that God is love; that access to the principle is by faith, a personal
attitude; that belief, surpassing logical basis and warrant, works
out through its own operation its own fulfilling evidence: such was
the implied moral metaphysic of Christianity. But this implication
needed to become a theory, a theology, a formulation; and in this
need, it found no recourse save to philosophies that had identified
true existence with the proper object of logical reason. For, in Greek
thought, after the valuable meanings, the meanings of industry and art
that appealed to sustained and serious choice, had given birth and
status to reflective reason, reason denied its ancestry of organized
endeavor, and proclaimed itself in its function of self-conscious
logical thought to be the author and warrant of all genuine things.
Yet how nearly Christianity had found prepared for it the needed means
of its own intellectual statement! We recall Aristotle’s account
of moral knowing, and his definition of man. Man as man, he tells
us, is a principle that may be termed either desiring thought or
thinking desire. Not as pure intelligence does _man_ know, but as an
organization of desires effected through reflection upon their own
conditions and consequences. What if Aristotle had only assimilated
his idea of theoretical to his notion of practical knowledge! Because
practical thinking was so human, Aristotle rejected it in favor of
pure, passionless cognition, something superhuman. Thinking desire is
experimental, is tentative, not absolute. It looks to the future and
to the past for help in the future. It is contingent, not necessary.
It doubly relates to the individual: to the individual thing as
experienced by an individual agent; not to the universal. Hence
desire is a sure sign of defect, of privation, of non-being, and
seeks surcease in something which knows it not. Hence desiring reason
culminating in beliefs relating to imperfect existence, stands forever
in contrast with passionless reason functioning in pure knowledge,
logically complete, of perfect being.
I need not remind you how through Neo-Platonism, St. Augustine, and the
Scholastic renaissance, these conceptions became imbedded in Christian
philosophy; and what a reversal occurred of the original practical
principle of Christianity. Belief is henceforth important because
it is the mere antecedent in a finite and fallen world, a temporal
and phenomenal world infected with non-being, of true knowledge to
be achieved only in a world of completed Being. Desire is but the
self-consciousness of defect striving to its own termination in
perfect possession, through perfect knowledge of perfect being. I
need not remind you that the _prima facie_ subordination of reason to
authority, of knowledge to faith, in the medieval code, is, after all,
but the logical result of the doctrine that man as man (since only
reasoning desire) is merely phenomenal; and has his reality in God, who
as God is the complete union of rational insight and being--the term
of man’s desire, and the fulfilment of his feeble attempts at knowing.
Authority, “faith” as it then had to be conceived, meant just that this
Being comes externally to the aid of man, otherwise hopelessly doomed
to misery in long drawn out error and non-being, and disciplines him
till, in the next world under more favoring auspices, he may have his
desires stilled in good, and his faith may yield to knowledge:--for we
forget that the doctrine of immortality was not an appendage, but an
integral part of the theory that since knowledge is the _true_ function
of man, happiness is attained only in knowledge, which itself exists
only in achievement of perfect Being or God.
For my part, I can but think that medieval absolutism, with its
provision for authoritative supernatural assistance in this world and
assertion of supernatural realization in the next, was more logical,
as well as more humane, than the modern absolutism, that, with the
same logical premises, bids man find adequate consolation and support
in the fact that, after all, his strivings are already eternally
fulfilled, his errors already eternally transcended, his partial
beliefs already eternally comprehended.
The modern age is marked by a refusal to be satisfied with the
postponement of the exercise and function of reason to another and
supernatural sphere, and by a resolve to practise itself upon its
present object, nature, with all the joys thereunto appertaining. The
pure intelligence of Aristotle, thought thinking itself, expresses
itself as free inquiry directed upon the present conditions of its
own most effective exercise. The principle of the inherent relation
of thought to being was preserved intact, but its practical locus was
moved down from the next world to this. Spinoza’s “God or Nature” is
the logical outcome; as is also his strict correlation of the attribute
of matter with the attribute of thought; while his combination of
thorough distrust of passion and faith with complete faith in reason
and all-absorbing passion for knowledge is so classic an embodiment of
the whole modern contradiction that it may awaken admiration where less
thorough-paced formulations call out irritation.
In the practical devotion of present intelligence to its present
object, nature, science was born, and also its philosophical
counterpart, the theory of knowledge. Epistemology only generalized in
its loose, although narrow and technical way, the question practically
urgent in Europe: How is science possible? How can intelligence
actively and directly get at its object?
Meantime, through Protestantism the values, the meanings formerly
characterizing the next life (the opportunity for full perception
of perfect being), were carried over into present-day emotions and
responses.
