the part that certain heroes, the warrior, the artist, the philosopher,
play in it. But we must sweep on to larger issues, for there is a
question that must have occurred to everyone as our description of the
Nietzschian battle has advanced. It is the old question, Cui bono! We
fight, suppose we win? Little Peterkin, who was surely brought up on
Schopenhauer, is there to ask, What good has come of it? A little power
more or less, what does it matter? Our brief hour is still a brief
hour, our atomic selves cannot greatly swell, what after all is the use
of fighting when we cannot befool ourselves as to the nature of the
spoils?
For answer, we might point once more to the Superman. For him we kill
pity in our hearts; for him, and not for spoils, is the battle fought.
Surely the conqueror is conquered and his winnings cannot warm a grave.
It is for the sake of them that come after that the costly struggle is
maintained. Every fighter should know this; it should fire his heart
and give him courage to be hard. “Higher than the love of thy nearest
stands the love of those most remote from thee, thine offspring, the
far future man. Higher than the love of thy kind is for me the love
of a Shadow. This Shadow that runs before thee is more beautiful than
thou; why dost thou not give him thy flesh and thy bones?”
But this Superman? Can things stop with him? Is he really a goal? Or
only a transition, a bridge to the super-superman? Has evolution really
changed the situation that Schopenhauer depicts? In the endless flux
can one find a purpose that abides?
This phrase--the endless flux--brings us to one of the strangest phases
of Nietzsche’s doctrine. One who, with Schopenhauer, has deeply
questioned the evidence of purpose, the harmony of purposes in this
world of ours, one who has groped in the night of things for that which
might inspire one’s will to live has perhaps been caught by the great
idea of evolution, has perhaps cried with Nietzsche, “I will live and
struggle for to-morrow.” Then, to such an one, the old questioning
spirit returns as it is bound to return to men who think. The morrow of
to-morrow looms up before him; the eternal flux of to-morrows stretches
itself out and loses itself in a vague “Whither?”
If now this one turn to Nietzsche for an answer, he receives one
certainly; but, surely, a mocking one!
“I preach,” cries Nietzsche, “the Wiederkunft.”
One day Zarathustra and his Dwarf come to a certain portal.
“Look on this portal, Dwarf. It has two faces; two ways come together
here which no man has traveled to the end.
“This long road back of us measures an eternity. And that long road
before us--that is another eternity.
“They are opposed, these two ways; they meet each other head-on and it
is here at this portal that they come together. The name of this portal
is written over it; it is the _‘Now.’_
“But if one were to follow one of these roads further, and always
further,--thinkest thou, Dwarf, they would always be opposed?
“Look upon this _‘Now’!_ From this portal there runs a long way back;
behind us lies an eternity.
“Must not all things that can come to pass already have passed along
this road? Must not everything that can happen already have happened
and run its course?
“And if all things already have come to pass, what thinkest thou,
Dwarf, of this _‘Now’?_ Must not this portal have been here before? And
are not all things in such wise fast knotted together that this _‘Now’_
drags with it all things to come? That, consequently, it drags itself
back again?
“For what of all things can come to pass, must they not again pass
along this endless road that stretches before us?
“And this slow spider crawling in the moonlight; aye, and this
moonlight, and I and thou in the portal whispering together, whispering
of eternal things, must we not all of us have been before?
“And must we not return again and again along that long road--must we
not eternally return?
“So spake he, and always lower and lower; for he was afraid of his
thoughts--and afterthoughts!”
Surely Nietzsche is mocking us with his Wiederkunft,--with his doctrine
of the eternal returning of things! What! he teaches that the struggle
has a goal, and that goal is just--tomorrow? Then, when bewildered by
the vision of the infinite stretch of tomorrows we turn to him for
explanation, he tells us that the stream is not even infinite but like
ancient Ocean “flows in upon itself.”
“Tied to the wheel of things,” India said we were, “therefore, let us
give up.”
“Tied to the wheel of things,” Nietzsche agrees we are, “therefore, let
us keep on.”
