CHARACTER AND OPINION IN THE UNITED STATES
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
THE LIFE OF REASON
OR THE PHASES OF HUMAN PROGRESS
Vol. I. Reason in Common Sense.
Vol. II. Reason in Society.
Vol. III. Reason in Religion.
Vol. IV. Reason in Art.
Vol. V. Reason in Science.
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INTERPRETATIONS OF POETRY AND RELIGION
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THE SENSE OF BEAUTY
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LITTLE ESSAYS DRAWN FROM THE WRITINGS OF GEORGE SANTAYANA
Edited with a Preface by LOGAN PEARSALL SMITH
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*CHARACTER & OPINION IN THE UNITED STATES*
*WITH REMINISCENCES OF WILLIAM JAMES AND JOSIAH ROYCE*
*AND ACADEMIC LIFE IN AMERICA*
BY
GEORGE SANTAYANA
LATE PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1921
_First Published 1920_
_Reprinted 1921_
PREFACE
The major part of this book is composed of lectures originally addressed
to British audiences. I have added a good deal, but I make no apology,
now that the whole may fall under American eyes, for preserving the tone
and attitude of a detached observer. Not at all on the ground that “to
see ourselves as others see us” would be to see ourselves truly; on the
contrary, I agree with Spinoza where he says that other people’s idea of
a man is apt to be a better expression of their nature than of his. I
accept this principle in the present instance, and am willing it should
be applied to the judgements contained in this book, in which the reader
may see chiefly expressions of my own feelings and hints of my own
opinions. Only an American—and I am not one except by long
association¹—can speak for the heart of America. I try to understand it,
as a family friend may who has a different temperament; but it is only
my own mind that I speak for at bottom, or wish to speak for. Certainly
my sentiments are of little importance compared with the volume and
destiny of the things I discuss here: yet the critic and artist too have
their rights, and to take as calm and as long a view as possible seems
to be but another name for the love of truth. Moreover, I suspect that
my feelings are secretly shared by many people in America, natives and
foreigners, who may not have the courage or the occasion to express them
frankly. After all, it has been acquaintance with America and American
philosophers that has chiefly contributed to clear and to settle my own
mind. I have no axe to grind, only my thoughts to burnish, in the hope
that some part of the truth of things may be reflected there; and I am
confident of not giving serious offence to the judicious, because they
will feel that it is affection for the American people that makes me
wish that what is best and most beautiful should not be absent from
their lives.
Civilisation is perhaps approaching one of those long winters that
overtake it from time to time. A flood of barbarism from below may soon
level all the fair works of our Christian ancestors, as another flood
two thousand years ago levelled those of the ancients. Romantic
Christendom—picturesque, passionate, unhappy episode—may be coming to an
end. Such a catastrophe would be no reason for despair. Nothing lasts
for ever; but the elasticity of life is wonderful, and even if the world
lost its memory it could not lose its youth. Under the deluge, and
watered by it, seeds of all sorts would survive against the time to
come, even if what might eventually spring from them, under the new
circumstances, should wear a strange aspect. In a certain measure, and
unintentionally, both this destruction and this restoration have already
occurred in America. There is much forgetfulness, much callow disrespect
for what is past or alien; but there is a fund of vigour, goodness, and
hope such as no nation ever possessed before. In what sometimes looks
like American greediness and jostling for the front place, all is love
of achievement, nothing is unkindness; it is a fearless people, and free
from malice, as you might see in their eyes and gestures, even if their
conduct did not prove it. This soil is propitious to every seed, and
tares must needs grow in it; but why should it not also breed clear
thinking, honest judgement, and rational happiness? These things are
indeed not necessary to existence, and without them America might long
remain rich and populous like many a barbarous land in the past; but in
that case its existence would be hounded, like theirs, by falsity and
remorse. May Heaven avert the omen, and make the new world a better
world than the old! In the classical and romantic tradition of Europe,
love, of which there was very little, was supposed to be kindled by
beauty, of which there was a great deal: perhaps moral chemistry may be
able to reverse this operation, and in the future and in America it may
breed beauty out of love.
[1] Perhaps I should add that I have not been in the United States
since January 1912. My observations stretched, with some intervals,
through the forty years preceding that date.