The dualism between faith authoritatively supported as the principle of
this life, and knowledge supernaturally realized as the principle of
the next, was transmuted into the dualism between intelligence now and
here occupied with natural things, and the affections and accompanying
beliefs, now and here realizing spiritual worths. For a time this
dualism operated as a convenient division of labor. Intelligence, freed
from responsibility for and preoccupation with supernatural truths,
could occupy itself the more fully and efficiently with the world
that now is; while the affections, charged with the values evoked in
the medieval discipline, entered into the present enjoyment of the
delectations previously reserved for the saints. Directness took the
place of systematic intermediation; the present of the future; the
individual’s emotional consciousness of the supernatural institution.
Between science and faith, thus conceived, a bargain was struck.
Hands off; each to his own, was the compact; the natural world to
intelligence, the moral, the spiritual world to belief. This (natural)
world for knowledge; that (supernatural) world for belief. Thus the
antithesis, unexpressed, ignored, _within experience_, between belief
and knowledge, between the purely objective values of thought and the
personal values of passion and volition, was more fundamental, more
determining, than the opposition, explicit and harassing, _within
knowledge_, between subject and object, mind and matter.
This latent antagonism worked out into the open. In scientific detail,
knowledge encroached upon the historic traditions and opinions with
which the moral and religious life had identified itself. It made
history to be as natural, as much its spoil, as physical nature. It
turned itself upon man, and proceeded remorselessly to account for
his emotions, his volitions, his opinions. Knowledge, in its general
theory, as philosophy, went the same way. It was pre-committed to
the old notion: the absolutely real is the object of _knowledge_,
and hence is something universal and impersonal. So, whether by the
road of sensationalism or rationalism, by the path of mechanicalism
or objective idealism, it came about that concrete selves, specific
feeling and willing beings, were relegated with the beliefs in which
they declare themselves to the “phenomenal.”
III
So much for the situation against which some contemporary tendencies
are a deliberate protest.
What of the positive conditions that give us not mere protest, like
the unreasoning revolt of heart against head found at all epochs, but
something articulate and constructive? The field is only too large,
and I shall limit myself to the evolution of the knowledge standpoint
itself. I shall suggest, first, that the progress of intelligence
directed upon natural materials has evolved a procedure of knowledge
that renders untenable the inherited conception of knowledge; and,
secondly, that this result is reinforced by the specific results of
some of the special sciences.
1. First, then, the very use of the knowledge standpoint, the very
expression of the knowledge preoccupation, has produced methods and
tests that, when formulated, intimate a radically different conception
of knowledge, and of its relation to existence and belief, than the
orthodox one.
The one thing that stands out is that thinking is inquiry, and that
knowledge as science is the outcome of systematically directed inquiry.
For a time it was natural enough that inquiry should be interpreted
in the old sense, as just change of subjective attitudes and opinions
to make them square up with a “reality” that is already there in
ready-made, fixed, and finished form. The rationalist had one notion
of the reality, _i.e._, that it was of the nature of laws, genera,
or an ordered system, and so thought of concepts, axioms, etc.,
as the indicated modes of representation. The empiricist, holding
reality to be a lot of little discrete particular lumps, thought of
disjointed sensations as its appropriate counterpart. But both alike
were thorough conformists. If “reality” is already and completely
given, and if knowledge is just submissive acceptance, then, of
course, inquiry is only a subjective change in the human “mind” or in
“consciousness,”--these being subjective and “unreal.”
But the very development of the sciences served to reveal a peculiar
and intolerable paradox. Epistemology, having condemned inquiry once
for all to the region of subjectivity in an invidious sense, finds
itself in flat opposition in principle and in detail to the assumption
and to the results of the sciences. Epistemology is bound to deny to
the results of the special sciences in detail any ulterior objectivity
just because they always _are_ in a process of inquiry--_in_ solution.
While a man may not be halted at being told that his mental activities,
since his, are not genuinely real, many men will draw violently back
at being told that all the discoveries, conclusions, explanations,
and theories of the sciences share the same fate, being the products
of a discredited mind. And, in general, epistemology, in relegating
human thinking as inquiry to a merely phenomenal region, makes concrete
approximation and conformity to objectivity hopeless. Even if it did
square itself up to and by “reality” it never could be sure of it.
The ancient myth of Tantalus and his effort to drink the water before
him seems to be ingeniously prophetic of modern epistemology. The
thirstier, the needier of truth the human mind, and the intenser the
efforts put forth to slake itself in the ocean of being just beyond
the edge of consciousness, the more surely the living waters of truth
recede!
When such self-confessed sterility is joined with consistent derogation
of all the special results of the special sciences, some one is sure to
raise the cry of “dog in the manger,” or of “sour grapes.” A revision
of the theory of thinking, of inquiry, would seem to be inevitable;
a revision which should cease trying to construe knowledge as an
attempted approximation to a reproduction of reality under conditions
that condemn it in advance to failure; a revision which should start
frankly from the fact of thinking as inquiring, and purely external
realities as terms in inquiries, and which should construe validity,
objectivity, truth, and the test and system of truths, on the basis of
what they actually mean and do within inquiry.
