its development. It is the solvent in which the inarticulate and
conflicting aspirations of a people become clarified and from which
they derive directing force. Since, however, philosophers are likely
to clothe their thoughts in highly technical language, there is
need of a class of middle-men-interpreters through whom philosophy
penetrates the masses. By American tradition, the philosophers have
been professors; the interpreters, clergymen. Professors are likely to
be deflected by the ideas embodied in the institutions with which they
associate themselves. The American college, in its foundations, was
designated a protector of orthodoxy and still echoes what Santayana
has so aptly called the “genteel tradition,” the tradition that the
teacher must defend the faith. Some of the most liberal New England
colleges even now demand attendance at daily chapel and Sunday church.
Less than a quarter of a century ago, one could still find, among major
non-sectarian institutions, the clergyman-president, himself a teacher,
crowning the curriculum with a senior requirement, Christian Evidences,
in support of the Faith.
The nineteenth century organized a vigorous war against this genteel
tradition. Not only were the attacks of rationalism on dogma
reinforced by the ever-mounting tide of scientific discovery within
our institutions of learning, but also the news of these scientific
discoveries began to stir the imagination of the public, and to
carry the conflict of science and theology beyond the control of the
church-college. The greatest leaven was Darwin’s “Origin of Species,”
of which two American editions were announced as early as 1860, one
year after its publication in England. The dogma of science came
publicly to confront the dogma of theology. Howsoever conservative
the college, it had to yield to the new intellectual temper and the
capitulation was facilitated by the army of young professors whom
cheapened transportation and the rumour of great achievements led to
the universities of Germany.
From the point of view of popular interest, the immediate effects of
these pilgrimages were not wholly advantageous to philosophy. In losing
something of their American provincialism, these pilgrims also lost
their hold on American interests. The problems that they brought back
were rooted in a foreign soil and tradition. To students they appeared
artificial and barren displays of technical skill. Thus an academic
philosophy of professordom arose, the more lonely through the loss
of the ecclesiastical mediators of the earlier tradition. But here
and there American vitality showed through its foreign clothes and
gradually an assimilation took place, the more easily, perhaps, since
German idealism naturally sustains the genteel tradition and thrives
amid the modes of thought that Emerson had developed independently and
for which his literary gifts had obtained a following.
Wherever New England has constituted the skeletal muscles of
philosophic culture, its temper has remained unchanged. Calvinism was
brought to America because it suited this temper, and the history of
idealism in America is the history of its preservation by adaptation to
a changing environment of ideas. Its marks are a sense of the presence
of the Divine in experience and a no less strong sense of inevitable
evil. Jonathan Edwards writes, “When we behold the light and brightness
of the sun, the golden edges of an evening cloud, or the beauteous
bow, we behold the adumbrations of His glory and goodness; and in the
blue sky, of his mildness and gentleness. There are also many things
wherein we may behold His awful majesty: in the sun in his strength, in
comets, in thunder, with the lowering thunder-clouds, in ragged rocks
and the brows of mountains.” Emerson’s version is: “Nature is always
consistent, though she feigns to contravene her own laws.... She arms
and equips an animal to find it place and living in the earth, and at
the same time she arms and equips another animal to destroy it. Space
exists to divide creatures; but by clothing the sides of a bird with
a few feathers she gives him a petty omnipresence.... Nature is the
incarnation of a thought, and turns to a thought again, as ice becomes
water and gas. Every moment instructs and every object; for wisdom is
infused into every form.” And Royce’s: “When they told us in childhood
that we could not see God just _because_ he was everywhere, just
because his omnipresence gave us no chance to discern him and to fix
our eyes upon him, they told us a deep truth in allegorical fashion....
The Self is so little a thing merely guessed at as the unknown source
of experience, that already, in the very least of daily experiences,
you unconsciously know him as something present.”
In its darker aspect this temper gives us Edwards’s “Sinners in the
Hands of an Angry God,” whose choices we may not fathom. But Emerson
is not far behind: “Great men, great nations, have not been boasters
and buffoons, but perceivers of the terror of life, and have manned
themselves to face it.... At Lisbon, an earthquake killed men like
flies. At Naples, three years ago, ten thousand persons were crushed in
a few minutes. Etc.... Providence has a wild, rough, incalculable road
to its end, and it is of no use to try to whitewash its huge, mixed
instrumentalities, or to dress up that terrific benefactor in the clean
shirt and white neckcloth of a student of divinity.” For Royce, “the
worst tragedy of the world is the tragedy of the brute chance to which
everything spiritual seems to be subject amongst us--the tragedy of
the diabolical irrationality of so many among the foes of whatever is
significant.”
