sadly wise? That thinking--the realist’s way of thinking--does leave
one in melancholy mood may be no objection to thinking in this way;
but it may not be ignored as a fact of history. Realism’s hymn of
triumph is written by the best of its poets and the most sincere of
its prophets--Leconte de Lisle. One does not attempt to translate a
Leconte de Lisle, but the thought of the final verses of his poem on
the Southland may be put in some such way as this--
Man, if with heart full of joy or bitterness
Thou go at noonday through these radiant fields--
Flee! Nature is empty and the sun consumes;
Nothing here is alive, nothing sad, nothing joyous.
But if having put tears behind thee and laughter
Thou be turned to forgetfulness of this troubled world,
No longer knowing how to pardon nor how to curse,
And would taste a last sad volupté--
Come! The sun speaks to thee a glorious language;
Lose thyself in its implacable flame
And return slow-footed to the vile city of men,
Thy soul seven times steeped in divine nothingness.
It is like that. This wondering in a world we did not make and cannot
change, in which all our creating is illusory--a chance trivial
expression of what the world has made us--with no other purpose in our
wandering but
For to admire and for to see,
For to be’old this world so wide.
--why yes, the fulness of such experience comes as near as can be to
bringing us to a seven-fold sense of the _néant divin_.
Well, when a man’s philosophy has turned bitter to his tongue and hangs
heavy on his heart, there are three things he may do. He may abide by
the consequences of his philosophy, and seeing no fault in the premises
accept the conclusion with all valiance. Or, he may rebel against
all logic and reason and trust that sympathies and antipathies are
safer guides to truth than any evidence could be. Or, finally, he may
examine the premises anew. It is, I must confess, only to the last--to
the reasoners and critics who go patiently to work to re-examine old
beliefs--that I lend a respectful ear. But I do not know that I can
begin an account of the backward swing from such extreme realism as
I have pictured to such extreme idealism as I can tell only part of
before I close, better than by letting the mere spirit of unreasoning
revolt against this selfless objectivity express itself.
* * * * *
With an exquisite insight into the psychology of those he calls “Wir
Gelehrten,” and with no care for the truth or error of the ways of
the objective spirit, Nietzsche registers his revolt against all
this spirit stands for. “However gratefully we may still welcome the
objective spirit,” he writes in his “Jenseits von Gut und Böse,”
“in the end we must learn to put some caution into our gratitude
and some restraint on the enthusiasm with which selflessness and
impersonality of mind have come to be extolled as ends in themselves,
as an emancipation and an enlightenment. The objective man who no
longer curses or upbraids, the ideal scholar in whom the scientific
instinct after a thousand whole or half failures has at last come to
full growth and blossoming, is surely the most precious tool there is;
but his proper place is in the hands of a stronger man than he is. We
say he is an instrument--he is a mirror, he is no end in himself. The
objective man is indeed a mirror. Accustomed to subject himself to
all that is to be known, without any other pleasure than such as the
knowing, the mirroring gives, he waits till something comes his way,
then spreads himself delicately before it so that the light foot-steps
and ghostly passing of spirit things may not be lost to his surface
and integument. What there is of a person still left in him seems to
him accidental, often arbitrary, oftener still disturbing; so much
has what was his very self become a medium through which pass and in
which are reflected foreign forms and happenings. If he tries to think
about himself at all, it is an effort for him and more often than not a
failure. He changes easily; he tries to grasp his own needs, and only
then is he clumsy and awkward. Perhaps it is his health that bothers
him, or the petty pent-up character of wife or friend, or the lack
of companions and companionship. Oh, yes, he tries to think out what
is the matter with him. No use! Already his thought has swept on to
the more general case, and tomorrow he will know as little as he did
yesterday what’s to be done about it. He has lost serious interest in
himself, time spent on himself is wasted. He is cheerful, not for want
of things to worry about, but for want of fingers and hands to lay
hold on his trouble. His way of taking whatever turns up, his sunny
unconstrained hospitality to anything that comes along, his way of
wishing everybody well, his dangerous indifference to the difference
between yes and no--ah, how often he has to pay for these his virtues!