Such a standpoint promises ample revenge for the long damnation and
longer neglect to which the principle of belief has been subjected.
The whole procedure of thinking as developed in those extensive and
intensive inquiries that constitute the sciences, is but rendering
into a systematic technique, into an art deliberately and delightfully
pursued, the rougher and cruder means by which practical human beings
have in all ages worked out the implications of their beliefs, tested
them, and endeavored in the interests of economy, efficiency, and
freedom, to render them coherent with one another. Belief, sheer,
direct, unmitigated belief, reappears as the working hypothesis; action
that at once develops and tests belief reappears in experimentation,
deduction, demonstration; while the machinery of universals, axioms,
_a priori_ truths, etc., becomes a systematization of the way in which
men have always worked out, in anticipation of overt action, the
implications of their beliefs, with a view to revising them, in the
interests of obviating unfavorable, and securing welcome consequences.
Observation, with its machinery of sensations, measurements, etc.,
is the resurrection of the way in which agents have always faced and
tried to define the problems that face them; truth is the union of
abstract postulated meanings and of concrete brute facts in a way that
circumvents the latter by judging them from a new standpoint, while it
tests concepts by using them as methods in the same active experience.
It all comes to experience personally conducted and personally
consummated.
Let consciousness of these facts dawn a little more brightly over the
horizon of epistemological prejudices, and it will be seen that nothing
prevents admitting the genuineness both of thinking activities and of
their characteristic results, except the notion that belief itself is
not a genuine ingredient of existence--a notion which itself is not
only a belief, but a belief which, unlike the convictions of the common
man and the hypotheses of science, finds its proud proof in the fact
that it does not demean itself so unworthily as to work.
Once believe that beliefs themselves are as “real” as anything else
can ever be, and we have a world in which uncertainty, doubtfulness,
really inhere; and in which personal attitudes and responses are real
both in their own distinctive existence, and as the only ways in which
an as yet undetermined factor of reality takes on shape, meaning,
value, truth. If “to wilful men the injuries that they themselves
procure, must be their schoolmasters”--and all beliefs are wilful--then
by the same token the propitious evolutions of meaning, which wilful
men secure to an expectant universe, must be their compensation and
their justification. In a doubtful and needy universe elements must be
beggarly, and the development of personal beliefs into experimentally
executed systems of actions, is the organized bureau of philanthropy
which confers upon a travailing universe the meaning for which it cries
out. The apostrophe of the poet is above all to man the thinker, the
inquirer, the knower:
O Dreamer! O Desirer, goer down
Unto untraveled seas in untried ships,
O crusher of the unimagined grape,
On unconceivèd lips.
2. Biology, psychology, and the social sciences proffer an imposing
body of concrete facts that also point to the rehabilitation of
belief--to the interpretation of knowledge as a human and practical
outgrowth of belief, not to belief as the state to which knowledge is
condemned in a merely finite and phenomenal world. I need not, as I
cannot, here summarize the psychological revision which the notions of
sensation, perception, conception, cognition in general have undergone,
all to one intent. “Motor” is writ large on their face. The testimony
of biology is unambiguous to the effect that the organic instruments
of the whole intellectual life, the sense-organs and brain and their
connections, have been developed on a definitely practical basis and
for practical aims, for the purpose of such control over conditions
as will sustain and vary the meanings of life. The historic sciences
are equally explicit in their evidence that knowledge as a system of
information and instruction is a coöperative social achievement, at
all times socially toned, sustained, and directed; and that logical
thinking is a reweaving through individual activity of this social
fabric at such points as are indicated by prevailing needs and aims.
This bulky and coherent body of testimony is not, of course, of itself
philosophy. But it supplies, at all events, facts that have scientific
backing, and that are as worthy of regard as the facts pertinent to any
science. At the present time these facts seem to have some peculiar
claim just because they present traits largely ignored in prior
philosophic formulations, while those belonging to mathematics and
physics have so largely wrought their sweet will on systems. Again, it
would seem as if in philosophies built deliberately upon the knowledge
principle, any body of known facts should not have to clamor for
sympathetic attention.
Such being the case, the reasons for ruling psychology and sociology
and allied sciences out of competency to give philosophic testimony
have more significance than the bare denial of jurisdiction. They are
evidences of the deep-rooted preconception that whatever concerns a
particular conscious agent, a wanting, struggling, satisfied and
dissatisfied being, must of course be only “phenomenal” in import.
This aversion is the more suggestive when the professed idealist
appears as the special champion of the virginity of pure knowledge.
