some other time grow into a systematic account of the varieties of
group minds that history and personal experience reveal to us. For my
world is highly organized--groups within groups and groups within these
in a way one might have learned at the feet of Nicolaus or by gathering
one’s history from Gierke’s “Geschichte des Deutschen Rechts.” But on
this occasion, instead of going into all this literature and all this
philosophy, let me come back to the matter of loyalty’s worth. There
would be no such thing as a demand for loyalty were there no call for
a man to deny his wish for home--whether home be on earth or on high
for him--for the sake of organizing himself into a group; which means,
as we have seen, sacrificing his purpose for the group purpose. Now,
what you think of the value of this sacrifice depends altogether on the
esteem in which you hold group minds. If you can find some principle on
which to estimate their dignity as something worth dying for in part
or altogether, then loyalty may be the last word of virtue. But if
you find that at their very best there is something rather primitive,
sometimes amoeboid, sometimes tigerish about such minds, then you
should seriously consider whether your biped soul owes anything more to
this polypod entity than the entity owes to it. Merging oneself into
something big may not be just the same as reaching for something high.
* * * * *
But I am not belittling loyalty. It is a great virtue so long as it
understands itself to be making a virtue of necessity. Just so is it a
great virtue to acquire equanimity in the face of death, in such wise
that not being able to invent a way of getting around the thing one
may accept it for the time being without disturbing oneself or one’s
friends more than the episode calls for. Still, if I had some genius to
spend, I should rather contribute it to the suppression of dying than
to the cultivation of a cheerful manner in dying. So should I rather
spend my time, if it were worth while, in wearing away the conditions
that make loyalty necessary than in developing a spirit of loyalty.
And so, or I mistake him, would Royce; for I can not get over the
impression that for him, too, loyalty is but a half-way house on the
road to something better--which something better is _love_.
It is with relief I find a definition of love can be effected which
makes no very heavy demands upon one’s sentimental experience; in fact,
requires no more in that way than a fair understanding of the theory of
substitutions. For the peculiar quality Royce finds in the idea of love
is that _love individuates_. This its quality is for him its virtue
also and its excellence, so that the more love individuates the more
is it love. We are far enough from the days when a Plato could hold
the love to be higher that had detached itself from the individual and
attached itself to the quality, had forgotten the beautiful being to
think only of his beauty. For Royce, love is not love unless it has
succeeded in making its object irreplaceable.
Now I do not know whether this constitutes a complete definition of
love. There is something hopeful about the suggestion that it may
do so; for if no one has been able to say anything very articulate
about love, neither has anyone said much that is intelligible about
individuation. But certain difficulties occur to one. Is love the only
thing that individuates? If there is such a thing as Platonic hate,
which I suppose would be the sort of hate that hates the sin and not
the sinner, why should there not be such a thing as a romantic hate
whose object would be just the sinner and not his fault? Or may not
a process of individuation go on, cold and impassible, untouched by
either hate or love?
* * * * *
One day Flaubert took his disciple by the hand and led him into the
secret places of art. The talent of the artist, he said, is a long
patience spent in learning how to portray so that your portrayal leaves
the object it offers just as individual as the thing is found. “When
you pass a grocer sitting at his door, or a concierge smoking his pipe,
or a stand of cabs, show me this grocer and this concierge, their pose,
their physical appearance, suggesting also by the skill of your image
all their moral nature in such wise that I do not confuse them with
any other grocer or with any other concierge. And make me see with
a single stroke in what a certain cab horse is unlike fifty others
following him or going before.”
Why, then, besides love and hate, art too claims to be that
which individuates--and not because, if we may believe a certain
philosophically minded critic, art has borrowed anything of love or
hate. This disciple of Flaubert, this Maupassant, carried out his
master’s teachings if ever an artist did, but there is that in his
way of doing it which makes one feel that Anatole France’s account
of him is not altogether wanting: “He is the great painter of the
human grimace. He paints without hate and without love, without anger
and without pity--hard-fisted peasants, drunken sailors, lost women,
obscure clerks dried up in the air of the office, and all the humble
folk whose humility is without beauty and without merit. All these
grotesques and all these unfortunates he shows us so distinctly that
we think we see them with our own eyes and find them more real than
reality itself. He is a skillful artist who knows he has done all there
is to do when he has given life to things. His indifference is as
indifferent as nature.”
I am not so very confident that all these claimants to the right of
individuating--love, hate, art--are equal claimants. As for hate, some
poverty of experience may account for the fact that all I know of this
romantically valued emotion has sometime been directed against persons
unknown, whose manner of conducting themselves on the earth beneath and
in the waters under the earth showed nothing more clearly than that
they had forgotten the human being and were utterly lost in loyalty. A
hate of such poor quality cannot well be said to individuate, and it is
certainly not any experience of my own that would lead me to suppose
romantic hate, as we have imagined it, to be real. Respecting the
impassibility of the creative artist, I am no less skeptical, and so I
think is France at bottom; for of this same artist whose indifference
is as indifferent as nature, he says in another passage of the same
appreciation that his hardened hero “is ashamed of nothing but his
large native kindliness, careful to hide what is most exquisite in his
soul.”
