Let me confess to the diffidence with which I find myself standing here
to-day. When the invitation of your committee reached me last fall,
the simple truth is that I accepted it as most men accept a
challenge,--not because they wish to fight, but because they are
ashamed to say no. Pretending in my small sphere to be a teacher, I
felt it would be cowardly to shrink from the keenest ordeal to which a
teacher can be exposed,--the ordeal of teaching other teachers.
Fortunately, the trial will last but one short hour; and I have the
consolation of remembering Goethe's verses,--
"Vor den Wissenden sich stellen,
Sicher ist 's in allen Fällen,"--
for if experts are the hardest people to satisfy, they have at any rate
the liveliest sense of the difficulties of one's task, and they know
quickest when one hits the mark.
Since it was as a teacher of physiology that I was most unworthily
officiating when your committee's {112} invitation reached me, I must
suppose it to be for the sake of bringing a puff of the latest winds of
doctrine which blow over that somewhat restless sea that my presence is
desired. Among all the healthy symptoms that characterize this age, I
know no sounder one than the eagerness which theologians show to
assimilate results of science, and to hearken to the conclusions of men
of science about universal matters. One runs a better chance of being
listened to to-day if one can quote Darwin and Helmholtz than if one
can only quote Schleiermacher or Coleridge. I almost feel myself this
moment that were I to produce a frog and put him through his
physiological performances in a masterly manner before your eyes, I
should gain more reverential ears for what I have to say during the
remainder of the hour. I will not ask whether there be not something
of mere fashion in this prestige which the words of the physiologists
enjoy just now. If it be a fashion, it is certainly a beneficial one
upon the whole; and to challenge it would come with a poor grace from
one who at the moment he speaks is so conspicuously profiting by its
favors.
I will therefore only say this: that the latest breeze from the
physiological horizon need not necessarily be the most important one.
Of the immense amount of work which the laboratories of Europe and
America, and one may add of Asia and Australia, are producing every
year, much is destined to speedy refutation; and of more it may be said
that its interest is purely technical, and not in any degree
philosophical or universal.
This being the case, I know you will justify me if I fall back on a
doctrine which is fundamental and well established rather than novel,
and ask you whether {113} by taking counsel together we may not trace
some new consequences from it which shall interest us all alike as men.
I refer to the doctrine of reflex action, especially as extended to the
brain. This is, of course, so familiar to you that I hardly need
define it. In a general way, all educated people know what reflex
action means.
It means that the acts we perform are always the result of outward
discharges from the nervous centres, and that these outward discharges
are themselves the result of impressions from the external world,
carried in along one or another of our sensory nerves. Applied at
first to only a portion of our acts, this conception has ended by being
generalized more and more, so that now most physiologists tell us that
every action whatever, even the most deliberately weighed and
calculated, does, so far as its organic conditions go, follow the
reflex type. There is not one which cannot be remotely, if not
immediately, traced to an origin in some incoming impression of sense.
There is no impression of sense which, unless inhibited by some other
stronger one, does not immediately or remotely express itself in action
of some kind. There is no one of those complicated performances in the
convolutions of the brain to which our trains of thought correspond,
which is not a mere middle term interposed between an incoming
sensation that arouses it and an outgoing discharge of some sort,
inhibitory if not exciting, to which itself gives rise. The structural
unit of the nervous system is in fact a triad, neither of whose
elements has any independent existence. The sensory impression exists
only for the sake of awaking the central process of reflection, and the
central process of reflection exists {114} only for the sake of calling
forth the final act. All action is thus _re_-action upon the outer
world; and the middle stage of consideration or contemplation or
thinking is only a place of transit, the bottom of a loop, both whose
ends have their point of application in the outer world. If it should
ever have no roots in the outer world, if it should ever happen that it
led to no active measures, it would fail of its essential function, and
would have to be considered either pathological or abortive. The
current of life which runs in at our eyes or ears is meant to run out
at our hands, feet, or lips. The only use of the thoughts it occasions
while inside is to determine its direction to whichever of these organs
shall, on the whole, under the circumstances actually present, act in
the way most propitious to our welfare.
The willing department of our nature, in short, dominates both the
conceiving department and the feeling department; or, in plainer
English, perception and thinking are only there for behavior's sake.
I am sure I am not wrong in stating this result as one of the
fundamental conclusions to which the entire drift of modern
physiological investigation sweeps us. If asked what great
contribution physiology has made to psychology of late years, I am sure
every competent authority will reply that her influence has in no way
been so weighty as in the copious illustration, verification, and
consolidation of this broad, general point of view.
I invite you, then, to consider what may be the possible speculative
consequences involved in this great achievement of our generation.
Already, it dominates all the new work done in psychology; but {115}
what I wish to ask is whether its influence may not extend far beyond
the limits of psychology, even into those of theology herself. The
relations of the doctrine of reflex action with no less a matter than
the doctrine of theism is, in fact, the topic to which I now invite
your attention.
We are not the first in the field. There have not been wanting writers
enough to say that reflex action and all that follows from it give the
_coup de grâce_ to the superstition of a God.
If you open, for instance, such a book on comparative psychology, as
der Thierische Wille of G. H. Schneider, you will find, sandwiched in
among the admirable dealings of the author with his proper subject, and
popping out upon us in unexpected places, the most delightfully _naïf_
German onslaughts on the degradation of theologians, and the utter
incompatibility of so many reflex adaptations to the environment with
the existence of a creative intelligence. There was a time, remembered
by many of us here, when the existence of reflex action and all the
other harmonies between the organism and the world were held to prove a
God. Now, they are held to disprove him. The next turn of the
whirligig may bring back proof of him again.
