moralist or the casuist. But the difficulties which beset the discovery
of the right moral course are of two kinds. There are the difficulties
which arise, from the blinding and confusing effect of selfish passions,
and which obscure from the view the end which should be aimed at in
action; when these have been overcome there arises a new set of
difficulties concerning the means by which the end should be attained.
In dealing with your neighbour the first thing to be understood is that
his interest is to be considered as well as your own; but when this has
been settled, it remains to be considered what his interest is. The
latter class of difficulties requires to be dealt with by the
intellectual or calculating faculty. The former class can only be dealt
with by the moral force of sympathy. Now it is true that the right
action will not be performed without the operation of both these
agencies. But the moral agency is the dominant one throughout; it is
that without which the very conception of law is impossible; it
overcomes those difficulties which in the vast majority of practical
cases are the most serious. The calculating casuistical faculty is, as
it were, in its employ, and it is no more improper to call it the
law-making power, although it does not ultimately decide what action is
to be performed, than to say that a house was built by one who did not
with his own hands lay the bricks and spread the mortar.
The objection which practical men take is a very important one, as the
criticisms of such men always are, being founded commonly upon large
observation and not perverted by theory. They say that the love of
Christ does not in practice produce the nobleness and largeness of
character which has been represented as its proper and natural result;
that instead of inspiring those who feel it with reverence and hope for
their kind, it makes them exceedingly narrow in their sympathies,
disposed to deny and explain away even the most manifest virtues
displayed by men, and to despair of the future destiny of the great
majority of their fellow-creatures; that instead of binding them to
their kind, it divides them from it by a gulf which they themselves
proclaim to be impassable and eternal, and unites them only in a gloomy
conspiracy of misanthropy with each other; that it is indeed a
law-making power, but that the laws it makes are little-minded and
vexatious prohibitions of things innocent, demoralising restraints upon
the freedom of joy and the healthy instincts of nature; that it favours
hypocrisy, moroseness, and sometimes lunacy; that the only vice it has
power to check is thoughtlessness, and its only beneficial effect is
that of forcing into activity, though not always into healthy activity,
the faculty of serious reflection.
This may be a just picture of a large class of religious men, but it is
impossible in the nature of things that such effects should be produced
by a pure personal devotion to Christ. We are to remember that nothing
has been subjected to such multiform and grotesque perversion as
Christianity. Certainly the direct love of Christ, as it was felt by its
first followers, is a rare thing among modern Christians. His character
has been so much obscured by scholasticism, as to have lost in a great
measure its attractive power. The prevalent feeling towards him now
among religious men is an awful fear of his supernatural greatness, and
a disposition to obey his commands arising partly from dread of future
punishment and hope of reward, and partly from a nobler feeling of
loyalty, which, however, is inspired rather by his office than his
person. Beyond this we may discern in them an uneasy conviction that he
requires a more personal devotion, which leads to spasmodic efforts to
kindle the feeling by means of violent raptures of panegyric and by
repeating over and getting by rote the ardent expressions of those who
really had it. That is wanting for the most part which Christ held to be
all in all, spontaneous warmth, free and generous devotion. That the
fruits of a Christianity so hollow should be poor and sickly is not
surprising.
But that Christ's method, when rightly applied, is really of mighty
force may be shown by an argument which the severest censor of
Christians will hardly refuse to admit. Compare the ancient with the
modern world: "Look on this picture and on that." One broad distinction
in the characters of men forces itself into prominence. Among all the
men of the ancient heathen world there were scarcely one or two to whom
we might venture to apply the epithet "holy." In other words, there were
not more than one or two, if any, who besides being virtuous in their
actions were possessed with an unaffected enthusiasm of goodness, and
besides abstaining from vice regarded even a vicious thought with
horror. Probably no one will deny that in Christian countries this
higher-toned goodness, which we call holiness, has existed. Few will
maintain that it has been exceedingly rare. Perhaps the truth is, that
there has scarcely been a town in any Christian country since the time
of Christ where a century has passed without exhibiting a character of
such elevation that his mere presence has shamed the bad and made the
good better, and has been felt at times like the presence of God
Himself. And if this be so, has Christ failed? or can Christianity die?
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 75: Chapter XIV of "Ecce Homo, a Survey of the Life and work
of Jesus Christ," 1865.]
[Footnote 76: Plato, Menexenus.--Author's note.]
LOYALTY AND INSIGHT[77]
JOSIAH ROYCE
Upon an occasion like this, when the children, the servants, and the
friends of this institution meet for their annual festival, there is one
word that best expresses the spirit of the occasion. It is the word
"loyalty,"--loyalty to your College, to its ideals, to its life, and to
the unity and effectiveness of this life. And amongst the ideals that
inspire the life of your College, and make that life effective and
united, there is one which is prominent in all your minds, whatever your
special studies, your practical aims, or your hopes. It is the ideal of
furthering, in all your minds, what we may call insight,--the ideal of
learning to see life as it is, to know the world as we men need to know
it, and to guide our purposes as we ought to guide them. It is also the
ideal of teaching to others the art of just such insight.