“Courage is the best of them that kill. Courage kills even pity. Now,
pity is the deep abyss: deep as one sees into life, just so deep does
one see into pain.
“But courage is the best of them that kill; courage that lays hold on
things; courage puts even Death to death, for it says to life: ‘War das
das Leben? Wohlan! Noch einmal!’”
* * * * *
Noch einmal! To make one ready to cry _da capo_ to life, that is the
test of a philosophy! Nietzsche’s doctrine of the Wiederkunft has no
scientific importance, but this fact is itself unimportant. It makes
little difference whether the River Ocean flows in upon itself, or
flows endlessly on, or falls at last into Hades. The important thing is
that worth and happiness lie in playing the game of life as experience
reveals it to us, no matter what that game may be.
“Thy will be my will, O Nature,” cried the Stoic Emperor. Is this
will the will to conquer, is it the will to produce the higher type,
is it the will to flow, is it the will wheel-like to turn in saecula
saeculorum--the word of life is “That also will I”; the word of
sickness and death is, “That will I not.”
There is enough of the dramatic for such as have a taste that way
in the circumstance that just this lonely, pain-wracked, finally
brain-sick man should have begun his philosophy with the phrase: “God
is dead of pity for men,” and should have concluded it with that other:
“War das das Leben? Wohlan! Noch einmal!”
VIII
PRAGMATISM
Nothing could be easier, you would say, than to distinguish the things
man has made from those he has merely stumbled upon and found. The suns
and their satellites, with the laws of their turning; the earth, with
its seas and continents and the ways of its winds and weather--surely
no man took thought on these things to make them. Whereas, from the
first bit of flint chipped to serve a human need to all our world has
now to show of instruments of power and works of art we have a record
of human ideals wrought in material, while man, surrounded by his
handiwork, has come to live more and more under laws of his own making.
Aristotle thought the difference between products of nature and works
of art so plain that he need not pause to explain it. The years that
have passed since then have developed no better mind than Aristotle’s,
no keener wit than Plato’s, but they have brought us a wealth of
experience--of an experience at once enlightening and disillusioning,
until
Jetzt sind wir so klug und witzig
Es verblutet uns das Herz.
We are no longer sure of very much, and among the things we are most
doubtful about is just this distinction between what man has made and
what he has found. To prove this, no one need go further afield than
just to consider himself. Surely I may say of myself, my character, my
private life that it is man-made, for am not I the man that made it?
It expresses all my ideals so far as I could realize them, and never
would it have been just what it is had I not moulded it that way. And
yet, who among us has not sat up of nights with that strange being he
calls himself, and wondered however he came to bring so uncompanionable
a companion home with him and where the devil he found him? Ernst
Mach tells an amusing anecdote at his own expense. One day he was
mounting the steps of a bus when he noticed at the other end of the
aisle a man’s face peering into his. He had no more than asked himself
“Where have I seen that degenerate looking pedagogue before?”--when he
discovered he was looking into a mirror.
And who, wearying of this sorry companion, has not tried to change
him for a better, only to find himself after a longer or shorter
while with the same old fellow at his elbow--a trifle more set in his
ways, perhaps, but otherwise little altered? Of the sadder sort of
autobiographies I should put the Journal Intime of Henri-Frédéric
Amiel easily first. Not from pain or poverty, not from the malice of
other men nor any disgrace of outer fortune did he suffer, but just
from the being that was himself. “From the beginning,” he writes in
1858, “I have been a dreamer fearing to act--in love with perfection
and as incapable of renouncing her demands as of meeting them. In
short, a mind of wide vision and a character of no strength; curious to
feel all that is to be felt, unfit for any action.” “Here,” comments
his friend, Edmond Scherer, “we have Amiel’s cross. He wanted--he
wanted to want--to will, and will-power was wanting in him. He cursed
the inner spell that was on him, but he could not shake it off.
