Selected papers on philosophy

EVERYMAN'S LIBRARY
EDITED BY ERNEST RHYS

PHILOSOPHY
& THEOLOGY

SELECTED

PAPERS ON PHILOSOPHY
BY WILLIAM JAMES
WITH INTRODUCTION BY
PROFESSOR C. M. BAKEWELL

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INTRODUCTION

" HE was so commanding a presence, so curious and inquiring,
so responsive and expansive, and so generous and reckless of
himself and of his own, that every one said of him : ' Here is
no musty savant, but a man, a great man, a man on the heroic
scale, not to serve whom is avarice and sin.' " So James
speaks with affection of his own teacher Agassiz, and the words
fitly describe the impression he himself made upon his students
and associates. There was none who did not come under the
spell of his personality, none who did not look forward eagerly
to every fresh work from his pen. There was such a sense of
life and reality in all that he wrote that reading his works had,
in a peculiar sense, the charm of personal intercourse. It was
like meeting the man himself and sharing in his faith, his
enthusiasm, his vision.

One does not think of James as a man with a philosophy,
but rather as one who cleared the decks for all future philo
sophising. Late in life, to be sure, he labelled his view " prag
matism," modestly declaring this to be a " new name for some
old ways of thinking," and dedicating the book in which the
view was presented to John Stuart Mill, from whom he first
learned the " pragmatic openness of mind." But he is careful
to explain that the word stands for a method, and for a theory
of truth, rather than for a system of philosophy. And when
the view was launched and began to have followers, instinc
tively he shrank from the use of the label. When a philosophy,
even his own, had been ticketed and had become one among
many philosophical isms, it began to lose some of its vitality.

At very rare intervals in the history of philosophy there have
appeared thinkers who, like William James, are too real to be
readily classified — thinkers who cut under the distinctions
that divide men into schools. When they appear they always
speak the language of the people for the simple reason that
they are interpreting life as real men live it with a freshness
of vision unknown in the schools. The influence of William
James has probably travelled further and gone deeper than
that of any other American scholar. Into the languages of all
•/ ' ' vii

viii Selected Papers on Philosophy

civilised peoples his works have been translated, and every
where they have met with instant recognition. Honorary
degrees, honorary memberships in learned societies and
academies, all manner of scholarly distinctions poured in upon
him from all quarters. And yet by far the larger part of his
published works consists of essays and addresses first delivered
to popular or semi-popular audiences; and even his most
technical performance, his classic work in psychology, is
singularly simple and direct and free from technicalities, and
withal readable. The fact is significant, and explains in part
the secret of his hold upon his contemporaries. For, though
writing for the people, he was never a populariser. He did not
have tucked away in his den some profound and recondite
system clothed in the polysyllabic profundity which learning
too often affects, which, on occasion, he condescended to
translate, in diluted doses, for the benefit of laymen. His pro-
foundest thought is in these pages. He could not help being
simple and clear, for he lived close to reality in its concrete
fulness ; and he could not help writing for the people, and not
for a special academic guild, because he believed in the people,
and because, furthermore, he believed in the mission of philo
sophy to help the people to interpret life and to lay hold of
life's ideals, and thus to " know a good man when they saw
him."

James tells us that it was the hours he spent with Agassiz
that " so taught him the difference between all possible ab
stractionists and all livers in the light of the world's concrete
fulness " that he was never able to forget it. And the term
which, by preference, he used to describe his position was
" radical empiricism," a phrase which shows the importance
he ascribed to method in philosophising. How far removed
this method is from that which commonly passes for empiricism
one can best find out by reading the last chapter in his larger
Psychology. Without going into details, it is enough here to
note that for him the method meant simply a recognition of
the fact that " the truth of things is after all their living ful
ness." To lay hold of the facts in their living fulness was what
he meant by being radically empirical. But the facts of human
nature are so intimate and so familiar that they usually escape
observation. Or if they chance to be called to our attention,
they are apt to be summarily lumped together under some
familiar caption, or forthwith named and classified in a

Introduction ix

conventional way, and thus disposed of. James could always
" see the familiar as if it were strange," and was thus peculiarly
fitted for the r61e of explorer and observer of the familiar, but
little known, facts of the inner life. Moreover, he appreciated
as few have done the extent to which words and phrases,

nogmas and ready-made principles of classification, blind
icn's vision and dull their senses. To the facts of experience
with which psychology and ethics deal he brought the artist's
skill in pure appreciation of values, and he possessed a rare
gift for describing what he saw. His special contributions to
psychology, and his significance in philosophy, are alike due
to this trait.

The first lesson of radical empiricism is that the mind never
is merely a passive spectator, never is merely a receptacle for
data supplied from without. Such a way of viewing experience
is to mistake for the mind what a real mind never is, and for
data what real data never are. In a striking passage James
writes :

" The world's contents are given to each of us in an order
so foreign to our subjective interests that we can hardly by an
effort of the imagination picture to ourselves what it is like.
We have to break that order altogether — and by picking
out from it the items which concern us, and connecting them
with others far away, which we say ' belong ' with them, we
are able to make out definite threads of sequence and tendency;
to foresee particular liabilities and get ready for them; and
to enjoy simplicity and harmony in place of what was chaos.
. . . Can we realise for an instant what a cross-section of
all existence at a definite point of time would be ? While I
talk and the flies buzz, a sea-gull catches a fish at the mouth of
the Amazon, a tree falls in the Adirondack wilderness, a man
sneezes in Germany, a horse dies in Tartary, and twins are
born in France. What does that mean? Does the contem
poraneity of these events with one another and with a million
others as disjointed, form a rational bond between them, and
unite them into anything that means for us a world ? Yet just
such a collateral contemporaneity, and nothing else, is the real
order of the world. It is an order with which we have nothing
to do but to get away from it as fast as possible. As I said, we
break it; we break it into histories, and we break it into arts,
and we break it into sciences; and then we begin to feel at
home. We make ten thousand separate serial orders of it, and

x Selected Papers on Philosophy

on any one of these we react as though the others did not
exist."1

Other philosophies had indeed noted this truth before. But
hitherto philosophy has been too much influenced by the
model of mathematics and physics, and has thus tended to
think in terms of the contrast between form and matter.
To-day biological sciences are in the ascendant, and they
furnish a safer model for philosophy inasmuch as they bring
us nearer to the facts in their concrete fulness. The contrast is
between the living and the dead; and life means growth,
development, progress, and time is of the essence of experience.
The complexity of experience upon which James laid stress was
that which it receives in its time dimension. The time quality
of experience is its most significant trait. Everywhere we find
fluency and continuity, and in all our interpretations, scientific
as well as philosophical, the practical categories are dominant.
Our philosophy is essentially forward-looking, and must
measure values in results, truth values as well as moral values.
Hence James was not interested in truth in the abstract, but
rather in the actual process of truth-getting — in what happens
when an idea is accepted as true; and he noted that ideas
passed for true in proportion to their serviceableness in guiding
us through the tangled complexity of experience, in making
us at home in the world in which we daily live, and thus
masters of it. Science itself was a human construction for
human ends. And when it gave itself airs, became sacrosanct
and absolute, as it did in the positivism of Herbert Spencer,
and in the name of science proceeded to rule out of court all
those facts and values of the spiritual life which do not admit
of verification through the senses, it ceased to be science, and
became a sheer philosophical dogmatism. It was in fact no
better than those pretentious idealisms which in the name of
abstract reason made all things parts of one inclusive whole,
made the world a "block universe," fixed, eternal, perfect,
and left no room for what makes life for the individual signi
ficant — freedom, choice, novelty, and progress.

Ideals again were not decorations of life in the abstract,
highly polished moral ornaments; they were the practical
tools of good living. They were not to be measured by the
noble language in which they were expressed, nor yet by the
subjective feelings or emotions they aroused, but by the way

1 " Reflex Action and Theism," The Will to Believe, etc., pp. 1 18-9.

Introduction xi

they worked, by what they actually accomplished in the
prosaic world of dust and dirt and brute fact, for the better
ment of character and of the conditions of human life. The
truth is that our life, intellectual and moral, is at every turn
ruled by ideals, and back of all ideals lies faith — a faith in
volving a certain element of risk from which none can escape.
And much of James's work is spent in defending the faiths by
which men actually live, by testing them in the only manner
in which their truth can be tested, by the way in which they
express themselves in life.

James also possessed in a wonderful degree what might be
called sympathetic imagination — the ability to get as it were
on the inside of the other fellow's vision ; and whenever he ran
across, in the work of another thinker, however humble and
obscure, evidence of some fresh and original interpretation of
genuine experience, he heralded it as a veritable discovery. It
was a new document to be reckoned with. He was, in fact,
singularly free from what he has called " a certain blindness in
human beings." How free, a reading of the Varieties of
Religious Experience will show. The essay in which he dis
cusses this blindness is, as he says, more than the piece of
sentimentalism that at first sight it might appear to be. "It
connects itself with a definite view of the world and of our
moral relations to it." That view is the pluralistic or indi
vidualistic philosophy according to which " the truth is too
great for any one actual mind, even though that mind be
dubbed ' the absolute,' to know the whole of it. The facts and
worths of life need many cognisers to take them in. There is no
point of view absolutely public and universal." The practical
consequence of this philosophy is, he adds, the " well known
democratic respect for the sacredness of individuality."

Perhaps the chief reason for the popularity of James's philo
sophy is the sense of freedom it brings with it. It is the philo
sophy of open doors; the philosophy of a new world with a
large frontier and, beyond, the enticing unexplored lands where
one may still expect the unexpected ; a philosophy of hope and
promise, a philosophy that invites adventure, since it holds
that the dice of experience are not loaded. The older monistic
philosophies and religions present by contrast stuffy closed
systems and an exhausted universe. They seem to pack the
individual into a logical strait-jacket and to represent all
history as simply the unfolding of a play that was written to its

xii Selected Papers on Philosophy

very last line from the dawn of creation. These old absolu
tisms go with the old order of things.

James is an interpreter of the new order of democracy. The
most important and interesting thing about a nation, or an
historic epoch, as about an individual, was, he held, its
" ideals and over-beliefs." And if he is our representative
philosopher of democracy, it is not because of his individualism,
his appreciation of the unique, the uncommunicable, his
hospitality of mind, his respect for humanity in its every
honest manifestation, his support of the doctrine of live and
let live, his tolerance of all that was not itself intolerant; it is
not because of his insistence that professions be measured by
their " cash value " in experience, and men by their ability
to " make good "; but it is, above all, because of his skill in
interpreting those ideals and over-beliefs of his nation and
epoch. For these are the things that save democracy from
vulgarity and commercialism, that preserve the higher human
qualities, and insure for the citizens of a free land the fruits of
civilisation — more air, more refinement, and a more liberal
perspective.

James was a firm believer in democracy. But he held that
democracy was still on trial, and that no one could tell how it
would stand the ordeal. "Nothing future," he writes, "is
quite secure; states enough have inwardly rotted; and
democracy as a whole may undergo self -poisoning. But, on
the other hand, democracy is a kind of religion, and we are
bound not to admit its failure. Faiths and Utopias are the
noblest exercise of human reason, and no one with a spark of
reason in him will sit down fatalistically before the croaker's
picture. The best of us are filled with the contrary vision of a
democracy stumbling through every error till its institutions
glow with justice and its customs shine with beauty. Our
better men shall show the way and we shall follow them. . . .
The ceaseless whisper of the more permanent ideals, the steady
tug of truth and justice, give them but time, must warp the
world in their direction." l

CHARLES M. BAKEWELL.

Special acknowledgment is due to the heirs of William
James, and to the publishers of his works, for permission to
reprint these essays.

1 Memories and Studies, pp. 317 ff.

Introduction xiii

The principal works of William James, from nine of which
have been taken the papers included in this volume, are:

1885. Literary Remains of Henry James, Senr., with an Intro
duction by William James.

Houghton, Mifflin & Co., Boston.

1891. Principles of Psychology.

Vol. I. : Scope of Psychology. Functions of the Brain. Con
ditions of Brain Activity. Habit. The Automaton Theory. The
Mind-Stuff. Theory, Methods, and Snares of Psychology. Relations
of Minds to Other Things. The Stream of Thought. The Conscious
ness of Self. Attention. Conception. Discrimination and Compari
son. Association. Perception of Time. Memory.

Vol. II : Sensation. Imagination. Perception of " Things."
Perception of Space. Perception of Reality. Reasoning. Production
of Movement. Instinct. The Emotions. Will. Hypnotism. Neces
sary Truth and the Effects of Experience.

Henry Holt & Co., New York. Macmillan & Co., London.

1892. Text-Book of Psychology. Briefer Course.

Sensation. Sight. Hearing. Touch. Sensations of Motion.
Structure of the Brain. Functions of the Brain. Neural Activity.
Habit. Stream of Consciousness. The Self. Attention. Conception.
Discrimination. Association. Sense of Time. Memory. Imagination.
Perception. Reasoning. Consciousness and Movement. Emotion.
Instinct. Will. Psychology and Philosophy.

Henry Holt & Co., New York. Macmillan & Co., London.

1897. The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philo

sophy.

The Will to Believe. Is Life Worth Living? The Sentiment of
Rationality. Reflex Action and Theism. The Dilemma of Deter
minism. The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life. Great Men
and their Environment. The Importance of Individuals. Some
Hegelisms. What Psychical Research has accomplished.

Longmans, Green & Co., London.

1898. Human Immortality. New Edition with Preface in reply

to his Critics, 1917.
Houghton, Mifflin & Co., Boston. Dent & Sons, London.

1899. Talks to Teachers on Psychology, and to Students on

Some of Life's Ideals.

Psychology and the Teaching Art. The Stream of Consciousness.
The Child as a Behaving Organism. Education and Behaviour.
The Necessity of Reaction. Native and Acquired Reactions. The
Laws of Habit. Association of Ideas. Interest. Attention. Memory.
Acquisition of Ideas. Apperception. The Will.

Talks to Students : The Gospel of Relaxation. On a Certain Blind
ness in Human Beings. What makes a Life Significant ?

Henry Holt & Co., New York. Longmans, Green & Co., London.

xiv Selected Papers on Philosophy

1902. The Varieties of Religious Experience. A Study in
Human Nature. The Gifford Lectures on Natural
Religion, Edinburgh, 1901-2.

I. Religion and Neurology. II. Circumscription of the Topic.
III. The Reality of the Unseen. IV. and V. The Religion of Healthy-
Mindedness. VI. and VII. The Sick Soul. VIII. The Divided Self and
the Process of its Unification. IX. and X. Conversion. XI., XII.,
and XIII. Saintliness. XIV. and XV. The Value of Saintliness.
XVI. and XVII. Mysticism. XVIII. Philosophy. XIX. Other
Characteristics. XX. Conclusion.

Longmans, Green & Co., London.

1907. Pragmatism. A New Name for Some Old Ways of
Thinking.

The Present Dilemma in Philosophy. What Pragmatism Means.
Some Metaphysical Problem* Pragmatically Considered. The One
and the Many. Pragmatism and Common Sense. Progmatism and
Conception of Truth. Pragmatism and Humanism. Pragmatism
and Religion.

Longmans, Green & Co., London.

1909. The Meaning of Truth. A Sequel to Pragmatism.

Function of Cognition. The Tigers in India. Humanism and
Truth. The Relation between Knower and Known. The Essence of
Humanism. A Word More about Truth. Professor Pratt on Truth.
Pragmatist Account of Truth. Meaning of the Word Truth. The
Existence of Julius Caesar. The Absolute and the Strenuous Life.
Hebert on Pragmatism. Abstractionism and ' Relativismus.' The
English Critics. A Dialogue.

Longmans, Green & Co., London.

1909. A Pluralistic Universe. Hibbert Lectures at Manchester
College.

I. The Types of Philosophic Thinking. II. Monistic Idealism.
III. Hegel and his Method. IV. Concerning Fechner. V. Compound
ing of Consciousness. VI. Bergson and his Critique of Intellectualism.
VII. The Continuity of Experience. VIII. Conclusion.

Appendix: A. The Thing and its Relations. B. The Experience
of Activity. C. On the Notion of Reality as Changing.

Longmans, Green & Co., London.

1911. Memories and Studies.

Louis Agassiz. Emerson. Robert Gould Shaw. Francis Boott.
Thomas Davidson. Herbert Spencer's Autobiography. Frederick
Myers. A Psychical Researcher. Mental Effects of Earthquake.
Energies of Men. The Moral Equivalent of War. Remarks at a
Peace Banquet (1904). Social Value of the College-bred. The
University and the Individual. A Pluralistic Mystic.

Longmans, Green & Co., London.

Introduction xv

1911. Some Problems of Philosophy. A Beginning of an Intro

duction to Philosophy.

Philosophy and its Critics. The Problems of Metaphysics. The
Problem of Being. Percept and Concept. The One and the Many.
The Problem of Novelty. Novelty and the Infinite. Novelty and
Causation.

Appendix : Faith and the Right to Believe.

Longmans, Green & Co., London.

1912. Essays in Radical Empiricism. Edited by Ralph Barton

Perry.

I. Does Consciousness Exist? II. A World of Pure Experience.
III. The Thing and its Relations. IV. How Two Minds can know
One Thing. V. The Place of Affectional Facts in a World of Pure
Experience. VI. The Experience of Activity. VII. The Essence of
Humanism. VIII. La Notion de Conscience. IX. Is Radical
Empiricism Solipsistic? X. Mr. Pitkin's Refutation of Radical
Empiricism. XI. Humanism and Truth Once More. XII. Absolu
tism and Empiricism.

Longmans, Green & Co., London.

CONTENTS

CHAP. PAGE

I. ON A CERTAIN BLINDNESS IN HUMAN BEINGS . . i
(From Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to
Students on Some of Life's Ideals.)

II. THE GOSPEL OF RELAXATION 22

(From Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to
Students on Some of Life's Ideals.)

III. THE ENERGIES OF MEN 40

(From Memories and Studies.)

IV. HABIT - ^ .58

(From Psychology, Briefer Course.)
V. THE WILL ...../... 67

(From Psychology, Vol. II.)

VI. PHILOSOPHY AND ITS CRITICS ..... 85
(From Some Problems of Philosophy.)

/ VII: THE WILL TO BELIEVE 99

(From The Will to Believe and Other Essays in

Popular Philosophy.)

VtlH. THE SENTIMENT OF RATIONALITY . . . .125
(From The Will to Believe .and Other Essays in

Popular Philosophy.)
IX. GREAT MEN AND THEIR ENVIRONMENT . . .165

(From The Will to Believe and Other Essays in
^ Popular Philosophy.)

K/X- WHAT PRAGMATISM MEANS 198

(From Pragmatism.)
XI. HUMANISM AND TRUTH . . . . . .218

(From The Meaning bf Truth.)

XII. THE POSITIVE CONTENT OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE .X 245
<Vi^^ (From The Varieties of Religions Experience.) i /

SELECTED PAPERS ON
PHILOSOPHY

ON A CERTAIN BLINDNESS IN HUMAN
BEINGS1

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

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

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

1 From Talks to Teachers on Psychology : and to Students on som^ of
Life's Ideals, 1915, pp. 229-264.

'

2 Selected Papers on Philosophy

ments, so far as they presume to decide in an absolute way
on the value of other persons' conditions or ideals.

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

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

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

Some years ago, while journeying in the mountains of

On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings 3

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

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

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

Then I said to the mountaineer who was driving me,

What sort of people are they who have to make these new
clearings? " " All of us," he replied. " Why, we ain't happy
here unless we are getting one of these coves under cultiva-

4 Selected Papers on Philosophy

tion." I instantly felt that I had been losing the whole
inward significance of the situation. Because to me the
clearings spoke of naught but denudation, I thought that
to those whose sturdy arms and obedient axes had made
them they could tell no other story. But, when they looked
on the hideous stumps, what they thought of was personal
victory. The chips, the girdled trees, and the vile split
rails spoke of honest sweat, persistent toil and final reward.
The cabin was a warrant of safety for self and wife and
babes. In short, the clearing, which to me was a mere ugly
picture on the retina, was to them a symbol redolent with
moral memories and sang a very paean of duty, struggle,
and success.

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

Wherever a process of life communicates an eagerness
to him who lives it, there the life becomes genuinely signifi
cant. Sometimes the eagerness is more knit up with the
motor activities, sometimes with the perceptions, some
times with the imagination, sometimes with reflective
thought. But, wherever it is found, there is the zest, the
tingle, the excitement of reality; and there is "impor
tance " in the only real and positive sense in which im
portance ever anywhere can be.

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

" Toward the end of September," Stevenson writes,
" when school-time was drawing near, and the nights
were already black, we would begin to sally from our
respective villas, each equipped with a tin bull's-eye
lantern. The thing was so well known that it had worn
a rut in the commerce of Great Britain; and the grocers,
about the due time, began to garnish their windows with

On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings 5

our particular brand of luminary. We wore them buckled
to the waist upon a cricket belt, and over them, such was
the rigour of the game, a buttoned top-coat. They smelled
noisomely of blistered tin. They never burned aright,
though they would always burn our fingers. Their use
was naught, the pleasure of them merely fanciful, and yet
a boy with a bull's-eye under his top-coat asked for nothing
more. The fishermen used lanterns about their boats, and
it was from them, I suppose, that we had got the hint ; but
theirs were not bull's-eyes, nor did we ever play at being
fishermen. The police carried them at their belts, and we
had plainly copied them in that; yet we did not pretend
to be policemen. Burglars, indeed, we may have had
some haunting thought of ; and we had certainly an eye to
past ages when lanterns were more common, and to certain
story-books in which we had found them to figure very
largely. But take it for all in all, the pleasure of the thing
was substantive; and to be a boy with a bull's-eye under
his top-coat was good enough for us.

" When two of these asses met, there would be an anxious
' Have you got your lantern? ' and a gratified ' Yes! '
That was the shibboleth, and very needful, too; for, as it
was the rule to keep our glory contained, none could recog
nize a lantern-bearer unless (like the polecat) by the smell.
Four or five would sometimes climb into the belly of a
ten-man lugger, with nothing but the thwarts above them
— for the cabin was usually locked — or chose out some
hollow of the links where the wind might whistle over
head. Then the coats would be unbuttoned, and the bull's-
eyes discovered; and in the chequering glimmer, under
the huge, windy hall of the night, and cheered by a rich
steam of toasting tinware, these fortunate young gentle
men would crouch together in the cold sand of the links,
or on the scaly bilges of the fishing-boat, and delight them
with inappropriate talk. Woe is me that I cannot give
some specimens! . . . But the talk was but a condiment,
and these gatherings themselves only accidents in the

6 Selected Papers on Philosophy

career of the lantern-bearer. The essence of this bliss was
to walk by yourself in the black night, the slide shut, the
top-coat buttoned, not a ray escaping, whether to conduct
your footsteps or to make your glory public — a mere
pillar of darkness in the dark; and all the while, deep
down in the privacy of your fool's heart, to know you had
a bull's-eye at your belt, and to exult and sing over the
knowledge.

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

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

On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings 7

old iron, cheap desires and cheap fears, that which we are
ashamed to remember and that which we are careless
whether we forget ; but of the note of that time-devouring
nightingale we hear no news.

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

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

" For to miss the joy is to miss all. In the joy of the
actors lies the sense of any action. That is the explanation,
that the excuse. To one who has not the secret of the lan
terns the scene upon the links is meaningless. And hence
the haunting and truly spectral unreality of realistic books.
... In each we miss the personal poetry, the enchanted
atmosphere, that rainbow work of fancy that clothes what

8 . Selected Papers on Philosophy

is naked and seems to ennoble what is base; in each, life
falls dead like dough instead of soaring away like a balloon
into the colours of the sunset ; each is true, each inconceiv
able; for no man lives in the external truth among salts
and acids, but in the warm, phantasmagoric chamber of
his brain, with the painted windows and the storied wall." 1

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

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

" What, then, is our neighbour? Thou hast regarded his
thought, his feeling, as somehow different from thine.
Thou hast said, ' A pain in him is not like a pain in me, but
something far easier to bear.' He seems to thee a little less
living than thou; his life is dim, it is cold, it is a pale fire
beside thy own burning desires. ... So, dimly and by
instinct hast thou lived with thy neighbour, and hast
known him not, being blind. Thou hast made [of him]
a thing, no Self at all. Have done with this illusion, and

1 " The Lantern-bearers," in the volume entitled Across the Plains.
Abridged in the quotation.

On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings 9

simply try to learn the truth. Pain is pain, joy is joy,
everywhere, even as in thee. In all the songs of the forest
birds; in all the cries of the wounded and dying, struggling
in the captor's power; in the boundless sea where the
myriads of water-creatures strive and die; amid all the
countless hordes of savage men; in all sickness and sorrow;
in all exultation and hope, everywhere, from the lowest
to the noblest, the same conscious, burning, wilful life is
found, endlessly manifold as the forms of the living crea
tures, unquenchable as the fires of the sun, real as these
impulses that even now throb in thine own little selfish
heart. Lift up thy eyes, behold that life, and then turn
away, and forget it as thou canst ; but, if thou hast known
that, thou hast begun to know thy duty." *
' This higher vision of an inner significance in what, until
then, we had realized only in the dead external way, often
comes over a person suddenly; and, when it does so, it
makes an epoch in his history. As Emerson says, there
is a depth in those moments that constrains us to ascribe
more reality to them than to all other experiences. The
passion of love will shake one like an explosion, or some
act wi}l awaken a remorseful compunction that hangs
like a cloud over all one's later day.

This mystic sense of hidden meaning starts upon us
often from non-human natural things. I take this passage
from Obermann, a French novel that had some vogue in its
day: " Paris, March 7. — It was dark and rather cold. I
was gloomy, and walked because I had nothing to do. I
passed by some flowers placed breast-high upon a wall.
A jonquil in bloom was there. It is the strongest expression
of desire: it was the first perfume of the year. I felt all the
happiness destined for man. This unutterable harmony of
souls, the phantom of the ideal world, arose in me complete.
I never felt anything so great or so instantaneous. I know
not what shape, what analogy, what secret of relation it
was that made me see in this flower a limitless beauty . . .
1 The Religious Aspect of Philosophy, pp. 157-162 (abridged).

io Selected Papers on Philosophy

I shall never enclose in a conception this power, this im
mensity that nothing will express; this form that nothing
will contain; this ideal of a better world which one feels,
but which it would seem that nature has not made." x

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

" To every natural form, rock, fruit, or flower,
Even the loose stones that cover the highway,
I gave a moral life : I saw them feel,
Or linked them to some feeling : the great mass
Lay bedded in some quickening soul, and all
That I beheld respired with inward meaning." *

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

" Magnificent

The morning rose, in memorable pomp,
Glorious as e'er I had beheld. In front
The sea lay laughing at a distance ; near,
The solid mountains shone, bright as the clouds,
Grain-tinctured, drenched in empyrean light;
And in the meadows and the lower grounds
Was all the sweetness of a common dawn —
Dews, vapours, and the melody of birds.
And labourers going forth to till the fields.

" Ah! need I say, dear Friend, that to the brim
My heart was full ; I made no vows, but vows
Were then made for me; bond unknown to me
Was given, that I should be, else sinning greatly
A dedicated Spirit. On I walked
In thankful blessedness, which yet survives." *

1 De S6nancour, Obermann, lettre xxx.

• The Prelude, book iiit • The Prelude, book iv.

On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings 1 1

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

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

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

Surely, a worthless hour of life when measured by the
1 Op. cit. Boston, Roberts, 1883, pp. 5, 6.

1 2 Selected Papers on Philosophy

usual standards of commercial value. Yet in what other
kind of value can the preciousness of any hour, made
precious by any standard, consist, if it consist not in feel
ings of excited significance like these, engendered in some
one, by what the hour contains?

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

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

" Flood -tide below me! I watch you, face to face;
Clouds of the west ! sun there half an hour high ! I see you also face
to face.

On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings i 3

Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes! how

curious you are to me !
On the ferry-boats, the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning

home, are more curious to me than you suppose ;
And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence, are more

to me, and more in my meditations, than you might suppose.
Others will enter the gates of the ferry, and cross from shore to shore ;
Others will watch the run of the flood-tide;
Others will see the shipping of Manhattan north and west, and the

heights of Brooklyn to the south and east ;
Others will see the islands large and small ;
Fifty years hence, others will see them as they cross, the sun half

an hour high.
A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years hence, others

will see them,
Will enjoy the sunset, the pouring hi of the flood-tide, the falling

back to the sea of the ebb-tide.

It avails not, neither time nor place — distance avails not.
Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt;
Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd ;
Just as you are refresh' d by the gladness of the river and the bright

flow, I was refresh' d ;
Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the swift

current, I stood, yet was hurried;

Just as you look on the numberless masts of ships, and the thick-
stemmed pipes of steamboats, I looked.
I too many and many a time cross' d the river, the sun half an hour

high;'
I watched the Twelfth-month sea-gulls — I saw them high in the air,

with motionless wings, oscillating their bodies,
I saw how the glistening yellow lit up parts of their bodies, and left

the rest hi strong shadow,
I saw the slow-wheeling circles, and the gradual edging toward the

south,

Saw the white sails of schooners and sloops, saw the ships at anchor,
The sailors at work in the rigging, or out astride the spars ;
The scallop-edged waves in the twilight, the ladled cups, the frolic
some crests and glistening;
The stretch afar growing dimmer and dimmer, the grey walls of the

granite store-houses by the docks ;
On the neighbouring shores, the fires from the foundry chimneys

burning high . . . into the night,

Casting their flicker of black . . . into the clefts of streets.
These, and all else, were to me the same as they are to you." *

And so on, through the rest of a divinely beautiful poem.
And, if you wish to see what this hoary loafer considered
the most worthy way of profiting by life's heaven-sent

1 Crossing Brooklyn Ferry (abridged).

14 Selected Papers on Philosophy

opportunities, read the delicious volume of his letters to
a young car-conductor who had become his friend: —

"NEW YORK, Oct. 9, 1868.

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

Truly a futile way of passing the time, some of you may
say, and not altogether creditable to a grown-up man. And

1 Calamus, Boston, 1897, PP- 4*. 42.

On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings 15

yet, from the deepest point of view, who knows the more of
truth and who knows the less — Whitman on his omnibus-
top, full of the inner joy with which the spectacle inspires
him, or you, full of the disdain which the futility of his
occupation excites ?

When your ordinary Brooklynite or New Yorker, leading
a life replete with too much luxury, or tired and careworn
about his personal affairs, crosses the ferry or goes up
Broadway, his fancy does not thus " soar away into the
colours of the sunset," as did Whitman's, nor does he
inwardly realize at all the indisputable fact that this world
never did anywhere or at any time contain more of essential
divinity, or of eternal meaning, than is embodied in the
fields of vision over which his eyes so carelessly pass. There
is life; and there, a step away, is death. There is the only
kind of beauty there ever was. There is the old human
struggle and its fruits together. There is the text and the
sermon, the real and the ideal in one. But to the jaded and
unquickened eye it is all dead and common, pure vulgarism,
flatness, and disgust. " Hech! it is a sad sight! " says
Carlyle, walking at night with some one who appeals to
him to note the splendour of the stars. And that very
repetition of the scene to new generations of men in secula
seculorum, that eternal recurrence of the common order,
which so fills a Whitman with mystic satisfaction, is to a
Schopenhauer, with the emotional anaesthesia, the feeling
of " awful inner emptiness " from out of which he views it
all, the chief ingredient of the tedium it instils. What is life
on the largest scale, he asks, but the same recurrent
inanities, the same dog barking, the same fly buzzing for
evermore ? Yet of the kind of fibre of which such inanities
consist is the material woven of all the excitements, joys,
and meanings that ever were, or ever shall be, in this world.

To be rapt with satisfied attention, like Whitman, to the
mere spectacle of the world's presence is one way, and
the most fundamental way, of confessing one's sense of
its unfathomable significance and importance. But how-

1 6 Selected Papers on Philosophy

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

But the great understander of these mysterious ebbs and
flows is Tolstoi. They throb all through his novels. In his
War and Peace, the hero, Peter, is supposed to be the richest
man in the Russian empire. During the French invasion he
is taken prisoner and dragged through much of the retreat.
Cold, vermin, hunger, and every form of misery assail him,
the result being a revelation to him of the real scale of life's
values. " Here only, and for the first time, he appreciated,
because he was deprived of it, the happiness of eating when
he was hungry, of drinking when he was thirsty, of sleeping
when he was sleepy, and of talking when he felt the desire to
exchange some words. . . . Later in life he always recurred
with joy to this month of captivity, and never failed to
1 Vita, lib. ii, chap. iv.

On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings 17

speak with enthusiasm of the powerful and ineffaceable
sensations, and especially of the moral calm which he had
experienced at this epoch. When at daybreak, on the
morrow of his imprisonment, he saw [I abridge here Tolstoi's
description] the mountains with their wooded slopes dis
appearing in the greyish mist ; when he felt the cool breeze
caress him ; when he saw the light drive away the Vapours,
and the sun rise majestically behind the clouds and cupolas,
and the crosses, the dew, the distance, the river, sparkle in
the splendid, cheerful rays, — his heart overflowed with
emotion. This emotion kept continually with him and
increased a hundred-fold as the difficulties of his situation
grew graver. . . . He learnt that man is meant for happi
ness and that this happiness is in him, in the satisfaction of
the daily needs of existence, and that unhappiness is the
fatal result, not of our need but of our abundance. . . .
When calm reigned in the camp, and the embers paled and
little by little went out, the full moon had reached the
zenith. The woods and the fields round about lay clearly
visible; and, beyond the inundation of light which filled
them, the view plunged into the limitless horizon. Then
Peter cast his eyes upon the firmament, filled at that hour
with myriads of stars. ' All that is mine,' he thought. ' All
that is in me, is me ! And that is what they think they have
taken prisoner ! That is what they have shut up in a cabin ! '
So he smiled and turned in to sleep among his comrades." *•

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

Life is always worth living, if one have such responsive
sensibilities. But we of the highly educated classes (so
1 La Guerre et la Paix, Paris, 1884, vol. iii. pp. 268, 275, 316.
B

1 8 Selected Papers on Philosophy

called) have most of us got far, far away from Nature. We
are trained to seek the choice, the rare, the exquisite
exclusively, and to overlook the common. We are stuffed
with abstract conceptions and glib with verbalities and
verbosities ; and in the culture of these higher functions the
peculiar sources of joy connected with our simpler functions
often dry up, and we grow stone-blind and insensible to
life's more elementary and general goods and joys.

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

The intense interest that life can assume when brought
down to the non-thinking level, the level of pure sensorial
1 Quoted by Lotze, Microcosmus, English translation, vol. ii. p. 240.

On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings 19

perception, has been beautifully described by a man who
can write, Mr. W. H. Hudson, in his volume Idle Days
in Patagonia.

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

" . . . It was my custom to go out every morning on
horseback with my gun and, followed by one dog, to ride
away from the valley; and no sooner would I climb the
terrace and plunge into the gray, universal thicket than I
would find myself as completely alone as if five hundred
instead of only five miles separated me from the valley and
river. So wild and solitary and remote seemed that gray
waste, stretching away into infinitude, a waste untrodden by
man, and where the wild animals are so few that they have
made no discoverable path in the wilderness of thorns. . . .
Not once nor twice nor thrice, but day after day I returned
to this solitude, going to it in the morning as if to attend a
festival, and leaving it only when hunger and thirst and the
westering sun compelled me. And yet I had no object in
going, — no motive which could be put into words; for,
although I carried a gun, there was nothing to shoot, — the G
shooting was all left behind in the valley. . . . Sometimes
I would pass a whole day without seeing one mammal, and •
perhaps not more than a dozen birds of any size. The
weather at that time was cheerless, generally with a gray
film of cloud spread over the sky, and a bleak wind, often
cold enough to make my bridle-hand quite numb. ... At
a slow pace, which would have seemed intolerable under
other circumstances, I would ride about for hours together
at a stretch. On arriving at a hill, I would slowly ride to its
summit, and stand there to survey the prospect. On every
side it stretched away in great undulations, wild and
irregular. How gray it all was ! Hardly less so near at hand
than on the haze-wrapped horizon where the hills were dim
and the outline obscured by distance. Descending from my
outlook, I would take up my aimless wanderings again, and

20 Selected Papers on Philosophy

visit other elevations to gaze on the same landscape from
another point ; and so on for hours. And at noon I would
dismount, and sit or lie on my folded poncho for an hour or
longer. One day in these rambles I discovered a small grove
composed of twenty or thirty trees, growing at a con
venient distance apart, that had evidently been resorted to
by a herd of deer or other wild animals. This grove was on
a hill differing in shape from other hills in its neighbour
hood ; and, after a time, I made a point of finding and using
it as a resting-place every day at noon. I did not ask myself
why I made choice of that one spot, sometimes going out of
my way to sit there, instead of sitting down under any one
of the millions of trees and bushes on any other hillside. I
thought nothing about it, but acted unconsciously. Only
afterwards it seemed to me that, after having rested there
once, each time I wished to rest again, the wish came
associated with the image of that particular clump of trees,
with polished stems and clean bed of sand beneath ; and in
l short time I formed a habit of returning, animal like, to
repose at that same spot.

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

On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings 21

turned to my former self — to thinking and the old insipid
existence [again].

" I had undoubtedly gone back; and that state of intense
watchfulness or alertness, rather, with suspension of the
higher intellectual faculties, represented the mental state
of the pure savage. He thinks little, reasons little, having
a surer guide in his [mere sensory perceptions]. He is in
perfect harmony with nature, and is nearly on a level,
mentally, with the wild animals he preys on, and which in
their turn sometimes prey on him." 1

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

And now what is the result of all these considerations
and quotations? It is negative in one sense, but positive
in another. It absolutely forbids us to be forward in pro
nouncing on the meaninglessness of forms of existence other
than our own; and it commands us to tolerate, respect,
and indulge those whom we see harmlessly interested and
happy in their own ways, however unintelligible these may
be to us. Hands off: neither the whole of truth nor the
whole of good is revealed to any single observer, although
each observer gains a partial superiority of insight from the
peculiar position in which he stands. Even prisons and
sick-rooms have their special revelations. It is enough to
ask of each of us that he should be faithful to his own oppor
tunities and make the most of his own blessings, without
presuming to regulate the rest of the vast field.
1 Op. cit. pp. 210-222 (abridged).

II
THE GOSPEL OF RELAXATION1

I WISH in the following hour to take certain psychological
doctrines and show their practical applications to mental
hygiene — to the hygiene of our American life more par
ticularly. Our people, especially in academic circles, are
turning towards psychology nowadays with great expecta
tions; and if psychology is to justify them, it must be
by showing fruits in the pedagogic and therapeutic lines.

The reader may possibly have heard of a peculiar theory
of the emotions, commonly referred to in psychological
literature as the Lange- James theory. According to this
theory, our emotions are mainly due to those organic
stirrings that are aroused in us in a reflex way by the
stimulus of the exciting object or situation. An emotion
of fear, for example, or surprise, is not a direct effect of the
object's presence on the mind, but an effect of that still
earlier effect, the bodily commotion which the object
suddenly excites; so that, were this bodily commotion
suppressed, we should not so much feel fear as call the
situation fearful; we should not feel surprise, but coldly
recognize that the object was indeed astonishing. One
enthusiast has even gone so far as to say that when we feel
sorry it is because we weep, when we feel afraid it is because
we run away, and not conversely. Some of you may per
haps be acquainted with the paradoxical formula. Now,
whatever exaggeration may possibly lurk in this account
of our emotions (and I doubt myself whether the exaggera
tion be very great), it is certain that the main core of it is

1 From Talks to Teachers on Psychology : and to Students on some
of Life's Ideals, 1915, pp. 199-228.

The Gospel of Relaxation 23

true, and that the mere giving way to tears, for example,
or to the outward expression of an anger-fit, will result for
the moment in making the inner grief or anger more acutely
felt. There is, accordingly, no better known or more
generally useful precept in the moral training of youth, or
in one's personal self-discipline, than that which bids us
pay primary attention to what we do and express, and not
to care too much for what we feel. If we only check a
cowardly impulse in time, for example, or if we only don't
strike the blow or rip out with the complaining or insulting
word that we shall regret as long as we live, our feelings
themselves will presently be the calmer and better, with no
particular guidance from us on their own account. Action
seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go
together; and by regulating the action, which is under
the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate
the feeling, which is not.

Thus the sovereign voluntary path to cheerfulness, if
our spontaneous cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully,
to look round cheerfully, and to act and speak as if cheer
fulness were already there. If such conduct does not make
you soon feel cheerful, nothing else on that occasion can. So
to feel brave, act as if we were brave, use all our will to that
end, and a courage-fit will very likely replace the fit of fear.
Again, in order to feel kindly toward a person to whom we
have been inimical, the only way is more or less deliberately
to smile, to make sympathetic inquiries, and to force our
selves to say genial things. One hearty laugh together will
bring enemies into a closer communion of heart than hours
spent on both sides in inward wrestling with the mental
demon of uncharitable feeling. To wrestle with a bad feeling
only pins our attention on it, and keeps it still fastened in
the mind : whereas, if we act as if from some better feeling,
the old bad feeling soon folds its tent like an Arab and
silently steals away.

The best manuals of religious devotion accordingly
reiterate the maxim that we must let our feelings go, and

24 Selected Papers on Philosophy

pay no regard to them whatever. In an admirable and
widely successful little book called The Christian's Secret
of a Happy Life, by Mrs. Hannah Whitall Smith, I find
this lesson on almost eyery page. Act faithfully and you
really have faith, no matter how cold and even how dubious
you may feel. " It is your purpose God looks at," writes
Mrs. Smith, " not your feelings about that purpose; and
your purpose, or will, is therefore the only thing you need
attend to. ... Let your emotions come or let them go,
just as God pleases, and make no account of them either
way. . . . They really have nothing to do with the matter.
They are not the indicators of your spiritual state, but are
merely the indicators of your temperament or of your
present physical condition."

But you all know these facts already, so I need no longer
press them on your attention. From our acts and from our
attitudes ceaseless inpouring currents of sensation come,
which help to determine from moment to moment what
our inner states shall be; that is a fundamental law of
psychology which I will therefore proceed to assume.

A Viennese neurologist of considerable reputation has
recently written about the Binnenleben, as he terms it,
or buried life of human beings. No doctor, this writer says,
can get into really profitable relations with a nervous
patient until he gets some sense of what the patient's
Binnenleben is, of the sort of unuttered inner atmosphere
in which his consciousness dwells alone with the secrets
of its prison-house. This inner personal tone is what we
can't communicate or describe articulately to others; but
the wraith and ghost of it, so to speak, are often what our
friends and intimates feel as our most characteristic quality.
In the unhealthy-minded, apart from all sorts of old regrets,
ambitions checked by shames, and aspirations obstructed
by timidities, it consists mainly of bodily discomforts not
distinctly localized by the sufferer, but breeding a general
self-mistrust and sense that things are not as they should
be with him. Half the thirst for alcohol that exists in the

The Gospel of Relaxation 25

world exists simply because alcohol acts as a temporary
anaesthetic and effacer to all these morbid feelings that
never ought to be in a human being at all. In the healthy-
minded, on the contrary, there are no fears or shames to
discover; and the sensations that pour in from the organism
only help to swell the general vital sense of security and
readiness for anything that may turn up.

Consider, for example, the effects of a well-toned motor-
apparatus, nervous and muscular, on our general personal
self-consciousness, the sense of elasticity and efficiency that
results. They tell us that in Norway the life of the woman
has lately been entirely revolutionized by the new order
of muscular feelings with which the use of the ski, or long
snow-shoes, as a sport for both sexes, has made the women
acquainted. Fifteen years ago the Norwegian women were,
even more than the women of other lands, votaries of the
old-fashioned ideal of femininity, " the domestic angel,"
the " gentle and refining influence " sort of thing. Now
these sedentary fireside tabby-cats of Norway have been
trained, they say, by the snow-shoes into lithe and auda
cious creatures, for whom no night is too dark or height
too giddy, and who are not only saying good-bye to the
traditional feminine pallor and delicacy of constitution,
but actually taking the lead in every educational and social
reform. I cannot but think that the tennis and tramping
and skating habits and the bicycle craze which are so
rapidly extending among our dear sisters and daughters
in this country are going also to lead to a sounder and
heartier moral tone, which will send its tonic breath through
all our American life.

I hope that here in America more and more the ideal of
the well-trained and vigorous body will be maintained neck
by neck with that of the well-trained and vigorous mind as
the two coequal halves of the higher education for men and
women alike. The strength of the British Empire lies in
the strength of character of the individual Englishman,
taken all alone by himself. And that strength, I am per-

26 Selected Papers on Philosophy

suaded, is perennially nourished and kept up by nothing
so much as by the national worship, in which all classes
meet, of athletic outdoor life and sport.

I recollect, years ago, reading a certain work by an
American doctor on hygiene and the laws of life and the
type of future humanity. I have forgotten its author's
name and its title, but I remember well an awful prophecy
that it contained about the future of our muscular system.
Human perfection, the writer said, means ability to cope
with the environment ; but the environment will more and
more require mental power from us, and less and less will
ask for bare brute strength. Wars will cease, machines will
do our heavy work, man will become more and more a mere
director of nature's energies, and less and less an exert er
of energy on his own account. So that, if the homo sapiens
of the future can only digest his food and think, what need
will he have of well-developed muscles at all? And why,
pursued this writer, should we not even now be satisfied
with a more delicate and intellectual type of beauty than
that which pleased our ancestors? Nay, I have heard a
fanciful friend make a still further advance in this " new-
man " direction. With our future food, he says, itself pre
pared in liquid form from the chemical elements of the
atmosphere, pepsinated or half-digested in advance, and
sucked up through a glass tube from a tin can, what need
shall we have of teeth, or stomachs even? They may go,
along with our muscles and our physical courage, while,
challenging ever more and more our proper admiration,
will grow the gigantic domes of our crania, arching over
our spectacled eyes, and animating our flexible little lips
to those floods of learned and ingenious talk which will
constitute our most congenial occupation.

I am sure that your flesh creeps at this apocalyptic
vision. Mine certainly did so; and I cannot believe that
our muscular vigour will ever be a superfluity. Even if
the day ever dawns in which it will not be needed for
fighting the old heavy battles against Nature, it will

The Gospel of Relaxation 27

still always be needed to furnish the background of
sanity, serenity, and cheerfulness to life, to give moral
elasticity to our disposition, to round off the wiry edge of
our fretfulness, and make us good-humoured and easy of
approach. Weakness is too apt to be what the doctors call
irritable weakness. And that blessed internal peace and
confidence, that acquiescentia in seipso, as Spinoza used to
call it, that wells up from every part of the body of a
muscularly well-trained human being, and soaks the
indwelling soul of him with satisfaction, is, quite apart
from every consideration of its mechanical utility, an
element of spiritual hygiene of supreme significance.

And now let me go a step deeper into mental hygiene
and try to enlist your insight and sympathy in a cause
which I believe is one of paramount patriotic importance
to us Yankees. Many years ago a Scottish medical man,
Dr. Clouston, a mad-doctor as they call him there, or what
we should call an asylum physician (the most eminent one
in Scotland), visited this country, and said something
that has remained in my memory ever since. " You
Americans," he said, " wear too much expression on your
faces. You are living like an army with all its reserves
engaged in action. The duller countenances of the British
population betoken a better scheme of life. They suggest
stores of reserved nervous force to fall back upon, if any
occasion should arise that requires it. This inexcitability,
this presence at all times of power not used, I regard,"
continued Dr. Clouston, " as the great safeguard of our
British people. The other thing in you gives me a sense of
insecurity, and you ought somehow to tone yourselves
down. You really do carry too much expression, you
take too intensely the trivial moments of life."

Now Dr. Clouston is a trained reader of the secrets of the
soul as expressed upon the countenance, and the observa
tion of his which I quote seems to me to mean a great deal.
And all Americans who stay in Europe long enough to get
accustomed to the spirit that reigns and expresses itself

28 Selected Papers on Philosophy

there, so unexcitable as compared with ours, make a
similar observation when they return to their native
shores. They find a wild-eyed look upon their compatriots'
faces, either of too desperate eagerness and anxiety or of
too intense responsiveness and good-will. It is hard to
say whether the men or the women show it most. It is
true that we do not all feel about it as Dr. Clouston felt.
Many of us, far from deploring it, admire it. We say:
" What intelligence it shows ! How different from the stolid
cheeks, the codfish eyes, the slow, inanimate demeanour
we have been seeing in the British Isles! " Intensity,
rapidity, vivacity of appearance are indeed with us some
thing of a nationally accepted ideal; and the medical
notion of " irritable weakness " is not the first thing sug
gested by them to our mind, as it was to Dr. Clouston's.
In a weekly paper not very long ago I remember reading
a story in which, after describing the beauty and interest
of the heroine's personality, the author summed up her
charms by saying that to all who looked upon her an
impression as of " bottled lightning " was irresistibly
conveyed.

Bottled lightning, in truth, is one of our American ideals,
even of a young girl's character ! Now it is most ungracious,
and it may seem to some persons unpatriotic, to criticize
in public the physical peculiarities of one's own people,
of one's own family, so to speak. Besides, it may be said,
and said with justice, that there are plenty of bottled-
lightning temperaments in other countries, and plenty of
phlegmatic temperaments here ; and that, when all is said
and done, the more or less of tension about which I am
making such a fuss is a very small item in the sum total
of a nation's life, and not worth solemn treatment at a time
when agreeable rather than disagreeable things should be
talked about. Well, in one sense the more or less of tension
in our faces and in our unused muscles is a small thing: not
much mechanical work is done by these contractions. But
it is not always the material size of a thing that measures

The Gospel of Relaxation 29

its importance: often it is its place and function. One of
the most philosophical remarks I ever heard made was by
an unlettered workman who was doing some repairs at my
house many years ago. "There is very little difference
between one man and another," he said, " when you go to
the bottom of it. But what little there is, is very impor
tant." And the remark certainly applies to this case. The
general over-contraction may be small when estimated in
foot-pounds, but its importance is immense on account of
its effects on the over-contracted person's spiritual life. This
follows as a necessary consequence from the theory of our
emotions to which I made reference at the beginning of this
article. For by the sensations that so incessantly pour in
from the over-tense excited body the over-tense and excited
habit of mind is kept up; and the sultry, threatening, ex
hausting, thunderous inner atmosphere never quite clears
away. If you never wholly give yourself up to the chair
you sit in, but always keep your leg -and -body -muscles
half contracted for a rise ; if you breathe eighteen or nine
teen instead of sixteen times a minute, and never quite
breathe out at that — what mental mood can you be in but
one of inner panting and expectancy, and how can the
future and its worries possibly forsake your mind? On
the other hand, how can they gain admission to your mind
if your brow be unruffled, your respiration calm and com
plete, and your muscles all relaxed ?

Now what is the cause of this absence of repose, this
bottled-lightning quality in us Americans? The explana
tion of it that is usually given is that it comes from the
extreme dryness of our climate and the acrobatic per
formances of our thermometer, coupled with the extra
ordinary progressiveness of our life, the hard work, the
railroad speed, the rapid success, and all the other things
we know so well by heart. Well, our climate is certainly
exciting, but hardly more so than that of many parts of
Europe, where nevertheless no bottled-lightning girls are
found. And the work done and the pace of life are as

30 Selected Papers on Philosophy

extreme in every great capital of Europe as they are here.
To me both of these pretended causes are utterly insufficient
to explain the facts.

To explain them, we must go not to physical geography,
but to psychology and sociology. The latest chapter both
in sociology and in psychology to be developed in a manner
that approaches adequacy is the chapter on the imitative
impulse. First Bagehot, then Tarde, then Royce and
Baldwin here, have shown that invention and imitation,
taken together, form, one may say, the entire warp and
woof of human life, in so far as it is social. The American
over- tension and jerkiness and breathlessness and intensity
and agony of expression are primarily social, and only
secondarily physiological, phenomena. They are bad habits,
nothing more or less, bred of custom and example, born of
the imitation of bad models and the cultivation of false
personal ideals. How are idioms acquired, how do local
peculiarities of phrase and accent come about? Through
an accidental example set by some one, which struck the
ears of others, and was quoted and copied till at last every
one in the locality chimed in. Just so it is with national
tricks of vocalization or intonation, with national manners,
fashions of movement and gesture, and habitual expression
of face. We, here in America, through following a suc
cession of pattern-setters whom it is now impossible to
trace, and through influencing each other in a bad direction,
have at last settled down collectively into what, for better
or worse, is our own characteristic national type — a type
with the production of which, so far as these habits go, the
climate and conditions have had practically nothing at all
to do.

