loyalty--what light, I say, can such a study throw upon this problem?
Very little--so some of you may say; for any discussion of the spirit of
loyalty can tell us nothing to make nature's mechanism more
comprehensible. One who favors loyalty as a way of solving life's
problems tells us about a certain ideal of human life,--an ideal which,
as I have asserted, does tend to solve our personal moral problems
precisely in so far as we are able to express this ideal in our
practical lives. In order to be loyal you indeed have no need to believe
in any of the well-known miracles of popular tradition. And equally, in
order to be loyal, you have no need, first, to decide whether nature is
or is not a mechanism; or whether the modern view of reality, as just
summarized, is or is not adequate; or whether the gods exist; or whether
man is or is not one of nature's products and temporarily well-knit and
plastic machines. Our doctrine of loyalty is founded not upon a decision
about nature's supposed mechanism, but upon a study of man's own inner
and deeper needs. It is a doctrine about the plan and the business of
human life. It seems, therefore, to be neutral as to every so-called
conflict between science and religion.
But now, in answer to these remarks, I have to show that the doctrine of
loyalty, once rightly understood, has yet a further application. It is a
doctrine that, when more fully interpreted, helps us toward a genuine
insight, not only into the plan of life, but into the nature of things.
The philosophy of loyalty has nothing to say against precisely so much
of naturalism as is indeed an established result of common sense and of
the scientific study of nature. The theory of the loyal life involves
nothing superstitious--no trust in magic, no leaning upon the
intervention of such spiritual agencies as the old mythologies
conceived. And yet, as I shall insist, nobody can understand and
practise the loyal spirit without tending thereby to get a true view of
the nature of things, a genuine touch with reality, which cannot be
gained without seeing that, however much of a mechanism nature may
appear to be, the real world is something much more than a mechanism,
and much more significant than are the waters which wear away stones.
Let me indicate what I mean by repeating in brief my doctrine of
loyalty--with reference to the spirit which it involves, and with
reference to the view of the realities of human life which it inevitably
includes.
Whoever is loyal has found some cause, I have said,--a cause to which,
by his inner interests, he is indeed attracted so that the cause is
fascinating to his sentiments. But the cause is also one to which the
loyal man is meanwhile practically and voluntarily devoted, so that his
loyalty is no mere glow of enthusiasm, but is an affair of his deeds as
well as of his emotions. Loyalty I therefore defined as the
thorough-going and practical devotion of a self to a cause. Why loyalty
is a duty; how loyalty is possible for every normal human being; how it
can appear early in youth, and then grow though life; how it can be at
once faithful to its own, and yet can constantly enlarge its scope; how
it can become universally human in its interests without losing its
concreteness, and without failing to keep in touch with the personal
affections and the private concerns of the loyal person; how loyalty is
a virtue for all men, however humble and however exalted they may be;
how the loyal service of the tasks of a single possibly narrow life can
be viewed as a service of the cause of universal loyalty, and so of the
interests of all humanity; how all special duties of life can be stated
in terms of a duly generalized spirit of loyalty; and how moral
conflicts can be solved, and moral divisions made, in the light of the
principle of loyalty; all this I have asserted, although here is indeed
no time for adequate discussion. But hereupon I want to concentrate our
whole attention, not upon the consequences and applications of the
doctrine of loyalty, but upon the most central characteristic of the
loyal spirit. This central characteristic of the loyal spirit consists
in the fact that it conceives and values its cause as a reality, as an
object that has a being of its own; while the type of reality which
belongs to a cause is different from the type of reality which we
ascribe either to a thing in the physical world or to a law of nature. A
cause is never a mere mechanism. It is an essentially spiritual reality.
If the loyal human being is right in the account which he gives of his
cause, then the real world contains beings which are not mere natural
objects, and is subject to laws which, without in the least running
counter to the laws of outer nature, are the laws of an essentially
spiritual realm, whose type of being is superior to that possessed by
the order of nature which our industrial arts use. Either, then, loyalty
is altogether a service of myths, or else the causes which the loyal
serve belong to a realm of real being which is above the level of mere
natural fact and natural law. In the latter case the real world is not
indifferent to our human search for values. The modern naturalistic and
mechanical views of reality are not, indeed, false within their own
proper range, but they are inadequate to tell us the whole truth. And
reality contains, further, and is characterized by, an essentially
spiritual order of being.
I have been speaking to persons who, as I have trusted, well know, so
far as they have yet had time to learn the lessons of life, something of
what loyalty means. Come, then, let us consider what is the sort of
object that you have present to your mind when you are loyal to a cause.
If your cause is a reality, what kind of a being is it? If causes are
realities, then in what sort of a real world do you live?
