, indeed, despite all special illusions of this or of that form of imperfect loyalty, essentially a type of reality which rationally survives all crit- icisms and underlies all doubts. " They reckon ill who leave me out ; When me they fly, I am the wings." This is what the genuine object of loyalty, the unity of the spiritual life, always says to us when we examine it in the right spirit. But the one source of our deepest insight into this unity of the spirit which underlies all the varie- ties, and which leads us upward to itself past all the sunderings and doubts of existence, is the loyal spirit itself. Loyalty asserts : "My cause is real. I know that my cause liveth." 88 LOYALTY AND INSIGHT But the cause, however imperfectly inter- preted, is always some sort of unity of the spiritual life in which we learn to share when- ever we begin to be loyal. The more we grow in loyalty and in insight into the meaning of our loyalty, the more we learn to think of some vast range of the unity of spiritual life as the reality to which all the other realities accessible to us are in one way or another sub- ordinate, so that they express this unity, and show more or less what it means. I believe that a sound critical philosophy justifies the view that the loyal, precisely in so far as they view their cause as real, as a personal, but also as an over-individual, realm of genuine spiritual life, are comprehending, as far as they go, the deepest nature of things. Religion, in its higher sense, always in- volves a practical relation to a spiritual world which, in its significance, in its inclu- siveness, in its unity, and in its close and com- forting touch with our most intense personal concerns, fulfills in a supreme degree the re- quirements which loyalty makes when it LOYALTY AND INSIGHT seeks for a worthy cause. One may have a true religion without knowing the reason why it is true. One may also have false religious beliefs. But in any case the affiliation of the spirit of the higher religion with the spirit of loyalty has been manifest, I hope, from the outset of this discussion of loyalty. By religious insight one may very properly mean any significant and true view of an object of religious devotion which can be obtained by any reasonable means. In speaking of loyalty and insight I have also given an indication of that source of reli- gious insight which I believe to be, after all, the surest, the most accessible, the most universal, and, in its deepest essence, the most rational. The problem of the modern philos- ophy of life is, we have said, the problem of keeping the spirit of religion, without falling a prey to superstition. At the outset of this lecture I told briefly why, in the modern world, we aim to avoid superstition. The true reason for this aim you now see better than at first I could state that reason. We 90 LOYALTY AND INSIGHT have learned, and wisely learned, that the great cause of the study of nature by scientific methods is one of the principal special causes to which man can be devoted ; for nothing serves more than the pursuit of the sciences serves to bind into unity the actual work of human civilization. To this cause of scien- tific study we have all learned to be, according to our lights, loyal. But the study of science makes us averse to the belief in magic arts, in supernatural interferences, in special prov- idences. The scientific spirit turns from the legends and the superstitions that in the past have sundered men, have inflamed the religious wars, have filled the realm of im- agination with good and evil spirits. Turns from these — to what .'' To a belief in a merely mechanical reality ? To a doctrine that the real world is foreign to our ideals ? To an assurance that life is vain ? No ; so to view the mission of the study of science is to view that mission falsely. The one great lesson of the triumph of science is the lesson of the vast significance of loyalty 91 LOYALTY AND INSIGHT ,to the cause of science. And this loyalty depends upon acknowledging the reality of a common, a rational, a significant unity of hu- man experience, a genuine cause which men can serve. When the sciences teach us to get rid of superstition, they do this by virtue of a loyalty to the pursuit of truth which is, as a fact, loyalty to the cause of the spiritual unity of mankind : an unity which the students of science conceive in terms of an unity of our human experience of nature, but which, after all, they more or less unconsciously interpret , just as all the other loyal souls interpret their causes; namely, as a genuine living reality, a life superior in type to the individual lives which we lead — worthy of devoted service, significant, and not merely an incidental play of a natural mechanism. This unity of hu- man experience reveals to us nature's mech- anisms, but is itself no part of the mechanism which it observes. If, now, we do as our general philosophy of loyalty would require : if we take all our loyalties, in whatever forms they may appear, 92 LOYALTY AND INSIGHT as more or less enlightened but always practi- cal revelations that there is an unity of spir- itual life which is above our present natural level, which is worthy of our devotion, which can give sense to life, and which consists of facts that are just as genuinely real as are the facts and the laws of outer nature, — well, can we not thus see our way towards a reli- gious insight which is free from superstition, which is indifferent to magic and to miracle, which accepts all the laws of nature just in so far as they are indeed known, but which never- theless stoutly insists : "This world is no mere mechanism ; it is full of a spiritual unity that transcends mere nature" ? I believe that we can do this. I believe that what I have merely hinted to you is ca- pable of a much richer development than I have here given to these thoughts. I believe, in brief, that in our loyalties we find our best sources of a genuinely religious insight. Men have often said, "The true source of religious insight is revelation ; for these mat- ters are above the powers of human reason." 93 LOYALTY AND INSIGHT Now, I am not here to discuss or to criticize anybody's type of revelation. But this I know, and this the behevers in various sup- posed revelations have often admitted, — that unless the aid of some interior spiritual insight comes to be added to the merely exter- nal revelation, one can be left in doubt by all possible signs and wonders whereby the reve- lation undertakes to give us convincing exter- nal evidence. Religious faith, indeed, relates to that which is above us, but it must arise from that which is within us. And any faith which has indeed a worthy religious object is either merely a mystic ecstasy, which must then be judged, if at all, only by its fruits, or else it is a loyalty, which never exists without seeking to bear fruit in works. Now my thesis is that loyalty is essentially adoration with service, and that there is no true adoration without practical loyalty. If I am right, all of the loyal are grasping in their own ways, and ac- cording to their lights, some form and degree of religious truth. They have won religious insight; for they view something, at least, 94 LOYALTY AND INSIGHT of the genuine spiritual world in its real unity, and they devote themselves to that unity, to its enlargement and enrichment. And therefore they approach more and more to the comprehension of that true spiritual life whereof, as I suppose, the real world essentially consists. Therefore I find in the growth of the spirit of loyalty which normally belongs to any loyal life the deepest source of a genuinely significant religious insight which belongs to just that individual in just his stage of de- velopment. In brief : Be loyal ; grow in loyalty. Therein lies the source of a religious insight free from superstition. Therein also lies the solution of the problems of the philosophy of life. 95 ESSAY III WHAT IS VITAL IN CfflSTIANITY? ESSAY III WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY?' T" DO not venture to meet this company as one -*^ qualified to preach, nor yet as an authority in matters which are technically theological. My contribution is intended to present some thoughts that have interested me as a student of philosophy. I hope that one or another of these thoughts may aid others in formulat- ing their own opinions, and in defining their own religious interests, whether these in- terests and opinions are or are not in agree- ment with mine. My treatment of the question, What is vital in Christianity ? will involve a study of three different special questions, which I pro- pose to discuss in order, as follows : 1. What sort of faith or of practice is it that can be called vital to any religion.? 'Prepared for a series of addresses to the Young Men's Christian Association of Harvard University in 1909. 99 WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? That is, By what criteria, in the case of any religion, can that which is vital be distin- guished from that which is not vital ? 2. In the light of the criteria established by answering this first question, what are to be distinguished as the vital elements of Christianity ? 3. What permanent value, and in partic- ular what value for us to-day, have those ideas and practices and religious attitudes which we should hold to be vital for Christianity ? The term "vital," as here used, obviously involves a certain metaphor. That is vital for a living organism without which that or- ganism cannot live. So breathing is a vital affair for us all. That is vital for an organic type which is so characteristic of that type that, were such vital features changed, the type in question, if not altogether destroyed, would be changed into what is essentially another type. Thus the contrast between 100 WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? gill breathing and lung breathing appears to be vital for the organic types in question. When we treat the social and mental life which is characteristic of a religion as if it were the life of an organism, or of a type or group of organisms, we use the word "vital" in accord- ance with the analogies thus indicated. If, with such a meaning of the word "vital," we turn to the religions that exist among men, we find that any religion presents itself to an observer as a more or less connected group: (1) of religious practices, such as prayers, ceremonies, festivals, rituals, and other ob- servances, and (2) of religious ideas, the ideas taking the form of traditions, legends, and beliefs about the gods or about spirits. On the higher levels, the religious ideas are em- bodied in sacred books, and some of them are emphasized in formal professions of faith. They also come, upon these higher levels, into a certain union with other factors of spiritual life which we are hereafter to discuss. Our first question is, naturally. What is the more vital about a religion: its religious 101 WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? practices, or its religious ideas, beliefs, and spiritual attitudes ? As soon as we attempt to answer this ques- tion, our procedure is somewhat different, according as we dwell upon the simpler and more ^primitive, or on the other hand upon the higher and more reflective and differen- tiated forms or aspects of religion. In primitive religions, and in the religious lives of many of the more simple-minded and less reflective people of almost any faith, however civilized, the religious practices seem' in general to be more important, and more vital for the whole structure of the religious life, than are the conscious beliefs which accompany the practices. I say this is true of primitive religions in general. It is also true for many of the simple-minded fol- lowers, even of very lofty religions. This rule is well known to the students of the history of reUgion in our day, and can easily be illus- trated from some of the most familiar aspects of religious life. But it is a rule which, as I frankly confess, has frequently been ignored 102 WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? or misunderstood by philosophers, as well as by others who have been led to approach reli- gions for the sake of studying the opinions of those who hold them. In various religious ideas people may be very far apart, at the same moment when their religious practices are in close harmony. In the world at large, including both the civilized and the uncivi- lized, we may say that the followers of a cult are, in general, people who accept as binding the practices of that cult. But the followers of the same cult may accompany the accept- ance of the cult with decidedly different inter- pretations of the reason why these practices are required of them, and of the super- natiu-al world which is supposed to be inter- ested in the practices. In primitive religions this rule is exempli- fied by facts which many anthropologists have expressed by saying that, on the whole, in the order of evolution, religious practices normally precede at least the more definite religious beliefs. Men come to believe as they do regarding the nature of some supernatural 103 WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? being, largely in consequence of the fact that they have first come to follow some course of conduct, not for any conscious reason at all, but merely from some instinctive tendency which by accident has determined this or that special expression. When the men come to observe this custom of theirs, and to consider why they act thus, some special religious be- lief often arises as a sort of secondary expla- nation of their practice. And this belief may vary without essentially altering either the practice or the religion. The pigeons in our college yard cluster about the benevolent student or visitor who feeds them. This clustering is the result of instinct and of their training in seeking food. The pigeons pre- sumably have no conscious ideas or theories about the true nature of the man who feeds them. Of course, they are somehow aware of his presence, and of what he does, but they surely have only the most rudimentary and indefinite germs of ideas about what he is. But if the pigeons were to come to conscious- ness somewhat after the fashion of primitive 104 WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? men, very probably they would regard this way of getting food as a sort of religious func- tion and would begin to worship the visitor as a kind of god. If they did so, what idea about this god would be to them vital? Would their beliefs show that they first rea- soned abstractly from effect to cause, and said, "He must be a being both powerful and be- nevolent, for otherwise his feeding of us in this way could not be explained"? Of course, if the pigeons developed into theologians or philosophers, they might reason thus. But if they came to self-consciousness as primitive men generally do, they would more probably say at first : "Behold, do we not cluster about him and beg from him, and coo to him ; and do we not get our food by doing thus ? He is, then, a being whom it is essentially worth while to treat in this way. He re- sponds to our cooing and our clustering. Thus we compel him to feed us. There- fore he is a worshipful being. And this is what we mean by a god; namely, some one whom it is practically useful to con- 105 WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? ciliate and compel by such forms of worship as we practice." If one passes from this feigned instance to the facts of early religious life, one easily ob- serves illustrations of a similar process, both in children and in the more primitive religions of men. A child may be taught to say his prayers. His early ideas of God as a giver of good things, or as a being to be propitiated, are then likely to be secondary to such be- havior. The prayers he often says long be- fore he sees why. His elders, at least when they follow the older traditions of religious instruction, begin by requiring of him the practice of saying prayers ; and then they gradually initiate the child into the ruling ideas of what the practice means. But for such a stage of religious consciousness the prayer is more vital than the interpretation. In primitive religions taboo and ritual alike precede, at least in many cases, those explana- tions of the taboos and of the ritual practices which inquirers get in answer to questions about the present beliefs of the people con- 106 WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? cerned. As religion grows, practices easily pass over from one religion to another, and through every such transition seem to pre- serve, or even to increase, their sacredness; but they get in the end, in each new religion into which they enter, a new explanation in terms of opinions, themselves producing, so to speak, the new ideas required to fit them to each change of setting. In this process the practices taken over may come to seem vital to the people concerned, as the Mass does to Catholics. But the custom may have pre- ceded the idea. The Christmas and Easter festivals are well-known and classic examples of this process. Christianity did not [initiate them. It assimilated them. But it then explained why it did so by saying that it was celebrating the birth and resurrection of Christ. It is no part of my task to develop at length a general theory about this frequent primacy of religious practice over the definite formu- lation of religious belief. The illustrations of the process are, however, numerous. Even 107 WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? on the higher levels of religious development, where the inner life comes to be emphasized, the matter indeed becomes highly compli- cated; but still, wherever there is an established church, the term "dissenter" often means in popular use a person who will not attend this church, or who will not conform to its prac- tices, much more consciously and decidedly than it means a person whose private ideas about religious topics diflFer from those of the people with whom he is willing to worship, or whose rules he is willing to obey. Nevertheless, upon these higher levels a part of the religious requirement very gener- ally comes to be a demand for some sort of orthodoxy. And therefore, upon this level, conformity of practice is indeed no longer enough. However the simple-minded em- phasize practice, the religious body itself re- quires not only the right practice, but also the acceptance of a profession of faith. And on this higher level, and in the opinion of those concerned with the higher aspect of their religion, this acceptance must now be not 108 WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? only a formal act but a sincere one. Here, then, in the life of the higher religions, belief tends to come into a position of primacy which results in a very notable contrast between the higher and the simpler forms and aspects of religious life. When religions take these higher forms, belief is at least officially em- phasized as quite equivalent in importance to practice. For those who view matters thus, "He that believeth not shall be damned," an unbeliever is, as such, a foe of the religion in question, and of its gods and of its wor- shipers. As an infidel he is a miscreant, an enemy not only of the true faith but per- haps of mankind. In consequence, religious persecution and religious wars may come to seem, at least for a time, inevitable means of defending the faith. And those who outgrow, or who never pass through, this stage of war- like propaganda and of persecution may still insist that for them it is faith rather than practice which is the vital element of their religion. To what heights such a view of the religious life may attain, the Pauline 109 WHAT IS ViITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? epistles bear witness, "Through grace are ye saved." And grace comes by faith, or in the form of faith. II So far, then, we have two great phases or stages of reUgious Ufe. On the one stage it is rehgious practice; as such, that is for the people concerned the more vital thing. Their belief is relatively secondary to their prac- tice, and may considerably vary, while the practice remains the unvarying, and, for them, vital feature. On the other, and no doubt higher, because more self-conscious, stage it is faith that assumes the conscious primacy. And on this second stage, if you believe not rightly, you have no part in the religion in question. That these two stages or phases of the life of religion are in practice closely intermingled, everybody knows. The primi- tive and the lofty are, in the religious life of civilized men, very near . together. The re- sulting entanglements furnish endlessly numer- ous problems for the religious life. For in all 110 WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? the higher faiths those who emphasize the inner life make much of faith as a personal disposition. And this emphasis, contending as it does with the more primitive and simple- minded tendency to lay stress upon the pri- macy of religious practice, has often led to re- volt against existing formalism, against ritual requirements, and so to reforms, to heresies, to sects, or to new world religions. Chris- tianity itself, viewed as a world religion, was the outgrowth of an emphasis upon a certain faith, to which its new practices were to be, and were, secondary. On the other hand, the appeal that every religion makes to the masses of mankind is most readily interpreted in terms of practice. Thus the baptism of a whole tribe or nation, at the command of their chief, has been sometimes accounted conver- sion. A formal profession of a creed in such cases has indeed become an essential part of the requirements of the religion in question. But this profession itself can be regarded, and often is regarded by whole masses of the people concerned, as a ceremony to be per- 111 WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? formed obediently, and no doubt willingly, rather than as an expression of any highly conscious inner conviction. In consequence, an individual worshiper may come to repeat the creed as a more or less magic charm, to ward off the demons who are known not to like to hear it ; or, again, the individual may rise and say the creed simply because the whole congregation at a certain point of the service has to do so. In particular, since the creeds of the higher faiths relate to what are regarded as mysteries, while the creed must be repeated by all the faithful, the required belief in the creed is often not understood to imply any clear or wise or even intelligent ideas about what the creed really intends to teach. Even in em- phasizing belief, then, one may thus interpret it mainly in terms of a willing obedience. The savage converted to the Roman Catholic Church is indeed taught not only to obey, but to profess belief, and as far as possible to get some sort of genuine inner belief. But he is regularly told that for his imperfect stage of 112 WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? insight it is enough if he is fully ready to say, "I believe what the church believes, both as far as I understand what the church believes and also as far as I do not understand what the church believes." And it is in this spirit that he must repeat the creed of the church. But his ideas about God and the world may meanwhile be as crude as his ignorance de- termines. He is still viewed as a Christian, if he is minded to accept the God of the church of the Christians, even though he still thinks of God as sometimes a visible and "magni- fied and non-natural" man, a corporeal pres- ence sitting in the heavens, while the scholas- tic theologian who has converted him thinks of God as wholly incorporeal, as not situated in loco at all, as not even existent in time, but only in eternity, and as spiritual substance, whose nature, whose perfection, whose om- niscience, and so on, are the topics of most elaborate definition. Thus, even when faith in a creed becomes an essential part of the requirements of a re- ligion, one often meets, upon a much higher I 113 WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? level, that primacy of tlie practical over the theoretical side of religion which the child's prayers, and the transplanted festivals, and the conceivable religion of the pigeons illus- trate. The faithful convert and his scholas- tic teacher agree much more in religious prac- tices than in conscious religious ideas. Meanwhile this very situation itself is re- garded by all concerned as by no means satis- factory. And those followers of the higher faiths who take the inner life more seriously are never content with this acceptance of what seems to them merely external formalism. For them faith, whether it is accompanied with a clear understanding or not, means something essentially interior and deep dnd soul-transforming. Hence they continually insist that no one can satisfy God who does not rightly view God. And thus the conflict between the primacy of the practical and of the right faith constantly tends to assume new forms in the life of all the higher religions. The conflict concerns the question whether right practice or right belief is the more vital 114 WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? element in religion. Well-known formulas, constantly repeated in religious instruction, profess to solve the problem once for all. But it remains a problem whose solution, if any solution at all is reached, has to be worked out afresh in the religious experience of each individual. Ill Some of you, to whom one of the best- known solutions of the problem is indeed fa- miliar enough, will no doubt have listened to this statement of the conflict between the primacy of religious practice and the primacy of religious belief with a growing impatience. What right-minded and really pious person does not know, you will say, that there is only one way to overcome this opposition, and that is by remembering that true religion is never an affair either of mere practice, apart from inner sincerity, or of theoretically orthodox opinions, apart from other inner experiences and in- terests ? Who does not know, you will say, that true religion is an affair of the whole 115 WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? man, not of deeds alone, nor of the intellect alone, but of the entire spiritual attitude, — of emotion and of trust, — of devotion and of motive, — of conduct guided by an inner hght, and of conviction due to a personal contact with religious truth ? Who does not know that about this all the best Christian teachers, whether Catholic or Protestant, are agreed ? Who does not know that the Ro- man Catholic theologian who converts the savage regards his own personal salvation as due, in case he wins it, not to the theoretical accuracy of his theological formulations, but to the direct working of divine grace, which alone can prepare the soul for that vision of God which can never be attained by mere reasonings, but can be won only through the miraculous gift of insight prepared for the blessed in heaven ? Who has not learned that in the opinion of enlightened Christians the divine grace can for this very reason be as truly present in the humble and ignorant soul of the savage convert as in that of his learned and priestly confessor? Who, then, need 116 WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? confound true faith with the power to formu- late the mysteries of the faith, except in so far, indeed, as one trustingly accepts whatever one can understand of the teachings of the church ? It is indeed, you will insist, grace that saves, and through faith. But the sav- ing faith, you will continue, is, at least in the present life, nothing theoretical. It is itself a gift of God. And it is essentially a spiritual attitude, — at once practical and such as to involve whatever grade of true knowledge is suited to the present stage of the soul in ques- tion. Herein, as some of you will say, the most enlightened and the most pious teachers of various religions, and certainly of very vari- ous forms of Christianity, are agreed. What is vital in the highest religion is neither the mere practice as external, nor the mere opin- ion as an internal formulation. It is the union of the two. It is the reaction of the whole spirit in the presence of an experience of the highest realities of human life and of the uni- verse. If any of you at this point assert this to be 117 WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? the solution of the problem as to what is vital in religion, if you insist that such spiritual gifts as the Pauline charity, and such emotional experiences as those of conversion, and of the ascent of the soul to God in prayer, and such moral sincerity as is the soul of all good works, are regarded by our best teachers as the really vital elements in religion, — you are insisting upon a solution of our problem which indeed belongs to a third, and no doubt to a very lofty phase of. the religious consciousness. And it is just this third phase or level of the re- ligious consciousness that I am to try to study in these conferences. But were such a state- ment in itself enough to show every one of us precisely what this vital feature of the higher religions is, and just how it can be secured by every man, and just how our modern world, with all its doubts and its problems, is related to the solution just proposed, I should indeed have no task in these lectures but to repeat the well-known formula, to apply it briefly to the case of Christianity, and to leave the rest to your own personal experience. 