This type, which we have thus reached by our imitative-
ness, we now have fixed upon us, for better or worse. Now
no type can be wholly disadvantageous; but, so far as our
type follows the bottled-lightning fashion, it cannot be
wholly good. Dr. Clouston was certainly right in thinking
that eagerness, breathlessness, and anxiety are not signs

The Gospel of Relaxation 3 i

of strength: they are signs of weakness and of bad co
ordination. The even forehead, the slab-like cheek, the cod
fish eye, may be less interesting for the moment ; but they
are more promising signs than intense expression is of what
we may expect of their possessor in the long run. Your dull,
unhurried worker gets over a great deal of ground, because
he never goes backward or breaks down. Your intense,
convulsive worker breaks down and has bad moods so often
that you never know where he may be when you most need
his help — he may be having one of his " bad days." We
say that so many of our fellow-countrymen collapse, and
have to be sent abroad to rest their nerves, because they
work so hard. I suspect that this is an immense mistake.
I suspect that neither the nature nor the amount of our
work is accountable for the frequency and severity of
our breakdowns, but that their cause lies rather in those
absurd feelings of hurry and having no time, in that
breathlessness and tension, that anxiety of feature, and that
solicitude for results, that lack of inner harmony and ease,
in short, by which with us the work is so apt to be accom
panied, and from which a European who should do the
same work would nine times out of ten be free. These
perfectly wanton and unnecessary tricks of inner attitude
and outer manner in us, caught from the social atmosphere,
kept up by tradition, and idealized by many as the admir
able way of life, are the last straws that break the American
camel's back, the final overflowers of our measure of wear
and tear and fatigue.

The voice, for example, in a surprisingly large number of
us has a tired and plaintive sound. Some of us are really
tired (for I do not mean absolutely to deny that our climate
has a tiring quality) ; but far more of us are not tired at all,
or would not be tired at all unless we had got into a wretched
trick of feeling tired, by following the prevalent habits
of vocalization and expression. And if talking high and
tired, and living excitedly and hurriedly, would only enable
us to do more by the way, even while breaking us down in

32 Selected Papers on Philosophy

the end, it would be different. There would be some compen
sation, some excuse, for going on so. But the exact reverse
is the case. It is your relaxed and easy worker, who is in no
hurry and quite thoughtless most of the while of conse
quences, who is your efficient worker; and tension and
anxiety, and present and future, all mixed up together in
our mind at once, are the surest drags upon steady progress
and hindrances to our success. My colleague, Professor
Miinsterberg, an excellent observer, who came here recently,
has written some notes on America to German papers.
He says in substance that the appearance of unusual
energy in America is superficial and illusory, being really
due to nothing but the habits of jerkiness and bad co
ordination for which we have to thank the defective train
ing of our people. I think myself that it is high time for
old legends and traditional opinions to be changed; and
that, if any one should begin to write about Yankee in
efficiency and feebleness, and inability to do anything
with time except to waste it, he would have a very pretty
paradoxical little thesis to sustain, with a great many
facts to quote, and a great deal of experience to appeal to
in its proof.

Well, my friends, if our dear American character is
weakened by all this over-tension — and I think, whatever
reserves you may make, that you will agree as to the main
facts — where does the remedy lie ? It lies, of course, where
lay the origins of the disease. If a vicious fashion and taste
are to blame for the thing, the fashion and taste must be
changed. And, though it is no small thing to inoculate
seventy millions of people with new standards, yet, if there
is to be any relief, that will have to be done. We must
change ourselves from a race that admires jerk and snap
for their own sakes, and looks down upon low voices and
quiet ways as dull, to one that, on the contrary, has calm
for its ideal, and for their own sakes loves harmony, dignity,
and ease.

So we go back to the psychology of imitation again.

The Gospel of Relaxation 33

There is only one way to improve ourselves, and that is by
some of us setting an example which the others may pick
up and imitate till the new fashion spreads from east to
west. Some of us are in more favourable positions than
others to set new fashions. Some are much more striking
personally and imitable, so to speak. But no living person is
sunk so low as not to be imitated by somebody. Thackeray
somewhere says of the Irish nation that there never was
an Irishman so poor that he didn't have a still poorer
Irishman living at his expense; and, surely, there is no
human being whose example doesn't work contagiously in
some particular. The very idiots at our public institutions
imitate each other's peculiarities. And, if you should in
dividually achieve calmness and harmony in your own
person, you may depend upon it that a wave of imitation
will spread from you, as surely as the circles spread out
ward when a stone is dropped into a lake.

Fortunately, we shall not have to be absolute pioneers.
Even now in New York they have formed a society for the
improvement of our national vocalisation, and one per
ceives its machinations already in the shape of various
newspaper paragraphs intended to stir up dissatisfaction
with the awful thing that it is. And, better still than that,
because more radical and general is the gospel of relaxation,
as one may call it, preached by Miss Annie Payson Call,
of Boston, in her admirable little volume called Power
through Repose, a book that ought to be in the hands of
every teacher and student in America of either sex. You
need only be followers, then, on a path already opened up by
others. But of one thing be confident: others still will
follow you.

And this brings me to one more application of psychology
to practical life, to which I will call attention briefly and
then close. If one's example of easy and calm ways is to be
effectively contagious, one feels by instinct that the less
voluntarily one aims at getting imitated, the more uncon
scious one keeps in the matter, the more likely one is to
c

34 Selected Papers on Philosophy

succeed. Become the imitable thing and you may then dis
charge your minds of all responsibility for the imitation.
The laws of social nature will take care of that result. Now
the psychological principle on which this precept reposes is
a law of very deep and wide-spread importance in the
conduct of our lives, and at the same time a law which we
Americans most grievously neglect. Stated technically, the
law is this: that strong feeling about one's self tends to arrest
the free association of one's objective ideas and motor pro
cesses. We get the extreme example of this in the mental
disease called melancholia.

A melancholic patient is filled through and through with
intensely painful emotion about himself. He is threatened,
he is guilty, he is doomed, he is annihilated, he is lost. His
mind is fixed as if in a clamp on these feelings of his own
situation, and in all the books on insanity you may read that
the usual varied flow of his thoughts has ceased. His
associative processes, to use the technical phrase, are
inhibited; and his ideas stand stock-still, shut up to their
one monotonous function of reiterating inwardly the fact of
the man's desperate estate. And this inhibitive influence
is not due to the mere fact that his emotion is painful.
Joyous emotions about the self also stop the association of
our ideas. A saint in ecstasy is as motionless and irrespon
sive and one-idea'd as a melancholiac. And, without going
as far as ecstatic saints, we know how in every one a great
or sudden pleasure may paralyze the flow of thought. Ask
young people returning from a party or a spectacle, and all
excited about it, what it was. " Oh, it was fine ! it was
fine ! it was fine ! " is all the information you are likely to
receive until the excitement has calmed down. Probably
every one of my hearers has been made temporarily half-
idiotic by some great success or piece of good fortune.
" Good ! Good ! Good ! " is all we can at such times say to
ourselves until we smile at our own very foolishness.

Now from all this we can draw an extremely practical
conclusion. If, namely, we wish our trains of ideation and

The Gospel of Relaxation 35

volition to be copious and varied and effective, we must
form the habit of freeing them from the inhibitive influ
ence of reflection upon them, of egoistic preoccupation
about their results. Such a habit, like other habits, can be
formed. Prudence and duty and self-regard, emotions of
ambition and emotions of anxiety, have, of course, a need
ful part to play in our lives. But confine them as far as
possible to the occasions when you are making your general
resolutions and deciding on your plans of campaign, and
keep them out of the details. When once a decision is
reached and execution is the order of the day, dismiss
absolutely all responsibility and care about the outcome.
Unclamp, in a word, your intellectual and practical
machinery, and let it run free; and the service it will do
you will be twice as good. Who are the scholars who get
" rattled " in the recitation-room? Those who think of the
possibilities of failure and feel the great importance of the
act. Who are those who do recite well? Often those who
are most indifferent. Their ideas reel themselves out of
their memory of their own accord. Why do we hear the
complaint so often that social life in New England is either
less rich and expressive or more fatiguing than it is in some
other parts of the world? To what is the fact, if fact it be,
due unless to the over-active conscience of the people, afraid
of either saying something too trivial and obvious, or some
thing insincere, or something unworthy of one's inter
locutor, or something in some way or other not adequate to
the occasion? How can conversation possibly steer itself
through such a sea of responsibilities and inhibitions as
this? On the other hand, conversation does flourish and
society is refreshing, and neither dull on the one hand nor
exhausting from its effort on the other, wherever people
forget their scruples and take the brakes off their hearts,
and let their tongues wag as automatically and irresponsibly
as they will.

They talk much in pedagogic circles to-day about the
duty of the teacher to prepare for every lesson in advance.

36 Selected Papers on Philosophy

To some extent this is useful. But we Yankees are assuredly
not those to whom such a general doctrine should be
preached. We are only too careful as it is. The advice I
should give to most teachers would be in the words of one
who is herself an admirable teacher. Prepare yourself in
the subject so well that it shall be always on tap : then in the
class-room trust your spontaneity and fling away all further
care.

My advice to students, especially to girl students, would
be somewhat similar. Just as a bicycle chain may be too
tight, so may one's carefulness and conscientiousness be
so tense as to hinder the running of one's mind. Take, for
example, periods when there are many successive days of
examination impending. One ounce of good nervous tone
in an examination is worth many pounds of anxious study
for it in advance. If you want really to do your best in an
examination, fling away the book the day before, say to
yourself, " I won't waste another minute on this miserable
thing, and I don't care an iota whether I succeed or not."
Say this sincerely, and feel it ; and go out to play, or go to
bed and sleep, and I am sure the results next day will
encourage you to use the method permanently. I have
heard this advice given to a student by Miss Call, whose
book on muscular relaxation I quoted a moment ago. In
her later book, entitled As a Matter of Course, the gospel
of moral relaxation, of dropping things from the mind, and
not " caring," is preached with equal success. Not only our
preachers, but our friends the theosophists and mind-
curers of various religious sects are also harping on this
string. And with the doctors, the Delsarteans, the various
mind-curing sects, and such writers as Mr. Dresser, Prentice
Mulford, Mr. Horace Fletcher, and Mr. Trine to help, and
the whole band of school-teachers and magazine-readers
chiming in, it really looks as if a good start might be made
in the direction of changing our American mental habit
into something more indifferent and strong.

Worry means always and invariably inhibition of associa-

The Gospel of Relaxation 37

tions and loss of effective power. Of course, the sovereign
cure for worry is religious faith ; and this, of course, you
also know. The turbulent billows of the fretful surface
leave the deep parts of the ocean undisturbed, and to him
who has a hold on vaster and more permanent realities
the hourly vicissitudes of his personal destiny seem re
latively insignificant things. The really religious person is
accordingly unshakable and full of equanimity, and calmly
ready for any duty that the day may bring forth. This is
charmingly illustrated by a little work with which I recently
became acquainted, " The Practice of the Presence of God,
the Best Ruler of a Holy Life, by Brother Lawrence, being
Conversations and Letters of Nicholas Herman of Lorraine,
translated from the French." l I extract a few passages,
the conversations being given in indirect discourse. Brother
Lawrence was a Carmelite friar, converted at Paris in 1666.
" He said that he had been footman to M. Fieubert, the
Treasurer, and that he was a great awkward fellow, who
broke everything. That he had desired to be received into
a monastery, thinking that he would there be made to smart
for his awkwardness and the faults he should commit, and
so he should sacrifice to God his life, with its pleasures ; but
that God had disappointed him, he having met with nothing
but satisfaction in that state. . . .

" That he had long been troubled in mind from a certain
belief that he should be damned; that all the men in the
world could not have persuaded him to the contrary ; but
that he had thus reasoned with himself about it : / engaged
in a religious life only for the love of God, and I have endeav
oured to act only for Him ; whatever becomes of me, whether
I be lost or saved, I will always continue to act purely for the
love of God. I shall have this good at least, that till death I
shall have done all that is in me to love Him. . . . That since
then he had passed his life in perfect liberty and continual
joy.

" That when an occasion of practising some virtue offered,
1 Fleming H. Revell Company, New York.

38 Selected Papers on Philosophy

he addressed himself to God, saying, ' Lord, I cannot do
this unless thou enablest me; ' and that then he received
strength more than sufficient. That, when he had failed
in his duty, he only confessed his fault, saying to God, ' I
shall never do otherwise, if You leave me to myself; it is
You who must hinder my failing and mend what is amiss.'
That after this he gave himself no further uneasiness
about it.

" That he had been lately sent into Burgundy to buy
the provision of wine for the society, which was a very
unwelcome task for him, because he had no turn for
business, and because he was lame, and could not go about
the boat but by rolling himself over the casks. That,
however, he gave himself no uneasiness about it, nor about
the purchase of the wine. That he said to God, ' It was his
business he was about/ and that he afterward found it
well performed. That he had been sent into Auvergne,
the year before, upon the same account ; that he could not
tell how the matter passed, but that it proved very well.

"So, likewise, in his business in the kitchen (to which
he had naturally a great aversion), having accustomed
himself to do everything there for the love of God, and
with prayer upon all occasions, for his grace to do his work
well, he had found everything easy during fifteen years
that he had been employed there.

" That he was very well pleased with the post he was
now in, but that he was as ready to quit that as the former,
since he was always pleasing himself in every condition
by doing little things for the love of God.

" That the goodness of God assured him he would not
forsake him utterly, and that he would give him strength
to bear whatever evil he permitted to happen to him;
and, therefore, that he feared nothing, and had no occasion
to consult with anybody about his state. That, when he
had attempted to do it, he had always come away more
perplexed/'

The simple-heartedness of the good Brother Lawrence,

The Gospel of Relaxation 39

and the relaxation of all unnecessary solicitudes Jand
anxieties in him, is a refreshing spectacle.

The need of feeling responsible all the live-long day has
been preached long enough in our New England. Long
enough exclusively, at any rate — long enough to the female
sex. What our girl students and woman teachers most
need nowadays is not the exacerbation but rather the
toning-down of their moral tensions. Even now I fear that
some one of my fair hearers may be making an undying
resolve to become strenuously relaxed, cost what it will,
for the remainder of her life. It is needless to say that that
is not the way to do it. The way to do it, paradoxical as it
may seem, is genuinely not to care whether you are doing
it or not. Then, possibly, by the grace of God, you may all
at once find that you are doing it, and, having learned
what the trick feels like, you may (again by the grace of
God) be enabled to go on.

And that something like this may be the happy experi
ence of all my hearers is, in closing, my most earnest wish.

Ill
THE ENERGIES OF MEN*

EVERY ONE knows what it is to start a piece of work, either
intellectual or muscular, feeling stale — or oold, as an Adiron
dack guide once put it to me. And everybody knows what
it is to " warm up " to his job. The process of warming up
gets particularly striking in the phenomenon known as
" second wind." On usual occasions we make a practice of
stopping an occupation as soon as we meet the first effective
layer (so to call it) of fatigue. We have then walked, played,
or worked " enough," so we desist. That amount of fatigue
is an efficacious obstruction on this side of which our
usual life is cast. But if an unusual necessity forces us to
press onward, a surprising thing occurs. The fatigue gets
worse up to a certain critical point, when gradually or
suddenly it passes away, and we are fresher than before.
We have evidently tapped a level of new energy, masked
until then by the fatigue-obstacle usually obeyed. There
may be layer after layer of this experience. A third and a
fourth " wind " may supervene. Mental activity shows the
phenomenon as well as physical, and in exceptional cases
we may find, beyond the very extremity of fatigue-distress,
amounts of ease and power that we never dreamed ourselves

1 This was the title originally given to the Presidential Address
delivered before the American Philosophical Association at Columbia
University, December 28, 1906, and published as there delivered
in the Philosophical Review for January 1907. The address was later
published, after slight alteration, in the American Magazine for
October 1907, under the title " The Powers of Men." The more
popular form is here reprinted under the title which the author
himself preferred.

From Memories and Studies, 1912, pp. 229-264.

40

The Energies of Men 4 1

to own — sources of strength habitually not taxed at all,
because habitually we never push through the obstruction,
never pass those early critical points.

For many years I have mused on the phenomenon of
second wind, trying to find a physiological theory. It is
evident that our organism has stored-up reserves of energy
that are ordinarily not called upon, but that may be called
upon : deeper and deeper strata of combustible or explosible
material, discontinuously arranged, but ready for use by
any one who probes so deep, and repairing themselves by
rest as well as do the superficial strata. Most of us continue
living unnecessarily near our surface. Our energy-budget
is like our nutritive budget. Physiologists say that a man
is in " nutritive equilibrium " when day after day he
neither gains nor loses weight. But the odd thing is that
this condition may obtain on astonishingly different
amounts of food. Take a man in nutritive equilibrium, and
systematically increase or lessen his rations. In the first
case he will begin to gain weight, in the second case to lose
it. The change will be greatest on the first day, less on the
second, less still on the third; and so on, till he has gained
all that he will gain, or lost all that he will lose, on that
altered diet. He is now in nutritive equilibrium again, but
with a new weight; and this neither lessens nor increases
because his various combustion-processes have adjusted
themselves to the changed dietary. He gets rid, in one way
or another, of just as much N, C, H, etc., as he takes in per
diem.

Just so one can be in what I might call " efficiency-
equilibrium " (neither gaining nor losing power when once
the equilibrium is reached) on astonishingly different
quantities of work, no matter in what direction the work
may be measured. It may be physical work, intellectual
work, moral work, or spiritual work.

Of course there are limits: the trees don't grow into
the sky. But the plain fact remains that men the world
over possess amounts of resource which only very excep-

42 Selected Papers on Philosophy

tional individuals push to their extremes of use. But the
very same individual, pushing his energies to their extreme,
may in a vast number of cases keep the pace up day after
day, and find no " reaction " of a bad sort, so long as
decent hygienic conditions are preserved. His more active
rate of energizing does nor wreck him; for the organism
adapts itself, and as the rate of waste augments, augments
correspondingly the rate of repair.

I say the rate and not the lime of repair. The busiest
man needs no more hours of rest than the idler. Some years
ago Professor Patrick, of the Iowa State University, kept
three young men awake for four days and nights. When
his observations on them were finished, the subjects were
permitted to sleep themselves out. All awoke from this
sleep completely refreshed, but the one who took longest
to restore himself from his long vigil only slept one-third
more time than was regular with him.

If my reader will put together these two conceptions,
first, that few men live at their maximum of energy, and
second, that any one may be in vital equilibrium at very
different rates of energizing, he will find, I think, that a
very pretty practical problem of national economy, as well
as of individual ethics, opens upon his view. In rough
terms, we may say that a man who energizes below his
normal maximum fails by just so much to profit by his
chance at life; and that a nation filled with such men is
inferior to a nation run at higher pressure. The problem
is, then, how can men be trained up to their most useful
pitch of energy ? And how can nations make such training
most accessible to all their sons and daughters. This, after
all, is only the general problem of education, formulated
in slightly different terms.

" Rough " terms, I said just now, because the words
" energy " and " maximum " may easily suggest only
quantity to the reader's mind, whereas in measuring the
human energies of which I speak, qualities as well as
quantities have to be taken into account. Every one feels

The Energies of Men 43

that his total power rises when he passes to a higher quali
tative level of life.

Writing is higher than walking, thinking is higher than
writing, deciding higher than thinking, deciding " no "
higher than deciding " yes " — at least the man who passes
from one of these activities to another will usually say that
each later one involves a greater element of inner work than
the earlier ones, even though the total heat given out or
the foot-pounds expended by the organism may be less.
Just how to conceive this inner work physiologically is
as yet impossible, but psychologically we all know what
the word means. We need a particular spur or effort
to start us upon inner work; it tires us to sustain it;
and when long sustained, we know how easily we lapse.
When I speak of " energizing," and its rates and levels
and sources, I mean therefore our inner as well as our outer
work.

Let no one think, then, that our problem of individual
and national economy is solely that of the maximum of
pounds raisable against gravity, the maximum of loco
motion, or of agitation of any sort, that human beings
can accomplish. That might signify little more than
hurrying and jumping about in inco-ordinated ways;
whereas inner work, though it so often reinforces outer
work, quite as often means its arrest. To relax, to say to
ourselves (with the " new thoughters ") " Peace! be still! *
is sometimes a great achievement of inner work. When I
speak of human energizing in general, the reader must
therefore understand that sum-total of activities, some
outer and some inner, some muscular, some emotional,
some moral, some spiritual, of whose waxing and waning
in himself he is at all times so well aware. How to keep it
at an appreciable maximum? How not to let the level
lapse? That is the great problem. But the work of men
and women is of innumerable kinds, each kind being, as
we say, carried on by a particular faculty; so the great
problem splits into two sub-problems, thus: —

44 Selected Papers on Philosophy

(1) What are the limits of human faculty in various
directions ?

(2) By what diversity of means, in the differing types
of human beings, may the faculties be stimulated to their
best results?

Read in one way, these two questions sound both trivial
and familiar: there is a sense in which we have all asked
them ever since we were born. Yet as a methodical pro
gramme of scientific inquiry, I doubt whether they have
ever been seriously taken up. If answered fully, almost
the whole of mental science and of the science of conduct
would find a place under them. I propose, in what follows,
to press them on the reader's attention in an informal way.

The first point to agree upon in this enterprise is that as
a rule men habitually use only a small part of the powers which
they actually possess and which they might use under appro
priate conditions.

Every one is familiar with the phenomenon of feeling
more or less alive on different days. Every one knows on
any given day that there are energies slumbering in him
which the incitements of that day do not call forth, but
which he might display if these were greater. Most of us
feel as if a sort of cloud weighed upon us, keeping us below
our highest notch of clearness in discernment, sureness in
reasoning, or firmness in deciding. Compared with what
we ought to be, we are only half awake. Our fires are
damped, our drafts are checked. We are making use of only
a small part of our possible mental and physical resources.
In some persons this sense of being cut off from their
rightful resources is extreme, and we then get the formid
able neurasthenic and psychasthenic conditions, with life
grown into one tissue of impossibilities, that so many
medical books describe.

Stating the thing broadly, the human individual thus
lives usually far within his limits; he possesses powers of
various sorts which he habitually fails to use. He energizes
below his maximum, and he behaves below his optimum.

The Energies of Men 45

In elementary faculty, in co-ordination, in power of inhibition
and control, in every conceivable way, his life is contracted
like the field of vision of an hysteric subject — but with less
excuse, for the poor hysteric is diseased, while in the rest
of us it is only an inveterate habit — the habit of inferiority
to our full self — that is bad.

Admit so much, then, and admit also that the charge
of being inferior to their full self is far truer of some men
than of others; then the practical question ensues: to
what do the better men owe their escape P and, in the fluc
tuations which all men feel in their own degree of energizing,
to what are the improvements due, when they occur ?

In general terms the answer is plain :

Either some unusual stimulus fills them with emotional
excitement, or some unusual idea of necessity induces them
to make an extra effort of will. Excitements, ideas, and
efforts, in a word, are what carry us over the dam.

In those " hyperesthetic " conditions which chronic
invalidism so often brings in its train, the dam has changed
its normal place. The slightest functional exercise gives a
distress which the patient yields to and stops. In such
cases of " habit-neurosis " a new range of power often
comes in consequence of the " bullying- treatment," of
efforts which the doctor obliges the patient, much against
his will, to make. First comes the very extremity of dis
tress, then follows unexpected relief. There seems no doubt
that we are each and all of us to some extent victims of habit-
neurosis. We have to admit the wider potential range and
the habitually narrow actual use. We live subject to
arrest by degrees of fatigue which we have come only from
habit to obey. Most of us may learn to push the barrier
farther off, and to live in perfect comfort on much higher
levels of power.

Country people and city people, as a class, illustrate
this difference. The rapid rate of life, the number of de
cisions in an hour, the many things to keep account of, in a
busy city man's or woman's life, seem monstrous to a

46 Selected Papers on Philosophy

country brother. He doesn't see how we live at all. A da>
in New York or Chicago fills him with terror. The dangei
and noise make it appear like a permanent earthquake.
But settle him there, and in a year or two he will have caughl
the pulse-beat. He will vibrate to the city's rhythms ; anc
if he only succeeds in his avocation, whatever that may
be, he will find a joy in all the hurry and the tension, he will
keep the pace as well as any of us, and get as much out of
himself in any week as he ever did in ten weeks in the
country.

The stimuli of those who successfully respond anc
undergo the transformation here, are duty, the exampl
of others, and crowd-pressure and contagion. The trans
formation, moreover, is a chronic one: the new level o.
energy becomes permanent. The duties of new offices oi
trust are constantly producing this effect on the human
beings appointed to them. The physiologists call a stimulus
" dynamogenic " when it increases the muscular con
tractions of men to whom it is applied; but appeals can
be dynamogenic morally as well as muscularly. We are
witnessing here in America to-day the dynamogenic effect
of a very exalted political office upon the energies of an
individual who had already manifested a healthy amount
of energy before the office came.

Humbler examples show perhaps still better what
chronic effects duty's appeal may produce in chosen in
dividuals. John Stuart Mill somewhere says that women
excel men in the power of keeping up sustained moral excite
ment. Every case of illness nursed by wife or mother is a
proof of this; and where can one find greater examples of
sustained endurance than in those thousands of poor homes
where the woman successfully holds the family together
and keeps it going by taking all the thought and doing all
the work — nursing, teaching, cooking, washing, sewing,
scrubbing, saving, helping neighbours, " choring " outside
— where does the catalogue end ? If she does a bit of scolding
now and then who can blame her? But often she does just

The Energies of Men 47

:he reverse ; keeping the children clean and the man good-
cempered, and soothing and smoothing the whole neigh
bourhood into finer shape.

Eighty years ago a certain Montyon left to the Academic
Frangaise a sum of money to be given in small prizes to
the best examples of " virtue " of the year. The academy's
committees, with great good sense, have shown a partiality
to virtues simple and chronic, rather than to her spasmodic
and dramatic flights; and the exemplary housewives
reported on have been wonderful and admirable enough,
n Paul Bourget's report for this year we find numerous
;ises, of which this is a type : Jeanne Chaix, eldest of six
;;iildren; mother insane, father chronically ill. Jeanne,
/ith no money but her wages at a pasteboard-box factory,
iirects the household, brings up the children, and success
fully maintains the family of eight, which thus subsists,
morally as well as materially, by the sole force of her valiant
will. In some of these French cases charity to outsiders is
added to the inner family burden; or helpless relatives,
young or old, are adopted, as if the strength were inex
haustible and ample for every appeal. Details are too long
to quote here; but human nature, responding to the call of
duty, appears nowhere sublimer than in the person of these
humble heroines of family life.

Turning from more chronic to acuter proofs of human
nature's reserves of power, we find that the stimuli that
carry us over the usually effective dam are most often the
classic emotional ones, love, anger, crowd-contagion or
despair. Despair lames most people, but it wakes others
fully up. Every siege or shipwreck or polar expedition
brings out some hero who keeps the whole company in heart.
Last year there was a terrible colliery explosion at Cour-
rieres in France. Two hundred corpses, if I remember
rightly, were exhumed. After twenty days of excavation,
the rescuers heard a voice. " Me void," said the first man
unearthed. He proved to be a collier named Nemy, who
had taken command of thirteen others in the darkness,

48 Selected Papers on Philosophy

disciplined them and cheered them, and brought them
out alive. Hardly any of them could see or speak or walk
when brought into the day. Five days later, a different
type of vital endurance was unexpectedly unburied in the
person of one Berton who, isolated from any but dead
companions, had been able to sleep away most of his time.

A new position of responsibility will usually show a man
to be a far stronger creature than was supposed. Cromwell's
and Grant's careers are the stock examples of how war will
wake a man up. I owe to Professor C. E. Norton, my
colleague, the permission to print part of a private letter
from Colonel Baird-Smith written shortly after the six
weeks' siege of Delhi, in 1857, for the victorious issue of
which that excellent officer was chiefly to be thanked. He
writes as follows:

"... My poor wife had some reason to think that war
and disease between them had left very little of a husband
to take under nursing when she got him again. An attack
of camp-scurvy had filled my mouth with sores, shaken
every joint in my body, and covered me all over with sores
and livid spots, so that I was marvellously unlovely to look
upon. A smart knock on the ankle-joint from the splinter
of a shell that burst in my face, in itself a mere bagatelle of
a wound, had been of necessity neglected under the pressing
and incessant calls upon me, and had grown worse and
worse till the whole foot below the ankle became a black
mass and seemed to threaten mortification. I insisted,
however, on being allowed to use it till the place was taken,
mortification or no; and though the pain was sometimes
horrible, I carried my point and kept up to the last. On
the day after the assault I had an unlucky fall on some
bad ground, and it was an open question for a day or two
whether I hadn't broken my arm at the elbow. Fortunately
it turned out to be only a severe sprain, but I am still
conscious of the wrench it gave me. To crown the whole
pleasant catalogue, I was worn to a shadow by a constant
diarrhoea, and consumed as much opium as would have

The Energies of Men 49

done credit to my father-in-law [Thomas De Quincey].
However, thank God, I have a good share of Tapleyism in
me and come out strong under difficulties. I think I may
confidently say that no man ever saw me out of heart, or
ever heard one croaking word from me even when our
prospects were gloomiest. We were sadly scourged by the
cholera, and it was almost appalling to me to find that out
of twenty-seven officers present, I could only muster fifteen
for the operations of the attack. However, it was done, and
after it was done came the collapse. Don't be horrified
when I tell you that for the whole of the actual siege, and in
truth for some little time before, I almost lived on brandy.
Appetite for food I had none, but I forced myself to eat
just sufficient to sustain life, and I had an incessant craving
for brandy as the strongest stimulant I could get. Strange
to say, I was quite unconscious of its affecting me in the
slightest degree. The excitement of the work was so great that
no lesser one seemed to have any chance against it, and I
certainly never found my intellect clearer or my nerves stronger
in my life. It was only my wretched body that was weak,
and the moment the real work was done by our becoming
complete masters of Delhi, I broke down without delay
and discovered that if I wished to live I must continue no
longer the system that had kept me up until the crisis was
passed. With it passed away as if in a moment all desire
to stimulate, and a perfect loathing of my late staff of life
took possession of me/'

Such experiences show how profound is the alteration
in the manner in which, under excitement, our organism
will sometimes perform its physiological work. The pro
cesses of repair become different when the reserves have
to be used, and for weeks and months the deeper use
may go on.

Morbid cases, here as elsewhere, lay the normal machinery
bare. In the first number of Dr. Morton Prince's Journal
of Abnormal Psychology, Dr. Janet has discussed five cases
of morbid impulse, with an explanation that is precious

50 Selected Papers on Philosophy

for my present point of view. One is a girl who eats, eats,
eats, all day. Another walks, walks, walks, and gets her
food from an automobile that escorts her. Another is a
dipsomaniac. A fourth pulls out her hair. A fifth wounds
her flesh and burns her skin. Hitherto such freaks of im
pulse have received Greek names (as bulimia, dromomania,
etc.) and been scientifically disposed of as " episodic
syndromata of hereditary degeneration." But it turns out
that Janet's cases are all what he calls psychasthenics, or
victims of a chronic sense of weakness, torpor, lethargy,
fatigue, insufficiency, impossibility, unreality, and power-
lessness of will; and that in each and all of them the par
ticular activity pursued, deleterious though it be, has the
temporary result of raising the sense of vitality and making
the patient feel alive again. These things reanimate: they
would reanimate us, but it happens that in each patient
the particular freak-activity chosen is the only thing that
does reanimate; and therein lies the morbid state. The
way to treat such persons is to discover to them more usual
and useful ways of throwing their stores of vital energy into
gear.

Colonel Baird-Smith, needing to draw on altogether
extraordinary stores of energy, found that brandy and
opium were ways of throwing them into gear.

Such cases are humanly typical. We are all to some
degree oppressed, unfree. We don't come to our own. It
is there, but we don't get at it. The threshold must be
made to shift. Then many of us find that an eccentric
activity — a " spree," say — relieves. There is no doubt that
to some men sprees and excesses of almost any kind are
medicinal, temporarily at any rate, in spite of what the
moralists and doctors say.

But when the normal tasks and stimulations of life don't
put a man's deeper levels of energy on tap, and he requires
distinctly deleterious excitements, his constitution verges
on the abnormal. The normal opener of deeper and deeper
levels of energy is the will. The difficulty is to use it, to

The Energies of Men 5 1

make the effort which the word volition implies. But if we
do make it (or if a god, though he were only the god Chance,
makes it through us), it will act dynamogenically on us
for a month. It is notorious that a single successful effort
of moral volition, such as saying " no " to some habitual
temptation, or performing some courageous act, will
launch a man on a higher level of energy for days and weeks,
will give him a new range of power. " In the act of un
corking the whisky bottle which I had brought home to
get drunk upon," said a man to me, " I suddenly found
myself running out into the garden, where I smashed it on
the ground. I felt so happy and uplifted after this act that
for two months I wasn't tempted to touch a drop."

The emotions and excitements due to usual situations
are the usual inciters of the will. But these act discontin-
uously; and in the intervals the shallower levels of life
tend to close in and shut us off. Accordingly the best
practical knowers of the human soul have invented the
thing known as methodical ascetic discipline to keep the
deeper levels constantly in reach. Beginning with easy
tasks, passing to harder ones, and exercising day by day, it
is, I believe, admitted that disciples of asceticism can reach
very high levels of freedom and power of will.

Ignatius Loyola's spiritual exercises must have produced
this result in innumerable devotees. But the most venerable
ascetic system, and the one whose results have the most
voluminous experimental corroboration is undoubtedly
the Yoga system in Hindustan. From time immemorial,
by Hatha Yoga, Raja Yoga, Karma Yoga, or whatever
code of practice it might be, Hindu aspirants to perfection
have trained themselves, month in and out, for years. The
result claimed, and certainly in many cases accorded by
impartial judges, is strength of character, personal power,
unshakability of soul. In an article in the Philosophical
Review? from which I am largely copying here, I have

1 " The Energies of Men," Philosophical Review, vol. xvi. No. i,
January 1907. [Cf. note on p. 40.]

52 Selected Papers on Philosophy

quoted at great length the experience with " Hatha Yoga "
of a very gifted European friend of mine who, by persist
ently carrying out for several months its methods of fasting
from food and sleep, its exercises in breathing and thought-
concentration, and its fantastic posture-gymnastics, seems
to have succeeded in waking up deeper and deeper levels
of will and moral and intellectual power in himself, and to
have escaped from a. decidedly menacing brain-condition
of the "circular " type, from which he had suffered for years.

Judging by my friend's letters, of which the last I have
is written fourteen months after the Yoga training began,
there can be no doubt of his relative regeneration. He
has undergone material trials with indifference, travelled
third-class on Mediterranean steamers, and fourth-class on
African trains, living with the poorest Arabs and sharing
their unaccustomed food, all with equanimity. His devotion
to certain interests has been put to heavy strain, and nothing
is more remarkable to me than the changed moral tone
with which he reports the situation. A profound modifica
tion has unquestionably occurred in the running .of his
mental machinery. The gearing has changed, and his will
is available otherwise than it was.

My friend is a man of very peculiar temperament. Few
of us would have had the will to start upon the Yoga
training, which, once started, seemed to conjure the further
will-power needed out of itself. And not all of those who
could launch themselves would have reached the same
results. The Hindus themselves admit that in some men the
results may come without call or bell. My friend writes to
me: " You are quite right in thinking that religious crises,
love-crises, indignation-crises may awaken in a very short
time powers similar to those reached by years of patient
Yoga-practice."

Probably most medical men would treat this individual's
case as one of what it is fashionable now to call by the name
of " self-suggestion," or " expectant attention " — as if
those phrases were explanatory, or meant more than the

The Energies of Men 53

fact that certain men can be influenced, while others
cannot be influenced, by certain sorts of ideas. This leads
me to say a word about ideas considered as dynamogenic
agents, or stimuli for unlocking what would otherwise be
unused reservoirs of individual power.

One thing that ideas do is to contradict other ideas and
keep us from believing them. An idea that thus negates
a first idea may itself in turn be negated by a third idea,
and the first idea may thus regain its natural influence
over our belief and determine our behaviour. Our philo
sophic and religious development proceeds thus by credu
lities, negations, and the negating of negations.

But whether for arousing or for stopping belief, ideas
.may fail to be efficacious, just as a wire at one time alive
with electricity may at another time be dead. Here our
insight into causes fails us, and we can only note results
in general terms. In general, whether a given idea shall be
a live idea depends more on the person into whose mind
it is injected than on the idea itself. Which is the suggestive
idea for this person, and which for that one? Mr. Fletcher's
disciples regenerate themselves by the idea (and the fact)
that they are chewing, and re-chewing, and super-chewing
their food. Dr. Dewey's pupils regenerate themselves by
going without their breakfast— a fact, but also an ascetic
idea. Not every one can use these ideas with the same
success.

But apart from such individually varying susceptibilities,
there are common lines along which men simply as men
tend to be inflammable by ideas. As certain objects
naturally awaken love, anger, or cupidity, so certain ideas
naturally awaken the energies of loyalty, courage, endur
ance, or devotion. When these ideas are effective in an
individual's life, their effect is often very great indeed.
They may transfigure it, unlocking innumerable powers
which, but for the idea, would never have come into play.
" Fatherland," " the Flag," " the Union," " Holy Church,"
" the Monroe Doctrine," " Truth," " Science," " Liberty,"

54 Selected Papers on Philosophy

Garibaldi's phrase, " Rome or Death," etc., are so many
examples of energy-releasing ideas. The social nature of
such phrases is an essential factor of their dynamic power.
They are forces of detent in situations in which no other
force produces equivalent effects, and each is a force of
detent only in a specific group of men.

The memory that an oath or vow has been made will
nerve one to abstinences and efforts otherwise impossible;
witness the " pledge " in the history of the temperance
movement. A mere promise to his sweetheart will clean
up a youth's life all over — at any rate for a time. For
such effects an educated susceptibility is required. The
idea of one's " honour," for example, unlocks energy only
in those of us who have had the education of a " gentle
man," so called.

That delightful being, Prince Pueckler-Muskau, writes
to his wife from England that he has invented " a sort of
artificial resolution respecting things that are difficult of
performance. My device," he continues, " is this: / give
my word of honour most solemnly to myself to do or to leave
undone this or that. I am of course extremely cautious in
the use of this expedient, but when once the word is given,
even though I afterwards think I have been precipitate or
mistaken, I hold it to be perfectly irrevocable, whatever
inconveniences I foresee likely to result. If I were capable
of breaking my word after such mature consideration, I
should lose all respect for myself — and what man of sense
would not prefer death to such an alternative ? . . . When
the mysterious formula is pronounced, no alteration in
my own view, nothing short of physical impossibilities,
must, for the welfare of my soul, alter my will. ... I
find something very satisfactory in the thought that man
has the power of framing such props and weapons out of
the most trivial materials, indeed out of nothing, merely
by the force of his will, which thereby truly deserves the
name of omnipotent." *
1 Tour in England, Ireland, and France, Philadelphia, 1833, p. 435.

The Energies of Men 55

Conversions, whether they be political, scientific, philo
sophic, or religious, form another way in which bound
energies are let loose. They unify us, and put a stop to
ancient mental interferences. The result is freedom, and
often a great enlargement of power. A belief that thus
settles upon an individual always acts as a challenge to
his will. But, for the particular challenge to operate, he
must be the right challenge. In religious conversions we
have so fine an adjustment that the idea may be in the
mind of the challengee for years before it exerts effects ; and
why it should do so then is often so far from obvious that
the event is taken for a miracle of grace, and not a natural
occurrence. Whatever it is, it may be a high- water mark
of energy, in which " noes," once impossible, are easy, and
in which a new range of " yeses " gains the right of way.

We are just now witnessing a very copious unlocking
of energies by ideas in the persons of those converts to
" New Thought," " Christian Science," " Metaphysical
Healing," or other forms of spiritual philosophy, who are
so numerous among us to-day. The ideas here are healthy-
minded and optimistic; it is quite obvious that a wave of
religious activity, analogous in some repects to the spread
of early Christianity, Buddhism, and Mohammedanism, is
passing over our American world. The common feature of
these optimistic faiths is that they all tend to the suppres
sion of what Mr. Horace Fletcher calls " fearthought."
Fearthought he defines as the " self-suggestion of inferi
ority "; so that one may say that these systems all operate
by the suggestion of power. And the power, small or great,
comes in various shapes to the individual, — power, as he
will tell you, not to " mind " things that used to vex him,
power to concentrate his mind, good cheer, good temper —
in short, to put it mildly, a firmer, more elastic moral tone.

The most genuinely saintly person I have ever known is
a friend of mine now suffering from cancer of the breast — I
hope that she may pardon my citing her here as an example
of what ideas can do. Her ideas have kept her a practically

56 Selected Papers on Philosophy

well woman for months after she should have given up and
gone to bed. They have annulled all pain and weakness
and given her a cheerful active life, unusually beneficent
to others to whom she has afforded help. Her doctors,
acquiescing in results they could not understand, have
had the good sense to let her go her own way.

How far the mind-cure movement is destined to extend
its influence, or what intellectual modifications it may
yet undergo, no one can foretell. It is essentially a religious
movement, and to academically nurtured minds its utter
ances are tasteless and often grotesque enough. It also
incurs the natural enmity of medical politicians, and of the
whole trades-union wing of that profession. But no un
prejudiced observer can fail to recognize its importance
as a social phenomenon to-day, and the higher medical
minds are already trying to interpret it fairly, and make
its power available for their own therapeutic ends.

Dr. Thomas Hyslop, of the great West Riding Asylum
in England, said last year to the British Medical Associa
tion that the best sleep-producing agent which his practice
had revealed to him was prayer. I say this, he added (I am
sorry here that I must quote from memory), purely as a
medical man. The exercise of prayer, in those who habi
tually exert it, must be regarded by us doctors as the most
adequate and normal of all the pacifiers of the mind and
calmers of the nerves.

But in few of us are functions not tied up by the exercise
of other functions. Relatively few medical men and scientific
men, I fancy, can pray. Few can carry on any living com
merce with " God." Yet many of us are well aware of how
much freer and abler our lives would be, were such important
forms of energizing not sealed up by the critical atmos
phere in which we have been reared. There are in every
one potential forms of activity that actually are shunted
out from use. Part of the imperfect vitality under
which we labour can thus be easily explained. One part of
our mind dams up — even damns up ! — the other parts.

The Energies of Men 57

Conscience makes cowards of us all. Social conventions-
prevent us from telling the truth after the fashion of the
heroes and heroines of Bernard Shaw. We all know persons
who are models of excellence, but who belong to the ex
treme philistine type of mind. So deadly is their intellectual
respectability that we can't converse about certain subjects
at all, can't let our minds play over them, can't even
mention them in their presence. I have numbered among
my dearest friends persons thus inhibited intellectually,
with whom I would gladly have been able to talk freely
about certain interests of mine, certain authors, say, as
Bernard Shaw, Chesterton, Edward Carpenter, H. G.
Wells, but it wouldn't do, it made them too uncomfortable,
they wouldn't play, I had to be silent. An intellect thus tied
down by literality and decorum makes on one the same sort
of an impression that an able-bodied man would who should
habituate himself to do his work with only one of his fingers,
locking up the rest of his organism and leaving it unused.

I trust that by this time I have said enough to convince
the reader both of the truth and of the importance of my
thesis. The two questions, first, that of the possible extent
of our powers; and, second, that of the various avenues
of approach to them, the various keys for unlocking them
in diverse individuals, dominate the whole problem of
individual and national education. We need a topography
of the limits of human power, similar to the chart which
oculists use of the field of human vision. We need also a
study of the various types of human being with reference
to the different ways in which their energy-reserves may be
appealed to and set loose. Biographies and individual experi
ences of every kind may be drawn upon for evidence here.1

1 " This would be an absolutely concrete study. . . . The limits
of power must be limits that have been realized in actual persons, and .
the various ways of unlocking the reserves of power must have been
exemplified in individual lives. ... So here is a programme of
concrete individual psychology. ... It is replete with interesting
facts, and points to practical issues superior in importance to any
thing we know." — From the address as originally delivered before the
Philosophical Association ; see Philosophical Review, xvi. I, 19.

IV
HABIT i

" HABIT a second nature ! Habit is ten times nature," the
Duke of Wellington is said to have exclaimed; and the
degree to which this is true no one probably can appreciate
as well as one who is a veteran soldier himself. The daily
drill and the years of discipline end by fashioning a man
completely over again, as to most of the possibilities of his
conduct.

" There is a story," says Prof. Huxley, " which is credible
enough, though it may not be true, of a practical joker
who, seeing a discharged veteran carrying home his dinner,
suddenly called out ' Attention ! ' whereupon the man
instantly brought his hands down, and lost his mutton
and potatoes in the gutter. The drill had been thorough,
and its effects had become embodied in the man's nervous
structure."

Riderless cavalry-horses, at many a battle, have been
seen to come together and go through their customary
evolutions at the sound of the bugle-call. Most domestic
beasts seem machines almost pure and simple, undoubtingly,
unhesitatingly doing from minute to minute the duties
they have been taught, and giving no sign that the possi
bility of an alternative ever suggests itself to their mind.
Men grown old in prison have asked to be readmitted after
being once set free. In a railroad accident a menagerie-
tiger, whose cage had broken open, is said to have emerged,
but presently crept back again, as if too much bewildered
by his new responsibilities, so that he was without difficulty
secured.

1 From Psychology, Briefer Course, 1893, pp. 142-150.

Habit 59

Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most
precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all
within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of
fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor. It alone
prevents the hardest and most repulsive walks of life from
being deserted by those brought up to tread therein. It
keeps the fisherman and the deck-hand at sea through the
winter; it holds the miner in his darkness, and nails the
countryman to his log-cabin and his lonely farm through
all the months of snow; it protects us from invasion by the
natives of the desert and the frozen zone. It dooms us all
to fight out the battle of life upon the lines of our nurture
or our early choice, and to make the best of a pursuit that
disagrees, because there is no other for which we are fitted,
and it is too late to begin again. It keeps different social
strata from mixing. Already at the age of twenty-five you
see the professional mannerism settling down on the young
commercial traveller, on the young doctor, on the young
minister, on the young counsellor-at-law. You see the little
lines of cleavage running through the character, the tricks
of thought, the prejudices, the ways of the " shop," in a
word, from which the man can by-and-by no more escape
than his coat-sleeve can suddenly fall into a new set of
folds. On the whole, it is best he should not escape. It
is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty,
the character has set like plaster, and will never soften
again.

If the period between twenty and thirty is the critical
one in the formation of intellectual and professional habits,
the period below twenty is more important still for the
fixing of personal habits, properly so called, such as vocalis
ation and pronunciation, gesture, motion, and address.
Hardly ever is a language learned after twenty spoken
without a foreign accent; hardly ever can a youth trans
ferred to the society of his betters unlearn the nasality and
other vices of speech bred in him by the associations of his
growing years. Hardly ever, indeed, no matter how much

60 Selected Papers on Philosophy

money there may be in his pocket, can he ever learn to
dress like a gentleman-born. The merchants offer their
wares as eagerly to him as to the veriest " swell," but he
simply cannot buy the right things. An invisible law, as
strong as gravitation, keeps him within his orbit, arrayed
this year as he was the last; and how his better-clad
acquaintances contrive to get the things they wear will
be for him a mystery till his dying day.

The great thing, then, in all. education, is to make our
nervous system our ally instead of our enemy. It is to fund
and capitalize our acquisitions, and live at ease upon the
interest of the fund. For this we must make automatic and
habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we
can, and guard against the growing into ways that are
likely to be disadvantageous to us, as we should guard
against the plague. The more of the details of our daily
life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism
the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their
own proper work. There is no more miserable human being
than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision, and
for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every
cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and the
beginning of every bit of work, are subjects of express
volitional deliberation. Full half the time of such a man
goes, to the deciding, or regretting, of matters which ought
to be so ingrained in him as practically not to exist for his
consciousness at all. If there be such daily duties not yet
ingrained in any one of my readers, let him begin this very
hour to set the matter right.

In Professor Bain's chapter on " The Moral Habits "
there are some admirable practical remarks laid down.
Two great maxims emerge from his treatment. The first is
that in the acquisition of a new habit, or the leaving off
of an old one, we must take care to launch ourselves with as
strong and decided an initiative as possible. Accumulate all
the possible circumstances which shall re-enforce the right
motives; put yourself assiduously hi conditions that

Habit 6 1

encourage the new way; make engagements incompatible
with the old; take a public pledge, if the case allows; in
short, envelop your resolution with every aid you know.
This will give your new beginning such a momentum that
the temptation to break down will not occur as soon as it
otherwise might ; and every day during which a breakdown
is postponed adds to the chances of its not occurring at all.

The second maxim is: Never suffer an exception to occur
till the new habit is securely rooted in your life. Each lapse
is like the letting fall of a ball of string which one is care
fully winding up; a single slip undoes more than a great
many turns will wind again. Continuity of training is the
great means of making the nervous system act infallibly
right. As Professor Bain says: —

" The peculiarity of the moral habits, contradistin
guishing them from the intellectual acquisitions, is the
presence of two hostile powers, one to be gradually raised
into the ascendant over the other. It is necessary, above
all things, in such a situation, never to lose a battle. Every
*ain on the wong side undoes the effect of many conquests
on the right. The essential precaution, therefore, is so to-
regulate the two opposing powers that the one may have
a series of uninterrupted successes, until repetition has
fortified it to such a degree as to enable it to cope with the
opposition, under any circumstances. This is the theoreti
cally best career of mental progress."

The need of securing success at the outset is imperative.
Failure at first is apt to damp the energy of all future
attempts, whereas past experiences of success nerve one
to future vigour. Goethe says to a man who consulted him
about an enterprise but mistrusted his own powers: " Ach !
you need only blow on your hands! " And the remark
illustrates the effect on Goethe's spirits of his own habitually
successful career.

The question of " tapering-off," in abandoning such
habits as drink and opium-indulgence comes in here, and
is a question about which experts differ within certain

62 Selected Papers on Philosophy

limits, and in regard to what may be best for an individual
case. In the main, however, all expert opinion would agree
that abrupt acquisition of the new habit is the best way,
if there be a real possibility of carrying it out. We must be
careful not to give the will so stiff a task as to insure it«
defeat at the very outset; but, provided one can stand it
a sharp period of suffering, and then a free time, is the
best thing to aim at, whether in giving up a habit like that
of opium, or in simply changing one's hours of rising or
work. It is surprising how soon a desire will die of inanition,
if it be never fed.

" One must first learn, unmoved, looking neither to the
right nor left, to walk firmly on the strait and narrow path,
before one can begin ' to make one's self over again/ He;
who every day makes a fresh resolve is like one who,
arriving at the edge of the ditch he is to leap, forever stops
and returns for a fresh run. Without unbroken advance
there is no such thing as accumulation of the ethical forces
possible, and to make this possible, and to exercise us and
habituate us in it, is the sovereign blessing of regular
work." x

A third maxim may be added to the preceding pair:
Seize the very first possible opportunity to act on every reso
lution you make, and on every emotional prompting you may
experience in the direction of the habits you aspire to gain. It
is not in the moment of their forming, but in the moment
of their producing motor effects, that resolves and aspirations
communicate the new " set " to the brain. As the author
last quoted remarks: —

" The actual presence of the practical opportunity alone
furnishes the fulcrum upon which the lever can rest, by
means of which the moral will may multiply its strength
and raise itself aloft. He who has no solid ground to press
against will never get beyond the stage of empty gesture-
making."

No matter how full a reservoir of maxims one may

1 J. Bahnsen, Bettrdge zu Charakterologie, 1867, vol i. p. 209.

Habit 63

possess, and no matter how good one's sentiments may be,
if one have not taken advantage of every concrete oppor
tunity to act, one's character may remain entirely unaffected
for the better. With mere good intentions, hell is prover
bially paved. And this is an obvious consequence of the
principles we have laid down. " A character," as J. S. Mill
says, " is a completely fashioned will "; and a will, in the
sense in which he means it, is an aggregate of tendencies
to act in a firm and prompt and definite way upon all the
principal emergencies of life. A tendency to act only be
comes effectively ingrained in us in proportion to the
uninterrupted frequency with which the actions actually
occur, and the brain " grows " to their use. When a resolve
or a fine glow of feeling is allowed to evaporate without
bearing practical fruit it is worse than a chance lost ; it works
so as positively to hinder future resolutions and emotions
from taking the normal path of discharge. There is no more
contemptible type of human character than that of the
nerveless sentimentalist and dreamer, who spends his life
in a weltering sea of sensibility and emotion, but who
never does a manly concrete deed. Rousseau, inflaming
all the mothers of France, by his eloquence, to follow Nature
and nurse their babies themselves, while he sends his own
children to the foundling hospital, is the classical example
of what I mean. But every one of us in his measure, when
ever, after glowing for an abstractly formulated Good, he
practically ignores some actual case, among the squalid
" other particulars " of which that same Good lurks dis
guised, treads straight on Rousseau's path. All Goods are
disguised by the vulgarity of their concomitants in this
work-a-day world ; but woe to him who can only recognize
them when he thinks them in their pure and abstract
form! The habit of excessive novel-reading and theatre-
going will produce true monsters in this line. The weeping
of the Russian lady over the fictitious personages in the
play, while her coachman is freezing to death on his seat
outside is the sort of thing that everywhere happens on

64 Selected Papers on Philosophy

a less glaring scale. Even the habit of excessive indulgence
in music, for those who are neither performers themselves
nor musically gifted enough to take it in a purely intellec
tual way, has probably a relaxing effect upon the character
• One becomes filled with emotions which habitually pass
without prompting to any deed, and so the inertly senti
mental condition is kept up. The remedy would be, nevei
to suffer one's self to have an emotion at a concert withoul
expressing it afterward in some active way. Let the ex
pression be the least thing in the world — speaking genially
to one's grandmother, or giving up one's seat in a horse-
car, if nothing more heroic offers — but let it not fail tc
take place.