Into this debate about his existence, I will not pretend to enter. I
must take up humbler ground, and limit my ambition to showing that a
God, whether existent or not, is at all events the kind of being which,
if he did exist, would form _the most adequate possible object_ for
minds framed like our own to conceive as lying at the root of the
universe. My thesis, in other words, is this: that some outward
reality of {116} a nature defined as God's nature must be defined, is
the only ultimate object that is at the same time rational and possible
for the human mind's contemplation. _Anything short of God is not
rational, anything more than God is not possible_, if the human mind be
in truth the triadic structure of impression, reflection, and reaction
which we at the outset allowed.
Theism, whatever its objective warrant, would thus be seen to have a
subjective anchorage in its congruity with our nature as thinkers; and,
however it may fare with its truth, to derive from this subjective
adequacy the strongest possible guaranty of its permanence. It is and
will be the classic mean of rational opinion, the centre of gravity of
all attempts to solve the riddle of life,--some falling below it by
defect, some flying above it by excess, itself alone satisfying every
mental need in strictly normal measure. Our gain will thus in the
first instance be psychological. We shall merely have investigated a
chapter in the natural history of the mind, and found that, as a matter
of such natural history, God may be called the normal object of the
mind's belief. Whether over and above this he be really the living
truth is another question. If he is, it will show the structure of our
mind to be in accordance with the nature of reality. Whether it be or
not in such accordance is, it seems to me, one of those questions that
belong to the province of personal faith to decide. I will not touch
upon the question here, for I prefer to keep to the strictly
natural-history point of view. I will only remind you that each one of
us is entitled either to doubt or to believe in the harmony between his
faculties and the truth; and that, whether he doubt or {117} believe,
he does it alike on his personal responsibility and risk.
"Du musst glauben, du musst wagen,
Denn die Götter leihn kein Pfand,
Nur ein Wunder kann dich tragen
In das schöne Wunderland."
I will presently define exactly what I mean by God and by Theism, and
explain what theories I referred to when I spoke just now of attempts
to fly beyond the one and to outbid the other.
But, first of all, let me ask you to linger a moment longer over what I
have called the reflex theory of mind, so as to be sure that we
understand it absolutely before going on to consider those of its
consequences of which I am more particularly to speak. I am not quite
sure that its full scope is grasped even by those who have most
zealously promulgated it. I am not sure, for example, that all
physiologists see that it commits them to regarding the mind as an
essentially teleological mechanism. I mean by this that the conceiving
or theorizing faculty--the mind's middle department--functions
_exclusively for the sake of ends_ that do not exist at all in the
world of impressions we receive by way of our senses, but are set by
our emotional and practical subjectivity altogether.[2] It is a
transformer of the world of our impressions into a totally different
world,--the world of our conception; and the transformation is effected
in the interests of our volitional nature, and for no other purpose
whatsoever. Destroy the volitional nature, the definite subjective
purposes, preferences, {118} fondnesses for certain effects, forms,
orders, and not the slightest motive would remain for the brute order
of our experience to be remodelled at all. But, as we have the
elaborate volitional constitution we do have, the remodelling must be
effected; there is no escape. 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. Is not the sum of your actual experience taken at this
moment and impartially added together an utter chaos? The strains of
my voice, the lights and shades inside the room and out, the murmur of
the wind, the ticking of the clock, the various organic feelings you
may happen individually to possess, do these make a whole at all? Is
it not the only condition of your mental sanity in the midst of them
that most of them should become non-existent for you, and that a few
others--the sounds, I hope, which I am uttering--should evoke from
places in your memory that have nothing to do with this scene
associates fitted to combine with them in what we call a rational train
of thought,--rational, because it leads to a conclusion which we have
some organ to appreciate? We have no organ or faculty to appreciate
the simply given order. The real world as it is given objectively at
this moment is the sum total of all its beings and {119} events now.
But can we think of such a sum? Can we realize 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 contemporaneity 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 on any one of these we react
as though the others did not exist. We discover among its various
parts relations that were never given to sense at all (mathematical
relations, tangents, squares, and roots and logarithmic functions), and
out of an infinite number of these we call certain ones essential and
lawgiving, and ignore the rest. Essential these relations are, but
only _for our purpose_, the other relations being just as real and
present as they; and our purpose is to _conceive simply_ and to
_foresee_. Are not simple conception and prevision subjective ends
pure and simple? They are the ends of what we call science; and the
miracle of miracles, a miracle not yet exhaustively cleared up by any
philosophy, is that the given order lends itself to the remodelling.
It shows itself plastic to many of our scientific, to {120} many of our
aesthetic, to many of our practical purposes and ends.
When the man of affairs, the artist, or the man of science fails, he is
not rebutted. He tries again. He says the impressions of sense _must_
give way, _must_ be reduced to the desiderated form.[3] They all
postulate in the interests of their volitional nature a harmony between
the latter and the nature of things. The theologian does no more. And
the reflex doctrine of the mind's structure, though all theology should
as yet have failed of its endeavor, could but confess that the endeavor
itself at least obeyed in form the mind's most necessary law.[4]
Now for the question I asked above: What kind of a being would God be
if he did exist? The word 'God' has come to mean many things in the
history {121} of human thought, from Venus and Jupiter to the 'Idee'
which figures in the pages of Hegel. Even the laws of physical nature
have, in these positivistic times, been held worthy of divine honor and
presented as the only fitting object of our reverence.[5] Of course,
if our discussion is to bear any fruit, we must mean something more
definite than this. We must not call any object of our loyalty a 'God'
without more ado, simply because to awaken our loyalty happens to be
one of God's functions. He must have some intrinsic characteristics of
his own besides; and theism must mean the faith of that man who
believes that the object of _his_ loyalty has those other attributes,
negative or positive, as the case may be.