118 WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? IV But as a fact, and as most of you know by personal experience, the well-known proposal of a solution thus stated is to most of us rather the formulation of a new problem than the end of the whole matter. If this higher unity of faith and practice, of grace and right-mind- edness, of the right conduct and the clear insight, of the knowledge of what is real and the feeling for the deepest values of life, — if all this is indeed the goal of the highest religions, and if it constitutes what their best teachers regard as vital, how far are many of us at the present day from seeing our way towards adapting any such solution to our own cases ! For us, the modern world is full of suggestions of doubt regarding the articles of the traditional creeds. The moral prob- lems of our time, full of new perplexities, con- fuse us with regard to what ought to be done. Our spiritual life is too complex to be any longer easily unified, or to be unified merely in the ways useful for earlier generations. Our 119 WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? individualism is too highly conscious to be easily won over to a mood of absorption in any one universal ideal. Our sciences are too complicated to make it easy for us to con- ceive the world either as a unity or as spirit- ual. The church is, for most of us, no longer one visible institution with a single authori- tative constitution, but a variety of social organizations, each with its own traditions and values. The spirit of Christianity, which even at the outset Paul found so hard to for- mulate and to reduce to unity, can no longer be formulated by us precisely in his terms. Hence, some of us seek for some still simpler, because more primitive, type of Christianity. But when we look behind Paul for the gen- uinely primitive Christianity, we meet with further problems, one or two of which we are soon to formulate more precisely in this dis- cussion. In brief, however vital for a reli- gion may be its power to unify the whole man, outer and inner, practical and intellectual, ignorant and wise, emotional and critical, the situation of our time is such that this uni- 120 WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? fication is no longer so presented to us by any one body of religious teaching, that we can simply accept it from tradition (since in the modern world we must both act and think as individuals for ourselves), nor that we can easily learn it from our own experience, since in these days our experience is no longer as full of the religiously inspiring elements as was the experience of the times of Jonathan Ed- wards, or of the Reformation, or of the found- ers of the great mediaeval religious orders, or of the early Christian church. If this unity of the spiritual life is to be reconquered, we must indeed take account of the old solutions, but we must give to them new forms, and adopt new ways, suited to the ideas and to the whole spirit of the modern world. Hence the proposed 'solution that I just rehearsed is simply the statement of the common pro- gram of all the highest religions of human- ity. But how to interpret this program in terms which will make it of live and per- manent meaning for the modern world, — this is precisely the religious problem of to-day. 121 WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY ? To sum up, then, our answer to the first of my three problems; namely. What form of faith or of practice can be called vital to any reli- gion ? I reply : In the case of any one of the more primitive religions it is, in general, the religious practices that are the most vital fea- tures of that religion; and these practices, in general, are vital in proportion as they are necessary to the social life of the tribe or nation amongst which they flourish, so that, when these vital practices die out, the nation in question either dwindles, or is conquered, or passes over into some new form of social order. Secondly, in the higher religions, be- cause of the emphasis that they lay upon the inner life, and especially in the world religions, such as Buddhism, Mohammedanism, and Christianity, belief tends to become a more and more vital feature of the religions in question, and the beliefs — such as monothe- ism, or the acceptance of a prophet, or of a longer or shorter formulated creed — are vital to such a religion in ways and to degrees which the preachers and the missionaries, the 122 WHWT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? religious wars and the sectarian conflicts of these faiths illustrate, — vital in proportion as the men concerned are ready to labor or to die for these beliefs, or to impose them upon other men, or to insist that no one shall be admitted to the religious community who does not accept them. But thirdly, as soon as religious beliefs are thus emphasized as over against religious prac- tices, the religious practices are not, thereby, in general set aside or even discouraged. On the contrary, they generally grow more numerous, and often more imposing. And consequently, in the minds of the more igno- rant, or of the less earnest, of the faithful there appears throughout the life of these higher religions a constant tendency to revert to the more primitive type of religion, or else never, in fact, to rise above that type. Hence, even in the religions wherein conformity is under- stood to imply a sincere orthodoxy, the pri- macy of ritual or of other practice over against faith and the inner life constantly tends to hold its own. There arises in such religions 123 WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? the well-known conflict of inner and outer, of faith and merely external works. This con- flict remains a constant source of transforma- tions, of heresies, and of reforms, in all these higher religions, and is in fact an irrepressible conflict so long as human nature is what it is. For a great mass of the so-called faithful, it is the conformity of practice that thus re- mains vital. But the teachers of the religion assert that the faith is vital. And now, fourthly, the higher religions, especially as represented in their highest type of teachings, are deeply concerned in over- coming and in reducing to unity this conflict of formal observance with genuine faith, wherever the conflict arises. The proposed \ solution which is most familiar, most prom- ising, if it can be won, and most difficult to be won, is the solution which consists in asserting and in showing, if possible, in life, that what is most vital to religion is not prac- tice apart from faith, nor faith apart from practice, but a complete spiritual reaction of the entire man, — • a reaction which, if pos- 124 WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? sible, shall unite a right belief in the unseen world of the faith with the inner perfection and blessedness that ought to result from the indwelling of the truth in the soul, and with that power to do good works and to conform to the external religious requirements which is to be expected from one whose soul is at peace and lives in the light. In a word, what this solution supposes to be most vital to the highest religion is the union of faith and works through a completed spirituality. Meanwhile, as we have also seen, just our age is especially beset with the problem : How can such a solution be any longer an object of reasonable hope, when the faiths have be- come uncertain, the practices largely anti- quated, our life and our duty so problematic, and our environment so uninspiring to our religious interests ? So much, then, for the first of our three problems. V It is now our task to consider the second of our questions. How does this problem re- 125 WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? garding what is vital to a religion appear when we turn to the special case of Christianity ? Our review of the sorts of elements which are found vital upon the various levels of the religious consciousness will have prepared you to look at once for what is most vital about Christianity upon the third and highest of the three levels that I have enumerated. It is true that in the minds of great masses of the less enlightened and less devoted popu- lation of the Christian world certain religious practices have always been regarded as con- stituting the most vital features of their reli- gion. These practices are especially those which for the people in question imply the obedient acceptance of the sacraments of the church. Of course for such, faith is indeed a condition for the efficacy of the sacraments. But faith expresses itself especially through and in one's relation to these sacraments. Such emphasis upon religious practices is inevitable, so long as human nature is what it is. But Christianity is obviously, upon all of its higher levels, essentially a religion of the 126 WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? inner life; and for all those in any body of Christians who are either more devout or more enlightened the problem of the church has always included, along with other things, the problem of finding and formulating the true faith ; and such faith is, to such people, vital to their religion. In consequence of its vast successes in conquering, after a fashion, its own regions of the world, Christianity has had to undertake upon a very large scale, and over a long series of centuries, the task of adapting itself to the needs of peoples who were in very various, and often in very primi- tive, conditions of culture. Hence, in formu- lating its faith and practice, it has had full experience of the conflict between those who in a relatively childlike and primitive way regard religious practice as the primal evidence and ex- pression of the possession of the true religion, and those who, on the contrary, insist prima- rily upon right belief and a rightly guided inner life as a necessary condition for such conduct as can be pleasing to God. Where, as in the case of the Roman Catholic Church, the effort 1273 WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? to reconcile these two motives has the longest traditional expression, that is, where the most elaborate ojEcial definition of the saving faith has been deliberately joined with the most pre- cise requirements regarding religious practice, the conflict of motives here in question has been only the more notable as a factor in the history of the church, — however completely for an individual believer this very conflict may appear to have been solved. In the Catholic doctrine of the sacraments, in the theory of the conditions upon which their va- lidity depends, and of their effects upon the process of salvation, the most primitive of religious tendencies stand side by side with the loftiest spiritual interests in glaring con- trast. On the one hand the doctrine of the sacraments appeals to primitive tendencies, because certain purely magical influences and incantations are! in question. The repe- tition of certain formulas and deeds acts as an irresistible miraculous charm. On the other hand the life of the spirit is furthered through the administration of these same 128 WHAT IS VITAL IN QHRISTIANITY ? sacraments by some of the deepest and most spiritual of influences, and by some of the most elevated forms of inner life which the con- sciousness of man has ever conceived. That there is an actual conflict of motives involved in this union of primitive magic with spiritual cultivation, the church in question has re- peatedly found, when the greater schisms re- lating to the validity or to the interpretation of her sacraments have rent the unity of her body, and when, sometimes within her own fold, the mystics have quarreled with the formalists, and both with the modernists, of any period in which the religious life of the church was at all intense. Most of you will agree, I suppose, as to the sort of solution of such conflicts between the higher and lower aspects of Christianity which is to be sought, in case there is to be any hope of a solution. You will probably be disposed to say : What is vital in Christianity, if Chris- tianity is permanently to retain its vitality at all in our modern world, must be defined pri- marily neither in terms of mere religious prac- K 129 WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? tice nor yet in terms of merely intellectual formulation, but in terms of that unity of will and intellect that may be expressed in the spiritual disposition of the whole man. You will say, What is vital in Christianity must be, if anything, the Christian interpretation of human life, and the life lived in the light of this interpretation. Such a life, you will in- sist, can never be identified by its formal reli- gious practices, however important, or even indispensable, some of you may believe this or that religious practice to be. Nor can one reduce what is vital in Christianity merely to a formulated set of opinions, since, as the well- known word has it, the devils also believe, and tremble, and, as some of you may be dis- posed benevolently to add, the philosophers also believe, and lecture. No, you will say, the Christian life includes practices, which may need to be visible and formal ; it includes beliefs, which may have to be discussed and formulated; but Christianity is, first of all, an interpretation of life, — an interpretation that is nothing if not practical, and also noth- 130 WHAT IS VITAL IX CHRISTIANITY? ing if not guided from within by a deep spirit- ual interest and a genuine religious experience. So fax we shall find it easy to agree regard- ing the principles of our inquiry. Yet, as the foregoing review of the historical conflicts of rehgion has shown us, we thus merely formu.- late our problem. We stand at the outset of what we want to do. \Miat is that interpretation of life which is vital to Christianity ? How must a Christian undertake to solve his problem of his own per- sonal salvation ? How shall he view the prob- lem of the salvation of mankind ? What is that spiritual attitude which is essential to the Christian religion ? Thus our second problem now formulates itself. VI Amongst the coimtless efforts to answer these questions there are two which in these discussions we especially need to face. The two answers thus proposed differ decidedly from each other. Each is capable of leading various further and more special formulations 131 WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? of opinion about the contents of the Christian rehgion. The first answer may be stated as follows : What is vital about Christianity is simply the spiritual attitude and the doctrine of Christ, as he himself taught this doctrine and this attitude in the body of his authentic say- ings and parables, and as he lived all this out in his own life. All in Christianity that goes beyond this — all that came to the conscious- ness of the church after Christ's own teach- ing had been uttered and fiinished — either is simply a paraphrase, an explanation, or an application of the original doctrine of Christ, or else is not vital, — is more or less unes- sential, mythical, or at the very least external. Grasp the spirit of Christ's own teaching, in- terpret life as he interpreted it, and live out this interpretation of life as completely as you can, imitating him — and then you are in essence a Christian. Fail to comprehend the spirit of Christ, or to live out his interpreta- tion of life, and you in so far fail to possess what is vital about Christianity. This, I say, 132 WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? is the first of the two answers that we must consider. It is an answer well known to most of you, and an emphasis upon this answer characterizes some of the most important religious movements of our own time. The second answer is as follows : What is vital about Christianity depends upon re- garding the mission and the life of Christ as an organic part of a divine plan for the redemp-j tion and salvation of man. While the doc- trine of Christ, as his sayings record this doctrine, is indeed an essential part of this mis- sion, one cannot rightly understand, above all one cannot apply, the teachings of Christ, one cannot live out the Christian interpretation of life, unless one first learns to view the person of Christ in its true relation to God, and the work of Christ as an entirely unique revela- tion and expression of God's will. The work of Christ, however, culminated in his death. Hence, as the historic church has always main- tained, it is the cross of Christ that is the sym- bol of whatever is most vital about Christian- ity. As for the person of Christ as his life 133 WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? revealed it, — what is vital in Christianity depends upon conceiving this personality in essentially superhuman terms. The prologue to the Fourth Gospel deliberately undertakes to state what for the author of that Gospel is vital in Christianity. This prologue does so by means of the familiar doctrine of the eter- nal Word that was the beginning, that was with God and was God, and that in Christ was made flesh and dwelt amongst men. Abandon this doctrine, and you give up what is vital in Christianity. Moreover, the work of Christ was essential to the whole relation of his own teachings to the life of men. Hu- man nature being what it is, the teaching that Christ's sayings record cannot enter into the genuine life of any one who has not first been transformed into a new man by means of an essentially superhuman and divine power of grace. It was the work of Christ to open the way whereby this divine grace became and still becomes efficacious. The needed trans- formation of human nature, the change of life which according to Christ's sayings is neces- 134 WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? sary as a condition for entering the kingdom of heaven, this is made possible through the effects of the life and death of Christ. This life and death were events whereby man's redemption was made possible, whereby the atonement for sin was accomplished. In brief, what is vital to Christianity includes an acceptance of the two cardinal doctrines of the incarnation and the atonement. For only in case these doctrines are accepted is it possible to interpret life in the essentially Christian way, and to live out this interpre- tation. Here are two distinct and, on the whole, op- posed answers to the question. What is vital in Christianity .'' I hope that you will see that each of these answers is an effort to rise above the levels wherein either religious prac- tice or intellectual belief is overemphasized. It is useless for the partisan of the Chris- tianity of the prologue to the Fourth Gospel to accuse his modern opponent of a willingness to degrade Christ to the level of a mere teacher of morals, and Christianity to a mere practice 135 WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? of good works. It is equally useless for one who insists upon the sufficiency of the gospel of Christ simply as Christ's recorded sayings teach it to accuse his opponent of an intention to make true religion wholly dependent upon the acceptance of certain metaphysical opin- ions regarding the superhuman nature of Christ. No, the opposition between these two views regarding what is vital in Christian- ity is an opposition that appears on the high- est levels of the religious consciousness. It is not that one view says: "Christ taught these and these moral doctrines, and the practice of these teachings constitutes all that is vital in Christianity." It is not that the opposing view says: "Christ was the eternal Word made flesh, and a mere belief in this fact and in the doctrine of the atoning death is the vital feature of Christianity." No, both of these two views attempt to be views upon the third level of the religious consciousness, — views about the whole interpretation of the higher life, and of its relation to God and to the salva- tion of man. So far, neither view, as its lead- 136 WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? ing defenders now hold it, can accuse the other of lapsing into those more primitive views of religion which I have summarized in the earlier part of this paper. And I have dwelt so long upon a preliminary view of the relations be- tween faith and practice in the history of re- ligion, because I wanted to clear the way for a study of our problem on its genuinely highest level, so that we shall henceforth be clear of certain old and uninspiring devices of con- troversy. Both parties are really trying to express what is vital in the Christian concep- tion of life. Both view Christianity as a faith which gives sense to life, and also as a mode of life which is centered about a faith. The true dispute arises upon the highest levels. The question is simply this : Is the Gospel which Christ preached, that is, the teaching recorded in the authentic sayings and parables, intelligible, acceptable, vital, in case you take it by itself ? Or, does Christianity lose its vitality in case you cannot give a true sense to those doctrines of the incarnation and the to atonement which the traditional Christian 137 WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? world has so long held and so deeply loved ? And furthermore, can you, in the light of mod- ern insight, give any longer a reasonable sense to the traditional doctrines of the atonement and the incarnation ? In other words : Is Christianity essentially a religion of redemp- tion in the sense in which tradition defined redemption ? Or is Christianity simply that religion of the love of God and the love of man which the sayings and the parables so richly illustrate ? However much, upon its lower levels, Chris- tianity may have used and included the mo- tives of primitive religion, this our present question is not reducible to the terms of the relatively lower conflict between a religion of creed and a religion of practice. The issue now defined concerns the highest interests of religious life. In favor of the traditional view that the essence of Christianity consists, first, in the doctrine of the superhuman person and the re- demptive work of Christ, and, secondly, in the interpretative life that rests upon this 138 WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? doctrine, stands the whole authority, such as it is, of the needs and religious experience of the church of Christian history. The church early found, or at least felt, that it could not live at all without thus interpret- ing the person and work of Christ. Against such an account of what is vital in Christianity stands to-day for many of us the fact that the doctrine in question seems to be, at least in the main, unknown to the historic Christ, in so far as we can learn what he taught, while both the evidence for the traditional doctrine and the interpretation of it have rested during Christian history upon reports which our whole modern view of the universe disposes many of us to regard as legendary, and upon a theology which many of us can no longer accept as literally true. Whether such objections are finally valid, we must later consider. I mention the objections here be- cause they are familiar, and because in our day they lead many to turn from the tangles of tradition with a thankful joy and relief to the hopeful task of trying to study, to apply, 139 WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? and to live the pure Gospel of Christ as he taught it in that body of sayings which, as many insist, need no legends to make them intelligible, and no metaphysics to make them sacred. Yet, as a student of philosophy, coming in no partisan spirit, I must insist that this reduction of what is vital in Christianity to the so-called pure Gospel of Christ, as he preached it and as it is recorded in the body of the presumably authentic sayings and para- bles, is profoundly unsatisfactory. The main argument for doubting that this so-called pure Gospel of Christ contains the whole of what is vital in Christianity rests upon the same considerations that led the historical church to try in its own way to interpret, and hence to supplement, this gospel by reports that may have been indeed full of the legendary, by metaphysical ideas that may indeed have been deeply imperfect, but by a deep instinc- tive sense of genuine religious values which after all, was indispensable for later humanity, — a sense of religious values which was a true 140 WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? sense. For one thing, Christ can hardly be supposed to have regarded his most authenti- cally reported religious sayings as containing the whole of his message, or as embodying the whole of his mission. For, if he had so viewed the matter, the Messianic tragedy in which his life work culminated would have been needless and unintelligible. For the rest, the doctrine that he taught is, as it stands, es- sentially incomplete. It is not a rounded whole. It looks beyond itself for a comple- tion, which the master himself unquestionably conceived in terms of the approaching end of the world, and which the church later con- ceived in terms of what has become indeed vital for Christianity. As modern men, then, we stand between opposed views. Each view has to meet hostile arguments. Each can make a case in favor of its value as a statement of the essence of Christianity. On the one hand the Christ of the historically authentic sayings, — whose gospel is, after all, not to be understood ex- cept as part of a much vaster religious process ; 141 WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? on the other hand the Christ of legend, whom it is impossible for us modern men longer to conceive as the former ages of the church often conceived him. Can we choose between the two ? Which stands for what is vital in Chris- tianity ? And, if we succeed in defining this vital element, what can it mean to us to-day, and in the light of our modern world ? Thus we have defined our problems. Our next task is to face them as openly, as truth- fully, and as carefully as our opportunity per- mits. VII Let us, then, briefly consider the first of the two views which have been set over against one another. The teachings of Christ which are preserved to us do indeed form a body of doctrine that one can survey and study without forming any final opinion about the historical char- acter of the narratives with which these teach- ings are accompanied iji the three Synoptic Gospels. The early church preserved the 142 WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? sayings, recorded them, no doubt, in various forms, but learned to regard one or two of the bodies of recorded sayings as especially impor- tant and authentic. The documents in which these earliest records were contained are lost to us; but our gospels, especially those of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, preserve the ear- lier tradition in a way that can be tested by the agreements in the reported sayings as they appear in the different gospels. It is of course true that some of the authentic teachings of Christ concern matters in regard to which other teachers of his own people had already reached insights that tended towards his own. But nobody can doubt that the sayings, taken as a whole, embody a new and profoundly individual teaching, and are what they pre- tend to be ; namely, at least a partial presen- tation of an interpretation of life, — an inter- pretation that was deliberately intended by the teacher to revolutionize the hearts and lives of those to whom the sayings were ad- dressed. Since a recorded doctrine, simply taken in itself, and apart from any narrative, 143 WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? is an unquestionable fact, and since a new and individual doctrine is a fact that can be ex- plained only as the work of a person, it is plain that, whatever you think of the narra- tive portions of the gospels, your estimate of Christ's reported teachings may be freed at once from any of the perplexities that perhaps beset you as to how much you can find out about his life. So much at least he was; namely, the teacher of this doctrine. As to his life, it is indeed important to know that he taught the doctrine as one who fully meant it; that while he taught it he so lived it out as to win the entire confidence of those who were nearest to him; that he was ready to die for it, and for whatever else he believed to be the cause that he served; and that when the time came he did die for his cause. So much of the gospel narrative is with all reasonable certainty to be regarded as historical. So far, then, one has to regard the teaching of Christ as a perfectly definite object for his- torical study and personal imitation, and as, in its main outlines, an accessible tradition. 