These latter cases make us aware that it is not simply
particular lines of discharge, but also general forms o\
discharge, that seem to be grooved out by habit in the brain,
Just as, if we let our emotions evaporate, they get into a
way of evaporating; so there is reason to suppose that i1
we often flinch from making an effort, before we know it
the effort-making capacity will be gone; and that, if we
suffer the wandering of our attention, presently it wil]
wander all the time. Attention and effort are, as we shall
see later, but two names for the same psychic fact. To what
brain-processes they correspond we do not know. The
strongest reason for believing that they do depend on brain-
processes at all, and are not pure acts of the spirit, is just
this fact, that they seem in some degree subject to the law
of habit, which is a material law. As a final practical maxim,
relative to these habits of the will, we may, then, offer
something like this : Keep the faculty of effort alive in you
by a little gratuitous exercise every day. That is, be systemati
cally ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary points, do every
day or two something for no other reason than that you
would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire neec
draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrainec
to stand the test. Asceticism of this sort is like the insurance
which a man pays on his house and goods. The tax does

Habit 65

him no good at the time, and possibly may never bring him
a return. But if the fire does come, his having paid it will be
his salvation from ruin. So with the man who has daily
inured himself to habits of concentrated attention, ener
getic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things. He
will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him,
and when his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff
in the blast.

x The physiological study of mental conditions is thus
the most powerful ally of hortatory ethics. The hell to
be endured hereafter, of which theology tells, is no worse
than the hell we make for ourselves in this world by habi
tually fashioning our characters in the wrong way. Could
the young but realize how soon they will become mere
walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to
their conduct while in the plastic state. We are spinning
our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every
smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little
scar. The drunken Rip Van Winkle, in Jefferson's play,
excuses himself for every fresh dereliction by saying,
" I won't count this time! " Well! he may not count it
and a kind Heaven may not count it ; but it is being counted
none the less. Down among his nerve-cells and fibres the
molecules are counting it, registering and storing it up
to be used against him when the next temptation comes.
Nothing we ever do is, in strict scientific literalness, wiped
^out. Of course this has its good side as well as its bad one.
As we become permanent drunkards by so many separate
drinks, so we become saints in the moral, and authorities
,and experts in the practical and scientific spheres, by so
many separate acts and hours of work. Let no youth have
any anxiety about the upshot of his education, whatever the
line of it may be. If he keep faithfully busy each hour of
the working day, he may safely leave the final result to
itself. He can with perfect certainty count on waking up
some fine morning, to find himself one of the competent
ones of his generation, in whatever pursuit he may have
E

66 Selected Papers on Philosophy

singled out. Silently, between all the details of his business
the power of judging in all that class of matter will hav<
built itself up within him as a possession that will neve:
pass away. Young people should know this truth in ad
vance. The ignorance of it has probably engendered mor<
discouragement and faint-heartedness in youths embarking
on arduous careers than all other causes put together.

V
THE WILL1

68 Selected Papers on Philosophy

same where pleasure and pain are the motor spurs — the]
drive other thoughts from consciousness at the same tim<
that they instigate their own characteristic " volitional '
effects. And this is also what happens at the moment of th<
fiat, in all the five types of " decision " which we hav<
described. In short, one does not see any case in which th<
steadfast occupancy of consciousness does not appear to b<
the prime condition of impulsive power. It is still mor<
obviously the prime condition of inhibitive power. Wha
checks our impulses is the mere thinking of reasons to th<
contrary — it is their bare presence to the mind which give:
the veto, and makes acts, otherwise seductive, impossibL
to perform. If we could only forget our scruples, our doubts
our fears, what exultant energy we should for a whil<
•display !

In closing in, therefore, after all these preliminaries
upon the more intimate nature of the volitional process, wi
'find ourselves driven more and more exclusively to con
sider the conditions which make ideas prevail in the mind
With the prevalence, once there as a fact, of the motivi
idea the psychology of volition properly stops. The move
fments which ensue are exclusively physiological pheno
mena, following according to physiological laws upon thi
neural events to which the idea corresponds. The willing
terminates with the prevalence of the idea; and whethe
the act then follows or not is a matter quite immaterial
so far as the willing itself goes. I will to write, and the ac
follows. I will to sneeze, and it does not. I will that th
distant table slide over the floor towards me; it also doe
not. My willing representation can no more instigate m;
sneezing-centre than it can instigate the table to activity
But in both cases it is as true and good willing as it wa
when I willed to write.1 In a word, volition is a psychi

1 This sentence is written from the author's own consciousnes;
But many persons say that where they disbelieve in the effect
«nsuing, as in the case of the table, they cannot will it. They " cai
vnot exert a volition that a table should move." This personal diffei
>ence mav be oartlv verbal. Different neonle mav attach differer

The Will 69

moral fact pure and simple, and is absolutely completed
when the stable state of the idea is there. The supervention

motion is a supernumerary phenomenon depending on
executive ganglia whose function lies outside the mind.

We thus find that we reach the heart of our inquiry into
volition when we ask by what process it is that the thought of
iny given object comes to prevail stably in the mind. Where
thoughts prevail without effort, we have sufficiently
studied in the several chapters on sensation, association,
ind attention, the laws of their advent before consciousness
and of their stay. We will not go over that ground again,
for we know that interest and association are the words,
let their worth be what it may, on which our explanations
must perforce rely. Where, on the other hand, the preva
lence of the thought is accompanied by the phenomenon of
effort, the case is much less clear. Already in the chapter
on attention we postponed the final consideration of
voluntary attention with effort to a later place. We have
now brought things to a point at which we see that attention
with effort is all that any case of volition implies. The
essential achievement of the will, in short, when it is most
" voluntary," is to ATTEND to a difficult object and hold it
fast before the mind. The so doing is the fiat ; and it is a
mere physiological incident that when the object is thus
attended to, immediate motor consequences should ensue.
A resolve, whose contemplated motor consequences are not
to ensue until some possibly far-distant future condition
shall have been fulfilled, involves all the psychic elements
of a motor fiat except the word " now " ; and it is the same

connotations to the word " will." But I incline to think that we
differ psychologically as well. When one knows that he has no power
one's desire of a thing is called a wish and not a will. The sense of
impotence inhibits the volition. Only by abstracting from the
thought of the impossibility am I able energetically to imagine
strongly the table sliding over the floor, make the bodily " effort "
which I do, and to will it to come towards me. It may be that some
people are unable to perform this abstraction, and that the image of
the table stationary on the floor inhibits the contradictory image of
its moving, which is the object to be willed.

70 Selected Papers on Philosophy

with many of our purely theoretic beliefs. We saw in effect
in the appropriate chapter, how in the last resort belief
means only a peculiar sort of occupancy of the mind, and
relation to the self felt in the thing believed; and we know
in the case of many beliefs how constant an effort of the
attention is required to keep them in this situation and
protect them from displacement by contradictory ideas.

Effort of attention is thus the essential phenomenon of will.
Every reader must know by his own experience that this
is so, for every reader must have felt some fiery passion's
grasp. What constitutes the difficulty for a man labouring
under an unwise passion of acting as if the passion were
unwise? Certainly there is no physical difficulty. It is
as easy physically to avoid a fight as to begin one, to pocket
one's money as to squander it on one's cupidities, to walk
away from as towards a coquette's door. The difficulty
is mental; it is that of getting the idea of the wise action to
stay before our mind at all. When any strong emotional
state whatever is upon us the tendency is for no images
but such as are congruous with it to come up. If others
by chance offer themselves, they are instantly smothered
and crowded out. If we be joyous, we cannot keep thinking
of those uncertainties and risks of failure which abound
upon our path; if lugubrious, we cannot think of new
triumphs, travels, loves, and joys; nor if vengeful, of our
oppressor's community of nature with ourselves. The
cooling advice which we get from others when the fever-fit
is on us is the most jarring and exasperating thing in life.
Reply we cannot, so we get angry; for by a sort of self-
preserving instinct which our passion has, it feels that these
chill objects, if they once but gain a lodgment, will work
and work until they have frozen the very vital spark from
out of all our mood and brought our airy castles in ruin to
the ground. Such is the inevitable effect of reasonable
ideas over others — if they cajg$tfckjjjt*a quiet hearing ; and
passion's cue accordingly/^-^ilwa^s^ind everywhere to
prevent their still small /^i<^ from \p|ing heard at all.

The Will 7i

Let me not think of that! Don't speak to me of that! "
This is the sudden cry of all those who in a passion perceive
some sobering considerations about to check them in mid-
career. " Haec tibi erit janua leti," we feel. There is some
thing so icy in this cold-water bath, something which seems
so hostile to the movement of our life, so purely negative,
in Reason when she lays her corpse-like finger on our heart
and says, " Halt! give up! leave off! go back! sit down! "
that it is no wonder that to most men the steadying in
fluence seems, for the time being, a very minister of death.

The strong-willed man, however, is the man who hears
the still small voice unflinchingly, and who, when the death-
bringing consideration comes, looks at its face, consents
to its presence, clings to it, affirms it, and holds it fast, in
spite of the host of exciting mental images which rise in
revolt against it and would expel it from the mind. Sus
tained in this way by a resolute effort of attention, the
difficult object ere long begins to call up its own congeners
and associates and ends by changing the disposition of the
man's consciousness altogether. And with his conscious
ness, his action changes, for the new object, once stably in
possession of the field of his thoughts, infallibly produces
its own motor effects. The difficulty lies in the gaining
possession of that field. Though the spontaneous drift
of thought is all the other way, the attention must be kept
strained on that one object until at last it grows, so as to
maintain itself before the mind with ease. This strain of
the attention is the fundamental act of will. And the will's
work is in most cases practically ended when the bare
presence to our thought of the naturally unwelcome object
has been secured. For the mysterious tie between the
thought and the motor centres next comes into play, and,
in a way which we cannot even guess at, the obedience of
the bodily organs follows as a matter of course.

In all this one sees how the immediate point of application
of the volitional effort lies exclusively in the mental world.
The whole drama is a mental drama. The whole difficulty

72 Selected Papers on Philosophy

is a mental difficulty, a difficulty with an object of our
thought. If I may use the word idea without suggesting
associationist or Herbartian fables, I will say that it is an
idea to which our will applies itself, an idea which if we let
it go would slip away, but which we will not let go. Consent
to the idea's undivided presence, this is effort's sole achieve
ment. Its only function is to get this feeling of consent into
the mind. And for this there is but one way. The idea to
be consented to must be kept from flickering and going out.
It must be held steadily before the mind until it fills the
mind. Such filling of the mind by an idea, with its congruous
associates, is consent to the idea and to the fact which the
idea represents. If the idea be that, or include that, of a
bodily movement of our own, then we call the consent thus
laboriously gained a motor volition. For Nature here
" backs " us instantaneously and follows up our inward
willingness by outward changes on her own part. She does
this in no other instance. Pity she should not have been
more generous, nor made a world whose other parts were
as immediately subject to our will!

In describing the " reasonable type " of decision, it was
said that it usually came when the right conception of
the case was found. Where, however, the right conception
is an anti-impulsive one, the whole intellectual ingenuity
of the man usually goes to work to crowd it out of sight
and to find names for the emergency, by the help of which
the dispositions of the moment may sound sanctified, and
sloth or passion may reign unchecked. How many excuses
does the drunkard find when each new temptation comes!
It is a new brand of liquor which the interests of intellectual
culture in such matters oblige him to test ; moreover it is
poured out and it is sin to waste it ; or others are drinking and
it would be churlishness to refuse ; or it is but to enable him
to sleep; or just to get through this job of work; or it isn't
drinking, it is because he feels so cold; or it is Christmas-
day; or it is a means of stimulating him to make a more

The Will 73

powerful resolution in favour of abstinence than any he
has hitherto made; or it is just this once, and once doesn't
count, etc., etc., ad libitum — it is, in fact, anything you
like except being a drunkard. That is the conception that
will not stay before the poor soul's attention. But if he
once gets able to pick out that way of conceiving from all
the other possible ways of conceiving the various oppor
tunities which occur, if through thick and thin he holds
to it that this is being a drunkard and is nothing else, he
is not likely to remain one long. The effort by which he
succeeds in keeping the right name unwaveringly present
to his mind proves to be his saving moral act.

Everywhere, then, the function of the effort is the same:
to keep affirming and adopting a thought which, if left to
itself, would slip away. It may be cold and flat when the
spontaneous mental drift is towards excitement, or great
and arduous when the spontaneous drift is towards repose.
In the one case the effort has to inhibit an explosive, in
the other to arouse an obstructed will. The exhausted
sailor on a wreck has a will which is obstructed. One of
his ideas is that of his sore hands, of the nameless exhaustion
of his whole frame which the act of further pumping
involves, and of the deliciousness of sinking into sleep. The
other is that of the hungry sea engulfing him. " Rather
the aching toil! " he says; and it becomes reality then,
in spite of the inhibiting influence of the relatively luxuri
ous sensations which he gets from lying still. But exactly
similar in form would be his consent to lie and sleep. Often
it is the thought of sleep and what leads to it which is the
hard one to keep before the mind. If a patient afflicted
with insomnia can only control the whirling chase of his
thoughts so far as to think of nothing at all (which can be
done), or so far as to imagine one letter after another of a
verse of scripture or poetry spelt slowly and monotonously
out, it is almost certain that here, too, specific bodily
effects will follow, and that sleep will come. The trouble is
to keep the mind upon a train of objects naturally so

74 Selected Papers on Philosophy

insipid. To sustain a representation, to think, is, in short,
the only moral act, for the impulsive and the obstructed,
for sane and lunatics alike. * Most maniacs know their
thoughts to be crazy, but find them too pressing to be
withstood. Compared with them the sane truths are so
deadly sober, so cadaverous, that the lunatic cannot bear
to look them in the face and say, " Let these alone be my
reality! " But with sufficient effort, as Dr. Wigan says: —

" Such a man can for a time wind, himself up, as it were,
and determine that the notions of the disordered brain
shall not be manifested. Many instances are on record
similar to that told by Pinel, where an inmate of the Bicetre,
having stood a long cross-examination, and given every
mark of restored reason, signed his" name to the paper
authorizing his discharge ' Jesus Christ,' and then went
off into all the vagaries connected with that delusion. In
the phraseology of the gentleman whose case is related
in an early part of this [Wigan 's] work he had ' held himself
tight ' during the examination in order to attain his
object; this once accomplished he 'let himself down'
again, and, if even conscious of his delusion, could not
control it. I have observed with such persons that it re
quires a considerable time to wind themselves up to the
pitch of complete self-control, that the effort is a painful
tension of the mind. . . . When thrown off their guard by
any accidental remark or worn out by the length of the
examination, they let themselves go, and cannot gather
themselves up again without preparation. Lord Erskine
relates the story of a man who brought an action against
Dr. Munro for confining him without cause. He underwent
the most rigid examination by the counsel for the defendant
without discovering any appearance of insanity, till a
gentleman asked him about a princess with whom he corre
sponded in cherry- juice, and he became instantly insane." x

To sum it all up in a word, the terminus of the psychological
process in volition, the point to which the will is directly
1 The Duality of Mind, pp. 141-42.

The Will 75

applied, is always an idea. There are at all times some
ideas from which we shy away like frightened horses the
moment we get a glimpse of their forbidding profile upon
the threshold of our thought. The only resistance which our
will can possibly experience is the resistance which such an
idea offers to being attended to at all. To attend to it is the
volitional act, and the only inward volitional act which we
ever perform.

I have put the thing in this ultra-simple way because I
want more than anything else to emphasize the fact that
volition is primarily a relation, not between our Self and
extra-mental matter (as many philosophers still maintain),
but between our Self and our own states of mind. But when,
a short while ago, I spoke of the filling of the mind with an
idea as being equivalent to consent to the idea's object, I
said something which the reader doubtless questioned at
the time, and which certainly now demands some qualifica
tion ere we pass beyond.

It is unqualifiedly true that if any thought do fill the
mind exclusively, such filling is consent. The thought, for
that time at any rate, carries the man and his will with it.
But it is not true that the thought need fill the mind
exclusively for consent to be there; for we often consent
to things whilst thinking of other things, even of hostile
things. . . . The effort to attend is therefore only a part
of what the word " will " covers; it covers also the effort
to consent to something to which our attention is not quite
complete. Often, when an object has gained our attention
exclusively, and its motor results are just on the point of
setting in, it seems as if the sense of their imminent irre
vocability were enough of itself to start up the inhibitory
ideas and to make us pause. Then we need a new stroke
of effort to break down the sudden hesitation which seizes
upon us, and to persevere. So that although attention is
the first and fundamental thing in volition, express consent
to the reality of what is attended to is often an additional
and quite distinct phenomenon involved.

j6 Selected Papers on Philosophy

The reader's own consciousness tells him, of course, just
what these words of mine denote. And I freely confess that
I am impotent to carry the analysis of the matter any
further or to explain in other terms of what this consent
consists. It seems a subjective experience sui generis,
which we can designate but not define. We stand here
exactly where we did in the case of belief. When an idea
stings us in a certain way, makes as it were a certain electric
connection with our Self, we believe that it is a reality.
When it stings us in another way, makes another connec
tion with our Self, we say, let it be a reality. To the word
" is " and to the words " let it be " there correspond
peculiar attitudes of consciousness which it is vain to seek
to explain. The indicative and the imperative moods are as
much ultimate categories of thinking as they are of gram
mar. The " quality of reality " which these moods attach
to things is not like other qualities. It is a relation to our
life. It means our adoption of the things, our caring for
them, our standing by them. This at least is what it practi
cally means for us; what it may mean beyond that we do
not know. And the transition from merely considering
an object as possible to deciding or willing it to be real;
the change from the fluctuating to the stable personal
attitude concerning it; from the "don't care" state of
mind to that in which " we mean business," is one of the
most familiar things in life. We can partly enumerate its,
conditions; and we can partly trace its consequences,
especially the momentous one that when the mental object
is a movement of our own body, it realizes itself outwardly
when the mental change in question has occurred. But
the change itself as a subjective phenomenon is something
which we can translate into no simpler terms.

Especially must we, when talking about the question
of free-will, rid our mind of the fabulous warfare of separate
agents called " ideas." The brain-processes may be agents,
and the thought as such may be an agent. But what the
ordinary psychologies call " ideas " are nothing but parts

The Will 77

of the total object of representation. All that is before the
mind at once, no matter how complex a system of things
and relations it may be, is one object for the thought.
Thus, "A - and - B - and - their - mutual - incompatibility -
and - the - fact - that - one - alone - can - be - true - or -
can - become - real - notwithstanding - the - probability - or -
desirability -of -both" may be such a complex object; and
where the thought is deliberative its object has always some
such form as this. When, now, we pass from deliberation
to decision, that total object undergoes a change. We either
dismiss A altogether and its relations to B, and think of
B exclusively; or after thinking of both as possibilities,
we next think that A is impossible, and that B is or forth
with shah1 be real. In either case a new object is before our
thought; and where effort exists, it is where the change
from the first object to the second one is hard. Our thought
seems to turn hi this case like a heavy door upon its hinges;
only, so far as the effort feels spontaneous, it turns, not as
if by some one helping, but as if by an inward activity 3
born for the occasion, of its own. . . .

My own belief is that the question of free-will is insoluble
on strictly psychologic grounds. After a certain amount of
effort of attention has been given to an idea, it is mani
festly impossible to tell whether either more or less of it
might have been given or not. To tell that, we should
have to ascend to the antecedents of the effort, and
defining them with mathematical exactitude, prove, by
laws of which we have not at present even an inkling, that
the only amount of sequent effort which could possibly
comport with them was the precise amount which actually
came. Measurements, whether of psychic or of neural
quantities, and deductive reasonings such as this method
of proof implies, will surely be forever beyond human
reach. No serious psychologist or physiologist will venture
even to suggest a notion of how they might be practically
made. We are thrown back, therefore, upon the crude
evidences of introspection on the one hand, with all its

78 Selected Papers on Philosophy

liabilities to deception, and, on the other hand, upon a
priori postulates and probabilities. He who loves to
balance nice doubts need be in no hurry to decide the point.
Like Mephistopheles to Faust, he can say to himself
" dazu hast du noch eine lange Frist," for from generatio:
to generation the reasons adduced on both sides will gro*
more voluminous, and the discussion more refined. Bu
if our speculative delight be less keen, if the love of a part
pris outweighs that of keeping questions open, or if, ar
a French philosopher of genius says, " V amour de la v'
qui s'indigne de tant de discours," awakens in us, craving tl
sense of either peace or power — then, taking the risk
error on our head, we must project upon one of the alt(
native views the attribute of reality for us; we must
fill our mind with the idea of it that it becomes our settl
creed. The present writer does this for the alternative
freedom, but since the grounds of his opinion are ethic
rather than psychological, he prefers to exclude them frc
the present book.

A few words, however, may be permitted about the Ic
of the question. The most that any argument can do
determinism is to make it a clear and seductive conceptic
which a man is foolish not to espouse, so long as he stan
by the great scientific postulate that the world must '
one unbroken fact, and that prediction of all things witho
exception must be ideally, even if not actually, possiblv
It is a moral postulate about the universe, the postulat
that what ought to be can be, and that bad acts cannot be fated
but that good ones must be possible in their place,whlch would
lead one to espouse the contrary view. But when scientific
and moral postulates war thus with each other and ob
jective proof is not to be had, the only course is voluntary
choice, for scepticism itself, if systematic, is also voluntary
choice. If, meanwhile, the will be undetermined, it would
seem only fitting that the belief in its indetermination
should be voluntarily chosen from amongst other possible
beliefs. Freedom's first deed should be to affirm itself.

The Will 79

We ought never to hope for any other method of getting
at the truth if indeterminism be a fact. Doubt of this
particular truth will therefore probably be open to us to
ie end of time, and the utmost that a believer in free-will
can ever do will be to show that the deterministic arguments
not coercive. That they are seductive, I am the last
deny ; nor do I deny that effort may be needed to keep
faith in freedom, when they press upon it, upright in
4he mind.

?There is a fatalistic argument for determinism, however,
l#lich is radically vicious. When a man has let himself
•£o time after time, he easily becomes impressed with the
eftarmously preponderating influence of circumstances,
fr^reditary habits, and temporary bodily dispositions over
£if.at might seem a spontaneity born for the occasion. " All

," he then says; " all is resultant of what pre-exists.

if the moment seems original, it is but the instable
»S#lecules passively tumbling in their preappointed way.
a is hopeless to resist the drift, vain to look for any new

coming in ; and less, perhaps, than anywhere else

the sun is there anything really mine in the decisions
ufcch I make." This is really no argument for simple
determinism. There runs throughout it the sense of a force
<*£ich might make things otherwise from one moment to
jother, if it were only strong enough to breast the tide. A
person who feels the impotence of free effort in this way has
vie acutest notion of what is meant by it, and of its possible
^dependent power. How else could he be so conscious
if its absence and of that of its effects? But genuine
determinism occupies a totally different ground; not the
impotence but the unthinkdbility of free-will is what it
affirms. It admits something phenomenal called free effort,
which seems to breast the tide, but it claims this as a
portion of the tide. The variations of the effort cannot be
independent, it says; they cannot originate ex nihilo, or
come from a fourth dimension; they are mathematically
fixed functions of the ideas themselves, which are the tide.

8o Selected Papers on Philosophy

Fatalism, which conceives of effort clearly enough as an
independent variable that might come from a fourth
dimension, if it would come but that does not come, is a
very dubious ally for determinism. It strongly imagines
that very possibility which determinism denies.

But what, quite as much as the inconceivability of
absolutely independent variables, persuades modern men
of science that their efforts must be predetermined, is
the continuity of the latter with other phenomena whose
.predetermination no one doubts. Decisions with effort
merge so gradually into those without it that it is not easy
to say where the limit lies. Decisions without effort merge
again into ideo-motor, and these into reflex acts; so that
the temptation is almost irresistible to throw the formula
which covers so many cases over absolutely all. Where
there is effort just as where there is none, the ideas them
selves which furnish the matter of deliberation are brought
before the mind by the machinery of association. And this
machinery is essentially a system of arcs and paths, a
reflex system, whether effort be amongst its incidents or
not. The reflex way is, after all, the universal way of
conceiving the business. The feeling of ease is a passive
result of the way in which the thoughts unwind themselves.
Why is not the feeling of effort the same ? Professor Lipps,
in his admirably clear deterministic statement, so far from
admitting that the feeling of effort testifies to an increment
of force exerted, explains it as a sign that force is lost. We
speak of effort, according to him, whenever a force expends
itself (wholly or partly) in neutralizing another force, and
so fails of its own possible outward effect. The outward
effect of the antagonistic force, however, also fails in
.corresponding measure, " so that there is no effort without
counter-effort . . . and effort and counter-effort signify
only that causes are mutually robbing each other of
effectiveness." Where the forces are ideas, both sets of
them, strictly speaking, are the seat of effort — both those
which tend to explode and those which tend to check

The Will 8 1

:hem. We, however, call the more abundant mass of ideas
wrselves ; and, talking of its effort as our effort, and of
that of the smaller mass of ideas as the resistance, we say
that our effort sometimes overcomes the resistances offered
the inertias of an obstructed, and sometimes those
presented by the impulsions of an explosive, will.
Really both effort and resistance are ours, and the identifi-
:ation of our self with one of these factors is an illusion and
i trick of speech. I do not see how any one can fail (especi
ally when the mythologic dynamism of separate " ideas,"
which Professor Lipps cleaves to, is translated into that of
brain-processes) to recognize the fascinating simplicity of
some such view as his. Nor do I see why for scientific pur
poses one need give it up even if indeterminate amounts of
effort really do occur. Before their indeterminism, science
simply stops. She can abstract from it altogether, then;
for in the impulses and inhibitions with which the effort
has to cope there is already a larger field of uniformity
than she can ever practically cultivate. Her prevision will
never foretell, even if the effort be completely predestinate,
the actual way in which each individual emergency is
resolved. Psychology will be Psychology,1 and Science
Science, as much as ever (as much and no more) in this
world, whether free-will be true in it or not. Science,
however, must be constantly reminded that her purposes
are not the only purposes, and that the order of uniform
causation which she has use for, and is therefore right in
postulating, may be enveloped in a wider order, on which
she has no claims at all.

1 Such ejaculations as Mr. Spencer's — " Psychical changes either
conform to law or they do not. If they do not, this work, in common
with all works on the subject, is sheer nonsense: no science of
Psychology is possible " (Principles of Psychology, i. 503) — are
beneath criticism. Mr. Spencer's work, like all the other " works on
the subject," treats of those general conditions of possible conduct
within which all our real decisions must fall no matter whether their
effort be small or great. However closely psychical changes may
conform to law, it is safe to say that individual histories and biogra
phies will never be written in advance no matter how " evolved "
psychology may become.
F

82 Selected Papers on Philosophy

We can therefore leave the free-will question altogethei
out of our account. The operation of free effort, if il
existed, could only be to hold some one ideal object, or
part of an object, a little longer or a little more intensely
before the mind. Amongst the alternatives which presenl
themselves as genuine possibles, it would thus make one
effective. And although such quickening of one idea mighl
be morally and historically momentous, yet, if considered
dynamically, it would be an operation amongst those
physiological infinitesimals which calculation must forevei
neglect.

But whilst eliminating the question about the amounl
of our effort as one which psychology will never have i
practical call to decide, I must say one word about th<
extraordinarily intimate and important character which
the phenomenon of effort assumes in our own eyes a;
individual men. Of course we measure ourselves by man}
standards. Our strength and our intelligence, our wealth
and even our good luck, are things which warm our hear!
and make us feel ourselves a match for life. But deepei
than all such things, and able to suffice unto itself withoul
them, is the sense of the amount of effort which we can pu1
forth. Those are, after all, but effects, products, and reflec
tions of the outer world within. But the effort seems
to belong to an altogether different realm, as if it were the
substantive thing which we are, and those were but exter
nals which we carry. If the " searching of our heart and
reins " be the purpose of this human drama, then what is
sought seems to be what effort we can make. He who car
make none is but a shadow; he who can make much is 3
hero. The huge world that girdles us about puts all sorts
of questions to us, and tests us in all sorts of ways. Som<
of the tests we meet by actions that are easy, and some o
the questions we answer hi articulately formulated words
But the deepest question that is ever asked admits of nc
reply but the dumb turning of the will and tightening o
our heart-strings as we say," Yes, I will even have it so ! '

The Will 83

•Vhen a dreadful object is presented, or when life as a
vhole turns up its dark abysses to our view, then the
vorthless ones among us lose their hold on the situation
Jtogether, and either escape from its difficulties by averting
heir attention, or if they cannot do that, collapse into
delding masses of plaintiveness and fear. The effort
equired for facing and consenting to such objects is
>eyond their power to make. But the heroic mind does
lifferently. To it, too, the objects are sinister and dreadful,
mwelcome, incompatible with wished-for things. But it
:an face them if necessary, without for that losing its hold
ipon the rest of life. The world thus finds in the heroic
nan its worthy match and mate ; and the effort which he
s able to put forth to hold himself erect and keep his heart
inshaken is the direct measure of his worth and function
n the game of human life. He can stand this Universe.
le can meet it and keep up his faith in it in presence of
hose same features which lay his weaker brethren low.
le can still find a zest in it, not by " ostrich-like forget-
ulness," but by pure inward willingness to face the world
vith those deterrent objects there. And hereby he becomes
>ne of the masters and the lords of life. He must be counted
vith henceforth; he forms a part of human destiny.
Neither in the theoretic nor in the practical sphere do we
are for, or go for help to, those who have no head for
isks, or sense for living on the perilous edge. Our religious
ife lies more, our practical life lies less, than it used to, on
he perilous edge. But just as our courage is so often a
eflex of another's courage, so our faith is apt to be, as
dax Miiller somewhere says, a faith in some one else's
aith. We draw new life from the heroic example. The
)rophet has drunk more deeply than any one of the cup
>f bitterness, but his countenance is so unshaken and he
peaks such mighty words of cheer that his will becomes our
vill, and our life is kindled at his own.

Thus not only our morality but our religion, so far as the
atter is deliberate, depend on the effort which we can

84 Selected Papers on Philosophy

make. " Will you or won't you have it so ? " is the mosl
probing question we are ever asked ; we are asked it every
hour of the day, and about the largest as well as the
smallest, the most theoretical as well as the most practical,
things. We answer by consents or non-consents and not
by words. What wonder that these dumb responses should
seem our deepest organs of communication with the nature
of things! What wonder if the effort demanded by them
be the measure of our worth as men ! What wonder if the
amount which we accord of it be the one strictly underived
and original contribution which we make to the world!

VI
PHILOSOPHY AND ITS CRITICS *

'HE progress of society is due to the fact that individuals

ary from the human average in all sorts of directions, and

hat the originality is often so attractive or useful that they

re recognized by their tribe as leaders, and become objects

f envy or admiration, and setters of new ideals.

Among the variations, every generation of men produces

ome individuals exceptionally preoccupied with theory.

uch men find matter for puzzle and astonishment where

o one else does. Their imagination invents explanations

nd combines them. They store up the learning of their

ime, utter prophecies and warnings, and are regarded as

>ages. Philosophy, etymologically meaning the love of

wisdom, is the work of this class of minds, regarded with

m indulgent relish, if not with admiration, even by those

who do not understand them or believe much in the truth

which they proclaim.

Philosophy, thus become a race-heritage, forms in its
totality a monstrously unwieldy mass of learning. So
taken, there is no reason why any special science like
chemistry or astronomy should be excluded from it.
By common consent, however, special sciences are to-day
excluded, for reasons presently to be explained; and what
remains is manageable enough to be taught under the name
of philosophy by one man if his interests be broad enough.
If this were a German textbook I should first give my
abstract definition of the topic, thus limited by usage, then
proceed to display its " Begriff, und Einteilung," and its
" Aufgdbe und Methode." But as such displays are usually
1 From Some Problems of Philosophy, 1911, pp. 3-28.
85

86 Selected Papers on Philosophy

unintelligible to beginners, and unnecessary after reading
the book, it will conduce to brevity to omit that chaptei
altogether, useful though it might possibly be to more
advanced readers as a summary of what is to follow.

I will tarry a moment, however, over the matter oi
definition. Limited by the omission of the special sciences,
the name of philosophy has come more and more to denote
ideas of universal scope exclusively. The principles oi
explanation that underlie all things without exception, the
elements common to gods and men and animals and stones,
the first whence and the last whither of the whole cosmic
procession, the conditions of all knowing, and the most
general rules of human action — these furnish the problems
commonly deemed philosophic par excellence ; and the
philosopher is the man who finds the most to say about
them. Philosophy is defined in the usual scholastic text
books as " the knowledge of things in general by their
ultimate causes, so far as natural reason can attain to
such knowledge." This means that explanation of the
universe at large, not description of its details, is what
philosophy must aim at; and so it happens that a view
of an}Tthing is termed philosophic just in proportion as
it is broad and connected with other views, and as it uses
principles not proximate, or intermediate, but ultimate
and all-embracing, to justify itself. Any very sweeping
view of the world is a philosophy in this sense, even though
it may be a vague one. It is a Weltanschauung, an intellec-
tualized attitude towards life. Professor Dewey well
describes the constitution of all the philosophies that
actually exist, when he says that philosophy expresses a
certain attitude, purpose, and temper of conjoined intellect
and will, rather than a discipline whose boundaries can
be neatly marked off.1

To know the chief rival attitudes towards life, as the
history of human thinking has developed them, and to

1 Compare the article " Philosophy " in Baldwin's Dictionary
of Philosophy and Psychology.

Philosophy and its Critics 87

iave heard some of the reasons they can give for them
selves, ought to be considered an essential part of liberal
3ducation. Philosophy, indeed, in one sense of the term is
snly a compendious name for the spirit in education which
the word " college " stands for in America. Things can be
aught in dry dogmatic ways or in a philosophic way. At
i technical school a man may grow into a first-rate instru
ment for doing a certain job, but he may miss all the
^raciousness of mind suggested by the term liberal culture,
may remain a cad and not a gentleman, intellectually
pinned down to his one narrow subject, literal, unable to
suppose anything different from what he has seen, without
imagination, atmosphere, or mental perspective.

Philosophy, beginning in wonder, as Plato and Aristotle
said, is able to fancy everything different from what it is.
It sees the familiar as if it were strange, and the strange as
if it were familiar. It can take things up and lay them down
again. Its mind is full of air that plays round every subject.
It rouses us from our native dogmatic slumber and breaks
up our caked prejudices. Historically it has always been
a sort of fecundation of four different human interests —
science, poetry, religion, and logic — by one another. It has
sought by hard reasoning for results emotionally valuable.
To have some contact with it, to catch its influence, is
thus good for both literary and scientific students. By
its poetry it appeals to literary minds ; but its logic stiffens
them up and remedies their softness. By its logic it appeals
to the scientific; but softens them by its other aspects, and
saves them from too dry a technicality. Both types of
student ought to get from philosophy a livelier spirit, more
air, more mental background. " Hast any philosophy in
thee, Shepherd? " — this question of Touchstone's is the
one with which men should always meet one another. A
man with no philosophy in him is the most inauspicious
and unprofitable of all possible social mates.

I say nothing in all this of what may be called the gym
nastic use of philosophic study, the purely intellectual

88 Selected Papers on Philosophy

power gained by denning the high and abstract concepts of
the philosopher and discriminating between them.

In spite of the advantages thus enumerated, the study
of philosophy has systematic enemies, and they were never
as numerous as at the present day. The definite conquests
of science and the apparent indefiniteness of philosophy's
results partly account for this; to say nothing of man's
native rudeness of mind, which maliciously enjoys deriding
long words and abstractions. " Scholastic jargon," " medi
aeval dialectics," are for many people synonyms of the
word philosophy. With his obscure and uncertain specu
lations as to the intimate nature and causes of things, the
philosopher is likened to a " blind man in a dark room
looking for a black hat that is not there." His occupation
is described as the art of " endlessly disputing without
coming to any conclusion," or more contemptuously still
as the " systematische Missbrauch einer eben zu diesem
Zwecke erfundenen Terminologies

Only to a very limited degree is this sort of hostility
reasonable. I will take up some of the current objections
in successive order, since to reply to them will be a con
venient way of entering into the interior of our subject.

Objection I. Whereas the sciences make steady progress
and yield applications of matchless utility, philosophy
makes no progress and has no practical applications.

Reply. The opposition is unjustly founded, for the
sciences are themselves branches of the tree of philosophy.
As fast as questions got accurately answered, the answers
were called " scientific," and what men call " philosophy "
to-day is but the residuum of questions still unanswered.
At this very moment we are seeing two sciences, psychology
and general biology, drop off from the parent trunk and
take independent root as specialties. The more general
philosophy cannot as a rule follow the voluminous details
of any special science.

A backward glance at the evolution of philosophy will
reward us here. The earliest philosophers in every land

Philosophy and its Critics 89

were encyclopaedic sages, lovers of wisdom, sometimes with
and sometimes without a dominantly ethical or religious
interest. They were just men curious beyond immediate
practical needs, and no particular problems, but rather the
problematic generally, was their specialty. China, Persia,
Egypt, India had such wise men, but those of Greece are
the only sages who until very recently have influenced the
course of western thinking. The earlier Greek philosophy
lasted, roughly speaking, for about two hundred and fifty
years, say from 600 B.C. onwards. Such men as Thales, Hera-
clitus, Pythagoras, Parmenides, Anaxagoras, Empedocles,
Democritus were mathematicians, theologians, politicians,
astronomers, and physicists. All the learning of their time,
such as it was, was at their disposal. Plato and Aris
totle continued their tradition, and the great mediaeval
philosophers only enlarged its field of application. If we
turn to Saint Thomas Aquinas's great " Summa," written
in the thirteenth century, we find opinions expressed about
literally everything, from God down to matter, with angels,
men, and demons taken in on the way. The relations of
almost everything with everything else, of the creator
with his creatures, of the knower with the known, of sub
stances with forms, of mind with body, of sin with salvation,
come successively up for treatment. A theology, a psy
chology, a system of duties and morals, are given in fullest
detail, while physics and logic are established in their uni
versal principles. The impression made on the reader is of
almost superhuman intellectual resources. It is true that
Saint Thomas's method of handling the mass of fact, or
supposed fact, which he treated, was different from that to
which we are accustomed. He deduced and proved every
thing, either from fixed principles of reason, or from holy
Scripture. The properties and changes of bodies, for ex
ample, were explained by the two principles of matter
and form, as Aristotle had taught. Matter was the quanti
tative, determinable, passive element ; form the qualitative,
unifying, determining, and active principle. All activity

90 Selected Papers on Philosophy

was for an end. Things could act on each other only when
in contact. The number of species of things was deter
minate, and their differences discrete, etc., etc.1

By the beginning of the seventeenth century, men were
tired of the elaborate a priori methods of scholasticism.
Suarez's treatises availed not to keep them in fashion. But
the new philosophy of Descartes, which displaced the
scholastic teaching, sweeping over Europe like wildfire,
preserved the same encyclopaedic character. We think
of Descartes nowadays as the metaphysician who said
" Cogito, ergo sum," separated mind from matter as two
contrasted substances, and gave a renovated proof of
God's existence. But his contemporaries thought of him
much more as we think of Herbert Spencer in our day, as a
great cosmic evolutionist who explained, by " the redis
tribution of matter and motion," and the laws of impact,
the rotations of the heavens, the circulation of the blood,
the refraction of light, apparatus of vision and of nervous
action, the passings of the soul, and the connection of the
mind and body.

Descartes died in 1650. With Locke's Essay Concerning
Human Understanding, published in 1690, philosophy for
the first time turned more exclusively to the problem of
knowledge, and became " critical." This subjective ten
dency developed; and although the school of Leibnitz,
who was the pattern of a universal sage, still kept up the
more universal tradition — Leibnitz's follower Wolff pub
lished systematic treatises on everything, physical as well
as moral — Hume, who succeeded Locke, woke Kant " from
his dogmatic slumber," and since Kant's time the word
" philosophy " has come to stand for mental and moral
speculations far more than for physical theories. Until a
comparatively recent time, philosophy was taught in our
colleges under the name of " mental and moral philosophy,"

1 J. Rickaby's General Metaphysics (Longmans, Green and Co.)
gives a popular account of the essentials of St. Thomas's philosophy
of nature. Thomas J. Harper's Metaphysics of the School (Macmillan)
goes into minute detail.

Philosophy and its Critics 9 1

or " philosophy of the human mind," exclusively, to dis
tinguish it from " natural philosophy."

But the older tradition is the better as well as the com-
pleter one. To know the actual peculiarities of the world we
are born into is surely as important as to know what makes
worlds anyhow abstractly possible. Yet this latter know
ledge has been treated by many since Kant's time as the
only knowledge worthy of being called philosophical.
Common men feel the question " What is Nature like? "
to be as meritorious as the Kantian question " How is
Nature possible? " So philosophy, in order not to lose
human respect, must take some notice of the actual consti
tution of reality. There are signs to-day of a return to the
more objective tradition.1

Philosophy in the full sense is only man thinking, thinking
about generalities rather than about particulars. But
whether about generalities or particulars, man thinks
always by the same methods. He observes, discriminates*
generalizes, classifies, looks for causes, traces analogies,
and makes hypotheses. Philosophy, taken as something
distinct from science or from practical affairs, follows no
method peculiar to itself. All our thinking to-day has
evolved gradually out of primitive human thought, and the
only really important changes that have come over its
manner (as distinguished from the matters in which it
believes) are a greater hesitancy in asserting its convictions,
and the habit of seeking verification 2 for them whenever
it can.

It will be instructive to trace very briefly the origins of
our present habits of thought.

Auguste Comte, the founder of a philosophy which he
called " positive," 3 said that human theory on any subject
always took three forms in succession. In the theological
stage of theorizing, phenomena are explained by spirits

1 For an excellent defence of it I refer my readers to Paulsen's
Introduction to Philosophy (translated by Thilly), 1895, PP- i9~44-
1 Compare G. H. Lewes, Aristotle, 1864, chap. iv.
8 Cours de philosophic positive, 6 volumes, Paris, 1830-1842.

92 Selected Papers on Philosophy

producing them ; in the metaphysical stage, their essential
feature is made into an abstract idea, and this is placed
behind them as if it were an explanation; in the positive
stage, phenomena are simply described as to their coexist
ences and successions. Their " laws " are formulated, but
no explanation of their natures or existence is sought after.
Thus a " spiritus rector " would be a theological — a " prin
ciple of attraction " a metaphysical — and " a law of the
squares " would be a positive theory of the planetary
movements.

Comte's account is too sharp and definite. Anthropology
shows that the earliest attempts at human theorizing mixed
the theological and metaphysical together. Common
things needed no special explanation, remarkable things
alone, odd things, especially deaths, calamities, diseases,
called for it. What made things act was the mysterious
energy in them, and the more awful they were the more
of this mana they possessed. The great thing was to acquire
mana oneself. " Sympathetic magic " is the collective
name for what seems to have been the primitive philosophy
here. You could act on anything by controlling anything
else that either was associated with it or resembled it. If
you wished to injure an enemy, you should either make an
image of him, or get some of his hair or other belongings,
or get his name written. Injuring the substitute, you thus
made him suffer correspondingly. If you wished the rain to
come, you sprinkled the ground, if the wind, you whistled,
etc. If you would have yams grow well in your garden, put
a stone there that looks like a yam. Would you cure jaun
dice, give tumeric, that makes things look yellow; or give
poppies for troubles of the head, because their seed vessels
form a " head." This " doctrine of signatures " played
a great part in early medicine. The various " -mancies "
and "-mantics" come in here, in which witchcraft and
incipient science are indistinguishably mixed. " Sym
pathetic " theorizing persists to the present day. "Thoughts
are things " f or a contemporary school — and on the whole a

Philosophy and its Critics 93

good school — of practical philosophy. Cultivate the thought
of what you desire, affirm it, and it will bring all similar
thoughts from elsewhere to reinforce it, so that finally
your wish will be fulfilled.1

Little by little, more positive ways of considering things
began to prevail. Common elements in phenomena began
to be singled out and to form the basis of generalizations.
But these elements at first had necessarily to be the more
dramatic or humanly interesting ones. The hot, the cold,
the wet, the dry in things explained their behaviour.
Some bodies were naturally warm, others cold. Motions
were natural or violent. The heavens moved in circles
because circular motion was the most perfect. The lever
was explained by the greater quantity of perfection em
bodied in the movement of its longer arm.2 The sun went
south in winter to escape the cold. Precious or beautiful
things had exceptional properties. Peacock's flesh resisted
putrefaction. The lodestone would drop the iron which
it held if the superiorly powerful diamond was brought
near, etc.

Such ideas sound to us grotesque, but imagine no tracks
made for us by scientific ancestors, and what aspects would
we single out from nature to understand things by? Not
till the beginning of the seventeenth century did the more
insipid kinds of regularity in things abstract men's attention
away from the properties originally picked out. Few of us
realize how short the career of what we know as " science "
has been. Three hundred and fifty years ago hardly any
one believed in the Copernican planetary theory. Optical
combinations were not discovered. The circulation of the
blood, the weight of air, the conduction of heat, the laws of

1 Compare Prentice Mulford and others of the " new thought "
type. For primitive sympathetic magic consult J. Jastrow in Fact
and Fable in Psychology, the chapter on " Analogy "; F. B. Jevons,
Introduction to the History of Religion, chap, iv.; J. G. Frazer,
The Golden Bough, i. 2 ; R. R. Marett, The Threshold of Religion,
passim; A. O. Lovejoy, The Monist, xvi. 357.

• On Greek science, see W. Whewell's History of the Inductive
Sciences, vol. i. book i. ; G. H. Lewes, A ristotle, passim.

94 Selected Papers on Philosophy

motion were unknown ; the common pump was inexplicable ;
there were no clocks; no thermometers; no general
gravitation; the world was five thousand years old;
spirits moved the planets; alchemy, magic, astrology,
imposed on every one's belief. Modern science began only
after 1600, with Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Torricelli,
Pascal, Harvey, Newton, Huygens, and Boyle. Five men
telling one another in succession the discoveries which
their lives had witnessed, could deliver the whole of it into
our hands: Harvey might have told Newton, who might
have tolcl Voltaire; Voltaire might have told Dalton, who
might have told Huxley, who might have told the readers
of this book.

The men who began this work of emancipation were
philosophers in the original sense of the word, universal
sages. Galileo said that he had spent more years on philo
sophy than months on mathematics. Descartes was a
universal philosopher in the fullest sense of the term. But
the fertility of the newer conceptions made special depart
ments of truth grow at such a rate that they became too
unwieldy with details for the more universal minds to carry
them, so the special sciences of mechanics, astronomy, and
physics began to drop off from the parent stem.

No one could have foreseen in advance the extraordinary
fertility of the more insipid mathematical aspects which
these geniuses ferreted out. No one could have dreamed
of the control over nature which the search for their con
comitant variations would give. " Laws " describe these
variations ; and all our present laws of nature have as their
model the proportionality of v to t, and of s to t 2 which
Galileo first laid bare. Pascal's discovery of the proportion
ality of altitude to barometric height, Newton's of accelera
tion to distance, Boyle's of air-volume to pressure, Des
cartes' of sine to cosine in the refracted ray, were the first
fruits of Galileo's discovery. There was no question of
agencies, nothing animistic or sympathetic in this new
way of taking nature. It was description only, of concomi-

Philosophy and its Critics 95

tant variations, after the particular quantities that varied
had been successfully abstracted out. The result soon
showed itself in a differentiation of human knowledge
into two spheres, one called " Science," within which the
more definite laws apply, the other " General Philosophy,"
in which they do not. The state of mind called positivistic
is the result. "Down with philosophy! " is the cry of
innumerable scientific minds. " Give us measurable facts
only, phenomena, without the mind's additions, without
entities or principles that pretend to explain." It is largely
from this kind of mind that the objection that philosophy
has made no progress, proceeds.

It is obvious enough that if every step forward which
philosophy makes, every question to which an accurate
answer is found, gets accredited to science the residuum
Of unanswered problems will alone remain to constitute
the domain of philosophy, and will alone bear her name.
In point of fact this is just what is happening. Philosophy
has become a collective name for questions that have not
yet been answered to the satisfaction of all by whom they
have been asked. It does not follow, because some of these
questions have waited two thousand years for an answer,
that no answer will ever be forthcoming. Two thousand
years probably measure but one paragraph in that great
romance of adventure called the history of the intellect
of man. The extraordinary progress of the last three hun
dred years is due to a rather sudden finding of the way in
which a certain order of questions ought to be attacked,
questions admitting of mathematical treatment. But to
assume, therefore, that the only possible philosophy must
be mechanical and mathematical, and to disparage all
inquiry into the other sorts of questions, is to forget the
extreme diversity of aspects under which reality undoubtedly
exists. To the spiritual questions the proper avenues of
philosophic approach will also undoubteoUy be found. They
have, to some extent, been found already. In some re
spects, indeed, " science " has made less progress than

96 Selected Papers on Philosophy

" philosophy " — its most general conceptions would as
tonish neither Aristotle nor Descartes, could they revisit
our earth. The composition of things from elements, their
evolution, the conservation of energy, the idea of a uni
versal determinism, would seem to them commonplace
enough — the little things, the microscopes, electric lights,
telephones, and details of the sciences, would be to them
the awe-inspiring things. But if they opened our books
on metaphysics, or visited a philosophic lecture room,
everything would sound strange. The whole idealistic or
" critical " attitude of our time would be novel, and it
would be long before they took it in.1

Objection 2. Philosophy is dogmatic, and pretends to
settle things by pure reason, whereas the only fruitful mode
of getting at truth is to appeal to concrete experience.
Science collects, classes, and analyzes facts, and thereby
far outstrips philosophy.

Reply. This objection is historically valid. Too many
philosophers have aimed at closed systems, established a
priori, claiming infallibility, and to be accepted or rejected
only as totals. The sciences on the other hand, using
hypotheses only, but always seeking to verify them by
experiment and observation, open a way for indefinite
self-correction and increase. At the present day, it is
getting more and more difficult for dogmatists claiming
finality for their systems, to get a hearing in educated
circles. Hypothesis and verification, the watchwords of,
science, have set the fashion too strongly in academic
minds.

Since philosophers are only men thinking about things
in the most comprehensive possible way, they can use any
method whatsoever freely. Philosophy must, in any case,
complete the sciences, and must incorporate their methods.
One cannot see why, if such a policy should appear advis-

1 The reader will find all that I have said, and much more, set
forth in an excellent article by James Ward in Mind, vol. xv. No. 58 :
" The Progress of Philosophy."

Philosophy and its Critics 97

ible, philosophy might not end by forswearing all dog-
natism whatever, and become as hypothetical in her
nanners as the most empirical science of them all.

Objection 3. Philosophy is out of touch with real life, for
vhich it substitutes abstractions. The real world is various,
.angled, painful. Philosophers have, almost without ex-
option, treated it as noble, simple, and perfect, ignoring
he complexity of fact, and indulging in a sort of optimism
hat exposes their systems to the contempt of common
nen, and to the satire of such writers as Voltaire and
Schopenhauer. The great popular success of Schopenhauer
s due to the fact that, first among philosophers, he spoke
he concrete truth about the ills of life.

Reply. This objection also is historically valid, but no
•eason appears why philosophy should keep aloof from
•eality permanently. Her manners may change as she
successfully develops. The thin and noble abstractions
nay give way to more solid and real constructions, when
:he materials and methods for making such constructions
;hall be more and more securely ascertained. In the end
Dhilosophers may get into as close contact as realistic
lovelists with the facts of life.

