history back we find that practically every age--at least for
many centuries--has been an age of transition. If we must set a
starting-point from which we have been moving, the social philosopher
will be inclined to place it about the beginning of the sixteenth
century. If we have been in transition for four hundred years, it
seems almost time to settle down from this wild ferment of beliefs
and discoveries that has kept the world’s mind in constant turmoil
since the time of the Renaissance. There are signs that such a
crystallization is taking place. We are weeding out our culture, and
casting aside the classical literature that was the breeding-ground for
the old ideas. We have achieved as yet little to take its place. Most
of the modern literature is rather a restless groping about in the dark
for new modes of thinking and new principles of life, and thus far it
hardly seems to have grasped the robust and vital in the new to any
appreciable extent. One can hardly believe that this morbid virus that
is still working with undiminished vigor and deadly effect will succeed
in making itself the dominant note in European literature for the next
five hundred years. One hates to think that our posterity is to be
doomed to torture itself into appreciating our feverish modern art and
music, and learn to rank the wild complexities of Strauss with the
sublimities of Beethoven. Shall we be sure that the conquest of the air
is finally achieved and a third dimension added to man’s traveling, or
is it all simply another daring and brilliant stab at the impossible,
another of those blasphemies against nature which impious man is
constantly striving to commit? There are few signs of the Socialistic
State, but who knows what births of new institutions, of which we are
now quite unaware, future ages will see to have been developing in our
very midst? Is religion doomed, or is it merely being transformed, so
that we shall be seen to have been creating amid all our indifference a
new type and a new ideal? Will our age actually be distinctive as the
era of the Dawn of Peace, or will the baby institution of arbitration
disappear before a crude and terrible reality? Are we progressing, or
shall we seem to have sown the seeds of world decay in this age of
ours, and at a great crisis in history let slip another opportunity
to carry mankind to a higher social level? It is maddening to the
philosopher to think how long he will have to live to find an answer
to these questions. He wants to know, but in the present all he can do
is to guess at random. Not immortality, but an opportunity to wake up
every hundred years or so to see how the world is progressing, may well
be his desire and his dream. Such an immortality may be incredible, but
it is the only form which has ever proved satisfactory, or ever will,
to the rational man.
X
THE EXPERIMENTAL LIFE
It is good to be reasonable, but too much rationality puts the soul
at odds with life. For rationality implies an almost superstitious
reliance on logical proofs and logical motives, and it is logic that
life mocks and contradicts at every turn. The most annoying people
in the world are those who demand reasons for everything, and the
most discouraging are those who map out ahead of them long courses of
action, plan their lives, and systematically in the smallest detail
of their activity adapt means to ends. Now the difficulty with all
the prudential virtues is that they imply a world that is too good to
be true. It would be pleasant to have a world where cause and effect
interlocked, where we could see the future, where virtue had its
reward, and our characters and relations with other people and the work
we wish to do could be planned out with the same certainty with which
cooks plan a meal. But we know that that is not the kind of a world
we actually live in. Perhaps men have thought that, by cultivating
the rational virtues and laying emphasis on prudence and forethought,
they could bend the stubborn constitution of things to meet their
ideals. It has always been the fashion to insist, in spite of all the
evidence, that the world was in reality a rational place where certain
immutable moral principles could be laid down with the same certainty
of working that physical laws possess. It has always been represented
that the correct procedure of the moral life was to choose one’s end
or desire, to select carefully all the means by which that end could
be realized, and then, by the use of the dogged motive force of the
will, to push through the plans to completion. In the homilies on
success, it has always been implied that strength of will was the only
requisite. Success became merely a matter of the ratio between the
quantity of effort and will-power applied, and the number of obstacles
to be met. If one failed, it was because the proper amount of effort
had not been applied, or because the plans had not been properly
constructed. The remedy was automatically to increase the effort or
rationalize the plans. Life was considered to be a battle, the strategy
of which a general might lay out beforehand, an engagement in which he
might plan and anticipate to the minutest detail the movement of his
forces and the disposition of the enemy. But one does not have to live
very long to see that this belief in the power and the desirability
of controlling things is an illusion. Life works in a series of
surprises. One’s powers are given in order that one may be alert and
ready, resourceful and keen. The interest of life lies largely in its
adventurousness, and not in its susceptibility to orderly mapping.
