and that consciousness--or, if you will, experience--is itself a
culmination and climax of Nature, is not a new view. Formulated by
Aristotle, it has always persisted wherever the traditions of sound
thinking have not been obscured by romanticism. The modern scientific
doctrine of evolution confirms and specifies the metaphysical insight
of Aristotle. This doctrine sets forth in detail, and in verified
detail, as a genuine characteristic of existence, the tendency toward
cumulative results, the definite trend of things toward culmination and
achievement. It describes the universe as possessing, in terms of and
by right of its own subject-matter (not as an addition of subsequent
reflection), differences of value and importance--differences,
moreover, that exercise selective influence upon the course of things,
that is to say, genuinely determine the events that occur. It tells us
that consciousness itself is such a cumulative and culminating natural
event. Hence it is relevant to the world in which it dwells, and its
determinations of value are not arbitrary, not _obiter dicta_, but
descriptions of Nature herself.
Recall the words of Spencer which Moore quoted this morning: “There is
no pleasure in the consciousness of being an infinitesimal bubble on
a globe that is infinitesimal compared with the totality of things.
Those on whom the unpitying rush of changes inflicts sufferings which
are often without remedy, find no consolation in the thought that
they are at the mercy of blind forces,--which cause indifferently
now the destruction of a sun and now the death of an animalcule.
Contemplation of a universe which is without conceivable beginning or
end and without intelligible purpose, yields no satisfaction.” I am
naïve enough to believe that the only question is whether the object
of our “consciousness,” of our “thought,” of our “contemplation,”
is or is not as the quotation states it to be. If the statement be
correct, pragmatism, like subjectivism (of which I suspect it is
only a variation, putting emphasis upon will instead of idea), is an
invitation to close our eyes to what is, in order to encourage the
delusion that things are other than they are. But the case is not so
desperate. Speaking dogmatically, the account given of the universe
is just--not true. And the doctrine of evolution of which Spencer
professedly made so much is the evidence. A universe describable in
evolutionary terms is a universe which shows, not indeed design, but
tendency and purpose; which exhibits achievement, not indeed of a
single end, but of a multiplicity of natural goods at whose apex is
consciousness. No account of the universe in terms _merely_ of the
redistribution of matter in motion is complete, no matter how true as
far as it goes, for it ignores the cardinal fact that the character
of matter in motion and of its redistribution is such as cumulatively
to achieve ends--to effect the world of values we know. Deny this
and you deny evolution; admit it and you admit purpose in the only
objective--that is, the only intelligible--sense of that term. I do not
say that in addition to the mechanism there are other ideal causes or
factors which intervene. I only insist that the whole story be told,
that the character of the mechanism be noted--namely, that it is such
as to produce and sustain good in a multiplicity of forms. Mechanism is
the mechanism of achieving results. To ignore this is to refuse to open
our eyes to the total aspects of existence.
Among these multiple natural goods, I repeat, is consciousness itself.
One of the ends in which Nature genuinely terminates is just awareness
of itself--of its processes and ends. For note the implication as to
why consciousness is a natural good: not because it is cut off and
exists in isolation, nor yet because we may, pragmatically, cut off and
cultivate certain values which have no existence beyond it; but because
it _is_ good that things should be known in their own characters. And
this view carries with it a precious result: to know things as they are
is to know them as culminating in consciousness; it is to know that the
universe genuinely achieves and maintains its own self-manifestation.
A final word as to the bearing of this view upon Grimes’s position.
To conceive of human history as a scene of struggle of classes for
domination, a struggle caused by love of power or greed for gain,
is the very mythology of the emotions. What we call history is
largely non-human, but so far as it is human, it is dominated by
intelligence: history is the history of increasing consciousness. Not
that intelligence is actually sovereign in life, but that at least it
is sovereign over stupidity, error, and ignorance. The acknowledgment
of things as they are--that is the causal source of every step in
progress. Our present system of industry is not the product of greed
or tyrannic lust of power, but of physical science giving the mastery
over the mechanism of Nature’s energy. If the existing system is ever
displaced, it will be displaced not by good intentions and vague
sentiments, but by a more extensive insight into Nature’s secrets.
Modern sentimentalism is revolted at the frank naturalism of Aristotle
in saying that some are slaves by nature and others free by nature.
But let socialism come to-morrow and somebody--not anybody, but
_some_body--will be managing its machinery and somebody else will be
managed by the machinery. I do not wonder that my socialistic friends
always imagine themselves active in the first capacity--perhaps by
way of compensation for doing all of the imagining and none of the
executive management at present. But those who are managed, who are
controlled, deserve at least a moment’s attention. Would you not at
once agree that if there is any justice at all in these positions of
relative inferiority and superiority, it is because those who are
capable by insight deserve to rule, and those who are incapable on
account of ignorance, deserve to be ruled? If so, how do you differ,
save verbally, from Aristotle?