No, I am not convinced that love has any rivals in the art of
individuating, and if not, then to call it that which individuates
is to define it completely. But whether it is a deduction from this
definition or whether it is an independent element in a fuller
definition of love, it must be set down as an important fact about
it that love wants the will and desire of the beloved to prevail.
It wants the will of another to prevail, and as the easiest and
most obvious way of bringing about this result is to yield its own
will, it has generally been supposed that love was less the art of
individuating than the art of yielding. But this is just the mistake
that has prevented love from taking its place among the more seriously
meant categories of philosophy and realities of life; for this yielding
disposition that might be supposed to make for peace in a republic of
lovers is the very matter introducing trouble and perplexity there.
It is the very matter that has made traditional Christianity less
effective than it might have been, failing where it fails, not because
there is anything better to be conceived than its gospel of love, but
because it has supposed a good heart and convinced will was enough to
bring about its kingdom.
Our two great experiments at loving--the love of man and woman and the
love of one’s neighbor--have been too much alike in this, that they
both supposed love to be the sort of thing one could fall into and be
done with. But it is clear this is not at all the way of the matter,
and in our poor imaginings about the lovers’ republic we have been too
much guided by our imperfect experience of what our loves have been to
think our way into what the love that individuates ought to be. Oh,
yes, our love has yielded; its great vice has been its contentment in
yielding rather than suffer the labor and unrest of that thinking which
alone could have saved its kingdom. In this dear illogical passion
for yielding, we have been content with a division of the spoils; one
is allowed to give this, the other that; one now, the other then; and
so we have patched up our lovers’ quarrel as best we could without
logic. But logic, which is supposed to have nothing to do with love
and has had little enough to do with the old loves of this world, has
everything to do with the love that individuates. For, the moment love
begins to be a mutual affair, neither lover has the right to usurp
the privilege of giving; else what is left for the other lover to do?
Without logic our lovers are doomed to stand bowing to each other
before the door of promise till time grows gray.
However, besides logic there is such a thing as bad logic, which is
perhaps nothing more than a well-meant half-thoughtfulness in presence
of puzzling experience. As a result of this half-thoughtfulness there
has sometimes crept a half-reasonableness into the matter we are
considering, which would begin by suggesting that the various and
contradictory desires of lovers, though equally strong, cannot, save by
improbable chance, be equally high and worth while; that, therefore,
the logical thing to do would be to let the lower ideal recognize the
higher and bow to it, while the higher might somehow forget its longing
to give and content its poor heart with being given to.
There are many difficulties in the way of making such an account of the
affair persuasive, but there are more serious troubles ahead of anyone
who would try to make it meaningful. Chief of these is the hopelessness
of defining high and low in the matter of purposes and ideals. Here,
once more, Royce is quick to analyze the difficulty and remove it;
for, if I read him aright, he sees no way, and no more do I, by which
the value of ultimate objects of desire may be compared. It is easy to
calculate the better means, but how is one to know the better end? Only
this may we do--we may discover that purposes which seem contradictory
are not really so, and that neither need sacrifice itself to the other
if thought be allowed to work its perfect work. No doubt happiness lies
in getting what we want; but this is not the same as getting what we
think we want, as capturing what we go after; for our wants are none
the less hard to make out because they are our own.
This, then, is thought’s infinitely difficult task in the service of
love, to analyze apparent desires until it has found the real want at
the core of appearance, while the postulate on which alone the advent
of the kingdom becomes possible is that thought may find our real wants
not contradictory. The times are not without sign that Christianity as
an ethics is coming to realize how very intellectual is the task it has
set itself in trying to bring the kingdom of Christ’s vision to be on
earth. What Christianity most needs, writes Tennant, is a philosophy.