144 WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? It is impossible to be sure of our tradition as regards each individual saying. But the main body of the doctrine stands before us as a con- nected whole, and it is in its wholeness that we are interested in comprehending its mean- ing. Now there is also no doubt, I have said, that this doctrine is intended as at least a part of an interpretation of hfe. For the explicit purpose of the teacher is to transform the inner life of his hearers, and thus to bring about, through this transformation, a reform of their individual outer life. It is, further- more, sure that, while the teaching in question includes a moral ideal, it is no merely moral teaching, but is full of a profoundly religious interest. For the transformation of the inner life which is in question has to do with the whole relation of the individual man to God. And there are especially two main theses of the teacher which do indeed explicitly relate to the realm of the superhuman and divine world, and which therefore do concern what we may call religious metaphysics. That L 145 WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? is, these theses are assertions about a reality that does not belong to the physical realm, and that is not confined to the realities which we contemplate when we consider merely ethical truth as such. The first of these religious theses relates to the nature of God. It is usually summarized as the doctrine of the Fatherhood of God. In its fuller state- ment it involves that account of the divine love for the individual man which is so char- acteristic and repeated a feature of the au- thentic sayings. The other thesis is what we now call judgment of value. It is the asser- tion of the infinite worth of each individual person, — an assertion richly illustrated in the parables, and used as the basis of the ethi- cal teaching of Christ, since the value that God sets upon your brother is the deepest rea- son assigned to show why your own life should be one of love towards your brother. VIII So much for the barest suggestion of a teach- ing which you all know, and which I have not 146 WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? here further to expound. Our present ques- tion is simply this : Is this the whole of what is vital to Christianity ? Or is there some- thing vital which is not contained in these recorded sayings, so far as they relate to the matters just summarily mentioned ? The answer to this question is suggested by certain very well-known facts. First, these sayings are, in the master's mind, only part of a program which, as the event showed, related not only to the individual soul and its salvation, but to the reform of the whole existing and visible social order. Or, expressed in our modern terms, the teacher contemplated a social revolution, as well as the before-mentioned universal religious refor- mation of each individual life. He was led, at least towards the end of his career, to interpret his mission as that of the Messiah of his people. That the coming social revo- lution was conceived by him in divine and miraculous terms, that it was to be completed by the final judgment of all men, that the coming kingdom was to be not of this world, 147 WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? in the sense in which the Roman Empire was of this world, but was to rest upon the directly visible triumph of God's will through the mi- raculous appearance of the chosen messenger who should execute this will, — all this re- garding the conception which was in Christ's mind seems clear. But, however the coming revolution was conceived, it was to be a vio- lent and supernatural revolution of the ex- ternal social order, and it was to appear openly to all men upon earth. The meek, the poor, were to inherit the earth ; the mighty were to be cast down ; the kingdoms of this world were to pass away ; and the divine sovereignty was to take its visible place as the controller of all things. Now it is no part of my present task to en- deavor to state any theory as to why the mas- ter viewed his kingdom of heaven, in part at least, in this way. You may interpret the doctrine as the church has for ages done, as a doctrine relating to the far-off future end of all human -affairs and to the supernatural mission of Christ as both Savior and Judge 148 WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? of the world ; or you may view the revolution- •ary purposes of the master as I myself actu- ally do, simply as his personal interpretation of the Messianic traditions of his people and of the social needs of his time and of the then common but mistaken expectation of the near end of the world. In any case, if this doc- trine, however brought about or interpreted, was for the master a vital part of his teaching, then you have to view the resulting interpre- tation of life accordingly. I need not say, however, that whoever to-day can still find a place for the Messianic hopes and for the doc- trine of the last judgment in his own inter- pretation of Christianity has once for all made up his mind to regard a doctrine, — and a deeply problematic doctrine, — a pro- foundly metaphysical doctrine about the per- son and work of Christ, and about the divine plan for the salvation of man, — as a vital part of his own Christianity. And now, in this same connection, we can point out that, if the whole doctrine of Christ had indeed consisted for him in regarding 149 WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? the coming of the kingdom of heaven as iden- tical with the inner transformation of each man by the spirit of divine love, then that direct and open opposition to the existing social authorities of his people which led to the Messianic tragedy would have been for the master simply needless. Christ chose this plan of open and social opposition for reasons of his own. We may interpret these reasons as the historical church has done, or we may view the matter otherwise, as I myself do. In any case, Christ's view of what was vital in Christianity certainly included, but also just as certainly went beyond, the mere preaching of the kingdom of heaven that is within you. But one may still say, as many say who want to return to a purely primitive Chris- tianity : Can we not choose to regard the reli- gious doctrine of the parables and of the say- ings, apart from the Messianic hopes and the anticipated social revolution, as for us vital and sufficient.^ Can we not decline to at- tempt to solve the Messianic mystery ? Is it 150 WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? not for us enough to know simply that the master did indeed die for his faith, leaving his doctrine concerning the spiritual kingdom, concerning God the Father, and concerning man the beloved brother, as his final legacy to future generations ? This legacy was of permanent value. Is it not enough for us ? I reply : To think thus is obviously to view Christ's doctrine as he himself did not view it. He certainly meant the kingdom of heaven to include the inner transformation of each soul by the divine love. But he also certainly conceived even this spiritual transformation in terms of some sort of Messianic mission, which was related to a miraculous coming transformation of human society. In the service of this Messianic social cause he died. And now even in Christ's interpretation of the inner and spiritual life of the individual man there are aspects which you cannot understand unless you view them in the light of the Mes- sianic expectation. I refer to the master's doctrine upon that side of it which empha- sizes the passive nonresistance of the indi- 151 WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? vidual man, in waiting for God's judgment. This side of Christ's doctrine has been fre- quently interpreted as requiring an extreme form of self-abnegation. It is this aspect of the doctrine which glorifies poverty as in it- self an important aid to piety. In this sense, too, the master sometimes counsels a certain indifference to ordinary human social rela- tions. In this same spirit his sayings so fre- quently illustrate the spirit of love by the mention of acts that involve the merely im- mediate relief of suffering, rather than by dwelling upon those more difficult and often more laborious forms of love, which his own life indeed exemplified, and which take the form of the lifelong service of a superper- sonal social cause. I would not for a moment wish to overem- phasize the meaning of these negative and ascetic aspects of the sayings. Christ's ethi- cal doctrine was unquestionably as much a positive individualism as it was a doctrine of love. It was also as genuinely a stern doc- trine as it was a humane one. Nobody un- 152 WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? derstands it who reduces it to mere self-abne- gation, or to nonresistance, or to any form of merely sentimental amiability. Nevertheless, as it was taught, it included sayings and illus- trations which have often been interpreted in the sense of pure asceticism, in the sense of simple nonresistance, in the sense of an unworldliness that seems opposed to the establishment and the prizing of definite hu- manities, — yes, even in the sense of an anar- chical contempt for the forms of any present worldly social order. In brief, the doctrine contains a deep and paradoxical opposition between its central assertion of the infinite value of love and of every individual human soul, on the one hand, and those of its special teachings, on the other hand, which seem to express a negative attitude towards all our natural efforts to assert and to sustain the values of life by means of definite social co- operation, such as we men can by ourselves devise. Now the solution of this paradox seems plain when we remember the abnormal social conditions of those whom Christ was 153 WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? teaching, and interpret his message in the hght of his Messianic social mission with its coming miraculous change of all human rela- tions. But in that case an important part of the sayings must be viewed as possessing a meaning which is simply relative to the place, to the people, to the time, and to those Mes- sianic hopes of an early end of the existing social order, — hopes which we know to have been mistakenly cherished by the early church. I conclude, then, so far, that a simple return to a purely primitive Christianity as a body of doctrine complete in itself, directly and fully expressed in the sayings of Christ, and applicable, without notable supplement, to all times, and to our own day, — is an in- complete and therefore inadequate religious ideal. The spiritual kingdom of heaven, the transformation of the inner life which the say- ings teach, is indeed a genuine part, — yes, a vital part, — of Christianity. But it is by no means the whole of what is vital to Chris- tianity. 154 WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? IX I turn to the second of the answers to our main question. According to this answer, Christianity is a redemptive religion. What is most vital to Christianity is contained in whatever is essential and permanent about the doctrines of the incarnation and the atone- ment. Now this is the answer which, as you will by this time see, I myself regard as ca- pable of an interpretation that will turn it into a correct answer to our question. In answering thus, I do not for a moment call in question the just-mentioned fact that the original teaching of the master regarding the kingdom of heaven is indeed a vital part of the whole of Christianity. But I do assert that this so-called purely primitive Christianity is not so vital, is not so central, is not so essential , to mature Christianity as are the doctrines of the incarnation and the atonement when these are rightly interpreted. In the light of these doctrines alone can the work of the master be seen in its most genuine significance. 155 WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? Yet, as has been already pointed out, the hteral acceptance of this answer to our ques- tion, as many still interpret the answer, seems to be beset by serious difficulties. These difficulties are now easily summarized. The historical Christ of the sayings and the para- bles, little as we certainly know regarding his life, is still a definite and, in the main, an ac- cessible object of study and of interpretation, just because, whatever else he was, he was the teacher of this recorded interpretation of life, — whether or not you regard that recorded interpretation as a fully complete and rounded whole. But the Christ whom the traditional doctrines of the atonement and of the incarna- tion present to us appears in the minds of most of us as the Christ of the legends of the early church, — a being whose nature and whose reported supernatural mission seem to be in- volved in doubtful mysteries — mysteries both theological and historical. Now I am not here to tell you in detail why the modern mind has come to be unwilling to accept, as literal re- ports of historical facts, certain well-known 156 WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? legends. I am not here to discuss that un- willingness upon its merits. It is enough for my present purpose to say first that the un- willingness exists, and, secondly, that, as a fact, I myself believe it to be a perfectly rea- sonable unwillingness. But I say this not at all because I suppose that modern insight has driven out of the reasonable world the reality of spiritual truth. The world of history is indeed a world full of the doubtful. And the whole world of phenomena in which you and I daily move about is a realm of mysteries. Nature and man, as we daily know them, and also daily misunderstand them, are not what they seem to us to be. The world of our usual human experience is but a beggarly fragment of the truth, and, if we take too seriously the bits of wisdom that it enables us to collect by the observation of special facts and of natural laws, it becomes a sort of curtain to hide from us the genuine realm of spiritual realities in the midst of which we all the while live. Moreover, it is one office of all higher religion to supplement these our fragments of experi- 157 WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? ence and ordinary notions of the natural order by a truer, if still imperfect, interpre- tation of the spiritual realities that are be- yond our present vision. That is, it is the business of religion to lift, however little, the curtain, to inspire us, not by mere dreams of ideal life, but by enlightening glimpses of the genuine truth which, if we were perfect, we should indeed see, not, as now, through a glass darkly, but face to face. All this I hold to be true. And yet I fully share the modern unwillingness to accept legends as literally true. For it is not by first repeating the tale of mere marvels, of miracles, — by dwelling upon legends, and then by taking the accounts in question as literally true historical reports, — it is not thus that we at present, in our modern life, can best help ourselves to find our way to the higher world. These miraculous reports are best understood when we indeed first dwell upon them lovingly and meditatively, but thereupon learn to view them as symbols, as the products of the deep and endlessly in- 158 WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY P structive religious imagination, — and thereby learn to interpret the actually definite, and to my mind unquestionably superhuman and eternal, truth that these legends express, but express by figures, — in the form of a parable, an image, a narrative, a tale of some special happening. The tale is not literally true. But its deeper meaning may be absolutely true. In brief, I accept the opinion that it is the oflBce of religion to interpret truths which are in themselves perfectly definite, eternal, and literal, but to interpret them to us by means of a symbolism which is the product of the constructive imagination of the great ages in which the religions which first voiced these truths grew up. There are some truths which our complicated natures best reach first through instinct and intuition, through para- ble and legend. Only when we have first reached them in this way, can most of us learn to introduce the practical and indeed saving application of these truths into our lives by living out the spirit of these parables. But then at last we may also hope, in the fullness 159 WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? of our own time, to comprehend these truths by a clearer insight into the nature of that eternal world which is indeed about and above us all, and which is the true source of our common life and light. I am of course saying all this not as one having authority. I am simply indicating how students of philosophy who are of the type that I follow are accustomed to view these things. In this spirit I will now ask you to look for a moment at the doctrines of the incarnation and of the atonement in some of their deeper aspects. It is a gain thus to view the doctrines, whether or no you accept literally the well-known miraculous tale. There has always existed in the Christian church a tradition tending to emphasize the conception that the supernatural work of Christ, which the church conceived in the form of the doctrines of the incarnation and the atonement, was not a work accomplished once for all at a certain historical point of time, but remains somehow an abiding work; 160 WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? or, perhaps, that it ought to be viewed as a timeless fact, which never merely happened, but which is such as to determine anew in every age the relation of the faithful to God. Of course, the church has often condemned as heretical one or another form of these opin- ions. Nevertheless, such opinions have in fact entered into the formation of the official dogmas. An instance is the influence that such an interpretation had upon the historic doctrine of the Mass and of the real presence, — a doctrine which, as I have suggested, com- bines in one some of the most primitive of religious motives with some of the deepest religious ideas that men have ever possessed. In other less official forms, in forms which frequently approached, or crossed, the boun- daries of technical heresy, some of the medieval mystics, fully believing in their own view of their faith, and innocent of any modern doubts about miracles, were accustomed in their tracts and sermons always and directly to interpret every part of the gospel narrative, including the miracles, as the expression of a M 161 WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? vast and timeless whole of spiritual facts, whereof the narratives are merely symbols. In the sermons of Meister Eckhart, the great early German mystic, this way of preaching Christian doctrine is a regular part of his ap- peal to the people. I am myself in my phi- losophy no mystic, but I often wish that in our own days there were more who preached what is indeed vital in Christianity in somewhat the fashion of Eckhart. Let me venture upon one or two examples. Eckhart begins as follows a sermon on the text, "Who is he that is born king of the Jews " (Matthew ii. 2) : "Mark you," he says, "mark you concerning this birth, where it takes place. I say, as I have often said : This eternal birth takes place in the soul, and takes place there precisely as it takes place in the eternal world, — no more, no less. This birth happens in the essence, in the very foundation, of the soul." "All other creatures," he con- tinues, "are God's footstool. But the soul is his image. This image must be adorned and fulfilled through this birth of God in the 162 WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? soul." The birth, the incarnation, of God occurs then, so Eckhart continues, in every soul, and eternally. But, as he hereupon asks : Is not this then also true of sinners, if this incarnation of God is thus everlasting and universal ? Wherein lies then the dif- ference between saint and sinner ? What special advantage has the Christian from this doctrine of the incarnation ? Eckhart in- stantly answers : Sin is simply due to the blindness of the soul to the eternal presence of the incarnate God. And that is what is meant by the passage : "The light shineth in the darkness, and the darkness comprehend- eth it not." Or again, Eckhart expounds in a sermon the statement that Christ came "in the full- ness of time"; that is, as people usually and literally interpret the matter, Christ came when the human race was historically prepared for his coming. But Eckhart is careless con- cerning this historical and literal interpre- tation of the passage in question, although he doubtless also believes it. For him the 163 WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? true meaning of the passage is wholly spiritual. When, he asks in substance, is the day ful- filled ? At the end of the day. When is a task fulfilled.? When the task is over. When, therefore, is the fullness of time reached ? Whenever a man is in his soul ready to be done with time ; that is, when in contemplation he dwells only upon and in the eternal. Then alone, when the soul forgets time, and dwells upon God who is above time, then, and then only, does Christ really come. For Christ's coming means simply our becoming aware of what Eckhart calls the eternal birth ; that is, the eternal relation of the real soul to the real God. It is hard, in our times, to get any sort of hearing for such really deeper interpretations of what is indeed vital in Christianity. A charming, but essentially trivial, religious psychology to-day invites some of us to view religious experience simply as a chance play- at-hide-and-seek with certain so-called sub- liminal mental forces and processes, whose crudely capricious crises and catastrophes ]64 WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? shall have expressed themselves in that fever- ish agitation that some take to be the essence of all. Meanwhile there are those who to- day try to keep religion alive mainly as a more or less medicinal influence, a sort of disinfec- tant or anodyne, that may perhaps still prove its value to a doubting world by curing dys- pepsia, or by removing nervous worries. Over against such modern tendencies, — humane, but stUl, as interpretations of the true essence of religion, essentially trivial, — there are those who see no hope except in holding fast by a literal acceptance of tradition. There are, finally, those who undertake the task, lofty indeed, but still, as I think, hopeless, — the task of restoring what they call a purely primi- tive Christianity. Now I am no disciple of Eckhart ; but I am sure that whatever is vital in Christianity concerns in fact the relation of the real individual human person to the real God. To the minds of the people whose religious tradition we have inherited this re- lation first came through the symbolic inter- pretation that the early church gave to the 165 WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? life of the master. It is this symboUc inter- pretation which is the historical legacy of the church. It is the genuine and eternal truth that lies behind this symbol which constitutes what is indeed vital to Christianity. I per- sonally regard the supernatural narratives in which the church embodied its faith simply as symbols, — the product indeed of no man's effort to deceive, but of the religious imagina- tion of the great constructive age of the early church. I also hold that the truth which lies behind these symbols is capable of a perfectly rational statement, that this statement lies in the direction which Eckhart, mistaken as he often was, has indicated to us. The truth in question is independent of the legends. It relates to eternal spiritual facts. I maintain also that those who, in various ages of the church, and in various ways, have tried to de- fine and to insist upon what they have called the "Essential Christ," as distinguished from the historical Christ, have been nearing in various degrees the comprehension of what is vital in Christianity. 166 WHAT IS. VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? What is true must be capable of expression apart from legends. What is eternally true may indeed come to our human knowledge through any event that happens to bring the truth in question to our notice; but, once learned, this truth may be seen to be inde- pendent of the historical events, whatever they were, which brought about our own in- sight. And the truth about the incarnation and the atonement seems to me to be statable in terms which I must next briefly indicate. First, God, as our philosophy ought to conceive him, is indeed a spirit and a person ; but he is not a being who exists in separation from the world, simply as its external creator. He expresses himself in the world; and the world is simply his own life, as he consciously lives it out. To use an inadequate figure, God expresses himself in the world as an artist expresses himself in the poems and the char- acters, in the music or in the other artistic creations, that arise within the artist's con- 167 WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? sciousness and that for him and in him con- sciously embody his will. Or again, God is this entire world, viewed, so to speak, from above and in its wholeness as an infinitely complex life which in an endless series of tem- poral processes embodies a single divine idea. You can indeed distinguish, and should dis- tinguish, between the world as our common sense, properly but fragmentarily, has to view it, and as our sciences study it, — between this phenomenal world, I say, and God, who is infinitely more than any finite system of natural facts or of human lives can express. But this distinction between God and world means no separation. Our world is the frag- mentary phenomenon that we see. God is the conscious meaning that expresses itself in and through the totality of all phenomena. The world, taken as a mass of happenings in time, of events, of natural processes, of single lives, is nowhere, and at no time, any complete expression of the divine will. But the entire world, of which our known world is a frag- ment, — the totality of what is, past, present, 168 WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? and future, the totality of what is physical and of what is mental, of what is temporal and of what is enduring, — this entire world is present at once to the eternal divine con- sciousness as a single whole, and this whole is what the absolute chooses as his own ex- pression, and is what he is conscious of choos- ing as his own life. In this entire world God sees himself lived out. This world, when taken in its wholeness, is at once the object of the divine knowledge and the deed wherein is embodied the divine will. Like the Logos of the Fourth Gospel, this entire world is not only with God, but is God. As you see, I state this doctrine, for the moment, quite summarily and dogmatically. Only an extensive and elaborate philosophical discussion could show you why I hold this doctrine to be true. Most of you, however, have heard of some such doctrine as the theory of the Divine Immanence. Some of you are aware that such an interpretation of the nature of God constitutes what is called philosophical Idealism. I am not here defending, nor even 169 WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? expounding, this doctrine. I believe, how- ever, that this is the view of the divine na- ture which the church has always more or less intuitively felt to be true, and has tried to express, despite the fact that my own formu- lation of this doctrine includes some features which in the course of the past history of dogma have been upon occasion formally condemned as heresy by various church au- thorities. But for my part I had rather be a heretic, and appreciate the vital meaning of what the church has always tried to teach, than accept this or that traditional formu- lation, but be unable to grasp its religiously significant spirit. Dogmatically, then, I state what, indeed, if there were time, I ought to expound and to defend on purely rational grounds. God and his world are one. And this unity is not a dead natural fact. It is the unity of a con- scious life, in which, in the course of infinite time, a divine plan, an endlessly complex and yet perfectly definite spiritual idea, gets ex- pressed in the lives of countless finite beings 170 WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? and yet with the unity of a single universal life. Whoever hears this doctrine stated, asks, however, at once a question, — the deepest, and also the most tragic question of our pres- ent poor human existence : Why, then, if the world is the divine life embodied, is there so much evil in it, — so much