rationalists and monists, of whatever brand they be, I ask WHY NOT? Our
acts, our turning-places, where we seem to ourselves to make ourselves
and grow, are the parts of the world to which we are closest, the parts
of which our knowledge is the most intimate and complete. Why should
we not take them at their face-value? Why may they not be the actual
turning-places and growing-places which they seem to be, of the
world--why not the workshop of being, where we catch fact in the making,
so that nowhere may the world grow in any other kind of way than this?
Irrational! we are told. How can new being come in local spots and
patches which add themselves or stay away at random, independently of
the rest? There must be a reason for our acts, and where in the last
resort can any reason be looked for save in the material pressure or the
logical compulsion of the total nature of the world? There can be but
one real agent of growth, or seeming growth, anywhere, and that agent is
the integral world itself. It may grow all-over, if growth there be, but
that single parts should grow per se is irrational.
But if one talks of rationality and of reasons for things, and insists
that they can't just come in spots, what KIND of a reason can there
ultimately be why anything should come at all? Talk of logic and
necessity and categories and the absolute and the contents of the whole
philosophical machine-shop as you will, the only REAL reason I can think
of why anything should ever come is that someone wishes it to be here.
It is DEMANDED, demanded, it may be, to give relief to no matter
how small a fraction of the world's mass. This is living reason, and
compared with it material causes and logical necessities are spectral
things.
In short the only fully rational world would be the world of
wishing-caps, the world of telepathy, where every desire is fulfilled
instanter, without having to consider or placate surrounding or
intermediate powers. This is the Absolute's own world. He calls upon the
phenomenal world to be, and it IS, exactly as he calls for it, no other
condition being required. In our world, the wishes of the individual are
only one condition. Other individuals are there with other wishes
and they must be propitiated first. So Being grows under all sorts
of resistances in this world of the many, and, from compromise to
compromise, only gets organized gradually into what may be called
secondarily rational shape. We approach the wishing-cap type of
organization only in a few departments of life. We want water and we
turn a faucet. We want a kodak-picture and we press a button. We want
information and we telephone. We want to travel and we buy a ticket. In
these and similar cases, we hardly need to do more than the wishing--the
world is rationally organized to do the rest.
But this talk of rationality is a parenthesis and a digression. What
we were discussing was the idea of a world growing not integrally but
piecemeal by the contributions of its several parts. Take the hypothesis
seriously and as a live one. Suppose that the world's author put the
case to you before creation, saying: "I am going to make a world
not certain to be saved, a world the perfection of which shall be
conditional merely, the condition being that each several agent does its
own 'level best.' I offer you the chance of taking part in such a world.
Its safety, you see, is unwarranted. It is a real adventure, with real
danger, yet it may win through. It is a social scheme of co-operative
work genuinely to be done. Will you join the procession? Will you trust
yourself and trust the other agents enough to face the risk?"
Should you in all seriousness, if participation in such a world were
proposed to you, feel bound to reject it as not safe enough? Would you
say that, rather than be part and parcel of so fundamentally pluralistic
and irrational a universe, you preferred to relapse into the slumber of
nonentity from which you had been momentarily aroused by the tempter's
voice?
Of course if you are normally constituted, you would do nothing of the
sort. There is a healthy-minded buoyancy in most of us which such a
universe would exactly fit. We would therefore accept the offer--"Top!
und schlag auf schlag!" It would be just like the world we practically
live in; and loyalty to our old nurse Nature would forbid us to say no.
The world proposed would seem 'rational' to us in the most living way.
Most of us, I say, would therefore welcome the proposition and add our
fiat to the fiat of the creator. Yet perhaps some would not; for there
are morbid minds in every human collection, and to them the prospect of
a universe with only a fighting chance of safety would probably make no
appeal. There are moments of discouragement in us all, when we are sick
of self and tired of vainly striving. Our own life breaks down, and we
fall into the attitude of the prodigal son. We mistrust the chances
of things. We want a universe where we can just give up, fall on our
father's neck, and be absorbed into the absolute life as a drop of water
melts into the river or the sea.