Or do you think that all that men want in order to _be_ men is to have
their bellies filled, with assurance of constant plenty and without too
much antecedent labor? No; believe me, Grimes, men _are_ men, and hence
their aspiration is for the divine--even when they know it not; their
desire is for the ruling element, for intelligence. Till they achieve
that they will still be discontented, rebellious, unruly--and hence
ruled--shuffle your social cards as much as you may.
_Grimes_ (after shrugging his shoulders contemptuously, finally says):
There is one thing I like about Arthur: he is frank. He comes out
with what you in all your hearts really believe--theory, supreme and
sublime. All is to the good in this best of all possible worlds, if
only some one be defining and classifying and syllogizing, according to
the lines already laid down. Aristotle’s God of pure intelligence (as
_he_ well knew) was the glorification of leisure; and Arthur’s point of
view, if Arthur but knew it, is as much the intellectual snobbery of a
leisure class economy, as the luxury and display he condemns are its
material snobbery. There is really nothing more to be said.
_Moore._ To get back into the game which Grimes despises. Doesn’t
Arthur practically say that the universe is good because it culminates
in intelligence, and that intelligence is good because it perceives
that the universe culminates in--itself? And, on this theory, are
ignorance and error, and consequent evil, any less genuine achievements
of Nature than intelligence and good? And on what basis does he
call by the titles of achievement and end that which at best is an
infinitesimally fragmentary and transitory episode? I said Eaton
begged the question. Arthur seems to regard it as proof of a superior
intelligence (one which realistically takes things as they are) to beg
the question. What is this Nature, this universe in which evil is as
stubborn a fact as good, in which good is constantly destroyed by the
very power that produces it, in which there resides a temporary bird of
passage--consciousness doomed to ultimate extinction--what is such a
Nature (all that Arthur offers us) save the problem, the contradiction
originally in question? A complacent optimism may gloss over its
intrinsic self-contradictions, but a more serious mind is forced to go
behind and beyond this scene to a permanent good which includes and
transcends goods defeated and hopes suborned. Not because idealists
have refused to note the facts as they are, but precisely because
Nature is, on its face, such a scene as Arthur describes, idealists
have always held that it is but Appearance, and have attempted to mount
through it to Reality.
_Stair._ I had not thought to say anything. My attitude is so different
from that of any one of you that it seemed unnecessary to inject
another varying opinion where already disagreement reigns. But when
Arthur was speaking, I felt that perhaps this disagreement exists
precisely because the solvent word had not been uttered. For, at
bottom, all of you agree with Arthur, and that is the cause of your
disagreement with him and one another. You have agreed to make reason,
intellect in some sense, the final umpire. But reason, intellect, is
the principle of analysis, of division, of discord. When I appeal
to feeling as the ultimate organ of unity, and hence of truth, you
smile courteously; say--or think--mysticism; and the case for you is
dismissed. Words like feeling, sensation, immediate appreciation,
self-communication of Being, I must indeed use when I try to tell
the truth I see. But I well know how inadequate the words are. And
why? Because language is the chosen tool of intelligence, and hence
inevitably bewrayeth the truth it would convey. But remember that words
are but symbols, and that intelligence must dwell in the realm of
symbols, and you realize a way out. These words, sensation, feeling,
etc., as I utter them are but invitations to woo you to put yourselves
into the one attitude that reveals truth--an attitude of direct vision.
The beatific vision? Yes, and No. No, if you mean something rare,
extreme, almost abnormal. Yes, if you mean the commonest and most
convincing, the _only_ convincing self-impartation of the ultimate
good in the scale of goods; the vision of blessedness in God. For
this doctrine is empirical; mysticism is the heart of all positive
empiricism, of all empiricism which is not more interested in denying
rationalism than in asserting itself. The mystical experience marks
every man’s realization of the supremacy of good, and hence measures
the distance that separates him from pure materialism. And since the
unmitigated materialist is the rarest of creatures, and the man with
faith in an unseen good the commonest, every man is a mystic--and the
most so in his best moments.
What an idle contradiction that Moore and Arthur should try to
adduce proofs of the supremacy of ideal values in the universe! The
sole possible proof is the proof that actually exists--the direct
unhindered realization of those values. For each value brings with it
of necessity its own depth of being. Let the pride of intellect and
the pride of will cease their clamor, and in the silences Being speaks
its own final word, not an argument or external ground of belief, but
the self-impartation of itself to the soul. Who are the prophets and
teachers of the ages? Those who have been accessible at the greatest
depths to these communications.