darkness, igno- rance, misery, disappointment, warfare, hatred, disease, death ? — in brief, why is the world as we know it full of the unreasonable? Are all these gloomy facts but illusions, bad dreams of our finite existence, — facts unknown to the very God who is, and who knows, all truth ? No, — that cannot be the answer ; for then the question would recur : Why are these our endlessly tragic illusions permitted ? Why are we allowed by the world-plan to be so unreasonable as to dream these bad dreams which fill our finite life, and which in a way constitute this finite life ? And that question would then be precisely equivalent to the former question, and just as hard to solve. In brief, the problem of evil is the great prob- 171 WHAT IS VIiTAL IN CHRISTIANITY? lem that stands between our ordinary finite view and experience of life on the one hand and our consciousness of the reasonableness and the unity of the divine life on the other hand. Has this problem of evil any solution? I believe that it has a solution, and that this solution has long since been in substance grasped and figured forth in symbolic forms by the higher religious consciousness of our race. This solution, not abstractly stated, but intuitively grasped, has also expressed itself in the lives of the wisest and best of the moral heroes of all races and nations of men. The value of suffering, the good that is at the heart of evil, lies in the spiritual triumphs that the endurance and the overcoming of evil can bring to those who learn the hard, the deep but glorious, lesson of life. And of all the spiritual triumphs that the presence of evil makes possible, the noblest is that which is won when a man is ready, not merely to bear the ills of fortune tranquilly if they come, as the Stoic moralists required their 172 WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? followers to do, but when one is willing to suf- fer vicariously, freely, devotedly, ills that he might have avoided, but that the cause to which he is loyal, and the errors and sins that he himself did not commit, call upon him to suflEer in order that the world may be brought nearer to its destined union with the divine. In brief, as the mystics themselves often have said, sorrow — wisely encountered and freely borne — is one of the most precious privi- leges of the spiritual life. There is a certain lofty peace in triumphing over sorrow, which brings us to a consciousness of whatever is divine in life, in a way that mere joy, un- troubled and unwon, can never make known to us. Perfect through suffering, — that is the universal, the absolutely necessary law of the higher spiritual life. It is a law that holds for God and for man, for those amongst men who have already become enlightened through learning the true lessons of their own sorrows, and for those who, full of hope, still look for- ward to a life from which they in the main anticipate joy and worldly success, and who 173 WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? have yet to learn that the highest good of life is to come to them through whatever will- ing endurance of hardness they, as good sol- diers of their chosen loyal service, shall learn to choose or to endure as their offering to their sacred cause. This doctrine that I now state to you is indeed no ascetic doctrine. It does not for a moment imply that joy is a sin, or an evil symptom. What it does assert is that as long as the joys and successes which you seek are expected and sought by you simply as good fortune, which you try to win through mere cleverness — through mere technical skill in the arts of controlling fortune, — so long, I say, as this is your view of life, you know neither God's purpose nor the truth about man's des- tiny. Our always poor and defective skill in controlling fortune is indeed a valuable part of our reasonableness, since it is the natural basis upon which a higher spiritual life may be built. Hence the word, "Young men, be strong," and the common-sense injunction, "Be skillful, be practical," are good counsel. And so health, and physical prowess, and 174 WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? inner cheerfulness, are indeed wisely viewed as natural foundations for a higher life. But the higher life itself begins only when your health and your strength and your skill and your good cheer appear to you merely as talents, few or many, which you propose to devote, to surrender, to the divine order, to whatever ideal cause most inspires your loy- alty, and gives sense and divine dignity to your life, — talents, I say, that you intend to return to your master with usury. And the work of the higher life consists, not in winning good fortune, but in transmuting all the tran- sient values of fortune into eternal values. This you best do when you learn by experi- ence how your worst fortune may be glorified, through wise resolve, and through the grace that comes from your conscious union with the divine, into something far better than any good fortune could give to you ; namely, into a knowledge of how God himself endures evil, and triumphs over it, and lifts it out of itself, and wins it over to the service of good. The true and highest values of the spiritual 175 WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? world consist, I say, in the triumph over suf- fering, over sorrow, and over unreasonable- ness; and the triumph over these things may appear in our human lives in three forms : First, as mere personal fortitude, — as the stoical virtues in their simplest expression. The stoical virtues are the most elementary stage of the higher spiritual life. Fortitude is indeed required of every conscious agent who has control over himself at all. And for- titude, even in this simplest form as manly and strenuous endurance, teaches you eternal values that you can never learn unless you first meet with positive ills of fortune, and then force yourself to bear them in the loyal service of your cause. Willing endurance of suffering and grief is the price that you have to pay for conscious fidelity to any cause that is vast enough to be worthy of the loyalty of I a lifetime. And thus no moral agent can be I made perfect except through suffering borne I in the service of his cause. Secondly, the triumph over suffering appears in the higher form of that conscious union with the divine 176 WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? plan which occurs when you learn that love, and loyalty, and the idealizing of life, and the most precious and sacred of all human rela- tionships, are raised to their highest levels, are glorified, only when we not merely learn in our own personal case to suffer, to sorrow, to endure, and be spiritually strong, but when we learn to do these things together with our own brethren. For the comradeship of those who willingly practice fortitude not merely as a private virtue, but as brethren in sorrow, is a deeper, a sweeter, a more blessed com- radeship than ever is that of the lovers who have not yet been tried so as by fire. Then the deepest trials of life come to you and your friend together; and when, after the poor hu- man heart has indeed endured what for the time it is able to bear of anguish, it finds its lit- tle moment of rest, and when you are able once more to clasp the dear hand that would help if it could, and to look afresh into your friend's eyes and to see there the light of love as you could never see it before, — then, even in the darkness of this world, you catch some faint N 177 WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? far-off glimpse of how the spirit may yet triumph despite all, and of why sorrow may reveal to us, as we sorrow and endure together, what we should never have known of life, and of love, and of each other, and of the high places of the spirit, if this cup had been per- mitted to pass from us. But thirdly, and best, the triumph of the spirit over suffering is revealed to us not merely when we endure, when we learn through sorrow to prize our brethren more, and when we learn to see new powers in them and even in our poor selves, powers such as only sorrow could bring to light, — but when we also turn back from such experiences to real life again, remember- ing that sorrow's greatest lesson is the duty of offering ourselves more than ever to the practical service of some divine cause in this world. When one is stung to the heart and seemingly wholly overcome by the wounds of fortune, it sometimes chances that he learns after a while to arise from his agony, with the word : "Well then, if, whether by my own fault or without it, I must descend into hell, 178 WHAT IS VITAL IN CHjRISTIANITY ? I will remember that in this place of sorrow there are the other souls in torment, seeking light; I will help them to awake and arise. As I enter I will open the gates of hell that they may go forth." Whatever happens to me, I say, this is a possible result of sorrow. I have known those men and women who could learn such a lesson from sorrow and who could practice it. These are the ones who, coming up through great tribulation, show us the highest glimpse that we have in this life of the triumph of the spirit over sorrow. But these are the ones who are willing to suffer vicari- ously, to give their lives as a ransom for many. These tell us what atonement means. Well, these are, after all, but glimpses of truth. But they show us why the same law holds for all the highest spiritual life. They show us that God too must sorrow in order that he may triumph. Now the true doctrine of the incarnation and of the atonement is, in its essence, simply the conception of God's nature which this solution of the problem of evil requires. First, 179 WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? God expresses himself in this world of finitude, incarnates himself in this realm of human im- perfection, but does so in order that through finitude and imperfection, and sorrow and temporal loss, he may win in the eternal world (that is, precisely, in the conscious unity of his whole life) his spiritual triumph over evil. In this triumph consists his highest good, and ours. It is God's true and eternal triumph that speaks to us through the well-known word: "In this world ye shall have tribula- tion. But fear not; I have overcome the world." Mark, I do not say that we, just as we naturally are, are already the true and complete incarnation of God. No, it is in overcoming evil, in rising above our natural unreasonableness, in looking towards the divine unity, that we seek what Eckhart so well expressed when he said, Let God be born in the soul. Hence the doctrine of the incar- nation is no doctrine of the natural divinity of man. It is the doctrine which teaches that the world will desires our unity with the universal purpose, that God will be born in us 180 WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? and through our consent, that the whole mean- ing of our life is that it shall transmute tran- sient and temporal values into eternal meanings. Humanity becomes conscious God incarnate only in so far as humanity looks godwards ; that is, in the direction of the whole unity of the rational spiritual life. And now, secondly, the true doctrine of the atonement seems to me simply this : We, as we temporally and transiently are, are des- tined to win our union with the divine only through learning to triumph over our own evil, over the griefs of fortune, over the un- reasonableness and the sin that now beset us. This conquest we never accomplish alone. As the mother that bore you suffered, so the world suffers for you and through and in you until you win your peace in union with the divine will. Upon such suffering you actu- ally depend for your natural existence, for the toleration which your imperfect self con- stantly demands from the world, for the help that your helplessness so often needs. When you sorrow, then, remember that God sor- 181 WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? rows, — sorrows in you, since in all your fini- tude you still are part of his life ; sorrows for you, since it is the intent of the divine spirit, in the plan of its reasonable world, that you should not remain what you now are; and sorrows, too, in waiting for higher fulfillment, since indeed the whole universe needs your spiritual triumph for the sake of its completion. On the other hand, this doctrine of the atonement means that there is never any com- pleted spiritual triumph over sorrow which is not accompanied with the willingness to suffer vicariously ; that is, with the will not merely to endure bravely, but to force one's very sorrow to be an aid to the common cause of all mankind, to give one's life as a ransom for one's cause, to use one's bitterest and most crushing grief as a means towards the raising of all life to the divine level. It is not enough to endure. Your duty is to make your grief a source of blessing. Thus only can sorrow bring you into conscious touch with the uni- versal life. Now all this teaching is old. The church 182 WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? began to learn its own version of this solution of the problem of evil when first it sorrowed over its lost master; when first it began to say: "It was needful that Christ should suffer"; when first in vision and in legend it began to conceive its glorified Lord. When later it said, "In the God-man Christ God suffered, once for all and in the flesh, to save us ; in him alone the Word became flesh and dwelt among us," the forms of its religious imagination were transient, but the truth of which these forms were the symbol was ever- lasting. And we sum up this truth in two theses : First, God wins perfection through expressing himself in a finite life and triumph- ing over and through its very finitude. And secondly, Our sorrow is God's sorrow. God means to express himself by winning us through the very triumph over evil to unity with the perfect life ; and therefore our fulfill- ment, like our existence, is due to the sorrow and the triumph of God himself. These two theses express, I believe, what is vital in Christianity. 183 ESSAY IV THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH IN THE LIGHT OF RECENT DISCUSSION ESSAY IV THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH IN THE LIGHT OF RECENT DISCUSSION! r MHE question : What is Truth ? is a typical philosophical problem. But it has been by no means at all times equally prominent throughout the history of philosophy. The ages in which it has come to the front have been those wherein, as at present, a keenly critical spirit has been predominant. At such times metaphysical interests are more or less subordinated, for a while, to the problems about method, to logical researches, or to the investigations which constitute a Theory of Knowledge. Such periods, as we know, have recurred more than once since scholastic philosophy declined. And such a period was that which Kant dominated. But the sort of inquiry 1 An address delivered before the International Congress of Philosophy at Heidelberg, in September, 1908. 187 THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH into the nature of truth which Kant's doc- trine initiated quickly led, at the close of the eighteenth century, to a renewed passion for metaphysical construction. The problem re- garding the nature of truth still occupied a very notable place in the doctrine of Fichte. It constituted one of the principal concerns, also, of Hegel's so much neglected and ill- understood "Phanomenologie des Geistes." And yet both in the minds of the contempo- raries of Fichte and of Hegel, and still more in those of their later disciples and opponents, the problem of truth went again into the back- ground when compared with the metaphysi- cal, the ethical, and the theological interests which constructive idealism and its oppo- nents, in those days, came to represent. Hence wherever one looks, in the history of philo- sophical opinion between 1830 and 1870, one sees how the problem of truth, although never wholly neglected, still remained, for some dec- ades, out of the focus of philosophical interest. But the scene rapidly changed about and after the year 1870. Both the new psychol- 188 IN THE LIGHT OF DISCUSSION ogy and the new logic, which then began to flourish, seemed, erelong, almost equally to emphasize the importance of a reconsidera- tion of the problem as to the nature of truth. These doctrines did this, especially because the question whether logic was henceforth to be viewed as a part of psychology became once more prominent, so soon as the psychological researches then undertaken had attracted the strong interest of the philosophical public. And meanwhile the revived interest in Kant, growing, as it did, side by side with the new psychology, called for a reinterpretation of the problems of the critical philosophy. The reawakening of Idealism, in England and in America, called attention, in its own way, to the same problem. The modern philosophi- cal movement in France, — a movement which was, from the outset, almost equally made up of a devotion to the new psychology and of an interest in the philosophy of the sciences, has cooperated in insisting upon the need of a revision of the theory of truth. And to com- plete the story of the latest philosophy, recent 189 THE PROBLEM, OF TRUTH tendencies in ethics, emphasizing as they have done the problems of individuahsm, and de- manding a far-reaching reconsideration of the whole nature of moral truth, have added the weight of their own, often passionate, interest to the requirements which are here in question. The total result is that we are just now in the storm and stress of a reexamination of the whole problem of truth. About this prob- lem the philosophical interest of to-day cen- ters. Consequently, whether you discuss the philosophy of Nietzsche or of mathematics, — whether the Umwertung aller Werte or the "class of all classes," — whether Mr. Russell's " Contradiction " or the Uebermensch is in ques- tion, — or whether none of these things at- tract you at all, so that your inquiries relate to psychology, or to evolution, or to the con- cepts of the historical sciences, or to whatever other region of philosophy you please, — always the same general issue has sooner or later to be faced. You are involved in some phase of the problem about the nature of truth. 190 IN THE LIGH.T OF DISCUSSION So much, then, as a bare indication of the historical process which has led us into our present position. I propose, in the present address, to offer an interpretation of some of the lessons that, as I think, we may learn from the recent discussions of the problem whose place in all our minds I have thus indicated. It seems natural to begin such a discussion by a classification of the main motives which are represented by the principal recent theories regarding the nature of truth. In enumer- ating these motives I need not dwell, in this company, upon those historical inferences and traditions whose presence in recent thought is most easily and universally recognized. That Empiricism, — due to the whole his- tory of the English school, modified in its later expressions by the Positivism of a former generation, and by the types of Naturalism which have resulted from the recent progress of the special sciences, — that, I say, such empiricism has affected our modern discussion 191 THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH of the nature of truth, — this we all recognize. I need not insist upon this fact. Moreover, the place which Kant occupies in the history of the theory of truth, — that again is some- thing which it is needless here to emphasize. And that the teaching of Fichte and of Hegel, as well as still other idealistic traditions, are also variously represented by present phases of opinion regarding our problem, we shall not now have to rehearse. I presuppose, then, these historical commonplaces. It is not, however, in terms of these that I shall now try to classify the motives to which the latest theories of truth are due. These recent motives, viewed apart from those unquestionably real influences of the older traditions of the history of philosophy are, to my mind, three in number : First, there is the motive especially sug- gested to us modern men by the study of the history of institutions, by our whole interest in what are called evolutionary processes, and by a large part of our recent psychological investigation. This is the motive which leads 192 IN THE LIGHT OF DISCUSSION many of us to describe human life altogether as a more or less progressive adjustment to a natural environment. This motive incites us, therefore, to Judge all human products and all human activities as instruments for the preservation and enrichment of man's natural existence. Of late this motive, whose modern forms are extremely familiar, has directly affected the theory of truth. The result appears in a part, although not in the whole, of what the doctrines known as Instru- mentalism. Humanism, and Pragmatism have been of late so vigorously teaching, in England, in America, in Italy, in France, and, in still other forms, in Germany. From the point of view which this motive suggests, human opinions, judgments, ideas, are part of the effort of a live creature to adapt himself to his natural world. Ideas and beliefs are, in a word, organic functions. And truth, in so far as we men can recognize truth at all, is a certain value belonging to such ideas. But this value itself is simply like the value which any natural organic function o 193 THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH possesses. Ideas and opinions are instru- ments whose use lies in the fact that, if they are the right ones, they preserve life and ren- der life stable. Their existence is due to the same natural causes that are represented in our whole organic evolution. Accordingly, assertions or ideas are true in proportion as they accomplish this their biological and psychological function. The value of truth ■As itself a biological and psychological value. The true ideas are the ones which adapt us for life as human beings. Truth, therefore, grows with our growth, changes with our needs, and is to be estimated in accordance with our success. The result is that all truth is as relative as it is instrumental, as human as it is useful. The motive which recent Instrumentalism or Pragmatism expresses, in so far as it takes this view of the nature of truth, is of course in one sense an ancient motive. Every culti- vated nation, upon beginning to think, recog- nizes in some measure such a motive. The Greeks knew this motive, and deliberately 194 IN THE LIGHT OF DISCUSSION connected both the pursuit and the estimate of truth with the art of life in ways whose problematic aspects the Sophists already illus- trated. Socrates and his followers, and later the Stoics as well as the Epicureans, also con- sidered, in their various ways, this instru- mental aspect of the nature of truth. And even in the Hindoo Upanishads one can find instances of such humanistic motives influ- encing the inquiry into the problem of truth. But it is true that the historical science of the nineteenth century, beginning, as it did, with its elaborate study of the history of institu- tions, and culminating in the general doctrines regarding evolution, has given to this motive an importance and a conscious definiteness such as makes its recent embodiment in Prag- matism a very modern and, in many ways, a novel doctrine about the nature of truth. II But closely bound up with this first motive in our recent thinking there is a second mo- tive, which in several ways very strongly con- 195 THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH trasts with the first. Yet in many minds these two motives are so interwoven that the writers in question are unaware which motive they are following when they utter their views about the nature of truth. No doubt one may indeed recognize the contrast between these motives, and may, nevertheless, urge good reasons for following in some measure both of them, each in its own way. Yet who- ever blindly confuses them is inevitably led into hopeless contradictions. As a fact, a large number of our recent pragmatists have never learned consciously to distinguish them. Yet they are indeed easy to distinguish, how- ever hard it may be to see how to bring them into a just synthesis. This second motive is the same as that which, in ethics, is responsible for so many sorts of recent Individualism. It is the mo- tive which in the practical realm Nietzsche glorified. It is the longing to be self-possessed and inwardly free, the determination to submit to no merely external authority. I need not pause to dwell upon the fact that, 196 IN THE LIGHT OF DISCUSSION in its application to the theory of truth, precisely as in its well-known applications to ethics, this motive is Protean. Every one of us is, I suppose, more or less under its influence. Sometimes, this motive appears mainly as a skeptical motive. Then it criticizes, destructively, traditional truth and thereupon leaves us empty of all assurances. But some- times it assumes the shape of a sovereign sort of rationalism, whereby the thinking subject, first rebelling against outer authority, creates his own laws, but then insists that all others shall obey these laws. In other cases, how- ever, it takes the form of a purely subjective idealism, confident of its own but claiming no authority. Or again, with still diflFerent re- sults, it consciously unites its ethical with its theoretical interests, calls itself "Personal Idealism," and regards as its main purpose, not only the freeing of the individual from all spiritual bondage, theoretical and practical, but also the winning for him of an inner har- mony of life. In general, in its highest as in 197 THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH some of its less successful embodiments, when it considers the sort of truth that we ought most to pursue, this motive dwells, as Pro- fessor Eucken has so effectively taught it to dwell, upon the importance of a Lebensan- schauung as against the rigidity and the pre- tended finality of a mere Weltanschauung. But meanwhile, upon occasion, this same motive embodies itself in various tendencies of the sort known as Irrationalism. In this last case, it points out to us how the intelli- gence, after all, is but a single and a very nar- row function of our nature, which must not be allowed to supersede or even too much to dominate the rest of our complex and essen- tially obscure, if fascinating, life. Perhaps, on the very highest levels of life, as it here- upon suggests to us : Gefiihl ist alles. If not, then at all events, we have the alternative formula : Im Anfang war die Tat. Or, once again, the solving word of the theory of truth is Voluntarism. Truth is won by willing, by creative activities. The doer, or perhaps the deed, not only finds, but is, the truth. Truth 198 IN THE LIGHT OF DISCUSSION is not to be copied, but to be created. It is living truth. And life is action. I have thus attempted to indicate, by well- known phrases, the nature of this second motive, — one whose presence in our recent theories of truth I believe that you will all recognize. Despite the Protean character and (as you will all at once see) the mutually con- flicting characters of its expressions, you will observe, I think, its deeper unity, and also its importance as an influence in our age. With us at present it acts as a sort of ferment, and also as an endless source of new enter- prises. It awakens us to resist the most vari- ous kinds of doctrinal authority, — scientific, clerical, academic, popular. It inspires count- less forms of Modernism, both within and without the boundaries of the various confes- sions of Christendom. As an effective motive, one finds it upon the lowest as also upon the highest levels of our intellectual and moral life. In some sense, as I have said, we all share it. It is the most characteristic and the most problematic of the motives of the 199 THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH modern world. Anarchism often appeals to it; yet the most saintly form of devotion, the most serious efforts for the good of man- kind, and our sternest and loftiest spiritual leaders, agree in employing it, and in regard- ing it as in some sense sacred. Our age shares this motive with the age of the French Revolution, of the older Idealistic movement, and of the Romantic School. All the more unfortunate, as I think, is the fact that many who glory in the originality of their own recent opinions about the nature of truth, know so little of the earlier history of this mo- tive, read so seldom the lesson of the past, and are thus so ill-prepared to appreciate both the spiritual dignity and the pathetic paradox of this tendency to make the whole problem of truth identical with the problem of the rights and the freedom of the individual. Ill I turn herewith to the third of the motives that I have to enumerate. In its most general form it is a very ancient and familiar motive. 