In conclusion. In its original acceptation, meaning the
:ompletest knowledge of the universe, philosophy must
nclude the results of all the sciences, and cannot be con
trasted with the latter. It simply aims at making of science
what Herbert Spencer calls a " system of completely
anified knowledge." l In the more modern sense, of some
thing contrasted with the sciences, philosophy means
' metaphysics." The older sense is the more worthy sense,
and as the results of the sciences get more available for
2O-ordination, and the conditions for finding truth in
different kinds of question get more methodically defined,
we may hope that the term will revert to its original mean
ing. Science, metaphysics, and religion may then again

1 See the excellent chapter in Spencer's First Principles entitled
" Philosophy Denned."

G

98 Selected Papers on Philosophy

form a single body of wisdom, and lend each other mutual
support.

At present this hope is far from its fulfilment. I propose
in this book to take philosophy in the narrow sense of
metaphysics, and to let both religion and the results of the
sciences alone.

VII
THE WILL TO BELIEVE »

[N the recently published Life by Leslie Stephen of his
brother, Fitz- James, there is an account of a school to
which the latter went when he was a boy. The teacher, a
certain Mr. Guest, used to converse with his pupils in this
wise: " Gurney, what is the difference between justification
and sanctification ? — Stephen, prove the omnipotence of

1 From The Will to Believe, pp. 1-31, 1915.

An address to the Philosophical Clubs of Yale and Brown
Jniversities. Published in the New World, June 1896.

[In a letter to an English critic, written in 1904, Professor James
uggests that this essay " should have been called by the less
inlucky title The Right to Believe." And he adds, " My essay hedged
:he licence to indulge in private over-beliefs with so many restric-
ions and signboards of danger that the outlet was narrow enough,
t made of tolerance the essence of the situation; it denned the
>ermissible cases; it treated the faith-attitude as a necessity for
ndividuals, because the total ' evidence,' which only the race can
[raw, has to include their experiments among its data. It tended to
show only that faith could not be absolutely vetoed, as certain
champions of ' science ' (Clifford, Huxley, etc.) had claimed it ought
to be. It was a function that might lead, and probably does lead,
into a wider world." After protesting against the misrepresentations
and travesties of the view here presented of which his critics have
been guilty, he goes on to say: " I cry to Heaven to tell me of what
insane root my ' leading contemporaries ' have eaten, that they are
so smitten with blindness as to the meaning of printed texts. Or are
we others absolutely incapable of making our meaning clear? I
imagine that there is neither insane root nor unclear writing, but
that in these matters each man writes from out of a field of con
sciousness of which the Bogey in the background is the chief object.
Your bogey is superstitious; my bogey is desiccation; and each,
for his contrast-effect, clutches at any text that can be used to repre
sent the enemy, regardless of exegetical proprieties. In my essay the
evil shape was a vision of ' Science ' in the form of abstraction, prig-
gishness, and sawdust, lording it over all. Take the sterilest scientific
prig and cad you know, compare him with the richest religious in
tellect you know, and you would not, any more than I would, give
the former the exclusive right of way." — EDITOR.]

99

i oo Selected Papers on Philosophy

God! " etc. In the midst of our Harvard freethinking and
indifference we are prone to imagine that here at your good
old orthodox College conversation continues to be some
what upon this order ; and to show you that we at Harvard
have not lost all interest in these vital subjects, I have
brought with me to-night something like a sermon on
justification by faith to read to you — I mean an essay in
justification of faith, a defence of our right to adopt a
believing attitude in religious matters, in spite of the fact
that our merely logical intellect may not have been coerced.
" The Will to Believe," accordingly, is the title of my
paper.

I have long defended to my own students the lawfulness
of voluntarily adopted faith; but as soon as they have
got well imbued with the logical spirit, they have as a rule
refused to admit my contention to be lawful philosophically,
even though in point of fact they were personally all the
time chock-full of some faith or other themselves. I am all
the while, however, so profoundly convinced that my own
position is correct, that your invitation has seemed to me
a good occasion to make my statements more clear. Per
haps your minds will be more open than those with which
I have hitherto had to deal. I will be as little technical as I
can, though I must begin by setting up some technical
distinctions that will help us in the end.

Let us give the name of hypothesis to anything that
may be proposed to our belief; and just as the electricians
speak of live and dead wires, let us speak of any hypothesis
as either live or dead. A live hypothesis is one which appeals
as a real possibility to him to whom it is proposed. If I
ask you to believe in the Mahdi, the notion makes no
electric connection with your nature — it refuses to scintil
late with any credibility at all. As an hypothesis it is com
pletely dead. To an Arab, however (even if he be not one

The Will to Believe 101

the Mahdi's followers), the hypothesis is among -the
•nind's possibilities: it is alive. This shows that deadness
ind liveness in an hypothesis are not intrinsic properties
but relations to the individual thinker. They are measured
by his willingness to act. The maximum of liveness in an
lypothesis means willingness to act irrevocably. Practically
:hat means belief; but there is some believing tendency
wherever there is willingness to act at all.

Next, let us call the decision between two hypotheses an
option. Options may be of several kinds. They may be —
I, living or dead ; 2, forced or avoidable ; 3, momentous or
trivial; and for our purposes we may call an option a
genuine option when it is of the forced, living, and momen
tous kind.

1. A living option is one in which both hypotheses are
iive ones. If I say to you: " Be a theosophist or be a
Mohammedan," it is probably a dead option, because for
you neither hypothesis is likely to be alive. But if I say:

' Be an agnostic or1 be a Christian," it is otherwise: trained
as you are, each hypothesis makes some appeal, however
small, to your belief.

2. Next, if I say to you: " Choose between going out
with your umbrella or without it," I do not offer you a
genuine option, for it is not forced. You can easily avoid

by not going out at all. Similarly, if I say, " Either love
me or hate me," " Either call my theory true or call it
false," your option is avoidable. You may remain indifferent
to me, neither loving not hating, and you may decline to
offer any judgment as to my theory. But if I say, " Either
accept this truth or go without it," I put on you a forced
option, for there is no standing place outside of the alter
native. Every dilemma based on a complete logical disjunc
tion, with no possibility of not choosing, is an option of
this forced kind.

3. Finally, if I were Dr. Nansen and proposed to you to
join my North Pole expedition, your option would be
momentous ; for this would probably be your only similar

102 Selected Papers on Philosophy

opportunity, and your choice now would either exclude
you from the North Pole sort of immortality altogether or
put at least the chance of it into your hands. He who re
fuses to embrace a unique opportunity loses the prize as
surely as if he tried and failed. Per contra, the option is
trivial when the opportunity is not unique, when the stake
is insignificant, or when the decision is reversible if it
later prove unwise. Such trivial options abound in the
scientific life. A chemist finds an hypothesis live enough to
spend a year in its verification: he believes in it to that
extent. But if his experiments prove inconclusive either
way, he is quit for his loss of time, no vital harm being
done.

It will facilitate our discussion if we keep all these dis
tinctions well in mind.

II

The next matter to consider is the actual psychology of
human opinion. When we look at certain facts, it seems as
if our passional and volitional nature lay at the root of all
our convictions. When we look at others, it seems as if
they could do nothing when the intellect had once said its
say. Let us take the latter facts up first.

Does it not seem preposterous on the very face of it to
talk of our opinions being modifiable at will ? Can our will
either help or hinder our intellect in its perceptions of truth ?
Can we, by just willing it, believe that Abraham Lincoln's
existence is a myth, and that the portraits of him in
McC lure's Magazine are all of some one else ? Can we, by
any effort of our will, or by any strength of wish that it
were true, believe ourselves well and about when we are
roaring with rheumatism in bed, or feel certain that the
sum of the two one-dollar bills in our pocket must be a
hundred dollars? We can say any of these things, but we
are absolutely impotent to believe them; and of just such
things is the whole fabric of the truths that we do believe

The Will to Believe 103

in made up — matters of fact, immediate or remote, as
Hume said, and relations between ideas, which are either
there or not there for us if we see them so, and which if
not there cannot be put there by any action of our own.

In Rascal's Thoughts there is a celebrated passage known
in literature as Pascal's wager. In it he tries to force us
into Christianity by reasoning as if our concern with truth
resembled our concern with the stakes in a game of chance.
Translated freely his words are these: You must either
believe or not believe that God is — which will you do?
Your human reason cannot say. A game is going on be
tween you and the nature of things which at the day of
judgment will bring out either heads or tails. Weigh what
your gains and your losses would be if you should stake
all you have on heads, or God's existence: if you win in
such case, you gain eternal beatitude ; if you lose, you lose
nothing at all. If there were an infinity of chances, and only
one for God in this wager, still you ought to stake your all
on God; for though you surely risk a finite loss by this
procedure, any finite loss is reasonable, even a certain one
is reasonable, if there is but the possibility of infinite gain.
Go, then, and take holy water, and have masses said ; belief
will come and stupefy your scruples — Cela vous /era croire
et vous abetira. Why should you not ? At bottom, what have
you to lose ?

You probably feel that when religious faith expresses
itself thus, in the language of the gaming-table, it is put to
its last trumps. Surely Pascal's own personal belief in
masses and holy water had far other springs; and this
celebrated page of his is but an argument for others, a last
desperate snatch at a weapon against the hardness of the
unbelieving heart. We feel that a faith in masses and holy
water adopted wilfully after such a mechanical calculation
would lack the inner soul of faith's reality ; and if we were
ourselves in the place of the Deity, we should probably take
particular pleasure in cutting off believers of this pattern
from their infinite reward. It is evident that unless there

104 Selected Papers on Philosophy

be some pre-existing tendency to believe in masses and holy
water, the option offered to the will by Pascal is not a living
option. Certainly no Turk ever took to masses and holy
water on its account; and even to us Protestants these
means of salvation seem such foregone impossibilities that
Pascal's logic, invoked for them specifically, leaves us
unmoved. As well might the Mahdi write to us, saying,
" I am the Expected One whom God has created in his
effulgence. You shall be infinitely happy if you confess me ;
otherwise you shall be cut off from the light of the sun.
Weigh, then, your infinite gain if I am genuine against
your finite sacrifice if I am not ! " His logic would be that of
Pascal ; but he would vainly use it on us, for the hypothesis
he offers us is dead. No tendency to act on it exists in
us to any degree.

The talk of believing by our volition seems, then, from
one point of view, simply silly. From another point of
view it is worse than silly, it is vile. When one turns to the
magnificent edifice of the physical sciences, and sees how
it was reared; what thousands of disinterested moral lives
of men lie buried in its mere foundations; what patience
and postponement, what choking down of preference, what
submission to the icy laws of outer fact are wrought into
its very stones and mortar; how absolutely impersonal
it stands in its vast augustness — then how besotted and
contemptible seems every little sentimentalist who comes
blowing his voluntary smoke-wreaths, and pretending to
decide things from out of his private dream ! Can we wonder
if those bred in the rugged and manly school of science
should feel like spewing such subjectivism out of their
mouths? The whole system of loyalties which grow up in
the schools of science go dead against its toleration; so
that it is only natural that those who have caught the
scientific fever should pass over to the opposite extreme,
and write sometimes as if the incorruptibly truthful
intellect ought positively to prefer bitterness and unac-
ceptableness to the heart in its cup.

The Will to Believe 105

It fortifies my soul to know

That, though I perish, Truth is so —

sings Clough, while Huxley exclaims: " My only conso
lation lies in the reflection that, however bad our posterity
may become, so far as they hold by the plain rule of not
pretending to believe what they have no reason to believe,
because it may be to their advantage so to pretend [the
word " pretend " is surely here redundant], they will not
have reached the lowest depth of immorality." And that
delicious enfant terrible Clifford writes: " Belief is dese
crated when given to unproved and unquestioned state
ments for the solace and private pleasure of the believer.
. . . Whoso would deserve well of his fellows in this matter
will guard the purity of his belief with a very fanaticism
of jealous care, lest at any time it should rest on an un
worthy object, and catch a stain which can never be wiped
away. ... If [a] belief has been accepted on insufficient
evidence [even though the belief be true, as Clifford on the
same page explains] the pleasure is a stolen one. ... It
is sinful because it is stolen in defiance of our duty to man
kind. That duty is to guard ourselves from such beliefs
as from a pestilence which may shortly master our own body
and then spread to the rest of the town. ... It is wrong
always, everywhere, and for every one, to believe anything
upon insufficient evidence."

in

All this strikes one as healthy, even when expressed, as by
Clifford, with somewhat too much of robustious pathos in
the voice. Free-will and simple wishing do seem, in the
matter of our credences, to be only fifth wheels to the coach.
Yet if any one should thereupon assume that intellectual
insight is what remains after wish and will and sentimental
preference have taken wing, or that pure reason is what then
settles our opinions, he would fly quite as directly in the
teeth of the facts.

06 Selected Papers on Philosophy •

It is only our already dead hypotheses that our willing
nature is unable to bring to life again. But what has made
them dead for us is for the most part a previous action of
our willing nature of an antagonistic kind. When I say
" willing nature," I do not mean only such deliberate
volitions as may have set up habits of belief that we cannot
now escape from — I mean all such factors of belief as fear
and hope, prejudice and passion, imitation and partisanship,
the circumpressure of our caste and set. As a matter of
fact we find ourselves believing, we hardly know how or
why. Mr. Balfour gives the name of " authority " to all
those influences, born of the intellectual climate, that make
hypotheses possible or impossible for us, alive or dead. Here
in this room, we all of us believe in molecules and the con
servation of energy, in democracy and necessary progress,
in Protestant Christianity and the duty of fighting for " the
doctrine of the immortal Monroe," all for no reasons worthy
of the name. We see into these matters with no more inner
clearness, and probably with much less, than any dis
believer in them might possess. His unconventionality
would probably have some grounds to show for its con
clusions; but for us, not insight, but the prestige of the
opinions, is what makes the spark shoot from them and
light up our sleeping magazines of faith. Our reason is
quite satisfied, in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out of
every thousand of us, if it can find a few arguments that
will do to recite in case our credulity is criticised by some
one else. Our faith is faith in some one else's faith, and in
the greatest matters this is most the case. Our belief in
truth itself, for instance, that there is a truth, and that our
minds and it are made for each other — what is it but a
passionate affirmation of desire, in which our social system
backs us up ? We want to have a truth ; we want to believe
that our experiments and studies and discussions must put
us in a continually better and better position towards it;
and on this line we agree to fight out our thinking lives.
But if a pyrrhonistic sceptic asks us how we know all this,

The Will to Believe 1 07

:an our logic find a reply? No! certainly it cannot. It is
ust one volition against another — we willing to go in for life
ipon a trust or assumption which he, for his part, does not
:are to make.1

As a rule we disbelieve all facts and theories for which we
iave no use. Clifford's cosmic emotions find no use for
Christian feelings. Huxley belabours the bishops because
here is no use for sacerdotalism in his scheme of life.
Newman, on the contrary, goes over to Romanism and
finds all sorts of reasons good for staying there, because
a, priestly system is for him an organic need and delight.
Why do so few " scientists " even look at the evidence for
telepathy, so called? Because they think, as a leading
Biologist, now dead, once said to me, that even if such a
thing were true, scientists ought to band together to keep
it suppressed and concealed. It would undo the uniformity
of Nature and all sorts of .other things without which
scientists cannot carry on their pursuits. But if this very
man had been shown something which as a scientist he
mightutffirwith telepathy, he might not only have examined
the evidence, but even have found it good enough. This
very law which the logicians would impose upon us — if I
may give the name of logicians to those who would rule
out our willing nature here — is based on nothing but their
own natural wish to exclude all elements for which theyT
in their professional quality of logicians, can find no us^"^

Evidently, then, our non-intellectual nature does in
fluence our convictions. There are passional tendencies
and volitions which run before and others which come after
belief, and it is only the latter that are too late for the fair;
and they are not too late when the previous passional work
has been already in their own direction. Pascal's argument,
instead of being powerless, then seems a regular, clincher,
and is the last stroke needed to make our faith in masses
and holy water complete. The state of things is evidently

1 Compare the admirable page 310 in S. H. Hodgson's Time and
Space. London, 1865.

io8 Selected Papers on Philosophy

far from simple; ,and pure insight and logic, whatever they
might do ideally, are not the only things that really do'
produce our creeds.

IV

Our next duty, having recognized this mixed-up state of
affairs, is to ask whether it be simply reprehensible and
pathological, or whether, on the contrary, we must treat
it as a normal element in making up our minds. The thesis
I defend is, briefly stated, this : Our passional nature not only
lawfully may, but must, decide an option between propositions,
whenever it is a genuine option that cannot by its nature be
decided on intellectual grounds ; for to say, under such cir
cumstances, " Do not decide, but leave the question open," is
itself a passional decision — just like deciding yes or no —
and is attended with the same risk of losing the truth. The
thesis thus abstractly expressed will, I trust, soon become
quite clear. But I must first indulge in a bit more of pre
liminary work.

It will be observed that for the purposes of this discussion

we are on " dogmatic " ground — ground, I mean, which

leaves systematic philosophical scepticism altogether out

of account. The postulate that there is truth, and that it is

the destiny of our minds to attain it, we are deliberately

resolving to make, though the sceptic will not make it.

We part company with him, therefore, absolutely, at this

/point. But the faith that truth exists, and that our minds

1 can find it, may be held in two ways. We may talk of the

<j empiricist way and of the absolutist way of believing in

I truth. The absolutists in this matter say that we not only

t/can attain to knowing truth, but we can know when we

\j/have attained to knowing it; while the empiricists think

that although we may attain it, we cannot infallibly know

when. <]fo know is one thing, and to know for certain that

The Will to Believe 109

»ve know is another. • One may hold to the first being
possible without the second; hence the empiricists and the
ibsolutists, although neither of them is a sceptic in the
isual philosophic sense of the term, show very different
legrees of dogmatism in their lives.

If we look at the history of opinions, we see that the
jmpiricist tendency has largely prevailed in science, while
n philosophy the absolutist tendency has had everything
ts own way. The characteristic sort of happiness, indeed,
vhich philosophies yield has mainly consisted in the con
viction felt by each successive school or system that by
t bottom-certitude had been attained. " Other philoso
phies are collections of opinions, mostly false; my philo
sophy gives standing-ground forever " — who does not
•ecognize in this the key-note of every system worthy of the
name? A system, to be a system at all, must come as a
closed system, reversible in this or that detail, perchance,
but in its essential features never !

Scholastic orthodoxy, to which one must always go
when one wishes to find perfectly clear statement, has
beautifully elaborated this absolutist conviction in a
doctrine which it calls that of " objective evidence." If,
for example, I am unable to doubt that I now exist before
you, that two is less than three, or that if all men are mortal
then I am mortal too, it is because these things illumine my
intellect irresistibly. The final ground of this objective
evidence possessed by certain propositions is the adcequatio
intellectus nostri cum re. The certitude it brings involves
an aptitudinem ad extorquendum certum assensum on the part
of the truth envisaged, and on the side of the subject a
quietem in cognitione, when once the object is mentally
received, that leaves no possibility of doubt behind; and
in the whole transaction nothing operates but the entitas
ipsa of the object and the entitas ipsa of the mind. We
slouchy modern thinkers dislike to talk in Latin — indeed,
we dislike to talk in set terms at all; but at bottom our
own state of mind is very much like this whenever we

1 1 o Selected Papers on Philosophy

uncritically abandon ourselves: You believe in objective
evidence and I do. Of some things we feel that we are
certain: we know, and we know that we do know. There
is something that gives a click inside of us, a bell that
strikes twelve, when the hands of our mental clock have
swept the dial and meet over the meridan hour. The
greatest empiricists among us are only empiricists on reflec
tion: when left to their instincts, they dogmatize like
infallible popes. When the Cliffords tell us how sinful it is to
be Christians on such " insufficient evidence/' insufficiency
is really the last thing they have in mind. -For them the
evidence is absolutely sufficient, only it makes the other
way. / They believe so completely in an anti-christian order
of the universe that there is no living option: Christianity
is a dead hypothesis from the start.

VI

But now, since we are all such absolutists by instinct,
what in our quality of students of philosophy ought we to
do about the fact? Shall we espouse and indorse it? Or
shall we treat it as a weakness of our nature from which
we must free ourselves, if we can ?

I sincerely believe that the latter course is the only one
we can follow as reflective men. Objective evidence and
certitude are doubtless very fine ideals to play with, but
where on this moonlit and dream-visited planet are they
found? I am, therefore, myself a complete empiricist so
far as my theory of human knowledge goes. I live, to be-
sure, by the practical faith that we must go on experiencing
and thinking over our experience, for only thus can our
opinions grow more true; but to hold any one of them —
I absolutely do not care which — as if it never could be
reinterpretable or corrigible, I believe to be a tremendously
mistaken attitude, and I think that the whole history of
philosophy will bear me out. There is but one indefectibly
certain truth, and that is the truth that pyrrhonistic

The Will to Believe 1 1 1

scepticism itself leaves standing — the truth that the
present phenomenon of consciousness exists. That, how
ever, is the bare starting-point of knowledge, the mere
admission of a stuff to be philosophized about. The various
philosophies are but so many attempts at expressing what
this stuff really is. And if we repair to our libraries what
disagreement do we discover! Where is a certainly true
answer found? Apart from abstract propositions of com
parison (such as two and two are the same as four), pro
positions which tell us nothing by themselves about con
crete reality, we find no proposition ever regarded by any
one as evidently certain that has not either been called a
falsehood, or at least had its truth sincerely questioned
by some one else. The transcending of the axioms of
geometry, not in play but in earnest, by certain of our
contemporaries (as Zo'llner and Charles H. Hinton), and
the rejection of the whole Aristotelian logic by the Hegelians
are striking instances in point.

No concrete test of what is really true has ever been
agreed upon. Some make the criterion external to the
moment of perception, putting it either in revelation, the
consensus gentium, the instincts of the heart, or the systema
tized experience of the race. Others make the perceptive
moment its own test — Descartes, for instance, with his
clear and distinct ideas guaranteed by the veracity of God ;
Reid with his " common-sense "; and Kant with his forms
of synthetic judgment a priori. The inconceivability of
the opposite; the capacity to be verified by sense; the
possession of complete organic unity or self -relation,
realized when a thing is its own other — are standards
which, in turn, have been used. The much-lauded objective
evidence is never triumphantly there; it is a mere aspira
tion or Grenzbegriff, marking the infinitely remote ideal
of our thinking life. To claim that certain truths now possess
it, is simply to say that when you think them true and they
are true, then their evidence is objective, otherwise it is
not. But practically one's conviction that the evidence one

1 1 2 Selected Papers on Philosophy

goes by is of the real objective brand, is only one more
subjective opinion added to the lot. For what a contra
dictory array of opinions have objective evidence and
absolute certitude been claimed! The world is rational
through and through — its existence is an ultimate brute
fact; there is a personal God — a personal God is incon
ceivable ; there is an extra-mental physical world immedi^
ately known — the mind can only know its own ideas; a
moral imperative exists — obligation is only the resultant
of desires ; a permanent spiritual principle is in every one —
there are only shifting states of mind; there is an endless
chain of causes — there is an absolute first cause; an
eternal necessity — a freedom; a purpose — no purpose;
a primal One — a primal Many; a universal continuity —
an essential discontinuity in things; an infinity — no
infinity. There is this — there is that; there is indeed
nothing which some one has not thought absolutely true,
while his neighbour deemed it absolutely false; and not
an absolutist among them seems ever to have considered
that the trouble may all the time be essential, and that the
intellect, even with truth directly in its grasp, may have
no infallible signal for knowing whether it be truth or no.
When, indeed, one remembers that the most striking
practical application to life of the doctrine of objective
certitude has been the conscientious labours of the Holy
Office of the Inquisition, one feels less tempted than ever
to lend the doctrine a respectful ear.

But please observe, now, that when as empiricists we
give up the doctrine of objective certitude, we do not thereby
give up the quest or hope of truth itself. We still pin our
faith on its existence, and still believe that we gain an ever
better position towards it by systematically continuing
to roll up experiences and think. Our great difference from
the scholastic lies in the way we face. The strength of his
system lies in the principles, the origin, the terminus a quo
of his thought; for us the strength is in the outcome, the
upshot, the terminus ad quern. Not where it comes from

The Will to Believe 1 1 3

but what it leads to is to decide. It matters not to an
empiricist from what quarter an hypothesis may come to
him: he may have acquired it by fair means or by foul;
passion may have whispered or accident suggested it; but
If the total drift of thinking continues to confirm it, that
is what he means by its being true.

VII

One more point, small but important, and our pre
liminaries are done. There are two ways of looking at our
duty in the matter of opinion — ways entirely different,
and yet ways about whose difference the theory of know
ledge seems hitherto to have shown very little concern.
We must know the truth ; and we must avoid error — these
are our first and great commandments as would-be knowers ;
but they are not two ways of stating an identical com
mandment, they are two separable laws. Although it may
indeed happen that when we believe the truth A, we escape
as an incidental consequence from believing the falsehood
B, it hardly ever happens that by merely disbelieving B
we necessarily believe A. We may in escaping B fall into
believing other falsehoods, C or D, just as bad as B ; or
we may escape B by not believing anything at all, not
even 4.

Believe truth! Shun error !— these, we see, are two
materially different laws; and by choosing between them
we may end by colouring differently our whole intellectual
life. We may regard the chase for truth as paramount,
and the avoidance of error as secondary; or we may, on
the other hand, treat the avoidance of error as more impera
tive, and let truth take its chance. Clifford, in the instruc
tive passage which I have quoted, exhorts us to the latter
course. Believe nothing, he tells us, keep your mind in
suspense forever, rather than by closing it on insufficient
evidence incur the awful risk of believing lies. You, on
the other hand, may think that the risk of being in error
H

H4 Selected Papers on Philosophy

is a very small matter when compared with the blessings
of real knowledge, and be ready to be duped many times in
your investigation rather than postpone indefinitely the
chance of guessing true. I myself find it impossible to go
with Clifford. We must remember that these feelings of
our duty about either truth or error are in any case only
expressions of our passional life. Biologically considered,
our minds are as ready to grind out falsehood as veracity,
and he who says, " Better go without belief forever than
believe a lie! " merely shows his own preponderant private
horror of becoming a dupe. He may be critical of many of
his desires and fears, but this fear he slavishly obeys. He
cannot imagine any one questioning its binding force. For
my own part, I have also a horror of being duped; but I
can believe that worse things than being duped may happen
to a man in this world : so Clifford's exhortation has to my
ears a thoroughly fantastic sound. It is like a general in
forming his soldiers that it is better to keep out of battle
forever than to risk a single wound. Not so are victories
either over enemies or over nature gained. Our errors are
surely not such awfully solemn things. In a world where
we are so certain to incur them in spite of all our caution,
a certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this
excessive nervousness on their behalf. At any rate, it
seems the fittest thing for the empiricist philosopher.

VIII

And now, after all this introduction, let us go straight
at our question. I have said, and now repeat it, that not
only as a matter of fact do we find our passional nature
influencing us in our opinions, but that there are some
options between opinions in which this influence must be
regarded both as an inevitable and as a lawful determinant
of our choice.

I fear here that some of you my hearers will begin to
scent danger, and lend an inhospitable ear. Two first steps

The Will to Believe 115

passion you have indeed had to admit as necessary —
we must think so as to avoid dupery, and we must think
so as to gain truth; but the surest path to those ideal
:onsummations, you will4 probably consider, is from now
onwards to take no further passional step.

Well, of course, I agree as far as the facts will allow.
Wherever the option between losing truth and gaining it is
not momentous, we can throw the chance of gaming truth
away, and at any rate save ourselves from any chance of
believing falsehood, by not making up our minds at all till
objective evidence has come. In scientific questions, this
is almost always the case; and even in human affairs in
general, the need of acting is seldom so urgent that a false
belief 'to act on is better than no belief at all. Law courts,
indeed, have to decide on the best evidence attainable for
the moment, because a judge's duty is to make law as well
as to ascertain it, and (as a learned judge once said to me)
few cases are worth spending much time over: the great
thing is to have them decided on any acceptable principle,
and got out of the way. But in our dealings with objective
nature we obviously are recorders, not makers, of the truth ;
and decisions for the mere sake of deciding promptly and
getting on to the next business would be wholly out of
place. Throughout the breadth of physical nature facts are
what they are quite independently of us, and seldom is
there any such hurry about them that the risks of being
duped by believing a premature theory need be faced. The
questions here are always trivial options, the hypotheses
are hardly living (at any rate not living for us spectators),
the choice between believing truth or falsehood is seldom
forced. The attitude of sceptical balance is therefore the
absolutely wise one if we would escape mistakes. What
difference, indeed, does it make to most of us whether we
have or have not a theory of the Rontgen rays, whether we
believe or not in mind-stuff, or have a conviction about the
causality of conscious states? It makes no difference.
Such options are not forced on us. On every account it is

1 1 6 Selected Papers on Philosophy

better not to make them, but still keep weighing reasons
pro et contra with an indifferent hand.

I speak, of course, here of the purely judging mind. For
purposes of discovery such indifference is to be less highly
recommended, and science would be far less advanced than
she is if the passionate desires of individuals to get their
own faiths confirmed had been kept out of the game. See,
for example, the sagacity which Spencer and Weismann
now display. On the other hand, if you want an absolute
duffer in an investigation, you must, after all, take the
man who has no interest whatever in its results: he is the
warranted incapable, the positive fool. The most useful
investigator, because the most sensitive observer, is always
he whose eager interest in one side of the question is
balanced by an equally keen nervousness lest he become
deceived.1 Science has organized this nervousness into a
regular technique, her so-called method of verification; and
she has fallen so deeply in love with the method that one may
even say she has ceased to care for truth by itself at all. It
is only truth as technically verified that interests her. The
truth of truths might come in merely affirmative form, and
she would decline to touch it. Such truth as that, she might
repeat with Clifford, would be stolen in defiance of her duty
to mankind. Human passions, however, are stronger than
technical rules. " Le cceur a ses raisons," as Pascal says,
" que la raison ne connait pas; " and however indifferent
to all but the bare rules of the game the umpire, the abstract
intellect, may be, the concrete players who furnish him the
materials to judge of are usually, each one of them, in love
with some pet " live hypothesis " of his own. Let us agree,
however, that wherever there is no forced option, the dis
passionately judicial intellect with no pet hypothesis,
saving us, as it does, from dupery at any rate, ought to be
our ideal.

The question next arises: Are there not somewhere

1 Compare Wilfrid Ward's Essay, " The Wish to Believe," in his
Witnesses to the Unseen, Macmillan and Co., 1893.

The Will to Believe 117

forced options in our speculative questions, and can we
(as men who may be interested at least as much in posi
tively gaining truth as in merely escaping dupery) always
wait with impunity till the coercive evidence shall have
arrived ? It seems a priori improbable that the truth should
be so nicely adjusted to our needs and powers as that. In
the great boarding-house of nature, the cakes and the butter
and the syrup seldom come out so even and leave the plates
so clean. Indeed, we should view them with scientific
suspicion if they did.

IX

Moral questions immediately present themselves as
questions whose solution cannot wait for sensible proof.
A moral question is a question not of what sensibly exists,
but of what is good, or would be good if it did exist. Science
can tell us what exists; but to compare the worths, both
of what exists and of what does not exist, we must consult
not science, but what Pascal calls our heart. Science her
self consults her heart when she lays it down that the in
finite ascertainment of fact and correction of false belief
are the supreme goods for man. Challenge the statement,
and science can only repeat it oracularly, or else prove it
by showing that such ascertainment and correction bring
man all sorts of other goods which man's heart in turn
declares. The question of having moral beliefs at all or not
having them is decided by our will. Are our moral pre
ferences true or false, or are they only odd biological
phenomena, making things good or bad for us, but in
themselves indifferent? How can your pure intellect
decide? If your heart does not want a world of moral
reality, your head will assuredly never make you believe in
one. Mephistophelian scepticism, indeed, will satisfy the
head's play-instincts much better than any rigorous idealism
can. Some men (even at the student age) are so naturally
cool-hearted that the moralistic hypothesis never has for

n8 Selected Papers on Philosophy

them any pungent life, and in their supercilious presence
the hot young moralist always feels strangely ill at ease.
The appearance of knowingness is on their side, of naivete
and gullibility on his. Yet, in the inarticulate heart of him;,
he clings to it that he is not a dupe, and that there is ai
realm in which (as Emerson says) all their wit and intel
lectual superiority is no better than the cunning of a fox..
Moral scepticism can no more be refuted or proved by logic
than intellectual scepticism can. When we stick to it that
there is truth (be it of either kind), we do so with our whole
nature, and resolve to stand or fall by the results. The
sceptic with his whole nature adopts the doubting attitude ;
but which of us is the wiser, Omniscience only knows.

Turn now from these wide questions of good to a certain
class of questions of fact, questions concerning personal
relations, states of mind between one man and another.
Do you like me or not ? — for example. Whether you do or
not depends, in countless instances, on whether I meet you.
half-way, am willing to assume that you must like me, and
show you trust and expectation. The previous faith on my
part in your liking's existence is in such cases what makes
your liking come. But if I stand aloof, and refuse to budge
an inch until I have objective evidence, until you shall have
done something apt, as the absolutists say, ad extorquendum
assensum meum, ten to one your liking never comes. How
many women's hearts are vanquished by the mere sanguine
insistence of some man that they must love him ! he will not
consent to the hypothesis that they cannot. The desire for
a certain kind of truth here brings about that special
truth's existence ; and so it is in innumerable cases of other
sorts. Who gains promotions, boons, appointments but
the man in whose life they are seen to play the part of live
hypotheses, who discounts them, sacrifices other things
for their sake before they have come, and takes risks for
them in advance? His faith acts on the powers above him
as a claim, and creates its own verification.

A social organism of any sort whatever, large or small, is

The Will to Believe 119

what it is because each member proceeds to his own duty
with a trust that the other members will simultaneously
do theirs. Wherever a desired result is achieved by the co
operation of many independent persons, its existence as a
fact is a pure consequence of the precursive faith in one
another of those immediately concerned. A government,
an army, a commercial system, a ship, a college, an athletic
team, all exist on this condition, without which not only is
nothing achieved, but nothing is even attempted. A whole
train of passengers (individually brave enough) will be
looted by a few highwaymen, simply because the latter
can count on one another, while each passenger fears that
if he makes a movement of resistance he will be shot before
any one else backs him up. If we believed that the whole
car-full would rise at once with us, we should each severally
rise, and train-robbing would never even be attempted.
There are, then, cases where a fact cannot come at all unless
a preliminary faith exists in its coming. And where faith
in a fact can help create the fact, that would be an insane logic
which should say that faith running ahead of scientific
evidence is the " lowest kind of immorality " into which
a thinking being can fall. Yet such is the logic by which
our scientific absolutists pretend to regulate our lives !

In truths dependent on our personal action, then, faith
based on desire is certainly a lawful and possibly an indis
pensable thing.

But now, it will be said, these are all childish human
cases, and have nothing to do with great cosmical matters,
like the question of religious faith. Let us then pass on to
that. Religions differ so much in their accidents that in
discussing the religious question we must make it very
generic and broad. What then do we now mean by the
religious hypothesis? Science says things are; morality
says some things are better than other things; and religion
says essentially two things.

120 Selected Papers on Philosophy

First, she says that the best things are the more eternal
things, the overlapping things, the things in the universe
that throw the last stone, so to speak, and say the final
word. " Perfection is eternal," — this phrase of Charles
Secretan seems a good way of putting this first affirmation
of religion, an affirmation which obviously cannot yet be
verified scientifically at all.

The second affirmation of religion is that we are better
off even now if we believe her first affirmation to be true.

Now, let us consider what the logical elements of this
situation are in case the religious hypothesis in both its
branches be really true. (Of course, we must admit that
possibility at the outset. If we are to discuss the question
at all, it must involve a living option. If for any of you
religion be a hypothesis that cannot by any living possi
bility be true, then you need go no farther. I speak to the
" saving remnant " alone.) So proceeding, we see, first,
that religion offers itself as a momentous option. We are
supposed to gam, even now, by our belief, and to lose by our
non-belief, a certain vital good. Secondly, religion is a forced
option, so far as that good goes. We cannot escape the issue
by remaining sceptical and waiting for more light, because,
although we do avoid error in that way if religion be untrue,
we lose the good, if it be true, just as certainly as if we
positively chose to disbelieve. It is as if a man should
hesitate indefinitely to ask a certain woman to marry him
because he was not perfectly sure that she would prove an
angel after he brought her home. Would he not cut him
self off from that particular angel-possibility as decisively as
if he went and married some one else ? Scepticism, then, is
not avoidance of option ; it is option of a certain particular
kind of risk. Better risk loss of truth than chance of error
— that is your faith-vetoer's exact position. He is actively
playing his stake as much as the believer is; he is backing
the field against the religious hypothesis, just as the believer
is backing the religious hypothesis against the field. To
preach scepticism to us as a duty until "sufficient evidence"

The Will to Believe 121

for religion be found, is tantamount therefore to telling us,
when in presence of the religious hypothesis, that to yield
to our fear of its being error is wiser and better than to
yield to our hope that it may be true. It is not intellect
against all passions, then ; it is only intellect with one pas
sion laying down its law. And by what, forsooth, is the
supreme wisdom of this passion warranted? Dupery for
dupery, what proof is there that dupery through hope is
so much worse than dupery through fejir_I I, for one, can see
no proof; and I simply refuse obedience to the scientist's
command to imitate his kind of option, in a case where my
own stake is important enough to give me the right to choose
my own form of risk. If religion be true and the evidence
for it be still insufficient, I do not wish, by putting your
extinguisher upon my nature (which feels to me as if it had
after all some business in this matter), to forfeit my sole
chance in life of getting upon the winning side — that chance
depending, of course, on my willingness to run the risk of
acting as if my passional need of taking the world religiously
might be prophetic and right.

All this is on the supposition that it really may be pro
phetic and right, and that, even to us who are discussing
the matter, religion is a live hypothesis which may be true.
Now, to most of us religion comes in a still further way that
makes a veto on our active faith even more illogical. The
more perfect and more eternal aspect of the universe is
represented in our religions as having personal form. The
universe is no longer a mere It to us, but a Thou, if we are
religious; and any relation that may be possible from person
to person might be possible here. For instance, although in
one sense we are passive portions of the universe, in another
we show a curious autonomy, as if we were small active
centres on our own account. We feel, too, as if the appeal
of religion to us were made to our own active good- will, as if
evidence might be forever withheld from us unless we met
the hypothesis half-way. To take a trivial illustration: just
as a man who in a company of gentlemen made no advances,

.

122 Selected Papers on Philosophy

asked a warrant for every concession, and believed no one's
word without proof, would cut himself off by such churlish
ness from all the social rewards that a more trusting spirit
would earn — so here, one who should shut himself up in
snarling logicality and try to make the gods extort his
recognition willy-nilly, or not get it at all, might cut him
self off forever from his only opportunity of making the
gods' acquaintance. This feeling, forced on us we know not
whence, that by obstinately believing that there are gods
(although not to do so would be so easy both for our logic
and our life) we are doing the universe the deepest service
we can, seems part of the living essence of the religious
hypothesis. If the hypothesis were true in all its parts,
including this one, then pure intellectiialism, with its veto
on our making willing advances, would be an absurdity;
and some participation of our sympathetic nature would
be logically required. I, therefore, for one, cannot see my
way to accepting the agnostic rules for truth-seeking, or
wilfully agree to keep my willing nature out of the game. I
cannot do so for this plain reason, that a rule of thinking
which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain
kinds of truth if those kinds of truth were really there, would
be an irrational rule. That for me is the long and short of
the formal logic of the situation, no matter what the kinds
of truth might materially be.

I confess I do not see how this logic can be escaped. But
sad experience makes me fear that some of you may still
shrink from radically saying with me, in abstracto, that we
have the right to believe at our own risk any hypothesis
that is live enough to tempt our will. I suspect, however,
that if this is so, it is because you have got away from the
abstract logical point of view altogether, and are thinking
(perhaps without realizing it) of some particular religious
hypothesis which for you is dead. The freedom to " believe
what we will " you apply to the case of some patent super
stition ; and the faith you think of is the faith denned by the

The Will to Believe 123

schoolboy when he said, " Faith is when you believe some
thing that you know ain't true." I can only repeat that
this is misapprehension. In concrete, the freedom to believe
can only cover living options which the intellect of the
individual cannot by itself resolve; and living options
never seem absurdities to him who has them to consider.
When I look at the religious question as it really puts itself
to concrete men, and when I think of all the possibilities
which both practically and theoretically it involves, then
this command that we shall put a stopper on our heart,
instincts, and courage, and wait — acting of course mean
while more or less as if religion were not true 1 — till dooms
day, or till such time as our intellect and senses working
together may have raked in evidence enough — this com
mand, I say, seems to me the queerest idol ever manufactured
in the philosophic cave. Were we scholastic absolutists, there
might be more excuse. If we had an infallible intellect with
its objective certitudes, we might feel ourselves disloyal
to such a perfect organ of knowledge in not trusting to it
exclusively, in not waiting for its releasing word. But if
we are empiricists, if we believe that no bell in us tolls to
let us know for certain when truth is in our grasp, then
it seems a piece of idle fantasticality to preach so solemnly
our duty of waiting for the bell. Indeed we may wait k
we will — I hope you do not think that I am denying that
— but if we do so, we do so at our peril as much as if we
believed. In either case we act, taking our life in our hands.
No one of us ought to issue vetoes to the other, nor should

1 Since belief is measured by action, he who forbids us to believe
religion to be true, necessarily also forbids us to act as we should if
we did believe it to be true. The whole defence of religious faith
hinges upon action. If the action required or inspired by the re
ligious hypothesis is in no way different from that dictated by the
naturalistic hypothesis, then religious faith is a pure superfluity,
better pruned away, and controversy about its legitimacy is a piece
of idle trifling, unworthy of serious minds. I myself believe, of
course, that the religious hypothesis gives to the world an expression
which specifically determines our reactions, and makes them in a
large part unlike what they might be on a purely naturalistic scheme
of belief. *

124 Selected Papers on Philosophy

we bandy words of abuse. We ought, on the contrary,
yflelicately and profoundly to respect one another's mental
, freedom: then only shall we bring about the intellectual
republic; then only shall we have that spirit of inner
tolerance without which all our outer tolerance is soulless,
and which is empiricism's glory; then only shall we live
and let live, in speculative as well as in practical things.
I began by a reference to Fitz- James Stephen; let me
end by a quotation from him. " What do you think of
yourself? What do you think of the world? . . . These
are questions with which all must deal as it seems good to
them. They are riddles of the Sphinx, and in some way
or other we must deal with them. ... In all important
transactions of life we have to take a leap in the dark. . . .
If we decide to leave the riddles unanswered, that is a
choice; if we waver in our answer, that, too, is a choice:
but whatever choice we make, we make it at our peril. If
a man chooses to turn his back altogether on God and the
future, no one can prevent him; no one can show beyond
reasonable doubt that he is mistaken. If a man thinks
otherwise and acts as he thinks, I do not see that any one
can prove that he is mistaken. Each must act as he thinks
best ; and if he is wrong, so much the worse for him. We
stand on a mountain pass in the midst of whirling snow
and blinding mist, through which we get glimpses now and
then of paths which may be deceptive. If we stand still
we shall be frozen to death. If we take the wrong road we
shall be dashed to pieces. We do not certainly know
whether there is any right one. What must we do? ' Be
strong and of a good courage/ Act for the best, hope for
the best, and take what comes. ... If death ends all, we
cannot meet death better." J

1 Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, p. 353, 2nd edition. London, 1874.

VIII
THE SENTIMENT OF RATIONALITY1

WHAT is the task which philosophers set themselves to
perform; and why do they philosophize at all? Almost
every one will immediately reply: They desire to attain
a conception of the frame of things which shall on the whole
be more rational than that somewhat chaotic view which
every one by nature carries about with him under his hat.
But suppose this rational conception attained, how is the
philosopher to recognize it for what it is, and not let it slip
through ignorance? The only answer can be that he will
recognize its rationality as he recognizes everything else, by
certain subjective marks with which it affects him. When
he gets the marks, he may know that he has got the
rationality.

What, then, are the marks? A strong feeling of ease,
peace, rest, is one of them. The transition from a state of
puzzle and perplexity to rational comprehension is full of
lively relief and pleasure.

But this relief seems to be a negative rather than a posi
tive character. Shall we then say that the feeling of
rationality is constituted merely by the absence of any
feeling of irrationality ? I think there are very good grounds
for upholding such a view. All feeling whatever, in the
light of certain psychological speculations, seems to depend
for its physical condition not on simple discharge of nerve-

1From The Will to Believe, 1915, pp. 63-110. This essay as far
as page 75 consists of extracts from an article printed in Mind for
July 1879. Thereafter it is a reprint of an address to the Harvard
Philosophical Club, delivered in 1880, and published in the Princeton
Review, July 1882.

125

126 Selected Papers on Philosophy

currents, but on their discharge under arrest, impediment,
or resistance. Just as we feel no particular pleasure when
we breathe freely, but a very intense feeling of distress when
the respiratory motions are prevented — so any unob
structed tendency to action discharges itself without the
production of much cogitative accompaniment, and any
perfectly fluent course of thought awakens but little feeling ;
but when the movement is inhibited, or when the thought
meets with difficulties, we experience distress. It is only
when the distress is upon us that we can be said to strive,
to crave, or to aspire. When enjoying plenary freedom
either in the way of motion or of thought, we are in a sort
of anaesthetic state in which we might say with Walt
Whitman, if we care to say anything about ourselves at
such times, " I am sufficient as I am." This feeling of the
sufficiency of the present moment, of its absoluteness, —
this absence of all need to explain it, account for it, 01
justify it, — is what I call the Sentiment of Rationality. As
soon, in short, as we are enabled from any cause whatever
to think with perfect fluency, the thing we think of seems
to us pro tanto rational.

Whatever modes of conceiving the cosmos facilitate
this fluency, produce the sentiment of rationality. Con
ceived in such modes, being vouches for itself and needs
no further philosophic formulation. But this fluency may
be obtained in various ways; and first I will take up the
theoretic way.

The facts of the world in their sensible diversity are
always before us, but our theoretic need is that they should
be conceived in a way that reduces their manifoldness tc
simplicity. Our pleasure at finding that a chaos of facts
is the expression of a single underlying fact is like the
relief of the musician at resolving a confused mass of sound
into melodic or harmonic order. The simplified result is
handled with far less mental effort than the original data;
and a philosophic conception of nature is thus in no meta
phorical sense a labour-saving contrivance. The passion

The Sentiment of Rationality 1 27

for parsimony, for economy of means in thought, is the
philosophic passion par excellence ; and any character or
aspect of the world's phenomena which* gathers up their
diversity into monotony will gratify that passion, and in
the phitosopher's mind stand for that essence of things
compared with which all their other determinations may
by him be overlooked.

More universality or extensiveness is, then, one mark
which the philosopher's conceptions must possess. Unless
they apply to an enormous number of cases they will not
bring him relief. The knowledge of things by their causes,
which is often given as a definition of rational knowledge,
is useless to him unless the causes converge to a minimum
number, while still producing the maximum number of
effects. The more multiple then are the instances, the more
flowingly does his mind rove from fact to fact. The pheno
menal transitions are no real transitions; each item is the
same old friend with a slightly altered dress.

Who does not feel the charm of thinking that the moon
and the apple are, as far as their relation to the earth goes,
identical; of knowing respiration and combustion to be
one; of understanding that the balloon rises by the same
law whereby the stone sinks; of feeling that the warmth
in one's palm when one rubs one's sleeve is identical with
the motion which the friction checks; of recognizing the
difference between beast and fish to be only a higher degree
of that between human father and son; of believing our
strength when we climb the mountain or fell the tree to
be no other than the strength of the sun's rays which made
the corn grow out of which we got our morning meal ?

But alongside of this passion for simplification there
exists a sister passion, which in some minds — though they
perhaps form the minority — is its rival. This is the passion
for distinguishing ; it is the impulse to be acquainted with
the parts rather than to comprehend the whole. Loyalty
to clearness and integrity of perception, dislike of blurred

1 28 Selected Papers on Philosophy

outlines, of vague identifications, are its characteristics.
It loves to recognize particulars in their full completeness,
and the more of these it can carry the happier it is. It
prefers any amount of incoherence, abruptness, and frag-
mentariness (so long as the literal details of the separate
facts are saved) to an abstract way of conceiving things
that, while it simplifies them, dissolves away at the same
time their concrete fulness. Clearness and simplicity thus
set up rival claims, and make a real dilemma for the
thinker.

A man's philosophic attitude is determined by the
balance in him of these two cravings. No system of philo
sophy can hope to be universally accepted among men
which grossly violates either need, or entirely subordinates
the one to the other. The fate of Spinoza, with his barren
union of all things in one substance, on the one hand; that
of Hume, with his equally barren " looseness and separate-
ness " of everything, on the other — neither philosopher
owning any strict and systematic disciples to-day, each
being to posterity a warning as well as a stimulus — show
us that the only possible philosophy must be a com
promise between an abstract monotony and a concrete
heterogeneity. But the only way to mediate between
diversity and unity is to class the diverse items as cases of
a common essence which you discover in them. Classifica
tion of things into extensive " kinds " is thus the first step;
'and classification of their relations and conduct into ex
tensive " laws " is the last step, in their philosophic unifica
tion. A completed theoretic philosophy can thus never
be anything more than a completed classification of the
world's ingredients; and its results must always be abstract
since the basis of every classification is the abstract essence
embedded in the living fact — the rest of the living fact
being for the time ignored by the classifier. This means
that none of our explanations are complete. They subsume
things under heads wider or more familiar; but the last
heads, whether of things or of their connections, are mere

The Sentiment of Rationality 129

130 Selected Papers on Philosophy

tical man is left to answer by his own wit. Which, of all the
essences, shall here and now be held the essence of this
concrete thing, the fundamental philosophy never attempts
to decide. We are thus led to the conclusion that the
simple classification of things is, on the one hand, the best
possible theoretic philosophy, but is, on the other, a most
miserable and inadequate substitute for the fulness of the
truth. It is a monstrous abridgment of life, which, like all
abridgments, is got by the absolute loss and casting out
of real matter. This is why so few human beings truly care
for philosophy. The particular determinations which she
ignores are the real matter exciting needs, quite as potent
and authoritative as hers. What does the moral enthusiast
care for philosophical ethics? Why does the &sthetik of
every German philosopher appear to the artist an abomina
tion of desolation?

Grau, theurer Freund, ist alle Theorie
Und griin des Lebens goldner Baum.

The entire man, who feels all needs by turns, will take
nothing as an equivalent for life but the fulness of living
itself. Since the essences of things are as a matter of fact
disseminated through the whole extent of time and space,
it is in their spread-outness and alternation that he will
enjoy them. When weary of the concrete clash and dust
and pettiness, he will refresh himself by a bath in the eternal
springs, or fortify himself by a look at the immutable
natures. But he will only be a visitor, not a dweller in the
region; he will never carry the philosophic yoke upon his
shoulders, and when tired of the grey monotony of her
problems and insipid spaciousness of her results, will
always escape gleefully into the teeming and dramatic
richness of the concrete world.

So our study turns back here to its beginning. Every
way of classifying a thing is but a way of handling it
for some particular purpose. Conceptions, " kinds," are
teleological instruments. No abstract concept can be a

The Sentiment of Rationality 1 3 i

valid substitute for a concrete reality except with reference
to a particular interest in the conceiver. The interest of
theoretic rationality, the relief of identification, is but one
of a thousand human purposes. When others rear their
heads, it must pack up its little bundle and retire till its
turn recurs. The exaggerated dignity and value that
philosophers have claimed for their solutions is thus greatly
reduced. The only virtue their theoretic conception need
have is simplicity, and a simple conception is an equivalent
for the world only so far as the world is simple — the world
meanwhile, whatever simplicity it may harbour, being also
a mightily complex affair. Enough simplicity remains,
however, and enough urgency in our craving to reach it,
to make the theoretic function one of the most invincible
of human impulses. The quest of the fewest elements of
things is an ideal that some will follow, as long as there are
men to think at all.

But suppose the goal attained. Suppose that at last we
have a system unified in the sense that has been explained.
Our world can now be conceived simply, and our mind
enjoys the relief. Our universal concept has made the con
crete chaos rational. But now I ask, Can that which is the
ground of rationality in all else be itself properly called
rational? It would seem at first sight that it might. One
is tempted at any rate to say that, since the craving for
rationality is appeased by the identification of one thing
with another, a datum which left nothing else outstanding
might quench that craving definitively, or be rational in se.
No otherness being left to annoy us, we should sit down at
peace. In other words, as the theoretic tranquillity of the
boor results from his spinning no further considerations
about his chaotic universe, so any datum whatever (pro
vided it were simple, clear, and ultimate) ought to banish
puzzle from the universe of the philosopher and confer
peace, inasmuch as there would then be for him absolutely
no further considerations to spin.