CONTENTS
· PREFACE
· CHAPTER I—THE MORAL BACKGROUND
· CHAPTER II—THE ACADEMIC ENVIRONMENT
· CHAPTER III—WILLIAM JAMES
· CHAPTER IV—JOSIAH ROYCE
· CHAPTER V—LATER SPECULATIONS
· CHAPTER VI—MATERIALISM AND IDEALISM IN AMERICAN LIFE
· CHAPTER VII—ENGLISH LIBERTY IN AMERICA
CHAPTER I—THE MORAL BACKGROUND
About the middle of the nineteenth century, in the quiet sunshine of
provincial prosperity, New England had an Indian summer of the mind; and
an agreeable reflective literature showed how brilliant that russet and
yellow season could be. There were poets, historians, orators,
preachers, most of whom had studied foreign literatures and had
travelled; they demurely kept up with the times; they were universal
humanists. But it was all a harvest of leaves; these worthies had an
expurgated and barren conception of life; theirs was the purity of sweet
old age. Sometimes they made attempts to rejuvenate their minds by
broaching native subjects; they wished to prove how much matter for
poetry the new world supplied, and they wrote “Rip van Winkle,”
“Hiawatha,” or “Evangeline”; but the inspiration did not seem much more
American than that of Swift or Ossian or Châteaubriand. These cultivated
writers lacked native roots and fresh sap because the American intellect
itself lacked them. Their culture was half a pious survival, half an
intentional acquirement; it was not the inevitable flowering of a fresh
experience. Later there have been admirable analytic novelists who have
depicted American life as it is, but rather bitterly, rather sadly; as
if the joy and the illusion of it did not inspire them, but only an
abstract interest in their own art. If any one, like Walt Whitman,
penetrated to the feelings and images which the American scene was able
to breed out of itself, and filled them with a frank and broad afflatus
of his own, there is no doubt that he misrepresented the conscious minds
of cultivated Americans; in them the head as yet did not belong to the
trunk.
Nevertheless, _belles‐lettres_ in the United States—which after all
stretch beyond New England—have always had two points of contact with
the great national experiment. One point of contact has been oratory,
with that sort of poetry, patriotic, religious, or moral, which has the
function of oratory. Eloquence is a republican art, as conversation is
an aristocratic one. By eloquence at public meetings and dinners, in the
pulpit or in the press, the impulses of the community could be brought
to expression; consecrated maxims could be reapplied; the whole latent
manliness and shrewdness of the nation could be mobilised. In the form
of oratory reflection, rising out of the problems of action, could be
turned to guide or to sanction action, and sometimes could attain, in so
doing, a notable elevation of thought. Although Americans, and many
other people, usually say that thought is for the sake of action, it has
evidently been in these high moments, when action became incandescent in
thought, that they have been most truly alive, intensively most active,
and although _doing_ nothing, have found at last that their existence
was worth while. Reflection is itself a turn, and the top turn, given to
life. Here is the second point at which literature in America has fused
with the activities of the nation: it has paused to enjoy them. Every
animal has his festive and ceremonious moments, when he poses or plumes
himself or thinks; sometimes he even sings and flies aloft in a sort of
ecstasy. Somewhat in the same way, when reflection in man becomes
dominant, it may become passionate; it may create religion or
philosophy—adventures often more thrilling than the humdrum experience
they are supposed to interrupt.
This pure flame of mind is nothing new, superadded, or alien in America.
It is notorious how metaphysical was the passion that drove the Puritans
to those shores; they went there in the hope of living more perfectly in
the spirit. And their pilgrim’s progress was not finished when they had
founded their churches in the wilderness; an endless migration of the
mind was still before them, a flight from those new idols and servitudes
which prosperity involves, and the eternal lure of spiritual freedom and
truth. The moral world always contains undiscovered or thinly peopled
continents open to those who are more attached to what might or should
be than to what already is. Americans are eminently prophets; they apply
morals to public affairs; they are impatient and enthusiastic. Their
judgements have highly speculative implications, which they often make
explicit; they are men with principles, and fond of stating them.
Moreover, they have an intense self‐reliance; to exercise private
judgement is not only a habit with them but a conscious duty. Not seldom
personal conversions and mystical experiences throw their ingrained
faith into novel forms, which may be very bold and radical. They are
traditionally exercised about religion, and adrift on the subject more
than any other people on earth; and if religion is a dreaming
philosophy, and philosophy a waking religion, a people so wide awake and
so religious as the old Yankees ought certainly to have been rich in
philosophers.