After each attempt to break it he fell back into himself again, more
bewildered, more weary and bruised than ever. In the waging of these
combats the years wore on, until the moment was near when Amiel would
have to acknowledge to himself that the circle was definitely closed
behind him.” Would you say that Amiel had made his destiny or found it?
Would you say that any of us is of his own workmanship, or does our
life slowly unfold itself to us as to Oedipus his fate?
What is thus suggested by self-examination is confirmed by the study of
other lives. The friend whose wayward course has made your affection
anxious for him--can you, with the best will in the world, change him
from himself? Some, out of bitterness of their experience, have said
it would be easier to repeal the law of gravitation than in any way to
alter human destiny. Others to be sure are more sanguine, and will not
give up seeking a way so long as there is a will to save. But whether,
even when they appear to succeed, it is not rather their patience that
is rewarded by being allowed to live long enough to witness what would
have come about without any of their doing, or whether character is
more truly a thing made by human effort than a thing found and unfolded
to our observation--respecting these matters there is divergence of
opinion.
Now, confidence in our ability to tell what we have made from what we
have found once shaken, there is no saying how far our questioning mind
may carry us. No saying, I mean, in the case of any individual man--for
it is easy enough to tell the general history of this doubt and
uncertainty. It reaches all the way from those who think that back of
all apparent creating by finite beings there is a Nature with its laws
that was never made, but can only little by little be made out. Let
us call those who think in this way “Realists.” Historic uncertainty
then reaches all the way from the realists to those who think that
heaven, the earth, and all that in them is, have no reality save as
they are the thought and work of finite minds. We will call these
thinkers “Idealists.” From realist to idealist and back again, through
all intermediate phases, the dialectic of history swings; but it does
not merely mark time therefore, it also measures progress. It is of one
moment--I think a rather interesting moment--of this progress that I
would speak in due order. Let this, then, be my prologue--and so to the
tale.
* * * * *
In 1907, William James wrote of the philosophy to which he had devoted
the last ten or twelve years: “I fully expect to see the pragmatist
view,” so he called this philosophy, “run through the classic stages
of a theory’s career. First, you know, a new theory is attacked as
absurd; then, it is admitted to be true, but obvious and insignificant;
finally, it is seen to be so important that its adversaries claim they
themselves discovered it. Our doctrine of truth is at present in the
first of these three stages, with symptoms of the second stage having
begun in certain quarters.”
Looking back over the years that have lapsed since this was written,
I cannot say that James’s prophecy as to the future of pragmatism
has been fulfilled; but that the world, at least the world in which I
have lived, has lost its first sense of the absurdity of pragmatism
is undoubtedly true. No one was more bitten than I with this first
feeling of the absurd, unless it was some other of my kind among those
who gathered of an evening in 1896 to listen to a reading of James’s
now famous little essay on “The Will to Believe”--the essay which, so
far as James was concerned, opened the campaign for pragmatism. James
had written the paper that winter as a lecture to be delivered before
the Philosophical Clubs of Yale and Brown Universities, and I cannot
recall what the occasion was that brought a small number of us graduate
students at Harvard together to hear it re-read; but I do recall that
we were very much bewildered and not a little shocked by the reading.
Not all, I dare say, who afterwards read this “Will to Believe” will
have experienced any such shock and bewilderment, nor will many have
felt what we found so upsetting in a bit of writing that was, as
writing, certainly, altogether delightful. But you must know that this
particular gathering was made up of students who had been brought up
in that theory of truth which I have called the realistic, and their
habitual attitude toward truth was such that they held their truth the
truer the more they were its discoverers and the less they had had to
do with the making of it.