And, as just a man, he is too often taken for the caput mortuum of
these virtues. Would you have him love or hate--I mean love or hate as
God, women and brutes understand love and hate--why, he will do the
best he can and give what he can. But no one should be disappointed if
this is not much; if just here he shows himself ungenuine, unattached,
unreliable--rotten. His love is thought out, his hates are trumped up
and rather a _tour de force_, little side issues and exaggerations.
He is only genuine when nothing prevents him from being objective.
His mirroring and everlastingly even soul can no longer say ‘yes,’ no
longer say ‘no.’ It imposes nothing on anything, neither does it upset
anything. It says with Leibnitz, ‘Je ne méprise presque rien.’”
If in this passage Nietzsche reveals his delicate antipathy for a
character we had all been taught to worship, in others he shows himself
a pragmatist before that word had been heard of. The philosopher for
him is no wanderer of the seas, accepting what shores he comes upon
whether they smile on him or frown. For Nietzsche, the philosopher is
a Caesarian conqueror who has his way with truth, and truth is such a
thing as a strong man may have his way with.
* * * * *
But, “I am not of those of whom one asks ‘why?’” Nietzsche has
somewhere written, and this is so true that I can use him for no more
than a vehement example of spleen. If I am to enter upon the path of
a more or less reasoned reaction against that objectivity we have all
sometime held sacred, I must turn to those of whom one can ask “why?”
And, notably, to William James.
Now, if I do turn to James to ask him “why?”--Why is not the realist,
with all his sad heroism and resigned courage, the noblest and best
that man has imagined?--he answers, or I take him to, Because realism
is a philosophy of little faith! Faith it is that makes worlds,
realistic science has only the wit to acknowledge and the strength to
suffer what faith has wrought. Bold to endure, it is timid to change,
and a world in the making needs its makers, needs its poets and
actors more than it needs audience or spectator. At the bottom of the
realist’s brave heart lurks an abiding fear--the fear of making a fool
of himself. But a world in the making like a battle in the fighting
cries out for fools and the foolhardy. Faith risks to the point of
folly, and because all making anew is a colossal risk, let us have
colossal faith.
Here, if I am not mistaken, you have the principal difference between
the realism that went before and the pragmatism that came after. The
faith which the builders rejected is become the head of the corner.
For there are such things, the pragmatist contends, as faiths that
realize themselves, beliefs that come true only because they are
firmly held and courageously acted upon, hopes that would never have
been fulfilled had not he who held them gone ahead in the confident
expectation that they would be fulfilled. Take, James would have you,
just that familiar class of questions of fact, “questions concerning
personal relations, states of mind between one man and another. _Do
you like me or not?_--for example. Whether you do or not depends, in
countless instances, on whether I meet you half way, am willing to
assume that you must like me, and show you trust and expectation.
The previous faith on my part in your liking’s existence is in such
cases what makes your liking come. But if I stand aloof, and refuse to
budge an inch until I have objective evidence, until you shall have
done something apt [as the realists say] _ad extorquendum assensum
meum_, ten to one your liking never comes. How many women’s hearts are
vanquished by the mere sanguine insistence of some man that they _must_
love him! He will not consent to the hypothesis that they cannot. The
desire for a certain kind of truth here brings about that special
truth’s existence, and so it is in innumerable cases of other sorts.
Who gains promotions, boons, appointments, but the man in whose life
they are seen to play the part of live hypotheses, who discounts them,
sacrifices other things for their sake before they have come, and takes
risks for them in advance? His faith acts on the powers above him as a
claim, and creates its own verification.”
These be but trifling affairs of commonplace life if you will,
but the imagination sweeps easily on from the relation of man and
man to all that man’s work which is done shoulder to shoulder. “A
social organism,” James goes on, “of any sort whatever, large or
small, is what it is because each member proceeds to his own duty
with a trust that the other members will simultaneously do theirs.