In fact, philosophy in the good old sense of curiosity about the nature
of things, with readiness to make the best of them, has not been absent
from the practice of Americans or from their humorous moods; their
humour and shrewdness are sly comments on the shortcomings of some
polite convention that everybody accepts tacitly, yet feels to be
insecure and contrary to the principles on which life is actually
carried on. Nevertheless, with the shyness which simple competence often
shows in the presence of conventional shams, these wits have not taken
their native wisdom very seriously. They have not had the leisure nor
the intellectual scope to think out and defend the implications of their
homely perceptions. Their fresh insight has been whispered in
parentheses and asides; it has been humbly banished, in alarm, from
their solemn moments. What people have respected have been rather scraps
of official philosophy, or entire systems, which they have inherited or
imported, as they have respected operas and art museums. To be on
speaking terms with these fine things was a part of social
respectability, like having family silver. High thoughts must be at
hand, like those candlesticks, probably candleless, sometimes displayed
as a seemly ornament in a room blazing with electric light. Even in
William James, spontaneous and stimulating as he was, a certain
underlying discomfort was discernible; he had come out into the open,
into what should have been the sunshine, but the vast shadow of the
temple still stood between him and the sun. He was worried about what
_ought_ to be believed and the awful deprivations of disbelieving. What
he called the cynical view of anything had first to be brushed aside,
without stopping to consider whether it was not the true one; and he was
bent on finding new and empirical reasons for clinging to free‐will,
departed spirits, and tutelary gods. Nobody, except perhaps in this last
decade, has tried to bridge the chasm between what he believes in daily
life and the “problems” of philosophy. Nature and science have not been
ignored, and “practice” in some schools has been constantly referred to;
but instead of supplying philosophy with its data they have only
constituted its difficulties; its function has been not to build on
known facts but to explain them away. Hence a curious alternation and
irrelevance, as between weekdays and Sabbaths, between American ways and
American opinions.
That philosophy should be attached to tradition would be a great
advantage, conducive to mutual understanding, to maturity, and to
progress, if the tradition lay in the highway of truth. To deviate from
it in that case would be to betray the fact that, while one might have a
lively mind, one was not master of the subject. Unfortunately, in the
nineteenth century, in America as elsewhere, the ruling tradition was
not only erratic and far from the highway of truth, but the noonday of
this tradition was over, and its classic forms were outgrown. A
philosophy may have a high value, other than its truth to things, in its
truth to method and to the genius of its author; it may be a feat of
synthesis and imagination, like a great poem, expressing one of the
eternal possibilities of being, although one which the creator happened
to reject when he made this world. It is possible to be a master in
false philosophy—easier, in fact, than to be a master in the truth,
because a false philosophy can be made as simple and consistent as one
pleases. Such had been the masters of the tradition prevalent in New
England—Calvin, Hume, Fichte, not to mention others more relished
because less pure; but one of the disadvantages of such perfection in
error is that the illusion is harder to transmit to another age and
country. If Jonathan Edwards, for instance, was a Calvinist of pristine
force and perhaps the greatest _master_ in false philosophy that America
has yet produced, he paid the price by being abandoned, even in his
lifetime, by his own sect, and seeing the world turn a deaf ear to his
logic without so much as attempting to refute it. One of the
peculiarities of recent speculation, especially in America, is that
ideas are abandoned in virtue of a mere change of feeling, without any
new evidence or new arguments. We do not nowadays refute our
predecessors, we pleasantly bid them good‐bye. Even if all our
principles are unwittingly traditional we do not like to bow openly to
authority. Hence masters like Calvin, Hume, or Fichte rose before their
American admirers like formidable ghosts, foreign and unseizable. People
refused to be encumbered with any system, even one of their own; they
were content to imbibe more or less of the spirit of a philosophy and to
let it play on such facts as happened to attract their attention. The
originality even of Emerson and of William James was of this incidental
character; they found new approaches to old beliefs or new expedients in
old dilemmas. They were not in a scholastic sense pupils of anybody or
masters in anything. They hated the scholastic way of saying what they
meant, if they had heard of it; they insisted on a personal freshness of
style, refusing to make their thought more precise than it happened to
be spontaneously; and they lisped their logic, when the logic came.