I have already indicated that, while loyalty always includes personal
affections, while you can never be loyal to what you take to be a merely
abstract principle, nevertheless, it is equally true that you can never
be genuinely loyal merely to an individual human being, taken just as
this detached creature. You can, indeed, love your friend, viewed just
as this individual. But love for an individual is so far just a fondness
for a fascinating human presence, and is essentially capricious, whether
it lasts or is transient. You can be, and should be, loyal to your
friendship, to the union of yourself and your friend, to that ideal
comradeship which is neither of you alone, and which is not the mere
doubleness that consists of you and your friend taken as two detached
beings who happen to find one another's presence agreeable. Loyalty to a
friendship involves your willingness actively and practically to create
and maintain a life which is to be the united life of yourself and your
friend--not the life of your friend alone, nor the life of yourself and
your friend as you exist apart, but the common life, the life above and
inclusive of your distinctions, the one life that you are to live as
friends. To the tie, to the unity, to the common life, to the union of
friends, you can be loyal. Without such loyalty friendship consists only
of its routine of more or less attractive private sentiments and mere
meetings, each one of which is one more chance experience, heaped
together with other chance experiences. But with such true loyalty your
friendship becomes, at least in ideal, a new life--a life that neither
of you could have alone; a life that is not a mere round of separate
private amusements, but that belongs to a new type of dual yet unified
personality. Nor are you loyal to your friendship merely as to an
abstraction. You are loyal to it as to the common better self of both of
you, a self that lives its own real life. Either such a loyalty to your
friendship is a belief in myths, or else such a type of higher and
unified dual personality actually possesses a reality of its own,--a
reality that you cannot adequately describe by reporting, as to the
taker of a census, that you and your friend are two creatures, with two
distinct cases of a certain sort of fondness to be noted down, and with
each a separate life into which, as an incident, some such fondness
enters. No; were a census of true friendship possible, the census taker
should be required to report: Here are indeed two friends; but here is
also the ideal and yet, in some higher sense, real life of their united
personality present,--a life which belongs to neither of them alone, and
which also does not exist merely as a parcel of fragments, partly in
one, partly in the other of them. It is the life of their common
personality. It is a new spiritual person on a higher level.
Or again, you are loyal to some such union as a family or a fraternity
represents. Or you are loyal to your class, your college, your
community, your country, your church. In all these cases, with endless
variety in the details, your loyalty has for its object each time, not
merely a group of detached personalities, but some ideally significant
common life; an union of many in one; a community which also has the
value of a person, and which, nevertheless, cannot be found distributed
about in a collection of fragments found inside the detached lives of
the individual members of the family, the club, the class, the college,
the country, the church. If this common life to which you are loyal is a
reality, then the real human world does not consist of separate
creatures alone, of the mere persons who flock in the streets and who
live in the different houses. The human world, if the loyal are right,
contains personality that is not merely shut up within the skin, now of
this, now of that, human creature. It contains personalities that no
organism confines within its bounds; that no single life, that no crowd
of detached lives, comprises. Yet this higher sort of common
personality, if the loyal are right, is as real as we separate creatures
are real. It is no abstraction. It lives. It loves, and we love it. We
enter into it. It is ours, and we belong to it. It works through us, the
fellow servants of the common cause. Yet we get our worth through
it,--the goal of our whole moral endeavor.
For those who are not merely loyal, but also enlightened, loyalty, never
losing the definiteness and the concreteness of its devotion to some
near and directly fascinating cause, sees itself to be in actual
spiritual unity with the common cause of all the loyal, whoever they
are. The great cause for all the loyal is in reality the cause of the
spread and the furtherance of the cause of the universal loyalty of all
mankind: a cause which nobody can serve except by choosing his own
nearer and more appreciated cause--the private cause which is directly
his own--his family, his community, his friendship, his calling, and the
calling of those who serve with him. Yet such personal service--your
special life cause, your task, your vocation--is your way of furthering
the ends of universal humanity. And if you are enlightened, you know
this fact. Through your loyalty you, then, know yourself to be kin to
all the loyal. You hereupon conceive the loyal as one brotherhood, one
invisible church for which and in which you live. The spirit dwells in
this invisible church,--the holy spirit that wills the unity of all in
fidelity and in service. Hidden from you by all the natural
estrangements of the present life, this common life of all the loyal,
this cause which is the one cause of all the loyal, is that for which
you live. In spirit you are really sundered from none of those who
themselves live in the spirit.
All this, I say, is what it is the faith of all the loyal to regard as
the real life in which we live and move and have our being, precisely in
so far as men come to understand what loyalty is. Thus, then, in
general, to be loyal is to believe that there are real causes. And to be
universally loyal is to believe that the one cause of loyalty itself,
the invisible church of all the loyal, is a reality; something as real
as we are. But causes are never detached human beings; nor are causes
ever mere crowds, heaps, collections, aggregations of human beings.