The peace and rest, the security desiderated at such moments is security
against the bewildering accidents of so much finite experience. Nirvana
means safety from this everlasting round of adventures of which the
world of sense consists. The hindoo and the buddhist, for this
is essentially their attitude, are simply afraid, afraid of more
experience, afraid of life.
And to men of this complexion, religious monism comes with its consoling
words: "All is needed and essential--even you with your sick soul and
heart. All are one with God, and with God all is well. The everlasting
arms are beneath, whether in the world of finite appearances you seem to
fail or to succeed." There can be no doubt that when men are reduced
to their last sick extremity absolutism is the only saving scheme.
Pluralistic moralism simply makes their teeth chatter, it refrigerates
the very heart within their breast.
So we see concretely two types of religion in sharp contrast. Using our
old terms of comparison, we may say that the absolutistic scheme appeals
to the tender-minded while the pluralistic scheme appeals to the tough.
Many persons would refuse to call the pluralistic scheme religious at
all. They would call it moralistic, and would apply the word religious
to the monistic scheme alone. Religion in the sense of self-surrender,
and moralism in the sense of self-sufficingness, have been pitted
against each other as incompatibles frequently enough in the history of
human thought.
We stand here before the final question of philosophy. I said in my
fourth lecture that I believed the monistic-pluralistic alternative to
be the deepest and most pregnant question that our minds can frame. Can
it be that the disjunction is a final one? that only one side can be
true? Are a pluralism and monism genuine incompatibles? So that, if
the world were really pluralistically constituted, if it really existed
distributively and were made up of a lot of eaches, it could only be
saved piecemeal and de facto as the result of their behavior, and its
epic history in no wise short-circuited by some essential oneness in
which the severalness were already 'taken up' beforehand and eternally
'overcome'? If this were so, we should have to choose one philosophy or
the other. We could not say 'yes, yes' to both alternatives. There would
have to be a 'no' in our relations with the possible. We should confess
an ultimate disappointment: we could not remain healthy-minded and
sick-minded in one indivisible act.
Of course as human beings we can be healthy minds on one day and sick
souls on the next; and as amateur dabblers in philosophy we may
perhaps be allowed to call ourselves monistic pluralists, or free-will
determinists, or whatever else may occur to us of a reconciling kind.
But as philosophers aiming at clearness and consistency, and feeling the
pragmatistic need of squaring truth with truth, the question is forced
upon us of frankly adopting either the tender or the robustious type of
thought. In particular THIS query has always come home to me: May not
the claims of tender-mindedness go too far? May not the notion of a
world already saved in toto anyhow, be too saccharine to stand? May not
religious optimism be too idyllic? Must ALL be saved? Is NO price to be
paid in the work of salvation? Is the last word sweet? Is all 'yes,
yes' in the universe? Doesn't the fact of 'no' stand at the very core of
life? Doesn't the very 'seriousness' that we attribute to life mean that
ineluctable noes and losses form a part of it, that there are genuine
sacrifices somewhere, and that something permanently drastic and bitter
always remains at the bottom of its cup?
I can not speak officially as a pragmatist here; all I can say is that
my own pragmatism offers no objection to my taking sides with this more
moralistic view, and giving up the claim of total reconciliation. The
possibility of this is involved in the pragmatistic willingness to treat
pluralism as a serious hypothesis. In the end it is our faith and not
our logic that decides such questions, and I deny the right of any
pretended logic to veto my own faith. I find myself willing to take
the universe to be really dangerous and adventurous, without therefore
backing out and crying 'no play.' I am willing to think that the
prodigal-son attitude, open to us as it is in many vicissitudes, is not
the right and final attitude towards the whole of life. I am willing
that there should be real losses and real losers, and no total
preservation of all that is. I can believe in the ideal as an ultimate,
not as an origin, and as an extract, not the whole. When the cup is
poured off, the dregs are left behind forever, but the possibility of
what is poured off is sweet enough to accept.
As a matter of fact countless human imaginations live in this moralistic
and epic kind of a universe, and find its disseminated and strung-along
successes sufficient for their rational needs. There is a finely
translated epigram in the greek anthology which admirably expresses this
state of mind, this acceptance of loss as unatoned for, even tho the
lost element might be one's self:
"A shipwrecked sailor, buried on this coast, Bids you set sail. Full
many a gallant bark, when we were lost, Weathered the gale."