Now, as regards a great many of the attributes of God, and their
amounts and mutual relations, the world has been delivered over to
disputes. All such may for our present purpose be considered as quite
inessential. Not only such matters as his mode of revealing himself,
the precise extent of his providence and power and their connection
with our free-will, the proportion of his mercy to his justice, and the
amount of his responsibility for evil; but also his metaphysical
relation to the phenomenal world, whether causal, substantial, ideal,
or what not,--are affairs of purely sectarian opinion that need not
concern us at all. Whoso debates them presupposes the essential
features of theism to be granted already; and it is with these
essential features, the bare poles of the subject, that our business
exclusively lies.
{122}
Now, what are these essential features? First, it is essential that
God be conceived as the deepest power in the universe; and, second, he
must be conceived under the form of a mental personality. The
personality need not be determined intrinsically any further than is
involved in the holding of certain things dear, and in the recognition
of our dispositions toward those things, the things themselves being
all good and righteous things. But, extrinsically considered, so to
speak, God's personality is to be regarded, like any other personality,
as something lying outside of my own and other than me, and whose
existence I simply come upon and find. A power not ourselves, then,
which not only makes for righteousness, but means it, and which
recognizes us,--such is the definition which I think nobody will be
inclined to dispute. Various are the attempts to shadow forth the
other lineaments of so supreme a personality to our human imagination;
various the ways of conceiving in what mode the recognition, the
hearkening to our cry, can come. Some are gross and idolatrous; some
are the most sustained efforts man's intellect has ever made to keep
still living on that subtile edge of things where speech and thought
expire. But, with all these differences, the essence remains
unchanged. In whatever other respects the divine personality may
differ from ours or may resemble it, the two are consanguineous at
least in this,--that both have purposes for which they care, and each
can hear the other's call.
Meanwhile, we can already see one consequence and one point of
connection with the reflex-action theory of mind. Any mind,
constructed on the {123} triadic-reflex pattern, must first get its
impression from the object which it confronts; then define what that
object is, and decide what active measures its presence demands; and
finally react. The stage of reaction depends on the stage of
definition, and these, of course, on the nature of the impressing
object. When the objects are concrete, particular, and familiar, our
reactions are firm and certain enough,--often instinctive. I see the
desk, and lean on it; I see your quiet faces, and I continue to talk.
But the objects will not stay concrete and particular: they fuse
themselves into general essences, and they sum themselves into a
whole,--the universe. And then the object that confronts us, that
knocks on our mental door and asks to be let in, and fixed and decided
upon and actively met, is just this whole universe itself and its
essence.
What are _they_, and how shall I meet _them_?
The whole flood of faiths and systems here rush in. Philosophies and
denials of philosophy, religions and atheisms, scepticisms and
mysticisms, confirmed emotional moods and habitual practical biases,
jostle one another; for all are alike trials, hasty, prolix, or of
seemly length, to answer this momentous question. And the function of
them all, long or short, that which the moods and the systems alike
subserve and pass into, is the third stage,--the stage of action. For
no one of them itself is final. They form but the middle segment of
the mental curve, and not its termination. As the last theoretic pulse
dies away, it does not leave the mental process complete: it is but the
forerunner of the practical moment, in which alone the cycle of
mentality finds its rhythmic pause.
{124}
We easily delude ourselves about this middle stage. Sometimes we think
it final, and sometimes we fail to see, amid the monstrous diversity in
the length and complication of the cogitations which may fill it, that
it can have but one essential function, and that the one we have
pointed out,--the function of defining the direction which our
activity, immediate or remote, shall take.
If I simply say, "Vanitas vanitatum, omnia vanitas!" I am defining the
total nature of things in a way that carries practical consequences
with it as decidedly as if I write a treatise De Natura Rerum in twenty
volumes. The treatise may trace its consequences more minutely than
the saying; but the only worth of either treatise or saying is that the
consequences are there. The long definition can do no more than draw
them; the short definition does no less. Indeed, it may be said that
if two apparently different definitions of the reality before us should
have identical consequences, those two definitions would really be
identical definitions, made delusively to appear different merely by
the different verbiage in which they are expressed.[6]
My time is unfortunately too short to stay and give to this truth the
development it deserves; but I will assume that you grant it without
further parley, and pass to the next step in my argument. And here,
too, I shall have to bespeak your close attention for a moment, while I
pass over the subject far more {125} rapidly than it deserves. Whether
true or false, any view of the universe which shall completely satisfy
the mind must obey conditions of the mind's own imposing, must at least
let the mind be the umpire to decide whether it be fit to be called a
rational universe or not. Not any nature of things which may seem to
be will also seem to be _ipso facto_ rational; and if it do not seem
rational, it will afflict the mind with a ceaseless uneasiness, till it
be formulated or interpreted in some other and more congenial way. The
study of what the mind's criteria of rationality are, the definition of
its exactions in this respect, form an intensely interesting subject
into which I cannot enter now with any detail.[7] But so much I think
you will grant me without argument,--that all three departments of the
mind alike have a vote in the matter, and that no conception will pass
muster which violates any of their essential modes of activity, or
which leaves them without a chance to work. By what title is it that
every would-be universal formula, every system of philosophy which
rears its head, receives the inevitable critical volley from one half
of mankind, and falls to the rear, to become at the very best the creed
of some partial sect? Either it has dropped out of its net some of our
impressions of sense,--what we call the facts of nature,--or it has
left the theoretic and defining department with a lot of
inconsistencies and unmediated transitions on its hands; or else,
finally, it has left some one or more of our fundamental active and
emotional powers with no object outside of themselves to react-on or to
live for. Any one of these defects is fatal to its complete success.