We must remember that ever since the days of Socrates, and especially
after the establishment of Christianity, the dice of thought have been
loaded. Certain pledges have preceded inquiry and divided the possible
conclusions beforehand into the acceptable and the inacceptable, the
edifying and the shocking, the noble and the base. Wonder has no longer
been the root of philosophy, but sometimes impatience at having been
cheated and sometimes fear of being undeceived. The marvel of existence,
in which the luminous and the opaque are so romantically mingled, no
longer lay like a sea open to intellectual adventure, tempting the mind
to conceive some bold and curious system of the universe on the analogy
of what had been so far discovered. Instead, people were confronted with
an orthodoxy—though not always the same orthodoxy—whispering mysteries
and brandishing anathemas. Their wits were absorbed in solving
traditional problems, many of them artificial and such as the ruling
orthodoxy had created by its gratuitous assumptions. Difficulties were
therefore found in some perfectly obvious truths; and obvious fables, if
they were hallowed by association, were seriously weighed in the balance
against one another or against the facts; and many an actual thing was
proved to be impossible, or was hidden under a false description. In
conservative schools the student learned and tried to fathom the
received solutions; in liberal schools he was perhaps invited to seek
solutions of his own, but still to the old questions. Freedom, when
nominally allowed, was a provisional freedom; if your wanderings did not
somehow bring you back to orthodoxy you were a misguided being, no
matter how disparate from the orthodox might be the field from which you
fetched your little harvest; and if you could not be answered you were
called superficial. Most spirits are cowed by such disparagement; but
even those who snap their fingers at it do not escape; they can hardly
help feeling that in calling a spade a spade they are petulant and
naughty; or if their inspiration is too genuine for that, they still
unwittingly shape their opinions in contrast to those that claim
authority, and therefore on the same false lines—a terrible tax to pay
to the errors of others; and it is only here and there that a very great
and solitary mind, like that of Spinoza, can endure obloquy without
bitterness or can pass through perverse controversies without contagion.
Under such circumstances it is obvious that speculation can be frank and
happy only where orthodoxy has receded, abandoning a larger and larger
field to unprejudiced inquiry; or else (as has happened among liberal
Protestants) where the very heart of orthodoxy has melted, has absorbed
the most alien substances, and is ready to bloom into anything that
anybody finds attractive. This is the secret of that extraordinary vogue
which the transcendental philosophy has had for nearly a century in
Great Britain and America; it is a method which enables a man to
renovate all his beliefs, scientific and religious, from the inside,
giving them a new status and interpretation as phases of his own
experience or imagination; so that he does not seem to himself to reject
anything, and yet is bound to nothing, except to his creative self. Many
too who have no inclination to practise this transcendental method—a
personal, arduous, and futile art, which requires to be renewed at every
moment—have been impressed with the results or the maxims of this or
that transcendental philosopher, such as that every opinion leads on to
another that reinterprets it, or every evil to some higher good that
contains it; and they have managed to identify these views with what
still seemed to them vital in religion.
In spite of this profound mutation at the core, and much paring at the
edges, traditional belief in New England retained its continuity and its
priestly unction; and religious teachers and philosophers could slip
away from Calvinism and even from Christianity without any loss of
elevation or austerity. They found it so pleasant and easy to elude the
past that they really had no quarrel with it. The world, they felt, was
a safe place, watched over by a kindly God, who exacted nothing but
cheerfulness and good‐will from his children; and the American flag was
a sort of rainbow in the sky, promising that all storms were over. Or if
storms came, such as the Civil War, they would not be harder to weather
than was necessary to test the national spirit and raise it to a new
efficiency. The subtler dangers which we may now see threatening America
had not yet come in sight—material restlessness was not yet ominous, the
pressure of business enterprises was not yet out of scale with the old
life or out of key with the old moral harmonies. A new type of American
had not appeared—the untrained, pushing, cosmopolitan orphan, cock‐sure
in manner but not too sure in his morality, to whom the old Yankee, with
his sour integrity, is almost a foreigner. Was not “increase,” in the
Bible, a synonym for benefit? Was not “abundance” the same, or almost
the same, as happiness?
Meantime the churches, a little ashamed of their past, began to court
the good opinion of so excellent a world. Although called evangelical,
they were far, very far, from prophesying its end, or offering a refuge
from it, or preaching contempt for it; they existed only to serve it,
and their highest divine credential was that the world needed them.