There were, to begin with, the laboratory men. Now, a laboratory is a
school of the most rigid discipline--a discipline whose first principle
is “keep yourself out of your experiment.” I think you will understand
what I mean by this when I say that a scrupulous experimenter about
to take conclusive readings in a matter that promises to be of some
value to science will, if possible, get another observer ignorant of
their import to take these readings for him, lest something of his own
excitement and anxiety corrupt his very touch, sight and hearing, and
warp his result to his will. And, what was this James was defending--a
“Will to Believe”? No wonder some wag of the lot dubbed it “The Will to
Make Believe”! And what was this again James was saying--“For purposes
of discovery ... indifference is to be less highly recommended, and
science would be far less advanced than she is if the passionate
desires of individuals to get their own faiths confirmed had been kept
out of the game.... On the other hand, if you want an absolute duffer
in an investigation, you must, after all, take the man who has no
interest whatever in its results: he is the warranted incapable, the
positive fool.” Had James addressed a gathering of the Sons of St.
Patrick, in the sense of demonstrating to them that the Pope of Rome
was the Beast mentioned in Revelations, he might have called forth a
noisier response, but none less sympathetic than ours.
One who would invite a man to bring his enthusiasms, his likings and
dislikings, in short, any will of his other than the will to persevere,
into a laboratory with him would naturally not forbid him to keep all
this equipment by him in whatever pursuit of truth he might engage,
whether of history, economics, morals or religion. And just as James
shocked the realist spirit of that little Harvard gathering of a score
of years ago, so have his writings fallen afoul of realism wherever
they have been read--and perhaps few writers on philosophy have been
more widely read than William James. This is to have made enemies
indeed, for the genius of realism, the spirit of the seeker who would
find what he might find and call it truth, naked, unclothed upon with
garments of human interpretation, has sometime breathed in every
science and every art.
* * * * *
Take the realistic historian now--but you will doubtless know this
character better if I show him to you, and the effect he produces upon
other temperaments, than if I merely describe him as a type. Among the
most entertaining of the reviews that Anatole France contributed to “Le
Temps,” in the late 80’s and early 90’s, is one that he devotes to a
work “tout à fait solide et puissant” of Louis Bourdeau, “L’Histoire et
les Historiens, essai critique”--a critical essay on history considered
as an objective science--“in which,” as France remarks, “M. Bourdeau
puts works on history in a class with fables and Mother Goose tales.
“‘History,’ says M. Bourdeau, ‘is not and cannot be a science.’ The
reasons he gives for this have not failed to make an impression on my
mind, and perhaps there is a special reason why they should impress
me--the sum of which is that I had tried to point out these reasons
before he did. I had thrown out suggestions of them flippantly and in
a spirit of badinage ten years ago in a little book of mine called the
‘Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard.’ I set no store by them then, but, now
that I see they are worth something, I am in haste to claim them.
“‘In the first place,’ I said in this little book,--‘In the first
place, what is history? History is the written presentation of past
events. But what is an event? Is it any fact whatever? No, sir. It
is a noteworthy fact. Now, how is the historian to judge whether
a fact is noteworthy or not? He judges according to his taste and
caprice, follows his own idea, in short, proceeds after the manner
of an artist. For facts do not of their own accord divide themselves
into historical facts and non-historical facts. Again, a fact is
something extremely complex. Does the historian represent facts in
all their complexity? No, that is impossible. He will represent them
stripped of the greater part of their detail, consequently truncated,
mutilated, different from what they were. As to the interrelation of
these facts, the less said of that the better. If a so-called historic
fact is brought about (which is possible) by one or more non-historic
facts--and for that very reason unknown--how can the historian
establish a relation between these facts?’
“These, if I am not mistaken, are the fundamental ideas upon which M.
Louis Bourdeau rests his right to refuse to history any scientific
value....
“Indulgent minds find a way to get along with the treacheries of
history. This muse is false, they think, but she no longer deceives us
when we have found out that she is deceiving us. Constant doubt shall
be our kind of certitude, they say. Prudently, we will go our way from
error to error toward a relative kind of truth, for even a lie is some
kind of a truth....
“But as for M. Bourdeau, he does not wish to be deceived even
knowingly, and he absolutely repudiates history. He drives her from
his door as deceitful, shameless, dissolute, having sold herself to
the powerful, a courtesan in the pay of kings, an enemy of the people,
wanton and false.”