Some one {126} will be sure to discover the flaw, to scout the system,
and to seek another in its stead.
I need not go far to collect examples to illustrate to an audience of
theologians what I mean. Nor will you in particular, as champions of
the Unitarianism of New England, be slow to furnish, from the motives
which led to your departure from our orthodox ancestral Calvinism,
instances enough under the third or practical head. A God who gives so
little scope to love, a predestination which takes from endeavor all
its zest with all its fruit, are irrational conceptions, because they
say to our most cherished powers, There is no object for you.
Well, just as within the limits of theism some kinds are surviving
others by reason of their greater practical rationality, so theism
itself, by reason of its practical rationality, is certain to survive
all lower creeds. Materialism and agnosticism, even were they true,
could never gain universal and popular acceptance; for they both,
alike, give a solution of things which is irrational to the practical
third of our nature, and in which we can never volitionally feel at
home. Each comes out of the second or theoretic stage of mental
functioning, with its definition of the essential nature of things, its
formula of formulas prepared. The whole array of active forces of our
nature stands waiting, impatient for the word which shall tell them how
to discharge themselves most deeply and worthily upon life. "Well!"
cry they, "what shall we do?" "Ignoramus, ignorabimus!" says
agnosticism. "React upon atoms and their concussions!" says
materialism. What a collapse! The mental train misses fire, the
middle fails to ignite the end, the cycle breaks down half-way to its
conclusion; and the active {127} powers left alone, with no proper
object on which to vent their energy, must either atrophy, sicken, and
die, or else by their pent-up convulsions and excitement keep the whole
machinery in a fever until some less incommensurable solution, some
more practically rational formula, shall provide a normal issue for the
currents of the soul.
Now, theism always stands ready with the most practically rational
solution it is possible to conceive. Not an energy of our active
nature to which it does not authoritatively appeal, not an emotion of
which it does not normally and naturally release the springs. At a
single stroke, it changes the dead blank _it_ of the world into a
living _thou_, with whom the whole man may have dealings. To you, at
any rate, I need waste no words in trying to prove its supreme
commensurateness with all the demands that department Number Three of
the mind has the power to impose on department Number Two.
Our volitional nature must then, until the end of time, exert a
constant pressure upon the other departments of the mind to induce them
to function to theistic conclusions. No contrary formulas can be more
than provisionally held. Infra-theistic theories must be always in
unstable equilibrium; for department Number Three ever lurks in ambush,
ready to assert its rights, and on the slightest show of justification
it makes its fatal spring, and converts them into the other form in
which alone mental peace and order can permanently reign.
The question is, then, _Can_ departments One and Two, _can_ the facts
of nature and the theoretic elaboration of them, always lead to
theistic conclusions?
The future history of philosophy is the only {128} authority capable of
answering that question. I, at all events, must not enter into it
to-day, as that would be to abandon the purely natural-history point of
view I mean to keep.
This only is certain, that the theoretic faculty lives between two
fires which never give her rest, and make her incessantly revise her
formulations. If she sink into a premature, short-sighted, and
idolatrous theism, in comes department Number One with its battery of
facts of sense, and dislodges her from her dogmatic repose. If she
lazily subside into equilibrium with the same facts of sense viewed in
their simple mechanical outwardness, up starts the practical reason
with its demands, and makes _that_ couch a bed of thorns. From
generation to generation thus it goes,--now a movement of reception
from without, now one of expansion from within; department Number Two
always worked to death, yet never excused from taking the most
responsible part in the arrangements. To-day, a crop of new facts;
to-morrow, a flowering of new motives,--the theoretic faculty always
having to effect the transition, and life growing withal so complex and
subtle and immense that her powers of conceiving are almost ruptured
with the strain. See how, in France, the mummy-cloths of the academic
and official theistic philosophy are rent by the facts of evolution,
and how the young thinkers are at work! See, in Great Britain, how the
dryness of the strict associationist school, which under the
ministration of Mill, Bain, and Spencer dominated us but yesterday,
gives way to more generous idealisms, born of more urgent emotional
needs and wrapping the same facts in far more massive intellectual
harmonies! These are but tackings to the common {129} port, to that
ultimate _Weltanschauung_ of maximum subjective as well as objective
richness, which, whatever its other properties may be, will at any rate
wear the theistic form.
Here let me say one word about a remark we often hear coming from the
anti-theistic wing: It is base, it is vile, it is the lowest depth of
immorality, to allow department Number Three to interpose its demands,
and have any vote in the question of what is true and what is false;
the mind must be a passive, reactionless sheet of white paper, on which
reality will simply come and register its own philosophic definition,
as the pen registers the curve on the sheet of a chronograph. "Of all
the cants that are canted in this canting age" this has always seemed
to me the most wretched, especially when it comes from professed
psychologists. As if the mind could, consistently with its definition,
be a reactionless sheet at all! As if conception could possibly occur
except for a teleological purpose, except to show us the way from a
state of things our senses cognize to another state of things our will
desires! As if 'science' itself were anything else than such an end of
desire, and a most peculiar one at that! And as if the 'truths' of
bare physics in particular, which these sticklers for intellectual
purity contend to be the only uncontaminated form, were not as great an
alteration and falsification of the simply 'given' order of the world,
into an order conceived solely for the mind's convenience and delight,
as any theistic doctrine possibly can be!