Irreligion, dissoluteness, and pessimism—supposed naturally to go
together—could never prosper; they were incompatible with efficiency.
That was the supreme test. “Be Christians,” I once heard a president of
Yale College cry to his assembled pupils, “be Christians and you will be
successful.” Religion was indispensable and sacred, when not carried too
far; but theology might well be unnecessary. Why distract this world
with talk of another? Enough for the day was the good thereof. Religion
should be disentangled as much as possible from history and authority
and metaphysics, and made to rest honestly on one’s fine feelings, on
one’s indomitable optimism and trust in life. Revelation was nothing
miraculous, given once for all in some remote age and foreign country;
it must come to us directly, and with greater authority now than ever
before. If evolution was to be taken seriously and to include moral
growth, the great men of the past could only be stepping‐stones to our
own dignity. To grow was to contain and sum up all the good that had
gone before, adding an appropriate increment. Undoubtedly some early
figures were beautiful, and allowances had to be made for local
influences in Palestine, a place so much more primitive and backward
than Massachusetts. Jesus was a prophet more winsome and nearer to
ourselves than his predecessors; but how could any one deny that the
twenty centuries of progress since his time must have raised a loftier
pedestal for Emerson or Charming or Phillips Brooks? It might somehow
not be in good taste to put this feeling into clear words; one and
perhaps two of these men would have deprecated it; nevertheless it
beamed with refulgent self‐satisfaction in the lives and maxims of most
of their followers.
All this liberalism, however, never touched the centre of traditional
orthodoxy, and those who, for all their modernness, felt that they
inherited the faith of their fathers and were true to it were
fundamentally right. There was still an orthodoxy among American
highbrows at the end of the nineteenth century, dissent from which was
felt to be scandalous; it consisted in holding that the universe exists
and is governed for the sake of man or of the human spirit. This
persuasion, arrogant as it might seem, is at bottom an expression of
impotence rather than of pride. The soul is originally vegetative; it
feels the weal and woe of what occurs within the body. With locomotion
and the instinct to hunt and to flee, animals begin to notice external
things also; but the chief point noticed about them is whether they are
good or bad, friendly or hostile, far or near. The station of the animal
and his interests thus become the measure of all things for him, in so
far as he knows them; and this aspect of them is, by a primitive
fatality, the heart of them to him. It is only reason that can discount
these childish perspectives, neutralise the bias of each by collating it
with the others, and masterfully conceive the field in which their
common objects are deployed, discovering also the principle of
foreshortening or projection which produces each perspective in turn.
But reason is a later comer into this world, and weak; against its
suasion stands the mighty resistance of habit and of moral presumption.
It is in their interest, and to rehabilitate the warm vegetative
autonomy of the primitive soul, that orthodox religion and philosophy
labour in the western world—for the mind of India cannot be charged with
this folly. Although inwardly these systems have not now a good
conscience and do not feel very secure (for they are retrograde and sin
against the light), yet outwardly they are solemn and venerable; and
they have incorporated a great deal of moral wisdom with their egotism
or humanism—more than the Indians with their respect for the infinite.
In deifying human interests they have naturally studied and expressed
them justly, whereas those who perceive the relativity of human goods
are tempted to scorn them—which is itself unreasonable—and to sacrifice
them all to the single passion of worship or of despair. Hardly anybody,
except possibly the Greeks at their best, has realised the sweetness and
glory of being a rational animal.
The Jews, as we know, had come to think that it was the creator of the
world, the God of the universe, who had taken them for his chosen
people. Christians in turn had asserted that it was God in person who,
having become a man, had founded their church. According to this Hebraic
tradition, the dignity of man did not lie in being a mind (which he
undoubtedly is) but in being a creature materially highly favoured, with
a longer life and a brighter destiny than other creatures in the world.
It is remarkable how deep, in the Hebraic religions, is this interest in
material existence; so deep that we are surprised when we discover that,
according to the insight of other races, this interest is the essence of
irreligion. Some detachment from existence and from hopes of material
splendour has indeed filtered into Christianity through Platonism.