Emersonian philosophy fails in two respects to satisfy the demands of
the puritanical temperament upon contemporary thought. In building
altars to the “Beautiful Necessity,” it neglects to assimilate the
discoveries of science, and it detaches itself from the Christian
tradition within which alone this spirit feels at home. Both of these
defects are met by the greatest of American idealists, Professor Royce.
In character and thought Royce is the great reconciler of
contradictions. Irrational in his affections, and at his best in
the society of children, he stands for the absolute authority of
reason; filled with indignation at wrong and injustice, he explains
the presence of evil as an essential condition for the good; keenly
critical and not optimistic as to the concrete characters of men, he
presents man as the image of God, a part of the self-representative
system through which the Divine nature unfolds itself. Never was there
a better illustration of Pascal’s dictum that we use our reasons to
support what we already believe, not to attain conclusions. And never
was there greater self-deception as to the presence of this process.
What man not already convinced of an Absolute could find in error the
proof of a deeper self that knows in unity all truth? Who else could
accept the dilemma “_either_ ... your real world yonder is through
and through a world of ideas, an outer mind that you are more or less
comprehending through your experience, _or else_, in so far as it
is real and outer, it is unknowable, an inscrutable X, an absolute
mystery”? Without the congeniality of belief, where is the thrill in
assimilating self-consciousness as infinite to a greater Infinite, as
the infinite systems of even numbers, or of odd numbers, or an infinity
of other infinite series can be assimilated to the greater infinity
of the whole number series as proper parts? Yet Royce has been able
to clothe these doctrines with vast erudition and flashes of quaint
humour, helped out by a prolix and somewhat desultory memory, and give
them life.
By virtue of the obscurantist logic inherent in this as in other
transcendental idealisms, there is a genuine attachment to a certain
aspect of Christianity. The identification of the Absolute with the
Logos of John in his “Spirit of Modern Philosophy” and the frequent
lapses into Scriptural language are not mere tricks to inspire
abstractions with the breath of life. By such logic “selves” are never
wholly distinct. If we make classifications, they are all _secundum
quid_. Absolute ontological sundering is as mythical as the Snark.
The individual is essentially a member of a community of selves that
establishes duties for him under the demands of Loyalty. This is the
basis of Royce’s ethics. But the fellowship in this community is also a
participation in the “beloved community” within which sin, atonement,
and the dogma of Pauline Christianity unfold themselves naturally in
the guise of social psychology. In such treatment of the “Problem of
Christianity” there is at most only a slight shifting of emphasis
from the somewhat too self-conscious individualism of his earliest
philosophy.
Royce used to tell a story on himself that illustrates a reaction of a
part of the public to idealistic philosophy. At the close of a lecture
before a certain woman’s organization, one of his auditors approached
him with the words: “Oh, my dear Professor Royce, I _did_ enjoy your
lectures _so_ much! Of course, I didn’t understand one word of it,
but it was so evident _you_ understood it all, that it made it _very_
enjoyable!” The lady, though more frank in her confession, was probably
not intellectually inferior to a considerable portion of the idealist’s
public. James notes the fascination of hearing high things talked
about, even if one cannot understand. But time is, alas, productive of
comparative understanding, and it may be with Royce, as with Emerson
before him, that growth of understanding contributes to narrowing the
circle of his readers. The imported mysteries of Eucken and Bergson
offer newer thrills, and a fuller sense of keeping up to date.
If Royce’s philosophy of religion has not the success that might have
been anticipated among those seeking a freer religion, it is probably,
as Professor Hocking suggests, because “idealism does not do the work
of religious truth.” Royce has no interest in churches or sects. Christ
is for him little more than a shadow. Prayer and worship find no place
in his discussion. The mantle of the genteel tradition must then fall
on other shoulders, probably those of Hocking himself. His “Meaning of
God in Human Experience” is an effort to unite realism, mysticism, and
idealism to establish Christianity as “organically rooted in passion,
fact, and institutional life.” Where idealism has destroyed the fear of
Hell, this new interpretation “restores the sense of infinite hazard, a
wrath to come, a heavenly city to be gained or lost in the process of
time and by the use of our freedom”!
In this philosophy, we ask, what has religion done for humanity and how
has it operated? Its effects appear in “the basis of such certainties
as we have, our self-respect, our belief in human worth, our faith in
the soul’s stability through all catastrophes of physical nature, and
in the integrity of history.” But if we accept this “mass of actual
deed, once and for all accomplished under the assurance of historic
religion” and through the medium of religious dogma and practice,
does this guarantee the future importance of religion? Much has been
accomplished under the conception that the earth was flat, but the
conception is nevertheless not valid.
