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
AND OTHER ESSAYS ON THE
PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE
BY
JOSIAH ROYCE, LL.D., LITT.D.
PROFESSOR OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY
AT HARVARD UNIVERSITY
gorfc
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1912
All rights reserved
COPTBIOHT, 1911,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up and electrotyped. Published November, 191 1. Reprinted
June, 1912.
B
NorfoooU
J. S. Gushing Co. Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, 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,
vi
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
vii
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
viii
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.
CONTENTS
ESSAY I
PAGE
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
ESSAY I
WILLIAM JAMES AND THE PHILOSOPHY
OF LIFE
ESSAY I
WILLIAM JAMES AND THE PHILOSOPHY
OF LIFE 1
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.
3
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-
I !/
ing and profound. For he viewed religious
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 j
I y
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-
6
AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE
opher. 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 affected 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
1 1 _
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
ll
WILLIAM JAMES
defenders of the new doctrines, so far as they
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 secondhand 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,"
he 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 shall
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 office 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 affairs, -
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 lie 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 Religious 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 undertook
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
j vigorous appeal to the religious experience of
1 V
Ithe 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 effective 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 effective in the forma
tion of new religious 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 James s 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 unconventional ardor of appre
ciation, with all its democratic catholicity of
sympathy, with all its freedom both from
26
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 sound 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, " Efficiency" ! Another
expression of the same motive 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
office 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-
J 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
t ^y 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 efficiency, 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 efficiency
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 their "consequences"
must be interpreted, and therefore it is indeed
unjust to confound pragmatism 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 the 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 you want to estimate his phi
losophy of life in its best form, you must read
or re-read, not the "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 the question of an
empiricist, of a man averse to abstractions,
36
AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF LJFE
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 differs 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 efficiency.
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 Believe."
The ethical maxims which are scattered
through these pages voluntarily 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 life 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
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 act of faith ?
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
founds 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 life 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 Pluralistic 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 "Rule 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
IXJYALTY AND INSIGHT
ESSAY II
LOYALTY AND INSIGHT 1
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
1 Commencement Address 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 different 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 offices, 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 differences
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
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
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
55
A
LOYALTY AND INSIGHT
many persons are joined in one common life.
The cause to which a loyal man is devoted is
of the nature of an institution, or of a home
life, or of a fraternity, wherein two or more
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
them together into one common life. Its
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 never
fulfilled, a seeking for success which never
attains its goal. Meanwhile, no merely cus
tomary morality ever adequately guides our
lives. Mere social authority never meets our
needs. But a cause, some unity of many
lives in one, some call upon the individual to
give himself over to the service of an idealized
community, this gives sense to life. This,
when we feel its presence, as we do upon this
occasion, we love, as the lovers love the com
mon life of friendship that is to make them
one, or as the mothers delight in the life that
is to unite themselves and their children in the
family, or as the devout feel that through
their communion in the life of their church
they become one with the Divine Spirit. For
such a cause we can make sacrifices, such as
the soldier makes in following the flag. For
what is the fortune of any detached self as
compared with the one cause of the whole
country ? And just such a voluntary de
votion to a cause can ennoble the routine of
the humblest daily business, in the office, in
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, through
your choice, through your service, through
your example, and through your dealings with
all men, you may, as far as in you lies, help
other people to be loyal to their own causes ;
may avoid cheating them of their opportunities
for loyalty ; may inspire them with their own
best type of loyalty ; and may so best serve
the one great cause of the spread of loyalty
amongst mankind. Or, if I may borrow and
adapt for a worthy end Lincoln s immortal
words, the moral law is this : Let us so live,
so love, and so serve that loyalty "of the
people, by the people, for the people, shall
not perish from the earth," but shall prosper
and abound.
The scheme of life thus suggested is, I be
lieve, adequate. I next want to tell what
bearing the spirit of loyalty has upon insight.
The insight that all of us most need and
desire is an insight, first, into the business of
life itself, and next into the nature and mean
ing of the real world in which we live. Our
forefathers used to center all their views of
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 modern
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 destroy est."
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
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
LOYALTYfAND INSIGHT
trate our whole attention, not upon the con
sequences and applications 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
ical world or to a law of nature. A cause is never
a mere mechanism. It is an essentially spirit
ual reality. If the loyal human being is right
in the account which he gives 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
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 capri
cious, 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
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 personality 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 s 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 different
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
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
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
(if by person you mean the ordinary human
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.
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 country 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 thousands of
years." It is that sort of being whereof 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-
Q 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
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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-
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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- i
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.
Mankind is not a mere collection of detached
individuals, or man could possess no knowl
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. Eitjiec- 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,
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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."
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
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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,
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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. 35
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 believers 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
i*fc
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 CHISTIANITY?
ESSAY III
WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? 1
I 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 :
\. What sort of faith or of practice is it
that can be called vital to any religion ?