Socrates and his disciples admired this world, but they did not
particularly covet it, or wish to live long in it, or expect to improve
it; what they cared for was an idea or a good which they found expressed
in it, something outside it and timeless, in which the contemplative
intellect might be literally absorbed. This philosophy was no less
humanistic than that of the Jews, though in a less material fashion: if
it did not read the universe in terms of thrift, it read it in terms of
art. The pursuit of a good, such as is presumably aimed at in human
action, was supposed to inspire every movement in nature; and this good,
for the sake of which the very heavens revolved, was akin to the
intellectual happiness of a Greek sage. Nature was a philosopher in
pursuit of an idea. Natural science then took a moralising turn which it
has not yet quite outgrown. Socrates required of astronomy, if it was to
be true science, that it should show why _it was best_ that the sun and
moon should be as they are; and Plato, refining on this, assures us that
the eyes are placed in the front of the head, rather than at the back,
because the front is the nobler quarter, and that the intestines are
long in order that we may have leisure between meals to study
philosophy. Curiously enough, the very enemies of final causes sometimes
catch this infection and attach absolute values to facts in an opposite
sense and in an inhuman interest; and you often hear in America that
whatever is is right. These naturalists, while they rebuke the moralists
for thinking that nature is ruled magically for our good, think her
adorable for being ruled, in scorn of us, only by her own laws; and thus
we oscillate between egotism and idolatry.
The Reformation did not reform this belief in the cosmic supremacy of
man, or the humanity of God; on the contrary, it took it (like so much
else) in terrible German earnest, not suffering it any longer to be
accepted somewhat lightly as a classical figure of speech or a mystery
resting on revelation. The human race, the chosen people, the Christian
elect were like tabernacle within tabernacle for the spirit; but in the
holy of holies was the spirit itself, one’s own spirit and experience,
which was the centre of everything. Protestant philosophy, exploring the
domain of science and history with confidence, and sure of finding the
spirit walking there, was too conscientious to misrepresent what it
found. As the terrible facts could not be altered they had to be
undermined. By turning psychology into metaphysics this could be
accomplished, and we could reach the remarkable conclusion that the
human spirit was not so much the purpose of the universe as its seat,
and the only universe there was.
This conclusion, which sums up idealism on its critical or scientific
side, would not of itself give much comfort to religious minds, that
usually crave massive support rather than sublime independence; it leads
to the heroic egotism of Fichte or Nietzsche rather than to any green
pastures beside any still waters. But the critical element in idealism
can be used to destroy belief in the natural world; and by so doing it
can open the way to another sort of idealism, not at all critical, which
might be called the higher superstition. This views the world as an
oracle or charade, concealing a dramatic unity, or formula, or maxim,
which all experience exists to illustrate. The habit of regarding
existence as a riddle, with a surprising solution which we think we have
found, should be the source of rather mixed emotions; the facts remain
as they were, and rival solutions may at any time suggest themselves;
and the one we have hit on may not, after all, be particularly
comforting. The Christian may find himself turned by it into a heathen,
the humanist into a pantheist, and the hope with which we instinctively
faced life may be chastened into mere conformity. Nevertheless, however
chilling and inhuman our higher superstition may prove, it will make us
feel that we are masters of a mystical secret, that we have a faith to
defend, and that, like all philosophers, we have taken a ticket in a
lottery in which if we hit on the truth, even if it seems a blank, we
shall have drawn the first prize.
Orthodoxy in New England, even so transformed and attenuated, did not of
course hold the field alone. There are materialists by instinct in every
age and country; there are always private gentlemen whom the clergy and
the professors cannot deceive. Here and there a medical or scientific
man, or a man of letters, will draw from his special pursuits some hint
of the nature of things at large; or a political radical will nurse
undying wrath against all opinions not tartly hostile to church and
state. But these clever people are not organised, they are not always
given to writing, nor speculative enough to make a system out of their
convictions. The enthusiasts and the pedagogues naturally flock to the
other camp. The very competence which scientific people and connoisseurs
have in their special fields disinclines them to generalise, or renders
their generalisations one‐sided; so that their speculations are
extraordinarily weak and stammering. Both by what they represent and by
what they ignore they are isolated and deprived of influence, since only
those who are at home in a subject can feel the force of analogies drawn
from that field, whereas any one can be swayed by sentimental and moral
appeals, by rhetoric and unction. Furthermore, in America the
materialistic school is without that support from popular passions which
it draws in many European countries from its association with
anticlericalism or with revolutionary politics; and it also lacks the
maturity, self‐confidence, and refinement proper in older societies to
the great body of Epicurean and disenchanted opinion, where for
centuries wits, critics, minor philosophers, and men of the world have
chuckled together over their Horace, their Voltaire, and their Gibbon.