Physics is but one chapter in the great jugglery which our conceiving
faculty is forever playing with {130} the order of being as it presents
itself to our reception. It transforms the unutterable dead level and
continuum of the 'given' world into an utterly unlike world of sharp
differences and hierarchic subordinations for no other reason than to
satisfy certain subjective passions we possess.[8]
And, so far as we can see, the given world is there only for the sake
of the operation. At any rate, to operate upon it is our only chance
of approaching it; for never can we get a glimpse of it in the
unimaginable insipidity of its virgin estate. To bid the man's
subjective interests be passive till truth express itself from out the
environment, is to bid the sculptor's chisel be passive till the statue
express itself from out the stone. Operate we must! and the only
choice left us is that between operating to poor or to rich results.
The only possible duty there can be in the matter is the duty of
getting the richest results that the material given will allow. The
richness lies, of course, in the energy of all three departments of the
mental cycle. Not a sensible 'fact' of department One must be left in
the cold, not a faculty of department Three be paralyzed; and
department Two must form an indestructible bridge. It is natural that
the habitual neglect of department One by theologians should arouse
indignation; but it is most _un_natural that the indignation should
take the form of a wholesale denunciation of department Three. It is
the story of Kant's dove over again, denouncing the {131} pressure of
the air. Certain of our positivists keep chiming to us, that, amid the
wreck of every other god and idol, one divinity still stands
upright,--that his name is Scientific Truth, and that he has but one
commandment, but that one supreme, saying, _Thou shalt not be a
theist_, for that would be to satisfy thy subjective propensities, and
the satisfaction of those is intellectual damnation. These most
conscientious gentlemen think they have jumped off their own
feet,--emancipated their mental operations from the control of their
subjective propensities at large and _in toto_. But they are deluded.
They have simply chosen from among the entire set of propensities at
their command those that were certain to construct, out of the
materials given, the leanest, lowest, aridest result,--namely, the bare
molecular world,--and they have sacrificed all the rest.[9]
Man's chief difference from the brutes lies in the exuberant excess of
his subjective propensities,--his pre-eminence over them simply and
solely in the number and in the fantastic and unnecessary character of
his wants, physical, moral, aesthetic, and intellectual. Had his whole
life not been a quest for the superfluous, he would never have
established himself as inexpugnably as he has done in the necessary.
And from the consciousness of this he should draw the lesson that his
wants are to be trusted; that even {132} when their gratification seems
farthest off, the uneasiness they occasion is still the best guide of
his life, and will lead him to issues entirely beyond his present
powers of reckoning. Prune down his extravagance, sober him, and you
undo him. The appetite for immediate consistency at any cost, or what
the logicians call the 'law of parsimony,'--which is nothing but the
passion for conceiving the universe in the most labor-saving
way,--will, if made the exclusive law of the mind, end by blighting the
development of the intellect itself quite as much as that of the
feelings or the will. The scientific conception of the world as an
army of molecules gratifies this appetite after its fashion most
exquisitely. But if the religion of exclusive scientificism should
ever succeed in suffocating all other appetites out of a nation's mind,
and imbuing a whole race with the persuasion that simplicity and
consistency demand a _tabula rasa_ to be made of every notion that does
not form part of the _soi-disant_ scientific synthesis, that nation,
that race, will just as surely go to ruin, and fall a prey to their
more richly constituted neighbors, as the beasts of the field, as a
whole, have fallen a prey to man.
I have myself little fear for our Anglo-Saxon race. Its moral,
aesthetic, and practical wants form too dense a stubble to be mown by
any scientific Occam's razor that has yet been forged. The knights of
the razor will never form among us more than a sect; but when I see
their fraternity increasing in numbers, and, what is worse, when I see
their negations acquiring almost as much prestige and authority as
their affirmations legitimately claim over the minds of the docile
public, I feel as if the influences working in the direction of our
mental barbarization were {133} beginning to be rather strong, and
needed some positive counteraction. And when I ask myself from what
quarter the invasion may best be checked, I can find no answer as good
as the one suggested by casting my eyes around this room. For this
needful task, no fitter body of men than the Unitarian clergy exists.
Who can uphold the rights of department Three of the mind with better
grace than those who long since showed how they could fight and suffer
for department One? As, then, you burst the bonds of a narrow
ecclesiastical tradition, by insisting that no fact of sense or result
of science must be left out of account in the religious synthesis, so
may you still be the champions of mental completeness and
all-sidedness. May you, with equal success, avert the formation of a
narrow scientific tradition, and burst the bonds of any synthesis which
would pretend to leave out of account those forms of being, those
relations of reality, to which at present our active and emotional
tendencies are our only avenues of approach. I hear it said that
Unitarianism is not growing in these days. I know nothing of the truth
of the statement; but if it be true, it is surely because the great
ship of Orthodoxy is nearing the port and the pilot is being taken on
board. If you will only lead in a theistic science, as successfully as
you have led in a scientific theology, your separate name as Unitarians
may perish from the mouths of men; for your task will have been done,
and your function at an end. Until that distant day, you have work
enough in both directions awaiting you.
Meanwhile, let me pass to the next division of our subject. I said
that we are forced to regard God as {134} the normal object of the
mind's belief, inasmuch as any conception that falls short of God is
irrational, if the word 'rational' be taken in its fullest sense; while
any conception that goes beyond God is impossible, if the human mind be
constructed after the triadic-reflex pattern we have discussed at such
length. The first half of the thesis has been disposed of.
Infra-theistic conceptions, materialisms and agnosticisms, are
irrational because they are inadequate stimuli to man's practical
nature. I have now to justify the latter half of the thesis.