The enemy rarely comes up from the side the general has expected; the
battle is usually fought out on vastly different lines from those that
have been carefully foreseen and rationally organized. And similarly in
life do complex forces utterly confound and baffle our best laid plans.
Our strategy, unless it is open to instant correction, unless it is
flexible, and capable of infinite resource and modification, is a
handicap rather than an aid in the battle of life. In spite of the
veracious accounts of youths hewing their way to success as captains
of industry or statesmen, with their eye singly set on a steadfast
purpose, we may be sure that life seldom works that way. It is not so
tractable and docile, even to the strongest. The rational ideal is
one of those great moral hypocrisies which every one preaches and no
one practices, but which we all believe with superstitious reverence,
and which we take care shall be proven erroneous by no stubborn facts
of life. Better that the facts should be altered than that the moral
tradition should die!
One of its evil effects is the compressing influence it has on many of
us. Recognizing that for us the world is an irrational place, we are
willing to go on believing that there are at least some gifted beings
who are proving the truth and vindicating the eternal laws of reason.
We join willingly the self-stigmatized ranks of the incompetent and are
content to shine feebly in the reflected light of those whose master
wills and power of effort have brought them through in rational triumph
to their ends. The younger generation is coming very seriously to doubt
both the practicability and worth of this rational ideal. They do not
find that the complex affairs of either the world or the soul work
according to laws of reason. The individual as a member of society is
at the mercy of great social laws that regulate his fortune for him,
construct for him his philosophy of life, and dictate to him his ways
of making a living. As an individual soul, he is the creature of
impulses and instincts which he does not create and which seem to lie
quite outside the reach of his rational will. Looked at from this large
social viewpoint, his will appears a puny affair indeed. There seems
little room left in which to operate, either in the sphere of society
or in his own spiritual life. That little of free-will, however, which
there is, serves for our human purposes. It must be our care simply
that we direct it wisely; and the rational ideal is not the wisest way
of directing it. The place of our free will in the scheme of life is
not to furnish driving, but _directing_ power. The engineer could never
create the power that drives his engine, but he can direct it into the
channels where it will be useful and creative. The superstition of the
strong will has been almost like an attempt to create power, something
the soul could never do. The rational ideal has too often been a mere
challenge to attain the unattainable. It has ended in futility or
failure.
This superstition comes largely from our incorrigible habit of looking
back over the past, and putting purpose into it. The great man looking
back over his career, over his ascent from the humble level of his
boyhood to his present power and riches, imagines that that ideal
success was in his mind from his earliest years. He sees a progress,
which was really the happy seizing of fortunate opportunities, as
the carrying-out of a fixed purpose. But the purpose was not there
at the beginning; it is the crowning touch added to the picture,
which completes and satisfies our age-long hunger for the orderly and
correct. But we all, rich and poor, successful and unsuccessful, live
from hand to mouth. We all alike find life at the beginning a crude
mass of puzzling possibilities. All of us, unless we inherit a place in
the world,--and then we are only half alive,--have the same precarious
struggle to get a foothold. The difference is in the fortune of the
foothold, and not in our private creation of any mystical force of
will. It is a question of happy occasions of exposure to the right
stimulus that will develop our powers at the right time. The capacity
alone is sterile; it needs the stimulus to fertilize it and produce
activity and success. The part that our free will can play is to expose
ourselves consciously to the stimulus; it cannot create it or the
capacity, but it can bring them together.