1 32 Selected Papers on Philosophy

This in fact is what some persons think. Professor Bain
says —

" A difficulty is solved, a mystery unriddled, when it can
be shown to resemble something else ; to be an example of
a fact already known. Mystery is isolation, exception, or
it may be apparent contradiction: the resolution of the
mystery is found in assimilation, identity, fraternity. When
all things are assimilated, so far as assimilation can go,
so far as likeness holds, there is an end to explanation;
there is an end to what the mind can do, or can intelligently
desire. . . . The path of science as exhibited in modern
ages is toward generality, wider and wider, until we reach
the highest, the widest laws of every department of things ;
there explanation is finished, mystery ends, perfect vision
is gained."

But, unfortunately, this first answer will not hold. Our
mind is so wedded to the process of seeing an oilier beside
every item of its experience, that when the notion of an
absolute datum is presented to it, it goes through its usual
procedure and remains pointing at the void beyond, as if
in that lay further matter for contemplation. In short,
it spins for itself the further positive consideration of a
nonentity enveloping the being of its datum; and as that
leads nowhere, back recoils the thought toward its datum
again. But there is no natural bridge between nonentity
and this particular datum, and the thought stands oscil
lating to and fro, wondering " Why was there a^thing
but nonentity; why just this universal datum and not
another? " and finds no end, in wandering mazes lost.
Indeed, Bain's words are so untrue that in reflecting men it
is just when the attempt to fuse the manifold into a single
totality has been most successful, when the conception
of the universe as a unique fact is nearest its perfec
tion, that the craving for further explanation, the onto-
logical wonder-sickness, arises in its extremest form. As
Schopenhauer says, " The uneasiness which keeps the never-

The Sentiment of Rationality 133

resting clock of metaphysics in motion, is the consciousness
that the non-existence of this world is just as possible as
its existence."

The notion of nonentity may thus be called the parent
of the philosophic craving in its subtilest and profoundest
sense. Absolute existence is absolute mystery, for its re
lations with the nothing remain unmediated to our under
standing. One philosopher only has pretended to throw a
logical bridge over this chasm. Hegel, by trying to show
that nonentity and concrete being are linked together by
a series of identities of a synthetic kind, binds everything
conceivable into a unity, with no outlying notion to disturb
the free rotary circulation of the mind within its bounds.
Since such unchecked movement gives the feeling of ration
ality, he must be held, if he has succeeded, to have eternally
and absolutely quenched all rational demands.

But for those who deem Hegel's heroic effort to have
failed, nought remains but to confess that when all things
have been unified to the supreme degree, the notion of a
possible other than the actual may still haunt our imagina
tion and prey upon our system. The bottom of being is
left logically opaque to us, as something which we simply
come upon and find, and about which (if we wish to act) we
should pause and wonder as little as possible. The philo
sopher's logical tranquillity is thus in essence no other than
the boor's. They differ only as to the point at which each
refuses to let further considerations upset the absoluteness
of the data he assumes. The boor does so immediately, and
is liable at any moment to the ravages of many kinds of
doubt. The philosopher does not do so till unity has been
reached, and is warranted against the inroads of those
considerations, but only practically, not essentially, secure
from the blighting breath of the ultimate Why? If he
cannot exorcise this question, he must ignore or blink it,
and, assuming the data of his system as something given,
and the gift as ultimate, simply proceed to a life of contem
plation or of action based on it. There is no doubt that this

i 34 Selected Papers on Philosophy

acting on an opaque necessity is accompanied by a certain
pleasure. See the reverence of Carlyle for brute fact:
" There is an infinite significance in fact." " Necessity,"
Fays Duhring, and he means not rational but given necessity,
" is the last and highest point that we can reach. .... It is
not only the interest of ultimate and definitive knowledge,
but also that of the feelings, to find a last repose and an
ideal equilibrium in an uttermost datum which can simply
not be other than it is."

Such is the attitude of ordinary men in their theism,
God's fiat being in physics and morals such an uttermost
datum. Such also is the attitude of all hard-minded analysts
and Verstandesmenschen. Lotze, Renouvier, and Hodgson
promptly say that of experience as a whole no account
can be given, but neither seeks to soften the abruptness of
the confession nor to reconcile us with our impotence.

But mediating attempts may be made by more mystical
minds. The peace of rationality may be sought through
ecstasy when logic fails. To religious persons of every
shade of doctrine moments come when the world, as it
is, seems so divinely orderly, and the acceptance of it by
the heart so rapturously complete, that intellectual ques
tions vanish ; nay, the intellect itself is hushed to sleep —
as Wordsworth says, "thought is not; in enjoyment it
expires." Ontological emotion so fills the soul that onto-
logical speculation can no longer overlap it and put her
girdle of interrogation-marks round existence. Even the
least religious of men must have felt with Walt Whitman,
when loafing on the grass on some transparent summer
morning, that " swiftly arose and spread round him the
peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the
earth." At such moments of energetic living we feel as if
there were something diseased and contemptible, yea, vile,
in theoretic grubbing and brooding. In the eye of healthy
sense the philosopher is at best a learned fool.

Since the heart can thus wall out the ultimate irration-

The Sentiment of Rationality 1 3 5

ality which the head ascertains, the erection of its proce
dure into a systematized method would be a philosophic
achievement of first-rate importance. But as used by
mystics hitherto it has lacked universality, being available
for few persons and at few times, and even in these being apt
to be followed by fits of reaction and dryness; and if men
should agree that the mystical method is a subterfuge with
out logical pertinency, a plaster but no cure, and that the
idea of nonentity can never be exorcised, empiricism will be
the ultimate philosophy. Existence then will be a brute fact
to which as a whole the emotion of ontologic wonder shall
rightfully cleave, but remain eternally unsatisfied. Then
wonderfulness or mysteriousness will be an essential attri
bute of the nature of things, and the exhibition and em-
phasing of it will continue to be an ingredient in the
philosophic industry of the race. Every generation will'
produce its Job, its Hamlet, its Faust, or its Sartor
Resartus.

With this we seem to have considered the possibilities
of purely theoretic rationality. But we saw at the outset
that rationality meant only unimpeded mental function.
Impediments that arise in the theoretic sphere might
perhaps be avoided if the stream of mental action should
leave that sphere betimes and pass into the practical.
Let us therefore inquire what constitutes the feeling of
rationality in its practical aspect. If thought is not to
stand forever pointing at the universe in wonder, if its
movement is to be diverted from the issueless channel
of purely theoretic contemplation, let us ask what con
ception of the universe will awaken active impulses capable
of effecting this diversion. A definition of the world which
will give back to the mind the free motion which has been
blocked in the purely contemplative path may so far make
the world seem rational again.

Well, of two conceptions equally fit to satisfy the logical
demand, that one which awakens the active impulses, or

1 36 Selected Papers on Philosophy

satisfies other aesthetic demands better than the other, will
be accounted the more rational conception, and will
deservedly prevail.

There is nothing improbable in the supposition that
an analysis of the world may yield a number of formulae,
all consistent with the facts. In physical science different
formulae may explain the phenomena equally well — the
one-fluid and the two-fluid theories of electricity, for
example. Why may it not be so with the world? Why
may there not be different points of view for surveying it,
within each of which all data harmonize, and which the
observer may therefore either choose between, or simply
cumulate one upon another? A Beethoven string- quartet
is truly, as some one has said, a scraping of horses' tails on
cats' bowels, and may be exhaustively described in such
terms; but the application of this description in no way
precludes the simultaneous applicability of an entirely
different description. Just so a thorough-going interpre
tation of the world in terms of mechanical sequence
is compatible with its being interpreted ideologically, '
for the mechanism itself may be designed.

If, then, there were several systems excogitated, equally
satisfying to our purely logical needs, they would still have
to be passed in review, and approved or rejected by our
aesthetic and practical nature. Can we define the tests of
rationality which these parts of our nature would use?

Philosophers long ago observed the remarkable fact that
mere familiarity with things is able to produce a feeling of
their rationality. The empiricist school has been so much
struck by this circumstance as to have laid it down that
the feeling of rationality and the feeling of familiarity are
one and the same thing, and that no other kind of rationality
than this exists. The daily contemplation of phenomena
juxtaposed in a certain order begets an acceptance of their
connection, as absolute as the repose engendered by theo
retic insight into their coherence, To explain a thing is to

The Sentiment of Rationality 1 37

pass easily back to its antecedents ; to know il^is easily to
foresee its consequents. Custom, which lets us do both, is
thus the source of whatever rationality the thing may gain
in our thought.

In the broad sense in which rationality was denned at
the outset of this essay, it is perfectly apparent that custom
must be one of its factors. We said that any perfectly fluent
and easy thought was devoid of the sentiment of irration
ality. Inasmuch then as custom acquaints us with all the
relations of a thing, it teaches us to pass fluently from that
thing to others, and pro tanio tinges it with the rational
character.

Now, there is one particular relation of greater practical
importance than all the rest — I mean the relation of a
thing to its future consequences. So long as an object is
unusual, our expectations are baffled; they are fully deter
mined as soon as it becomes familiar. I therefore propose
this as the first practical requisite which a philosophic
conception must satisfy : It must, in a general way at least,
banish uncertainty from the future. The permanent presence
of the sense of futurity in the mind has been strangely
ignored by most writers, but the fact is that our conscious^
ness at a given moment is never free from the ingredient
of expectancy. Every one knows how when a painful thing
has to be undergone in the near future, the vague feeling
that it is impending penetrates all our thought with uneasi
ness and subtly vitiates our mood even when it does not
control our attention; it keeps us from being at rest, at
home in the given present. The same is true when a great
happiness awaits us. But when the future is neutral and
perfectly certain, " we do not mind it," as we say, but give
an undisturbed attention to the actual. Let now this
haunting sense of futurity be thrown off its bearings or
left without an object, and immediately uneasiness takes
possession of the mind. But in every novel or unclassified
experience this is just what occurs; we do not know what
will come next ; and novelty per se becomes a mental irri-

138 Selected Papers on Philosophy

tant, while custom perse is a mental sedative, merely because
the one baffles while the other settles our expectations.

Every reader must feel the truth of this. What is meant
by coming " to feel at home " in a new place, or with new
people? It is simply that, at first, when we take up our
quarters in a new room, we do not know what draughts
may blow in upon our back, what doors may open, what
forms may enter, what interesting objects may be found in
cupboards and corners. When after a few days we have
learned the range of all these possibilities, the feeling of
strangeness disappears. And so it does with people, when
we have got past the point of expecting any essentially new
manifestations from their character.

The utility of this emotional effect of expectation is
perfectly obvious; " natural selection," in fact, was bound
to bring it about sooner or later. It is of the utmost practical
importance to an animal that he should have prevision of
the qualities of the objects that surround him, and especially
that he should not come to rest in presence of circumstances
that might be fraught either with peril or advantage —
go to sleep, for example, on the brink of precipices, in the
dens of enemies, or view with indifference some new-
appearing object that might, if chased, prove an important
addition to the larder. Novelty ought to irritate him. All
curiosity has thus a practical genesis. We need only look
at the physiognomy of a dog or a horse when a new object
comes into his view, his mingled fascination and fear, to
see that the element of conscious insecurity or perplexed
expectation lies at the root of his emotion. A dog's curiosity
about the movements of his master or a strange object
only extends as far as the point of deciding what is going
to happen next. That settled, curiosity is quenched. The
dog quoted by Darwin, whose behaviour in presence of a
newspaper moved by the wind seemed to testify to a
sense " of the supernatural," was merely exhibiting the
irritation of an uncertain future. A newspaper which could
move spontaneously was in itself so unexpected that the

The Sentiment of Rationality 139

poor brute could not tell what new wonders the next
moment might bring forth.

To turn back now to philosophy. An ultimate datum,
even though it be logically unrationalized, will, if its
quality is such as to define expectancy, be peacefully
accepted by the mind; while if it leave the least oppor
tunity for ambiguity in the future, it will to that extent
cause mental uneasiness if not distress. Now, in the ulti
mate explanations of the universe which the craving for
rationality has elicited from the human mind, the demands
of expectancy to be satisfied have always played a funda
mental part. The term set up by philosophers as primordial
has been one which banishes the incalculable. " Substance/'
for example, means, as Kant says, das Beharrliche, which
will be as it has been, because its being is essential and
eternal. And although we may not be able to prophesy
in detail the future phenomena to which the substance
shall give rise, we may set our minds at rest in a general
way, when we have called the substance God, Perfection,
Love, or Reason, by the reflection that whatever is in store
for us can never at bottom be inconsistent with the char
acter of this term; so that our attitude even toward the
unexpected is in a general sense defined. Take again the
notion of immortality, which for common people seems to
be the touchstone of every philosophic or religious creed:
what is this but a way of saying that the determination of
expectancy is the essential factor of rationality? The
wrath of science against miracles, of certain philosophers
against the doctrine of free-will, has precisely the same
root — dislike to admit any ultimate factor in things which
may rout our prevision or upset the stability of our
outlook.

Anti - substantialist writers strangely overlook this
function in the doctrine of substance: " If there be such
a substratum" says Mill, " suppose it at this instant mira
culously annihilated, and let the sensations continue to
occur in the same order, and how would the substratum

140 Selected Papers on Philosophy

be missed? By what signs should we be able to discover
that its existence had terminated ? Should we not have as
much reason to believe that it still existed as we now have ?
And if we should not then be warranted in believing it, how
can we be so now? " Truly enough, if we have already
securely bagged our facts in a certain order, we can dispense
with any further warrant for that order. But with regard
to the facts yet to come the case is far different. It does not
follow that if substance may be dropped from our con
ception of the irrecoverably past, it need be an equally
empty complication to our notions of the future. Even if
it were true that, for aught we know to the contrary, the
substance might develop at any moment a wholly new set
of attributes, the mere logical form of referring things
to a substance would still (whether rightly or wrongly)
remain accompanied by a feeling of rest and future con
fidence. In spite of the acutest nihilistic criticism, men will
therefore always have a liking for any philosophy which
explains things per substantiam.

A very natural reaction against the theosophizing conceit
and hide-bound confidence in the upshot of things, which
vulgarly optimistic minds display, has formed one factor
of the scepticism of empiricists, who never cease to remind
us of the reservoir of possibilities alien to our habitual
experience which the cosmos may contain, and which, for
any warrant we have to the contrary, may turn it inside
out to-morrow. Agnostic substantialism like that of Mr.
Spencer, whose Unknowable is not merely the unfathomable
but the absolute-irrational, on which, if consistently
represented in thought, it is of course impossible to count,
performs the same function of rebuking a certain stagnancy
and smugness in the manner in which the ordinary philistine
feels his security. But considered as anything else than as
reactions against an opposite excess, these philosophies
of uncertainty cannot be acceptable; the general mind will
fail to come to rest in their presence, an<J will seek for
solutions of a more reassuring kind.

The Sentiment of Rationality 141

We may then, I think, with perfect confidence lay down
is a first point gained in our inquiry, that a prime factor
n the philosophic craving is the desire to have expectancy
lefined; and that no philosophy will definitively triumph
vhich in an emphatic manner denies the possibility of
gratifying this need.

We pass with this to the next great division of our
:opic. It is not sufficient for our satisfaction merely to know
:he future as determined, for it may be determined in
jither of many ways, agreeable or disagreeable. For a
philosophy to succeed on a universal scale it must define
:he future congruously with our spontaneous powers. A
philosophy may be unimpeachable in other respects, but
iither of two defects will be fatal to its universal acceptance.
First, its ultimate principle must not be one that essentially
Daffies and disappoints our dearest desires and most
:herished powers. A pessimistic principle like Schopen
hauer's incurably vicious Will-substance, or Hartmann's
wicked jack-of- all-trades the Unconscious, will perpetually
:all forth essays at other philosophies. Incompatibility of
the future with their desires and active tendencies is, in fact,
to most men a source of more fixed disquietude than
uncertainty itself. Witness the attempts to overcome the
" problem of evil," the " mystery of pain." There is no
" problem of good."

But a second and worse defect in a philosophy than that
of contradicting our active propensities is to give them no
object whatever to press against. A philosophy whose
principle is so incommensurate with our most intimate
powers as to deny them all relevancy in universal affairs,
as to annihilate their motives at one blow, will be even more
unpopular than pessimism. Better face the enemy than the
eternal Void! This is why materialism will always fail of
universal adoption, however well it may fuse things into
atomistic unity, however clearly it may prophesy the future
eternity. For materialism denies reality to the objects of

142 Selected Papers on Philosophy

almost all the impulses which we most cherish. The real
meaning of the impulses, it says, is something which has no
emotional interest for us whatever. Now, what is called
" extradition " is quite as characteristic of our emotions
as of our senses: both point to an object as the cause of
the present feeling. What an intensely objective reference
lies in fear! In like manner an enraptured man and a.
dreary-feeling man are not simply aware of their subjective
states; if they were, the force of their feelings would all.
evaporate. Both believe there is outward cause why they
should feel as they do: either, " It is a glad world! how
good life is ! " or, " What a loathsome tedium is existence! "
Any philosophy which annihilates the validity of the
reference by explaining away its objects or translating
them into terms of no emotional pertinency, leaves the
mind with little to care or act for. This is the opposite
condition from that of nightmare, but when acutely brought
home to consciousness it produces a kindred horror. In
nightmare we have motives to act, but no power; here we
have powers, but no motives. A nameless unheimlichkeit
comes over us at the thought of there being nothing eternal
in our final purposes, in the objects of those loves and
aspirations which are our deepest energies. The mon
strously lopsided equation of the universe and its knower,
which we postulate as the ideal of cognition, is perfectly
paralleled by the no less lopsided equation of the universe
and the doer. We demand in it a character for which our
emotions and active propensities shall be a match. Small
as we are, minute as is the point by which the cosmos
impinges upon each one of us, each one desires to feel that
his reaction at that point is congruous with the demands of
the vast whole — that he balances the latter, so to speak,
and is able to do what it expects of him. But as his abilities
to do lie wholly in the line of his natural propensities; as
he enjoys reacting with such emotions as fortitude, hope,
rapture, admiration, earnestness, and the like; and as he
very unwillingly reacts with fear, disgust, despair, or doubt

The Sentiment of Rationality 143

a philosophy which should only legitimate emotions of
the latter sort would be sure to leave the mind a prey to
discontent and craving.

It is far too little recognized how entirely the intellect
is built up of practical interests. The theory of evolution is
Beginning to do very good service by its reduction of all
mentality to the type of reflex action. Cognition, in this
view, is but a fleeting moment, a cross-section at a certain
point, of what in its totality is a motor phenomenon. In
the lower forms of life no one will pretend that cognition
is anything more than a guide to appropriate action. The
;erminal question concerning things brought for the first
time before consciousness is not the theoretic " What is
that? " but the practical " Who goes there? " or rather, as
Horwicz has admirably put it, "What is to be done? "
— " Was fang' ich an?-""' In all our discussions about the
intelligence of lower animals, the only test we use is that of
their acting as if for a purpose. Cognition, in short, is in
complete until discharged in act; and although it is true
that the later mental development, which attains its maxi
mum through the hypertrophied cerebrum of man, gives
birth to a vast amount of theoretic activity over and above
that which is immediately ministerial to practice, yet the
earlier claim is only postponed, not effaced, and the active
nature asserts its rights to the end.

When the cosmos in its totality is the object offered to
consciousness, the relation is in no whit altered. React
on it we must in some congenial way. It was a deep instinct
in Schopenhauer which led him to reinforce his pessimistic
argumentation by a running volley of invective against the
practical man and his requirements. No hope for pessimism
unless he is slain!

Helmholtz's immortal works on the eye and ear are to
a great extent little more than a commentary on the law
that practical utility wholly determines which parts of our
sensations we shall be aware of, and which parts we shall
ignore. We notice or discriminate an ingredient of sense :

144 Selected Papers on Philosophy

only so far as we depend upon it to modify our actions.
We comprehend a thing when we synthetize it by identity
with another thing. But the other great department of our
understanding, acquaintance (the two departments being
recognized in all languages by the antithesis of such words as
wissen and kennen ; scire and noscere, etc.), what is that also
but a synthesis — a synthesis of a passive perception with
a certain tendency to reaction? We are acquainted with
a thing as soon as we have learned how to behave towards
it, or how to meet the behaviour which we expect from it.
Up to that point it is still " strange " to us.

If there be anything at all in this view, it follows that
however vaguely a philosopher may define the ultimate
universal datum, he cannot be said to leave it unknown to
us so long as he in the slightest degree pretends that our
emotional or active attitude toward it should be of one sort
rather than another. Pie who says " life is real, life is
earnest," however much he may speak of the fundamental
mysteriousness of things, gives a distinct definition to that
mysteriousness by ascribing to it the right to claim from us
the particular mood called seriousness — which means the
willingness to live with energy, though energy bring pain.
The same is true of him who says that all is vanity. For
indefinable as the predicate " vanity " may be in se, it is
clearly something that permits anaesthesia, mere escape
from suffering, to be our rule of life. There can be no
greater incongruity than for a disciple of Spencer to
proclaim with one breath that the substance of things is
unknowable, and with the next that the thought of it
should inspire us with awe, reverence, and a willingness to
add our co-operative push in the direction toward which its
manifestations seem to be drifting. The unknowable may
be unfathomed, but if it make such distinct demands upon
our activity we surely are not ignorant of its essential
quality.

If we survey the field of history and ask what feature all

The Sentiment of Rationality 145

146 Selected Papers on Philosophy

but an exorcism of all scepticism as to the pertinency of
one's natural faculties.

In a word, " Son of Man, stand upon thy feet and I will
speak unto thee! " is the only revelation of truth to which
the solving epochs have helped the disciple. But that has
been enough to satisfy the greater part of his rational need.
In se and per se the universal essence had hardly been more
defined by any of these formulas than by the agnostic x ;
but the mere assurance that my powers, such as they are,
are not irrelevant to it, but pertinent; that it speaks to
them and will in some way recognize their reply; that I
can be a match for it if I will, and not a footless waif —
suffices to make it rational to my feeling in the sense given
above. Nothing could be more absurd than to hope for
the definitive triumph of any philosophy which should
refuse to legitimate, and to legitimate in an emphatic
manner, the more powerful of our emotional and practical
tendencies. Fatalism, whose solving word in all crises of
behaviour is " all striving is vain," will never reign supreme,
for the impulse to take life strivingly is indestructible in the
race. Moral creeds which speak to that impulse will be
widely successful in spite of inconsistency, vagueness, and
shadowy determination of expectancy. Man needs a rule
for his will, and will invent one if one be not given him.

But now observe a most important consequence. Men's
active impulses are so differently mixed that a philosophy
fit in this respect for Bismarck will almost certainly be unfit
for a valetudinarian poet. In other words, although one
can lay down in advance the rule that a philosophy which
utterly denies all fundamental ground for seriousness, for
effort, for hope, which says the nature of things is radically
alien to human nature, can never succeed — one cannot in
advance say what particular dose of hope, or of gnosticism
of the nature of things, the definitely successful philosophy
shall contain. In short, it is almost certain that personal
temperament will here make itself felt, and that although

The Sentiment of Rationality 1 47

all men will insist on being spoken to by the universe in
some way, few will insist on being spoken to in just the
same way. We have here, in short, the sphere of what
Matthew Arnold likes to call Aberglaube, legitimate,
inexpugnable, yet doomed to eternal variations and
disputes.

Take idealism and materialism as examples of what
I mean, and suppose for a moment that both give a con
ception of equal theoretic clearness and consistency, and
that both determine our expectations equally well. Id'ealism
will be chosen by a man of one emotional constitution,
materialism by another. At this very day all sentimental
natures, fond of conciliation and intimacy, tend to an
idealistic faith. Why ? Because idealism gives to the nature
of things such kinship with our personal selves. Our own
thoughts are what we are most at home with, what we are
least afraid of. To say then that the universe essentially is
thought, is to say that I myself, potentially at least, am all.
There is no radically alien corner, but an all-pervading
intimacy. Now, in certain sensitively egotistic minds this
conception of reality is sure to put on a narrow, close, sick
room air. Everything sentimental and priggish will be
consecrated by it. That element in reality which every
itrong man of common-sense willingly feels there because
it calls forth powers that he owns — the rough, harsh, sea-
wave, north-wind element, the denier of persons, the
democratizer — is banished because it jars too much on the
desire for communion. Now, it is the very enjoyment
of this element that throws many men upon the materialistic
or agnostic hypothesis, as a polemic reaction against the
contrary extreme. They sicken at a life wholly constituted
of intimacy. There is an overpowering desire at moments to
escape personality, to revel in the action of forces that have
no respect for our ego, to let the tides flow, even though they
flow over us. The strife of these two kinds of mental temper
will, I think, always be seen in philosophy. Some men will
keep insisting on the reason, the atonement, that lies in

148 Selected Papers on Philosophy

the heart of things, and that we can act with ; others, on the
opacity of brute fact that we must react against.

Now, there is one element of our active nature which the
Christian religion has emphatically recognized, but which
philosophers as a rule have with great insincerity tried to
huddle out of sight in their pretension to found systems of
absolute certainty. I mean the element of faith. Faith
means belief in something concerning which doubt is still
theoretically possible ; and as the test of belief is willingness
to act, one may say that faith is the readiness to act in a
cause the prosperous issue of which is not certified to us in
advance. It is in fact the same moral quality which we call
courage in practical affairs ; and there will be a very wide
spread tendency in men of vigorous nature to enjoy a cer
tain amount of uncertainty in their philosophic creed, just
as risk lends a zest to worldly activity. Absolutely certified
philosophies seeking the inconcussum are fruits of mental
natures in which the passion for identity (which we saw to
be but one factor of the rational appetite) plays an ab
normally exclusive part. In the average man, on the con
trary, the power to trust, to risk a little beyond the literal
evidence, is an essential function. Any mode of conceiving
the universe which makes an appeal to this generous power,
and makes the man seem as if he were individually helping
to create the actuality of the truth whose metaphysical
reality he is willing to assume, will be sure to be responded
to by large numbers.

The necessity of faith as an ingredient in our mental
attitude is strongly insisted on by the scientific philosophers
of the present day; but by a singularly arbitrary caprice
they say that it is only legitimate when used in the interests
of one particular proposition — the proposition, namely,
that the course of nature is uniform. That nature will
follow to-morrow the same laws that she follows to-day is,
they all admit, a truth which no man can know ; but in the
interests of cognition as well as of action we must postulate

The Sentiment of Rationality 149

or assume it. As Helmholtz says: " Hier gilt nur der eine
Rath: vertraue und handle !" And Professor Bain urges :
" Our only error is in proposing to give any reason or justi
fication of the postulate, or to treat it as otherwise than
begged at the very outset."

With regard to all other possible truths, however, a
number of our most influential contemporaries think that
an attitude of faith is not only illogical but shameful. Faith
in a religious dogma for which there is no outward proof,
but which we are tempted to postulate for our emotional
interests, just as we postulate the uniformity of nature for
our intellectual interests, is branded by Professor Huxley as

the lowest depth of immorality." Citations of this kind
from leaders of the modern Aufkldrung might be multiplied
almost indefinitely. Take Professor Clifford's article on
the " Ethics of Belief." He calls it " guilt " and " sin " to
believe even the truth without " scientific evidence." But
what is the use of being a genius, unless with the same
scientific evidence as other men, one can reach more truth
than they ? Why does Clifford fearlessly proclaim his belief
in the conscious-automaton theory, although the " proofs "
before him are the same which make Mr. Lewes reject
it? Why does he believe in primordial units of "mind-
stuff " on evidence which would seem quite worthless to
Professor Bain? Simply because, like every human being
of the slightest mental originality, he is peculiarly sensitive
to evidence that bears in some one direction. It is utterly
hopeless to try to exorcise such sensitiveness by calling it
the disturbing subjective factor, and branding it as the root
of all evil. " Subjective " be it called! and " disturbing "
to those whom it foils ! But if it helps those who, as Cicero
says, " vim naturae magis sentiunt," it is good and not evil.
Pretend what we may, the whole man within us is at work
when we form our philosophical opinions. Intellect, will,
taste, and passion co-operate just as they do in practical
affairs ; and lucky it is if the passion be not something as
petty as a love of personal conquest over the philosopher

150 Selected Papers on Philosophy

across the way. The absurd abstraction of an intellect
verbally formulating all its evidence and carefully esti
mating the probability thereof by a vulgar fraction by the
size of whose denominator and numerator alone it is
swayed, is ideally as inept as it is actually impossible. It
is almost incredible that men who are themselves working
philosophers should pretend that any philosophy can be,
or ever has been, constructed without the help of personal
preference, belief, or divination. How have they succeeded
in so stultifying their sense for the living facts of human
nature as not to perceive that every philosopher, or man of
science either, whose initiative counts for anything in the
evolution of thought, has taken his stand on a sort of dumb
conviction that the truth must lie in one direction rather
than another, and a sort of preliminary assurance that his
notion can be made to work ; and has borne his best fruit in
trying to make it work? These mental instincts in different
men are the spontaneous variations upon which the intellec
tual struggle for existence is based. The fittest conceptions
survive, and with them the names of their champions
shining to all futurity.

The coil is about us, struggle as we may. The only escape
from faith is mental nullity. What we enjoy most in a Hux
ley or a Clifford is not the professor with his learning, but
the human personality ready to go in for what it feels to be
right, in spite of all appearances. The concrete man has
but one interest — to be right. That for him is the art of all
arts, and all means are fair which help him to it. Naked
he is flung into the world, and between him and nature
there are no rules of civilized warfare. The rules of the
scientific game, burdens of proof, presumptions, experimenta
crucis, complete inductions, and the like, are only binding
on those who enter that game. As a matter of fact we all
more or less do enter it, because it helps us to our end. But
if the means presume to frustrate the end and call us cheats
for being right in advance of their slow aid, by guesswork
or by hook or crook, what shall we say of them? Were all

The Sentiment of Rationality 1 5 1

3f Clifford's works, except the Ethics of Belief, forgotten,
e might well figure in future treatises on psychology in
place of the somewhat threadbare instance of the miser who
las been led by the association of ideas to prefer his gold
to all the goods he might buy therewith.

In short, if I am born with such a superior general reaction
to evidence that I can guess right and act accordingly, and
gain all that comes of right action, while my less gifted
neighbour (paralyzed by his scruples and waiting for more
evidence which he dares not anticipate, much as he longs
o) still stands shivering on the brink, by what law shall I
>e forbidden to reap the advantages of my superior native
ensitiveness ? Of course I yield to my belief in such a case
as this or distrust it, alike at my peril, just as I do in any
of the great practical decisions of life. If my inborn faculties
are good, I am a prophet ; if poor, I am a failure : nature
pews me out of her mouth, and there is an end of me. In
he total game of life we stake our persons all the while;
and if in its theoretic part our persons will help us to a con-
lusion, surely we should also stake them there, however
narticulate they may be.1

But in being myself so very articulate in proving what
:o all readers with a sense for reality will seem a platitude,
am I not wasting words? We cannot live or think at all
without some degree of faith. Faith is synonymous with

1 At most, the command laid upon us by science to believe nothing
not yet verified by the senses is a prudential rule intended to maxim
ize our right thinking and minimize our errors in the long run. In the
particular instance we must frequently lose truth by obeying it; but
on the whole we are safer if we follow it consistently, for we are sure
to cover our losses with our gains. It is like those gambling and in
surance rules based on probability, in which we secure ourselves
against losses in detail by hedging on the total run. But this hedging
philosophy requires that long run should be there; and this makes
it inapplicable to the question of religious faith as the latter comes
home to the individual man. He plays the game of life not to escape
losses, for he brings nothing with him to lose; he plays it for gains;
and it is now or never with him, for the long run which exists indeed
for humanity, is not there for him. Let him doubt, believe, or deny,
he runs his risk, and has the natural right to choose which one It
shall be.

152 Selected Papers on Philosophy

working hypothesis. The only difference is that while some
hypotheses can be refuted in five minutes, others may defy
ages. A chemist who conjectures that a certain wall-paper
contains arsenic, and has faith enough to lead him to take
the trouble to put some of it into a hydrogen bottle, finds
out by the results of his action whether he was right or
wrong. But theories like that of Darwin, or that of the
kinetic constitution of matter, may exhaust the labours of
generations in their corroboration, each tester of their truth
proceeding in this simple way — that he acts as if it were
true, and expects the result to disappoint him if his assump
tion is false. The longer disappointment is delayed, the
stronger grows his faith in his theory.

Now, in such questions as God, immortality, absolute
morality, and free-will, no non-papal believer at the present
day pretends his faith to be of an essentially different com
plexion ; he can always doubt his creed. But his intimate
persuasion is that the odds in its favour are strong enough
to warrant him in acting all along on the assumption of its
truth. His corroboration or repudiation by the nature of
things may be deferred until the day of judgment. The
uttermost he now means is something like this : "I
expect then to triumph with tenfold glory ; but if it should
turn out, as indeed it may, that I have spent my days in a
fool's paradise, why, better have been the dupe of such
a dreamland than the cunning reader of a world like that
which then beyond all doubt unmasks itself to view." In
short, we go in against materialism very much as we should
go in, had we a chance, against the second French empire
or the Church of Rome, or any other system of things to
ward which our repugnance is vast enough to determine
energetic action, but too vague to issue in distinct argu
mentation. Our reasons are ludicrously incommensurate
with the volume of our feeling, yet on the latter we unhesi
tatingly act.

Now, I wish to show what to my knowledge has never

The Sentiment of Rationality 153

been clearly pointed out, that belief (as measured by action)
not only does and must continually outstrip scientific
evidence, but that there is a certain class of truths of whose
reality belief is a factor as well as a confessor; and that as
regards this class of truths faith is not only licit and perti
nent, but essential and indispensable. The truths cannot
tecome true till our faith has made them so.

Suppose, for example, that I am climbing in the Alps
and have had the ill-luck to work myself into a position
[rom which the only escape is by a terrible leap. Being
without similar experience, I have no evidence of my ability
to perform it successfully; but hope and confidence in
myself make me sure I shall not miss my aim, and nerve
my feet to execute what without those subjective emotions
would perhaps have been impossible. But suppose that,
on the contrary, the emotions of fear and mistrust prepon
derate; or suppose that, having just read the Ethics of
Belief, I feel it would be sinful to act upon an assump
tion unverified by previous experience — why, then I shall
hesitate so long that at last, exhausted and trembling, and
aunching myself in a moment of despair, I miss my foothold
and roll into the abyss. In this case (and it is one of an
mmense class) the part of wisdom clearly is to believe what
one desires ; for the belief is one of the indispensable pre
liminary conditions of the realization of its object. There
are then cases where faith creates its own verification. Be
lieve, and you shall be right, for you shall save yourself;
doubt, and you shall again be right, for you shall perish.
The only difference is that to believe is greatly to your
advantage.

The future movements of the stars or the facts of past
history are determined now once for all, whether I like them
or not. They are given irrespective of my wishes, and in all
that concerns truths like these subjective preference should
have no part; it can only obscure the judgment. But in
every fact into which there enters an element of personal
contribution on my part, as soon as this personal contri-

154 Selected Papers on Philosophy

bution demands a certain degree of subjective energy which,
in its turn, calls for a certain amount of faith in the result-^-
so that, after all, the future fact is conditioned by my
present faith in it — how trebly asinine would it be for me
to deny myself the use of the subjective method, the method
of belief based on desire!

In every proposition whose bearing is universal (and
such are all the propositions of philosophy), the acts of
the subject and their consequences throughout eternity
should be included in the formula. If M represent the entire
world minus the reaction of the thinker upon it, and if
M+x represent the absolutely total matter of philosophic
propositions (x standing for the thinker's reaction and its
results) — what would be a universal truth if the term x
were of one complexion, might become egregious error if
x altered its character. Let it not be said that x is too
infinitesimal a component to change the character of the
immense whole in which it lies imbedded. Everything
depends on the point of view of the philosophic proposition
in question. If we have to define the universe from the
point of view of sensibility, the critical material for our
judgment lies in the animal kingdom, insignificant as that
is, quantitatively considered. The moral definition of the
world may depend on phenomena more restricted still in
range. In short, many a long phrase may have its sense
reversed by the addition of three letters, n-o-t ; many
a monstrous mass have its unstable equilibrium discharged
one way or the other by a feather weight that falls.

Let us make this clear by a few examples. The philosophy
of evolution offers us to-day a new criterion to serve as an
ethical test between right and wrong. Previous criteria,
it says, being subjective, have left us still floundering in
variations of opinion and the status belli. Here is a criterion
which is objective and fixed: That is to be called good which
is destined to prevail or survive. But we immediately see
that this standard can only remain objective by leaving
myself and my conduct out. If what prevails and survives

The Sentiment of Rationality 155

does so by my help, and cannot do so without that help;
if something else will prevail in case I alter my conduct — how
can I possibly now, conscious of alternative courses of
action open before me, either of which I may suppose
capable of altering the path of events, decide which course
to take by asking what path events will follow? If they
follow my direction, evidently my direction cannot wait
on them. The only possible manner in which an evolutionist
can use his standard is the obsequious method of fore
casting the course society would take but for him, and then
putting an extinguisher on all personal idiosyncrasies of
desire and interest, and with bated breath and tiptoe tread
following as straight as may be at the tail, and bringing up
the rear of everything. Some pious creatures may find a
pleasure in this; but not only does it violate our general
wish to lead and not to follow (a wish which is surely not
immoral if we but lead aright) , but if it be treated as every
ethical principle must be treated — namely, as a rule good
for all men alike — its general observance would lead to its
practical refutation by bringing about a general deadlock.
Each good man hanging back and waiting for orders from
the rest, absolute stagnation would ensue. Happy, then, if
a few unrighteous ones contribute an initiative which sets
things moving again!

All this is no caricature. That the course of destiny may
be altered by individuals no wise evolutionist ought to doubt.
Everything for him has small beginnings, has a bud which
may be " nipped," and nipped by a feeble force. Human
races and tendencies follow the law, and have also small
beginnings. The best, according to evolution, is that which
has the biggest endings. Now, if a present race of men,
enlightened in the evolutionary philosophy, and able to
forecast the future, were able to discern in a tribe arising
near them the potentiality of future supremacy; were able
to see that their own race would eventually be wiped out
of existence by the new-comers if the expansion of these
were left unmolested — these present sages would have two

156 Selected Papers on Philosophy

courses open to them, either perfectly in harmony with the
evolutionary test: Strangle the new race now, and ours
survives; help the new race, and it survives. In both
cases the action is right as measured by the evolutionary
standard — it is action for the winning side.

Thus the evolutionist foundation of ethics is purely
objective only to the herd of nullities whose votes count
for zero in the march of events. But for others, leaders of
opinion or potentates, and in general those to whose actions
position or genius gives a far-reaching import, and to the
rest of us, each in his measure — whenever we espouse a
cause we contribute to the determination of the evolutionary
standard of right. The truly wise disciple of this school will
then admit faith as an ultimate ethical factor. Any philo
sophy which makes such questions as, What is the ideal
type of humanity ? What shall be reckoned virtues ? What
conduct is good? depend on the question, What is going
to succeed? — must needs fall back on personal belief as one
3f the ultimate conditions of the truth. For again and again
success depends on energy of act ; energy again depends on
faith that we shall not fail; and that faith in turn on the
faith that we are right — which faith thus verifies itself.

Take as an example the question of optimism or pessi
mism, which makes so much noise just now in Germany.
Every human being must sometime decide for himself
whether life is worth living. Suppose that hi looking at the
world and seeing how full it is of misery, of old age, of
wickedness and pain, and how unsafe is his own future,
he yields to the pessimistic conclusion, cultivates disgust
and dread, ceases striving, and finally commits suicide. He
thus adds to the mass M of mundane phenomena, inde
pendent of his subjectivity, the subjective complement x,
which makes of the whole an utterly black picture illumined
by no gleam of good. Pessimism completed, verified by his
moral reaction and the deed in which this ends, is true
beyond a doubt. M +x expresses a state of things totally
bad. The man's belief supplied all that was lacking to

The Sentiment of Rationality 157

nake it so, and now that it is made so the belief was
right.

But now suppose that with the same evil facts M , the
man's reaction x is exactly reversed; suppose that instead
of giving way to the evil he braves it, and finds a sterner,
more wonderful joy than any passive pleasure can yield in
triumphing over pain and defying fear; suppose he does
this successfully, and however thickly evils crowd upon him
proves his dauntless subjectivity to be more than their
match — will not every one confess that the bad character of
the M is here the conditio sine qua non of the good character
of the #? Will not every one instantly declare a world
fitted only for fair-weather human beings susceptible of
every passive enjoyment, but without independence, courage,
or fortitude, to be from a moral point of view incommen-
surably inferior to a world framed to elicit from the man
every form of triumphant endurance and conquering moral
energy ? As James Hinton says : —

" Little inconveniences, exertions, pains — these are the
only things in which we rightly feel our life at all. If these
be not there, existence becomes worthless, or worse; suc
cess in putting them all away is fatal. So it is men engage
in athletic sports, spend their holidays in climbing up moun
tains, find nothing so enjoyable as that which taxes their
endurance and their energy. This is the way we are made,
I say. It may or may not be a mystery or a paradox; it is
a fact. Now, this enjoyment in endurance is just according
to the intensity of life : • the more physical vigour and
balance, the more endurance can be made an element of
satisfaction. A sick man cannot stand it. The line of enjoy
able suffering is not a fixed one; it fluctuates with the
perfectness of the life. That our pains are, as they are, un
endurable, awful, overwhelming, crushing, not to be borne
save in misery and dumb impatience, which utter exhaustion
alone makes patient— that our pains are thus unendurable,
means not that they are too great but that we are sick. We
have not got our proper life. So you perceive pain is no

158 Selected Papers on Philosophy

more necessarily an evil, but an essential element of the
highest good." l

But the highest good can be achieved only by our getting
our proper life ; and that can come about only by help of
a moral energy born of the faith that in some way or other
we shall succeed in getting it if we try pertinaciously enough.
This world is good, we must say, since it is what we make
it — and we shall make it good. How can we exclude from
the cognition of a truth a faith which is involved in the
creation of the truth ? M has its character indeterminate,
susceptible of forming part of a thorough-going pessimism
on the one hand, or of a meliorism, a moral (as distinguished
from a sensual) optimism on the other. All depends on the
character of the personal contribution x. Wherever the
facts to be formulated contain such a contribution, we
may logically, legitimately, and inexpugnably believe what
we desire. The belief creates its verification. The thought
becomes literally father to the fact, as the wish was father
to the thought.2

Let us now turn to the radical question of life — the
question whether this be at bottom a moral or an unmoral
universe — and see whether the method of faith may legi
timately have a place there. It is really the question of
materialism. Is the world a simple brute actuality, an exist
ence de facto about which the deepest thing that can be said
is that it happens so to be; or is the judgment of better or

1 Life of James Hinton, pp. 172, 173. See also the excellent chapter
on " Faith and Sight " in The Mystery of Matter, by J. Allanson
Picton. Hinton's Mystery of Pain will undoubtedly always remain
the classical utterance on this subject.

1 Observe that in all this not a word has been said of free-will. It
all applies as well to a predetermined as to an indeterminate uni
verse. If Af+x is fixed in advance, the belief which leads to x and
the desire which prompts the belief are also fixed. But fixed or not,
these subjective states form a phenomenal condition necessarily
preceding the facts ; necessarily constitutive, therefore, of the truth
M+x which we seek. If, however, free acts be possible, a faith in
their possibility, by augmenting the moral energy which gives them
birth, will increase their frequency in a given individual.

The Sentiment of Rationality 159

worse, of ought, as intimately pertinent to phenomena as
:he simple judgment is or is not ? The materialistic theorists
;ay that judgments of worth are themselves mere matters
}f fact ; that the words " good " and " bad " have no sense
ipart from subjective passions and interests which we may,
I we please, play fast and loose with at will, so far as any
iuty of ours to the non-human universe is concerned. Thus,
when a materialist says it is better for him to suffer great
inconvenience than to break a promise, he only means that
tiis social interests have become so knit up with keeping
[aith that, those interests once being granted, it is better
for him to keep the promise in spite of everything. But
the interests themselves are neither right nor wrong, except
possibly with reference to some ulterior order of interests
which themselves again are mere subjective data without
character, either good or bad.

For the absolute moralists, on the contrary, the interests
are not there merely to be felt — they are to be believed in
and obeyed. Not only is it best for my social interests to
keep my promise, but best for me to have those interests,
and best for the cosmos to have this me. Like the old
woman in the story who described the world as resting on a
rock, and then explained that rock to be supported by
another rock, and finally when pushed with questions said
it was rocks all the way down — he who believes this to be
a radically moral universe must hold the moral order to
rest either on an absolute and ultimate should, or on a series
of shoulds all the way down.1

The practical difference between this objective sort of
moralist and the other one is enormous. The subjectivist in
morals, when his moral feelings are at war with the facts
about him, is always free to seek harmony by toning down
the sensitiveness of the feelings. Being mere data, neither
good nor evil in themselves, he may pervert them or lull

1 In either case, as a later essay explains, the should which the
moralist regards as binding upon him must be rooted in the feeling of
some other thinker, or collection of thinkers, to whose demands
he individually bows.

1 60 Selected Papers on Philosophy

them to sleep by any means at his command. Truckling,
compromise, time-serving, capitulations of conscience, are
conventionally opprobrious names for what, if successfully
carried out, would be on his principles by far the easiest
and most praiseworthy mode of bringing about that har
mony between inner and outer relations which is all that h«
means by good. The absolute moralist, on the other hand,
when his interests clash with the world, is not free to gain
harmony by sacrificing the ideal interests. According to
him, these latter should be as they are and not otherwise.
Resistance then, poverty, martyrdom if need be, tragedy
in a word — such are the solemn feasts of his inward faith.
Not that the contradiction between the two men occurs
every day; in commonplace matters all moral schools
agree. It is only in the lonely emergencies of life that our
creed is tested : then routine maxims fail, and we fall back
on our gods. It cannot then be said that the question, Is
this a moral world? is a meaningless and unverifiable
question because it deals with something non-phenomenal.
Any question is full of meaning to which, as here, contrary
answers lead to contrary behaviour. And it seems as if in
answering such a question as this we might proceed exactly
as does the physical philosopher in testing an hypothesis.
He deduces from the hypothesis an experimental action, x ;
this he adds to the facts M already existing. It fits them if
the hypothesis be true; if not, there is discord. The results
of the action corroborate or refute the idea from which it
flowed. So here : the verification of the theory which you
may hold as to the objectively moral character of the world
can consist only in this — that if you proceed to act upon your
theory it will be reversed by nothing that later turns up as
your action's fruit ; it will harmonize so well with the entire
drift of experience that the latter will, as it were, adopt it,
or at most give it an ampler interpretation, without obliging
you in any way to change the essence of its formulation.
If this be an objectively moral universe, all acts that I
make on that assumption, all expectations that I ground on

The Sentiment of Rationality 1 6 1

.t, will tend more and more completely to interdigitate
with the phenomena already existing. M+x will be in
iccord; and the more I live, and the more the fruits of
ny activity come to light, the more satisfactory the con
sensus will grow. While if it be not such a moral universe,
ind I mistakenly assume that it is, the course of experience

l throw ever new impediments in the way of my belief,
and become more and more difficult to express in its
Language. Epicycle upon epicycle of subsidiary hypothesis
will have to be invoked to give to the discrepant terms a
temporary appearance of squaring with each other; but
at last even this resource will fail.

If, on the other hand, I rightly assume the universe to be
not moral, in what does my verification consist ? It is that
by letting moral interests sit lightly, by disbelieving that
there is any duty about them (since duty obtains only as
between them and other phenomena) , and so throwing them
over if I find it hard to get them satisfied — it is that by
refusing to take up a tragic attitude, I deal in the long-run
most satisfactorily with the facts of life. " All is vanity "
is here the last word of wisdom. Even though in certain
limited series there maybe a great appearance of seriousness,
he who in the main treats things with a degree of good-
natured scepticism and radical levity. will find that the
practical fruits of his epicurean hypothesis verify it more
and more, and not only save him from pain but do honour
to his sagacity. While, on the other hand, he who contrary
to reality stiffens himself in the notion that certain things
absolutely should be, and rejects the truth that at bottom
it makes no difference what is, will find himself evermore
thwarted and perplexed and bemuddled by the facts of the
world, and his tragic disappointment will, as experience
accumulates, seem to drift farther and farther away from
that final atonement or reconciliation which certain partial
tragedies often get.

Anesthesia is the watchword of the moral sceptic brought
to bay and put to his trumps. Energy is that of the moralist.

1 62 Selected Papers on Philosophy

Act on my creed, cries the latter, and the results of your
action wiil prove the creed true, and that the nature of
things is earnest infinitely. Act on mine, says the epicu
rean and the results will prove that seriousness is but a
superficial glaze upon a world of fundamentally trivial
import. You and your acts and the nature of things will
be alike enveloped in a single formula, a universal vanitas
vanitatum.

For the sake of simplicity I have written as if the verifi
cation might occur in the life of a single philosopher —
which is manifestly untrue, since the theories still face
each other, and the facts of the world give countenance to
both. Rather should we expect, that, in a question of this
scope, the experience of the entire human race must make
the verification, and that all the evidence will not be " in "
till the final integration of things, when the last man has
had his say and contributed his share to the still unfinished
x. Then the proof will be complete; then it will appear
without doubt whether the moralistic x has filled up the
gap which alone kept the M of the world from forming an
even and harmonious unity, or whether the non-moralistic
% has given the finishing touches which were alone needed
to make the M appear outwardly as vain as it inwardly
was.

But if this be so, is it not clear that the facts M , taken
per se, are inadequate to justify a conclusion either way in
advance of my action ? My action is the complement which,
by proving congruous or not, reveals the latent nature of
the mass to which it is applied. The world may in fact be
likened unto a lock, whose inward nature, moral or unmoral,
will never reveal itself to our simply expectant gaze. The
positivists, forbidding us to make any assumptions re
garding it, condemn us to eternal ignorance, for the " evi
dence " which they wait for can never come so long as we
are passive. But nature has put into our hands two keys,
by which we may test the lock. If we try the moral key

The Sentiment of Rationality 163

2nd it fits, it is a moral lock. If we try the unmoral key and
it fits, it is an unmoral lock. I cannot possibly conceive of
my other sort of " evidence " or " proof " than this. It is

ite true that the co-operation of generations is needed
to educe it. But in these matters the solidarity (so called)

the human race is a patent fact. The essential thing to
notice is that our active preference is a legitimate part of
the game — that it is our plain business as men to try one

the keys, and the one in which we most confide. If then
the proof exist not till I have acted, and I must needs in
icting run the risk of being wrong, how can the popular
science professors be right in objurgating in me as infamous
a, " credulity " which the strict logic of the situation
"equires ? If this really be a moral universe ; if by my acts
[ be a factor of its destinies; if to believe where I may
doubt be itself a moral act analogous to voting for a side
not yet sure to win — by what right shall they close in upon
me and steadily negate the deepest conceivable function of
nay being by their preposterous command that I shall stir
neither hand nor foot, but remain balancing myself in
eternal and insoluble doubt ? Why, doubt itself is a decision

the widest practical reach, if only because we may miss
by doubting what goods we might be gaining by espousing
the winning side. But more than that ! it is often practically
.mpossible to distinguish doubt from dogmatic negation.
[f I refuse to stop a murder because I am in doubt whether
t be not justifiable homicide, I am virtually abetting the
:rime. If I refuse to bale out a boat because I am in doubt
whether my efforts will keep her afloat, I am really helping
to sink her. If in the mountain precipice I doubt my right
to risk a leap, I actively connive at my destruction. He
who commands himself not to be credulous of God, of duty,
of freedom, of immortality, may again and again be
indistinguishable from him who dogmatically denies them.
Scepticism in moral matters is an active ally of immorality.
Who is not for is against. The universe will have no neutrals
in these questions. In theory as in practice, dodge or hedge,

164 Selected Papers on Philosophy

or talk as we like about a wise scepticism, we are really
doing volunteer military service for one side or the other.
Yet obvious as this necessity practically is, thousands
of innocent magazine readers lie paralyzed and terrified
in the network of shallow negations which the leaders of
opinion have thrown over their souls. All they need to be
free and hearty again in the exercise of their birthright is
that these fastidious vetoes should be swept away. All that
the human heart wants is its chance. It will willingly forego
certainty in universal matters if only it can be allowed to
feel that in them it has that same inalienable right to run
risks which no one dreams of refusing to it in the pettiest
practical affairs. And if I, in these last pages, like the mouse
in the fable, have gnawed a few of the stings of the sophis
tical net that has been binding down its lion- strength, I shall
be more than rewarded for my pains.