It is too soon to estimate the depth of impression that this philosophy
will make on American culture. Professor Hocking warns us against
hastening to judge that the world is becoming irreligious. He believes
that the current distaste for the language of orthodoxy may spring
from the opposite reason, that man is becoming potentially more
religious. If so, this fact may conspire with the American tradition
of the church-college to verify Professor Cohen’s assertion that
“the idealistic tradition still is and perhaps will long continue to
be the prevailing basis of philosophic instruction in America.” But
there are signs that point to an opposite conclusion and the means of
emancipation are at hand both in a change of popular spirit and within
philosophy itself.
The economic and social conditions that scattered the more adventurous
of the New Englanders through the developing West, and the tides
of immigration of the 19th century, have weakened the hold of the
Calvinistic spirit. These events, and scientific education, are
producing a generation that can look upon the beauties of nature, be
moved to enjoyment, admiration, and wonder by them without, on that
account, feeling themselves in the presence of a supernatural Divine
principle. Success in mastering nature has overcome the feeling of
helplessness in the presence of misfortune. It breeds optimists of
intelligence. To a cataclysm such as the San Francisco earthquake,
it replies with organized relief and reconstruction in reinforced
concrete. If pestilence appears, it seeks the germ, an antitoxin, and
sanitary measures. There are no longer altars built to the Beautiful
Necessity.
Within philosophy, the most radical expression of this attitude appears
in the New Realism, and in the instrumentalism of Dewey. In 1910,
six of the younger American philosophers issued in the _Journal of
Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Method_ “The Programme and First
Platform of Six Realists,” followed shortly by a co-operative volume
of studies to elaborate the doctrine. Their deepest bond of union is
a distaste for the romantic spirit and obscurantist logic of Absolute
Idealism. Hence their dominant idea is to cut at the very foundations
of this system, the theory of relations in general, and the relation
of idea and object in particular. Young America is not fond of the
subtleties of history, hence these realists take their stand upon the
“unimpeachable truth of the accredited results of science” at a time
when, by the irony of history, science herself has begun to doubt.
To thwart idealism, psychology must be rewritten. While consciousness
exists there is always the chance that our world of facts may fade into
subjective presentations. Seizing a fruitful suggestion of James’, they
introduce us to a world of objects that exists quite independently
of being known. The relations of these objects are external to them
and independent of their character. Sometimes, however, there arise
relations between our organisms and other objects that can best be
described by asserting that these objects have entered into our
consciousness. How then can we fall into error? Only as nature makes
mistakes, by reacting in a way that brings conflict with unnoted
conditions. Perhaps the greatest contribution of Realism as yet to
American thought is the contribution of some of its apostles to its
implicit psychology, already independently established as behaviourism,
the most vital movement in contemporary psychology.
The highly technical form of the Six Realists’ co-operative volume has
kept their doctrine from any great reading public. But in its critical
echoes, the busy American finds a sympathetic note in the assertion
of the independent reality of the objects with which he works and the
world in which he has to make his way. His also is practical faith
in science, and he is glad to escape an inevitable type of religion
and moral theory to be swallowed along with philosophy. Until the New
Realists, however, develop further implications of their theory, or
at least present congenial religious, moral, and social attitudes,
their philosophy has only the negative significance of release. If it
is going to take a deep hold on life, it must also be creative, not
replacing dogma by dogma, but elaborating some new world vision. As yet
it has told us little more than that truth, goodness, and beauty are
independent realities, eternal subsistencies that await our discovery.
Professor Perry has outlined a realistic morality. For him a right
action is any that conduces to goodness and whatever fulfils an
interest is good. But a good action is not necessarily moral. Morality
requires the fulfilment of the greatest possible number of interests,
under the given circumstances; the highest good, if attainable,
would be an action fulfilling all possible interests. This doctrine,
though intelligible, is hard to apply in specific instances. In it
realism dissolves into pragmatism, and its significance can best be
seen in connection with that philosophy, where it has received fuller
development and concrete applications.
Pragmatism obtained its initial impulse through a mind in temper
between the sturdy common sense of the New Realists and the
emotionalistic romanticism of the Idealists, or rather comprehending
both within itself. This mind is that of William James, the last heir
of the line of pure New England culture, made cosmopolitan by travel
and intellectual contacts. Of Swedenborgian family, skilled alike in
science and art, James lived the mystical thrills of the unknown but
could handle them with the shrewdness of a Yankee trader. With young
America, his gaze is directed toward the future, and with it, he is
impatient of dogma and restraint. He is free from conventions of
thought and action with the freedom of those who have lived them all
in their ancestry and dare to face realities without fear of social
or intellectual _faux pas_. With such new-found freedom goes a vast
craving for experience. For him, the deepest realities are the personal
experiences of individual men.