* * * * *
The brief time we allow ourselves for our utterances ought yet to prove
ample for a person of industry and thrift to make himself thoroughly
misunderstood; and I hope I have used it to no less purpose on this
than on former occasions; but among the misunderstandings I would
prevent, if I could, is that which would sum up the matter of my
discourse as a defense of _individualism_ against _collectivism_. Such
an issue could only be meaningful for one to whom the collectivity was
denied some sort of individuality which the “individual” enjoys. But
I have tried to show that I could conceive no such difference between
the mind of the part and the mind of the group. The group mind may
be loved with the human love that individuates, as well as can the
soul of a fellow-man; and no doubt one may love one’s country as a
mistress. But the difference between the love of equals and the love
of constituents is plain. The latter sort of love can last only so
long as its object endures, and as long as it lasts its sacrifices are
incurable; for in a world that has conquered strife there would no
longer be that contradiction between the will of a group and the will
of its parts, which alone makes the group entity meaningful. Groups
bound in mutual respect of each other and studying to preserve their
parts irreplaceable _have no minds_; the entity born of struggle and
calling for sacrifice has simply disappeared; where we had a group
mind, we have now but an aggregate of minds, “a fluid complex of
relations among individuals.” But the love of equals can push on toward
the ideal without destroying the very object of its devotion; it can go
on searching the core of concord in the stupid appearance of discord
until love has found a way to make loyalty a lost virtue and a group
mind a thing that is no more.
XI
RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT
When I had gathered together the pages in which for a time I had been
living with these men whose thought had been so real a thing to me, who
one by one had said their word and left it to live or die according as
men’s hearts received it, I was as though suddenly and newly aware of
the great modern city without pressing on my window-panes. Little by
little its vast insistent presence seemed to push my whilom companions
out of the room of being back to their places among the many silent
dead. For indeed, I reflected, how few, how vanishingly small a number
of those who are out there will be better, worse or different for
anything these lives had spent themselves to gain and to give.
If such thoughts came to me, as to any one they might, must they not
have come often and often to those of whom I have been telling? and
must not these men have been seized at times with a wistful sense of
the humor of their situation? If so, what gave them courage to keep on
and to endure until the end? Was it that by some fatality they were
bond-slaves to the remote, from whose dominance they could not, even
if they would, have freed themselves? For one may suppose that all men,
even philosophers, are human enough sometimes to crave the response of
their fellows to the effort of their lives; the recognition not merely
of some few initiated ones, but of the many or of those who represent
the many by the simplicity of their thought. Must not many a one whose
labor was with the stars have stopped on his way to envy some singer at
the street-corner whose trivial melody had caught the ear and held the
steps of passers-by? What reasoning then, or what destiny carried our
star-gazer on to his lonely vigil?
You may say, the psychology of the man who thinks of cosmic things is
simple and that his steadfastness is due to his inability to realize or
his ability to forget the homely intimate things of life that to the
rest of us are, if not important, yet all the more indispensable. To
this I answer: ’tis unlikely! But whether true or not of any of those
whose thoughts must seem (if I have not entirely failed to render them)
so much our own, let it not be true of us!
I mean, that no one can think of himself as likely to enrich the world
so greatly by his thought and labor that he may count himself to be or
encourage himself to become a soul solitary to its toil. Which, being
so of our lives as a whole, we frequently feel and wholesomely feel
that it is not very well for us to indulge even moments of these lives
in studies and reflections so detached from all the give and take of
our other time as to leave no trace of influence there.
Perhaps indeed it cannot be said of any of our momentary flights away
from familiar things that we come back from them with no star-dust on
our wings, and so these spirit holidays may be excused as may any other
holiday on the ground of their quickening and refreshment. But little
as I would quarrel with holidays of any kind, and satisfied as I should
be had any one found these pages opening to him a door to some fourth
dimension where momentary exhilaration or passing forgetfulness might
be found, yet I have the feeling that holidays are but a poor imperfect
device for making other days more livable.
In these last reflections, I am sensible that I have been clumsily
feeling my way to the asking of a question. It is this: May we not
bring the experience of the most thoughtful men of the centuries
that have gone before so to bear in our daily living that it will no
longer be noble, because no longer necessary, to scorn delights and
live laborious days (save holidays)? May not these men have been the
prophets of that mediation which will make labor and delight one thing?
May it not be possible for us after their leading so to live and strive
in the moment that more and more of the whole toward which it tends may
be felt in it? And this whole, the while, will it not come so to be
conceived that its real presence in the crumb of bread and drop of wine
may make of our daily partaking a sacrament as bright as it is enduring?
If so, and, as it seems to me, only if so, will these thinkers about
the whole have found that for which they seemed to waste their
being--the response of the man living the moment, which is everyman.
Then will we the studious have brought back from our wanderings with
these “souls of men outworn” something more than ineffable things and
memories of dreams dreamt with them. To men bound for the most part to
live the moment, that moment would not have lost its throbbing intimacy
because it had lost its solitude.
Now of all desirable things, one may feel and in a poor fashion of
words try to tell how desirable they are, without having much hope of
securing them for himself or of being able to offer them to others.
But it cannot be a bad way to begin winning something for oneself at
least by enriching one’s reflection with all the stored experience of
history. And as history is not always easy to gather, it is at least
a generous impulse to tell of what is to be found there a little more
simply and compendiously than others have cared to tell it. Which
done--and the doing of it has that peculiar quality of giving to the
labor of the moment its sense of participation--it is time to look
about one with one’s own eyes.