These two words, then, "loyalty" and "insight," name, one of them, the
spirit in which, upon such occasions as this, we all meet; the other,
the ideal that determines the studies and the researches of any modern
institution of learning. Upon each day of its year of work your College
says to its children and to its servants and to its community: "Let us
know, let us see, let us comprehend, let us guide life by wisdom, and in
turn let us discover new wisdom for the sake of winning new life." But
upon a day like the present one, the work of the year being laid aside,
your College asks and receives your united expression of loyalty to its
cause. Perhaps some of you may feel that for just this moment you have
left behind, at least temporarily, the task of winning insight. You
enjoy, for the hour, the fruits of toil. Study and research cease, you
may say, for to-day, while the spirit of loyalty finds its own free
expression and takes content in its holiday.
I agree that the holidays and the working days have a different place in
our lives. But it is my purpose in this address to say something about
the connections between the spirit which rules this occasion--the spirit
of loyalty--and the ideal by which the year's work has to be
guided,--the ideal of furthering true insight. The loyalty that now
fills your minds is merely one expression of a certain spirit which
ought to pervade all our lives--not only in our studies, but in our
homes, in our offices, in our political and civic life--not merely upon
holidays, or upon other great occasions, but upon our working days; and
most of all when our tasks seem commonplace and heavy. And, on the other
hand, the insight which you seek to get whenever, in the academic world,
you work in the laboratory or in the field, in the library or in the
classroom or alone in your study, the insight that you try both to
embody in your practical life and to enrich through your
researches,--just this insight, I say, is best to be furthered by a
right cultivation of the spirit of loyalty.
I suppose that when I utter these words, you will easily give to them a
certain general assent. But I want to devote this address to making just
such words mean more to you than at first they may appear to mean.
First, then, let me tell you what I myself mean by the term "loyalty."
Then let me deal with my principal thesis, which is that the true spirit
of loyalty is not merely a proper accompaniment of all serious work, but
is an especially important source of a very deep insight into the
meaning of life, and, as I personally believe, into the nature of the
whole universe.
Three sorts of persons, I have noticed, are fond of using the term
"loyalty." These are quite different types of persons; or, in any case,
they use the word upon very different occasions. But these very
differences are to my mind important. The first type of those who love
to use the term "loyalty" consists of those who employ it to express a
certain glow of enthusiastic devotion, the type of the lovers, of the
students when the athletic contests are near, of the partisans in the
heat of a political contest, or of the friends of an institution upon a
day like this. To such persons, or at least at such moments, loyalty is
conceived as something brilliantly emotional, as a passion of devotion.
The second class of those who are fond of the word "loyalty" are the
warriors and their admirers. To such persons loyalty means a willingness
to do dangerous service, to sacrifice life, to toil long and hard for
the flag that one follows. But for a third type of those who employ the
word, loyalty especially means steady, often unobtrusive, fidelity to
more or less formal obligations, such as the business world and the
workshop impose upon us. Such persons think of loyalty as, first of all,
faithfulness in obeying the law of the land, or in executing the plans
of one's official superiors, or in serving one's employer or one's
client or one's chief, or one's fraternity or other social union. In
this sense the loyal servant may be obscure and unemotional. But he is
trustworthy. Now, a word which thus so forcibly appeals to the lovers
who want to express their passionate devotion, and also to the soldiers
who want to name that obstinate following of the flag which makes
victory possible; a word which business men also sometimes use to
characterize the quietly and industriously faithful employee who obeys
orders, who betrays no secrets, and who regards the firm's interest as
his own;--well, such a word, I think, is not as much ambiguous as deep
in its meaning. For, after all, loyal emotions, loyal sacrifice of life,
loyal steadiness in obscure service, are but various symptoms of a
certain spirit which lies beneath all its various expressions. This
spirit is a well-known one. All the higher life of society depends upon
it. It may manifest itself as enthusiasm upon an occasion like this, or
as contempt for death upon the battle field, or as quiet service when
the toil of life is grim, or as the cool fidelity that pursues the daily
routine of office or of workshop or of kitchen with a steady persistence
and with a simple acceptance of traditional duties or of the day's toil.
But the spirit thus manifested is not exhausted by any of its symptoms.