To sum up : No philosophy will permanently be deemed
rational by all men which (in addition to meeting logical
demands) does not to some degree pretend to determine
expectancy, and in a still greater degree make a direct
appeal to all those powers of our nature which we hold in
highest esteem. Faith, being one of these powers, will
always remain a factor not to be banished from philosophic
constructions, the more so since in many ways it brings
forth its own verification. In these points, then, it is hopeless
to look for literal agreement among mankind.

The ultimate philosophy, we may therefore conclude,
must not be too strait-laced in form, must not in all its parts
divide heresy from orthodoxy by too sharp a line. There
must be left over and above the propositions to be sub
scribed, ubique, semper, et ab omnibus, another realm into
which the stifled soul may escape from pedantic scruples
and indulge its own faith at its own risks ; and all that can
here be done will be to mark out distinctly the questions
which fall within faith's sphere.

IX
GREAT MEN AND THEIR ENVIRONMENT1

A REMARKABLE parallel, which I think has never been
oticed, obtains between the facts of social evolution on the
ne hand, and of zoological evolution as expounded by
Ir. Darwin on the other.

It will be best to prepare the ground for my thesis by a
ew very general remarks on the method of getting at
cientific truth. It is a common platitude that a complete
cquaintance with any one thing, however small, would
require a knowledge of the entire universe. Not a sparrow
falls to the ground but some of the remote conditions of his
fall are to be found in the milky way, in our federal consti
tution, or in the early history of Europe. That is to say,
alter the milky way, alter the federal constitution, alter
the facts of our barbarian ancestry, arid the universe would
so far be a different universe from what it now is. One fact
involved in the difference might be that the particular
little street-boy who threw the stone which brought down
the sparrow might not find himself opposite the sparrow
at that particular moment; or, finding himself there, he
might not be in that particular serene and disengaged
mood of mind which expressed itself in throwing the stone.
But, true as all this is, it would be very foolish for any one
who was inquiring the cause of the sparrow's fall to over
look the boy as too personal, proximate, and, so to speak,
anthropomorphic an agent, and to say that the true cause
is the federal constitution, the westward migration of the
Celtic race, or the structure of the milky way. If we pro-

1 A lecture before the Harvard Natural History Society; published
in The Atlantic Monthly, October 1880.

From The Will to Believe, 1915, pp. 216-254.

165

1 66 Selected Papers on Philosophy

ceeded on that method, we might say with perfect legitimacy
that a friend of ours, who had slipped on the ice upon his
doorstep and cracked his skull, some months after dining
with thirteen at the table, died because of that ominous
feast. I know, in fact, one such instance ; and I might, if I
chose, contend with perfect logical propriety that the slip
on the ice was no real accident. " There are no accidents,"
I might say, " for science. The whole history of the world
converged to produce that slip. If anything had been left
out, the slip would not have occurred just there and then.
To say it would is to deny the relations of cause and effect
throughout the universe. The real cause of the death was
not the slip, but the conditions which engendered the slip —
and among them his having sat at a table, six months pre
vious, one among thirteen. That is truly the reason why he
died within the year."

It will soon be seen whose arguments I am, in form,
reproducing here. I would fain lay down the truth without
polemics or recrimination. But unfortunately we never
fully grasp the import of any true statement until we have
a clear notion of what the opposite untrue statement would
be. The error is needed to set off the truth, much as a dark
background is required for exhibiting the brightness of a
picture. And the error which I am going to use as a foil
to set off what seems to me the truth of my own statements
is contained in the philosophy of Mr. Herbert Spencer and
his disciples. Our problem is, What are the causes that
make communities change from generation to generation —
that make the England of Queen Anne so different from the
England of Elizabeth, the Harvard College of to-day so
different from that of thirty years ago ?

I shall reply to this problem, The difference is due to the
accumulated influences of individuals, of their examples,
their initiatives, and their decisions. The Spencerian school
replies, The changes are irrespective of persons, and inde
pendent of individual control. They are due to the environ
ment, to the circumstances, the physical geography, the

Great Men and their Environment 1 67

ancestral conditions, the increasing experience of outer
relations; to everything, in fact, except the Grants and
the Bismarcks, the Joneses, and the Smiths.

Now, I say that these theorizers are guilty of precisely
the same fallacy as he who should ascribe the death of his
friend to the dinner with thirteen, or the fall of the sparrow
to the milky way. Like the dog in the fable, who drops his
real bone to snatch at its image, they drop the real causes
to snatch at others, which from no possible human point
of view are available or attainable. Their fallacy is a prac
tical one. Let us see where it lies. Although I believe in free
will myself, I will waive that belief in this discussion, and
assume with the Spencerians the predestination of all human
actions. On that assumption I gladly allow that were the
intelligence investigating the man's or the sparrow's death
omniscient and omnipresent, able to take in the whole of
time and space at a single glance, there would not be the
slightest objection to the milky way or the fatal feast being
invoked among the sought-for causes. Such a divine intelli
gence would see instantaneously all the infinite lines of con
vergence towards a given result, and it would, moreover,
see impartially : it would see the fatal feast to be as much
a condition of the sparrow's death as of the man's ; it would
see the boy with the stone to be as much a condition of the
man's fall as of the sparrow's.

The human mind, however, is constituted on an entirely
different plan. It has no such power of universal intuition.
Its finiteness obliges it to see but two or three things at a
time. If it wishes to take wider sweeps it has to use " general
ideas," as they are called, and in so doing to drop all con
crete truths. Thus, in the present case, if we as men wish
to feel the connection between the milky way and the boy
and the dinner and the sparrow and the man's death, we
can do so only by falling back on the enormous emptiness
of what is called an abstract proposition. We must say,
All things in the world are fatally predetermined, and hang

1 68 Selected Papers on Philosophy

together in the adamantine fixity of a system of natural
law. But in the vagueness of this vast proposition we have
lost all the concrete facts and links; and in all practical
matters the concrete links are the only things of importance.
The human mind is essentially partial. It can be efficient
at all only by picking out what to attend to and ignoring
everything else — by narrowing its point of view. Otherwise,
what little strength it has is dispersed, and it loses its way
altogether. Man always wants his curiosity gratified for a
particular purpose. If, in the case of the sparrow, the pur
pose is punishment, it would be idiotic to wander off from
the cats, boys, and other possible agencies close by in the
street, to survey the early Celts and the milky way: the
boy would meanwhile escape. And if, in the case of
the unfortunate man, we lose ourselves in contemplation
of the thirteen-at-table mystery, and fail to notice the
ice on the step and cover it with ashes, some other poor
fellow, who never dined out in his life, may slip on it in
coming to the door, and fall and break his head too.

It is, then, a necessity laid upon us as human beings to
limit our view. In mathematics we know how this method
of ignoring and neglecting quantities lying outside of a cer
tain range has been adopted in the differential calculus.
The calculator throws out all the " infinitesimals " of the
quantities he is considering. He treats them (under certain
rules) as if they did not exist. In themselves they exist per
fectly all the while ; but they are as if they did not exist for
the purposes of his calculation. Just so an astronomer, in
dealing with the tidal movements of the ocean, takes no
account of the waves made by the wind, or by the pressure
of all the steamers which day and night are moving their
thousands of tons upon its surface. Just so the marksman,
in sighting his rifle, allows for the motion of the wind but
not for the equally real motion of the earth and solar system.
Just so a business man's punctuality may overlook an error
of five minutes, while a physicist, measuring the velocity
of light, must count each thousandth of a second.

Great Men and their Environment 169

There are, in short, different cycles of operation in nature ;
different departments, so to speak, relatively independent of
one another, so that what goes on at any moment in one
may be compatible with almost any condition of things at
the same time in the next. The mould on the biscuit in the
store-room of a man-of-war vegetates in absolute indiffer
ence to the nationality of the flag, the direction of the
voyage, the weather, and the human dramas that may go on
on board; and a mycologist may study it in complete
abstraction from all these larger details. Only by so study
ing it, in fact, is there any chance of the mental concentra
tion by which alone he may hope to learn something of its
nature. On the other hand, the captain who in manoeuvring
the vessel through a naval fight should think it necessary to
bring the mouldy biscuit into his calculations would very
likely lose the battle by reason of the excessive " thorough
ness " of his mind.

The causes which operate in these incommensurable
cycles are connected with one another only if we take the
whole universe into account. For all lesser points of view it
is lawful — nay, more, it is for human wisdom necessary —
to regard them as disconnected and irrelevant to one
another.

And this brings us nearer to our special topic. If we look
at an animal or a human being, distinguished from the rest
of his kind by the possession of some extraordinary peculi
arity, good or bad, we shall be able to discriminate between
the causes which originally produced the peculiarity in him
and the causes that maintain it after it is produced; and we ]
shall see, if the peculiarity be one that he was born with,
that these two sets of causes belong to two such irrelevant
cycles. It was the triumphant originality of Darwin to
see this, and to act accordingly. Separating the causes
of production under the title of " tendencies to spontaneous
variation," and relegating them to a physiological cycle

170 Selected Papers on Philosophy

which he forthwith agreed to ignore altogether,1 he confined
his attention to the causes of preservation, and under the
names of natural selection and sexual selection studied them
exclusively as functions of the cycle of the environment.

Pre-Darwinian philosophers had also tried to establish
the doctrine of descent with modification; but they all
committed the blunder of clumping the two cycles of causa
tion into one. What preserves an animal with his peculiarity,
if it be a useful one, they saw to be the nature of the environ
ment to which the peculiarity was adjusted. The giraffe
with his peculiar neck is preserved by the fact that there
are in his environment tall trees whose leaves he can digest.
But these philosophers went further, and said that the
presence of the trees not only maintained an animal with
a long neck to browse upon their branches, but also pro
duced him. They made his neck long by the constant
striving they aroused in him to reach up to them. The
environment, in short, was supposed by these writers to
mould the animal by a kind of direct pressure, very much
as a seal presses the wax into harmony with itself. Num
erous instances were given of the way in which this goes
on under our eyes. The exercise of the forge makes the right
arm strong, the palm grows callous to the oar, the mountain
air distends the chest, the chased fox grows cunning and
the chased bird shy, the arctic cold stimulates the animal
combustion, and so forth. Now these changes, of which
many more examples might be adduced, are at present
distinguished by the special name of adaptive changes. Their
peculiarity is that that very feature in the environment to
which the animal's nature grows adjusted, itself produces the
adjustment. The " inner relation," to use Mr. Spencer's
phrase, " corresponds " with its own efficient cause.

1 Darwin's theory of pangenesis is, it is true, an attempt to account
(among other things) for variation. But it occupies its own separate
place, and its author no more invokes the environment when he
talks of the adhesions of gemmules than he invokes these adhesions
when he talks of the relations of the whole animal to the environ
ment. Divide et impera !

Great Men and their Environment 171

Darwin's first achievement was to show the utter insig
nificance in amount of these changes produced by direct
adaptation, the immensely greater mass of changes being
produced by internal molecular accidents, of which we
know nothing. His next achievement was to define the true
problem with which we have to deal when we study the
effects of the visible environment on the animal. That
problem is simply this: Is the environment more likely
to preserve or to destroy him, on account of this or that
peculiarity with which he may be born ? In giving the name
" of accidental variations " to those peculiarities with
which an animal is born, Darwin does not for a moment
mean to suggest that they are not the fixed outcome of
natural law. If the total system of the universe be taken into
account, the causes of these variations and the visible
environment which preserves or destroys them, un
doubtedly do, in some remote and roundabout way, hang
together. What Darwin means is, that, since that environ
ment is a perfectly known thing, and its relations to the
organism in the way of destruction or preservation are
tangible and distinct, it would utterly confuse our finite
understandings and frustrate our hopes of science to mix
in with it facts from such a disparate and incommensurable
cycle as that in which the variations are produced. This
last cycle is that of occurrences before the animal is born.
It is the cycle of influences upon ova and embryos; in
which lie the causes that tip them and tilt them towards
masculinity or femininity, towards strength or weakness,
towards health or disease, and towards divergence from
the parent type. What are the causes there?

In the first place, they are molecular and invisible-
inaccessible, therefore, to direct observation of any kind.
Secondly, their operations are compatible with any social,
political, and physical conditions of environment. The
same parents, living in the same environing conditions,
may at one birth produce a genius, at the next an idiot or
a monster. The visible external conditions are therefore not

172 Selected Papers on Philosophy

direct determinants of this cycle ; and the more we consider
the matter, the more we are forced to believe that two
children of the same parents are made to differ from each
other by causes as disproportionate to their ultimate effects
as is the famous pebble on the Rocky Mountain crest, which
separates two rain-drops, to the Gulf of St. Lawrence and
the Pacific Ocean toward which it makes them severally flow.

The great mechanical distinction between transitive
forces and discharging forces is nowhere illustrated on such
a scale as in physiology. Almost all causes there are forces
of detent, which operate by simply unlocking energy already
stored up. They are upsetters of unstable equilibria, and
the resultant effect depends infinitely more on the nature of
the materials upset than on that of the particular stimulus
which joggles them down. Galvanic work, equal to unity,
done on a frog's nerve will discharge from the muscle to
which the nerve belongs mechanical work equal to seventy
thousand ; and exactly the same muscular effect will emerge
if other irritants than galvanism are employed. The irritant
has merely started or provoked something which then went
on of itself — as a match may start a fire which consumes a
whole town. And qualitatively as well as quantitatively
the effect may be absolutely incommensurable with the
cause. We find this condition of things in all organic matter.
Chemists are distracted by the difficulties which the instabi
lity of albuminoid compounds opposes to their study. Two
specimens, treated in what outwardly seem scrupulously
identical conditions, behave in quite different ways. You
know about the invisible factors of fermentation, and how
the fate of a jar of milk — whether it turn into a sour clot
or a mass of koumiss — depends on whether the lactic acid
ferment or the alcoholic is introduced first, and gets ahead
of the other in starting the process. Now, when the result is
the tendency of an ovum, itself invisible to the naked eye,
to tip towards this direction or that in its further evolution
— to bring forth a genius or a dunce, even as the rain-drop

Great Men and their Environment 173

passes east or west of the pebble — is it not obvious that the
deflecting cause must lie in a region so recondite and minute,
must be such a ferment of a ferment, an infinitesimal of so
high an order, that surmise itself may never succeed even in
attempting to frame an image of it ?

Such being the case, was not Darwin right to turn his
back upon that region altogether, and to keep his own prob-
iem carefully free from all entanglement with matters such
as these ? The success of his work is a sufficiently affirmative
reply.

And this brings us at last to the heart of our subject. The
causes of production of great men lie in a sphere wholly
inaccessible to the social philosopher. He must simply
accept geniuses as data, just as Darwin accepts his sponta
neous variations. For him, as for Darwin, the only problem
is, these data being given, How does the environment affect
them, and how do they affect the environment? Now, I
affirm that the relation of the visible environment to the
great man is in the main exactly what it is to the " variation "
in the Darwinian philosophy. It chiefly adopts or rejects,
preserves or destroys, in short selects him.1 And whenever
it adopts and preserves the great man, it becomes modified
by his influence in an entirely original and peculiar way. He
acts as a ferment, and changes its constitution, just as the
advent of a new zoological species changes the faunal and
floral equilibrium of the region in which it appears. We all
recollect Mr. Darwin's famous statement of the influence
of cats on the growth of clover in their neighbourhood. We
all have read of the effects of the European rabbit in New
Zealand, and we have many of us taken part in the contro
versy about the English sparrow here — whether he kills most
canker-worms or drives away most native birds. Just so the

1 It is true that it remodels him, also, to some degree, by its edu
cative influence, and that this constitutes a considerable difference
between the social case and the zoological case. I neglect this aspect
of the relation here, for the other is the more important. At the end
of the article I will return to it incidentally.

174 Selected Papers on Philosophy

great man, whether he be an importation from without like
Clive in India or Agassiz here, or whether he spring from
the soil like Mahomet or Franklin, brings about a rearrange
ment, on a large or a small scale, of the pre-existing social
relations.

The mutations of societies, then, from generation to
generation, are in the main due directly or indirectly to the
acts or the example of individuals whose genius was so
adapted to the receptivities of the moment, or whose acci
dental position of authority was so critical that they became
ferments, initiators of movement, setters of precedent or
fashion, centres of corruption, or destroyers of other persons,
whose gifts, had they had free play, would have led society
in another direction.

We see this power of individual initiative exemplified
on a small scale all about us, and on a large scale in the case
of the leaders of history. It is only following the common-
sense method of a Lyell, a Darwin, and a Whitney to inter
pret the unknown by the known, and reckon up cumulatively
the only causes of social change we can directly observe.
Societies of men are just like individuals, in that both at any
given moment offer ambiguous potentialities of develop
ment. Whether a young man enters business or the ministry
may depend on a decision which has to be made before a
certain day. He takes the place offered in the counting-house
and is committed. Little by little, the habits, the knowledges,
of the other career, which once lay so near, cease to be
reckoned even among his possibilities. At first, he may
sometimes doubt whether the self he murdered in that
decisive hour might not have been the better of the two;
but with the years such questions themselves expire, and the
old alternative ego, once so vivid, fades into something less
substantial than a dream. It is no otherwise with nations.
They may be committed by kings and ministers to peace or
war, by generals to victory or defeat, by prophets to this
religion or to that, by various geniuses to fame in art, science,
or industry. A war is a true point of bifurcation of future

Great Men and their Environment 175

jossibilities. Whether it fail or succeed, its declaration must
>e the starting-point of new policies. Just so does a revolu-
ion, or any great civic precedent, become a deflecting
nfluence, whose operations widen with the course of time.
Communities obey their ideals; and an accidental success
ixes an ideal, as an accidental failure blights it.

Would England have to-day the " imperial " ideal which
he now has if a certain boy named Bob CHve had shot
limself, as he tried to do, at Madras? Would she be the
Irifting raft she is now in European affairs 1 if a Frederic
he Great had inherited her throne instead of a Victoria, and
f Messrs. Bentham, Mill, Cobden, and Bright had all been
x>rn in Prussia? England has, no doubt, to-day precisely
he same intrinsic value relatively to the other nations that
he ever had. There is no such fine accumulation of human
material upon the globe. But in England the material has
tost effective form, while in Germany it has found it. Leaders
pve the form. Would England be crying forward and back
ward at once, as she does now, " letting I will not wait
jpon I would," wishing to conquer but not to fight, if her
.deal had in all these years been fixed by a succession of
statesmen of supremely commanding personality, working
ji one direction ? Cert ainly not. She would have espoused,
tor better or worse, either one course or another. Had
Bismarck died hi his cradle, the Germans would still be
satisfied with appearing to themselves as a race of spec
tacled Gdehrten and political herbivora, and to the French
as ces bans, or ces naifs, Allemands. Bismarck's will showed
them, to their own great astonishment, that they could play
a far livelier game. The lesson will not be forgotten. Ger
many may have many vicissitudes, but they —

" will never do away, I ween,
The marks of that which once hath been " —

of Bismarck's initiative, namely, from 1860 to 1873.
The fermentative influence of geniuses must be admitted
1 The reader will remember when this was written.

176 Selected Papers on Philosophy

as, at any rate, one factor in the changes that constitute
social evolution. The community may evolve in many ways.
The accidental presence of this or that ferment decides in
which way it shall evolve. Why, the very birds of the forest,
the parrot, the mino, have the power of human speech, but
never develop it of themselves; some one must be there to
teach them. So with us individuals. Rembrandt must teach
us to enjoy the struggle of light with darkness, Wagner
to enjoy peculiar musical effects; Dickens give a twist to
our sentimentality, Artemus Ward to our humour ; Emer
son kindles a new moral light within us. But it is like
Columbus's egg. " All can raise the flowers now, for all
have got the seed." But if this be true of the individuals
in the community, how can it be false of the com
munity as a whole? If shown a certain way, a com
munity may take it; if not, it will never find it. And
the ways are to a large extent indeterminate in advance.
A nation may obey either of many alternative impulses
given by different men of genius, and still live and be pros
perous, just as a man may enter either of many businesses.
Only, the prosperities may differ in their type.

But the indeterminism is not absolute. Not every " man "
fits every " hour." Some incompatibilities there are. A
given genius may come either too early or too late. Peter
the Hermit would now be sent to a lunatic asylum. John
Mill in the tenth century would have lived and died un
known. Cromwell and Napoleon need their revolutions,
Grant his civil war. An Ajax gets no fame in the day of
telescopic-sighted rifles; and, to express differently an
instance which Spencer uses, what could a Watt have
effected in a tribe which nd* precursive genius had taught
to smelt iron or to turn a lathe ?

Now, the important thing to notice is that what makes
a certain genius now incompatible with his surroundings is
usually the fact that some previous genius of a different
strain has warped the community away from the sphere of
his possible effectiveness. After Voltaire, no Peter the

Great Men and their Environment 177

ermit; after Charles IX. and Louis XIV., no general
rotestantization of France; after a Manchester school, a
aconsfield's success is transient; after a Philip II., a
astelar makes little headway ; and so on. Each bifurcation
;uts off certain sides of the field altogether, and limits the
uture possible angles of deflection. A community is a living
hing, and in words which I can do no better than quote
rom Professor Clifford,1 "it is the peculiarity of living
ings not merely that they change under the influence of
urrounding circumstances, but that any change which
kes place in them is not lost but retained, and as it were
uilt into the organism to serve as the foundation for future
tions. If you cause any distortion in the growth of a tree
nd make it crooked, whatever you may do afterwards to
ake the tree straight the mark of your distortion is there ;
t is absolutely indelible; it has become part of the tree's
ture. . . . Suppose, however, that you take a lump of
old, melt it, and let it cool. ... No one can tell by
xamining a piece of gold how often it has been melted and
cooled in geologic ages, or even in the last year by the hand
f man. Any one who cuts down an oak can tell by the rings
in its trunk how many times winter has frozen it into
idowhood, and how many times summer has warmed it
into life. A living being must always contain within itself
the history, not merely of its own existence, but of all its
ncestors."

Every painter can tell us how each added line deflects
is picture in a certain sense. Whatever lines follow must
be built on those first laid down. Every author who starts
to rewrite a piece of work knows how impossible it becomes
to use any of the first-written pages again. The new begin
ning has already excluded the possibility of those earlier
phrases and transitions, while it has at the same time created
the possibility of an indefinite set of new ones, no one of
which, however, is completely determined in advance.
Just so the social surroundings of the past and present
1 Lectures and Essays, i. 82.

178 Selected Papers on Philosophy

hour exclude the possibility of accepting certain contribu
tions from individuals; but they do not positively define
what contributions shall be accepted, for in themselves they
are powerless to fix what the nature of the individual
offerings shall be.1

Thus social evolution is a resultant of the interaction
of two wholly distinct factors — the individual, deriving
his peculiar gifts from the play of physiological and infra-
social forces, but bearing all the power of initiative and
origination in his hands; and, second, the social environ
ment, with its power of adopting or rejecting both him and
his gifts. Both factors are essential to change. The com
munity stagnates without the impulse of the individual.
The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the com
munity.

All this seems nothing more than common-sense. All
who wish to see it developed by a man of genius should read
that golden little work, Bagehot's Physics and Politics, in
which (it seems to me) the complete sense of the way in
which concrete things grow and change is as livingly present
as the straining after a pseudo-philosophy of evolution is
livingly absent. But there are never wanting minds to whom
such views seem personal and contracted, and allied to an
anthropomorphism long exploded in other fields of know
ledge. " The individual withers, and the world is more and
more," to these writers; and in a Buckle, a Draper, and a
Taine we all know how much the " world " has come to be
almost synonymous with the climate. We all know, too,
how the controversy has been kept up between the partisans
of a " science of history " and those who deny the existence
of anything like necessary " laws " where human societies
are concerned. Mr. Spencer, at the opening of his Study

1 Mr. Grant Allen himself, in an article from which I shall pres
ently quote, admits that a set of people who, if they had been exposed
ages ago to the geographical agencies of Timbuctoo, would have
developed into negroes might now, after a protracted exposure to the
conditions of Hamburg, never become negroes if transplanted to
Timbuctoo.

Great Men and their Environment 179

of Sociology, makes an onslaught on the " great-man
theory " of history, from which a few passages may be
quoted: —

" The genesis of societies by the action of great men may
be comfortably believed so long as, resting in general
notions, you do not ask for particulars. But now, if, dis
satisfied with vagueness, we demand that our ideas shall be
brought into focus and exactly defined, we discover the
hypothesis to be utterly incoherent. If, not stopping at
the explanation of social progress as due to the great man,
we go back a step, and ask, Whence comes the great man ?
we find that the theory breaks down completely. The
question has two conceivable answers: his origin is super
natural or it is natural. Is his origin supernatural ? Then
he is a deputy god, and we have theocracy once removed
— or, rather, not removed at all. ... Is this an unaccept
able solution ? Then the origin of the great man is natural ;
and immediately this is recognized, he must be classed
with all other phenomena in the society that gave him birth
as a product of its antecedents. Along with the whole
generation of which he forms a minute part, along with its
institutions, language, knowledge, manners, and its multi
tudinous arts and appliances, he is a resultant. . . . You
must admit that the genesis of the great man depends on
the long series of complex influences which has produced
the race in which he appears, and the social state into
which that race has slowly grown. . . . Before he can
remake his society, his society must make him. All those
changes of which he is the proximate initiator have their
chief causes in the generations he descended from. If there
is to be anything like a real explanation of those changes,
it must be sought in that aggregate of conditions out of
which both he and they have arisen." 1

Now, it seems to me that there is something which one
might almost call impudent in the attempt which Mr.
Spencer makes, in the first sentence of this extract, to pin
1 Study of Sociology, pp. 33~35-

180 Selected Papers on Philosophy

the reproach of vagueness upon those who believe in the
power of initiative of the great man.

Suppose I say that the singular moderation which now
distinguishes social, political, and religious discussion in
England, and contrasts so strongly with the bigotry and
dogmatism of sixty years ago, is largely due to J. S. Mill's
example. I may possibly be wrong about the facts; but I
am, at any rate, " asking for particulars," and not " resting
in general notions." And if Mr. Spencer should tell me it
started from no personal influence whatever, but from the
" aggregate of conditions," the " generations," Mill and
all his contemporaries " descended from," the whole past
order of nature in short, surely he, not I, would be the
person " satisfied with vagueness."

The fact is that Mr. Spencer's sociological method is
identical with that of one who would invoke the zodiac
to account for the fall of the sparrow, and the thirteen at
table to explain the gentleman's death. It is of little more
scientific value than the Oriental method of replying to
whatever question arises by the unimpeachable truism,
" God is great." Not to fall back on the gods, where a
proximate principle may be found, has with us Westerners
long since become the sign of an efficient as distinguished
from an inefficient intellect.

To believe that the cause of everything is to be found in
its antecendents is the starting-point, the initial postulate,
not the goal and consummation, of science. If she is simply
to lead us out of the labyrinth by the same hole we went
in by three or four thousand years ago, it seems hardly
worth while to have followed her through the darkness at all.
If anything is humanly certain it is that the great man's
society, properly so-called, does not make him before he
can remake it. Physiological forces, with which the social,
political, geographical, and to a great extent anthropo
logical conditions have just as much and just as little to do
as the condition of the crater of Vesuvius has to do with the
flickering of this gas by which t write, are what make him.

Great Men and their Environment 1 8 i

Can it be that Mr. Spencer holds the convergence of socio
logical pressures to have so impinged on Stratford-upon-
Avon about the 26th of April, 1564, that a W. Shakespeare,
with all his mental peculiarities, had to be born there — as
the pressure of water outside a certain boat will cause a
stream of a certain form to ooze into a particular leak ? And
does he mean to say that if the aforesaid W. Shakespeare had
died of cholera infantum, another mother at Stratford-upon-
Avon would needs have engendered a duplicate copy of
him, to restore the sociologic equilibrium — just as the same
stream of water will reappear, no matter how often you
pass a sponge over the leak, so long as the outside level
remains unchanged? Or might the substitute arise at
" Stratf ord-atte-Bowe " ? Here, as elsewhere, it is very
hard, in the midst of Mr. Spencer's vagueness, to tell what
he does mean at all.

We have, however, in his disciple, Mr. Grant Allen, one
who leaves us in no doubt whatever of his precise meaning.
This widely informed, suggestive, and brilliant writer pub
lished last year a couple of articles in the Gentleman's
Magazine, in which he maintained that individuals have
no initiative in determining social change.

" The differences between one nation and another,
whether in intellect, commerce, art, morals, or general
temperament, ultimately depend, not upon any mysterious
properties of race, nationality, or any other unknown and
unintelligible abstractions, but simply and solely upon the
physical circumstances to which they are exposed. If it
be a fact, as we know it to be, that the French nation differs
recognizably from the Chinese, and the people ot Hamburg
differ recognizably from the people of Timbuctoo, then the
notorious and conspicuous differences between them are
wholly due to the geographical position of the various races.
If the people who went to Hamburg had gone to Timbuctoo,
they would now be indistinguishable from the semi-bar
barian negroes who inhabit that central African metropolis ; 1

1 No ! not even though they were bodily brothers ! The geographical

1 82 Selected Papers on Philosophy

and if the people who went to Timbuctoo had gone to Ham
burg, they would now have been white-skinned merchants
driving a roaring trade in imitation sherry and indigestible
port. . . . The differentiating agency must be sought in
the great permanent geographical features of land and sea
. . . these have necessarily and inevitably moulded the
characters and histories of every nation upon the earth.
. . . We cannot regard any nation as an active agent in
differentiating itself. Only the surrounding circumstances
can have any effect in such a direction. [These two sentences
dogmatically deny the existence of the relatively inde
pendent physiological cycle of causation.] To suppose other
wise is to suppose that the mind of man is exempt from the
universal law of causation. There is no caprice, no spon
taneous impulse, in human endeavours. Even tastes and
inclinations must themselves be the result of surrounding
causes." l

Elsewhere Mr. Allen, writing of the Greek culture,
says: —

" It was absolutely and unreservedly the product of the
geographical Hellas, acting upon the given factor of the
undifferentiated Aryan brain. ... To me it seems a self-
evident proposition that nothing whatsoever can differen
tiate one body of men from another, except the physical
conditions in which they are set — including, of course, under
the term physical conditions the relations of place and time
in which they stand with regard to other bodies of men.
To suppose otherwise is to deny the primordial law of

factor utterly vanishes before the ancestral factor. The difference
between Hamburg and Timbuctoo as a cause of ultimate divergence
of two races is as nothing to the difference of constitution of the
ancestors of the two races, even though as in twin brothers, this
difference might be invisible to the naked eye. No two couples of
the most homogeneous race could possibly be found so identical as,
if set in identical environments, to give rise to two identical lineages.
The minute divergence at the start grows broader with each genera
tion, and ends with entirely dissimilar breeds.

, l Article "Nation Making," in Gentleman's Magazine, 1878. I
quote from the reprint in the Popular Science Monthly Supplement,
December 1878, pp. 121, 123, 126.

Great Men and their Environment 183

Causation. To imagine that the mind can differentiate itself
is to imagine that it can be differentiated without a cause." l

This outcry about the law of universal causation being
undone, the moment we refuse to invest in the kind of
causation which is peddled round by a particular school,
makes one impatient. These writers have no imagination of
alternatives. With them there is no tertium quid, between
outword environment and miracle. Aut Cczsar, aut nullus :
Aut Spencerism, aut catechism!

If by " physical conditions " Mr. Allen means what he
does mean, the outward cycle of visible nature and man,
his assertion is simply physiologically false. For a national
mind differentiates " itself " whenever a genius is born in
its midst by causes acting in the invisible and molecular
cycle. But if Mr. Allen means by " physical conditions "
the whole of nature, his assertion, though true, forms but
the vague Asiatic profession of belief in an all-enveloping
fate, which certainly need not plume itself on any specially
advanced or scientific character.

And how can a thinker so clever as Mr. Allen fail to have
distinguished in these matters between necessary conditions
and sufficient conditions of a given result ? The French say
that to have an omelet we must break our eggs; that is,
the breaking of eggs is a necessary condition of the omelet.
But is it a sufficient condition? Does an omelet appear
whenever three eggs are broken? So of the Greek mind.
To get such versatile intelligence it may be that such com
mercial dealings with the world as the geographical Hellas
afforded are a necessary condition. But if they are a suffi
cient condition, why did not the Phoenicians outstrip the
Greeks in intelligence? No geographical environment can
produce a given type of mind. It can only foster and further
certain types fortuitously produced, and thwart and frus
trate others. Once again, its function is simply selective,

1 Article " Hellas " in Gentleman's Magazine, 1878. Reprint in
Popular Science Monthly Supplement, September 1878.

184 Selected Papers on Philosophy

and determines what shall actually be only by destroying
what is positively incompatible. An Arctic environment is
incompatible with improvident habits in its denizens; but
whether the inhabitants of such a region shall unite with
their thrift the peacefulness of the Eskimo or the pugnacity
of the Norsemen is, so far as the climate is concerned, an
accident. Evolutionists should not forget that we all have
five fingers not because four or six would not do just as
well, but merely because the first vertebrate above the
fishes happened to have that number. He owed his pro
digious success in founding a line of descent to some
entirely other quality — we know not which — but the ines
sential five fingers were taken in tow and preserved to the
present day. So of most social peculiarities. Which of
them shall be taken in tow by the few qualities which the
environment necessarily exacts is a matter of what physio
logical accidents shall happen among individuals. Mr.
Allen promises to prove his thesis in detail by the examples
of China, India, England, Rome, etc. I have not the small
est hesitation in predicting that he will do no more with
these examples than he has done with Hellas. He will
appear upon the scene after the fact, and show that the
quality developed by each race was, naturally enough, not
incompatible with its habitat. But he will utterly fail to
show that the particular form of compatibility fallen into
in each case was the one necessary and only possible
form.

Naturalists know well enough how indeterminate the
harmonies between a fauna and its environment are. An
animal may better his chances of existence in either of
many ways — growing aquatic, arboreal, or subterranean;
small and swift, or massive and bulky; spiny, horny,
slimy, or venomous; more timid or more pugnacious;
more cunning or more fertile of offspring; more gre
garious or more solitary; or in other ways besides — and
any one of these ways may suit him to many widely
different environments.

Great Men and their Environment 185

Readers of Mr. A. R. Wallace will well remember the
striking illustrations of this in his Malay Archipelago : —

" Borneo closely resembles New Guinea not only in its
vast size and its freedom from volcanoes, but in its variety
of geological structure, its uniformity of climate, and the
general aspect of the forest vegetation that clothes its sur
face; the Moluccas are the counterpart of the Philippines
in their volcanic structure, their extreme fertility, their
luxuriant forests, and their frequent earthquakes; and
Bali, with the east end of Java, has a climate almost as dry
and a soil almost as arid as that of Timor. Yet between
these corresponding groups of islands, constructed, as it
were, after the same pattern, subjected to the same climate,
and bathed by the same oceans, there exists the greatest
possible contrast when we compare their animal produc
tions. Nowhere does the ancient doctrine that differences or
similarities in the various forms of life that inhabit different
countries are due to corresponding physical differences or
similarities in the countries themselves, meet with so direct
and palpable a contradiction. Borneo and New Guinea, as
alike physically as two distinct countries can be, are zoo
logically wide as the poles asunder; while Australia, with
its dry winds, its open plains, its stony deserts, and its
temperate climate, yet produces birds and quadrupeds
which are closely related to those inhabiting the hot, damp,
luxuriant forests which everywhere clothe the plains and
mountains of New Guinea."

Here we have similar physical-geography environments
harmonising with widely differing animal lives, and similar
animal lives harmonizing with widely differing geographical
environments. A singularly accomplished writer, E. Gry-
zanowski, in the North American Review* uses the in
stances of Sardinia and Corsica in support of this thesis
with great effect. He says :—

" These sister islands, lying in the very centre of the
Mediterranean, at almost equal distances from the centres
i Vol. cxiii. p. 318 (October 1871).

1 86 Selected Papers on Philosophy

of Latin and Neo-Latin civilization, within easy reach
the Phoenician, the 'Greek, and the Saracen, with a coas
line of more than a thousand miles, endowed with obvio
and tempting advantages, and hiding untold sources
agricultural and mineral wealth, have nevertheless remain
unknown, unheeded, and certainly uncared for during tl
thirty centuries of European history. . . . These islan<
have dialects, but no language; records of battles, but :i
history. They have customs, but no laws; the vendeti
but no justice. They have wants and wealth, but no cor
merce; timber and ports, but no shipping. They ha1
legends, but no poetry; beauty, but no art; and twen
years ago it could still be said that they had universities, b
no students. . . . That Sardinia, with all her emotion
and picturesque barbarism, has never produced a sing
artist is almost as strange as her barbarism itself. . .
Near the focus of European civilization, in the very sp
which an a priori geographer would point out as the mo
favourable place for material and intellectual, commerce
and political development, these strange sister islands ha11
slept their secular sleep, like nodes on the sounding boai
of history."

This writer then goes on to compare Sardinia and Sici
with some detail. All the material advantages are in favoi
of Sardinia, " and the Sardinian population, being of £
ancestry more mixed than that of the English race, wou
justify far higher expectations than that of Sicily." Y
Sicily's past history has been brilliant in the extreme, ar
her commerce to-day is great. Dr. Gryzanowski has h
own theory of the historic torpor of these favoured isle
He thinks they stagnated because they never gaim
political autonomy, being always owned by some Cont
nental power. I will not dispute the theory ; but I will as!
Why did they not gain it? and answer immediately
Simply because no individuals were born there with patrio
ism and ability enough to inflame their countrymen wil
national pride, ambition, and thirst for independent lif

Great Men and their Environment 187

x>rsicans and Sardinians are probably as good stuff as any
f their neighbours. But the best wood-pile will not blaze
ill a torch is applied, and the appropriate torches seem to
ave been wanting.1

Sporadic great men come everywhere. But for a com-
lunity to get vibrating through and through with intensely
ctive life, many geniuses coming together and in rapid

1 1 am well aware that in much that follows (though in nothing
aat precedes) I seem to be crossing the heavily shotted bows of
Gal ton, for whose laborious investigations into the heredity of
enius I have the greatest respect. Mr. Galton inclines to think
lat genius of intellect and passion is bound to express itself, what-
ver the outward opportunity, and that within any given race an
qual number of geniuses of each grade must needs be born in every
qual period of time; a subordinate race cannot possibly engender

large number of high-class geniuses, etc. He would, I suspect,
fer the suppositions I go on to make — of great men fortuitously
ssembling around a given epoch and making it great, and of their
eing fortuitously absent from certain places and times (from Sar-
inia, from Boston now, etc.) — to be radically vicious. I hardly
hink, however, that he does justice to the great complexity of the
onditions of effective greatness, and to the way in which the physio-
agical averages of production may be masked entirely during long
•eriods, either by the accidental mortality of geniuses in infancy, or
»y the fact that the particular geniuses born happened not to find
asks. I doubt the truth of his assertion that intellectual genius, like
nurder, " will out." It is true that certain types are irrepressible.
Voltaire, Shelley, Carlyle, can hardly be conceived leading a dumb
.nd vegetative life in any epoch. But take Mr. Galton himself, take
iis cousin Mr. Darwin, and take Mr. Spencer : nothing is to me more
onceivable than that at another epoch all three of these men might
iave died " with all their music in them," known only to their friends
5 persons of strong and original character and judgment. What has
tarted them on their career of effective greatness is simply the
,ccident of each stumbling upon a task vast, brilliant, and con-
;enial enough to call out the convergence of all his passions and
K)wers. I see no more reason why, in case they had not fallen in with
heir several hobbies at propitious periods in their life, they need
tecessarily have hit upon other hobbies, and made themselves
qually great. Their case seems similar to that of the Washingtons,
/romwells, and Grants, who simply rose to their occasions. But apart
rom these causes of fallacy, I am strongly disposed to think that
rhere transcendent geniuses are concerned the numbers anyhow are
o small that their appearance will not fit into any scheme of averages.
Chat is, two or three might appear together, just as the two or three
>alls nearest the target centre might be fired consecutively. Take
onger epochs and more firing, and the great geniuses and near balls
rould on the whole be more spread out.

1 88 Selected Papers on Philosophy

succession are required. This is why great epochs are so
rare — why the sudden bloom of a Greece, an early Rome,
a Renaissance, is such a mystery. Blow must follow blow
so fast that no cooling can occur in the intervals. Then the
mass of the nation grows incandescent, and may continue
to glow by pure inertia long after the originators of its
internal movement have passed away. We often hear sur
prise expressed that in these high tides of human affairs not
only the people should be filled with stronger life, but that
individual geniuses should seem so exceptionally abundant
This mystery is just about as deep as the time-honoured
conundrum as to why great rivers flow by great towns. It
is true that great public fermentations awaken and adopt
many geniuses, who in more torpid times would have had
no chance to work. But over and above this there must be
an exceptional concourse of genius about a time, to make
the fermentation begin at all. The unlikeliness of the
concourse is far greater than the unlikeliness of any parti
cular genius; hence the rarity of these periods and the
exceptional aspect which they always wear.

It is folly, then, to speak of the " laws of history " as of
something inevitable, which science has only to discover,
and whose consequences any one can then foretell but do
nothing to alter or avert. Why, the very laws of physics are>
conditional, and deal with ifs. The physicist does not say, J
" The water will boil anyhow; " he only says it will boil
if a fire be kindled beneath it. And so the utmost the student J
of sociology can ever predict is that if a genius of a certain I
sort show the way, society will be sure to follow. It might
long ago have been predicted with great confidence that
both Italy and Germany would reach a stable unity if some
one could but succeed in starting the process. It could not
have been predicted, however, that the modus operandi in
each case would be subordination to a paramount state
rather than federation, because no historian could have
calculated the freaks of birth and fortune which gave at
the same moment such positions of authority to three such

Great Men and their Environment 189

peculiar individuals as Napoleon III., Bismarck, and
Cavour. So of our own politics. It is certain now that the
movement of the independents, reformers, or whatever one
please to call them, will triumph. But whether it do so by
converting the Republican party to its ends, or by rearing a
new party on the ruins of both our present factions, the
historian cannot say. There can be no doubt that the
reform movement would make more progress in one year
with an adequate personal leader than as now in ten without
one. Were there a great citizen, splendid with every civic
gift, to be its candidate, who can doubt that he would lead
us to victory ? But, at present, we, his environment, who
sigh for him and would so gladly preserve and adopt him
if he came, can neither move without him, nor yet do any
thing to bring him forth.1

To conclude : The evolutionary view of history, when it
denies the vital importance of individual initiative, is, then,
an utterly vague and unscientific conception, a lapse from
modern scientific determinism into the most ancient oriental
fatalism. The lesson of the analysis that we have made
(even on the completely deterministic hypothesis with
which we started) forms an appeal of the most stimulating
sort to the energy of the individual. Even the dogged
resistance of the reactionary conservative to changes which
lie cannot hope entirely to defeat is justified and shown
to be effective. He retards the movement; deflects it a
little by the concessions he extracts ; gives it a resultant
momentum, compounded of his inertia and his adversaries'
speed; and keeps up, in short, a constant lateral pressure,
which, to be sure, never heads it round about, but brings it
up at last at a goal far to the right or left of that to which
it would have drifted had he allowed it to drift alone.

I now pass to the last division of my subject, the function

1 Since this paper was written, President Cleveland has to a certain
extent met the need. But who can doubt that if he had certain
other qualities which he has not yet shown, his influence would have
been still more decisive? (1896).

190 Selected Papers on Philosophy

of the environment in mental evolution. After what I have
already said, I may be quite concise. Here, if anywhere,
it would seem at first sight as if that school must be right
which makes the mind passively plastic, and the environ
ment actively productive of the form and order of its
conceptions ; which, in a word, thinks that all mental pro
gress must result from a series of adaptive changes, in the
sense already defined of that word. We know what a vast
part of our mental furniture consists of purely remembered,
not reasoned, experience. The entire field of our habits
and associations by contiguity belongs here. The entire
field of those abstract conceptions which were taught us
with the language into which we were born belongs here
also. And, more than this, there is reason to think that the
order of " outer relations " experienced by the individual
may itself determine the order in which the general char
acters imbedded therein shall be noticed and extracted by
his mind.1 The pleasures and benefits, moreover, which
certain parts of the environment yield, and the pains and
hurts which other parts inflict, determine the direction of
our interest and our attention, and so decide at which
points the accumulation of mental experiences shall begin.
It might, accordingly, seem as if there were no room for
any other agency than this; as if the distinction we have
found so useful between " spontaneous variation," as the
producer of changed forms, and the environment, as their
preserver and destroyer, did not hold in the case of mental
progress; as if, in a word, the parallel with darwinism
might no longer obtain, and Spencer might be quite right
with his fundamental law of intelligence, which says, " The
cohesion between psychical states is proportionate to the
frequency with which the relation between the answering
external phenomena has been repeated in experience." 2

1 That is, if a certain general character be rapidly repeated in our
outer experience with a number of strongly contrasted concomitants,
it will be sooner abstracted than if its associates are invariable or
monotonous.

1 Principles of Psychology, i. 460. See also pp. 463, 464, 500. On

Great Men and their Environment 191

But, in spite of all these facts, I have no hesitation what
ever in holding firm to the darwinian distinction even here.
I maintain that the facts in question are all drawn from the
lower strata of the mind, so to speak — from the sphere of
its least evolved functions, from the region of intelligence
which man possesses in common with the brutes. And I
can easily show that throughout the whole extent of those
mental departments which are highest, which are most
characteristically human, Spencer's law is violated at every
step; and that as a matter of fact the new conceptions,
emotions, and active tendencies which evolve are originally
produced in the shape of random images, fancies, acci
dental out-births of spontaneous variation in the functional
activity of the excessively instable human brain, which
the outer environment simply confirms or refutes, adopts
or rejects, preserves or destroys — selects, in short, just as
it selects morphological and social variations due to mole
cular accidents of an analogous sort.

It is one of the tritest of truisms that human intelligences
of a simple order are very literal. They are slaves of habit,
doing what they have been taught without variation ; dry,
prosaic, and matter-of-fact in their remarks; devoid of
humour, except of the coarse physical kind which rejoices
in a practical joke; taking the world for granted ; and pos
sessing in their faithfulness and honesty the single gift by
which they are sometimes able to warm us into admiration.
But even this faithfulness seems to have a sort of inorganic
ring, and to remind us more of the immutable properties
of a piece of inanimate matter than of the steadfastness of
a human will capable of alternative choice. When we des
cend to the brutes, all these peculiarities are intensified. No
reader of Schopenhauer can forget his frequent allusions to
the trockener ernst of dogs and horses, nor to their ehrlichkeit.

page 408 the law is formulated thus: The persistence of the con
nection in consciousness is proportionate to the persistence of the
outer connection. Mr. Spencer works most with the law of frequency.
Either law, from my point of view, is false; but Mr. Spencer ought
not to think them synonymous.

192 Selected Papers on Philosophy

And every noticer of their ways must receive a deep im
pression of the fatally literal character of the few, simple,
and treadmill-like operations of their minds.

But turn to the highest order of minds, and what a
change! Instead of thoughts of concrete things patiently
following one another in a beaten track of habitual sug
gestion, we have the most abrupt cross-cuts and transitions
from one idea to another, the most rarefied abstractions
and discriminations, the most unheard-of combinations of
elements, the subtlest associations of analogy; in a word,
we seem suddenly introduced into a seething caldron of
ideas, where everything is fizzling and bobbing about in a
state of bewildering activity, where partnerships can be
joined or loosened in an instant, treadmill routine is un
known, and the unexpected seems the only law. According
to the idiosyncrasy of the individual, the scintillations will
have one character or another. They will be sallies of wit
and humour ; they will be flashes of poetry and eloquence ;
they will be constructions of dramatic fiction or of mechani
cal device, logical or philosophic abstractions, business
projects, or scientific hypotheses, with trains of experi
mental consequences based thereon; they will be musical
sounds, or images of plastic beauty or picturesqueness, or
visions of moral harmony. But, whatever their differences
may be, they will all agree in this — that their genesis is
sudden and, as it were, spontaneous. That is to say, the
same premises would not, in the mind of another individual,
have engendered just that conclusion; although, when the
conclusion is offered to the other individual, he may
thoroughly accept and enjoy it, and envy the brilliancy of
him to whom it first occurred.

To Professor Jevons is due the great credit of having
emphatically pointed out l how the genius of discovery
depends altogether on the number of these random notions
and guesses which visit the investigator's mind. To be
fertile in hypotheses is the first requisite, and to be willing

1 In his Principles of Science, chaps, xi. xii. xxvi.

Great Men and their Environment 193

to throw them away the moment experience contradicts
them is the next. The Baconian method of collating tables
of instances may be a useful aid at certain times. But one
might as well expect a chemist's note-book to write down
the name of the body analyzed, or a weather table to sum
itself up into a prediction of probabilities of its own accord,
as to hope that the mere fact of mental confrontation with
a certain series of facts will be sufficient to make any brain
conceive their law. The conceiving of the law is a spontan
eous variation in the strictest sense of the term. It flashes
out of one brain, and no other, because the instability of
tha.t brain is such as to tip and upset itself in just that par
ticular direction. But the important thing to notice is that
the good flashes and the bad flashes, the triumphant
hypotheses and the absurd conceits, are on an exact
equality in respect of their origin. Aristotle's absurd
Physics and his immortal Logic flow from one source:
the forces that produce the one produce the other. When
walking along the street, thinking of the blue sky or the
fine spring weather, I may either smile at some grotesque
whim which occurs to me, or I may suddenly catch an
intuition of the solution of a long-unsolved problem, which
at that moment was far from my thoughts. Both notions
are shaken out of the same reservoir — the reservoir of a
brain in which the reproduction of images in the relations
of their outward persistence or frequency has long ceased
to be the dominant law. But to the thought, when it is
once engendered, the consecration of agreement with out
ward relations may come. The conceit perishes in a moment,
and is forgotten. The scientific hypothesis arouses in me
a fever of desire for verification. I read, write, experiment,
consult experts. Everything corroborates my notion, which
being then published in a book spreads from review to
review and from mouth to mouth, till at last there is
no doubt I am enshrined in the Pantheon of the great
diviners of nature's ways. The environment preserves the

N

194 Selected Papers on Philosophy

conception which it was unable to produce in any brain
less idiosyncratic than my own.

Now, the spontaneous upsettings of brains this way
and that at particular moments into particular ideas and
combinations are matched by their equally spontaneous
permanent tiltings or saggings towards determinate
directions. The humorous bent is quite characteristic ; the
sentimental one equally so. And the personal tone of each
mind, which makes it more alive to certain classes of ex
perience than others, more attentive to certain impressions,
more open to certain reasons, is equally the result of that
invisible and unimaginable play of the forces of growth
within the nervous system which, irresponsibly to the
environment, makes the brain peculiarly apt to function
in a certain way. Here again the selection goes on. The
products of the mind with the determined aesthetic bent
please or displease the community. We adopt Wordsworth,
and grow unsentimental and serene. We are fascinated by
Schopenhauer, and learn from him the true luxury of woe.
The adopted bent becomes a ferment in the community,
and alters its tone. The alteration may be a benefit or a
misfortune, for it is (pace Mr. Allen) a differentiation from
within, which has to run the gauntlet of the larger environ
ment's selective power. Civilized Languedoc, taking the
tone of its scholars, poets, princes, and theologians, fell a
prey to its rude Catholic environment in the Albigensian
crusade. France in 1792, taking the tone of its St. Justs and
Marats, plunged into its long career of unstable outward
relations. Prussia in 1806, taking the tone of its Hum-
boldts and its Steins, proved itself in the most signal way
" adjusted " to its environment in 1872.

Mr. Spencer, in one of the strangest chapters of his
Psychology,* tries to show the necessary order in which the
development of conceptions in the human race occurs. No
abstract conception can be developed, according to him,

1 Part viii. chap. iii.

Great Men and their Environment 195

until the outward experiences have reached a certain
degree of heterogeneity, definiteness, coherence, and so
forth.

" Thus the belief in an unchanging order, the belief in
law, is a belief of which the primitive man is absolutely
incapable. . . . Experiences such as he receives furnish
but few data for the conception of uniformity, whether as
displayed in things or in relations. . . . The daily impres
sions which the savage gets yield the notion very imper
fectly, and in but few cases. Of all the objects around —
trees, stones, hills, pieces of water, clouds, and so forth
— most differ widely . . . and few approach complete
likeness so nearly as to make discrimination difficult.
Even between animals of the same species it rarely happens
that, whether alive or dead, they are presented in just the
same attitudes. ... It is only along with a gradual de
velopment of the arts . . . that there come frequent
experiences of perfectly straight lines admitting of com
plete apposition, bringing the perceptions of equality and
inequality. Still more devoid is savage life of the experiences
which generate the conception of the uniformity of success-
sion. The sequences observed from hour to hour and day
to day seem anything but uniform ; difference is a far more
conspicuous trait among them. ... So that if we contem
plate primitive human life as a whole, we see that multi
formity of sequence, rather than uniformity, is the notion
which it tends to generate. . . . Only as fast as the
practice of the arts develops the idea of measure can the
consciousness of uniformity become clear. . . . Those
conditions furnished by advancing civilization which make
possible the notion of uniformity simultaneously make
possible the notion of exactness. . . . Hence the primitive
man has little experience which cultivates the consciousness
of what we call truth. How closely allied this is to the
consciousness which the practice of the arts cultivates is
implied even in language. We speak of a true surface as
well as a true statement. Exactness describes perfection in

196 Selected Papers on Philosophy

a mechanical fit, as well as perfect agreement between the
results of calculations."