200 IN THE LIGHT OF DISCUSSION It is, indeed, very diflferent from both of the foregoing. Superficially regarded, it seems, at first sight, less an expression of interests that appear ethical. At heart, however, it is quite as deep a motive as either of the others, and it is in fact a profoundly ethical motive as well as a genuinely intellectual one. One may say that, in a sense and to some degree, it pervades the whole modern scientific move- ment, is present wherever two or three are gathered together for a serious exchange of scientific opinions, and is, in most cases, the one motive that, in scientific assemblies, is more or less consciously in mind whenever somebody present chances to refer to the love of truth, or to the scientific conscience of his hearers. I have called this third on our list of motives an ancient motive. It is so. Yet in modern times it has assumed very novel forms, and has led to scientific and, in the end, to philo- sophical enterprises which, until recently, nobody would have thought possible. It would be unwise at this point to attempt 201 J THE PROBLtEM OF TRUTH to define this motive in abstract terms. I must first exemplify it. When I say that it is the motive to which the very existence of the exact sciences is due, and when I add the remark that our scientific common sense knows this motive as the fondness for dispas- sionately weighing evidence, and often simply names it the love of objectivity, I raise more questions in your minds regarding the nature of this motive than at this point I can answer. If, however, anybody suggests, say from the side of some form of recent pragmatism, that I must be referring to the nowadays so deeply discredited motives of a pure "Intellectual- ism," I repudiate at once the suggestion. The motive to which I refer is intensely practical. Men have lived and died for it, and have found it inestimably precious. I know of no mo- tive purer or sweeter in human life. Mean- while, it indeed chances to be the motive which has partially embodied itself in Pure Mathe- matics. And neither the tribe of Nietzsche nor the kindred of the instrumentalists have been able justly to define it. 202 IN THE LIGHT OF DISCUSSION What I am just now interested to point out is that this motive has entered, in very novel ways, into the formulation of certain modern theories of truth. And when I speak of its most novel forms of expression, the historical process to which I refer is the development of the modern critical study of the foundations of mathematics. To philosophical students in general the existence of metageometrical researches, which began at the outset of the nineteenth century, has now been made fairly familiar. But the non-Euclidean geometry is but a small frag- ment of that investigation of the foundations of mathematical truth which went on so rapidly during the nineteenth century. Among the most important of the achievements of the century in this direction were the new defini- tions of continuity and the irrational numbers, the modern exact theory of limits, and the still infant theory of Assemblages. Most important of all, to my mind, were certain discoveries in the field of Logic of which I shall later say a word. I mention these mat- 203 THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH ters here as examples of the influence of a mo- tive whose highly technical applications may make it seem to one at a distance hopelessly intellectualistic, but whose relation to the theory of truth is close, just because, as I think, its relation to truly ethical motives is also extremely intimate. The motive in question showed itself at \ the outset of the nineteenth century, and later in the form of an increased conscientiousness regarding what should be henceforth accepted as a rigid proof in the exact sciences. The Greek geometers long ago invented the con- ception of rigid methods of proof and brought their own methods, in certain cases, very near to perfection. But the methods that they used proved to be inapplicable to many of the problems of modern mathematics. The re- sult was that, in the seventeenth and eight- eenth centuries, the mathematical sciences rapidly took possession of new realms of truth, but in doing so sacrificed much of the old classic rigidity. Nevertheless, regarded as the instrumentalists now desire us to regard 204 IN THE LIGHT OP DISCUSSION truth, the mathematical methods of the eight- eenth century were indeed incomparably more successful in adjusting the work of the physical sciences to the demands of experience than the methods of the Greek geometers had ever been. If instrumentalism had been the whole story of man's interest in truth, the later developments would have been impos- sible. Nevertheless the modern scientific con- science somehow became increasingly dissat- isfied with its new mathematical possessions. It regarded them as imperfectly won. It undertook to question, in a thousand ways, its own methods and its own presuppositions. It learned to reject altogether methods of proof which, for a time, had satisfied the greatest constructive geniuses of earlier mod- ern mathematics. The result has been the development of profoundly novel methods, both of research and of instruction in the exact sciences. These methods have in many ways brought to a still higher perfection the Greek ideal of rigid proof. Yet the same methods have shown themselves to be no 205 THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH ■mere expressions of a pedantic intellectualism. They have meant clearness, self-possession, and a raising of the scientific conscience to higher levels. Meanwhile, they proved po- tent both in conquering new realms and in discovering the wonderful connections that we now find linking together types of exact truth which at first sight appeared to be hope- lessly diverse. In close union with the development of these new methods in the exact sciences, and, as I may say, in equally close union with this new scientific conscience, there has gradually come into being a reformed Logic, — a logic still very imperfectly expounded in even the best modern textbooks, and as yet hardly grasped, in its unity, by any one investigator, — but a logic which is rapidly progressing, which is full of beauty, and which is destined, I believe, profoundly to influence, in the near future, our whole philosophy of truth. This new logic appears to offer to us an endless realm for detailed researches. - As a set of investiga- tions it is as progressive as any instrumentalist 206 IN THE LIGHT OF DISCUSSION can desire. The best names for it, I think, are the names employed by several different thinkers who have contributed to its growth. Our American logician, Mr. Charles Peirce, named it, years ago, the Logic of Relatives. Mr. Russell has called it the Logic, or the Calculus, of Relations. Mr. Kempe has pro- posed to entitle it the Theory of Mathe- matical Form. One might also call it a new and general theory of the Categories. Seen from a distance, as I just said, it appears to be a collection of highly technical special re- searches, interesting only to a few. But when one comes into closer contact with any one of its serious researches, one sees that its main motive is such as to interest every truthful and reflective inquirer who really grasps that motive, while the conception of truth which it forces upon our attention is a conception which neither of the other motives just char- acterized can be said adequately to express. In so far as the new logic has up to this time given shape to philosophical theories of truth, it in part appears to tend towards what the 207 THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH pragmatists nowadays denounce as Intellec- tualism. As a fact Mr. Bertrand Russell, the brilliant and productive leader of this move- ment in England, and his philosophical friend Mr. George Moore, seem to regard their own researches as founded upon a sort of new Realism, which views truth as a realm wholly independent of the constructive activities by which we ourselves find or pursue truth. But the fact that Mr. Charles Peirce, one of the most inventive of the creators of the new logic, is also viewed by the Pragmatists as the founder of their own method, shows how the relation of the new logic to the theory of truth is something that still needs to be made clear. As a fact, I believe that the outcome of the new logic will be a new synthesis of Voluntarism and Absolutism. What I just now emphasize is, that this modern revision of the concepts of the exact sciences, and this creation of a new logic, are in any case due to a motive which is at once theoretical and ethical. It is a motive which has defined standards of rigidity in proof such 208 IN THE LIGHT OF DISCUSSION as were, until recently, unknown. In this sense it has meant a deepening and quicken- ing of the scientific conscience. It has also seemed, in so far, to involve a rejection of that love of expediency in thinking which is now a favorite watchword of pragmatists and instru- mentalists. And when viewed from this side the new logic obviously tends to emphasize some form of absolutism, to reject relativism in thinking, to make sterner requirements upon our love of truth than can be expressed in terms of instrumentalism or of individual- ism. And yet the motive which lies beneath this whole movement has been, I insist, no barren intellectualism. The novelty of the constructions to which this motive has led, — the break with tradition which the new geometry (for instance) has involved, — such things have even attracted, from a distance, the attention of some of the least exactly trained of the pragmatist thinkers, and have aroused their hasty and uncomprehending sympathy. "This non-Euclidean geometry," they have said, "these novel postulates, these P 209 THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH '/me Sehdpfungen des menschlichen Geistes' (as Dedekind, himself one of the great crea- tive minds of the new logical movement, has called the numbers), — well, surely these must be instances in favor of our theory of truth. Thus, as we should have predicted, novelties appear in what was supposed to be an abso- lutely fixed region. Thus (as Professor James words the matter), human thought 'boils over,' and ancient truths alter, grow, or decay." Yet when modern pragmatists and relationists use such (expressions, they fail to comprehend the fact that the new discoveries in these logi- cal and mathematical fields simply exemplify a more rigid concept of truth than ever, before the new movement began, had been defined in the minds of the mathematicians them- selves. The non-Euclidean geometry, strange to say, is not a discovery that we are any freer than we were before to think as we like re- garding the system of geometrical truth. It is one part only of what Hilbert has called the "logical analysis" of our concept of space. "When we take this analysis as a whole, it 210 IN THE LIGHT OF DISCUSSION involves a deeper insight than Eudid could possibly possess into the unchangeable ne- cessities which bind together the system of logical relationships that the space of our experience merely exemplifies. Nothing could be more fixed than are these necessities. As for the numbers, which Dedekind called "freie Schopfungen," — well, his own masterpiece of logical theory is a discovery and a rigid demonstration of a very remarkable and thoroughly objective truth about the funda- mei^tal relations in terms of which we all of us do our thinking. His proof that all of the endless wealth of the properties of the ordinal numbers follows from a certain synthesis of two of the simplest of our logical conceptions, neither one of which, when taken alone, seems to have anything to do with the conception of order or of number, — this proof, I say, is a direct contribution to a systematic theory of the categories, and, as such, is, to the logical inquirer, a dramatically surprising discovery of a realm of objective truth, which nobody is free to construct or to abandon at his pleas- 211 THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH ure. If this be relativism, it is tlie relativism of an eternal system of relations. If this be freedom, it is the divine freedom of a self- determined, but, for that very reason, abso- lutely necessary fashion of thought and of activity. Well, — to sum up, — this third motive in modern inquiry has already led us to the dis- covery of what are, for us, novel truths re- garding the fundamental relations upon which all of our thought and all of our activity rest. These newly discovered truths possess an absoluteness which simply sets at naught the empty trivialities of current relativism. Such truth has, in fact, the same sort of relation to the biologically "instrumental" value of our thinking processes as the Theory of Numbers (that "divine science," as Gauss called it) has to the account books of the shopkeeper. And yet, as I must insist, the motive that has led us to this type of absolutism is no pure intellectualism. And the truth in question is as much a truth about our modes of activity as the purest voluntarism could desire it to 212 IN THE LIGHT OF DISCUSSION be. In brief, there is, I believe, an absolute voluntarism, a theory of the way in which activities must go on if they go on at all. And, as I believe, just such a theory is that which in future is to solve for us the problem of the nature of truth. I have illustrated our third motive at length. Shall I now try to name it ? Well, I should say that it is at bottom the same motive that lay at the basis of Kant's Critical Philosophy ; but it is this motive altered by the influence of the modern spirit. It is the motive whichi leads us to seek for clear and exact self-con sciousness regarding the principles both of our belief and of our conduct. This motive leads us to be content only in case we can indeed find principles of knowledge and of action, — principles, not mere transient ex- pediences, and not mere caprices. On the other hand, this motive bids us decline to ac- cept mere authority regarding our principles. It requires of us freedom along with insight, exactness side by side with assurance, and self-criticism as well as search for the ultimate. 213 THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH IV In tlius sketching for you these three mo- tives, I have been obUged to suggest my esti- mate of their significance. But this estimate has so far been wholly fragmentary. Let me next indicate the sense in which I believe that each of these three motives tends, in a very important sense, to throw light upon the genuine theory of truth. I begin here with the first of the three mo- tives, — namely, with the motive embodied in recent instrumentalism. Instrumentalism views truth as simply the value belonging to certain ideas in so far as these ideas are bio- logical functions of our organisms, and psycho- logical functions whereby we direct our choices and attain our successes. Wide and manifold are the inductive evi- dences which the partisans of such theories of truth adduce in support of their theory. There is the evidence of introspection and of the modern psychological theory of the un- derstanding. Opinions, beliefs, ideas, — what 214 IN THE LIGHT OF DISCUSSION are they all but accompaniments of the motor processes whereby, as a fact, our organisms are adjusted to their environment ? To dis- cover the truth of an idea, what is that for any one of us but to observe our success in our adjustment to our situation ? Knowledge is power. Common sense long ago noted this fact. Empiricism has also since taught us that we deal only with objects of experience. The new instrumentalism adds to the old empiricism simply the remark that we possess truth in so far as we learn how to control these objects of experience. And to this more direct evidence for the instrumental theory of truth is added the evidence derived from the whole work of the modern sciences. In what sense are scientific hypotheses and theories found to be true ? Only in this sense, says the instrumentalist, — only in this sense, that through these hypotheses we acquire con- stantly new sorts of control over the course of our experience. If we turn from scientific to moral truth, we find a similar result. The moral ideas of any social order are practical 215 THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH plans and practical demands in terms of which this social order endeavors, by controlling the activities of its members, to win general peace and prosperity. The truth of moral ideas lies solely in this their empirical value in adjusting individual activities to social de- mands, and in thus winning general success for all concerned. Such are mere hints of the evidences that can be massed to illustrate the view that the truth of ideas is actually tested, and is to be tested, by their experienced workings, by their usefulness in enabling man to control his em- pirically given situation. If this be the case, then truth is always relative to the men con- cerned, to their experience, and to their situa- tions. Truth grows, changes, and refuses to be tested by absolute standards. It haf- pens to ideas, in so far as they work. It belongs to them when one views them as in- struments to an end. The result of all this is a relativistic, an evolutionary, theory of [truth. For such a view logic is a part of ^psychology, — a series of comments upon 216 IN THE LIGHT OF DISCUSSION certain common characteristics of usefully working ideas and opinions. Ethical theory is a branch of evolutionary sociology. And in general, if you want to test the truth of ideas and opinions, you must look forward ! to their workings, not backward to the prin- j ciples from which they might be supposed to i follow, nor yet upwards to any absolute stand- \ ards which may be supposed to guide them, \ and least of all to any realm of fixed facts that j they are supposed to be required, willy hilly, j to copy. Truth is no barren repetition of a , dead reality, but belongs, as a quahty, to the j successful deeds by which we produce for our- / selves the empirical realities that we want. ] Such is the sort of evidence which my friends. Professor James and Professor Dewey, and their numerous followers, in recent dis- cussion, have advanced in favor of this in- strumental, practical, and evolutionary theory of truth. Such are the considerations which, in other forms, Mach has illustrated by means of his history and analyses of the work of mod- ern science. 317 THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH Our present comment upon this theory must be given in a word. It contains indeed a report of the truth about our actual human hfe, and about the sense in which we all seek and test and strive for truth, precisely in so far as truth-seeking is indeed a part of our present organic activities. But the sense in which this theory is thus indeed a true ac- count of a vast range of the phenomena of human life is not reducible to the sense which the theory itself ascribes to the term "truth." For suppose I say, reporting the facts of the history of science: "Newton's theory of gravitation proved to be true, and its truth lay in this : The definition and the original testing of the theory consisted in a series of the organic and psychological functions of the live creature Newton. His theories were for him true in so far as, after hard work, to be sure, and long waiting, they enabled him to control and to predict certain of his own experiences of the facts of nature. The same theories are still true for us because they have successfully guided, and still guide, certain 218 IN THE LIGHT OF DISCUSSION observations and experiences of the men of to-day." This statement reduces the truth of Newton's theory to the type of truth which instrumentalism demands. But in what sense is my account of this matter itself a true ac- count of the facts of human life .'' Newton is dead. As mortal man he succeeds no longer. His ideas, as psychological functions, died with him. His earthly experiences ceased when death shut his eyes. Wherein consists to-day, then, the historical truth that Newton ever existed at all, or that the countless other men whom his theories are said to have guided ever lived, or experienced, or succeeded .'' And if I speak of the men of to-day, in what sense is the statement true that they now live, or have experience, or use Newton's theory, or succeed with it as an instrument .'' No doubt all these historical and socially significant statements of mine are indeed substantially true. But does their truth consist in my suc- cess in using the ideal instruments that I use when I utter these assertions ? Evidently I mean, by calling these my own assertions true, 219 THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH much more than I can interpret in terms of my experience of their success in guiding my act. In brief, the truth that historical events ever happened at all; the truth that there ever was a past time, or that there ever will be a future time ; the truth that anybody ever succeeds, except in so far as I myself, just now, in the use of these my present instruments for the transient control of my passing ex- perience chance to succeed; the truth that there is any extended course of human experi- ence at all, or any permanence, or any long- lasting success, — well, all such truths, they are indeed true, but their truth cannot pos- sibly consist in the instrumental value which any man ever experiences as belonging to any of his own personal ideas or acts. Nor can this truth consist in anything that even a thousand or a million men can separately ex- perience, each as the success of his own ideal instruments. For no one man experiences the success of any man but himself, or of any instruments but his own ; and the truth, say, 220 IN THE LIGHT OF DISCUSSION of Newton's theory consists, by hypothesis, in the perfectly objective fact that generations of men have really succeeded in guiding their experience by this theory. But that this is the fact no man, as an individual man, ever has experienced or will experience under hu- man conditions. When an instrumentalist, then, gives to us his account of the empirical truth that men obtain through using their ideas as instru- ments to guide and to control their own ex- perience, his accoimt of human organic and psychological functions may be, — yes, is, — as far as it goes, true. But if it is true at all, then it is true as an account of the characters actually common to the experience of a vast number of men. It is true, if at all, as a report of the objective constitution of a certain total- ity of facts which we call human experience. It is, then, true in a sense which no man can ever test by the empirical success of his own ideas as his means of controlling his own experiences. Therefore the truth which we must ascribe to instrumentalism, if we regard 221 THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH it as a true doctrine at all, is precisely a truth, not in so far as instrumentalism is itself an instrument for helping on this man's or that man's way of controlling his experience. If instrumentalism is true, it is true as a report of facts about the general course of history, of evolution, and of human experience, — facts which transcend every individual man's experience, verifications, and successes. To make its truth consist in the mere sum of the various individual successes is equally vain, unless indeed that sum is a fact. But no in dividual man ever experiences that fact. Instrumentalism, consequently, expresses no motive which by itself alone is adequate to constitute any theory of truth. And yet, as I have pointed out, I doubt not that instrumen- talism gives such a substantially true account of man's natural functions as a truth seeker. Only the sense in which instrumentalism is a true account of human life is opposed to the adequacy of its own definition of truth. The first of our three motives is, therefore, useful only if we can bring it into synthesis with 222 IN THE LIGHT OF DISCUSSION other motives. In fact it is useless to talk of the success of the human spirit in its efforts to win control over experience, unless there is indeed a human spirit which is more than any man's transient consciousness of his own ef- forts, and unless there is an unity of experi- ence, an unity objective, real, and supratem- poral in its significance. V Our result so far is that man indeed uses his ideas as means of controlling his experi- ence, and that truth involves such control, but that truth cannot be defined solely in terms of our personal experience of our own success in obtaining this control. Hereupon the second of the motives which we have found influencing the recent theories of truth comes to our aid. If instrumentalism needs a supplement, where are we, the indi- vidual thinkers, to look for that supplement, except in those inner personal grounds which incline each of us to make his own best inter- pretation of life precisely as he can, in accord- 223 THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH ance with his own will to succeed, and in ac- cordance with his individual needs ? To be sure, as one may still insist, we are always dealing with live human experience, and with its endless constraints and limita- tions. And when we accept or reject opin- ions, we do so because, at the time, these opinions seem to us to promise a future empirical "working," a successful "control" over experience, — in brief, a success such as appeals to live human beings. Instrumen- talism in so far correctly defines the nature which truth possesses in so far as we ever actually verify truth. And of course we al- ways believe as we do because we are subject to the constraint of our present experience. But since we are social beings, and beings with countless and varied intelligent needs, we constantly define and accept as valid very numerous ideas and opinions whose truth we do not hope personally to verify. Our act in accepting such unverified truths is (as Pro- fessor James states the case) essentially simi- lar to the act of the banker in accepting credit 224 IN THE LIGHT OF DISCUSSION values instead of cash. A note or other evi- dence of value is good if it can be turned into cash at some agreed time, or under specified conditions. Just so, an idea is true, not merely at the moment when it enables some- body to control his own experience. It is true if, under definable conditions which, as a fact, you or I may never verify, it would enable some human being whose purposes agree with ours to control his own experience. If we personally do not verify a given idea, we can still accept it then upon its credit value. We can accept it precisely as paper, which can- not now be cashed, is accepted by one who regards that paper as, for a given purpose, or to a given extent, equivalent to cash. A bond, issued by a government, may promise pay- ment after fifty years. The banker may to- day accept such a bond as good, and may pay cash for it, although he feels sure that he personally will never live to see the principal repaid by the borrower. Now, as Professor James would say, it is in this sense that our ideas about past time, and Q 225 THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH about the content of other men's minds, and about the vast physical world, "with all its stars and milky ways," are accepted as true. Such ideas have for us credit values. We accept these ideas as true because we need to trade on credits. Borrowed truth is as valuable in the spiritual realm as borrowed money is in the commercial realm. To be- lieve a now unverified truth is simply to say : "I accept that idea, upon credit, as equivalent to the cash payments in terms of live experi- ence which, as I assert, I could get in case I had the opportunity." And so much it is indeed easy to make out about countless assertions which we all accept. They are assertions about experience, but not about our present experience. They are made under various constraints of convention, habit, desire, and private conviction, but they are opinions whose truth is for us dependent upon our personal assent and acquiescence. Herewith, however, we face what is, for more than one modern theory of truth, a very critical question. Apparently it is one thing 226 IN THE LIGHT OF DISCUSSIOIS to say: "I accept this opinion upon credit," and quite another thing to say: "The truth of this opinion consists, solely and essentially, in the fact that it is credited by me." In seeming, at least, it is one thing to assert : "We trade upon credit; we deal in credits," and quite another thing to say: "There is no value behind this bond or behind this bit of irredeemable paper currency, except its credit value." But perhaps a modern theory of truth may decline to accept such a dif- ference as ultimate. Perhaps this theory may say : The truth is the credit. As a fact, a vast number of our human opinions — those, for instance, which relate to the past, or to the contents of other men's minds — ap- pear, within the range of our personal experi- ence, as credits whose value we, who believe the opinions, cannot hope ever to convert into the cash of experience. The banker who holds the bond not maturing within