The appearances of loyalty are manifold. Its meaning is one. And I
myself venture to state what the true spirit of loyalty is by defining
the term thus: By loyalty I mean the thorough-going, the voluntary, and
the practical devotion of a self to a cause. And by a cause I mean
something of the nature that the true lover has in mind when he is
wisely devoted to his love; that the faithful member of a family serves
when the family itself is the cause dear to him; that the member of a
fraternity, or the child of a college, or the devoted professional man,
or the patriot, or the martyr, or the faithful workman conceives when he
thinks of that to which he gives his life. As all these illustrations
suggest, the cause to which one can be loyal is never a mere collection
of individuals; nor is it ever a mere abstract principle. This cause,
whether in the church or the army or the workshop, in the home or in the
friendship, is some sort of unity whereby many persons are joined in one
common life. The cause to which a loyal man is devoted is of the nature
of an institution, or of a home life, or of a fraternity, wherein two or
more persons aim to become one; or of a religion, wherein the unity of
the spirit is sought through the communion of the faithful. Loyalty
respects individuals, but aims to bring them together into one common
life. Its command to the loyal is: "Be 'one undivided soul of many a
soul'". It recognizes that, when apart, individuals fail; but that when
they try to unite their lives into one common higher selfhood, to live
as if they were the expressions, the instruments, the organs of one
ideally beautiful social group, they win the only possible fulfillment
of the meaning of human existence. Through loyalty to such a cause,
through devotion to an ideally united social group, and only through
such loyalty, can the problems of human personality be solved. By
nature, and apart from some cause to which we are loyal, each of us is
but a mass of caprices, a chaos of distracting passions, a longing for
happiness that is never fulfilled, a seeking for success which never
attains its goal. Meanwhile, no merely customary morality ever
adequately guides our lives. Mere social authority never meets our
needs. But a cause, some unity of many lives in one, some call upon the
individual to give himself over to the service of an idealized
community--this gives sense to life. This, when we feel its presence, as
we do upon this occasion, we love, as the lovers love the common life of
friendship that is to make them one, or as the mothers delight in the
life that is to unite themselves and their children in the family, or as
the devout feel that through their communion in the life of their church
they become one with the Divine Spirit. For such a cause we can make
sacrifices, such as the soldier makes in following the flag. For what is
the fortune of any detached self as compared with the one cause of the
whole country? And just such a voluntary devotion to a cause can ennoble
the routine of the humblest daily business, in the office, in the
household, in the school, at the desk, or in the market place, if one
only finds the cause that can hold his devotion--be this cause his
business firm or his profession or his household or his country or his
church, or all these at once. For all these causes have their value in
this: that through the business firm, or the household, or the
profession, or the spiritual community, the lives of many human selves
are woven into one, so that our fortunes and interests are no longer
conceived as detached and private, but as a giving of ourselves in order
that the social group to which we are devoted should live its own united
life.
With this bare indication of what I mean by loyalty, I may now say that
of late years I have attempted to show in detail, in various discussions
of our topic, that the spirit of loyalty, rightly understood, and
practically applied, furnishes an adequate solution for all the
problems of the moral life. The whole moral law can be summed up in the
two commandments: first, Be loyal; and secondly, So choose, so serve,
and so unify the life causes to which you yourself are loyal that,
through your choice, through your service, through your example, and
through your dealings with all men, you may, as far as in you lies, help
other people to be loyal to their own causes; may avoid cheating them of
their opportunities for loyalty; may inspire them with their own best
type of loyalty, and may so best serve the one great cause of the spread
of loyalty among mankind. Or, if I may borrow and adapt for a worthy end
Lincoln's immortal words, the moral law is this: Let us so live, so
love, and so serve, that loyalty "of the people, by the people, for the
people, shall not perish from the earth," but shall prosper and abound.
The scheme of life thus suggested is, I believe, adequate. I next want
to tell what bearing the spirit of loyalty has upon insight.
The insight that all of us most need and desire is an insight, first,
into the business of life itself, and next into the nature and meaning
of the real world in which we live. Our forefathers used to center all
their views of life and of the world about their religion. Many of the
leading minds of to-day center their modern insight about the results of
science. In consequence, what I may call the general problems of
insight, and the views of life and of the world which most of us get
from our studies, have come of late to appear very different from the
views and the problems which our own leading countrymen a century ago
regarded as most important. The result is that the great problem of the
philosophy of life to-day may be defined as the effort to see whether,
and how, you can cling to a genuinely ideal and spiritual interpretation
of your own nature and of your duty, while abandoning superstition, and
while keeping in close touch with the results of modern knowledge about
man and nature.
Let me briefly indicate what I mean by this problem of a modern
philosophy of life. From the modern point of view great stress has been
laid upon the fact that man, as we know man, appears to be subject to
the laws of the natural world. Modern knowledge makes these laws appear
very far-reaching, very rigid, and very much of the type that we call
mechanical. We have, therefore, most of us, learned not to expect
miraculous interferences with the course of nature as aids in our human
conflict with destiny. We have been taught to regard ourselves as the
products of a long process of natural evolution. We have come to think
that man's control over nature has to take the general form which our
industrial arts illustrate, and which our recent contests with disease,
such as the wars with tuberculosis and with yellow fever, exemplify.