The horror which the theologians have of infidelity passes therefore
into the average American mind unmitigated by the suspicion that
anything pleasant could lie in that quarter, much less the open way to
nature and truth and a secure happiness. There is another handicap, of a
more technical sort, under which naturalistic philosophy labours in
America, as it does in England; it has been crossed by scepticism about
the validity of perception and has become almost identical with
psychology. Of course, for any one who thinks naturalistically (as the
British empiricists did in the beginning, like every unsophisticated
mortal), psychology is the description of a very superficial and
incidental complication in the animal kingdom: it treats of the curious
sensibility and volatile thoughts awakened in the mind by the growth and
fortunes of the body. In noting these thoughts and feelings, we can
observe how far they constitute true knowledge of the world in which
they arise, how far they ignore it, and how far they play with it, by
virtue of the poetry and the syntax of discourse which they add out of
their own exuberance; for fancy is a very fertile treacherous thing, as
every one finds when he dreams. But dreams run over into waking life,
and sometimes seem to permeate and to underlie it; and it was just this
suspicion that he might be dreaming awake, that discourse and tradition
might be making a fool of him, that prompted the hard‐headed Briton,
even before the Reformation, to appeal from conventional beliefs to
“experience.” He was anxious to clear away those sophistries and
impostures of which he was particularly apprehensive, in view of the
somewhat foreign character of his culture and religion. Experience, he
thought, would bear unimpeachable witness to the nature of things; for
by experience he understood knowledge produced by direct contact with
the object. Taken in this sense, experience is a method of discovery, an
exercise of intelligence; it is the same observation of things, strict,
cumulative, and analytic, which produces the natural sciences. It rests
on naturalistic assumptions (since we know when and where we find our
data) and could not fail to end in materialism. What prevented British
empiricism from coming to this obvious conclusion was a peculiarity of
the national temperament. The Englishman is not only distrustful of too
much reasoning and too much theory (and science and materialism involve
a good deal of both), but he is also fond of musing and of withdrawing
into his inner man. Accordingly his empiricism took an introspective
form; like Hamlet he stopped at the _how_; he began to think about
thinking. His first care was now to arrest experience as he underwent
it; though its presence could not be denied, it came in such a
questionable shape that it could not be taken at its word. This mere
presence of experience, this ghostly apparition to the inner man, was
all that empirical philosophy could now profess to discover. Far from
being an exercise of intelligence, it retracted all understanding, all
interpretation, all instinctive faith; far from furnishing a sure record
of the truths of nature, it furnished a set of pathological facts, the
passive subject‐matter of psychology. These now seemed the only facts
admissible, and psychology, for the philosophers, became the only
science. Experience could discover nothing, but all discoveries had to
be retracted, so that they should revert to the fact of experience and
terminate there. Evidently when the naturalistic background and meaning
of experience have dropped out in this way, empiricism is a form of
idealism, since whatever objects we can come upon will all be _a priori_
and _a fortiori_ and _sensu eminentiori_ ideal in the mind. The irony of
logic actually made English empiricism, understood in this psychological
way, the starting‐point for transcendentalism and for German philosophy.
Between these two senses of the word experience, meaning sometimes
contact with things and at other times absolute feeling, the empirical
school in England and America has been helplessly torn, without ever
showing the courage or the self‐knowledge to choose between them. I
think we may say that on the whole their view has been this: that
feelings or ideas were absolute atoms of existence, without any ground
or source, so that the elements of their universe were all mental; but
they conceived these psychical elements to be deployed in a physical
time and even (since there were many simultaneous series of them) in
some sort of space. These philosophers were accordingly idealists about
substance but naturalists about the order and relations of existences;
and experience on their lips meant feeling when they were thinking of
particulars, but when they were thinking broadly, in matters of history
or science, experience meant the universal nebula or cataract which
these feelings composed—itself no object of experience, but one believed
in and very imperfectly presented in imagination. These men believed in
nature, and were materialists at heart and to all practical purposes;
but they were shy intellectually, and seemed to think they ran less risk
of error in holding a thing covertly than in openly professing it.