1 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 religion 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
natural 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 differ 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 VilTAL 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 religious life. On the one stage it
is religious 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
no
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-
lll
WHAT is VITA;L IN CHRISTIANITY?
forced 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, borh 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 the 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 and
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
light, 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.
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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
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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-
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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.
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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
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WH AT 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
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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-
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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
our questions. How does this problem re-
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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
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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
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WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY?
to reconcile these two motives has the longest
traditional expression, that is, where the most
elaborate official 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
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WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY?
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-
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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-
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WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY?
ing if not guided from within by a deep spirit
ual interest and a genuine religious experience.
So far we shall find it easy to agree regard
ing the principles of our inquiry. Yet, as the
foregoing review of the historical conflicts of
religion has shown us, we thus merely formu
late our problem. We stand at the outset of
what we want to do.
What 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 countless 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
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WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY?
of opinion about the contents of the Christian
religion.
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 finished 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,
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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
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
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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-
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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
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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
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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
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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,
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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 ;
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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 in the three Synoptic
Gospels. The early church preserved the
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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,
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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.
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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 life. 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
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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
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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,
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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
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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
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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
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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-
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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-
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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 nonresistanee, 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
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WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY?
teaching, and interpret his message in the
light 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.
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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.
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WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY?
Yet, as has been already pointed out, the
literal 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-
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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-
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WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY?
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 office 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
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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;
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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
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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
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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
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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
164
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 still, 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
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WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY?
life of the master. It is this symbolic 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.
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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-
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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,
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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
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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-
j pressed in the lives of countless finite beings
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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 VI.TAL 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
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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
suffer 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
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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
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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 vil,
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
a lifetime. And thus no moral agent can be
made perfect except through suffering borne
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 CHRISTIANITY?
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, v }
* I.!. ..... im I ~" I |
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-
I
ment, like our existence, is due to the sorrow
and the triumph of God himself. These two \ j
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 1
.)^JG
rflHE 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 individualism, 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 LIGHjT 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.
m
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
is 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-f ^ _
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 different 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
V 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- 1
known phrases, the nature of this second \
motive, one whose presence in our recent I
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 theMJiircp 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 different 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
THE PROBLEM 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 OF 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- j
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-i
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
freie Schopfungen 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 Euclid 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
mental 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 the 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
I 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 which
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 thus sketching for you these three mo
tives, I have been obliged 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. C. Instrumentalism
NMMH"*
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 v
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
tm
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
t
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 hap
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
ciples from which they might be supposed to
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
they are supposed to be required, willy nilly,
to copy. Truth is no barren repetition of a
dead reality, but belongs, as a quality, to the
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.
217
h
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
life, 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
uman 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 account 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 DISCUSSION
to say: "I accept this opinion upon credit,"
H 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 ^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 believe in the minds of other
men, I accept as valid countless opinions
that are for me, in my private capacity and
from 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, oruj
V.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, for our own private and individual
ends, they are credited. Credit is relative to
tne 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
*9|p
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 modern 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
i that assertion may be left to bite the dust of
x>j I
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
/^f attitude of one who chooses Jiot^io 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 I
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,
^ \ -. _---
jl 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-consciousness, 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 T t HE 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 sufficient 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
Cransceno!^ 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
L%
IN THE LIGHT OF DISCUSSION
self-conscious life, we simply contradict our- I V
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 truth 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
ture of our will which we can test as often as
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,
y tf 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
I 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 b 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-
* 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 t the corresponding mathematical
theories at once absolutely valid and signi
ficant. In brief, pure mathematics consists
of constructions and theories based wholly
V 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.
I 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
t
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? I i y
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
^^B*^ 1 ^
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 Geistes" 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
x U>| 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
w 7 hether 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
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
IMMORTALITY *
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.
1 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 Miinsterberg 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 I
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 Miinster- }
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 divin e 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 reality has time,
whether for the universe or for us ?
It requires but little 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 unreal. 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
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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.
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IMMORTALITY
We see from these illustrations, I hope,
that much of our common speech about time
is belied 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
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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
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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
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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 universal 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
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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.
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IMMORTALITY
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
i ! 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 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,
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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 j
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
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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 \ve 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
offspring."
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
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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
formulation. You will die, not as blind fate
determines, nor merely because time flies :
you will die, if at all, 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 Miins-
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.
*ww =
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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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 differenti
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-
"**<**s w
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
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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
%H* ^
all finitude, because the totality of finite pro
cesses is before him at once, while nothing
finite possesses true totality.
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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-
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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
u 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
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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
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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 feelings, 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 T 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 4
-. v . - - -. .- - " - - ...--- - ..
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 /J,P
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 - - 1 am essentially the V ^ ^
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 ff.
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.
Eucken, 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 ff.,
261 ff., 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 ff. ; 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, 154 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, 149 ff., 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 flf., 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 Catholic 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.
Unworldliness, 35.
Upanishads, 195.
" Vital," 100 ff., 105.
Vital elements in any religion,
99 ff., 117 ff., 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.
Zaratbustra, 230.
301
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