I dare say it may for an instant have perplexed some of you that I
should speak of conceptions that aimed at going beyond God, and of
attempts to fly above him or outbid him; so I will now explain exactly
what I mean. In defining the essential attributes of God, I said he
was a personality lying outside our own and other than us,--a power not
ourselves. Now, the attempts to fly beyond theism, of which I speak,
are attempts to get over this ultimate duality of God and his believer,
and to transform it into some sort or other of identity. If
infratheistic ways of looking on the world leave it in the third
person, a mere _it_; and if theism turns the _it_ into a _thou_,--so we
may say that these other theories try to cover it with the mantle of
the first person, and to make it a part of _me_.
I am well aware that I begin here to tread on ground in which trenchant
distinctions may easily seem to mutilate the facts.
That sense of emotional reconciliation with God which characterizes the
highest moments of the theistic consciousness may be described as
'oneness' with him, and so from the very bosom of theism a {135}
monistic doctrine seem to arise. But this consciousness of
self-surrender, of absolute practical union between one's self and the
divine object of one's contemplation, is a totally different thing from
any sort of substantial identity. Still the object God and the subject
I are two. Still I simply come upon him, and find his existence given
to me; and the climax of my practical union with what is given, forms
at the same time the climax of my perception that as a numerical fact
of existence I am something radically other than the Divinity with
whose effulgence I am filled.
Now, it seems to me that the only sort of union of creature with
creator with which theism, properly so called, comports, is of this
emotional and practical kind; and it is based unchangeably on the
empirical fact that the thinking subject and the object thought are
numerically two. How my mind and will, which are not God, can yet
cognize and leap to meet him, how I ever came to be so separate from
him, and how God himself came to be at all, are problems that for the
theist can remain unsolved and insoluble forever. It is sufficient for
him to know that he himself simply is, and needs God; and that behind
this universe God simply is and will be forever, and will in some way
hear his call. In the practical assurance of these empirical facts,
without 'Erkentnisstheorie' or philosophical ontology, without
metaphysics of emanation or creation to justify or make them more
intelligible, in the blessedness of their mere acknowledgment as given,
lie all the peace and power he craves. The floodgates of the religious
life are opened, and the full currents can pour through.
It is this empirical and practical side of the theistic position, its
theoretic chastity and modesty, which I {136} wish to accentuate here.
The highest flights of theistic mysticism, far from pretending to
penetrate the secrets of the _me_ and the _thou_ in worship, and to
transcend the dualism by an act of intelligence, simply turn their
backs on such attempts. The problem for them has simply
vanished,--vanished from the sight of an attitude which refuses to
notice such futile theoretic difficulties. Get but that "peace of God
which passeth understanding," and the questions of the understanding
will cease from puzzling and pedantic scruples be at rest. In other
words, theistic mysticism, that form of theism which at first sight
seems most to have transcended the fundamental otherness of God from
man, has done it least of all in the theoretic way. The pattern of its
procedure is precisely that of the simplest man dealing with the
simplest fact of his environment. Both he and the theist tarry in
department Two of their minds only so long as is necessary to define
what is the presence that confronts them. The theist decides that its
character is such as to be fitly responded to on his part by a
religious reaction; and into that reaction he forthwith pours his soul.
His insight into the _what_ of life leads to results so immediately and
intimately rational that the _why_, the _how_, and the _whence_ of it
are questions that lose all urgency. 'Gefühl ist Alles,' Faust says.
The channels of department Three have drained those of department Two
of their contents; and happiness over the fact that being has made
itself what it is, evacuates all speculation as to how it could make
itself at all.
But now, although to most human minds such a position as this will be
the position of rational equilibrium, it is not difficult to bring
forward certain {137} considerations, in the light of which so simple
and practical a mental movement begins to seem rather short-winded and
second-rate and devoid of intellectual style. This easy acceptance of
an opaque limit to our speculative insight; this satisfaction with a
Being whose character we simply apprehend without comprehending
anything more about him, and with whom after a certain point our
dealings can be only of a volitional and emotional sort; above all,
this sitting down contented with a blank unmediated dualism,--are they
not the very picture of unfaithfulness to the rights and duties of our
theoretic reason?
Surely, if the universe is reasonable (and we must believe that it is
so), it must be susceptible, potentially at least, of being reasoned
_out_ to the last drop without residuum. Is it not rather an insult to
the very word 'rational' to say that the rational character of the
universe and its creator means no more than that we practically feel at
home in their presence, and that our powers are a match for their
demands? Do they not in fact demand to be _understood_ by us still
more than to be reacted on? Is not the unparalleled development of
department Two of the mind in man his crowning glory and his very
essence; and may not the _knowing of the truth_ be his absolute
vocation? And if it is, ought he flatly to acquiesce in a spiritual
life of 'reflex type,' whose form is no higher than that of the life
that animates his spinal cord,--nay, indeed, that animates the writhing
segments of any mutilated worm?
It is easy to see how such arguments and queries may result in the
erection of an ideal of our mental destiny, far different from the
simple and practical religious one we have described. We may well
begin {138} to ask whether such things as practical reactions can be
the final upshot and purpose of all our cognitive energy. Mere outward
acts, changes in the position of parts of matter (for they are nothing
else), can they possibly be the culmination and consummation of our
relations with the nature of things? Can they possibly form a result
to which our godlike powers of insight shall be judged merely
subservient? Such an idea, if we scan it closely, soon begins to seem
rather absurd. Whence this piece of matter comes and whither that one
goes, what difference ought that to make to the nature of things,
except so far as with the comings and the goings our wonderful inward
conscious harvest may be reaped?
And so, very naturally and gradually, one may be led from the theistic
and practical point of view to what I shall call the _gnostical_ one.