his own life- time can, after all, if the bond is good, sell it to-day for cash. And that truth which he can personally and empirically test whenever he 227 THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH wants to test, is enough to warrant his act in accepting the credit. But I, who am confident of the truths of history, or of geology, or of physics, and who beheve in the minds of othet men, — I accept as valid countless opinions that are for me, in my private capacity and froni an empirical point of view, nothing but irredeemable currency. In vain do I say : "I could convert these ideas into the cash of experience if I were some other man, or if I were living centuries ago instead of to-day." For the question simply recurs : In what sense are these propositions about my own possible experience true when I do not test their truth, — yes, true although I, personally, cannot test their truth ? These credits, irredeem- able in terms of the cash of my experience, — wherein consists their true credit value ? Here one apparently stands at the parting of the ways. One can answer this question by saying: "The truth of these assertions (or their falsity, if they are false) belongs to them whether I credit them or no, whether I verify them or not. Their truth or their 228 IN THE LIGHT OF DISCUSSION falsity is their own character and is independ- ent of my credit and my verification." But to say this appears to be, after all, just the intellectualism which so many of our modern pragmatists condemn. There remains, how- ever, one other way. One can say : " The truth of the unverified assertions consists simply in the fact that,toT our own private and individual ends, they are credited. Credit is relative to the creditor. If he finds that, on the whole, it meets his purpose to credit, he credits. And there is no truth, apart from present veri- fications, except this truth of credit." In other words, that is true for me which I find myself accepting as my way of reacting to my situation. This, I say, is a theory of truth which can be attempted. Consider what a magnificent freedom such a theory gives to all of us. Credit is relative to the creditor. To be sure, if ever the day of reckoning should come, one would be subject, at the moment of verifica- tion, to the constraints of experience. At such times, one would either get the cash or 229 THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH would not get it. But after all very few of our ideas about this great and wonderful world of ours ever are submitted to any such sharp tests. History and the minds of other men, — well, our personal opinions about these remain credits that no individual amongst us can ever test for himself. As your world is mainly made up of such things, your view of your world remains, then, sub- ject to your own needs. It ought to be thus subject. There is no absolute truth. There is only the truth that you need. Enter into the possession of your spiritual right. Bor- row Nietzsche's phraseology. Call the truth of ordinary intellectualism mere Sklavenwahr- heit. It pretends to be absolute ; but only the slaves believe in it. "Henceforth," so some Zarathustra of a new theory of truth may say, "I teach you Herrenwahrheit." Credit what you choose to credit. ^ Truth is made for man, not man for truth. Let your life "boil over" into new truth as much as you find such effervescence convenient. When, apart from the constraints of present 230 IN THE LIGHT. OF DISCUSSION verification, and apart from mere convention, I say : "This opinion of mine is true," I mean simply : "To my mind, lord over its own needs, this assertion now appears expedient." Whenever my expediency changes, my truth will change. But does anybody to-day hold just this theory of truth ? I hesitate to make accusa- tions which some of my nearest and dearest friends may repudiate as personally injurious. But this I can say: I find a great many re- cent theorists about truth talking in just this spirit so long as they feel free to glorify their spiritual liberty, to amuse their readers with clever assaults upon absolutism, and to arouse sympathy by insistence upon the human and the democratic attractiveness of the novel views of truth that they have to advance. Such individualism, such capriciousness, is in the air. Our modem theorists of truth fre- quently speak in this way. When their ex- pressions of such views are criticized, they usually modify and perhaps withdraw them. What, as individuals, such teachers really 231 THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH mean, I have no right to say. Nobody but themselves can say; and some of them seem to say whatever they please. But this I know : Whoever identifies the truth of an assertion with his own individual interest in making that assertion may be left to bite the dust of his own confusion in his own way and time. The outcome of such essential waywardness is not something that you need try to determine through controversy. It is self-determined. For in case I say to you: "The sole ground for my assertions is this, that I please to make them," — well, at once I am defining exactly the attitude which we all alike regard as the attitude of one who chooses not to tell the truth. And if, hereupon, I found a theory of truth upon generalizing such an assertion, — well, I am defining as truth-telling pre- cisely that well-known practical attitude which is the contradictory of the truth-telling attitude. The contrast is not one between intellectualism and pragmatism. It is the contrast between two well-known attitudes of will, — the will that is loyal to truth as an uni- 232 IN THE LIGHT OF DISCUSSION versal ideal, and the will that is concerned with its own passing caprices. If I talk of truth, I refer to what the truth-loving sort of will seeks. If hereupon I define the true as that which the individual personally views as expedient in opinion or in assertion, I con- tradict myself, and may be left to my own confutation. For the position in which I put myself, by this individualistic theory of truth, is closely analogous to the position in which Epi- menides the Cretan, the hero of the fallacy of the liar, was placed by his own so famous thesis. VI And yet, despite all this, the modern as- sault upon mere intellectualism is well founded. The truth of our assertions is indeed definable only by taking account of the meaning of our own individual attitudes of will, and the truth, whatever else it is, is at least instrumental in helping us towards the goal of all human voli- tion. The only question is whether the will really means to aim at doing something that has a final and eternal meaning. 233 THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH Herewith I suggest a theory of truth which we can understand only in case we follow, the expressions of the third of the three modern motives to which I have referred. I have said that the new logic and the new methods of reasoning in the exact sciences are just now bringing us to a novel comprehension of our relation to absolute truth. I must attempt a very brief indication as to how this is indeed the case. I have myself long since maintained that there is indeed a logic of the will, just as truly as there is a logic of the intellect. Personally, I go further still. I assert : all logic is the logic of the will. There is no pure intellect. Thought is a mode of action, a mode of action distinguished from other modes mainly by its internal clearness of self-conscio;isness, by its relatively free control of its own procedure, and by the universality, the impersonal fair- ness and obviousness of its aims and of its motives. An idea in the consciousness of a thinker is simply a present consciousness of some expression of purpose, — a plan of action. 234 IN THE LIGHT OF DISCUSSION A judgment is an act of a reflective and self- conscious character, an act whereby one ac- cepts or rejects an idea as a suflScient expres- sion of the very purpose that is each time in question. Our whole objective world is mean- while defined for each of us in terms of our ideas. General assertions about the meaning of our ideas are reflective acts whereby we acknowledge and accept certain ruling prin- ciples of action. And in respect of all these aspects of doctrine I find myself at one with recent voluntarism, whether the latter takes the form of instrumentalism, or insists upon some more individualistic theory of truth. But for my part, in spite, or in fact because of this my voluntarism, I cannot rest in any mere relativism. Individualism is right in saying, "I will to credit this or that opinion." But individualism is wrong in supposing that I can ever be content with my own will in as far as it. is merely an individual will. The will to my mind is to all of us nothing but a thirst for complete and conscious self-possession, for fullness of life. And in terms of this its cen- 235 THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH tral motive, the will defines the truth that it endlessly seeks as a truth that possesses com- pleteness, totality, self-possession, and there- fore absoluteness. The fact that, in our hu- man experience, we never meet with any truths such as completely satisfy our longing for insight, this fact we therefore inevitably interpret, not as any defect in the truth, but as a defect in our present state of knowledge, a limitation due to our present type of individu- ality. Hence we acknowledge a truth which transcends our individual life. Our concepts of the objectively real world, our ethical ideals of conduct, our estimates of what constitutes the genuine worth of life, — all these construc- tions of ours are therefore determined by the purpose to conform our selves to absolute standards. We will the eternal. We define the eternal. And this we do whenever we ;talk of what we call genuine facts or actu- alities, or of the historical content of human experience, or of the physical world that our sciences investigate. If we try to escape this inner necessity of our whole voluntary and 236 i;n the light of discussion self-conscious life, we simply contradict our- selves. We can define the truth even of rel- ativism only by asserting that relativism is after all absolutely true. We can admit our ignorance of trutl^ only by acknowledging the absoluteness of that truth of which we are ignorant. And all this is no caprice of ours. All this results from a certain necessary na- i ture of our will which we can test as often as j we please by means of the experiment of try-' ing to get rid of the postulate of an absolute truth. We shall find that, however often we try this experiment, the denial that there is any absolute truth simply leads to its own denial, and reinstates what it denies. The reference that I a little while since made to our assertions regarding the past, and re- garding the minds of other men, has already suggested to us how stubbornly we all assert certain truths which, for every one of us, transcend empirical verification, but which we none the less regard as absolutely true. If I say: "There never was a past," I contradict myself, since I assume the past even in as- 237 THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH serting that a past never was. As a fact our whole interpretation of our experience is de- termined, in a sense akin to that which Kant defined, by certain modes of our own activity, whose significance is transcendental, even while their whole application is empirical. These modes of our activity make all our em- pirical sciences logically possible. Meanwhile it need not surprise us to find that Kant's method of defining these modes of our activity was not adequate, and that a new logic is giv- ing us, in this field, new light. The true na- ture of these necessary modes of our activity becomes most readily observable to us in case we rightly analyze the methods and concepts, not of our own empirical, but rather of our mathematical sciences. For in these sciences our will finds its freest expression. And yet for that very reason in these sciences the abso- luteness of the truth which the will defines is most obvious. The new logic to which I refer is especially a study of the logic of mathematics. 238 IN THE LIGHT OF DISCUSSION VII That there are absolutely true propositions, the existence of the science of pure mathe- matics proves. It is indeed the case that, as Russell insists, the propositions of pure mathe- matics are (at least in general) hypothetical propositions. But the hypothetical character of the propositions of pure mathematics does not make the truth that a certain mathemati- cally interesting consequent follows from a certain antecedent, in any way less than abso- lutely true. The assertion, "a implies &," where a and h are propositions, may be an absolutely true assertion; and, as a fact, the hypothetical assertions of pure mathematics possess this absolutely true character. Now it is precisely the nature and ground of this absoluteness of purely mathematical truth upon which recent research seems to me to have thrown a novel light. And the light which has appeared in this region seems to me to be destined to reflect itself anew upon all regions and types of truth, so that empiri- 239 THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH cal and contingent, and historical and psycho- logical and ethical truth, different as such other types of truth may be from mathemat- ical truth, will nevertheless be better under- stood, in future, in the light of the newer re- searches into the logic of pure mathematics. I can only indicate, in the most general way, the considerations which I here have in mind. At the basis of every mathematical theory, — as, for instance, at the basis of pure geom- etry, or pure number theory, — one finds a set of fundamental concepts, the so-called "in- definables" of the theory in question, and a set of fundamental "propositions," the so- called "axioms" of this theory. Modern study of the logic of pure mathematics has set in a decidedly novel light the question : What is the rational source, and what is the logical basis of these primal concepts and of these primal propositions of mathematical theory ? I have no time here to deal with the complications of the recent discussion of this question. But so much I can at once point out : there are certain concepts and cer- 240 IN THE LIGHT OF DISCUSSION tain propositions which possess the character of constituting the doctrine which may be called, in the modern sense, Pure Logic. Some of these concepts and propositions were long ago noted by Aristotle. But the Aristo- telian logic actually took account of only a portion of the concepts of pure logic, and was able to give, of these concepts, only a very insufficient analysis. There is a similar in- adequacy about the much later analysis of the presuppositions of logic which Kant at- tempted. The theory of the categories is in fact undergoing, at present, a very important process of reconstruction. And this process is possible just because we have at present discovered wholly new means of analyzing the concepts and propositions in question. I refer (as I may in passing state) to the means supplied by modern Symbolic Logic. Well, the concepts of pure logic, when once defined, constitute an inexhaustible source for the constructions and theories of pure mathe- matics. A set of concepts and of proposi- tions such as can be made the basis of a mathe- B 241 THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH matical theory is a set possessing a genuine and unquestionable significance if, and only if, these concepts and these propositions can be brought into a certain definite relation with the concepts and propositions of pure logic. \ This relation may be expressed by saying that if the conditions of general logical theory are such as to imply the valid possi- bility of the mathematical definitions and constructions in question, then — but only then — are .the corresponding mathematical theories at once absolutely valid and signi- ficant. In brief, pure mathematics consists of constructions and theories based wholly upon the conceptions and propositions of pure logic. The question as to the absoluteness of mathematical truth hereupon reduces itself to the question as to the absoluteness of the truths of pure logic. Wherein, however, consists this truth of pure logic ? I answer, at once, in my own way. Pure logic is the theory of the mere form of thinking. But what is thinking? 242 IN THE LIGHT OF DISCUSSION Thinking, I repeat, is simply our activity of willing precisely in so far as we are clearly conscious of what we do and why we do it. And thinking is found by us to possess an absolute form precisely in so far as we find that there are certain aspects of our activity which sustain themselves even in and through the very effort to inhibit them. One who says : " I do not admit that for me there is any difference between saying yes and saying no," — says "no," and distinguishes negation from affirmation, even in the very act of de- nying this distinction. Well, affirmation and negation are such self-sustaining forms of our will activity and of our thought activity. And such self-sustaining forms of activity determine absolute truths. For instance, it is an absolute truth that there is a determinate difference between the assertion and the denial of a given proposition, and between the doing and the not doing of a given deed. Such absolute truths may appear trivial enough. Modern logical theory is for the first time making clear to us how endlessly wealthy in 243 THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH consequences such seemingly trivial asser- tions are. The absoluteness of the truths of pure logic is shown through the fact that you can test these logical truths in this reflective way. They are truths such that to deny them is simply to reassert them under a new form. I fully agree, for my own part, that absolute truths are known to us only in such cases as those which can be tested in this way. I contend only that recent logical analysis has given to us a wholly new insight as to the fruitfulness of such truths. VIII An ancient example of a use of that way of testing the absoluteness of truth which is here in question is furnished by a famous proof which Euclid gave of the theorem, according to which there exists no last prime number in the ordinal sequence of the whole numbers. Euclid, namely, proved this theorem by what I suppose to be one device whereby individual instances of absolute truths are accessible to 244 IN THE LIGHT OF DISCUSSION US men. He proved the theorem by showing that the denial of the theorem implies the truth of the theorem. That is, if I suppose that there is a last prime number, I even thereby provide myself with the means of con- structing a prime number, which comes later in the series of whole numbers than the sup- posed "last" prime, and which certainly exists just as truly as the whole numbers themselves exist. Here, then, is one classic instance of an absolute truth. To be sure Euclid's theorem about the prime numbers is a hypothetical proposition. It depends upon certain concepts and proposi- tions about the whole numbers. But the equally absolute truth that the whole num- bers themselves form an endless series, with no last term, has been subjected, in recent times, to wholly new forms of reexamination by Dedekind, by Frege, and by Russell. The various methods used by these different writers involve substantially the same sort of consid- eration as that which Euclid already applied to the prime numbers. There are certain 245 THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH truths which you cannot deny without deny- ing the truth of the first principles of pure logic. But to deny these latter principles is to reassert them under some other and equiva- lent form. Such is the common principle at the basis of the recent reexamination of the concept of the whole numbers. Dedekind, in showing that the existence of the dense ordinal series of the rational numbers implies the existence of the Dedekind Schnitte of this series, discovered still another absolute, al- though of course hypothetical, truth which itself implies the truth of the whole theory of the so-called real numbers. Now all such discoveries are indeed revelations of absolute truth in precisely this sense, that at the basis of all the concepts and propositions about num- ber there are concepts and propositions be- longing to pure logic ; while if you deny these propositions of pure logic, you imply, by this very denial, the reassertion of what you deny. To discover this fact, to see that the denial of a given , proposition implies the reassertion of that proposition, is not, as Kant supposed, 246 IN THE LIGHT OF DISCUSSION something that you can accomplish, if at all, then only by a process of mere "analysis." On the contrary, Euclid's proof as to the prime numbers, and the modern exact proofs of the fundamental theorems of mathematics, in- volve, in general, a very difficult synthetic process, — a construction which is by no means at first easy to follow. And the same highly synthetic constructions run through the whole of modern logic. Now once again what does one discover when he finds out such absolute truths ? I do not believe, as Russell believes, that one in such cases discovers truths which are simply and wholly independent of our constructive processes. On the contrary, what one dis- covers is distinctly what I must call a volun- taristic truth, — a truth about the creative will that thinks the truth. One discovers, namely, that our constructive processes, viewed just as activities, possess a certain absolute nature and conform to their own self- determined but, for that very reason, abso- lute laws. One finds out in such cases what 247 THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH one must still, with absolute necessity, do under the presupposition that one is no longer bound by the constraints of ordinary experi- ence, but is free, as one is in pure mathematics free, to construct whatever one can construct. The more, in such cases, one deals with what indeed appear to be, in one aspect, "freie Schopfungen des menschlichen Qeistes" the more one discovers that their laws, which are the fundamental and immanent laws of the will itself, are absolute. For one finds what it is that one must construct even if one denies that, in the ideal world of free construction which one is seeking to define, that construc- tion has a place. In brief, all such researches illustrate the fact that while the truth which we acknowledge is indeed relative to the will which acknowledges that truth, still what one may call the pure form of willing is an absolute form, a form which sustains itself in the very effort to violate its own lawS. We thus find out absolute truth, but it is absolute truth about the nature of the creative will in terms of which we conceive all truths. 248 IN THE LIGHT OF DISCUSSION Now it is perfectly true that such absolute truth is not accessible to us in the empirical world, in so far as we deal with individual phenomena. But it is also true that we all of us conceive the unity of the world of ex- perience — the meaning, the sense, the con- nection of its facts — in terms of those cate- gories which express precisely this very form of our creative activity. Hence, although every empirical truth is relative, all relative truth is inevitably defined by us as subject to conditions which themselves are absolute. This, which Kant long ago maintained, gets a very new meaning in the light of recent logic, — a far deeper meaning, I think, than Kant could conceive. In any case, the new logic, and the new mathematics, are making us acquainted with absolute truth, and are giving to our knowledge of this truth a clearness never before acces- sible to human thinking. And yet the new logic is doing all this in a way that to my mind is in no wise a justification of the intellectual- ism which the modern instrumentalists con- 249 THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH demn. For what we hereby learn is that all truth is indeed relative to the expression of our will, but that the will inevitably determines for itself forms of activity which are objectively valid and absolute, just because to attempt to inhibit these forms is once more to act, and is to act in accordance with them. These forms are the categories both of our thought and of our action. We recognize them equally whether we consider, as in ethics, the nature of reasonable conduct, or, as in logic, the forms of conceptual construction, or, as in mathe- matics, the ideal types of objects that we can define by constructing, as freely as possible, in conformity with these forms. When we turn back to the world of experience, we in- evitably conceive the objects of experience in terms of our categories. Hence the unity and the transindividual character which rightly we assign to the objects of experience. What we know about these objects is always relative to our human needs and activities. But all of this relative knowledge is — how- ever provisionally — defined in terms of ab- 250 IN THE LIGHT OF DISCUSSION solute principles. And that is why the scien- tific spirit and the scientific conscience are indeed the expression of motives, which you can never reduce to mere instrumentalism, and can never express in terms of any indi- vidualism. And that is why, wherever two or three are gathered together in any serious moral or scientific enterprise, they believe in a truth which is far more than the mere work- ing of any man's ephemeral assertions. In sum, an absolute truth is one whose denial implies the reassertion of that same truth. To us men, such truths are accessible only in the realm of our knowledge of the forms that predetermine all of our concrete activities. Such knowledge we can obtain regarding the categories of pure logic and also regarding the constructions of pure mathematics. In deal- ing, on the other hand, with the concrete objects of experience, we are what the instru- mentalists suppose us to be, namely, seekers for a successful control over this experience. And as the voluntarists also correctly empha- size, in all our empirical constructions, scien- 251 THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH tific and practical, we express our own indi- vidual wills and seek such success as we can get. But there remains the fact that in all these constructions we are expressing a will which, as logic and pure mathematics teach us, has an universal absolute nature, — the same in all of us. And it is for the sake of winning some adequate expression of this our absolute nature, that we are constantly striv- ing in our empirical world for a success which we never can obtain at any instant, and can never adequately define in any merely rela- tive terms. The result appears in our ethical search for absolute standards, and in our meta- physical thirst for an absolute interpretation of the universe, — a thirst as unquenchable as the over-individual will that expresses itself I through all our individual activities is itself world-wide, active, and in its essence absolute. In recognizing that all truth is relative to the will, the three motives of the modern theo- ries of truth are at one. To my mind they, therefore, need not remain opposed motives. Let us observe their deeper harmony, and 252 IN THE LIGHT OF DISCUSSION bring them into synthesis. And then what I have called the trivialities of mere instrumen- talism will appear as what they are, — frag- mentary hints, and transient expressions, of that will whose life is universal, whose form is absolute, and whose laws are at once those of logic, of ethics, of the unity of experience, and of whatever gives sense to life. Tennyson, in a well-known passage of his "In Memoriam," cries : " Oh living Will that shalt endure When all that seems shall suffer shock, Rise in the spiritual rock, Flow through our deeds and make them pure." That cry of the poet was an expression of moral and religious sentiment and aspiration; but he might have said essentially the same thing if he had chosen the form of praying : Make our deeds logical. Give our thoughts sense and unity. Give our Instrumentalism some serious unity of eternal purpose. Make our Pragmatism more than the mere passing froth of waves that break upon the beach of triviality. In any case, the poet's cry is an 253 THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH expression of that Absolute Pragmatism, of that Voluntarism, which recognizes all truth as the essentially eternal creation of the Will. What the poet utters is that form of Idealism which seems to me to be indicated as the com- mon outcome of all the three motives that underlie the modern theory of truth. 