In other words, for the rational ideal we must substitute the
experimental ideal. Life is not a campaign of battle, but a laboratory
where its possibilities for the enhancement of happiness and the
realization of ideals are to be tested and observed. We are not to
start life with a code of its laws in our pocket, with its principles
of activity already learned by heart, but we are to discover those
principles as we go, by conscientious experiment. Even those laws that
seem incontrovertible we are to test for ourselves, to see whether they
are thoroughly vital to our own experience and our own genius. We are
animals, and our education in life is, after all, different only in
degree, and not in kind, from that of the monkey who learns the trick
of opening his cage. To get out of his cage, the monkey must find
and open a somewhat complicated latch. How does he set about it? He
blunders around for a long time, without method or purpose, but with
the waste of an enormous amount of energy. At length he accidentally
strikes the right catch, and the door flies open. Our procedure in
youth is little different. We feel a vague desire to expand, to get out
of our cage, and liberate our dimly felt powers. We blunder around for
a time, until we accidentally put ourselves in a situation where some
capacity is touched, some latent energy liberated, and the direction
set for us, along which we have only to move to be free and successful.
We will be hardly human if we do not look back on the process and
congratulate ourselves on our tenacity and purpose and strong will. But
of course the thing was wholly irrational. There were neither plans nor
purposes, perhaps not even discoverable effort. For when we found the
work that we did best, we found also that we did it easiest. And the
outlines of the most dazzling career are little different. Until habits
were formed or prestige acquired which could float these successful
geniuses, their life was but the resourceful seizing of opportunity,
the utilization, with a minimum of purpose or effort, of the promise of
the passing moment. They were living the experimental life, aided by
good fortune and opportunity.
Now the youth brought up to the strictly rational ideal is like the
animal who tries to get out of his cage by going straight through the
bars. The duck, beating his wings against his cage, is a symbol of
the highest rationality. His logic is plain, simple, and direct. He
is in the cage; there is the free world outside; nothing but the bars
separate them. The problem is simply to fortify his will and effort
and make them so strong that they will overcome the resistance of the
cage. His error evidently lies not in his method, but in his estimation
of the strength of the bars. But youth is no wiser; it has no data
upon which to estimate either its own strength or the strength of
its obstacles. It counts on getting out through its own self-reliant
strength and will. Like the duck, “impossible” is a word not found in
its vocabulary. And like the duck, it too often dashes out its spirit
against the bars of circumstance. How often do we see young people,
brought up with the old philosophy that nothing was withheld from those
who wanted and worked for things with sufficient determination, beating
their ineffectual wings against their bars, when perhaps in another
direction the door stands open that would lead to freedom!
We do not hear enough of the tragedies of misplaced ambition. When the
plans of the man of will and determination fail, and the inexorable
forces of life twist his purposes aside from their end, he is sure
to suffer the prostration of failure. His humiliation, too, is in
proportion to the very strength of his will. It is the burden of
defeat, or at best the sting of petty success, that crushes men, and
crushes them all the more thoroughly if they have been brought up to
believe in the essential rationality of the world and the power of will
and purpose. It is not that they have aimed too high, but that they
have aimed in the wrong direction. They have not set out experimentally
to find the work to which their powers were adapted, they did not test
coolly and impartially the direction in which their achievement lay.
They forgot that, though faith may remove mountains, the will alone is
not able. There is an urgency on every man to develop his powers to
the fullest capacity, but he is not called upon to develop those that
he does not possess. The will cannot create talent or opportunity. The
wise man is he who has the clear vision to discern the one, and the
calm patience to await the other. Will, without humor and irony and a
luminous knowledge of one’s self, is likely to drive one to dash one’s
brains out against a stone wall. The world is too full of people with
nothing except a will. The mistake of youth is to believe that the
philosophy of experimentation is enervating. They want to attack life
frontally, to win by the boldness of their attack, or by the exceeding
excellence of their rational plans and purposes. But therein comes a
time when they learn perhaps that it is better to take life not with
their naked fists, but more scientifically,--to stand with mind and
soul alert, ceaselessly testing and criticizing, taking and rejecting,
poised for opportunity, and sensitive to all good influences.