What under such circumstances the private eye, turning from the past
and peering into the future, thinks it sees there, might well be kept
private for all the authority it can have and for all the interest it
may have for another. Each will have his own vision of the horizon. But
it has never been found that the truth is in the end better made out by
each holding his own counsel as to what he timidly thinks he descries
there. No, out of the confusion of many witnesses comes what little we
have guessed or can hope to guess of truth, and no less of that truth
which, because it deals with the tie that binds the least with the
greatest of things, I venture to call religious.
* * * * *
In these pages, little or no mention has been made of those great
historic religions in whose name temples and cathedrals have been
built, and throngs have been moved to worship and to war. This neglect
has not been due to indifference: it will perhaps have been felt that
these matters were present to the writer as the background against
which the thought of the philosophers had to be portrayed if we were
to gain insight into their motives and meanings. But our study was to
be of those who had given reasons for the faith that was in them, or
it might be for their lack of faith. This, the great swaying mass of
humanity cannot be expected to do, and if the learned and thoughtful
of its various communions have constantly tried to do it for their
fellows, these studious devout minds are led by the very diligence of
their reflection to interpret the formulas of the throng in a way the
throng could not understand. Thus they too become philosophers, and for
the depth and learning of their thought are as interesting as any of
those here presented. It would be hard to find in history a clearer and
more judicious mind than Thomas Aquinas.
But because these theologians are in modern times the exponents of
religious views that are widely spread in some manifest form or other,
we may assume that they are familiar figures in the thoughts of men of
our day and civilization. Wherefore it is of others, churchless and
alone, with nothing but their personal writings to make their views
known, yet religious in the object of their inquiry and in the conduct
of their thought, that I have chosen to speak.
The immense dialectic of the thought of these men has presented so many
aspects of the religious problem that it must have left in the reader a
sense of confusion if not of bewilderment. Such a baffled mood comes on
every thoughtful student, not once, but again and again, as he reviews
the past and tries to estimate the value of its gain; to consider what
has definitely perished with its time, what perhaps marks development
and points somewhither.
Let me then suggest as well as may be done in a few words some things
these men have put behind them and some things to which, with all their
mutual opposition, they seem resultantly to point.
* * * * *
In the first place, their common assumption has been that the way of
arriving at religious truth was by reason or experience, not by what is
commonly called “revelation.” There is nothing new or modern in this
attitude of mind. The earliest critics of popular religion share the
feeling that (as Xenophanes wrote, in the sixth century B.C.):
By no means at the beginning did the gods reveal all things to mortals,
But mortals themselves, by inquiry, in time have made gradual progress.
And even among those who did not mean to be critics, we find some
devoutly maintaining that divine revelation brings naught that reason
and experience cannot confirm; naught, then, they could not have
reached: “Non alia est philosophia, _i.e._, sapientiae studium, et alia
religio,” writes John Scotus in the ninth century. “Quid est aliud de
philosophia tractare nisi verae religionis regulas exponere? Conficitur
inde veram esse philosophiam veram religionem conversimque veram
religionem esse veram philosophiam.” (_De praedest. proem._)
But those who from revelation turn to _reason_ and those who turn to
_experience_ for evidence in all matters, are of two different tempers
of mind and habits of thought. The first we found represented in
Spinoza with his _Ethica ordine geometrico demonstrata_; the second in
Hume with his methods of natural history and human history.
Of these two schools, I think we may regard the first as definitely
closed. That is, to establish the existence of God by logic alone and
as a necessity of thought, would only be dreamed of today by those who
meant by God, by logic, and by thought’s necessity something quite
different from anything the seventeenth century rationalist could have
meant by those terms.
Yet to say that the _method_ of a Spinoza is dead, is not to say that
his contribution to the spiritual problems with which he dealt is
naught. Nothing could be more important to our whole attitude toward
these problems than Spinoza’s insight: The scientific demand that we
treat nature as an inviolable mechanism and the ethical demand that
the human element in nature remain a free agent _are consistent_.
It can readily be seen that all the rest of one’s thoughts about
the world must hang upon one’s acceptance or non-acceptance of this
reconciliation of mechanical necessity and living freedom. (It must not
be supposed, however, that all later thought was agreed that Spinoza
had effected this reconciliation; perhaps the present writer is without
company in thinking that Spinoza’s indications in this sense may be
followed to a clear and satisfactory issue.)
If the method of rationalism has lost meaning for us, do we then abide
in the confidence that experimental science must find all that is to be
found of an object for religion to attach itself to? To my thinking,
no! Or rather, the meaning of experience and with it of empirical
science has been so altered by later reflection that the relation
between human desire and human finding is no longer conceived to be
that austere separation which a Hume, a Clifford or a Huxley made the
basis of intellectual honesty and even of moral honor.