254 ESSAY V IMMORTALITY ESSAY V IMMOETALITY ' ALL questions about Immortality relate to some form of the continuance of hu- man life in time, beyond death. All such questions presuppose, then, the conception of time. But now, what is Time ? How is it related to Truth, to Reality, to God ? And if any answer to these questions can be sug- gested, what light do such answers throw on man's relation to time, and on the place of death in the order of time ? Secondly, all questions about Immortality relate to the survival of human personality. But, what is our human personality ? What aspect of a man do you want to have survive ? In considering these two sets of questions, I shall be led to mention in passing several others, all of which bear upon our topic. ' An address prepared for an Association of Clergymen in March, 1906. s 257 IMMORTALITY My honored colleague. Professor Miinster- berg, in his recent little book on " The Eternal Life," has raised in a somewhat novel form an old issue regarding the metaphysics of time, and has applied his resulting opinion to our problem of immortality. The real world, he has said, — the world of the absolute, — is an essentially timeless world — a world of mean- ings, of ideal values — a world where there is no question of how long things endure, but only a question as to what value they have in the whole of real life. In this genuinely real world of ideal values everything has eternal being in accordance with its absolute worth. A value cannot be lost, for it belongs to the timeless whole. But the ordinary point of view, which so emphasizes time, as most of us do, is merely a quantitative view — a falsifi- cation, or at least a narrowing, of the truth — a transformation of reality — a translation of its meaning into the abstract terms of a special set of concepts — concepts useful in our hu- man science and in our daily business, but not valid for the student of real life. Matter, 258 IMMORTALITY indeed, endures in time ; but then matter is a conceptual entity, a phenomenon, a creation, of the scientific point of view. A man endures in time while his body lives ; but this is only the man as viewed in relation to the clocks and to the calendars — the phenomenal man — the man of the street and the market place, of the psychological laboratory and of the scientific record, of the insurance agents and of the newspapers. The real man whom you estimate and love is not this phenomenal man in time, but the man of will and of meaning, of ideals and of personal character, whose value you acknowledge. This real man is — what he is worth. His place in the world is determined not by the time during which he endures, but by the moral values which he expresses, and which the Absolute timelessly recognizes for what they eternally are. This real man does not come and go. He is. To say that he is immortal is merely to say that he has timeless value. And to say that is to express your love for him in- its true meaning. Hence, as Professor Munsterberg holds, 259 IMMORTALITY the whole problem about immortality is falsely- stated in popular discussion. Revise your view of time. See how time is but an appear- ance belonging to the world of description; that is, the world of conceptual clocks and calendars; and then the real man is known to you, not as temporally outlasting death, but as, in his timeless ethical value, in the real world of appreciation, deathless. For he belongs to the realm of meanings; and the timeless Absolute of real life neither waits for him to come, nor misses him after his death as one passed away, but acknowledges him in his true value as what he is, the real person, whose eternal significance as little requires his endless endurance in the unreal conceptual time of the calendar and of the clock makers, as this same significance requires him to have a taller stature than he has in the equally unreal conceptual space of the metric system and of the tailor's measuring tape. So far my colleague, as I venture to restate his view. I do not agree with him in the way in which he has formulated and applied this 260 IMMORTALITY view. Yet I think that Professor Miinster- berg is at least in one respect justified in print- ing his essay. He is justified, namely, in call- ing our attention to the fact that, in order to discuss immortality exhaustively, we must include in our discussion some view of the sense in which time itself is a reality. And I also think that my colleague's view of time, al- though not mine, contains an important ele- ment of truth. Let me try to suggest what this element is. I need not say to theologically trained readers that you cannot well conceive of God without supposing the Divine Being to be otherwise related to time than we men just now are. To view the Deity as just now wait- ing, as we wait, for the vicissitudes of coming experience that are floating down the time stream towards him, to conceive the divine foreknowledge merely as a sort of clever com- putation of what will yet happen, a neat prediction of the fortunes that God has yet to expect — well, I cannot suppose any com- petent theologian to be satisfied thus to con- 261 IMMORTALITY ceive of the divine knowledge of time, or of what time contains. If God is merely the potent computer and predicter, whose expec- tations as to the future have never yet been disappointed, then he remains merely upon the level of a mighty fortune teller and fortune controller — a magician after all. And not thus can you be content to conceive of the divine omniscience. If the question arose: Why might not God's foreknowledge some day prove to have been fallible ? Why might not revolving time force upon him unexpected facts ? — then you would certainly reply : "If God, as God, absolutely foreknows, that means, properly viewed, not merely that he skillfully anticipates, or even that he mightily controls fortune, but that time, present, past, future, is somehow his own, is somehow at once for him, is an eternal present for which he has not to wait, a total expression of his will which he not merely remembers or anticipates, but views in one whole, totum simul, as St. Thomas well insisted." God's relation to time cannot, then, be 262 IMMORTALITY merely our own present human relation. We expect what is not yet. But if God is God, he views the future and the past as we do the present. And in so far Professor Munster- berg's view is indeed well founded. The last- ing or the passing away of things as we view them does not express the whole divine view of them. What has, for us men, passed away, is, for the divine omniscience, not lost. What is future is, from the divine point of view, a presentation. Time is in God, rather than is God in time. Some such view you surely must take if God is to be conceived at all. But if God views facts as they are, this in- deed implies that death, and the passing away of man, and the lapse of countless lives into what we call the forgotten past, cannot really be what we take these things to be — an abso- lutely real loss to reality of values which, but for death, would not become thus unreal. As a fact, I do not doubt that the least fact of transient experience has a meaning for the divine point of view — a meaning which we very ill express when we say of such a fact: 263 IMMORTALITY "It passes, it is done, it is no more." In reality — that is, from the divitfe point of view — there can be no absolute loss of what is once to be viewed as real at all. Now so far, using, to be sure, for the mo- ment, theological rather than my colleague's metaphysical terms, I suggest a view about time which is obviously close to that which Professor Miinsterberg emphasizes. Never- theless I do not agree with him that, by means of such considerations, we can completely de- fine the sense in which man is immortal. I turn, then, from this first naturally vague ef- fort to hint that our human view of time is inadequate, and that even our present brief lives have a divine meaning which no human view of their transiency exhausts, — I turn, I say, from this glance into general theology, back to the problem about time, as we men have to conceive time. We talk of to-morrow, of the time after death, of the future in gen- eral. In that future, we say, we are to live or not to live. Every such formula, every such hypothesis, presupposes some sense in which 264 IMMORTALITY our words about the future can have truth, even to-day — presupposes then some doc- trine about what time is, and about how the past and future are related to the present. We must therefore ask again, but now in a more definite way. What reahty has time, whether for the universe or for us ? It requires but httle reflection to see that, in our ordinary speech about time, we are accustomed to use obscure, if not contradic- tory, language. We often ascribe true real- ity to the present only, and speak as if the past, as being over and done with, had no reality whatever; while the future, as yet unborn, we hereupon view as if it were also wholly imreal. The present, however, — this only real region of time, — we often speak of that as a mere point, having no duration what- ever. Yet in this point we place all reality; and meanwhile, even as we name it, this sole reality vanishes and becomes past. Time, however, if thus defined, consists of two un- real regions, which contain together all dura- tion — all that ever has been or will be ; and 265 IMMORTALITY time, in addition to these, its unreal halves, contains just one real instant, which itself has no duration, and which is thus no extended part of time at all, but only a vanishing pres- ence. Thus, after all, there remains, when thus viewed, no real region in time at all. Nothing is; all crumbles. Such a view has only to be explicitly stated in order to be recog- nized as inadequate ; as a fact, such a view is a mere heap of false abstractions. Moreover, we ourselves not only frequently assert, but almost as constantly deny, this interpretation of time. For the past we view, after all, as a very stern and hard reality. What is done, is done. The past is irrevocable, unchange- able, adamantine, the safest of storehouses, the home of the eternal ages. Moreover, you can tell the truth about the past. Hence the past is surely not unreal in the sense in which fairyland is unreal. A man who practically treats the past as unreal, becomes ipso facto a liar; and you might in fact define a false witness as a man who tries to make the past over at will, not recognizing its stern and 266 IMMORTALITY unalterable truth. On the other hand, the future indeed is not thus irrevocable; but it has its own sort of very potent and recogniz- able being. You constantly live by adjust- ing yourself to the reality of the future. The coal strike threatens. You wish that your coal bins, if they are not full, were full. For next winter, after all, is a reality. Thus, then, the two regions of time, the past and future, are not wholly unreal. For the truth- ful witness the past is a reality. For the faithful maker of promises the future is a reality. As for the present, — after all, are many dreams less real than is the mere pres- ent ^ Fools live in the present, and dream there, taking it to be the real world. But whoever acts wisely, knows that the present is merely his chance for a deed ; and that the worth of a deed is determined by its intended relations to past and future. Not the present, then, of our flickering human consciousness, is the temporal reality, so much as are the past and the future. Life has its dignity through its bearing upon their contents and their meaning. 267 IMMORTALITY We see from these illustrations, I hope, that much of our common speech about time is behed by our practical attitudes towards time. Truthful reports and promises, seri- ous deeds and ideals, prudence and conserva- tism and enterprise, all unite to show us that the reality of time is possessed especially by its past and its future, over against which the present is indeed but vanishing. And now what, after all, do such illustrations teach us regarding the true meaning of our conception of time ? I answer at once, dogmatically, — but, as I hope, not without some suggestion of the reason for my answer: Time, to my mind, is an essential practical aspect of reality, which derives its whole meaning from the nature and from the life of the will. Take away from your conception of the world the idea of a being who has a will, who has a practical re- lation to facts ; take away the idea of a being who looks before and after, who strives, seeks, hopes, pursues, records, reports, promises, accomplishes ; take away, I say, every idea of 268 IMMORTALITY such a being from your world, and whatever then remains in your conceived world gives you no right to a conception of time as any real aspect of things. The time of the timepieces and of mechanical science, the time of ge- ology and of physics, is indeed, as Professor Miinsterberg maintains, but an abstraction. This abstraction is useful in the natural sciences. But it has no ultimate meaning except in relation to beings that have a will, that live a practical life, and that mean to do something. Given such beings, it can be shown that they need the conception of the time of mechanics or of geology in order to define their relation to nature. But apart from their needs, time is nothing. The time regions, already mentioned in this account, get their distinct types of reality solely from their diverse relations to a finite will, and, for us, to our own finite will. The past is that portion of reality where, to be sure, deeds also belong ; but these past deeds are presupposed by my present attitude of will as already, and irrevocably, accomplished facts. As such they 269 IMMORTALITY are the acknowledged basis upon which all present deeds rest. That is, then, what I mean by the past, viz. the presupposed and hence irrevocable basis on which my present deed rests. I say, "So much is done." The will, therefore, presupposing the past, asks, "What next.?" and is ready to decide by further action. The future is equally defin- able solely in terms of the will. The future is the region of the opportunity of the finite will. The future also, indeed, contains its aspect of destiny — as, for example, next winter's chill. But it likewise contains the chance of deeds yet undone, and so incites the will. As for the present, it is the scintil- lating flash of the instant's opportunity and accomplishment. It too is meaningless ex- cept for the deed, be this deed a mere act of attention or an outward expression. In terms, then, of my attitude of will, and only in such terms, can I define time, and its regions, dis- tinctions, and reality. Time then is, I should say, a peculiarly ob- vious instance of the necessity for defining 270 IMMORTALITY the universe in idealistic terms — that is, in terms of life, of will, of conscious meaning. Burdened as we all are by the mere concept of the time of the clock makers and of the calendars, by the equally conceptual time of theoretical physics and of daily business, we are prone to forget that it is the human will itself which defines for us all such concepts, which abstracts them from life, and which then often bows to them as if they were indeed mere fate. If you look beneath the abstrac- tions, you find that time is in essence the form of the finite will, and that when I acknowledge one vmiversal world time, I do so only by ex- tending the conception of the will to the whole world. If I say: "There is to come a future," I mean merely : My will acknowledges deeds yet to be done, and defines as the future reality of the universe a will continuous with my will — a world will in whose expression my pres- ent deed has its place. The unity and con- tinuity of the time of the universe are defin- able only through the practical relation of my will to this world will. My deed has its place 271 IMMORTALITY in the system of the world's deeds. The will that is yet to be expressed in the future is in- separable in its essence from the will which even now, and in my present deed, acknowl- edges this future as its own. As appears from these forms of expression, I am in philos- ophy an idealist. This is no place to set forth lengthy arguments for idealism. I have to sketch and to speak dogmatically. But the conception of time is peculiarly good as an illustration of the need of idealism. My result is, so far, that time is indeed in- definable and meaningless except as the form in which a conscious will process expresses its own coherent series of deeds and of meanings. And so, if all the finite world is subject to one time process, this assertion means merely that all our wills are together partial expressions of a single conscious volitional process — the process whereby the world will gets expressed in finite forms and deeds. A complete argument for idealism would, of course,' have to develop and to supplement this interpretation of time in many ways. But here is a hint of idealism. 272 IMMOHTALITY A result so stated is, I admit, not at first sight at all decisive as to any question of per- sonal immortality. Yet I hope that the reader will already see how a doctrine of this sort, dogmatically as I have to state it, fragmen- tarily as I have to suggest my reasons for hold- ing it, must have some bearing upon the prob- lem as to how and whether a personal survival of death is a possibility. One is too much disposed to view the time process as an utterly foreign fate, physically forced upon unwilling mortals, who can only lament how youth flies, and how the good old times come again no more, and how the unknown future, vast and merciless, is impending and is yet to engulf us. What I now point out is that all such abstract conceptions of the fatal, external, physical, inhuman, unconscious reality of the world's time process are inadequate. As we have seen, in our sketch of a few such false conceptions, they appear in various, in para- doxically conflicting forms, which sometimes treat all time as unreal except the present, and sometimes view the past and future as T 273 IMMORTALITY an iron reality of blind fate. As a fact, so I insist, we concretely know time as the form of the will. We define the time relations practi- cally, and in terms of deeds done and to be done. If we generalize our time experience, so as conceptually to view the whole world as expressing itself in a single temporal process, our generalization means this : that the entire world is the expression of a single will, which is in its totality continuous with our own, so that the past and future of our personal will is also the past and future of this world will, and conversely. The lesson, however, is already this : If, as is very obviously true, there was a time when I personally did not exist, then that was because the world will did not then yet need, and so did not yet involve, in its own expres- sion, and as a part thereof, my personal deeds. If, on the other hand, the time is to come when I, in my private personality, shall have be- come extinct, that can be only because the world will as a whole, after my passing away, 274 IMMORTALITY is thenceforth to presuppose all of my personal deeds as irrevocably done, and is to have no longer any need to include my further choices. Assume, for the moment, that this is to be the case. This world will, however, is in any event not foreign in nature to my own will, but is continuous therewith ; just as continu- ous, namely, as the real time of my own con- sciousness is continuous with the real time of the universe. If I die, then, and finally cease, that will be because a will — a conscious will — a will essentially continuous with my own — a will now expressed in my consciousness, but sure to be forever expressed in some con- sciousness — a will that now includes all my hopes and my meanings — must some day come to look back upon my personal life as an expression no longer needed. My extinction, then, if it comes, will be at all events a teleo- logical, not a merely fatal process — an inner and purposive checking of the very will which now throbs in me — a checking which will also be a significant attainment — not a blind passing away, due to the mere fate that, in 275 IMMORTALITY time, all becomes unreal. "Our life," said wondrous old Heraclitus, "is the death of gods; our death is the life of gods." And Heraclitus meant by these words that if in- deed all passes away, and if we pass too, that can only be because that very divine life which now lives in us will, living in other divine forms, accomplish the very meaning which it now partially accomplishes in us, by express- ing itself otherwise, and yet as the very life which is now ours. "For we are also his oflf spring." Considerations such as these are indeed but highly fragmentary. They certainly do not by themselves give any adequate notion of immortality. They have been empha- sized by many thinkers who thereby meant merely to make light of personal permanence. Nevertheless, to conceive time as the form of the will, and universal time as the form of the world will, and our lives as linked to a con- scious world will by precisely as close a link as binds the time of our consciousness — to conceive of all this, I say, is to be helped to a 276 IMMORTALITY sort of introduction to a more definite view of our problem. In time you are at any rate not lost as the snows are lost when they melt ; or engulfed as the mountains are engulfed when they are washed away and sink, as sediment, into the sea. For the world time is also the time of your consciousness; and, in precisely as genuine a sense, the world will is your will. If you ever become extinct, that will occur only as a single deed, or as a partial expression, becomes extinct for the doer who, presuppos- ing that very deed, bases his own further ex- pression upon the acknowledgment, the valu- ation, and the memory of the past deed itself. The question whether such extinction will occur at all thus gets its proper teleological formidation. You will die, not as blind fate determines, nor merely because time flies : you will die, if at aU, because the world will needs no more of your personal deeds, except in so far as they are henceforth merely pre- supposed, . So far, then, I suggest what might be called a voluntaristic theory of the time process. 277 IMMORTALITY I understand, I may say, that Professor Mtins- terberg would in large measure agree with even this account of the time relations as due to, as expressions of, the significant attitudes of a world will. The point where my col- league and I are at variance is now ready for a clearer statement than is the one so far given in this discussion. The difference relates to the way in which this entire will process, this whole expression of significant activities in the universe, appears when viewed, so to speak, sub specie eternitatis ; that is, in its whole- ness, as God must be conceived to view it — or as any one ought to view it who does not confine himself to the abstract concepts of the clock makers and of the calendars, but who considers real life as it genuinely is, in its veri- table meaning. The time process is the form of the will. Past and future differ as deeds yet to be done differ from presupposed and irrevocable deeds. The present is the vanishing opportunity for the single deed. The time distinctions, then, are relative to deeds and to meanings. Grant 278 IMMORTALITY all this for a moment. What follows ? Does it follow that whoever views the world life as it truly is, sees the whole world as a timeless totality, consisting simply of mean- ings, of acts, of will attitudes, whose relations are not temporal, but significant ? Does it follow that endurance in time is no test of the worth of a personality, any more than colossal stature is needed as an attribute of a great personality ? I cannot agree to such a conclusion, in the form in which Professor Miinsterberg states it. First, then, as to the supposed timeless- ness of the world of real meanings, let me use an aesthetic example. Music, which Schopen- hauer called an image of the will, is in any case essentially an art that expresses beauti- fully significant musical meanings in temporal order. Abstract, however, from the time form of music, and what is left of any musical form whatever .'' If the gods listen to music at all, they must appreciate its sequences. Wherein consists, however, a true musical apprecia- tion ? Whoever aimlessly half listens to the 279 IMMORTALITY musical accompaniments of a dance or of a public festival, may indeed be so absorbed in the passing instant's sound that he gets no sense of the whole. True listening to music grasps, in a certain sense as a totum simul, entire sequences — measures, phrases, move- ments, symphonies. But such wiser listening and appreciation is not timeless. It does not ignore sequence. It is time-inclusive. It grasps as an entirety a sequence which trans- cends any one temporal present. In this grasping of the whole of a time process one gets a consciousness of a present which is no longer merely a vanishing present, but a time- including, a relatively eternal present, in which various vanishing instants have their places as relatively present, past, and future one to another. Well, such a view, as I take it, comes nearer to getting the sense of what real life is than does any view which considers its world merely as timeless. If, then, I try to conceive how God views things, I can only suppose, not that the absolute view ignores time, but that the 280 IMMORTALITY absolute view sees at a glance all time, past, present, future, just as the true appreciator of the music knows the entirety of the sequence as a sort of higher or inclusive present — a present in which the earlier stages do not merely vanish into the later stages, and yet, on the other hand, are not at all devoid of time relations to the later stages. For this inclusive view, as I suppose, sees the totality of the significant deeds and will attitudes as a single life process — temporal because it is both significant and volitional, — and present, not in the vanishing, but in the inclusive and eternal sense — present not as a timeless whole, but as an infinite sequence — "one undivided soul of many a soul," one life in infinite variety of expression. For such a view, however, — a view which is not timeless, but time-inclusive — the dura- tion of a given series of will acts, the wealth, the lasting, the variety of a distinguishable portion of the entire process, might have — yes, must have — a true relation to the de- gree of the significance which this portion of 281 IMMORTALITY the whole possesses. A truly great work of musical art must involve a considerable se- quence. Its length has a definable relation to its greatness. What is true of a work of art might be true of so much of the world life as constitutes an individual finite being. There might be significant time processes — individual lives, so to speak — whose mean- ing would require them to be endless, and whose place in the whole might demand that, once having appeared, they could never in the later will activities of the temporal order be ignored, but must thenceforth cooperate — the temporal will process always including amongst its deeds activities which were not only its own, but also their own. If such individual lives, distinct in their meaning from other partial expressions of the world will, endless in their duration from some one point onwards, were actually factors in the world process, and were amongst the facts which the absolute view of real life had to in- clude, in order to express and to find its own complete truth — how would such lives be 282 IMMORTALITY related to the world life in its entirety ? How would they be related to that absolute in- sight, to that divine view, which, in an eternal, that is, in a time-inclusive sense, would see at a glance the entirety of the world process ? If I try to suggest, however vaguely, an answer to these momentous questions, the reader will understand that I am merely sketching, and am not now trying to prove, what elsewhere I have discussed with tedious detail, and in a far more technical way. Here we have no time to weigh arguments pro and con. I can only outline, in a dogmatic way, my views. I merely suggest a few of their reasons. I have spoken of a world will. I have said that to recognize, as we all do, one time pro- cess as holding for all the world, is to recognize the world will as a single volitional process in which all our lives are bound up. We are simply different modes of willing, continu- ously related to one another and to the total world will which throbs and strives in all of us alike, but which, in endless variety, seeks 283 IMMORTALITY now this and now that special aim — accom- plishes now this and now that special deed — presupposes an infinity of deeds as its own past — goes on to an infinity of deeds as its future — is content to be no one of us, but shows in our social life the community of our endlessly various aims, as in our individual lives it exhibits an endless variety of dififerenti- ations and of distinguishable trends of purpose. It is one will in us all; yet I have tried to show, elsewhere, that this does not deprive us of individuality. It needs our variety and our freedom. And we need its unity and its inexhaustible fertility of suggestion. We read the symbols of this inexhaustible fertility when we study nature, and when we commune with man. We acknowledge this unity when- ever we view the time of the world as one time. Our own will to live is the will of the world, conscious in us, and demanding our individual variety as its own mode of expres- sion. We conspire with the world will even when most we seem to rebel. We are one with it even when most we think of ourselves 284 IMMORTALITY as separate. Art, ethics, reason, science, serv- ice, all bear witness both to our unity with its purposes, and to its need that all unity of purpose should be expressed through an end- less variety of individual activities. I have thus spoken of the world will as this infinitely complex unity in the variety of all finite wills. I have also spoken of an abso- lute point of view, which views this entire life of the world will as one whole. I have used theological speech, and have called this absolute point of view that of the divine being, the point of view of God. Now this is no opportunity to consider either the proofs for the divine existence or the problem regarding the nature of God. I have again to use dog- matic forms of speech. I mean by the term "God" the totality of the expressions and life of the world will, when considered in its con- scious unity. God is a consciousness which knows and which intends the entire life of the world, a consciousness which views this life at one glance, as its own life and self, and which therefore not only wills but attains, not only 285 IMMORTALITY seeks but possesses, not only passes from ex- pression to expression, but eternally is the entire temporal sequence of its own expres- sions. God has and is a will, and this will, if viewed as a temporal sequence of activities, is identical with what I have called the world will. Only, when viewed as the divine will this world will is taken not merely as an in- finite sequence of will activities, but in its eternal unity as one whole of life. God is omniscient, because his insight comprehends and finds unified, in one eternal instant, the totality of the temporal process, with all of its contents and meanings. He is omnipotent, because all that is done is, when viewed in its unity, his deed, and that despite the endless varieties and strifes which freedom and which the variety of individual finite expressions involve. God is immanent in the finite, be- cause nothing is which is not a part of his total self-expression. He is transcendent of all finitude, because the totality of finite pro- cesses is before him at once, while nothing finite possesses true totality. 