The whole burden of Mr. Spencer's book is to show the
fatal way in which the mind, supposed passive, is moulded
by its experiences of " outer relations." In this chapter
the yard-stick, the balance, the chronometer, and other
machines and instruments come to figure among the " re
lations " external to the mind. Surely they are so, after
they have been manufactured; but only because of the
preservative power of the social environment. Originally
all these things and all other institutions were flashes of
genius in an individual head, of which the outer environ
ment showed no sign. Adopted by the race and become its
heritage, they then supply instigations to new geniuses
whom they environ to make new inventions and discoveries ;
and so the ball of progress rolls. But take out the geniuses,
or alter their idiosyncrasies, and what increasing uniformi
ties will the environment show? We defy Mr. Spencer or
any one else to reply.

The plain truth is that the " philosophy " of evolution
(as distinguished from our special information about par
ticular cases of change) is a metaphysical creed, and nothing
else. It is a mood of contemplation, an emotional attitude,
rather than a system of thought — a mood which is old as
the world, and which no refutation of any one incarnation
of it (such as the spencerian philosophy) will dispel; the
mood of fatalistic pantheism, with its intuition of the One
and All, which was, and is, and ever shall be, and from whose
womb each single thing proceeds. Far be it from us to speak
slightingly here of so hoary and mighty a style of looking
on the world as this. What we at present call scientific
<iiscoveries had nothing to do with bringing it to birth, nor
can one easily conceive that they should ever give it its
quietus, no matter how logically incompatible with its
spirit the ultimate phenomenal distinctions which science
accumulates should turn out to be. It can laugh at the
phenomenal distinctions on which science is based, for it

Great Men and their Environment 1 97

draws its vital breath from a region which — whether above
or below — is at least altogether different from that in which
science dwells. A critic, however, who cannot disprove the
truth of the metaphysic creed, can at least raise his voice
in protest against its disguising itself in " scientific " plumes.
I think that all who have had the patience to follow me
thus far will agree that the spencerian " philosophy " of
social and intellectual progress is an obsolete anachronism,
reverting to a pre-darwinian type of thought, just as the
spencerian philosophy of " Force," effacing all the previous
distinctions between actual and potential energy, momen
tum, work, force, mass, etc., which physicists have with so
much agony achieved, carries us back to a pre-galilean age.

X

WHAT PRAGMATISM MEANS *

SOME years ago, being with a camping party in the moun
tains, I returned from a solitary ramble to find every one
engaged in a ferocious metaphysical dispute. The corpus
of the dispute was a squirrel — a live squirrel supposed to be
clinging to one side of a tree- trunk ; while over against the
tree's opposite side a human being was imagined to stand.
This human witness tries to get sight of the squrrrel by
moving rapidly round the tree, but no matter how fast he
goes, the squirrel moves as fast in the opposite direction,
and always keeps the tree between himself and the man, so
that never a glimpse of him is caught. The resultant meta
physical problem now is this: Does the man gQ_jroun_d the
squirrel or not ? He goes round the tree, sure enough, and
the squirrel is on the tree ; but does he go round the squirrel ?
In the unlimited leisure of the wilderness discussion had
been worn threadbare. Every one had taken sides and was
obstinate; and the numbers on both sides were even.
Each side, when I appeared, therefore appealed to me to
make it a majority. Mindful of the scholastic adage that
whenever you meet a contradiction you must make a
distinction, I immediately sought and found one, as
follows ; " Which party is right," I said, " depends on what
you practically mean by ' going round ' the squirrel. If
you mean passing from the north of him to the east, then
to the south, then to the west, and then to the north of him
again, obviously the man does go round him, for he occupies
these successive positions. But if on the contrary you mean
being first in front of him, then on the right of him, then
behind him, then on his left, and finally in front again, it
1 From Pragmatism, 1907, pp. 43-81.
198

What Pragmatism Means 199

is quite obvious that the man fails to go round him, for by
compensating movements the squirrel makes, he keeps his
belly turned towards the man all the time, and his back
turned away. Make the distinction, and there is no occasion
for any further dispute. You are both right and both wrong,
according as you conceive the verb ' to go round ' in one
practical fashion or the other."

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

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

A glance at the histonMofJheidea will show you still
better what pragmatisi^ieaiisr^Tie term is derived from
the same Greekword irpdypa, meaning action, from which
our words " practice " and " practical " come. It was first
introduced into philosophy by Mr. Charles Peirce in 1878.
In an article entitled " How to Make Our Ideas Clear," in
the Popular Science Monthly for January of that year,1
1 Translated in the Revue Philosophique for January 1879 (vol. vii.).

200 Selected Papers on Philosophy

Mr. Peirce, after pointing out that our beliefs are really
rules for action, said that, to develop a thought's meaning,
we need only determine what conduct it is fitted to produce :
that conduct is for us its sole significance. And the tangible
fact at the root of all our thought-distinctions, however
subtle, is that there is no one of them so fine as to consist
in anything but a possible difference of practice. To attain
perfect clearness in our thoughts of an object, then, we
need only consider what conceivable effects of a practical
kind the object may involve — what sensations we are to
expect from it, and what reactions we must prepare. Our
conception of these effects, whether immediate or remote,
is then for us the whole of our conception of the object, so
far as that conception has positive significance at all.

This is the principle of Peirce, the principle of pragmatism.
It lay entirely unnoticed by any one for twenty years, until
I, in an address before Professor Howison's philosophical
union at the university of California, brought it forward
again and made a special application of it to religion. By
that date (1898) the times seemed ripe for its reception.
The word " pragmatism " spread, and at present it fairly
spots the pages of the philosophic journals. On all hands
we find the " pragmatic movement " spoken of, sometimes
with respect, sometimes with contumely, seldom with
clear understanding. It is evident that the term applies
itself conveniently to a number of tendencies that hitherto
have lacked a collective name, and that it has " come to
stay."

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

" All realities influence our practice," he wrote me, " and
that influence is their meaning for us. I am accustomed to
put questions to my classes in this way : In what respects

What Pragmatism Means 20 r

would the world be different if this alternative or that were
true? If I can find nothing that would become different,
then the alternative has no sense."

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

It is astonishing to see how many philosophical disputes
collapse into insignificance the moment you subject them
to this simple test of tracing a concrete consequence. There
can be no difference anywhere that doesn't make a difference
elsewhere — no difference in abstract truth that doesn't
express itself in a difference in concrete fact and in conduct
consequent upon that fact, imposed on somebody, somehow,
somewhere, and somewhen. The whole function of philo
sophy ought to be to find out what definite difference it

1 " Theorie und Praxis," Zeitsch. des Oestcrreichische* Ingcnicur u.
Architecten-Vereines, 1905, Nr. 4, u. 6. I find a still more radical prag-
matism than Ostwald' s in an address by Professor W. S. Franklin:
" I think that the sickliest notion of physics, even if a student gets
it, is that it is " the science of masses, molecules, and the ether."
And I think that the healthiest notion, even if a student does not
wholly get it, is that physics is the science of the ways of taking
hold of bodies and pushing them! " (Science, January 2, 1903.)

2O2 Selected Papers on Philosophy

will make to you and me, at definite instants of our life, if
this world-formula or that world-formula be the true one.

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

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

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

Metaphysics has usually followed a very primitive kind of

What Pragmatism Means 203

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

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

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

All these, you see, are anti-intellectualist tendencies, i-
Against rationalism as a pretension and a method prag
matism is fully armed and militant. But, at the outset, at
least, it stands for no particular results. It has no dogmas,
and no doctrines save its method. As the young Italian

204 Selected Papers on Philosophy

pragmatist Papini has well said, it lies in the midst of our
theories like a corridor in a hotel. Innumerable chambers
open out of it. In one you may find a man writing an athe
istic volume; in the next some one on his knees praying
for faith and strength; in a third a chemist investigating
a body's properties; in a fourth a system of idealistic
metaphysics is being excogitated; in a fifth the impossi
bility of metaphysics is being shown. But they all own
the -corridor, and all must pass through it if they want a
practicable way of getting into or out of their respective
rooms.

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

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

One of the most successfully cultivated branches of
philosophy in our time is what is called inductive_logic,
the study of the conditions under which our sciences have
evolved. Writers on this subject have begun to show a
singular unanimity as to what the laws of nature and ele
ments of fact mean when formulated by mathematicians,,
physicists, and chemists When the first mathematical,
logical, and natural uniformities, the first laws, were dis
covered, men were so carried away by the clearness, beauty,
and simplification that resulted that they believed them-

What Pragmatism Means 205

selves to have deciphered authentically the eternal thoughts
of the Almighty. His mind also thundered and rever
berated in syllogisms. He also thought in conic sections,
squares, and roots and ratios, and geometrized like Euclid.
He made Kepler's laws for the planets to follow; he made
velocity increase proportionally to the time in falling
bodies; he made the law of the sines for light to obey when
refracted; he established the classes, orders, families, and
genera of plants and animals, and fixed the distances
between them. He thought the archetypes of all things, and
devised their variations ; and when we rediscover any one
of these his wondrous institutions, we seize his mind in its
very literal intention.

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

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

Riding now on the front of this wave of scientific logic,
Messrs. Schiller and Dewey appear with their pragmatistic
account of what truth everywhere signifies. Everywhere,
these teachers say, " truth " in our ideas and beliefs means
the same thing that it means in science. It means, they

206 Selected Papers on Philosophy

say, nothing but this, that ideas (which themselves are but
parts of our experience) become true just in so far as they help
us to get into satisfactory relation with other parts of our
experience, to summarise them and get about among them
by conceptual shortcuts instead of following the intermin
able succession of particular phenomena. Any idea upon
which we can ride, so to speak ; any idea that will carry us
prosperously from any one part of our experience to any
other part, linking things satisfactorily, working securely,
simplifying, saving labour — is true for just so much, true
in so far forth, true instrumentally. This is the "-^^^^en;:
tal_" view of truth taught so successfully at Chicago" the
view that truth in our ideas means their power to " work,"
promulgated so brilliantly at Oxforo^.

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

The observable process which Schiller and Dewey par
ticularly singled out for generalization is the familiar one by
which any individual settles into new opinions. The process
here is always the same. The individual has a stock of old
opinions already, but he meets a new experience that puts
them to a strain. Somebody contradicts them; or in a
reflective moment he discovers that they contradict each
other; or he hears of facts with which they are incompa
tible; or desires arise in him which they cease to satisfy.
The result is an inward trouble to which his mind till then
had been a stranger, and from which he seeks to escape by
modifying his previous mass of opinions. He saves as much
of it as he can, for in this matter of belief we are all extreme

What Pragmatism Means 207

conservatives. So he tries to change first this opinion, and
then that (for they resist change very variously), until at
last some new idea comes up which he can graft upon the
ancient stock with a minimum of disturbance of the latter,
some idea that mediates between the stock and the new
experience and runs them into one another most felicitously
and expediently.

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

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

208 Selected Papers on Philosophy

them altogether, or to abuse those who bear witness for
them.

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

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

I need not multiply instances. A new opinion counts as
" true " just in proportion as it gratifies the individual's
desire to assimilate the novel in his experience to his beliefs
in stock. It must both lean on old truth and grasp new fact ;
and its success (as I said a moment ago) in doing this, is a
matter for the individual's appreciation. 'When old truth
grows, then, by new truth's addition, it is for subjective
reasons. We are in the process and obey the reasons. That

What Pragmatism Means 209

new idea is truest which performs most felicitously its
function of satisfying our double urgency. It makes itself
true, gets itself classed as true, by the way it works;
grafting itself then upon the ancient body of truth, which
thus grows much as a tree grows by the activity of a new
layer of cambium.

Now Dewey and Schiller proceed to generalize this
observation and to apply it to the most ancient parts of
truth. They also once were plastic. They also were called
true for human reasons. They also mediated between still
earlier truths and what in those days were novel observa
tions. Purely objective truth, truth in whose establishment
the function of giving human satisfaction in marrying pre
vious parts of experience with newer parts played no r61e
whatever, is nowhere to be found. The reasons why we call
things true is the reason why they are true, for " to be true "
means only to perform this marriage-function.

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

Mr. Schiller still gives to all this view of truth the name
of " Humanism," but, for this doctrine too, the name of
pragmatism seems fairly to be in the ascendant, so
o

210 Selected Papers on Philosophy

I will treat it under the name of pragmatism in these
lectures.

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

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

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

What Pragmatism Means 2ii

be what we ought to think unconditionally. The con
ditioned ways in which we do think are so much irrelevance
and matter for psychology. Down with psychology, up with
logic, in all this question!

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

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

But enough of this at present? The justification of what
I say must be postponed. I wish now to add a word in
further explanation of the claim I made at our last meeting
that pragmatism may be a happy harmonizer of empiricist

2 1 2 Selected Papers on Philosophy

ways of thinking with the more religious demands of human
beings.

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

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

What Pragmatism Means 213

but thereupon he leaves you to be finitely saved by your
own temporal devices.

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

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

What I said just now about the Absolute, of transcen
dental idealism, is a case in point. First, I called it majestic
and said it yielded religious comfort to a class of minds,
and then I accused it of remoteness and sterility. But so
far as it affords such comfort, it surely is not sterile; it has
that amount of value; it performs a concrete function. As

214 Selected Papers on Philosophy

a good pragmatist, I myself ought to call the Absolute
true "in so far forth," then; and I unhesitatingly now do so.

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

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

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

I am well aware how odd it must seem to some of you

J/to hear me say that an idea is " true " so long as to believe

it is profitable to our lives. That it is good, for as much as it

profits, you will gladly admit. If what we do by its aid is

What Pragmatism Means 215

good, you will allow the idea itself to be good in so far forth,
for we are the better for possessing it. But is it not a strange
misuse of the word " truth," you will say, to call ideas also
" true " for this reason?

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

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

Pragmatism says no, and I f ully agree with her. Probably

2i 6 Selected Papers on Philosophy

you also agree, so far as the abstract statement goes, but
with a suspicion that if we practically did believe every
thing that made for good in our own personal lives, we
should be found indulging all kinds of fancies about this
world's affairs, and all kinds of sentimental superstitions
about a world hereafter. Your suspicion here is undoubtedly
well founded, and it is evident that something happens
when you pass from the abstract to the concrete that
complicates the situation.

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

If I could restrict my notion of the Absolute to its bare
holiday-giving value it wouldn't clash with my other
truths. But we cannot easily thus restrict our hypotheses,
They carry supernumerary features, and these it is that

What Pragmatism Means 217

clash so. My disbelief in the Absolute means then disbelief
in those other supernumerary features, for I fully believe
in the legitimacy of taking moral holidays.

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

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

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

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

XI
HUMANISM AND TRUTH i

RECEIVING from the editor of Mind an advance proof of
Mr. Bradley 's article on " Truth and Practice," I under
stand this as a hint to me to join in the controversy over
" Pragmatism " which seems to have seriously begun.
As my name has been coupled with the movement, I deem
it wise to take the hint, the more so as in some quarters
greater credit has been given me than I deserve, and
probably undeserved discredit in other quarters falls also
to mv lot.

First, as to the word " pragmatism." I myself have
only used the term to indicate a method of carrying on
abstract discussion. The serious meaning of a concept,
says Mr. Peirce, lies in the concrete difference to some
one which its being true will make. Strive to bring all
debated conceptions to that " pragmatic " test, and you
will escape vain wrangling; if it can make no practical
difference which of two statements be true, then they are
really one statement in two verbal forms; if it can make
no practical difference whether a given statement be true
or false, then the statement has no real meaning. In neither
case is there anything fit to quarrel about : we may save our
breath and pass to more important things.

All that the pragmatic method implies, then, is that
truths should have practical 2 consequences. In England

1 From The Meaning of Truth, 1914, pp. 51-101.

Reprinted with slight verbal revision from Mind, vol. xiii. N.S.
p. 457 (October 1904). A couple of interpolations from another
article in Mind, " Humanism and Truth Once More," in vol. xiv.,
have been made.

* " Practical " in the sense of particular, of course, not in the sense
that the consequences may not be mental as well as physical.

218

Humanism and Truth 219

the word has been used more broadly still, to cover the
notion that the truth of any statement consists in the conse
quences, and particularly in their being good consequences.
Here we get beyond affairs of method altogether; and since
my pragmatism and this wider pragmatism are so different,
and both are important enough to have different names,
I think that Mr. Schiller's proposal to call the wider
pragmatism by the name of " humanism " is excellent and
ought to be adopted. The narrower pragmatism may still
be spoken of as the " pragmatic method."

I have read in the past six months many hostile reviews
of Schiller's and Dewey 's publications ; but with the excep
tion of Mr. Bradley's elaborate indictment, they are out
of reach where I write, and I have largely forgotten them.
I think that a free discussion of the subject on my part
would in any case be more useful than a polemic attempt
at rebutting these criticisms in detail. Mr. Bradley in
particular can be taken care of by Mr. Schiller. He re«
peatedly confesses himself unable to comprehend Schiller's
views, he evidently has not sought to do so sympathetically,
and I deeply regret to say that his laborious article throws,
for my mind, absolutely no useful light upon the subject. It
seems to me on the whole an ignoratio elenchi, and I feel
free to disregard it altogether.

The subject is unquestionably difficult. Messrs. Dewey 's
and Schiller's thought is eminently an induction, a general
isation working itself free from all sorts of entangling par
ticulars. If true, it involves much restatement of traditional
notions. This is a kind of intellectual product that never
attains a classic form of expression when first promulgated.
The critic ought therefore not to be too sharp and logic-
chopping in his dealings with it, but should weigh it as a
whole, and especially weigh it against its possible alterna
tives. One should also try to apply it first to one instance
and then to another to see how it will work. It seems to
me that it is emphatically not a case for instant execution,
by conviction of intrinsic absurdity or of self-contradiction,

220 Selected Papers on Philosophy

.or by caricature of what it would look like if reduced to
skeleton shape. Humanism is in fact much more like one
of those secular changes that come upon public opinion
overnight, as it were, borne upon tides " too deep for sound
or foam," that survive all the crudities and extravagances
of their advocates, that you can pin to no one absolutely
essential statement, nor kill by any one decisive stab.

Such have been the changes from aristocracy to demo
cracy, from classic to romantic taste, from theistic to
pantheistic feeling, from static to evolutionary ways of
understanding' life — changes of which we all have been
spectators. Scholasticism still opposes to such changes the
method of confutation by single decisive reasons, showing
that the new view involves self-contradiction, or traverses
some fundamental principle. This is like stopping a river
by planting a stick in the middle of its bed. Round your
obstacle flows the water and " gets there all the same." In
reading some of our opponents, I am not a little reminded
d those catholic writers who refute darwinism by telling
us that higher species cannot come from lower because
minus nequit gignere plus, or that the notion of transforma
tion is absurd, for it implies that species tend to their own
destruction, and that would violate the principle that
every reality tends to persevere in its own shape. The point
of view is too myopic, too tight and close to take in the
inductive argument. Wide generalizations in science always
meet with these summary refutations in their early days;
but they outlive them, and the refutations then sound oddly
antiquated and scholastic. I cannot help suspecting that
the humanistic theory is going through this kind of would-
be refutation at present.

The one condition of understanding humanism is to
become inductive-minded oneself, to drop rigorous defi
nitions, and follow lines of least resistance " on the whole."
" In other words," an opponent might say, " resolve your
intellect into a kind of slush." "Even so," I make reply,
"' if you will consent to use no politer word." For humanism,

Humanism and Truth 221

conceiving the more " true " as the more " satisfactory "
(Dewey's term), has sincerely to renounce rectilinear
arguments and ancient ideals of rigour and finality. It is in
just this temper of renunciation, so different from that of
pyrrhonistic scepticism, that the spirit of humanism essen
tially consists. Satisfactoriness has to be measured by a
multitude of standards, of which some, for aught we know,
may fail in any given case; and what is more satisfactory
than any alternative in sight, may to the end be a sum of
pluses and minuses, concerning which we can only trust
that by ulterior corrections and improvements a maximum
of the one and a minimum of the other may some day be
approached. It means a real change of heart, a break with
absolutistic hopes, when one takes up this inductive view
of the conditions of belief.

As I understand the pragmatist way of seeing things, it
owes its being to the break-down which the last fifty years
have brought about in the older notions of scientific truth.
" God geometrizes," it used to be said; and it was believed
that Euclid's elements literally reproduced his geometrizing.
There is an eternal and unchangeable " reason "; and its
voice was supposed to reverberate in Barbara and Celarent.
So also of the " laws of nature," physical and chemical, so
of natural history classifications— all were supposed to
be exact and exclusive duplicates of pre-human arche
types buried in the structure of things, to which the spark
of divinity hidden in our intellect enables us to penetrate.
The anatomy of the world is logical, and its logic is that of a
university professor, it was thought. Up to about 1850
almost every one believed that sciences expressed truths
that were exact copies of a definite code of non-human
realities. But the enormously rapid multiplication of
theories in these later days has well-nigh upset the notion
of any one of them being a more literally objective kind
of thing than another. There are so many geometries, so
many logics, so many physical and chemical hypotheses,
so many classifications, each one of them good for so much

222 Selected Papers on Philosophy

and yet not good for everything, that the notion that even
the truest formula may be a human device and not a literal
transcript has dawned upon us. We hear scientific laws
now treated as so much " conceptual shorthand," true
so far as they are useful but no farther. Our mind has
become tolerant of symbol instead of reproduction, of
approximation instead of exactness, of plasticity instead
of rigour. " Energetics," measuring the bare face of sensible
phenomena so as to describe in a single formula all their
changes of " level," is the last word of this scientific
humanism, which indeed leaves queries enough outstanding
as to the reason for so curious a congruence between the
world and the mind, but which at any rate makes our whole
notion of scientific truth more flexible and genial than it
used to be.

It is to be doubted whether any theorizer to-day, either
in mathematics, logic, physics, or biology, conceives him
self to be literally re-editing processes of nature or thoughts
of God. The main forms of our thinking, the separation of
subjects from predicates, the negative, hypothetic, and
disjunctive judgments, are purely human habits. The ether,
as Lord Salisbury said, is only a noun for the verb to un
dulate; and many of our theological ideas are admitted,
even by those who call them " true," to be humanistic in
like degree.

I fancy that these changes in the current notions of
truth are what originally gave the impulse to Messrs.
Dewey's and Schiller's views. The suspicion is in the air
nowadays that the superiority of one of our formulas to
another may not consist so much in its literal " objectivity,"
as in subjective qualities like its usefulness, its " elegance,"
or its congruity with our residual beliefs. Yielding to these
suspicions, and generalizing, we fall into something like
the humanistic state of mind. Truth we conceive to mean
everywhere not duplication but addition; not the con
structing of inner copies of already complete realities, but
rather the collaborating with realities so as to bring about

Humanism and Truth 225

a clearer result. Obviously this state of mind is at first full
of vagueness and ambiguity. " Collaborating " is a vague
term; it must at any rate cover conceptions and logical
arrangements. " Clearer " is vaguer still. Truth must brins
clear thoughts, as well as clear the way to action. " Reality "
is the vaguest term of all. The only way to test such a
programme at all is to apply it to the various types of
truth, in the hope of reaching an account that shall be more
precise. Any hypothesis that forces such a review upon one
has one great merit, even if in the end it prove invalid;
it gets us better acquainted with the total subject. To give
the theory plenty of " rope " and see if it hangs itself
eventually is better tactics than to choke it off at the outset
by abstract accusations of self-contradiction. I think,
therefore, that a decided effort at sympathetic mental play
with humanism is the provisional attitude to be recom
mended to the reader.

When I find myself playing sympathetically with human
ism, something like what follows is what I end by con
ceiving it to mean.

Experience is a process that continually gives us new
material to digest. We handle this intellectually by the
mass of beliefs of which we find ourselves already pos
sessed, assimilating, rejecting, or rearranging in different
degrees. Some of the apperceiving ideas are recent acquisi
tions of our own, but most of them are common-sense
traditions of the race. There is probably not a common-
sense tradition, of all those which we now live by, that was
not in the first instance a genuine discovery, an inductive
generalization like those more recent ones of the atom, of
inertia, of energy, of reflex action, or of fitness to survive.
The notions of one Time and of one Space as single continu
ous receptacles; the distinction between thoughts and
things, matter and mind; between permanent subjects
and changing attributes; the conception of classes with
sub-classes within them; the separation of fortuitous from

224 Selected Papers on Philosophy

regularly caused connections; surely all these were once
definite conquests made at historic dates by our ancestors
in their attempts to get the chaos of their crude individual
experiences into a more shareable and manageable shape.
They proved of such sovereign use as denkmittel that they
are now a part of the very structure of our mind. We cannot
play fast and loose with them. No experience can upset
them. On the contrary, they apperceive every experience
and assign it to its place.

To what effect? That we may the better foresee the
course of our experiences, communicate with one another,
and steer our lives by rule. Also that we may have a cleaner,
clearer, more inclusive mental view.

The greatest common-sense achievement, after the dis
covery of one Time and one Space, is probably the concept
of permanently existing things. When a rattle first drops out
of the hand of a baby, he does not look to see where it has
gone. Non-perception he accepts as annihilation until he
finds a better belief. That our perceptions mean beings,
rattles that are there whether we hold them in our hands
or not, becomes an interpretation so luminous of what
happens to us that, once employed, it never gets forgotten.
It applies with equal felicity to things and persons, to the
objective and to the ejective realm. However a Berkeley,
a Mill, or a Cornelius may criticize it, it works ; and in
practical life we never think of " going back " upon it, or
reading our incoming experiences in any other terms. We
may, indeed, speculatively imagine a state of " pure "
experience before the hypothesis of permanent objects
behind its flux had been framed ; and we can play with the
idea that some primeval genius might have struck into a
different hypothesis. But we cannot positively imagine
to-day what the different hypothesis could have been, for
the category of trans-perceptual reality is now one of the
foundations of our life. Our thoughts must still employ
it if they are to possess reasonableness and truth.

This notion of a first in the shape of a most chaotic pure

Humanism and Truth 225

experience which sets us questions, of a second in the way of
fundamental categories, long ago wrought into the struc
ture of our consciousness and practically irreversible, which
define the general frame within which answers must fall,
and of a third which gives the detail of the answers in the
shapes most congruous with all our present needs, is, as
I take it, the essence of the humanistic conception. It
represents experience in its pristine purity to be now so en
veloped in predicates historically worked out that we can
.think of it as little more than an Other, of a That which the
mind, in Mr. Bradley 's phrase, " encounters," and to
whose stimulating presence we respond by ways of thinking
which we call " true " in proportion as they facilitate our
mental or physical activities and bring us outer power and
inner peace. But whether the Other, the universal That,
has itself any definite inner structure, or whether, if it have
any, the structure resembles any of our predicated whats,
this is a question which humanism leaves untouched. For
us, at any rate, it insists, reality is an accumulation of our
own intellectual inventions, and the struggle for " truth "
in our progressive dealings with it is always a struggle to
work in new nouns and adjectives while altering as little
as possible the old.

It is hard to see why either Mr. Bradley 's own logic or
his metaphysics should oblige him to quarrel with this
conception. He might consistently adopt it verbatim et
literatim, if he would, and simply throw his peculiar absolute
round it, following in this the good example of Professor
Royce. Bergson in France, and his disciples, Wilbois the
physicist and Leroy, are thoroughgoing humanists in the
sense defined. Professor Milhaud also appears to be one;
and the great Poincare misses it by only the breadth of a
hair. In Germany the name of Simmel offers itself as that
of a humanist of the most radical sort. Mach and his
school, and Hertz and Ostwald must be classed as humanists.
The view is in the atmosphere and must be patiently dis
cussed,
p

226 Selected Papers on Philosophy

The best way to discuss it would be to see what the
alternative might be. What is it indeed? Its critics make
no explicit statement, Professor Royce being the only one
so far who has formulated anything definite. The first
service of humanism to philosophy accordingly seems to
be that it will probably oblige those who dislike it to search
their own hearts and heads. It will force analysis to the
front and make it the order of the day. At present the lazy
tradition that truth is adcequatio intellectus et rei seems
all there is to contradict it with. Mr. Bradley 's only
suggestion is that true thought " must correspond to a
determinate being which it cannot be said to make," and
obviously that sheds no new light. What is the meaning of
the word to "correspond"? Where is the "being" ?
What sort of things are " determinations," and what is
meant in this particular case by " not to make " ?

Humanism proceeds immediately to refine upon the
loosenesss of these epithets. We correspond in some way
with anything with which we enter into any relations at all.
If it be a thing, we may produce an exact copy of it, or we
may simply feel it as an existent in a certain place. If it
be a demand, we may obey it without knowing anything
more about it than its push. If it be a proposition, we may
agree by not contradicting it, by letting it pass. If it be a
relation between things, we may act on the first thing so
as to bring ourselves out where the second will be. If it
be something inaccessible, we may substitute a hypothetical
object for it, which, having the same consequences, will
cipher out for us real results. In a general way we may
simply add our thought to it ; and if it suffers the addition,
and the whole situation harmoniously prolongs and en
riches itself, the thought will pass for true.

As for the whereabouts of the beings thus corresponded
to, although they may be outside of the present thought
as well as in it, humanism sees no ground for saying they
are outside of finite experience itself. Pragmatically, their
reality means that we submit to them, take account of

Humanism and Truth 227

them, whether we like to or not, but this we must perpetu
ally do with experiences other than our own. The whole
system of what the present experience must correspond to
" adequately " may be continuous with the present ex
perience itself. Reality, so taken as experience other than
the present, might be either the legacy of past experience
or the content of experience to come. Its determinations
for us are in any case the adjectives which our acts of
judging fit to it, and those are essentially humanistic
things.

To say that our thought does not " make " this reality
means pragmatically that if our own particular thought
were annihilated the reality would still be there in some
shape, though possibly it might be a shape that would lack
something that our thought supplies. That reality is
" independent " means that there is something in every
experience that escapes our arbitrary control. If it be a
sensible experience it coerces our attention; if a sequence
we cannot invert it ; if we compare two terms we can come
to only one result. There is a push, an urgency, within our
very experience, against which we are on the whole power
less, and which drives us in a direction that is the destiny
of our belief. That this drift of experience itself is in the
last resort due to something independent of all possible
experience may or may not be true. There may or may not
be an extra-experiential " ding an sich " that keeps the
ball rolling, or an " absolute " that lies eternally behind
all the successive determinations which human thought has
made. But within our experience itself, at any rate, human
ism says, some determinations show themselves as being
independent of others; some questions, if we ever ask
them, can only be answered in one way; some beings, if
we ever suppose them, must be supposed to have existed
previously to the supposing; some relations, if they exist
ever, must exist as long as their terms exist.

Truth thus means, according to humanism, the relation
of less fixed parts of experience (predicates) to other

228 Selected Papers on Philosophy

relatively more fixed parts (subjects); and we are not
required to seek it in a relation of experience as such to
anything beyond itself. We can stay at home, for our
behaviour as experients is hemmed in on every side. The
forces both of advance and of resistance are exerted by
our own objects, and the notion of truth as something
opposed to waywardness or licence inevitably grows up
solipsistically inside of every human life.

So obvious is all this that a common charge against the
humanistic authors " makes me tired." " How can a
deweyite discriminate sincerity from bluff? " was a question
asked at a philosophic meeting where I reported on Dewey's
Studies. " How can the mere x pragmatist feel any duty
to think truly? " is the objection urged by Professor Royce.
Mr. Bradley in turn says that if a humanist understands his
own doctrine, " he must hold any idea, however mad, to be
the truth, if any one will have it so." And Professor Taylor
describes pragmatism as believing anything one pleases
and calling it truth.

Such a shallow sense of the conditions under which men's
thinking actually goes on seems to me most surprising.
These critics appear to suppose that, if left to itself, the
rudderless raft of our experience must be ready to drift
anywhere or nowhere. Even though there were compasses
on board, they seem to say, there would be no pole for
them to point to. There must be absolute sailing- directions,
they insist, decreed from outside, and an independent chart
of the voyage added to the " mere " voyage itself, if we
are ever to make a port. But is it not obvious that even
though there be such absolute sailing-directions in the
shape of prehuman standards of truth that we ought to
follow, the only guarantee that we shall in fact follow them
must lie in our human equipment. The " ought " would
be a brutum fulmen unless there were a felt grain inside

1 1 know of no " mere " pragmatist, if mereness here means, as it
seems to, the denial of all concreteness to the pragmatist' s thought.

Humanism and Truth 229

of our experience that conspired. As matter of fact the
devoutest believers in absolute standards must admit that
men fail to obey them. Waywardness is here, in spite of
the eternal prohibitions, and the existence of any amount
of reality ante rem is no warrant against unlimited error
in rebus being incurred. The only real guarantee we have
against licentious thinking is the circumpressure of ex
perience itself, which gets us sick of concrete errors, whether
there be a trans-empirical reality or not. How does the
partisan of absolute reality know what this orders him to-
think ? He cannot get direct sight of the absolute ; and he
has no means of guessing what it wants of him except by
following the humanistic clues. The only truth that he
himself will ever practically accept will be that to which
his finite experiences lead him of themselves. The state
of mind which shudders at the idea of a lot of experiences
left to themselves, and that augurs protection from the
sheer name of an absolute, as if, however inoperative, that
might still stand for a sort of ghostly security, is like the
mood of those good people who, whenever they hear of a
social tendency that is damnable, begin to redden and to
puff, and say " Parliament or Congress ought to make
a law against it," as if an impotent decree would give
relief.

All the sanctions of a law of truth lie in the very texture
of experience. Absolute or no absolute, the concrete truth
for us will always be that way of thinking in which our
various experiences most profitably combine.

And yet, the opponent obstinately urges, your humanist
will always have a greater liberty to play fast and loose
with truth than will your believer in an independent realm
of reality that makes the standard rigid. If by this latter
believer he means a man who pretends to know the stan
dard and who fulminates it, the humanist will doubtless
prove more flexible; but no more flexible than the absolu
tist himself if the latter follows (as fortunately our present-
day absolutists do follow) empirical methods of inquiry

230 Selected Papers on Philosophy

in concrete affairs. To consider hypotheses is surely always
better than to dogmatize ins Uaue hinein.

Nevertheless this probable flexibility of temper in him
has been used to convict the humanist of sin. Believing as
he does, that truth lies in rebus, and is at every moment our
own line of most propitious reaction, he stands forever
debarred, as I have heard a learned colleague say, from
trying to convert opponents, for does not their view, being
their most propitious momentary reaction, already fill the
bill ? Only the believer in the ante-rem brand of truth can
on this theory seek to make converts without self-stulti
fication. But can there be self-stultification in urging any
account whatever of truth? Can the definition ever con
tradict the deed ? " Truth is what I feel like saying " — sup
pose that to be the definition. " Well, I feel like saying that,
and I want you to feel like saying it, and shall continue to
say it until I get you to agree." Where is there any contra
diction ? Whatever truth may be said to be, that is the kind
of truth which the saying can be held to carry. The temper
which a saying may comport is an extra-logical matter.
It may indeed be hotter in some individual absolutist than
in a humanist, but it need not be so in another. And the
humanist, for his part, is perfectly consistent in compass
ing sea and land to make one proselyte, if his nature be
enthusiastic enough.

"But how can you be enthusiastic over any view of
things which you know to have been partly made by your
self, and which is liable to alter during the next minute ?
How is any heroic devotion to the ideal of truth possible
under such paltry conditions? "

This is just another of those objections by which the
anti-humanists show their own comparatively slack hold on
the realities of the situation. If they would only follow the
pragmatic method and ask: "What is truth known-as?
What does its existence stand for in the way of concrete
goods? " — they would see that the name of it is the inbe-
griff of almost everything that is valuable in our lives.

Humanism and Truth 231

The true is the opposite of whatever is instable, of whatever
is practically disappointing, of whatever is useless, of what
ever is lying and unreliable, of whatever is unverifiable and
unsupported, of whatever is inconsistent and contradictory,
of whatever is artificial and eccentric, of whatever is unreal
in the sense of being of no practical account. Here are
pragmatic reasons with a vengeance why we should turn to
truth — truth saves us from a world of that complexion.
What wonder that its very name awakens loyal feeling!
In particular what wonder that all little provisional fool's
paradises of belief should appear contemptible in comparison
with its bare pursuit! When absolutists reject humanism
because they feel it to be untrue, that means that the whole
habit of their mental needs is wedded already to a different
view of reality, in comparison with which the humanistic
world seems but the whim of a few irresponsible youths.
Their own subjective apperceiving mass is what speaks here
in the name of the eternal natures and bids them reject our
humanism — as they apprehend it. Just so with us human
ists, when we condemn all noble, clean-cut, fixed, eternal,
rational, temple-like systems of philosophy. These con
tradict the dramatic temperament of our nature, as our
dealings with nature and our habits of thinking have so far
brought us to conceive it. They seem oddly personal and
artificial, even when not bureaucratic and professional in
an absurd degree. We turn from them to the great unpent
and unstayed wilderness of truth as we feel it to be con
stituted, with as good a conscience as rationalists are
moved by when they turn from our wilderness into their
neater and cleaner intellectual abodes.

This is surely enough to show that the humanist does
not ignore the character of objectivity and independ
ence in truth. Let me turn next to what his opponents
mean when they say that to be true, our thoughts must
" correspond." x

1 [I cannot forbear quoting as an illustration of the contrast
between humanist and rationalist tempers of mmd, m a sphere

232 Selected Papers on Philosophy

The vulgar notion of correspondence here is that the
thoughts must copy the reality — cognitio fit per assimili-
ationem cogniti et cognoscentis ; and philosophy, without
having ever fairly sat down to the question, seems to have
instinctively accepted this idea; propositions are held
true if they copy the eternal thought; terms are held true
if they copy extra-mental realities. Implicitly, I think that
the copy-theory has animated most of the criticisms that
have been made on humanism.

A priori, however, it is not self-evident that the sole busi
ness of our mind with realities should be to copy them. Let
my reader suppose himself to constitute for a time all the
reality there is in the universe, and then to receive the
announcement that another being is to be created who shall
know him truly. How will he represent the knowing in
advance? What will he hope it to be? I doubt extremely
whether it could ever occur to him to fancy it as a mere
copying. Of what use to him would an imperfect second
edition of himself in the new comer's interior be ? It would
seem pure waste of a propitious opportunity. The demand
would more probably be for something absolutely new.
The reader would conceive the knowing humanistically.

remote from philosophy, these remarks on the Dreyfus " affaire,"
written by one who assuredly had never heard of humanism or
pragmatism: " Autant que la Revolution, T Affaire ' est desormais
une de nos ' origines.' Si elle n'a pas fait ouvrir le gouffre, c'est elle
du moins qui a rendu patent et visible le long travail souterrain qui,
silencieusement, avait prepar6 la separation entre nos deux camps
d'aujourd'hui, pour ecarter enfin, d'un coup soudain, la France des
traditionalists (poseurs de principes, chercheurs d'unite, constructeurs
de syst&mes a priori) et la France eprise du fait positif et de libre
ex amen ; — la France revolutionnaire et romantique si Ton veut,
celle qui met tres haut 1'individu, qui ne veut pas qu'un juste
perisse, fut-ce pour sauver la nation, et qui cherche la verite dans
toutes ses parties aussi bien que dans une vue d'ensemble. . . .
Duclaux ne pouvait pas concevoir qu'on preferat quelqu« chose a la
verite. Mais il voyait autour de lui de fort honne"tes gens qui,
mettant en balance la vie d'un homme et la raison d'litat, lui
avouaient de quel poids leger ils jugeaient une simple existence
individuelle, pour innocente qu'elle fut. C'etaient des classiques, des
gens a qui I' 'ensemble seul imported — La Vie de Emile Duclaux, par
Mme. Em. D., Laval, 1906, pp. 243, 247-248.]

Humanism and Truth 233

" The new comer," he would say, " must take account of
my presence by reacting on it in such a way that good would
accrue to us both. If copying be requisite to that end, let
there be copying ; otherwise not." The essence in any case
would not be the copying but the enrichment of the
previous world.

I read the other day, in a book of Professor Eucken's,
a phrase, "Die erhohung des vorgefundenen daseins," which
seems to be pertinent here. Why may not thought's
mission be to increase and elevate, rather than simply to
imitate and reduplicate, existence? No one who has read
Lotze can fail to remember his striking comment on the
ordinary view of the secondary qualities of matter, which
brands them as " illusory " because they copy nothing
in the thing. The notion of a world complete in itself, to
which thought comes as a passive mirror, adding nothing
to fact, Lotze says is irrational. Rather is thought itself
a most momentous part of fact, and the whole mission of
the pre-existing and insufficient world of matter may
simply be to provoke thought to produce its far more
precious supplement.

" Knowing," in short, may, for aught we can see before
hand to the contrary, be only one way of getting into fruitful
relations with reality, whether copying be one of the rela
tions or not.

It is easy to see from what special type of knowing the
copy-theory arose. In our dealings with natural pheno
mena the great point is to be able to foretell. Foretelling,
according to such a writer as Spencer, is the whole meaning
of intelligence. When Spencer's " law of intelligence " says
that inner and outer relations must " correspond," it means
that the distribution of terms in our inner time-scheme and
space-scheme must be an exact copy of the distribution in
real time and space of the real terms. In strict theory the
mental terms themselves need not answer to the real terms
in the sense of severally copying them, symbolic mental
terms being enough, if only the real dates and places be

234 Selected Papers on Philosophy

copied. But in our ordinary life the mental terms are
images and the real ones are sensations, and the images
so often copy the sensations that we easily take copying of
the terms as well as of relations to be the natural significance
of knowing. Meanwhile much, even of this common de
scriptive truth, is couched in verbal symbols. If our symbols
fit the world, in the sense of determining our expectations
rightly, they may even be the better for not copying its
terms.

It seems obvious that the pragmatic account of all this
routine of phenomenal knowledge is accurate. Truth here
is a relation, not of our ideas to non-human realities, but of
conceptual parts of our experience to sensational parts.
Those thoughts are true which guide us to beneficial inter
action with sensible particulars as they occur, whether
they copy these in advance or not.

From the frequency of copying in the knowledge of
phenomenal fact, copying has been supposed to be the
essence of truth in matters rational also. Geometry and logic,
it has been supposed, must copy archetypal thoughts in the
Creator. But in these abstract spheres there is no need of
assuming archetypes. The mind is free to carve so many
figures out of space, to make so many numerical collections,
to frame so many classes and series, and it can analyse
and compare so endlessly that the very superabundance
of the resulting ideas makes us doubt the " objective "
pre-existence of their models. It would be plainly wrong
to suppose a God whose thought consecrated rectangular
but not polar co-ordinates, or Jevons's notations but not
Boole's. Yet if, on the other hand, we assume God to have
thought in advance of every possible flight of human fancy
in these directions, his mind becomes too much like a
Hindoo idol with three heads, eight arms, and six breasts,
too much made up of superfoetation and redundancy for us
to wish to copy it, and the whole notion of copying tends
to evaporate from these sciences. Their objects can be

Humanism and Truth 235

better interpreted as being created step by step by men, as
fast as they successively conceive them.

If now it be asked how, if triangles, squares, square roots,
genera, and the like, are but improvised human " arte
facts," their properties and relations can be so promptly
known to be " eternal," the humanistic answer is easy. If
triangles and genera are of our own production we can keep
them invariant. We can make them " timeless " by ex
pressly decreeing that on the things we mean time shall exert
no altering effect, that they are intentionally and it may be
fictitiously abstracted from every corrupting real associate
and condition. But relations between invariant objects
will themselves be invariant. Such relations cannot be
happenings, for by hypothesis nothing shall happen to the
objects. I have tried to show in the last chapter of my
Principles of Psychology 1 that they can only be relations
of comparison. No one so far seems to have noticed my
suggestion, and I am too ignorant of the development of
mathematics to feel very confident of my own view. But
if it were correct it would solve the difficulty perfectly.
Relations of comparison are matters of direct inspection.
As soon as mental objects are mentally compared, they are
perceived to be either like or unlike. But once the same,
always the same, once different, always different, under
these timeless conditions. Which is as much as to say that
truths concerning these man-made objects are necessary
and eternal. We can change our conclusions only by chang
ing our data first.

The whole fabric of the a priori sciences can thus be
treated as a man-made product. As Locke long ago pointed
out, these sciences have no immediate connection with
fact. Only if a fact can be humanized by being identified
with any of these ideal objects, is what was true of the ob
jects now true also of the facts. The truth itself meanwhile
was originally a copy of nothing; it was only a relation

i Vol ii. pp. 641 ff.

236 Selected Papers on Philosophy

directly perceived to obtain between two artificial mental
things.1

We may now glance at some special types of knowing,
so as to see better whether the humanistic account fits.
On the mathematical and logical types we need not enlarge
further, nor need we return at much length to the case of
our descriptive knowledge of the course of nature. So far
as this involves anticipation, though that may mean copying,
it need, as we saw, mean little more than " getting ready "
in advance. But with many distant and future objects, our
practical relations are to the last degree potential and
remote. In no sense can we now get ready for the arrest of
the earth's revolution by the tidal brake, for instance ; and
with the past, though we suppose ourselves to know it truly,
we have no practical relations at all. It is obvious that,
although interests strictly practical have been the original
starting-point of our search for true phenomenal descrip
tions, yet an intrinsic interest in the bare describing func
tion has grown up. We wish accounts that shall be true,
whether they bring collateral profit or not. The primitive
function has developed its demand for mere exercise. This
theoretic curiosity seems to be the characteristically human
differentia, and humanism recognizes its enormous scope.
A true idea now means not only one that prepares us for
an actual perception. It means also one that might prepare
us for a merely possible perception, or one that, if spoken,
would suggest possible perceptions to others, or suggest
actual perceptions which the speaker cannot share. The
ensemble of perceptions thus thought of as either actual or
possible form a system which it is obviously advantageous
to us to get into a stable and consistent shape ; and here
it is that the common-sense notion of permanent beings
finds triumphant use. Beings acting outside of the thinker
explain, not only his actual perceptions, past and future,

1 Mental things which axe realities of course within the mental
world. •

Humanism and Truth 237

but his possible perceptions and those of every one else.
Accordingly they gratify our theoretic need in a supremely
beautiful way. We pass from our immediate actual through
them into the foreign and potential, and back again into
the future actual, accounting for innumerable particulars
by a single cause. As in those circular panoramas, where a
real foreground of dirt, grass, bushes, rocks, and a broken-
down cannon is enveloped by a canvas picture of sky and
earth and of a raging battle, continuing the foreground
so cunningly that the spectator can detect no joint; so
these conceptual objects, added to our present perceptual
reality, fuse with it into the whole universe of our belief. In
spite of all berkeleyan criticism, we do not doubt that they
are really there. Though our discovery of any one of them
may only date from now, we unhesitatingly say that it not
only is, but was there, if, by so saying, the past appears
connected more consistently with what we feel the present
to be. This is historic truth. Moses wrote the Pentateuch,
we think, because if he didn't all our religious habits will
have to be undone. Julius Caesar was real, or we can never
listen to history again. Trilobites were once alive, or all our
thought about the strata is at sea. Radium, discovered
only yesterday, must always have existed, or its analogy
with other natural elements, which are permanent, fails.
In all this, it is but one portion of our beliefs reacting on
another so as to yield the most satisfactory total state of
mind. That state of mind, we say, sees truth, and the
content of its deliverances we believe.

Of course, if you take the satisfactoriness concretely,
as something felt by you now, and if, by truth, you mean
truth taken abstractly and verified in the long run, you
cannot make them equate, for it is notorious that the
temporarily satisfactory is often false. Yet at each and
every concrete moment truth for each man is what man
" troweth " at that moment with the maximum of satisfac
tion to himself ; and similarly, abstract truth, truth verified
by the long run, and abstract satisfactoriness, long-run

238 Selected Papers on Philosophy

satisfactoriness, coincide. If, in short, we compare concrete
with concrete and abstract with abstract, the true and the
satisfactory do mean the same thing. I suspect that a
certain muddling of matters hereabouts is what makes
the general philosophic public so impervious to humanism's
claims.

The fundamental fact about our experience is that it is
a process of change. For the " trower " at any moment,
truth, like the visible area round a man walking in a fog, or
like what George Eliot calls " the wall of dark seen by small
fishes' eyes that pierce a span in the wide Ocean," is an
objective field which the next moment enlarges and of
which it is the critic, and which then either suffers altera
tion or is continued unchanged. The critic sees both the
first trower's truth and his own truth, compares them with
each other, and verifies or confutes. His field of view is
the reality independent of that earlier trower's thinking
with which that thinking ought to correspond. But the
critic is himself only a trower; and if the whole process
of experience should terminate at that instant, there would
be no otherwise known independent reality with which his
thought might be compared.

The immediate in experience is always provisionally in
this situation. The humanism, for instance, which I see and
try so hard to defend is the completest truth attained from
my point of view up to date. But, owing to the fact that all
experience is a process, no point of view can ever be the
last one. Every one is insufficient and off its balance
and responsible to later points of view than itself. You,
occupying some of these later points in your own person,
and believing in the reality of others, will not agree that
my point of view sees truth positive, truth timeless,
truth that counts, unless they verify and confirm what
it sees.

You generalize this by saying that any opinion, however
satisfactory, can count positively and absolutely as true
only so far as it agrees with a standard beyond itself; and

Humanism and Truth 239

if you then forget that this standard perpetually grows up
endogenously inside the web of the experiences, you may
carelessly go on to say that what distributively holds of
each experience, holds also collectively of all experience,
and that experience as such and in its totality owes what
ever truth it may be possessed of to its correspondence
with absolute realities outside of its own being. This
evidently is the popular and traditional position. From
the fact that finite experiences must draw support from one
another, philosophers pass to the notion that experience
uberhaupt must need an absolute support. The denial of
such a notion by humanism lies probably at the root of
most of the dislike which it incurs.

But is this not the globe, the elephant, and the tortoise
over again ? Must not something end by supporting itself ?
Humanism is willing to let finite experience be self-support
ing. Somewhere being must immediately breast nonentity.
Why may not the advancing front of experience, carrying
its immanent satisfactions and dissatisfactions, cut against
the black inane as the luminous orb of the moon cuts the
caerulean abyss? Why should anywhere the world be
absolutely fixed and finished? And if reality genuinely
grows, why may it not grow in these very determinations
which here and now are made ?

In point of fact it actually seems to grow by our mental
determinations, be these never so " true." Take the " great
bear " or " dipper " constellation in the heavens. We call
it by that name, we count the stars and call them seven,
we say they were seven before they were counted, and we
say that whether any one had ever noted the fact or not,
the dim resemblance to a long-tailed (or long-necked?)
animal was always truly there. But what do we mean by
this projection into past eternity of recent human ways of
thinking? Did an "absolute" thinker actually do the
counting, tell off the stars upon his standing number-tally,
and make the bear-comparison, silly as the latter is? Were

240 Selected Papers on Philosophy

they explicitly seven, explicitly bear-like, before the human
witness came ? Surely nothing in the truth of the attribu
tions drives us to think this. They were only implicitly
or virtually what we call them, and we human witnesses
first explicated them and made them " real." A fact
virtually pre-exists when every condition of its realization
save one is already there. In this case the condition lacking
is the act of the counting and comparing mind. But the
stars (once the mind considers them) themselves dictate
the result. The counting in no wise modifies their previous
nature, and, they being what and where they are, the count
cannot fall out differently. It could then always be made.
Never could the number seven be questioned, if the question
once were raised.

We have here a quasi-paradox. Undeniably something
comes by the counting that was not there before. And yet
that something was always true. In one sense you create
it, and in another sense you find it. You have to treat your
count as being true beforehand, the moment you come to
treat the matter at all.

Our stellar attributes must always be called true, then;
yet none the less are they genuine additions made by our
intellect to the world of fact. Not additions of conscious
ness only, but additions of " content." They copy nothing
that pre-existed, yet they agree with what pre-existed,
fit it, amplify it, relate and connect it with a " wain," a
number-tally, or what not, and build it out. It seems to me
that humanism is the only theory that builds this case out
in the good direction, and this case stands for innumerable
other kinds of cases. In all such cases, odd as it may sound,
our judgment may actually be said to retroact and to
enrich the past.