Man, we have been led to say, wins his way only by studying nature and
by applying his carefully won empirical knowledge to the guidance of his
arts. The business of life--so we have been moved to assert--must
therefore be guided simply by an union of plain common sense with the
scientific study of nature. The real world, we have been disposed to
say, is, on the whole, so far as we can know it, a mechanism. Therefore
the best ideal of life involves simply the more or less complete control
of this mechanism for useful and humane ends. Such, I say, is one very
commonly accepted result to which modern knowledge seems to have led
men. The practical view of life and of its business which expresses this
result has been, for many of us, twofold. First, we have been led to
this well-known precept: If you want to live wisely, you must, at all
events, avoid superstition. That is, you must not try to guide human
life by dealing with such supernatural powers, good and evil, as the
mythologies of the past used to view as the controlling forces of human
destiny. You must take natural laws as you find them. You must believe
about the real world simply what you can confirm by the verdict of human
experience. You must put no false hopes either in magic arts or in
useless appeals to the gods. You must, for instance, fight tuberculosis
not by prayer, but by knowing the conditions that produce it and the
natural processes that tend to destroy its germs. And so, in general, in
order to live well and wisely you must be a naturalist and not a
supernaturalist. Or in any case you must conform your common sense not
to the imagination that in the past peopled the dream world of humanity
with good and evil spirits, but to the carefully won insight that has
shown us that our world is one where natural law reigns unyielding,
defying equally our magic arts and our prayerful desires for divine aid.
But secondly, side by side with this decidedly positive advice, many of
us have been brought to accept a practical attitude towards the world
which has seemed to us negative and discouraging. This second attitude
may be expressed in the sad precept: Hope not to find this world in any
universal sense a world of ideal values. Nature is indifferent to
values. Values are human, and merely human. Man can indeed give to his
own life much of what he calls value, if he uses his natural knowledge
for human ends. But when he sets out upon this task, he ought to know
that, however sweet and ideal human companionship may be as it exists
among men, humanity as a whole must fight its battle with nature and
with the universe substantially alone, comfortless except for the
comforts that it wins precisely as it builds its houses; namely, by
using the mechanisms of nature for its own purposes. The world happens,
indeed, to give man some power to control natural conditions. But even
this power is due to the very fact that man also is one of nature's
products,--a product possessing a certain stability, a certain natural
plasticity and docility, a limited range of natural initiative. As a
rock may deflect a stream, so man, himself a natural mechanism, may turn
the stream of nature's energies into paths that are temporarily useful
for human purposes. But from the modern point of view the ancient plaint
of the Book of Job remains true, both for the rock and for the man:
"The waters wear away stones,
And the hope of frail man thou destroyest."
In the end, our relations to the universe thus seem to remain relations
to an essentially foreign power, which cares for our ideals as the
stormy sea cares for the boat, and as the bacteria care for the human
organism upon which they prey. If we ourselves, as products of nature,
are sufficiently strong mechanisms, we may be able to win, while life
lasts, many ideal goods. But just so, if the boat is well enough built,
it may weather one or another passing storm. If the body is well knit,
it may long remain immune to disease. Yet in the end the boat and the
human body fail. And in no case, so this view asserts, does the real
world essentially care for or help or encourage our ideals. Our ideals
are as foreign to the real natural world as the interests of the ship's
company are to the ocean that may tolerate, but also may drown them. Be
free from superstition, then; and next: avoid false hopes. Such are the
two theses that seem to embody for many minds the essentially modern
view of things and the essential result for the philosophy of life of
what we have now learned.
But hereupon the question arises whether this is indeed the last word of
insight; whether this outcome of modern knowledge does indeed tell the
whole story of our relations to the real world. That this modern view
has its own share of deeper truth we all recognize. But is this the
whole truth? Have we no access whatever to any other aspect of reality
than the one which this naturalistic view emphasizes? And again, the
question still arises: Is there any place left for a religion that can
be free from superstition, that can accept just so much of the foregoing
modern results as are indeed established, and that can yet supplement
them by an insight which may show the universe to be, after all,
something more than a mechanism? In sum, are we merely stones that
deflect the stream for a while, until the waters wear them away? Or are
there spiritual hopes of humanity which the mechanism of nature cannot
destroy? Is the philosophy of life capable of giving us something more
than a naturalism--humanized merely by the thought that man, being,
after all, a well-knit and plastic mechanism, can for a time mold nature
to his ends? So much for the great problem of modern insight. Let us
turn to consider the relation of the spirit of loyalty to this problem.