286 IMMORTALITY If one hereupon asks, Why should there be finitude, variety, imperfection, temporal se- quence at all ? — we can only answer : Not otherwise can true and concrete perfection be expressed than through the overcoming of imperfections. Not otherwise can absolute attainment be won than through an infinite sequence of temporal strivings. Not otherwise can absolute personality exist than as mediated through the unification of the lives of imper- fect and finite personalities. Not otherwise can the infinite live than through incarnation in finite form, and a rewinning of its total meaning through a conquest of its own fini- tude of expression. Not otherwise can ra- tional satisfaction find a place than through a triumph over irrational dissatisfactions. The highest good logically demands a conquering of evil. The eternal needs expression in a temporal sequence whereof the eternal is the unity. The divine will must, as world will, differentiate itself into individuals, sequences, forms of finitude, into strivings, into ignorant seekings after the light, into doubting, erring, 287 IMMORTALITY wandering beings, that even hereby the per- fection of the spirit may be won. Perfect through suffering — this is the law of the di- vine perfection. All these assertions would need, were there time, their own defense. I do not assert them as merely my own. That they are substan- tially true is what the whole lesson of the moral and religious experience of our race seems to me to have led us to see. That they are neces- sarily true can, as I think, be demonstrated, So much, then, for some hint as to how the temporal is, to my mind, related to the eternal. But what, one may ask, has all this to do with deciding the problem regarding immor- tality ? Much, every way, I reply, if you only add, at this point, a little reflection as to the second of the two questions with which this paper opened. We have studied our relation to time, and also have considered the relation of time to the divine being. But what, so we asked at the outset, is a human personality ? Incidentally, as it were, we have now al- 288 IMMORTALITY most answered this question, so far as it here concerns us. A human personality has many aspects, psychological, physical, social, ethical. But a man is a significant being by virtue not of his body, or his feelings, or his fortunes, or his social status, but by virtue of his will. The concept of personality is an ethical concept. A man, as an ethical being, is what he purposes to be, so far as his purpose is as yet temporally expressed. So far as his will is not yet ex- pressed, his life belongs to the future. All else about him besides his will, his purpose, his life plan, his ideal, his deed, his volitional expression, — all else than this, I say, is mere material for manhood, mere clothing, mere environment, or mere fortune. Ignorantly as he now expresses himself, his worth lies not in the extent of his knowledge, but in the seri- ousness of his intent to express himself. Is he a sinner, then he is not yet true to his own will; that is, he is not yet, in the temporal order, his own complete and genuinely ideal self. For my duty is only my own will brought Tj 289 IMMORTALITY to a reasonable self-consciousness, and is not an external restraint. Hence the sinner is not yet his own explicit self. His conflict with the world is also an internal conflict — an inner war with his own imperfection. But if one who appears in the outer form of man shows no sign as yet of having any personal ideal, or life plan, or purpose, or individual will at all, then one can only say, " Since here we find a seemingly blind expression of the world will, but not an expression that as yet gives an account of itself, we must indeed suppose that some form of personality is here, in this fragment of the time process, latent, but we simply cannot tell what form." In such a case we indeed call the being whom we know in our human relations a person; but he so far appears as a person by courtesy. An explicit personality is one which shows itself through deeds that embody a coherent ideal — an ideal — an ideal which need not be abstractly formulated, but which must be practically active, recognizably significant, consciously in need of further temporal expression. Such an 290 IMMORTALITY explicit personality may be that of a hero, of a saint, or of a rascal. The hero and the saint are simply personalities that are so far expressed in forms whose deeds and ideals have a truer internal harmony. A rascal is a finite personality who is, so far as his per- sonality is yet expressed, essentially at war with himself, as he is with the world. For his deeds are opposed to his true meaning. In so far as he appears to us, as he often does, to be a contented rascal or a joyous sinner, who observes not this essential warfare with himself — in just so far, I say, he is a fool, and, accordingly, in just so far he lacks explicit personality; so that, when we judge him as such a joyous rascal, we know not with what personality we are dealing. But the awakened sinner, however obstinate in his wrong-doing, is a consciously tragic figure. He may also be much of a hero. We shall then admire his vigor. But he remains a warfare of ideals and deeds, and so is not yet come to himself. The true hero, the righteous man, the saint, — these are personalities on a higher level. But 291 IMMORTALITY at no one point in time have they attained their total expression. For the dutiful will, in a finite being, is insatiable. It views itself as a dutiful will in so far as it seeks something yet to be done ; and it views itself as an indi- vidual dutiful will in so far as it consciously says : "Since this is my duty, nobody else in the universe — no, not God, in so far as God is other than myself — can do this duty for me. My duty I must myself do. And wher- ever in time I stand, I am dissatisfied with what is so far done. I must pass on to the next." Saints and sinners, so far as they are indeed explicit personalities, that is, finite wills con- scious of their own individual intent, agree in being, in the temporal world, practically dis- satisfied. The righteous man is dissatisfied with his present opportunity to express his will. He needs yet further future opportun- ities to do his duty. The conscious sinner is dissatisfied with the very will which he is at the moment trying to express. Each, as a finite being, engaged in a temporal process, 292 IMMORTALITY is a person by virtue of his very " dissatisfac- tions." I refer now by the word "dissatisfac- tion," not to gloomy feehngs, so much as to eagerness for further deeds. How we feel is a matter of fortune. How active we need to be, that constitutes our very selves, as now we are. For a finite personality, I insist, is a will to do something. So far as I have some- thing yet to do, I am, however, dissatisfied with the past as with the present. I demand, in just so far, a future — a future in which, since I am now a sinner, at war with myself, I shall come into unity with my own will, and shall discover what it is that I am seeking — a future in which, in so far as even now I know and intend my duty, I shall further express this will of mine in the countless deeds that my personal purpose requires me yet to do. So much, then, for a hint regarding what a finite personality is. But in view of all the foregoing, how shall we say that such a finite personality is related to the world and to God ? I reply : A finite personality, as a conscious expression of the world will, is, when viewed 293 IMMORTALITY in time, an expression of what is just now a dissatisfaction — and of a dissatisfaction of this very personality with itself. In so far as consciously sinful, this personality is dissatis- fied with what it so far knows about its own will ; but in so far as it is a finite doer of deeds, this personality, whether just or unjust, is dissatisfied with what it has so far done to ex- press its will. Hence it looks to the future. And our very conception of the temporal future is due to this our present active dis- satisfaction. That such dissatisfactions should be at all in the world is due, however, as we have said, to that general need which demands that the eternal should be expressed through the tem- poral, that the divine and absolute should take on human and fallible form, and that the infinite should be incarnate in the finite. Not otherwise than through a divine immanence, however, can I conceive all these finite forms of temporal striving to arise. What then follows ? Does not this follow at once? The finite personality can say: 294 IMMORTALITY "In me, as now I am, God is dissatisfied with himself just in so far as now he is partially expressed in me. I am a form of that divine dissatisfaction which constitutes the entire temporal order. This is my link with God, that now I am discontent with the expression of my personality." In me, then, God is discontented with his own temporal expression. This very dis- content I myself am. It constitutes me. This individual thirst for infinity, this per- sonal warfare with my own temporal malad- justment to my own ideal — this is my personality. I am this hatred of my own im- perfection, this search for the future deed, this intent to do more than has yet been done. All else about me, — fortune, feeling, hope, fear, joy, sorrow, — these are accidents. These are my clothing, my mere belongings ; these con- stitute the very wilderness of finitude in which I wander. But I — I am essentially the wanderer, whose home is in eternity. And in me God is discontent — discontent with my waywardness — discontent with the little so 295 IMMORTALITY far done. In me the temporal being, in me now, God is in need, is hungry, is thirsty, is in prison. In me, then, God is dissatisfied. But he is God. He is absolute. Eternity is his. He must be satisfied. In eternity, in the view of the whole temporal process, he is satisfied. In his totality he attains, and he attains what I seek. This then is, as I conceive, the situation of any finite personality. How is this divine satisfaction attained ? I answer, not by ignor- ing, either now or hereafter, the voluntary individual expression ; for it is of the very es- sence of personality to define its opportunity, its deed, and its meaning, as individual, as insatiable, and unique. And God, too, so defines them, if he knows what personality is. No; the divine satisfaction can be obtained solely through the deeds of the individual. No finite series of these deeds expresses the insatiable demand of the ethical individual for further expression. And this, I take it, is our rational warrant for insisting that every rational person has, in the endless temporal 296 IMMORTALITY order, an opportunity for an endless series of deeds. To sum up : Since the time order is the expression of a will continuous with my own, my life cannot ever become a wholly past fact unless my individual will is one that, after some point of time, becomes superfluous for the further temporal expression of the mean- ing of the whole world life. But as an ethical personality I have an insatiable need for an opportunity to find, to define, and to accom- plish my individual and unique duty. This need of mine is God's need in me and of me. Seen, then, from the eternal point of view, my personal life must be an endless series of deeds. This is a sketch of what I take to be the doctrine of immortality. The reader will observe that I have spoken wholly of will, of deeds, and of opportunity for deeds. I have carefully avoided saying anything about for- tune, about future rewards and punishments, about future compensations for present sor- rows, about one's rights to meet again one's lost friends, about any of these better known 297 IMMORTALITY popular aspects of our topic. As a fact, I pretend to no knowledge about my future fortunes, and to no rights whatever to demand, as a finite personality, any particular sort of good fortune. The doctrine of immortality is to my mind a somewhat stern doctrine. God in eternity wins the conscious satisfac- tion of my essential personal need. So much I can assert. But my essential personal need is simply for a chance to find out my rational purpose and to do my unique duty. I have no right to demand anything but this. The rest I can leave to a world order which is di- vine and rational, but which is also plainly a grave and serious order. 298 INDEX Absolute Pragmatism, 254. Absolute Truth, 242 ff. Absolutism, 208 f. American civilization, 17 f. Americanism in philosophy, 33. Aristotle, 241. Athletic type of morality, 31 f . Atonement, 135, 138, 155 f., 160, 167, 179 flf. Baptism, 111. Bushido, 80. Calculus of relations, 207. Carlyle, 39 f . " Cash values," 34. Christ, 107, 132 ff., 150 ff., 156, 160, 163 f., 165, 183. Christianity, Essay III, pas- sim. Christology, 21. Church, 24, 58, 75, 77, 108, 113, 120 f., 128 f., 160, 170, 182. Consequences, 34, 36. Courage, 29. Darwin and Darwinism, 11. Dedekind, 210 f., 245 f. Dewey, 217. " Dissenter," 108. Divided self, the, 29. Divine immanence, 169, 294. Edwards, Jonathan, 3 ff., 121. Efficiency, 28, 35, 38. Emerson, R. W., 3 ff., 8. Empiricism, 191, 215. Epimenides, 233. Euoken, 198. Euclid, 211, 244 f., 247. Evil, problem of, 171 ff. Evolution, doctrine of, 11, 13. Experience, 22, 34, 37 f., 83, 86, 92, 222 ff., 250. Faith, 108 ff., 113 f., 124, 126. Fichte, 42, 188, 192. Fiske, 12. Frege, 245. French Revolution, 200. Gauss, 212. God,105f.,113f.,116f.,134f., 145 f., 151, 167 ff., 179 flf., 261 flf., 278, 280, 285 f., 295 ff. Gospel, 135, 140, 142, 161, 169. Grace, 110, 116, 118. Greek geometers, 204 f . Haeckel, 12. Hegel, 42 f., 188, 192. Heraclitus, 276. Hilbert, 210. Huxley, 12. Idealism, 189, 197, 254, 272. Immortality, Essay V, passim, 257, 273, 276, 297 f. Incarnation, 135, 138, 155 f., 160, 163, 167, 179. Insight, 50, 59 f., 63, 66, 68, 88, 113. 299 INDEX Instrumentalism, 194, 209, 214, 221 ff., 235, 253. Intellectualism, 202, 208 f., 232 f. Irrationalism, 198. James, William, Essay I, pas- sim; as representative American philosopher, 7 ; as friend and teacher, 9 ; as thinker, 10 £f. ; as inter- preter of evolutionary ideas, 14, 16; his contributions to psychology, 14 ff. ; as in- terpreter of the problems of the American people, 18 ; his treatment of religious problems, 19 ff. ; his atti- tude toward ethics, 19, 26 ff. ; his pragmatism, 32 ff. ; his doctrines embodied in " the will to believe," 36 ff. ; his polemic against Hegel, 42 f., 210, 217, 224 f. Job, 64. Kant, 187, 189, 192, 213, 238, 241, 246, 249. Kempe, 207. Kingdom of heaven, 150, 164 f . Lange, 12. Logic, 203, 206 f., 208, 234, 238, 250, 252. Lowell lectures, 32. Loyalty, Essay II, passim; loyalty to college, 49, 75 ; loyalty and insight, 50, 59 f . ; meaning of the term " loy- alty," 52 ff. ; cause of loy- alty, 55 ff., 69 f.; moral law summed up in terms of loyalty, 58 f . ; loyalty and modern philosophy of life, 67 ff. ; loyalty and reality. 71 ff. ; the cause for all the loyal, 77 ff. ; loyalty and religion, 90 ff. Mach, 217. Mass, 107, 161. Mathematics, 190, 202, 204, 238 ff., 247, 251 f. Mechanism, 61 f., 64 f., 66 f., 69, 71,86 f., 92 f. Meister Eckhart, 162 f., 164 ff., 180. Messianic, 141, 147, 149ff.,154. Modernism, 199. Modern philosophy of life, 60 ff., 90. Monotheism, 122. Moore, George, 208. Miinsterberg, 86, 258 f., 261. 263, 269, 278 f. Natural science, 83, 85. New Realism, 208. Newton, 218 f., 221. Nietzsche, 190, 196, 202, 230. Nogi, General, 80. Non-Euclidean geometry, 203, 209 f. Orthodoxy, 108, 123. Papal condemnation, 22. Paul, 120. Pauline charity, 118. Pauline epistles, 109 f. Peirce, Charles, 207 f. " Phanomenologie des Geis- tes," 188. Philosophy of action, 39. Pragmatic method, 33. Pragmatism, 32 ff., 193, 194 f ., 232, 253. Primitive religion, 103, 106, 120, 122 f., 155. " Psychical research," 16. 300 INDEX Psychology, 14 ff., 189, 216. Pure Logic, 241 f., 244. Reality, 66, 69, 71 f., 82, 86, 92, 146. Redemption, 138. Reformation, 121. Relativism, 209, 212, 237. Religious beliefs, 101 ff., 110 ff., 122 f., 137 f. ; practices, 101 ff., 110, 122 f., 126, 137 f. ; values, 100, 140. Religious metaphysics, 145. Revelation, 93 f. Roman CathoUc Church, 112, 127. Roman Empire, 148. Romantic School, 200. " Rule of Reason," 44. Russell, 190, 207, 239, 245, 247. Sacraments, 128. Schopenhauer, 279. Skepticism, 88. Sloth, 29. Socrates, 195. Spencer, 11. Spirit of loyalty, the, 51, 54, 58. St. Thomas, 262. Superstition, 62, 65, 68, 83, 90, 92 f ., 95. Symbolic Logic, 241. Tennyson, 253. Theory of Assemblages, 203. Theory of the Categories, 207. Theory of Knowledge, 187. Theory of Mathematical Form, 207. Time, problem of, 257 ff. Truth, problem of, 33 ; Essay IV, passim. Tuberculosis, 62. Tyndall, 12. Un-worldliness, 35. Upanishads, 195. " Vital," 100 ff., 105. Vital elements in any religion, 99ff., 117ff., 122; in Chris- tianity, 100 ff., 126 ff., 129 ff., 142 ff., 155, 164 ff., 183. Voluntarism, 198, 208, 235, 254. Voluntaristic theory of time, 277 ff. Von Hartmann, 12. Zarathustra, 230. 301 T HE following pages contain advertisements of Macmillan books by the same author and on kindred subjects By JOSIAH ROYCE Professor of the History of Philosophy, Harvard University Race Questions, Provincialism, and Other American Problems Goth, i2mo, $1.2$ net; by mail, $1.35 This work will be of deep interest to all those thoughtfully considering the pressing problems of American society, prob- lems which are of utmost importance to American readers generally. The book is made up of five essays, different in subject, but bound together by the unity of their interest as scholarly studies of our life and civilization and containing some of Professor Royce's most important utterances on our national life and character. The author handles in a scholarly and intensely interesting manner the subject of race questions and prejudices, with the psychology of racial antipathies ; American idealism in its popular and practical aspects ; the relations of climate and civilization ; and some relations of physical training to the present problems of moral education in America. The second and fourth essays of the book both relate to pro- vincialism, — the one discussing, in general terms, the need and uses of that spirit in our American life ; the other sketching the bases upon which rests that particular form of provincialism to which the author personally owes most, and stating the services that it may accomplish in dealing with various types of evils in this country. THE MACMILLAN COMPANY Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York By JOSIAH ROYCE The Philosophy of Loyalty Cloth, 4og pages, i2mo, index, $1.50 net; by mail, $1.60 An interesting book Even the man who knows nothing of philosophy will be charmed by the clearness of expression, the charity of the thought, and its close re- lation to the practical affairs of daily life. Few thinking men have failed to fear the dangers of a general lowering of the standards of morality, and will rejoice in a book which so felicitously summons us to that highest of all ideals — the being true to ourselves. An appealing book To the man who finds it hard to subscribe to the old creeds, yet feels the need of an abiding, guiding principle. Professor Royce regards loyalty " not only as a guide of life, but as a revelation of our relation to a realm of an eternal and all embracing unity of spiritual life." — New York Tribune. A book that reconciles the best that is to be learned from modern philosophers. The recent speculative revolt against moral tradition has tended on the one hand toward the stark individualism of Nietzsche and on the other to a nar- rowing form of sociahsm practically limited to a particular class. " Pro- fessor Royce has undertaken in a most admirable spirit to interpret the universal moral obligation and method in terms of 'loyalty' ... a sound and inspiring book." — Chicago Record-Herald, "Believing that certain present-day conditions and tendencies in- dicate a lowering of individual and national standards. Professor Royce ^ves himself resolutely to the task of remedial and constructive criti- cism. His programme of reform is summed up in the single phrase — the cultivation of the spirit of loyalty ... It helps him to appreciate the poverty of egotistical ideals — such as the ideal of power — and it plainly propounds means whereby life may be made really worth living." — r^e Outlook. Other Works by the Same Author Outlines of Psychology ClotA, Svo, $t.oo net; postage 12 cents The World and the Individual Two volumes Gifford Lectures delivered before the University at Aberdeen. First Series : The Four Historical Conceptions of Being $3.00 net Second Series : Nature, Man, and the Moral Order $2.25 ««' THE MACMILLAN COMPANY Fnblisliers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York What is Pragmatism? By JAMES BISSETT PRATT, Ph.D. Assistant Professor of Philosophy in Williams College ; Author of " The Psychology of Religious Belief," etc. Cloth, i2mo, $i.2S net; hy mail, $1.33 The controversy over Pragmatism is one of the most important movements in contemporary philosophy. Pragmatism has the double significance of skill, activity, method and system in affairs, and of objectional activity, officiousness, fussiness, etc. In the liter- ature of philosophy it deals with a skilled method of analyzing ques- tions which are fundamental for both our philosophical and our rehgious conceptions. Although the pragmatists have several times presented their side of the question to the public, no book has as yet appeared in English written from the non-pragmatist's point of view and giving anything like a connected and complete statement of his position. To do this is Professor Pratt's aim in the present volume. Throughout the book the author's first endeavor has been to give a just and sympathetic presentation of the chief doctrines of Prag- matism, and then to analyze each of them in turn so that its exact meaning may become perfectly clear even to the non-technical reader. Finally he has sought to show the bearings of these prag- matic principles upon the great questions of the nature of man and the religious view of the universe. The reader is thus enabled to see exactly what this new philosophy means and what it involves, to understand the position of its opponents, and to judge for him- self between them. Dr. Pratt has a style which in its directness and simplicity com- pares with that of the leading American prophet of Pragmatism, Professor James, and his little book is so clear and convincing, so straightforward and free from metaphysical cant, that it should find its largest audience outside of academic circles, among people who want to know in plain terms just what Pragmatism means. THE MACMILLAN COMPANY Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New Tork The Persistent Problems of Philosophy An Introduction to Metaphysics through the Study of Modem Systems By MARY WHITON CALKINS Professor of Philosophy and Psychology in Wellesley College Published in New York, 1907. Second edition, 1908 Cloth, 8vo, S7S pages, $2.50 net This book is intended for beginners in philosophy as well as for students and readers who are seriously concerned with the problems of the subject. It combines the essential features of an Introduction to Metaphysics with those of a History of Modern Philosophy. Expositions are supported by exact quotations from philosophical texts, and by this means it is hoped to impress upon students the necessity of a first-hand study of philosophical texts. The classifica- tion of philosophical systems has been simplified by the carefial distinction between " qualitative " and " numerical " forms of mon- ism and pluralism. The Appendix contains brief biographies of philosophers and topically arranged bibliographies, not only of the philosophers discussed in the body of the book, but also of the less important modern schools and writers. The concluding chapter, on Contemporary Philosophical Systems, with the corresponding part of the Appendix, offers a useful summary of the doctrines of writers so recent that they are not considered in most text-books of modern philosophy. Though mainly expository and critical, the book is written " from the standpoint of a metaphysical system fairly well defined." This is the doctrine of monistic personal idealism, based, however, on experience, and therefore proof against the pragmatist's attack upon realistic forms of absolute idealism. " It is exceptional in lucidity, candor, and the freshness with which it surveys well-worn doctrines. More than any Introduction to Philosophy with which I am acquainted, it will induce its reader to turn to the original sources, and to find pleasure in seeing Philo- sophy as it rises in the minds of the great thinkers. While the book is unusually attractive in style, and well fitted for popular use, it is the work of an original and critical scholar. The temper with which the history of philosophy should be studied finds here ad- mirable expression." — Prof. G. H. Palmer, Department of Phi- losophy, Harvard University. THE MACMILLAN COMPANY Fubliahers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York By HENRI BERGSON Professor at the College de France Time and Free Will An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness Authorized translation by F. L. PoGSON, New York Cloth, 8vo, $2.7S net " The translation is faithful and readable. There are added a sympa- thetic preface by the translator and an admirably comprehensive bibliography of articles about Bergson's philosophy in several lan- guages. The first presentation of this important contemporary to our public has been so well done that all readers of the book must lament the sudden death of the young Oxford scholar to whom we owe the service." — Nation. " This is a great work, profoundly original, rigorous and keen in analysis, clear in statement; and while showing that language com- pels us to treat life and its problems in a symbolical manner, yet it also shows that a close analysis of experience clearly reveals the true concrete life. Professor Bergson does not profess to cover the entire field of philosophy in this volume, but what he has covered is done in such an original and profound way that no one who pretends to keep abreast of philosophical thought will ignore it." — Boston Transcript. Matter and Memory Translated by Nancy M. Paxil and W. S. Palmer Cloth, 8vo, 3jg pag'.s, $2.jj net A study of memory as an example of the relation between matter and spirit, both of which assumptions the author makes in the beginning. PUBLISHED BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 64-66 Fifth Avenue, Wew York Cornell University Library B945.R89 W7 William James and other essays on the ph olln 3 1924 029 067 746