We may think that department Three of the mind, with its doings of
right and its doings of wrong, must be there only to serve department
Two; and we may suspect that the sphere of our activity exists for no
other purpose than to illumine our cognitive consciousness by the
experience of its results. Are not all sense and all emotion at bottom
but turbid and perplexed modes of what in its clarified shape is
intelligent cognition? Is not all experience just the eating of the
fruit of the tree of _knowledge_ of good and evil, and nothing more?
These questions fan the fire of an unassuageable gnostic thirst, which
is as far removed from theism in one direction as agnosticism was
removed from it in the other; and which aspires to nothing less than an
absolute unity of knowledge with its object, and refuses to be
satisfied short of a fusion and solution and saturation of both
impression and action with reason, and {139} an absorption of all three
departments of the mind into one. Time would fail us to-day (even had
I the learning, which I have not) to speak of gnostic systems in
detail. The aim of all of them is to shadow forth a sort of process by
which spirit, emerging from its beginnings and exhausting the whole
circle of finite experience in its sweep, shall at last return and
possess itself as its own object at the climax of its career. This
climax is the religious consciousness. At the giddy height of this
conception, whose latest and best known form is the Hegelian
philosophy, definite words fail to serve their purpose; and the
ultimate goal,--where object and subject, worshipped and worshipper,
facts and the knowledge of them, fall into one, and where no other is
left outstanding beyond this one that alone is, and that we may call
indifferently act or fact, reality or idea, God or creation,--this
goal, I say, has to be adumbrated to our halting and gasping
intelligence by coarse physical metaphors, 'positings' and
'self-returnings' and 'removals' and 'settings free,' which hardly help
to make the matter clear.
But from the midst of the curdling and the circling of it all we seem
dimly to catch a glimpse of a state in which the reality to be known
and the power of knowing shall have become so mutually adequate that
each exhaustively is absorbed by the other and the twain become one
flesh, and in which the light shall somehow have soaked up all the
outer darkness into its own ubiquitous beams. Like all headlong
ideals, this apotheosis of the bare conceiving faculty has its depth
and wildness, its pang and its charm. To many it sings a truly siren
strain; and so long as it is held only as a postulate, as a mere
vanishing {140} point to give perspective to our intellectual aim, it
is hard to see any empirical title by which we may deny the legitimacy
of gnosticism's claims. That we are not as yet near the goal it
prefigures can never be a reason why we might not continue indefinitely
to approach it; and to all sceptical arguments, drawn from our reason's
actual finiteness, gnosticism can still oppose its indomitable faith in
the infinite character of its potential destiny.
Now, here it is that the physiologist's generalization, as it seems to
me, may fairly come in, and by ruling any such extravagant faith out of
court help to legitimate our personal mistrust of its pretensions. I
confess that I myself have always had a great mistrust of the
pretensions of the gnostic faith. Not only do I utterly fail to
understand what a cognitive faculty erected into the absolute of being,
with itself as its object, can mean; but even if we grant it a being
other than itself for object, I cannot reason myself out of the belief
that however familiar and at home we might become with the character of
that being, the bare being of it, the fact that it is there at all,
must always be something blankly given and presupposed in order that
conception may begin its work; must in short lie beyond speculation,
and not be enveloped in its sphere.
Accordingly, it is with no small pleasure that as a student of
physiology and psychology I find the only lesson I can learn from these
sciences to be one that corroborates these convictions. From its first
dawn to its highest actual attainment, we find that the cognitive
faculty, where it appears to exist at all, appears but as one element
in an organic mental whole, and as a minister to higher mental
powers,--the powers {141} of will. Such a thing as its emancipation
and absolution from these organic relations receives no faintest color
of plausibility from any fact we can discern. Arising as a part, in a
mental and objective world which are both larger than itself, it must,
whatever its powers of growth may be (and I am far from wishing to
disparage them), remain a part to the end. This is the character of
the cognitive element in all the mental life we know, and we have no
reason to suppose that that character will ever change. On the
contrary, it is more than probable that to the end of time our power of
moral and volitional response to the nature of things will be the
deepest organ of communication therewith we shall ever possess. In
every being that is real there is something external to, and sacred
from, the grasp of every other. God's being is sacred from ours. To
co-operate with his creation by the best and rightest response seems
all he wants of us. In such co-operation with his purposes, not in any
chimerical speculative conquest of him, not in any theoretic drinking
of him up, must lie the real meaning of our destiny.
This is nothing new. All men know it at those rare moments when the
soul sobers herself, and leaves off her chattering and protesting and
insisting about this formula or that. In the silence of our theories
we then seem to listen, and to hear something like the pulse of Being
beat; and it is borne in upon us that the mere turning of the
character, the dumb willingness to suffer and to serve this universe,
is more than all theories about it put together. The most any theory
about it can do is to bring us to that. Certain it is that the acutest
theories, the greatest intellectual power, the most elaborate
education, are a {142} sheer mockery when, as too often happens, they
feed mean motives and a nerveless will. And it is equally certain that
a resolute moral energy, no matter how inarticulate or unequipped with
learning its owner may be, extorts from us a respect we should never
pay were we not satisfied that the essential root of human personality
lay there.
I have sketched my subject in the briefest outlines; but still I hope
you will agree that I have established my point, and that the
physiological view of mentality, so far from invalidating, can but give
aid and comfort to the theistic attitude of mind. Between agnosticism
and gnosticism, theism stands midway, and holds to what is true in
each. With agnosticism, it goes so far as to confess that we cannot
know how Being made itself or us. With gnosticism, it goes so far as
to insist that we can know Being's character when made, and how it asks
us to behave.