Our judgments at any rate change the character of future
reality by the acts to which they lead. Where these acts
are expressive of trust — trust, e.g. that a man is honest,
that our health is good enough, or that we can make a
successful effort — which acts may be a needed antecedent

Humanism and Truth 241

of the trusted things becoming true, Professor Taylor says 1
that our trust is at any rate untrue when it is made, i.e.,
before the action; and I seem to remember that he dis
poses of anything like a faith in the general excellence of
the universe (making the faithful person's part in it at any
rate more excellent) as a " lie in the soul." But the pathos
of this expression should not blind us to the complication
of the facts. I doubt whether Professor Taylor would him
self be in favour of practically handling trusters of these
kinds as Uars. Future and present really mix in such
emergencies, and one can always escape lies in them by
using hypothetic forms. But Mr. Taylor's attitude suggests
such absurd possibilities of practice that it seems to me
to illustrate beautifully how self-stultifying the conception
of a truth that shall merely register a standing fixture
may become. Theoretic truth, truth of passive copying,
sought in the sole interests of copying as such, not because
copying is good for something, but because copying ought
schlechthin to be, seems, if you look at it coldly, to be an
almost preposterous ideal. Why should the universe,
existing in itself, also exist in copies? How can it be
copied in the solidity of its objective fulness? And
even if it could, what would the motive be? " Even the
hairs of your head are numbered." Doubtless they are,
virtually; but why, as an absolute proposition, ought the
number to become copied and known? Surely knowing is
only one way of interacting with reality and adding to its
effect.

The opponent here will ask: " Has not the knowing of
truth any substantive value on its own account, apart
from the collateral advantages it may bring? And if you
allow theoretic satisfactions to exist at all, do they not
crowd the collateral satisfactions out of house and home,
and must not pragmatism go into bankruptcy, if she admits
them at all? " The destructive force of such talk disappears

1 In an article criticising Pragmatism (as he conceives it) in the
McGill University Quarterly, published at Montreal, for May 1904.

Q

242 Selected Papers on Philosophy

as soon as we use words concretely instead of abstractly,
and ask, in our quality of good pragmatists, just what the
famous theoretic needs are known as and in what the
intellectual satisfactions consist.

Are they not all mere matters of consistency — and,
emphaticalty not of consistency between an absolute reality
and the mind's copies of it, but of actually felt consistency
among judgments, objects, and habits of reacting, in the
mind's own experienceable world? And are not both our
need of such consistency and our pleasure in it conceivable
as outcomes of the natural fact that we are beings that do
develop mental habits — habit itself proving adaptively bene
ficial in an environment where the same objects, or the same
kinds of objects, recur and follow " law " ? If this were so,
what would have come first would have been the collateral
profits of habit as such, and the theoretic life would have
grown up in aid of these. In point of fact, this seems to
have been the probable case. At life's origin, any present
perception may have been " true " — if such a word could
then be applicable. Later, when reactions became organized,
the reactions became " true " whenever expectation was
fulfilled by them. Otherwise they were " false " or "mis
taken " reactions. But the same class of objects needs the
same kind of reaction, so the impulse to react consistently
must gradually have been established, and a disappoint
ment felt whenever the results frustrated expectation. Here
is a perfectly plausible germ for all our higher consistencies.
Nowadays, if an object claims from us a reaction of the
kind habitually accorded only to the opposite class of
objects, our mental machinery refuses to run smoothly.
The situation is intellectually unsatisfactory.

Theoretic truth thus falls within the mind, being the
accord of some of its processes and objects — " accord " con
sisting here in well-definable relations. So long as the
satisfaction of feeling such an accord is denied us, whatever
collateral profits may seem to inure from what we believe
in are but as dust in the balance — provided always that we

Humanism and Truth 243

are highly organized intellectually, which the majority
of us are not. The amount of accord which satisfies most
men and women is merely the absence of violent clash
between their usual thoughts and statements and the
limited sphere of sense-perceptions in which their lives are
cast. The theoretic truth that most of us think we " ought "
to attain to is thus the possession of a set of predicates
that do not explicitly contradict their subjects. We pre
serve it as often as not by leaving other predicates and
subjects out.

In some men theory is a passion, just as music is in
others. The form of inner consistency is pursued far beyond
the line at which collateral profits stop. Such men system
atize and classify and schematize and make synoptical
tables and invent ideal objects for the pure love of unifying.
Too often the results, glowing with " truth " for the inven
tors, seem pathetically personal and artificial to bystanders.
Which is as much as to say that the purely theoretic
criterion of truth can leave us in the lurch as easily as any
other criterion, and that the absolutists, for all their pre
tensions, are " in the same boat " concretely with those
whom they attack.

I am well aware that this paper has been rambling in the
extreme. But the whole subject is inductive, and sharp
logic is hardly yet in order. My great trammel has been the
non-existence of any definitely stated alternative on my
opponents' part. It may conduce to clearness if I recapi
tulate, in closing, what I conceive the main points of
humanism to be. They are these : —

1. An experience, perceptual or conceptual, must con
form to reality in order to be true.

2. By " reality " humanism means nothing more than
the other conceptual or perceptual experiences with which
a given present experience may find itself in point of fact
mixed up.1

i This is meant merely to exclude reality of an " unknowable '»
sort, of which no account in either perceptual or conceptual terms

244 Selected Papers on Philosophy

3. By " conforming," humanism means taking account
of in such a way as to gain any intellectually and practically
satisfactory result.

4. To " take account-of " and to be " satisfactory " are
terms that admit of no definition, so many are the ways
in which these requirements can practically be worked
out*

5. Vaguely and in general, we take account of a reality
by preserving it in as unmodified a form as possible. But,
to be then satisfactory, it must not contradict other
realities outside of it which claim also to be preserved.
That we must preserve all the experience we can and
minimize contradiction in what we preserve, is about all
that can be said in advance.

6. The truth which the conforming experience embodies
may be a positive addition to the previous reality, and
later judgments may have to conform to it. Yet, virtually
at least, it may have been true previously. Pragmati
cally, virtual and actual truth mean the same thing; the
possibility of only one answer, when once the question is
raised.

can be given. It includes of course any amount of empirical reality
independent of the knovrer. Pragmatism is thus " epistemologically "
realistic in its account.

XII

THE POSITIVE CONTENT OF RELIGIOUS
EXPERIENCE *

THE material of our study of human nature is now spread
before us ; and in this parting hour, set free from the duty
of description, we can draw our theoretical and practical
conclusions. In my first lecture, defending the empirical
method, I foretold that whatever conclusions we might
come to could be reached by spiritual judgments only,
appreciations of the significance for life of religion, taken
" on the whole." Our conclusions cannot be as sharp as
dogmatic conclusions would be, but I will formulate them,
when the time comes, as sharply as I can.

Summing up in the broadest possible way the character
istics of the religious life, as we have found them, it includes
the following beliefs: —

1. That the visible world is part of a more spiritual
universe from which it draws its chief significance;

2. That union or harmonious relation with that higher
universe is our true end ;

3. That prayer or inner communion with the spirit
thereof — be that spirit " God " or "law "—is a process
wherein work is really done, and spiritual energy flows in
and produces effects, psychological or material, within the
phenomenal world.

Religion includes also the following psychological char
acteristics : —

1 From The Varieties of Religious Experience, pp. 485-527.
[The title is supplied from the context. Some footnotes have been
omitted. — ED.]

245

246 Selected Papers on Philosophy

4. A new zest which adds itself like a gift to life, and
takes the form either of lyrical enchantment or of appeal to
earnestness and heroism.

5. An assurance of safety and a temper of peace, and, in
relation to others, a preponderance of loving affections.

In illustrating these characteristics by documents, we
have been literally bathed in sentiment. In re-reading my
manuscript, I am almost appalled at the amount of emotion
ality which I find in it. After so much of this, we can afford
to be dryer and less sympathetic in the rest of the work
that lies before us.

The sentimentality of many of my documents is a conse
quence of the fact that I sought them among the extrava
gances of the subject. If any of you are enemies of what
our ancestors used to brand as enthusiasm, and are,
nevertheless, still listening to me now, you have probably
felt my selection to have been sometimes almost perverse,
and have wished I might have stuck to soberer examples.
I reply that I took these extremer examples as yielding the
profounder information. To learn the secrets of any science
we go to expert specialists, even though they may be
eccentric persons, and not to commonplace pupils. We
combine what they tell us with the rest of our wisdom, and
form our final judgment independently. Even so with
religion. We who have pursued such radical expressions of
it may now be sure that we know its secrets as authentically
as any one can know them who learns them from another ;
and we have next to answer, each of us for himself, the
practical question : what are the dangers in this element of
life ? and in what proportion may it need to be restrained
by other elements, to give the proper balance ?

But this question suggests another one which I will
answer immediately and get it out of the way, for it has
more than once already vexed us. Ought it to be assumed
that in all men the mixture of religion with other elements
should be identical ? Ought it, indeed, to be assumed that
the lives of all men should show identical religious elements ?

Content of Religious Experience 247

In other words, is the existence of so many religious types
and sects and creeds regrettable ?

To these questions I answer " No " emphatically. And
my reason is that I do not see how it is possible that
'creatures in such different positions and with such different
powers as human individuals are, should have exactly the
same functions and the same duties. No two of us have
identical difficulties, nor should we be expected to work
out identical solutions. Each, from his peculiar angle of
observation, takes in a certain sphere of fact and trouble,
which each must deal with in a unique manner. One of
us must soften himself, another must harden himself;
one must yield a point, another must stand firm — in order
the better to defend the position assigned him. If an
Emerson were forced to be a Wesley, or a Moody forced
to be aWhitman, the total human consciousness of the divine
would suffer. The divine can mean no single quality, it
must mean a group of qualities, by being champions of
which in alternation, different men may all find worthy
missions. Each attitude being a syllable in human nature's
total message, it takes the whole of us to spell the meaning
out completely. So a " god of battles " must be allowed to
be the god for one kind of person, a god of peace and heaven
and home the god for another. We must frankly recognize
the fact that we live in partial systems, and that parts are
not interchangeable in the spiritual life. If we are peevish
and jealous, destruction of the self must be an element of
our religion; why need it be one if we are good and sym
pathetic from the outset ? If we are sick souls, we require
a religion of deliverance; but why think so much of de
liverance if we are healthy-minded? Unquestionably,
some men have the completer experience and the higher
vocation, here just as in the social world; but for each
man to stay in his own experience, whate'er it be, and for
others to tolerate him there, is surely best.

But, you may now ask, would not this one-sidedness be

248 Selected Papers on Philosophy

cured if we should all espouse the science of religions as our
own religion ? In answering this question I must open again
the general relations of the theoretic to the active life.

Knowledge about a thing is not the thing itself. You
remember what Al-Ghazzali told us in the Lecture on
Mysticism — that to understand the causes of drunkenness,
as a physician understands them, is not to be drunk. A
science might come to understand everything about the
causes and elements of religion, and might even decide which
elements were qualified, by their general harmony with
other branches of knowledge, to be considered true; and
yet the best man at this science might be the man who found
it hardest to be personally devout. Tout savoir c'est tout
pardonner. The name of Renan would doubtless occur to
many persons as an example of the way in which breadth
of knowledge may make one only a dilettante in possibilities,
and blunt the acuteness of one's living faith. If religion
be a function by which either God's cause or man's cause
is to be really advanced, then he who lives the life of it,
however narrowly, is a better servant than he who merely
knows about it, however much. Knowledge about life is
one thing; effective occupation of a place in life, with its
dynamic currents passing through your being, is another.

For this reason, the science of religions may not be an
equivalent for living religion; and if we turn to the inner
difficulties of such a science, we see that a point comes when
she must drop the purely theoretic attitude, and either let
her knots remain uncut or have them cut by active faith.
To see this, suppose that we have our science of religions
constituted as a matter of fact. Suppose that she has
assimilated all the necessary historical material and dis
tilled out of it as its essence the same conclusions which I
myself a few moments ago pronounced. Suppose that she
agrees that religion, wherever it is an active thing, involves
a belief in ideal presences, and a belief that in our prayerful
communion with them, work is done, and something real
comes to pass. She has now to exert her critical activity,

Content of Religious Experience 249

and to decide how far, in the light of other sciences and hi
that of general philosophy, such beliefs can be considered
true.

Dogmatically to decide this is an impossible task. Not
only are the other sciences and the philosophy still far
from being completed, but in their present state we find
them full of conflicts. The sciences of nature know nothing
of spiritual presences, and on the whole hold no practical
commerce whatever with the idealistic conceptions towards
which general philosophy inclines. The so-called scientist
is, during his scientific hours at least, so materialistic that
one may well say that on the whole the influence of science
goes against the notion that religion should be recognized
at all. And this antipathy to religion finds an echo within
the very science of religions itself. The cultivator of this
science has to become acquainted with so many grovelling
and horrible superstitions that a presumption easily arises
in his mind that any belief that is religious probably is
false. In the " prayful communion " of savages with such
mumbo-jumbos of deities as they acknowledge, it is hard
for us to see what genuine spiritual work — even though it
were work relative only to their dark savage obligations —
can possibly be done.

The consequence is that the conclusions of the science of
religions are as likely to be adverse as they are to be favour
able to the claim that the essence of religion is true. There
is a notion in the air about us that religion is probably only
an anachronism, a case of " survival," an atavistic relapse
into a mode of thought which humanity in its more enlight
ened examples has outgrown; and this notion our religious
anthropologists at present do little to counteract.

This view is so widespread at the present day that I must
consider it with some explicitness before I pass to my ^ own
conclusions. Let me call it the " Survival theory " for
brevity's sake.

The pivot round which the religious life, as we have traced
it, revolves, is the interest of the individual in his private

250 Selected Papers on Philosophy

personal destiny. Religion, in short, is a monumental chap
ter in the history of human egotism. The gods believed in —
whether by crude savages or by men disciplined intellectu
ally — agree with each other in recognizing personal calls.
Religious thought is carried on in terms of personality,
this being, in the world of religion, the one fundamental
fact. To-day, quite as much as at any previous age, the
religious individual tells you that the divine meets him on
the basis of his personal concerns.

Science, on the other hand, has ended by utterly repudi
ating the personal point of view. She catalogues her ele
ments and records her laws, indifferent as to what purpose
may be shown forth by them, and constructs her theories
quite careless of their bearing on human anxieties and fates.
Though the scientist may individually nourish a religion
and be a theist in his irresponsible hours, the days are over
when it could be said that for Science herself the heavens
declare the glory of God and the firmament showeth his
handiwork. Our solar system, with its harmonies, is seen
now as but one passing case of a certain sort of moving
equilibrium in the heavens, realized by a local accident
in an appalling wilderness of worlds where no life can exist.
In a span of time which as a cosmic interval will count but
as an hour it will have ceased to be. The Darwinian notion
of chance production, and subsequent destruction, speedy
or deferred, applies to the largest as well as to the smallest
facts. It is impossible, in the present temper of the scientific
imagination, to find in the driftings of the cosmic atoms,
whether they work on the universal or on the particular scale,
anything but a kind of aimless weather, doing and undoing,
achieving no proper history, and leaving no result. Nature
has no one distinguishable ultimate tendency with which
it is possible to feel a sympathy. In the vast rhythm of her
processes, as the scientific mind now follows them, she ap
pears to cancel herself. The books of natural theology which
satisfied the intellects of our grandfathers seem to us quite
grotesque, representing, as they did, a God who conformed

Content of Religious Experience 251

the largest things of nature to the paltriest of our private
wants. The God whom science recognizes must be a God
of universal laws exclusively, a God who does a wholesale,
not a retail business. He cannot accommodate his processes
to the convenience of individuals. The bubbles on the foam
which coats a storm}' sea are floating episodes, made and
unmade by the forces of the wind and water. Our private
selves are like those bubbles — epiphenomena, as Clifford,
I believe, ingeniously called them; their destinies weigh
nothing and determine nothing in the world's irremediable
currents of events.

You see how natural it is, from this point of view, to
treat religion as a mere survival, for religion does in fact
perpetuate the traditions of the most primeval thought. To
coerce the spiritual powers, or to square them and get them
on our side, was, during enormous tracts of time, the one
great object in our dealings with the natural world. For
our ancestors, dreams, hallucinations, revelations, and
cock-and-bull stories were inextricably mixed with facts.
Up to a comparatively recent date such distinctions as
those between what has been verified and what is only
conjectured, between the impersonal and the personal
aspects of existence, were hardly suspected or conceived.
Whatever you imagined in a lively manner, whatever you
thought fit to be true, you affirmed confidently; and what
ever you affirmed, your comrades believed. Truth was
what had not yet been contradicted, most things were
taken into the mind from the point of view of their human
suggestiveness, and the attention confined itself exclusively
to the aesthetic and dramatic aspects of events.

How indeed could it be otherwise? The extraordinary
value, for explanation and prevision, of those mathematical
and mechanical modes of conception which science uses,
was a result that could not possibly have been expected
in advance. Weight, movement, velocity, direction, position,
what thin, pallid, uninteresting ideas! How could the
richer animistic aspects of Nature, the peculiarities and

252 Selected Papers on Philosophy

oddities that make phenomena picturesquely striking or
expressive, fail to have been first singled out and followed
by philosophy as the more promising avenue to the know
ledge of Nature's life ? Well, it is still in these richer animistic
and dramatic aspects that religion delights to dwell. It is
the terror and beauty of phenomena, the "promise" of
the dawn and of the rainbow, the " voice " of the thunder,
the " gentleness " of the summer rain, the " sublimity "
of the stars, and not the physical laws which these things
follow, by which the religious mind still continues to be
most impressed; and just as of yore, the devout man tells
you that in the solitude of his room or of the fields he still
feels the divine presence, that inflowings of help come in
reply to his prayers, and that sacrifices to this unseen
reality fill him with security and peace.

Pure anachronism ! says the survival-theory — anachron
ism for which deanthropomorphization of the imagination
is the remedy required. The less we mix the private with
the cosmic, the more we dwell in universal and impersonal
tarns, the truer heirs of Science we become.
I In spite of the appeal which this impersonality of the
scientific attitude makes to a certain magnanimity of tem
per, I believe it to be shallow, and I can now state my reason
in comparatively few words. That reason is that, so long
as we deal with the cosmic and the general, we deal only
with the symbols of reality, but as soon as we deal with
private and personal phenomena as such, we deal with realities
in the completest sense of the term. I think I can easily make
clear what I mean by these words.

The world of our experience consists at all times of two
parts, an objective and a subjective part, of which the
former may be incalculably more extensive than the latter,
and yet the latter can never be omitted or suppressed. The
objective part is the sum total of whatsoever at any given
time we may be thinking of, the subjective part is the
inner " state " in which the thinking comes to pass. What
we think of may be enormous — the cosmic times and spaces,

Content of Religious Experience 253

for example— whereas the inner state may be the most
fugitive and paltry activity of mind. Yet the cosmic
objects, so far as the experience yields them, are but ideal
pictures of something whose existence we do not inwardly
possess but only point at outwardly, while the inner state
is our very experience itself; its reality and that of our
experience are one. A conscious field plus its object as felt
or thought of plus an attitude towards the object plus
the sense of a self to whom the attitude belongs — such a
concrete bit of personal experience may be a small bit, but
it is a solid bit as long as it lasts ; not hollow, not a mere
abstract element of experience, such as the " object " is
when taken all alone. It is a full fact, even though it be an
insignificant fact; it is of the kind to which all realities
whatsoever must belong; the motor currents of the world
run through the like of it ; it is on the line connecting real
events with real events. That unsharable feeling which
each one of us has of the pinch of his individual destiny
as he privately feels it rolling out on fortune's wheel may
be disparaged for its egotism, may be sneered at as un
scientific, but it is the one thing that fills up the measure
of our concrete actuality, and any would-be existent that
should lack such a feeling, or its analogue, would be a piece
of reality only half made up.

If this be true, it is absurd for science to say that the
egotistic elements of experience should be suppressed.
The axis of reality runs solely through the egotistic places
— they are strung upon it like so many beads. To describe
the world with all the various feelings of the individual
pinch of destiny, all the various spiritual attitudes, left
out from the description — they being as describable as
anything else — would be something like offering a printed
bill of fare as the equivalent for a solid meal. Religion makes
no such blunder. The individual's religion may be egotistic,
and those private realities which it keeps in touch with
may be narrow enough; but at any rate it always remains
infinitely less hollow and abstract, as far as it goes, than a

254 Selected Papers on Philosophy

science which prides itself on taking no account of anything
private at all.

A bill of fare with one real raisin on it instead of the word
" raisin," with one real egg instead of the word " egg,"
might be an inadequate meal, but it would at least be a
commencement of reality. The contention of the survival-
theory that we ought to stick to non-personal elements
exclusively seems like saying that we ought to be satisfied
forever with reading the naked bill of fare. I think, there
fore, that however particular questions connected with our
individual destinies may be answered, it is only by acknow
ledging them as genuine questions, and living in the sphere
of thought which they open up, that we become profound.
But to live thus is to be religious; so I unhesitatingly
repudiate the survival-theory of religion as being founded
on an egregious mistake. It does not follow, because our
ancestors made so many errors of fact and mixed them
with their religion, that we should therefore leave off being
religious at all.1 By being religious we establish ourselves

1 Even the errors of fact may possibly turn out not to be as whole
sale as the scientist assumes. We saw in Lecture IV. how the religious
conception of the universe seems to many mind-curers " verified "
from day to day by their experience of fact. " Experience of fact "
is a field with so many things in it that the sectarian scientist,
methodically declining, as he does, to recognize such " facts " as
mind-curers and others like them experience, otherwise than by such
rude heads of classification as " bosh," " rot," " folly," certainly
leaves out a mass of raw fact which, save for the industrious interest
of the religious in the more personal aspects of reality, would never
have succeeded in getting itself recorded at all. We know this to be
true already in certain cases ; it may, therefore, be true in others as
well. Miraculous healings have always been part of the supernaturalist
stock in trade, and have always been dismissed by the scientist
as figments of the imagination. But the scientist's tardy education
in the facts of hypnotism has recently given him an apperceiving
mass for phenomena of this order, and he consequently now allows
that the healings may exist, provided you expressly call them effects
of " suggestion." Even the stigmata of the cross on Saint Francis's
hands and feet may on these terms not be a fable. Similarly, the
time-honoured phenomenon of diabolical possession is on the point
of being admitted by the scientist as a fact, now that he has the name
of " hystero-demonopathy " by which to apperceive it. No one can

Content of Religious Experience 255

in possession of ultimate reality at the only points at which
reality is given us to guard. Our responsible concern is
with our private destiny after all.

You see now why I have been so individualistic through
out these lectures, and why I have seemed so bent on rehabi
litating the element of feeling in religion and subordinating
its intellectual part. Individuality is founded in feeling;
and the recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder strata of
character, are the only places in the world in which we
catch real fact in the making, and directly perceive how
events happen, and how work is actually done. Compared
with this world of living individualized feelings, the world
of generalized objects which the intellect contemplates is
without solidity or life. As in stereoscopic or kinetoscopic
pictures seen outside the instrument, the third dimension,
the movement, the vital element, are not there. We get a
beautiful picture of an express train supposed to be moving,
but where in the picture, as I have heard a friend say, is the
energy .or the fifty miles an hour?

Let us agree, then, that Religion, occupying herself with
personal destinies and keeping thus in contact with the
only absolute realities which we know, must necessarily
play an eternal part in human history. The next thing to
decide is what she reveals about those destinies, or whether
indeed she reveals anything distinct enough to be con
sidered a general message to mankind. We have done, as

foresee just how far this legitimation of occultist phenomena under
newly found scientist titles may proceed — even " prophecy," even
" levitation," might creep into the pale.

Thus the divorce between scientist facts and religious facts may
not necessarily be as eternal as it at first sight seems, nor the personal-
ism and romanticism of the world, as they appeared to primitive
thinking, be matters so irrevocably outgrown. The final human
opinion may, in short, in some manner now impossible to foresee,
revert to the more personal style, just as any path of progress may
follow a spiral rather than a straight line. If this were so, the rigor
ously impersonal view of science might one day appear as having
been a temporarily useful eccentricity rather than the definitively
triumphant position which the sectarian scientist at present so
confidently announces it to be.

256 Selected Papers on Philosophy

you see, with our preliminaries, and our final summing up
can now begin.

I am well aware that after all the palpitating documents
which I have quoted, and all the perspectives of emotion-
inspiring institution and belief that my previous lectures
have opened, the dry analysis to which I now advance may
appear to many of you like an anti-climax, a tapering-off
and flattening- out of the subject, instead of a crescendo of
interest and result. I said awhile ago that the religious
attitude of Protestants appears poverty-stricken to the
Catholic imagination. Still more poverty-stricken, I fear,
may my final summing up of the subject appear at first to
some of you. On which account I pray you now to bear
this point in mind, that in the present part of it I am ex
pressly trying to reduce religion to its lowest admissible
terms, to that minimum, free from individualistic excres
cences, which all religions contain as their nucleus, and on
which it may be hoped that all religious persons may agree.
That established, we should have a result which might be
small but would -at least be solid ; and on it and round it
the ruddier additional beliefs on which the different indivi
duals make their venture might be grafted, and flourish as
richly as you please. I shall add my own over-belief (which
will be, I confess, of a somewhat pallid kind, as befits a
critical philosopher), and you will, I hope, also add your
over-beliefs, and we shall soon be in the varied world of
concrete religious constructions once more. For the moment
let me dryly pursue the analytic part of the task.

Both thought and feeling are determinants of conduct,
and the same conduct may be determined either by feeling
or by thought. When we survey the whole field of religion,
we find a great variety in the thoughts that have prevailed
there; but the feelings on the one hand and the conduct on
the other are almost always the same, for Stoic, Christian,
and Buddhist saints are practically indistinguishable in
their lives. The theories which Religion generates, being
thus variable, are secondary ; and if you wish to grasp her

Content of Religious Experience 257

essence you must look to the feelings and the conduct as
being the more constant elements. It is between these
two elements that the short circuit exists on which she
carries on her principal business, while the ideas and sym
bols and other institutions form loop-lines which may be
perfections and improvements, and may even some day all
be united into one harmonious system, but which are not
to be regarded as organs with an indispensable function,
necessary at all times for religious life to go on. This seems
to me the first conclusion which we are entitled to draw
from the phenomena we have passed in review.

The next step is to characterize the feelings. To what
psychological order do they belong ?

The resultant outcome of them is in any case what Kant
calls a " sthenic " affection, an excitement of the cheerful,
expansive, " dynamogenic " order which, like any tonic,
freshens our vital powers. In almost every lecture, but
especially in the lectures on Conversion and on Saintliness,
we have seen how this emotion overcomes temperamental
melancholy and imparts endurance to the Subject, or a
zest, or a meaning, or an enchantment and glory to the
common objects of life. The name of " faith-state," by
which Professor Leuba designates it, is a good one. It is a
biological as well as a psychological condition, and Tolstoy
is absolutely accurate in classing faith among the forces
by which men live. The total absence of it, anhedonia, means
collapse.

The faith-state may hold a very minimum of intellectual
content. We saw examples of this in those sudden raptures
of the divine presence, or in such mystical seizures as Dr.
Bucke described. It may be a mere vague enthusiasm, half
spiritual, half vital, a courage, and a feeling that great
and wondrous things are in the air.1

1 Example: Henri Perreyve writes to Gratry: " I do not know
how to deal with the happiness which you aroused in me this
morning. It overwhelms me; I want to do something, yet I can do
nothing and am fit for nothing. ... I would fain do great things."
Again, after an inspiring interview, he writes: " I went homewards,
R

258 Selected Papers on Philosophy

When, however, a positive intellectual content is associ
ated with a faith-state, it gets invincibly stamped in upon
belief, and this explains the passionate loyalty of religious
persons everywhere to the minutest details of their so
widely differing creeds. Taking creeds and faith-states
together, as forming " religions," and treating these as
purely subjective phenomena, without regard to the ques
tion of their " truth," we are obliged, on account of their
extraordinary influence upon action and endurance, to class
them amongst the most important biological functions of
mankind. Their stimulant and anaesthetic effect is so
great that Professor Leuba, in a recent article, goes so far
as to say that so long as men can use their God, they care
very little who he is, or even whether he is at all. " Then
truth of the matter can be put," says Leuba, " in this way:
God is not known, he is not understood ; h^js_use^- some
times as meat-purveyor, sometimes as moral support,j
sometimes as friend, sometimes as an object of love. If he
proves himself useful, the religious consciousness asks for
no more than that. Does God really exist? How does he
exist ? What is he ? are so many irrelevant questions. Not
God, but life, more life, a larger, richer, more satisfying life,
is, in the last analysis, the end of religion. The love of life,
at any and every level of development, is the religious
impulse." i

At this purely subjective rating, therefore, Religion must
be considered vindicated in a certain way from the attacks
of her critics. It would seem that she cannot be a mere
anachronism and survival, but must exert a permanent
function, whether she be with or without intellectual con
tent, and whether, if she have any, it be true or false.

intoxicated with joy, hope, and strength. I wanted to feed upon my
happiness in solitude, far from all men. It was late; but, unheeding
that, I took a mountain path and went on like a madman, looking
at the heavens, regardless of earth. Suddenly an instinct made me
draw hastily back — I was on the very edge of a precipice, one step
more and I must have fallen. I took fright and gave up my noc
turnal promenade." — A. Gratry, Henri Perreyve, London, 1872, pp.
92, 89.

Content of Religious Experience 259

We must next pass beyond the point of view of merely
subjective utility, and make inquiry into the intellectual
content itself.

First, is there, under all the discrepancies of the creeds,
a common nucleus to which they bear their testimony
unanimously ?

And second, ought we to consider the testimony true? I
will take up the first question first, and.answer it immedi
ately in the affirmative. The warring gods and formulas
of the various religions do indeed cancel each other, but
there is a certain uniform deliverance in which religions all
appear to meet. It consists of two parts: —

1. An uneasiness; and

2. Its solution.

1. The uneasiness, reduced to its simplest terms, is a
sense that there is something wrong about us as we j\ajturajly f
stand. s ,

2. The solution is a sense that we are saved from the wrong-
ness by making proper connection with the higher powers.

In those more developed minds which alone we are
studying, the wrongness takes a moral character, and the
salvation takes a mystical tinge. I think we shall keep well
within the limits of what is common to all such minds if
we formulate the essence of their religious experience in
terms like these : —

The individual, so far as he suffers from his wrongness
and criticizes it, is to that extent consciously beyond it and
in at least possible touch with something higher, if anything
higher exist. Along with the wrong part there is thus a *'
better part of him, even though it may be but a most helpless
germ. With which part he should identify his real being is
by no means obvious at this stage; but when stage 2 (the
stage of solution or salvation) arrives, the man identifies his
real being with the germinal higher part of himself; and
does so in the following way. He becomes conscious that
this higher part is conterminous and continuous with a
MORE of the same quality, which is operative in the universe

260 Selected Papers on Philosophy

outside of him, and which he can keep in working touch with,
and in a fashion get on board of and save himself when
all his lower being has gone to pieces in the wreck.

It seems to me that all the phenomena are accurately
describable in these very simple general terms. They allow
for the divided self and the struggle; they involve the
change of personal centre and the surrender of the lower
self; they express the appearance of exteriority of the
helping power and yet account for our sense of union with
it; and they fully justify our feelings of security and joy.
There is probably no autobiographic document, among all
those which I have quoted, to which the description will
not well apply. One need only add such specific details as
will adapt it to various theologies and various personal
temperaments, and one will then have the various experi
ences reconstructed in their individual forms.

So far, however, as this analysis goes, the experiences are
only psychological phenomena. They possess, it is true,
enormous biological worth. Spiritual strength really
increases in the subject when he has them, a new life opens
for him, and they seem to him a place of conflux where
the forces of two universes meet; and yet this may be
nothing but his subjective way of feeling things, a mood of
his own fancy, in spite of the effects produced. I now turn
to my second question: What is the objective " truth ".of
their content ?

The part of the content concerning which the question
of truth most pertinently arises is that "MORE of the same
quality " with which our own higher self appears in the
experience to come into harmonious working relation. Is
such a " more " merely our own notion, or does it really
exist? If so, in what shape does it exist? Does it act, as
well as exist? And in what form should we conceive of
that " union " with it of which religious geniuses are so
convinced ?

It is in answering these questions that the various theo
logies perform their theoretic work, and that their diver-

Content of Religious Experience 261

*encies most come to light. They all agree that the " more "
really exists; though some of them hold it to exist in the
shape of a personal god or gods, while others are satisfied
to conceive it as a stream of ideal tendency embedded in
the eternal structure of the world. They all agree,moreover,
that it acts as well as exists, and that something really is
effected for the better when you throw your life into its
hands. It is when they treat of the experience of " union "
with it that their speculative differences appear most
clearly. Over this point pantheism and theism, nature
and second birth, works and grace and karma, immortality
and reincarnation, rationalism and mysticism, carry on
inveterate disputes.

At the end of my lecture on Philosophy I held out the
notion that an impartial science of religions might sift out
from the midst of their discrepancies a common body of
doctrine which she might also formulate in terms to which
physical science need not object. This, I said, she might
adopt as her own reconciling hypothesis, and recommend
it for general belief. I also said that in my last lecture
I should have to try my own hand at framing such an
hypothesis.

The time has now come for this attempt. Who says
" hypothesis " renounces the ambition to be coercive in
his arguments. The most I can do is, accordingly, to offer
something that may fit the facts so easily that your scien
tific logic will find no plausible pretext for vetoing your
impulse to welcome it as true.

The " more," as we called it, and the meaning of our
" union " with it, form the nucleus of our inquiry. Into
what definite description can these words be translated,
and for what definite facts do they stand? It would never
do for us to place ourselves off-hand at the position of a
particular theology, the Christian theology, for example,
and proceed immediately to define the " more " as Jehovah,
and the " union " as his imputation to us of the righteous
ness of Christ. That would be unfair to other religions, and,

262 Selected Papers on Philosophy

from our present standpoint at least, would be an over-
belief.

We must begin by using less particularized terms ; and,
since one of the duties of the science of religions is to keep
religion in connection with the rest of science, we shall do
well to seek first of all a way of describing the " more,"
which psychologists may also recognize as real. The
subconscious self is nowadays a well-accredited psycholo
gical entity; and I believe that in it we have exactly the
mediating term required. Apart from all religious considera
tions, there is actually and literally more life in our total
soul than we are at any time aware of. The exploration of
the transmarginal field has hardly yet been seriously under
taken, but what Mr. Myers said in 1892 in his essay on the
Subliminal Consciousness is as true as when it was first
written: "Each of us is in reality an abiding psychical
entity far more extensive than he knows — an individuality
which can never express itself completely through any
corporeal manifestation. The Self manifests through the
organism ; but there is always some part of the Self unmani-
fested; and always, as it seems, some power of organic
expression in abeyance or reserve." Much of the content
of this larger background against which our conscious being
stands out in relief is insignificant. Imperfect memories,
silly jingles, inhibitive timidities, " dissolutive " pheno
mena of various sorts, as Myers calls them', enter into it
for a large part. But in it many of the performances of
genius seem also to have their origin; and in our study
of conversion, of mystical experiences, and of prayer, we
have seen how striking a part invasions from this region
play in the religious life.

Let me then propose, as an hypothesis, that whatever
it may be on its farther side, the " more " with which in
religious experience we feel ourselves connected is on its
hither side the subconscious continuation of our conscious
life. Starting thus with a recognized psychological fact as
our basis, we seem to preserve a contact with " science "

Content of Religious Experience 263

vhich the ordinary theologian lacks. At the same time
he theologian's contention that the religious man is moved
:>y an external power is vindicated, for it is one of the
peculiarities of invasions from the subconscious region to
:ake on objective appearances, and to suggest to the Sub-
ect an external control. In the religious life the control is
felt as " higher " ; but since on our hypothesis it is primarily
the higher faculties of our own hidden mind which are
:ontrolling, the sense of union with the power beyond us is
i sense of something, not merely apparently but literally
true.

This doorway into the subject seems to me the best one
ior a science of religions, for it mediates between a number
of different points of view. Yet it is only a doorway, and
difficulties present themselves as soon as we step through
it, and ask how far our transmarginal consciousness carries
us if we follow it on its remoter side. Here the over-beliefs
begin: here mysticism and the conversion-rapture and
Vedantism and transcendental idealism bring in their
monistic interpretations and tell us that the finite self
rejoins the absolute self, for it was always one with God
and identical with the soul of the world. Here the prophets
of all the different religions come with their visions, voices,
raptures, and other openings, supposed by each to authenti
cate his own peculiar faith.

Those of us who are not personally favoured with such
specific revelations must stand outside of them altogether
and, for the present at least, decide that, since they corro
borate incompatible theological doctrines, they neutralize
one another and leave no fixed result. If we follow any one
of them, or if we follow philosophical theory and embrace
monistic pantheism on non-mystical grounds, we do so in
the exercise of our individual freedom, and build out our
religion in the way most congruous with our personal
susceptibilities. Among these susceptibilities intellectual
ones play a decisive part. Although the religious question
is primarily a question of life, of living or not living in the

264 Selected Papers on Philosophy

higher union which opens itself to us as a gift, yet the spiri
tual excitement in which the gift appears a real one will
often fail to be aroused in an individual until certain par
ticular intellectual beliefs or ideas which, as we say, come
home to him, are touched. These ideas will thus be essential
to that individual's religion; — which is as much as to say
that over-beliefs in various directions are absolutely indis-*
pensable, and that we should treat them with tenderness
and tolerance so long as they are not intolerant themselves.
As I have elsewhere written, the most interesting and valu-/
able things about a man are usually his over-beliefs.

Disregarding the over-beliefs, and confining ourselves
to what is common and generic, we have in the fact that the
conscious person is continuous with a wider self through
which saving experiences come, a positive content of religious
experience which, it seems to me, is literally and objectively
true as far as it goes. If I now proceed to state my own
hypothesis about the farther limits of this extension of
our personality, I shall be offering my own over-belief —
though I know it will appear a sorry under-belief to some
of you — for which I can only bespeak the same indulgence
which in a converse case I should accord to yours.

The farther limits of our being plunge, it seems to me,
into an altogether other dimension of existence from the
sensible and merely " understandable " world. Name it
the mystical region, or the supernatural region, whichever
you choose. So far as our ideal impulses originate in this
region (and most of them do originate in it, for we find them
possessing us in a way for which we cannot articulately
account), we belong to it in a more intimate sense than that
in which we belong to the visible world, for we belong in
the most intimate sense wherever our ideals belong. Yet
the unseen region in question is not merely ideal, for it
produces effects in this world. When we commune with it,
work is actually done upon our finite personality, for we
are turned into new men, and consequences in the way of
conduct follow in the natural world upon our regenerative

Content of Religious Experience 265

change. But that which produces effects within another
reality must be termed a reality itself, so I feel as if we had
no philosophic excuse for calling the unseen or mystical
world unreal.

God is the natural appellation, for us Christians at least,
for the supreme reality, so I will call this higher part of the
universe by the name of God. We and God have business
with each other; and in opening ourselves to his influence
our deepest destiny is fulfilled. The universe, at those
parts of it which our personal being constitutes, takes a
turn genuinely for the worse or for the better in proportion
as each one of us fulfils or evades God's demands. As far
as this goes, I probably have you with me, for I only trans
late into schematic language what I may call the instinctive
belief of mankind: God is real since he produces real effects.

The real effects in question, so far as I have as yet
admitted them, are exerted on the personal centres of
energy of the various subjects, but the spontaneous faith
of most of the subjects is that they embrace a wider
sphere than this. Most religious men believe (or " know,"
if they be mystical) that not only they themselves, but the
whole universe of beings to whom the God is present, are
secure in his parental hands. There is a sense, a dimension,
they are sure, in which we are all saved, in spite of the gates
of hell and all adverse terrestrial appearances. God's
existence is the guarantee of an ideal order that shall be
permanently preserved. This world may indeed, .as science
assures us, some day burn up or freeze ; but if it is part of his
order, the old ideals are sure to be brought elsewhere to
fruition, so that where God is, tragedy is only provisional
and partial, and shipwreck and dissolution are not the abso
lutely final things. Only when this farther step of faith
concerning God is taken, and remote objective consequences
are predicted, does religion, as it seems to me, get wholly
free from the first immediate subjective experience, and
bring a real hypothesis into play. A good hypothesis in
science must have other properties than those of the

266 Selected Papers on Philosophy

phenomenon it is immediately invoked to explain, other
wise it is not prolific enough. God, meaning only what
enters into the religious man's experience of union, falls
short of being an hypothesis of this more useful order. He
needs to enter into wider cosmic relations in order to justify
the subject's absolute confidence and peace.

That the God with whom, starting from the hither side
of our own extra-marginal self, we come at its remoter
margin into commerce should be the absolute world-ruler,
is of course a very considerable over-belief. Over-belief
as it is, though, it is an article of almost every one's religion.
Most of us pretend in some way to prop it upon our philo
sophy, but the philosophy itself is really propped upon
this faith. What is this but to say that Religion, in icr
fullest exercise of function, is not a mere illumination of
facts already elsewhere given, not a mere passion, like lovs,
which views things in a rosier light ? It is indeed that, as \*e
have seen abundantly. But it is something more, namely
a postulator of new facts as well. The world interpreted
religiously is not the materialistic world over again, with
an altered expression; it must have, over and above the
altered expression, a natural constitution different at some
point from that which a materialistic world would have. It
must be such that different events can be expected in it,
different conduct must be required.

This thoroughly " pragmatic " view of religion has
usually been taken as a matter of course by common men.
They have interpolated divine miracles into the field of
nature, they have built a heaven out beyond the grave. It
is only transcendentalist metaphysicians who think that,
without adding any concrete details to Nature, or sub
tracting any, but by simply calling it the expression of
absolute spirit, you make it more divine just as it stands.
I believe the pragmatic way of taking religion to be the
deeper way. It gives it body as well as soul, it makes it
claim, as everything real must claim, some characteristic
realm of fact as its very own. What the more characteristi-

Content of Religious Experience 267

cally divine facts are, apart from the actual inflow of energy
in the faith-state and the prayer-state, I know not. But
the over-belief on which I am ready to make my personal
venture is that they exist. The whole drift of my education
goes to persuade me that the world of our present conscious
ness is only one out of many worlds of consciousness that
exist, and that those other worlds must contain experiences
which have a meaning for our life also; and that although
in the main their experiences and those of this world keep
discrete, yet the two become continuous at certain points,
and higher energies filter in. By being faithful in my poor
measure to this over-belief, I seem to myself to keep more
sane and true. I can, of course, put myself into the sectarian
scientist's attitude, and imagine vividly that the world of
sensations and of scientific laws and objects may be all.
But whenever I do this, I hear that inward monitor of
which W. K. Clifford once wrote, whispering the word
"bosh! " Humbug is humbug, even though it bear the
scientific name, and the total expression' of human experi
ence, as I view it objectively, invincibly urges me beyond
the narrow " scientific " bounds. Assuredly, the real
world is of a different temperament — more intricately built
than physical science allows. So my objective and my sub
jective conscience both hold me to the over-belief which I
express. Who knows whether the faithfulness of indivi
duals here below to their own poor over-beliefs may not
actually help God in turn to be more effectively faithful
to his own greater tasks?

In writing my concluding lecture I had to aim so much
at simplification that I fear that my general philosophic
position received so scant a statement as hardly to be
intelligible to some of my readers. I therefore add this
epilogue, which must also be so brief as possibly to remedy
but little the defect. In a later work I may be enabled to
state my position more amply and consequently more
clearly.

268 Selected Papers on Philosophy

Originality cannot be expected in a field like this, where
all the attitudes and tempers that are possible have been
exhibited in literature long ago, and where any new writer
can immediately be classed under a familiar head. If one
should make a division of all thinkers into naturalists and
supernaturalists, I should undoubtedly have to go, along
with most philosophers, into the supernaturalist branch.
But there is a crasser and a more refined supernaturalism
and it is to the refined division that most philosophers at the
present day belong. If not regular transcendental idealists,
they at least obey the Kantian direction enough to bar out
ideal entities from interfering causally in the course of
phenomenal events. Refined supernaturalism is universal-
istic supernaturalism; for the " crasser " variety " piece
meal " supernaturalism would perhaps be the better name.
It went with that older theology which to-day is supposed
to reign only among uneducated people, or to be found
among the few belated professors of the dualisms which
Kant is thought to have displaced. It admits miracles
and providential leadings, and finds no intellectual difficulty
in mixing the ideal and the real worlds together by inter
polating influences from the ideal region among the forces
that causally determine the real world's details. In this
the refined supernaturalists think that it muddles disparate
dimensions of existence. For them the world of the ideal
has no efficient causality, and never bursts into the world
of phenomena at particular points. The ideal world, for
them, is not a world of facts, but only of the meaning of
facts; it is a point of view for judging facts. It appertains
to a different " -ology," and inhabits a different dimension
of being altogether from that in which existential proposi
tions obtain. It cannot get down upon the flat level of
experience and interpolate itself piecemeal between distinct
portions of nature, as those who believe, for example, in
divine aid coming in response to prayer, are bound to think
it must.

Notwithstanding my own inability to accept either

Content of Religious Experience 269

popular Christianity or scholastic theism, I suppose that
my belief that in communion with the Ideal new force
comes into the world, and new departures are made here be
low, subjects me to being classed among the supernaturalists
of the piecemeal or crasser type. Universalistic super-
naturalism surrenders, it seems to me, too easily to natural
ism. It takes the facts of physical science at their face
value, and leaves the laws of life just as naturalism finds
them, with no hope of remedy, in case their fruits are bad.
It confines itself to sentiments about life as a whole, senti
ments which may be admiring and adoring but which
need not be so, as the existence of systematic pessimism
proves. In this universalistic way of taking the ideal world,
the essence of practical religion seems to me to evaporate.
Both instinctively and for logical reasons, I find it hard to
believe that principles can exist which make no difference
in facts. But all facts are particular facts, and the whole
interest of the question of God's existence seems to me to lie
in the consequences for particulars which that existence may
be expected to entail. That no concrete particular of ex
perience should alter its complexion in consequence of a
God being there seems to me an incredible proposition, and
yet it is the thesis to which (implicitly at any rate) refined
supernaturalism seems to cling. It is only with experience
en bloc, it says, that the Absolute maintains relations. It
condescends to no transactions of detail.

I am ignorant of Buddhism and speak under correction,
and merely in order the better to describe my general point
of view; but as I apprehend the Buddhistic doctrine of
Karma, I agree in principle with that. All supernaturalists
admit that facts are under the judgment of higher law; but
for Buddhism as I interpret it, and for religion generally
so far as it remains unweakened by transcendentalistic
metaphysics, the word " judgment " here means no such
bare academic verdict or platonic appreciation as it means
in Vedantic or modern absolutist systems; it carries, on the
contrary, execution with it, is in rebus as well as post rem,

270 Selected Papers on Philosophy

and operates " causally " as partial factor in the total fact.
The universe becomes a gnosticism pure and simple on
any other terms. But this view that judgment and exe
cution go together is that of the crasser supernaturalist
way of thinking, so the present volume must on the whole
be classed with the other expressions of that creed.

I state the matter thus bluntly, because the current of
thought in academic circles runs against me, and I feel like
a man who must set his back against an open door quickly
if he does not wish to see it closed and locked. In spite of
its being so shocking to the reigning intellectual tastes,
I believe that a candid consideration of piecemeal super-
naturalism and a complete discussion of all its metaphysical
bearings will show it to be the hypothesis by which the
largest number of legitimate requirements are met. That,
of course, would be a programme for other books than this;
what I now say sufficiently indicates to the philosophic
reader the place where I belong.

If asked just where the differences in fact which are due to
God's existence come in, I should have to say that in general
I have no hypothesis to offer beyond what the phenomenon
of " prayerful communion," especially when certain kinds
of incursion from the subconscious region take part in it,
immediately suggests. The appearance is that in this phe
nomenon something ideal, which in one sense is part of
ourselves and in another sense is not ourselves, actually
exerts an influence, raises our centre of personal energy,
and produces regenerative effects unattainable in other
ways. If, then, there be a wider world of being than that
of our everyday consciousness, if in it there be forces whose
effects on us are intermittent, if one facilitating condition
of the effects be the openness of the " subliminal " door, we
have the elements of a theory to which the phenomena
of religious life lend plausibility. I am so impressed by the
importance of these phenomena that I adopt the hypothe
sis which they so naturally suggest. At these places at
least, I say, it would seem as though transmundane energies,

Content of Religious Experience 27 1

God, if you will, produced immediate effects within the
natural world to which the rest of OUT experience belongs.

The difference in natural " fact " which most of us would
assign as the first difference which the existence of a God
ought to make would, I imagine, be personal immortality.
Religion, in fact, for the great majority of our own race
means immortality and nothing else. God is the producer
of immortality, and whoever has doubts of immortality is
written down as an atheist without farther trial. I have
said nothing in my lectures about immortality or the
belief therein, for to me it seems a secondary point. If our
ideals are only cared for in " eternity," I do not see why
we might not be willing to resign their care to other hands
than ours. Yet I sympathize with the urgent impulse to
be present ourselves, and in the conflict of impulses, both
of them so vague yet both of them noble, I know not how
to decide. It seems to me that it is eminently a case for
facts to testify. Facts, I think, are yet lacking to prove
" spirit-return," though I have the highest respect for the
patient labours of Messrs. Myers, Hodgson, and Hyslop,
and am somewhat impressed by their favourable conclusions.
I consequently leave the matter open, with this brief word
to save the reader from a possible perplexity as to why
immortality got no mention in the body of this book.

The ideal power with which we feel ourselves in con
nection, the " God " of ordinary men, is, both by ordinary
men and by philosophers, endowed with certain of those
metaphysical attributes which in the lecture on Philosophy
I treated with such disrespect. He is assumed as a matter of
course to be " one and only " and to be " infinite "; and
the notion of many finite gods is one which hardly any one
thinks it worth while to consider, and still less to uphold.
Nevertheless, in the interests of intellectual clearness, I feel
bound to say that religious experience, as we have studied
it, cannot be cited as unequivocally supporting the infinitist
belief. The only thing that it unequivocally testifies to is
that we can experience union with something larger than

272 Selected Papers on Philosophy

ourselves and in that union find our greatest peace. Philo
sophy, with its passion for unity, and mysticism with its
monoideistic bent, both " pass to the limit " and identify
the something with a unique God who is the all-inclusive
soul of the world. Popular opinion, respectful to their
authority, follows the example which they set.

Meanwhile the practical needs and experiences of religion
seem to me sufficiently met by the belief that beyond each
man and in a fashion continuous with him there exists a
larger power which is friendly to him and to his ideals. All
that the facts require is that the power should be both other
and larger than our conscious selves. Anything larger will
do, if only it be large enough to trust for the next step. It
need not be infinite, it need not be solitary. It might con
ceivably even be only a larger and more godlike self, of
which the present self would then be but the mutilated
expression, and the universe might conceivably be a col
lection of such selves, of different degrees of inclusiveness,
with no absolute unity realized in it at all. Thus would a
sort of polytheism return upon us — a polytheism which
I do not on this occasion defend, for my only aim at present
is to keep the testimony of religious experience clearly
within its proper bounds.

Upholders of the monistic view will say to such a poly
theism (which, by the way, has always been the real religion
of common people, and is so still to-day) that unless ther
be one all-inclusive God, our guarantee of security is lei
imperfect. In the Absolute, and in the Absolute only, al
is saved. If there be different gods, each caring for hi
part, some portion of some of us might not be covered wit!
divine protection, and our religious consolation woulc
thus fail to be complete. It goes back to what was sai(
about the possibility of there being portions of th
universe that may irretrievably be lost. Common sense
less sweeping in its demands than philosophy or mysticisn
have been wont to be, and can suffer the notion of thi
world being partly saved and partly lost. The ordinar

Content of Religious Experience 273

moralistic state of mind makes the salvation of the world
conditional upon the success with which each unit does its
part. Partial and conditional salvation is in fact a most
familiar notion when taken in the abstract, the only diffi
culty being to determine the details. Some men are even
disinterested enough to be willing to be in the unsaved
remnant as far as their persons go if only they can be
persuaded that their cause will prevail — all of us are
willing whenever our activity-excitement rises sufficiently
high. I think, in fact, that a final philosophy of religion
will have to consider the pluralistic hypothesis more seriously
than it has hitherto been willing to consider it. For
practical life at any rate, the chance of salvation is enough.
No fact in human nature is more characteristic than its
willingness to live on a chance. The existence of the chance
makes the difference, as Edmund Gurney says, between a
life of which the keynote is resignation and a life of which the
keynote is hope. But all these statements are unsatisfactory
from their brevity, and I can only say that I hope to return
to the same questions in another book.

8530V6

James, K. B

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Selected papers on phisosophy. .J23