Wherever a desired result is achieved by the co-operation of many
independent persons, its existence as a fact is a pure consequence of
the precursive faith in one another of those immediately concerned.
A government, an army, a commercial system, a ship, a college, an
athletic team, all exist on this condition, without which not only
is nothing achieved, but nothing is even attempted. A whole train
of passengers (individually brave enough) will be looted by a few
highwaymen, simply because the latter can count on one another, while
each passenger fears that if he makes a movement of resistance, he will
be shot before anyone else backs him up. If we believed that the whole
car-full would rise at once with us, we should each severally rise, and
train robbing would never even be attempted.”
Have you ever, O patient reader, in the heat of a political campaign
for what you thought were better things met with that cool chilling
intelligence that hastens to warn you against trying to change human
nature? As it was in the beginning it is now and ever shall be,
gangs without end. Amen! And he is right, this unduped and undupable
intelligence is right--but on one condition only: The world will always
be as it was at the beginning if it is exclusively inhabited by unduped
and undupable intelligences--by realists, in short. Or, have you ever
tried to refresh your tired soul with what the Germans have written
of Realpolitik? If so, you will already know a great deal of what
pragmatism is _not_. It is not a philosophy of the “what never has been
never can be” temper of mind.
“There are cases,” James puts it, “where a fact cannot come at all
unless a preliminary faith exists in its coming. _And where faith in
a fact can help create the fact_, that would be an insane logic which
would say [with Huxley] that faith running ahead of scientific evidence
is the ‘lowest kind of immorality into which a thinking being may
fall.’...”
I am afraid there is about the pragmatist something of that dangerous
citizen who will not hesitate on occasion to grasp this sorry scheme of
things entire and shatter it to bits, full of the faith that it can be
remoulded closer to the heart’s desire.
* * * * *
“But now,” James returns to his argument, “these are all childish human
cases, and have nothing to do with the great cosmical matters, like the
question of religious faith. Let us then pass on to that....
“To most of us religion comes in a way that makes a veto on our
active faith illogical. The more perfect and more eternal aspect of
the universe is represented in our religions as having a personal
form. The universe is no longer a mere _It_ to us, but a _Thou_, if
we are religious; and any relation that may be possible from person
to person might be possible here. For instance, although in one sense
we are passive portions of the universe, in another we show a curious
autonomy, as if we were small active centers on our own account. We
feel, too, as if the appeal of religion to us were made to our own
active good-will, as if evidence might be forever withheld unless we
met the hypothesis half way. To take a trivial illustration: just as a
man who, in a company of gentlemen made no advances, asked a warrant
for every concession, and believed no one’s word without proof, would
cut himself off by such churlishness from all the social rewards that
a more trusting spirit would earn,--so here, one who should shut
himself up in snarling logicality and try to make the gods extort his
recognition willy-nilly, or not get it at all, might cut himself off
forever from his only opportunity of making the gods’ acquaintance.
This feeling ... that by obstinately believing that there are gods ...
we are doing the universe the deepest service we can, seems part of the
being and essence of the religious hypothesis.”
I do not lay this passage before you as an example of clear thinking
and cogent reasoning. Who does not find it baffling, elusive, leading
to no kind of action, must have a mind differently constituted from
mine or from any with which I am more intimately acquainted. It is,
if you please, the groping of a faith that feels it has a right to
exist, but does not know as yet what is right for it to do. All of
which is most unpragmatic--not at all practical. But perhaps this very
quality, this manner of James’s of feeling his way through the dark _en
tâtonnant_, with his heart’s courage for his only light, is what most
endears him to our age. We sit with Zarathustra midst shattered tables
of the law, and our awkward fingers cannot grave new ones hurriedly. We
fumble, we hesitate, we begin again. We fumble, we hesitate, but we
_do_, if we are idealists, begin again.
Now, one of the new things we have tried is just this manner of meeting
the universe half way in the matter of religious faith. And this trial
has been no interchange of philosophical abstractions; but a struggle
of very living men. To tell about it will perhaps illustrate better
than anything else the appeal pragmatism made to some and the offense
it gave to others.