If any one fear that in insisting so strongly that behavior is the aim
and end of every sound philosophy I have curtailed the dignity and
scope of the speculative function in us, I can only reply that in this
ascertainment of the _character_ of Being lies an almost infinite
speculative task. Let the voluminous considerations by which all
modern thought converges toward idealistic or pan-psychic conclusions
speak for me. Let the pages of a Hodgson, of a Lotze, of a Renouvier,
reply whether within the limits drawn by purely empirical theism the
speculative faculty finds not, and shall not always find, enough to do.
But do it little or much, its _place_ in a philosophy is always the
same, and is set by the structural form of the mind. Philosophies,
whether expressed in sonnets or {143} systems, all must wear this form.
The thinker starts from some experience of the practical world, and
asks its meaning. He launches himself upon the speculative sea, and
makes a voyage long or short. He ascends into the empyrean, and
communes with the eternal essences. But whatever his achievements and
discoveries be while gone, the utmost result they can issue in is some
new practical maxim or resolve, or the denial of some old one, with
which inevitably he is sooner or later washed ashore on the _terra
firma_ of concrete life again.
Whatever thought takes this voyage is a philosophy. We have seen how
theism takes it. And in the philosophy of a thinker who, though long
neglected, is doing much to renovate the spiritual life of his native
France to-day (I mean Charles Renouvier, whose writings ought to be
better known among us than they are), we have an instructive example of
the way in which this very empirical element in theism, its confession
of an ultimate opacity in things, of a dimension of being which escapes
our theoretic control, may suggest a most definite practical
conclusion,--this one, namely, that 'our wills are free.' I will say
nothing of Renouvier's line of reasoning; it is contained in many
volumes which I earnestly recommend to your attention.[10] But to
enforce my doctrine that the number of volumes is not what makes the
philosophy, let me conclude by recalling to you the little poem of
Tennyson, published last year, in which the speculative voyage is made,
and the same conclusion reached in a few lines:--
{144}
"Out of the deep, my child, out of the deep,
From that great deep before our world begins,
Whereon the Spirit of God moves as he will,--
Out of the deep, my child, out of the deep,
From that true world within the world we see,
Whereof our world is but the bounding shore,--
Out of the deep, Spirit, out of the deep,
With this ninth moon that sends the hidden sun
Down yon dark sea, thou comest, darling boy.
For in the world which is not ours, they said,
'Let us make man,' and that which should be man,
From that one light no man can look upon,
Drew to this shore lit by the suns and moons
And all the shadows. O dear Spirit, half-lost
In thine own shadow and this fleshly sign
That thou art thou,--who wailest being born
And banish'd into mystery,...
...our mortal veil
And shattered phantom of that Infinite One,
Who made thee unconceivably thyself
Out of his whole world-self and all in all,--
Live thou, and of the grain and husk, the grape
And ivyberry, choose; and still depart
From death to death through life and life, and find
Nearer and ever nearer Him who wrought
Not matter, nor the finite-infinite,
_But this main miracle, that thou art thou,
With power on thine own act and on the world_."
[1] Address delivered to the Unitarian Ministers' Institute at
Princeton, Mass., 1881, and printed in the Unitarian Review for October
of that year.
[2] See some Remarks on Spencer's Definition of Mind, in the Journal of
Speculative Philosophy for January, 1878.
[3] "No amount of failure in the attempt to subject the world of
sensible experience to a thorough-going system of conceptions, and to
bring all happenings back to cases of immutably valid law, is able to
shake our faith in the rightness of our principles. We hold fast to
our demand that even the greatest apparent confusion must sooner or
later solve itself in transparent formulas. We begin the work ever
afresh; and, refusing to believe that nature will permanently withhold
the reward of our exertions, think rather that we have hitherto only
failed to push them in the right direction. And all this pertinacity
flows from a conviction that we have no right to renounce the
fulfilment of our task. What, in short sustains the courage of
investigators is the force of obligation of an ethical idea."
(Sigwart: Logik, bd. ii., p. 23.)
This is a true account of the spirit of science. Does it essentially
differ from the spirit of religion? And is any one entitled to say in
advance, that, while the one form of faith shall be crowned with
success, the other is certainly doomed to fail?
[4] Concerning the transformation of the given order into the order of
conception, see S. H. Hodgson, The Philosophy of Reflection, chap. v.;
H. Lotze, Logik, sects. 342-351; C. Sigwart, Logik, sects. 60-63, 105.
[5] Haeckel has recently (Der Monismus, 1893, p. 37) proposed the
Cosmic Ether as a divinity fitted to reconcile science with theistic
faith.
[6] See the admirably original "Illustrations of the Logic of Science,"
by C. S. Peirce, especially the second paper, "How to make our Thoughts
clear," in the Popular Science Monthly for January, 1878.
[7] On this subject, see the preceding Essay.
[8] "As soon as it is recognized that our thought, as logic deals with
it, reposes on our _will to think_, the primacy of the will, even in
the theoretical sphere, must be conceded; and the last of
presuppositions is not merely [Kant's] that 'I think' must accompany
all my representations, but also that 'I will' must dominate all my
thinking." (Sigwart; Logik, ll. 25.)
[9] As our ancestors said, _Fiat justitia, pereat mundus_, so we, who
do not believe in justice or any absolute good, must, according to
these prophets, be willing to see the world perish, in order that
_scientia fiat_. Was there ever a more exquisite idol of the den, or
rather of the _shop_? In the clean sweep to be made of superstitions,
let the idol of stern obligation to be scientific go with the rest, and
people will have a fair chance to understand one another. But this
blowing of hot and of cold makes nothing but confusion.
[10] Especially the Essais de Critique Générale, 2me Edition, 6 vols.,
12mo, Paris, 1875; and the Esquisse d'une Classification Systématique
des Doctrines Philosophiques, 2 vols., 8vo, Paris, 1885.
{145}