The experimental life does not put one at the mercy of chance. It is
rather the rational mind that is constantly being shocked and deranged
by circumstances. But the dice of the experimenter are always loaded.
For he does not go into an enterprise, spiritual or material, relying
simply on his reason and will to pull him through. He asks himself
beforehand whether something good is not sure to come whichever way
the dice fall, or at least whether he can bear the event of failure,
whether his spirit can stand it if the experiment ends in humiliation
and barrenness. It is surprising how many seeming disasters one finds
one can bear in this anticipatory look; the tension of the failure is
relieved, anyhow. By looking ahead, one has insured one’s self up to
the limit of the venture, and one cannot lose. But to the man with the
carefully planned campaign, every step is crucial. If all does not turn
out exactly as he intends, he is ruined. He thinks he insures himself
by the excellence of his designs and the craftiness of his skill. But
he insures himself by the strange method of putting all his eggs in one
basket. He thinks, of course, he has arranged his plans so that, if
they fall, the universe falls with them. But when the basket breaks,
and the universe does not fall, his ruin is complete.
Ambition and the rational ideal seem to be only disastrous; if
unsuccessful, they produce misanthropists; if successful, beings that
prey upon their fellow men. Too much rationality makes a man mercenary
and calculating. He has too much at stake in everything he does to
know that calm disinterestedness of spirit which is the mark of the
experimental attitude towards life. Our attitude towards our personal
affairs, material and spiritual, should be like the interest we take
in sports and games. The sporting interest is one secret of a healthy
attitude towards life. The detached enthusiasm it creates is a real
ingredient of happiness. The trouble with the rational man is that
he has bet on the game. If his side wins, there is a personal reward
for him; if it loses, he himself suffers a loss. He cannot know the
true sporting interest which is unaffected by considerations of the
end, and views the game as the thing, and not the outcome. To the
experimental attitude, failure means nothing beyond a shade of regret
or chagrin. Whether we win or lose, something has been learned, some
insight and appreciation of the workings of others or of ourselves. We
are ready and eager to begin another game; defeat has not dampened our
enthusiasm. But if the man who has made the wager loses, he has lost,
too, all heart for playing. Or, if he does try again, it is not for
interest in the game, but with a redoubled intensity of self-interest
to win back what he has lost. With the sporting interest, one looks on
one’s relations with others, on one’s little rôle in the world, in the
same spirit that we look on a political contest, where we are immensely
stirred by the clash of issues and personalities, but where we know
that the country will run on in about the same way, whoever is elected.
This knowledge does not work against our interest in the struggle
itself, nor in the outcome. It only insures us against defeat. It makes
life livable by endowing us with disinterestedness. If we lose, why,
better luck next time, or, at worst, is not losing a part of life?
The experimenter with life, then, must go into his laboratory with the
mind of the scientist. He has nothing at stake except the discovery
of the truth, and he is willing to work carefully and methodically
and even cold-bloodedly in eliciting it from the tangled skein of
phenomena. But it is exactly in this cheerful, matter-of-fact way that
we are never willing to examine our own personalities and ideas. We
take ourselves too seriously, and handle our tastes and enthusiasms
as gingerly as if we feared they would shrivel away at the touch. We
perpetually either underestimate or overestimate our powers and worth,
and suffer such losses on account of the one and humiliations on
account of the other, as serve to unbalance our knowledge of ourselves,
and discourage attempts to find real guiding principles of our own or
others’ actions. We need this objective attitude of the scientist.