* * * * *
We have all known, though doubtless our fathers knew him better, that
studious theologian who, as proof of a devout life’s industry, left
behind him a Testament worn to something like its elemental dust. He
was a realist in temperament, and sought God and God’s meaning in
documents as an historian might seek to reconstruct some character
of the past from the archives. He was supplemented in his labors by
learned indefatigable searchers of other remains of the past from
whose ruins they sought to bring corroborative testimony. He was
opposed only by other students who had pored over their Testaments with
equal devotion, if to opposite purpose, and by other archaeologists
who had searched the ruins with equal pains, if with other result.
But protagonist and antagonist alike of the Christianity into which
we were born were realists. Neither dreamt that the existence or
non-existence, the benevolence or cruelty, the oneness or manyness of
God were matters with which his personal wishes and strivings, his
finite wantings and not wantings could have anything to do. If you had
suggested to either that perhaps God was still in the making and that
those who would know Him must strain their eyes toward the future, not
keep them fixed on the past--it is a question which would have been
first to put you down as an impious fellow and a blasphemer.
How different from all this is the spirit of that recent movement
within the Christian church that is generally called Modernism!
“Defined and condemned in the encyclical _Pascendi_,” writes J.
Bourdeau, in 1907, “modernism continues to fill the reviews and the
periodicals, even those that ordinarily treat of matters profane. This
internal crisis of Catholicism, this new attempt to reconcile the
church with the times, aimed at internal reform, not at schism. It was
destined to end in the excommunication or interdiction of some of its
more refractory spirits and in the submission of almost all. And yet,
by those who shared its hopes, modernism is not looked upon as the bed
of a torrent from now on to be dry; it runs like an underground river,
and some day, perhaps, will come to the surface again with sufficient
force to sweep away the dikes.”
Well, this modernism which M. Bourdeau, in his little volume,
“Pragmatisme et Modernisme,” brackets with pragmatism as being of the
same temper, is, like all other modernities, not very new. We associate
it with such names as Father Tyrrel, in England; l’Abbé Loisy, in
France; the senator and novelist Fogazzaro, in Italy, and if the matter
has interested us, with a host of other writers no less distinguished.
But it is really of the essence of Newman, and goes back to Pascal. For
“The heart,” Pascal has said, “has its reasons that the reason does not
understand.” It was to these reasons that Newman listened, and offers
us again in his “Grammar of Assent,” and it is these reasons that
modernism would have to be the only ones on which Christianity can be
safely founded.
But what are they, these reasons, and what does this voice of the
heart say? Its first clear utterance is negative. It does not care
who wrote the various books of the Scriptures, or what corroborative
or contradictory evidence those who study the documents and monuments
of the past may come upon. “Higher critics,” so far from being its
enemies, are welcome participants in its cause. As little does it cling
to the literal sense of the various dogmatic interpretations the
Church has from time to time put upon the sacred writings. Would you
know, for example, whether there is a Real Presence? Modernism would
answer: The Eucharist is indeed meaningless unless there be a Real
Presence; but whether Christ is really there for you or not depends on
you alone. And the like of other dogmas.
Yet it would appear that history, sacred, ecclesiastical, or profane,
is no dead letter to the modernist. He is intensely conscious and
amply studious of the past. Nor will he, if I make him out, permit its
episodes to be treated as symbols, parables and allegories. No, the
past tells the story of a great religious truth in the making. If you
ask him what Christianity is, he will tell you it isn’t, it never has
been, it never will be any definitely finished thing; but for him it
is the best guide to living that he with all his devotion and all his
thought can make it. The modernists are Christians because they are
heirs to, and imbued with the spirit of Christianity, as they are not
inspired of the Buddha or of Confucius. Yes, they are devout Catholics
because they can work better at the making of a religion in the
atmosphere of their ancestral church than in any other air. Religion
to them is to aid in the way best suited to their temperaments and
traditions in the evolution of religion; for them Christianity is in
process, and we are the potters that mould it, not the explorers that
discover it.