So far, the picture of non-objective history in all its
ugliness--history as it has been written in the past. But now the
history of the future, objective history, realistic history--ah, that
will be quite another story. It is Bourdeau who speaks: “The historians
of the future will have for their first task the gathering and
interpreting of statistical data concerning the common events of life.
The activity of thought always expresses itself in acts, and the only
way to take account of these is, after having classified them under
definite functions, to set them down at the moment of their happening,
to count them under given conditions of population, of time and place,
then to compare these results whether simultaneous or successive, to
note the variations of the function and to make the inductions that
they warrant. Thus, and only thus, may we some day know what the
multitudes that make up humanity are doing.
“This is the way we must write history from now on, not only in the
young countries which, like Australia, Canada, La Plata, are founded
under new conditions, but even in the old societies of Europe that,
like the others, hope to work out for themselves an ideal order of
labor, of peace and of liberty. For one who has reached our point
of advancement, any other way of studying history is inexact and
childish. A reform is coming, and will either be made by the historians
or in spite of them. The age of literary historiography is about to
close; that of scientific history about to open. When it shall be
able to reconstruct for us the life of a people in the way we have
indicated, we shall see that no story can offer so much of interest, of
instruction and of grandeur.”
I do not know that every one is bound to share Bourdeau’s enthusiasm
for statistical history. Perhaps some will hope with France that they
may not be spared to read history written in this way, and will solace
themselves the meanwhile with their Thucydides and Herodotus. But at
least, all will have caught the martial tread of realism resounding
through these passages.
* * * * *
In the laboratory sciences the objective spirit sits as a strong man
in his castle, impregnable, unattackable. There we see him dreaming
dreams of conquest, the fair domain of history, in which we may include
economics, seems ready to fall to his bow and spear for the world’s
endless betterment. And what lies beyond? Lands that are the fairest,
richest, most desired of all; and yet which will take all his daring,
all his courage, all his steadfastness and an undying enthusiasm to
make his own. They are the lands of morals and religion.
I like those chapters of history that tell how the spirit of the
experimenter sets out to conquer the realms that have so long been
ruled by masters with whom he can have no sympathy--tradition, coming
out of the vague mists of the past; superstition, born of human
ignorance; mysticism, inarticulate, ecstatic, offering reasons for
itself that are reasons only to those who ask for none. To win all this
for objectivity, for the kingdom of the kind of truth that believes
only because the experiment says so, the experiment that any unbeliever
may repeat for himself and abide by the result--this is surely a brave
adventure, and whether they meet victory or defeat one cannot refuse
one’s enthusiasm to those who have had courage to make it.
Of those who set forth in this way, I should call David Hume the
father. Would you, for example, know what is right and what is wrong?
Then turn not to inspired writings, but travel widely through the
civilizations of different countries and different times and seek
as you would seek any other historical fact, first, what people
_called_ good and what they _called_ bad. Then, if underlying the vast
contradictions of historic precept you find nevertheless an agreement
in the purpose these precepts, set in their native settings, served,
why, then, you will have arrived at the only meaning good and bad can
have.
Or, would you know whether this is God’s world or no? Turn not to
reputed miracles, and indulge not in idle dreams of another world in
which the faulty humanity and utter finiteness of this one will have
found its supplement and correction; but, take just the order and
purpose of this world as your best experience reveals it to you. It
may be that this seeking will leave you dark, puzzled, uncertain; but
better the unrest of judgment suspended than the dream-like peace of
faith unfounded.
It fortifies my soul to know
That, though I perish, truth is so.
wrote Arthur Clough. And, again, he has written:
To spend uncounted years of pain,
Again, again and yet again,
In working out in heart and brain
The problem of our being here;
To gather facts from far and near,
Upon the mind to hold them clear,
And, knowing more may yet appear,
Unto one’s latest breath to fear
The premature result to draw--
Is this the object, end and law,
And purpose of our being here?
Over these verses Clough has written: “Perchè pensa? Pensando
s’invecchia.”
* * * * *