_Grimes._ I suppose that poverty--and possibly disease--are specially
competent ministers to the spiritual vision? The moral is obvious.
Economic changes are purely irrelevant, because purely material and
external. Indeed, upon the whole, efforts at reform are undesirable,
for they distract attention from the fact that the final thing, the
vision of good, is totally disconnected from external circumstance.
I do not say, Stair, you personally believe this; but is not such a
quietism the logical conclusion of all mysticism?
_Stair._ This is not so true as to say that in your efforts at reform
you are really inspired by the divine vision of justice; and that this
mystic vision and not the mere increase of quantity of eatables and
drinkables is your animating motive.
_Grimes_. Well, to my mind this whole affair of mystical values and
experiences comes down to a simple straight-away proposition. The
submerged masses do not occupy themselves with such questions as those
you are discussing. They haven’t the time even to consider whether
they want to consider them. Nor does the occasional free citizen
who even now exists--a sporadic reminder and prophecy of ultimate
democracy--bother himself about the relation of the cosmos to value.
Why? Not from mystic insight any more than from metaphysical proof;
but because he has so many other interests that are worth while.
His friends, his vocation and avocations, his books, his music, his
club--these things engage him and they reward him. To multiply such
men with such interests--that is the genuine problem, I repeat; and
it is a problem to be solved only through an economic and material
redistribution.
_Eaton_. Gladly, Stair, do all of us absolve ourselves from the
responsibility of having to create the goods that life--call it God
or Nature or Chance--provides. But we cannot, if we would, absolve
ourselves from responsibility for maintaining and extending these
goods when they have happened. To find it very wonderful--as Arthur
does--that intelligence perceives values as they are is trivial, for
it is only an elaborate way of saying that they have happened. To
invite us, ceasing struggle and effort, to commune with Being through
the moments of insight and joy that life provides, is to bid us to
self-indulgence--to enjoyment at the expense of those upon whom the
burden of conducting life’s affairs falls. For even the mystics still
need to eat and drink, be clothed and housed, and somebody must do
these unmystic things. And to ignore others in the interest of our own
perfection is not conducive to genuine unity of Being.
Intelligence is, indeed, as you say, discrimination, distinction.
But why? Because we have to _act_ in order to keep secure amid the
moving flux of circumstance, some slight but precious good that Nature
has bestowed; and because, in order to act successfully, we must act
after conscious selection--after discrimination of means and ends.
Of course, all goods arrive, as Arthur says, as natural results, but
so do all bads, and all grades of good and bad. To label the results
that occur culminations, achievements, and then argue to a quasi-moral
constitution of Nature because she effects such results, is to employ
a logic which applies to the life-cycle of the germ that, in achieving
itself, kills man with malaria, as well as to the process of human
life that in reaching its fullness cuts short the germ-fulfilment. It
is putting the cart before the horse to say that because Nature is
so constituted as to produce results of all types of value, therefore
Nature is actuated by regard for differences of value, Nature, till it
produces a being who strives and who thinks in order that he may strive
more effectively, does not know whether it cares more for justice
or for cruelty, more for the ravenous wolf-like competition of the
struggle for existence, or for the improvements incidentally introduced
through that struggle. Literally it has no mind of its own. Nor would
the mere introduction of a consciousness that pictured indifferently
the scene out of which consciousness developed, add one iota of reason
for attributing eulogistically to Nature regard for value. But when the
sentient organism, having experienced natural values, good and bad,
begins to select, to prefer, and to make battle for its preference; and
in order that it may make the most gallant fight possible picks out
and gathers together in perception and thought what is favorable to
its aims and what hostile, then and there Nature has at last achieved
significant regard for good. And this is the same thing as the birth
of intelligence. For the holding an end in view and the selecting
and organizing out of the natural flux, on the basis of this end,
conditions that are means, _is_ intelligence. Not, then, when Nature
produces health or efficiency or complexity does Nature exhibit regard
for value, but only when it produces a living organism that has settled
preferences and endeavors. The mere happening of complexity, health,
adjustment, is all that Nature effects, as rightly called accident as
purpose. But when Nature produces an intelligence--ah, then, indeed
Nature has achieved something. Not, however, because this intelligence
impartially pictures the nature which has produced it, but because
in human consciousness Nature becomes genuinely partial. Because in
consciousness an end is preferred, is selected for maintenance, and
because intelligence pictures not a world just as it is _in toto_,
but images forth the conditions and obstacles of the continued
maintenance of the selected good. For in an experience where values
are demonstrably precarious, an intelligence that is not a principle
of emphasis and valuation (an intelligence which defines, describes,
and classifies merely for the sake of knowledge,) is a principle of
stupidity and catastrophe.