Well, J. Bourdeau is not wrong; modernism and pragmatism are indeed
of like temper and children of the same age--an age of troubled
outlook, but of brave if chastened hope. The contrast between the
realistic theologian with his ancient texts, documents, monuments,
and the idealistic theologian who turns to the past not for authority
but for guidance, not for facts but for a sense of tendency and
direction--this contrast is not unlike that other one pragmatism has
brought about between “Natural Religion” and what I may call “Human
Religion.” Natural religion sought in the order of nature evidence of
its designer, of a thoughtful purpose back of or in it, the same spirit
that a naturalist might hunt for the tracks of a mastodon or follow the
wanderings of a glacier. For the humanist, the purpose of nature is a
thing in the making, and we are here to help make it. It will turn out
as our finite efforts form it--good or bad, as we are good or bad; wise
or not, as we are. The practical message of “Human Religion” is pretty
much that with which James closes his little essay, “Is Life Worth
Living?” “Be not afraid of life. Believe that life _is_ worth living
and your belief helps create the fact. The ‘scientific proof’ that you
are right may not be clear before the day of judgment (or some stage
of being which that expression may serve to symbolize) is reached.
But the faithful fighters of this hour, or the beings that then and
there will represent them, may then turn to the faint-hearted who here
decline to go on with words like those with which Henry IV. greeted the
tardy Crillon after a great victory had been gained: ‘Hang yourself,
brave Crillon! we fought at Arques, and you were not there.’”
* * * * *
I have tried to show pragmatism as a moment in the swing of thought
from realism to idealism, and how for it the most vital, that is to
say, the moral and religious aspects of our world are things to work
and fight for, to make and to mould, not just to find and come across.
Its god is indeed a god of battles, and we are his soldiers on whom his
victory depends. But as I view this battle, it is not to be fought out
in heart throes and outpourings of sentiment. These may indeed change
and better human relationships; but it must not be forgotten that human
relationships exist in a physical universe that is older than they,
and promises to outlast them. Now, just the physics of things show a
strong tendency to be amoral and atheistic. “You all know the picture
of the last state of the universe which evolutionary science foresees.
I cannot state it better than in Mr. Balfour’s words: ‘The energies of
our system will decay, the glory of the sun will be dimmed, and the
earth, tideless and inert, will no longer tolerate the race which has
for a moment disturbed its solitude. Man will go down into the pit
and all his thoughts will perish. The uneasy consciousness which in
this obscure corner has for a brief space broken the contented silence
of the universe will be at rest. Matter will know itself no longer.
“Imperishable monuments” and “immortal deeds,” death itself, and love
stronger than death, will be as if they had not been. Nor will anything
that is be better or worse for all that the labor, genius, devotion,
and suffering of man have striven through countless ages to effect.’
“That,” comments James, “is the sting of it, that in the vast drifting
of the cosmic weather, though many a jeweled shore appears, and
many an enchanted cloud-bank floats away, long lingering ere it be
dissolved--even as ours now lingers for our joy--yet, when these
transient products are gone, nothing, absolutely _nothing_ remains to
represent those particular qualities, those elements of preciousness
which they may have enshrined. Dead and gone are they, gone utterly
from the very sphere and room of being. Without an echo; without a
memory; without an influence on aught that they may come after to make
it care for similar ideals.”[14]
Has not, then, realism the last word in this argument and does not the
rolling mechanism of things have its way with us in the end--since it
compasses not only our death, but the collapse of the very theatre in
which our little lives have played themselves out?
No, I should say, this is not the moral of the tale, though there is
a moral to the tale. “Knowledge,” writes Francis Bacon, in his “Novum
Organum,” “knowledge and human power are synonymous.” So are human
impotence and human ignorance synonymous. The child that dips a cup of
water from the fountain is subduing nature’s mechanism to its needs. It
is only a question of how great is our knowledge if we would know how
great is our power.