Causes are at once personal (if by person you mean the ordinary human
individual in his natural character) and _super_-personal. Persons they
are, because only where persons are found can causes be defined.
Super-personal they are, because no mere individual human creature, and
no mere pairs or groups or throngs of human beings, can ever constitute
unified causes. You cannot be loyal to a crowd as a crowd. A crowd can
shout, as at a game or a political convention. But only some sort of
organized unity of social life can either do the work of an unit or hold
the effective loyalty of the enlightened worker who does not merely
shout with the throng. And so when you are really loyal to your country,
your country does not mean to you merely the crowd, the mass of your
separate fellow citizens. Still less does it mean the mere organs, or
the separate servants of the country,--the custom house, the War
Department, the Speaker of the House, or any other office or official.
When you sing "My country, 'tis of thee," you do not mean, "My
post-office, 'tis of thee," nor yet, "My fellow citizens, 'tis of you,
just as the creatures who crowd the street and who overfill the railway
cars," that I sing. If the poet continues in his own song to celebrate
the land, the "rocks and rills," the "woods and templed hills," he is
still speaking only of symbols. What he means is the country as an
invisible but, in his opinion, perfectly real spiritual unity. General
Nogi, in a recent Japanese publication about Bushido, expressed his own
national ideal beautifully in the words: "Here the sovereign and the
people are of one family and have together endured the joys and sorrows
of thousands of years." It is that sort of being whereof one speaks when
one expresses true loyalty to the country. The country is the spiritual
entity that is none of us and all of us--none of us because it is our
unity; all of us because in it we all find our patriotic unity.
Such, then, is the idea that the loyal have of the real nature of the
causes which they serve. I repeat, If the loyal are right, then the real
world contains other beings than mechanisms and individual human and
animal minds. It contains spiritual unities which are as real as we are,
but which certainly do not belong to the realm of a mere nature
mechanism. Does not all this put the problems of our philosophy of life
in a new light?
But I have no doubt that you may at once reply: All this speech about
causes is after all merely more or less pleasing metaphor. As a fact,
human beings are just individual natural creatures. They throng and
struggle for existence, and love and hate and enjoy and sorrow and die.
These causes are, after all, mere dreams, or at best entities as we have
just described. The friends like to talk of being one; but there are
always two or more of them, and the unity is a pretty phrase. The
country is, in the concrete, the collection of the countrymen, with
names, formulas, songs, and so on, attached, by way of poetical license
or of convenient abbreviation or of pretty fable. The poet really meant
simply that he was fond of the landscape, and was not wholly averse to a
good many of his countrymen, and was in any case fond of a good song.
Loyalty, like the rest of human life, is an illusion. Nature is real.
The unity of the spirit is a fancy.
This, I say, may be your objection. But herewith we indeed stand in the
presence of a certain very deep philosophical problem concerning the
true definition of what we mean by reality. Into this problem I have
neither time nor wish to enter just now. But upon one matter I must,
nevertheless, stoutly insist. It is a matter so simple, so significant,
so neglected, that I at once need and fear to mention it to you,--need
to mention it, because it puts our philosophy into a position that quite
transforms the significance of that whole modern view of nature upon
which I have been dwelling since the outset of this lecture; fear to
mention it, because the fact that it is so commonly neglected shows how
hard to be understood it has proved.
That disheartening view of the foreign and mechanical nature of the real
world which our sciences and our industrial arts have impressed upon the
minds of so many of us; that contempt for superstition; that denial of
the supernatural, which seems to the typical modern man the beginning of
wisdom;--to what is all this view of reality due? To the results, and,
as I believe, to the really important results, of the modern study of
natural science. But what is the study of natural science? Practically
considered, viewed as one of the great moral activities of mankind, _the
study of science is a very beautiful and humane expression of a certain
exalted form of loyalty_. Science is, practically considered, the
outcome of the absolutely devoted labors of countless seekers for
natural truth. But how do we human beings get at what we call natural
truth? By observation--so men say--and by experience. But by whose
experience? By the united, by the synthesized, by the revised,
corrected, rationally criticized, above all by the common, experience of
many individuals. The possibility of science rests upon the fact that
human experience may be progressively treated so as to become more and
more an unity. The detached individual records the transit of a star,
observes a precipitate in a test tube, stains a preparation and examines
it under a microscope, collects in the field, takes notes in a
hospital--and loyally contributes his little fragment of a report to the
ideally unified and constantly growing totality called scientific human
experience. In doing this he employs his memory, and so conceives his
own personal life as an unity. But equally he aims--and herein consists
his scientific loyalty--to bring his personal experience into unity with
the whole course of human experience in so far as it bears upon his own
science. The collection of mere data is never enough. It is in the unity
of their interpretation that the achievements of science lie. This unity
is conceived in the form of scientific theories; is verified by the
comparative and critical conduct of experiments. But in all such work
how manifold are the presuppositions which we make when we attempt such
unification! Here is no place to enumerate these presuppositions. Some
of them you find discussed in the textbooks of the logic of science.