James’ greatest contribution is his “Psychology.” In it he places
himself in the stream of human experience, ruthlessly cutting the
gordian knots of psychological dogma and conventions. The mind that he
reports is the mind each of us sees in himself. It is not so much a
science of psychology as the materials for such a science, a science
in its descriptive stage, constantly interrupted by shrewd homilies
wherein habit appears as the fly-wheel of society, or our many selves
enlarge the scope of sympathetic living. Nor is it congenial to this
adventurer in experience that his explorations should constrain
human nature within a scientist’s map. Not only must the stream of
consciousness flow between the boundaries of our concepts, but also in
the human will there is a point, be it ever so small, where a “we,” too
real ever to be comprehended by science or philosophy, can dip down
into the stream of consciousness and delay some fleeting idea, be it
only for the twinkling of an eye, and thereby change the whole course
and significance of our overt action. Freedom must not unequivocally
surrender to scientific determinism, or chance to necessity.
James is a Parsifal to whom the Grail is never quite revealed. His
pragmatism and radical empiricism are but methods of exploration and
no adventure is too puny or mean for the quest. We must make our ideas
clear and test them by the revelation they produce. Thoughts that make
no difference to us in living are not real thoughts, but imaginings.
The way is always open and perhaps there is a guiding truth, a
working value, in the operations of even the deranged mind. We must
entertain the ecstatic visions of saints, the alleged communications of
spiritualists, mystical contacts with sources of some higher power, and
even the thought-systems of cranks, that nothing be lost or untried.
Not that we need share such beliefs, but they are genuine experiences
and who can foretell where in experiences some fruitful vision may
arise!
As a psychologist, James knew that the significance of a belief lies
not so much in its content as in its power to direct the energies it
releases. His catholic interests are not equivalent to uncritical
credulity. Santayana, the wisest of his critics, is right in his
assertion that James never lost his agnosticism: “He did not really
believe; he merely believed in the right of believing that you might be
right if you believed.” As for Pascal, the wager on immortality might
be worth the making for if one won there was the blessedness of Heaven,
and if one lost--at least there should have been a sustaining optimism
through the trials of this life. Communion with the infinite might open
new sources of power. If so, the power was there. If not, no harm had
been done by the trial. Yet there is no evidence in James’ philosophy
that he himself drew inspiration from any of such sources.
If James has drawn to himself the greatest reading public of all
American philosophers, it is because in him each man can find the
sanction for himself. Without dogmatism or pedantry, James is the
voice of all individual human experiences. In him, each man can find a
sympathetic auditor, and words vivid with the language of the street,
encouraging his endeavours or at least pointing out the significance
of his experiences for the great business of living. Sometimes James
listens to human confessions with a suppressed cry of pain and recalls
wistfully “A Certain Blindness in Human Beings,” or asks “Is Life Worth
Living?” Once with indignation at “the delicate intellectualities
and subtleties and scrupulosities” of philosophy he confronts “the
host of guileless thoroughfed thinkers” with the radical realities of
Morrison I. Swift, only to partially retract a few pages later with
the admission, for him grudgingly given, that the Absolute may afford
its believers a certain comfort and is “in so far forth” true. We live
after all in an open universe, the lid is off and time relentlessly
operates for the production of novelties. No empiricist can give a
decision until the evidence is all in, and in the nature of the case
this can never happen.
Such openness of interest forefends the possibility of James’ founding
a school of philosophy. It also renders all his younger contemporaries
in some measure his disciples. Popularly he is the refuge of the
mystics and heterodox, the spiritualists and the cranks who seek the
sanction of academic scholarship and certified dignity. There are
more things in the philosophies of these who call him master than are
dreamed of in his philosophy. In academic philosophy there is a dual
descent of the James tradition. As a principle of negative criticism,
it may be turned into its opposite, as with Hocking, who enunciates
the extreme form of the pragmatic principle, If a theory is not
interesting, it is false--and utilizes it for his realistic, mystic,
idealistic absolutism. The philosophy of Henri Bergson, that has been
widely read in this country, reinforces this mystical spiritual side,
but American mysticism has popularly tended to degenerate into the
occultisms of second-rate credulous minds.
On the other hand, for those in whom the conflict of science and
religion is settling itself on the side of science, the principle of
pragmatism lends itself to the interpretation originally intended by
Charles Peirce, the author of the term, as an experimentalism, a search
for verifiable hypotheses after the manner of the sciences. But this
side of the doctrine is the one that has been developed by John Dewey.
Professor Dewey is without question the leading American philosopher,
both from the thoroughness of his analyses and the vigour of his appeal
to the American public. In discarding the Hegelian Idealism in which
he was trained, he is thoroughly aligned with the New America. In him
science has wholly won, and although of New England, Vermont, ancestry,
there remains not a trace of the New Englander’s romantic spiritual
longings for contact with a vast unknown. His dogmatic faiths, and no
man is without such faiths, relate to evolution, democracy, and the
all-decisive authority of experience.