We must be self-conscious with a detached self-consciousness,
treating ourselves as we treat others, experimenting to discover our
possibilities and traits, testing ourselves with situations, and
gradually building up a body of law and doctrine for ourselves, a real
morality that will have far more worth and power and virtue than all
that has been tried and tested before by no matter how much of alien
human experience. We must start our quest with no prepossessions,
with no theory of what ought to happen when we expose ourselves to
certain stimuli. It is our business to see what does happen, and then
act accordingly. If the electrical experimenter started with a theory
that like magnetic poles attract each other, he would be shocked to
discover that they actually repelled each other. He might even set it
down to some inherent depravity of matter. But if his theory was not
a prejudice but a hypothesis, he would find it possible to revise it
quickly when he saw how the poles actually behaved. And he would not
feel any particular chagrin or humiliation.
But we usually find it so hard to revise our theories about ourselves
and each other. We hold them as prejudices and not as hypotheses, and
when the facts of life seem to disprove them, we either angrily clutch
at our theories and snarl in defiance, or we pull them out of us with
such a wrench that they draw blood. The scientist’s way is to start
with a hypothesis and then to proceed to verify it by experiment.
Similarly ought we to approach life and test all our hypotheses by
experience. Our methods have been too rigid. We have started with
moral dogmas, and when life obstinately refused to ratify them, we
have railed at it, questioned its sincerity, instead of adopting some
new hypothesis, which more nearly fitted our experience, and testing
it until we hit on the principle which explained our workings to
ourselves. The common-sense, rule-of-thumb morality which has come down
to us is no more valid than the common-sense, scientific observation
that the sun goes round the earth. We can rely no longer on the loose
gleanings of homely proverb and common sense for our knowledge of
personality and human nature and life.
If we do not adopt the experimental life, we are still in bondage to
convention. To learn of life from others’ words is like learning to
build a steam-engine from books in the class-room. We may learn of
principles in the spiritual life that have proven true for millions
of men, but even these we must test to see if they hold true for our
individual world. We can never attain any self-reliant morality if we
allow ourselves to be hypnotized by fixed ideas of what is good or
bad. No matter how good our principles, our devotion to morality will
be mere lip-service unless each belief is individually tested, and its
power to work vitally in our lives demonstrated.
But this moral experimentation is not the mere mechanical repetition of
the elementary student in the laboratory, who makes simple experiments
which are sure to come out as the law predicts. The laws of personality
and life are far more complex, and each experiment discovers something
really novel and unique. The spiritual world is ever-creative; the same
experiments may turn out differently for different experimenters, and
yet they may both be right. In the spiritual experimental life, we must
have the attitude of the scientist, but we are able to surpass him in
daring and boldness. We can be certain of a physical law that as it has
worked in the past, so it will work in the future. But of a spiritual
law we have no such guarantee. This it is that gives the zest of
perpetual adventure to the moral life. Human nature is an exhaustless
field for investigation and experiment. It is inexhaustible in its
richness and variety.
The old rigid morality, with its emphasis on the prudential virtues,
neglected the fundamental fact of our irrationality. It believed
that if we only knew what was good, we would do it. It was therefore
satisfied with telling us what was good, and expecting us automatically
to do it. But there was a hiatus somewhere. For we do not do what we
want to, but what is easiest and most natural for us to do, and if
it is easy for us to do the wrong thing, it is that that we will do.
We are creatures of instincts and impulses that we do not set going.
And education has never taught us more than very imperfectly how to
train these impulses in accordance with our worthy desires. Instead of
endeavoring to cure this irrationality by directing our energy into the
channel of experimentation, it has worked along the lines of greatest
resistance, and held up an ideal of inhibition and restraint. We have
been alternately exhorted to stifle our bad impulses, and to strain
and struggle to make good our worthy purposes and ambitions. Now the
irrational man is certainly a slave to his impulses, but is not the
rational man a slave to his motives and reasons? The rational ideal has
made directly for inflexibility of character, a deadening conservatism
that is unable to adapt itself to situations, or make allowance for the
changes and ironies of life. It has riveted the moral life to logic,
when it should have been yoked up with sympathy. The logic of the heart
is usually better than the logic of the head, and the consistency of
sympathy is superior as a rule for life to the consistency of the
intellect.