If any one, like Herbert Spencer, kept psychology in its place and in
that respect remained a pure naturalist, he often forfeited this
advantage by enveloping the positive information he derived from the
sciences in a whirlwind of generalisations. The higher superstition, the
notion that nature dances to the tune of some comprehensive formula or
some magic rhyme, thus reappeared among those who claimed to speak for
natural science. In their romantic sympathy with nature they attributed
to her an excessive sympathy with themselves; they overlooked her
infinite complications and continual irony, and candidly believed they
could measure her with their thumb‐rules. Why should philosophers drag a
toy‐net of words, fit to catch butterflies, through the sea of being,
and expect to land all the fish in it? Why not take note simply of what
the particular sciences can as yet tell us of the world? Certainly, when
put together, they already yield a very wonderful, very true, and very
sufficient picture of it. Are we impatient of knowing everything? But
even if science was much enlarged it would have limits, both in
penetration and in extent; and there would always remain, I will not say
an infinity of unsolved problems (because “problems” are created by our
impatience or our contradictions), but an infinity of undiscovered
facts. Nature is like a beautiful woman that may be as delightfully and
as truly known at a certain distance as upon a closer view; as to
knowing her through and through, that is nonsense in both cases, and
might not reward our pains. The love of all‐inclusiveness is as
dangerous in philosophy as in art. The savour of nature can be enjoyed
by us only through our own senses and insight, and an outline map of the
entire universe, even if it was not fabulously concocted, would not tell
us much that was worth knowing about the outlying parts of it. Without
suggesting for a moment that the proper study of mankind is man only—for
it may be landscape or mathematics—we may safely say that their proper
study is what lies within their range and is interesting to them. For
this reason the moralists who consider principally human life and paint
nature only as a background to their figures are apt to be better
philosophers than the speculative naturalists. In human life we are at
home, and our views on it, if one‐sided, are for that very reason
expressive of our character and fortunes. An unfortunate peculiarity of
naturalistic philosophers is that usually they have but cursory and
wretched notions of the inner life of the mind; they are dead to
patriotism and to religion, they hate poetry and fancy and passion and
even philosophy itself; and therefore (especially if their science too,
as often happens, is borrowed and vague) we need not wonder if the
academic and cultivated world despises them, and harks back to the
mythology of Plato or Aristotle or Hegel, who at least were conversant
with the spirit of man.
Philosophers are very severe towards other philosophers because they
expect too much. Even under the most favourable circumstances no mortal
can be asked to seize the truth in its wholeness or at its centre. As
the senses open to us only partial perspectives, taken from one point of
view, and report the facts in symbols which, far from being adequate to
the full nature of what surrounds us, resemble the coloured signals of
danger or of free way which a railway engine‐driver peers at in the
night, so our speculation, which is a sort of panoramic sense,
approaches things peripherally and expresses them humanly. But how
doubly dyed in this subjectivity must our thought be when an orthodoxy
dominant for ages has twisted the universe into the service of moral
interests, and when even the heretics are entangled in a scepticism so
partial and arbitrary that it substitutes psychology, the most
derivative and dubious of sciences, for the direct intelligent reading
of experience! But this strain of subjectivity is not in all respects an
evil; it is a warm purple dye. When a way of thinking is deeply rooted
in the soil, and embodies the instincts or even the characteristic
errors of a people, it has a value quite independent of its truth; it
constitutes a phase of human life and can powerfully affect the
intellectual drama in which it figures. It is a value of this sort that
attaches to modern philosophy in general, and very particularly to the
American thinkers I am about to discuss. There would be a sort of
irrelevance and unfairness in measuring them by the standards of pure
science or even of a classic sagacity, and reproaching them for not
having reached perfect consistency or fundamental clearness. Men of
intense feeling—and others will hardly count—are not mirrors but lights.
If pure truth happened to be what they passionately desired, they would
seek it single‐mindedly, and in matters within their competence they
would probably find it; but the desire for pure truth, like any other,
must wait to be satisfied until its organ is ripe and the conditions are
favourable. The nineteenth century was not a time and America was not a
place where such an achievement could be expected. There the wisest felt
themselves to be, as they were, questioners and apostles rather than
serene philosophers. We should not pay them the doubtful compliment of
attributing to them merits alien to their tradition and scope, as if the
nobleness they actually possessed—their conscience, vigour, timeliness,
and influence—were not enough.