As for Grimes, it is indeed true that problems are solved only where
they arise--namely, in action, in the adjustments of behavior. But,
for good or for evil, they can be solved there only with method; and
ultimately method is intelligence, and intelligence is method. The
larger, the more human, the less technical the problem of practice,
the more open-eyed and wide-viewing must be the corresponding method.
I do not say that all things that have been called philosophy
participate in this method; I do say, however, that a catholic and
far-sighted theory of the adjustment of the conflicting factors of
life _is_--whatever it be called--philosophy. And unless technical
philosophy is to go the way of dogmatic theology, it must loyally
identify itself with such a view of its own aim and destiny.
INTELLIGENCE AND MORALS[6]
“Except the blind forces of nature,” said Sir Henry Maine, “nothing
moves in this world which is not Greek in its origin.” And if we ask
why this is so, the response comes that the Greek discovered the
business of man to be pursuit of good, and intelligence to be central
in this quest. The utmost to be said in praise of Plato and Aristotle
is not that they invented excellent moral theories, but that they rose
to the opportunity which the spectacle of Greek life afforded. For
Athens presented an all but complete microcosm for the study of the
interaction of social organization and individual character. A public
life of rich diversity in concentrated and intense splendor trained
the civic sense. Strife of faction and the rapid oscillations of types
of polity provided the occasion for intellectual inquiry and analysis.
The careers of dramatic personalities, habits of discussion, ease of
legislative change, facilities for personal ambitions, distraction by
personal rivalries, fixed attention upon the elements of character,
and upon consideration of the effect of individual character on
social vitality and stability. Happy exemption from ecclesiastic
preoccupations, susceptibility to natural harmony, and natural piety
conspired with frank and open observation to acknowledgment of the rôle
played by natural conditions. Social instability and shock made equally
pertinent and obvious the remark that only intelligence can confirm
the values that natural conditions generate, and that intelligence is
itself nurtured and matured only in a free and stable society.
In Plato the resultant analysis of the mutual implications of the
individual, the social and the natural, converged in the ideas that
morals and philosophy are one: namely, a love of that wisdom which
is the source of secure and social good; that mathematics and the
natural sciences focused upon the problem of the perception of the good
furnish the materials of moral science; that logic is the method of the
pregnant organization of social conditions with respect to good; that
politics and psychology are sciences of one and the same human nature,
taken first in the large and then in the little. So far that large and
expansive vision of Plato.
But projection of a better life must be based upon reflection of the
life already lived. The inevitable limitations of the Greek city-state
were inevitably wrought into the texture of moral theory.
The business of thought was to furnish a substitute for customs which
were then relaxing from the pressure of contact and intercourse without
and the friction of strife within. Reason was to take the place of
custom as a guide of life; but it was to furnish rules as final, as
unalterable as those of custom. In short, the thinkers were fascinated
by the afterglow of custom. They took for their own ideal the
distillation from custom of its essence--ends and laws which should be
rigid and invariable. Thus Morals was set upon the track which it dared
not leave for nigh twenty-five hundred years: search for _the_ final
good, and for _the_ single moral force.
Aristotle’s assertions that the state exists by nature, and that in the
state alone does the individual achieve independence and completeness
of life, are indeed pregnant sayings. But as uttered by Aristotle they
meant that, in an isolated state, the Greek city-state, set a garlanded
island in the waste sea of _barbaroi_, a community indifferent when not
hostile to all other social groupings, individuals attain their full
end. In a social unity which signified social contraction, contempt,
and antagonism, in a social order which despised intercourse and
glorified war, is realized the life of excellence!
There is likewise a profound saying of Aristotle’s that the individual
who otherwise than by accident is not a member of a state is either a
brute or a god. But it is generally forgotten that elsewhere Aristotle
identified the highest excellence, the chief virtue, with pure thought,
and identifying this with the divine, isolated it in lonely grandeur
from the life of society. That man, so far as in him lay, should be
godlike, meant that he should be non-social, because supra-civic.
Plato the idealist had shared the belief that reason is the divine;
but he was also a reformer and a radical and he would have those who
attained rational insight descend again into the civic cave, and in
its obscurity labor patiently for the enlightenment of its blear-eyed
inhabitants. Aristotle, the conservative and the definer of what is,
gloried in the exaltation of intelligence in man above civic excellence
and social need; and thereby isolated the life of truest knowledge
from contact with social experience and from responsibility for
discrimination of values in the course of life.