Those puritans who answered 'yes' to the question: Are you willing to be
damned for God's glory? were in this objective and magnanimous condition
of mind. The way of escape from evil on this system is NOT by getting
it 'aufgehoben,' or preserved in the whole as an element essential but
'overcome.' It is by dropping it out altogether, throwing it overboard
and getting beyond it, helping to make a universe that shall forget its
very place and name.
It is then perfectly possible to accept sincerely a drastic kind of a
universe from which the element of 'seriousness' is not to be expelled.
Whoso does so is, it seems to me, a genuine pragmatist. He is willing to
live on a scheme of uncertified possibilities which he trusts; willing
to pay with his own person, if need be, for the realization of the
ideals which he frames.
What now actually ARE the other forces which he trusts to co-operate
with him, in a universe of such a type? They are at least his fellow
men, in the stage of being which our actual universe has reached. But
are there not superhuman forces also, such as religious men of the
pluralistic type we have been considering have always believed in? Their
words may have sounded monistic when they said "there is no God but
God"; but the original polytheism of mankind has only imperfectly and
vaguely sublimated itself into monotheism, and monotheism itself, so far
as it was religious and not a scheme of class-room instruction for the
metaphysicians, has always viewed God as but one helper, primus inter
pares, in the midst of all the shapers of the great world's fate.
I fear that my previous lectures, confined as they have been to human
and humanistic aspects, may have left the impression on many of you that
pragmatism means methodically to leave the superhuman out. I have shown
small respect indeed for the Absolute, and I have until this moment
spoken of no other superhuman hypothesis but that. But I trust that you
see sufficiently that the Absolute has nothing but its superhumanness
in common with the theistic God. On pragmatistic principles, if the
hypothesis of God works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word,
it is true. Now whatever its residual difficulties may be, experience
shows that it certainly does work, and that the problem is to build it
out and determine it, so that it will combine satisfactorily with all
the other working truths. I cannot start upon a whole theology at the
end of this last lecture; but when I tell you that I have written a book
on men's religious experience, which on the whole has been regarded as
making for the reality of God, you will perhaps exempt my own pragmatism
from the charge of being an atheistic system. I firmly disbelieve,
myself, that our human experience is the highest form of experience
extant in the universe. I believe rather that we stand in much the same
relation to the whole of the universe as our canine and feline pets
do to the whole of human life. They inhabit our drawing-rooms and
libraries. They take part in scenes of whose significance they have no
inkling. They are merely tangent to curves of history the beginnings and
ends and forms of which pass wholly beyond their ken. So we are tangents
to the wider life of things. But, just as many of the dog's and cat's
ideals coincide with our ideals, and the dogs and cats have daily living
proof of the fact, so we may well believe, on the proofs that religious
experience affords, that higher powers exist and are at work to save the
world on ideal lines similar to our own.
You see that pragmatism can be called religious, if you allow that
religion can be pluralistic or merely melioristic in type. But whether
you will finally put up with that type of religion or not is a question
that only you yourself can decide. Pragmatism has to postpone dogmatic
answer, for we do not yet know certainly which type of religion is going
to work best in the long run. The various overbeliefs of men, their
several faith-ventures, are in fact what are needed to bring the
evidence in. You will probably make your own ventures severally. If
radically tough, the hurly-burly of the sensible facts of nature will
be enough for you, and you will need no religion at all. If radically
tender, you will take up with the more monistic form of religion:
the pluralistic form, with its reliance on possibilities that are not
necessities, will not seem to afford you security enough.
But if you are neither tough nor tender in an extreme and radical
sense, but mixed as most of us are, it may seem to you that the type
of pluralistic and moralistic religion that I have offered is as good a
religious synthesis as you are likely to find. Between the two extremes
of crude naturalism on the one hand and transcendental absolutism on
the other, you may find that what I take the liberty of calling the
pragmatistic or melioristic type of theism is exactly what you require.
The End