Some of them are instinctive, and almost never get discussed at all. But
it is here enough to say that we all presuppose _that human experience
has, or can by the loyal efforts of truth seekers be made to possess, a
real unity, superior in its nature and significance to any detached
observer's experience, more genuinely real than is the mere collection
of the experiences of any set of detached observers, however large_. The
student of natural science is loyal to the cause of the enlargement of
this organized and criticized realm of the common human experience.
Unless this unity of human experience is a genuine reality, unless all
the workers are living a really common life, unless each man is,
potentially at least, in a live spiritual unity with his fellows,
science itself is a mere metaphor, its truth is an illusion, its results
are myths. For science is conceived as true only by conceiving the
experiences of countless observers as the sharing of a common realm of
experience. If, as we all believe, the natural sciences do throw a real,
if indeed an inadequate, light upon the nature of things, then they do
so because no one man's experience is disconnected from the real whole
of human experience. They do so because the cause to which the loyal
study of science is devoted, the cause of the enlargement of human
experience, is a cause that has a supernatural, or, as Professor
Münsterberg loves to say, an over-individual, type of reality. Mankind
is not a mere collection of detached individuals, or man could possess
no knowledge of any unity of scientific truth. If men are really only
many, and if they have no such unity of conscious experience as loyalty
everywhere presupposes, then the cause of science also is a vain
illusion, and we have no unified knowledge of nature, only various
private fancies about nature. If we know, however ill, nature's
mechanism, we do so because human experience is not merely a collection
of detached observations, but forms an actual spiritual unity, whose
type is not that of a mechanism, whose connections are ideally
significant, whose constitution is essentially that which the ideal of
unified truth requires.
So, then, I insist, the dilemma is upon our hands. Either the sciences
constitute a progressive, if imperfect, insight into real truth--and
then the cause of the unity of human experience is a real cause that
really can be served exactly as the lover means to be loyal to his
friendship and the patriot to his country; and then also human life
really possesses such unity as the loyal presuppose--or else none of
this is so. But then loyalty and science alike deal with metaphors and
with myths. In the first case the spiritual unity of the life that we
lead is essentially vindicated. Causes such as the loyal serve are real.
The cause of science also is real. But in that case an essentially
spiritual realm, that of the rational unity of human experience, is
real; and possesses a grade both of reality and of worth which is
superior to the grade of reality that the phenomena of nature's
mechanism exhibit to us. In the other case the sciences whose results
are supposed to be discouraging and unspiritual vanish, with all their
facts, into the realm of fable, together with the world that all the
loyal, including the faithful followers of the sciences, believe to be
real.
I have here no time to discuss the paradoxes of a totally skeptical
philosophy. It is enough to say that such a total skepticism is, indeed,
self-refuting. The only rational view of life depends upon maintaining
that what the loyal always regard as a reality, namely, their cause, is,
indeed, despite all special illusions of this or of that form of
imperfect loyalty, essentially a type of reality which rationally
survives all criticisms and underlies all doubts.
"They reckon ill who leave me out;
When me thy fly, I am the wings."
This is what the genuine object of loyalty, the unity of the spiritual
life, always says to us when we examine it in the right spirit. But the
one source of our deepest insight into this unity of the spirit which
underlies all the varieties, and which leads us upward to itself past
all the sunderings and doubts of existence, is the loyal spirit itself.
Loyalty asserts: "My cause is real. I know that my cause liveth." But
the cause, however imperfectly interpreted, is always some sort of unity
of the spiritual life in which we learn to share whenever we begin to be
loyal. The more we grow in loyalty and in insight into the meaning of
our loyalty, the more we learn to think of some vast range of the unity
of spiritual life as the reality to which all the other realities
accessible to us are in one way or another subordinate, so that they
express this unity, and show more or less what it means. I believe that
a sound critical philosophy justifies the view that the loyal, precisely
in so far as they view their cause as real, as a personal, but also as
an over-individual, realm of genuine spiritual life, are comprehending,
as far as they go, the deepest nature of things.
Religion, in its higher sense, always involves a practical relation to a
spiritual world which, in its significance, in its inclusiveness, in its
unity, and in its close and comforting touch with our most intense
personal concerns, fulfils in a supreme degree the requirements which
loyalty makes when it seeks for a worthy cause. One may have a true
religion without knowing the reason why it is true. One may also have
false religious beliefs. But in any case the affiliation of the spirit
of the higher religion with the spirit of loyalty has been manifest, I
hope, from the outset of this discussion of loyalty. By religious
insight one may very properly mean any significant and true view of an
object of religious devotion which can be obtained by any reasonable
means.