The idealist, so content with the notion that consciousness determines
reality, provided it be done once for all, at a jump and in lump, is
so uneasy in presence of the idea that empirical conscious beings
genuinely determine existences now and here! One is reminded of the
story told, I think, by Spencer. Some committee had organized and
contended, through a long series of parliaments, for the passage of
a measure. At last one of their meetings was interrupted with news
of success. Consternation was the result. What was to become of the
occupation of the committee? So, one asks, what is to become of
idealism at large, of the wholesale unspecifiable determination of
“reality” by or in “consciousness,” if specific conscious beings, John
Smiths, and Susan Smiths (to say nothing of their animal relations),
beings with bowels and brains, are found to exercise influence upon the
character and existence of reals?
One would be almost justified in construing idealism as a Pickwickian
scheme, so willing is it to idealize the principle of intelligence
at the expense of its specific undertakings, were it not that this
reluctance is the necessary outcome of the Stoic basis and tenor of
idealism--its preoccupation with logical contents and relations in
abstraction from their _situs_ and function in conscious living beings.
IV
I have suggested to you the naïve conception of the relation of beliefs
to realities: that beliefs are themselves real without discount,
manifesting their reality in the usual proper way, namely, by modifying
and shaping the reality of other things, so that they connect the bias,
the preferences and affections, the needs and endeavors of personal
lives with the values, the characters ascribed to things:--the latter
thus becoming worthy of human acquaintance and responsive to human
intercourse. This was followed by a sketch of the history of thought,
indicating how beliefs and all they insinuate were subjected to
preconceived notions of knowledge and of “reality” as a monopolistic
possession of pure intellect. Then I traced some of the _motifs_ that
make for reconsideration of the supposed uniquely exclusive relation
of logical knowledge and “reality”; _motifs_ that make for a less
invidiously superior attitude towards the convictions of the common man.
In concluding, I want to say a word or two to mitigate--for escape is
impossible--some misunderstandings. And, to begin with, while possible
doubts inevitably troop with actual beliefs, the doctrine in question
is not particularly sceptical. The radical empiricist, the humanist,
the pragmatist, label him as you will, believes not in fewer but in
more “realities” than the orthodox philosophers warrant. He is not
concerned, for example, in discrediting objective realities and logical
or universal thinking; he is interested in such a reinterpretation of
the sort of “reality” which these things possess as will accredit,
without depreciation, concrete empirical conscious centers of action
and passion.
My second remark is to the opposite effect. The intent is not
especially credulous, although it starts from and ends with the radical
credulity of all knowledge. To suppose that because the sciences are
ultimately instrumental to human beliefs, we are therefore to be
careless of the most exact possible use of extensive and systematic
scientific methods, is like supposing that because a watch is made to
tell present time, and not to be an exemplar of transcendent, absolute
time, watches might as well be made of cheap stuffs, casually wrought
and clumsily put together. It is the task of telling present time, with
all its urgent implications, that brings home, steadies, and enlarges
the responsibility for the best possible use of intelligence, the
instrument.
For one, I have no interest in the old, old scheme of derogating from
the worth of knowledge in order to give an uncontrolled field for some
_special_ beliefs to run riot in,--be these beliefs even faith in
immortality, in some special sort of a Deity, or in some particular
brand of freedom. Any one of our beliefs is subject to criticism,
revision, and even ultimate elimination through the development of its
own implications by intelligently directed action. Because reason is
a scheme of working out the meanings of convictions in terms of one
another and of the consequences they import in further experience,
convictions are the more, not the less, amenable and responsible to the
full exercise of reason.[29]
Thus we are put on the road to that most desirable thing,--the union
of acknowledgment of moral powers and demands with thoroughgoing
naturalism. No one really wants to lame man’s practical nature; it is
the supposed exigencies of natural science that force the hand. No one
really bears a grudge against naturalism for the sake of obscurantism.
It is the need of some sacred reservation for moral interests that
coerces. We all want to be as naturalistic as we can be. But the “can
be” is the rub. If we set out with a fixed dualism of belief and
knowledge, then the uneasy fear that the natural sciences are going
to encroach and destroy “spiritual values” haunts us. So we build
them a citadel and fortify it; that is, we isolate, professionalize,
and thereby weaken beliefs. But if beliefs are the most natural, and
in that sense, the most metaphysical of all things, and if knowledge
is an organized technique for working out their implications and
interrelations, for directing their formation and employ, how
unnecessary, how petty the fear and the caution. Because freedom of
belief is ours, free thought may exercise itself; the freer the thought
the more sure the emancipation of belief. Hug some special belief and
one fears knowledge; believe in belief and one loves and cleaves to
knowledge.
We have here, too, the possibility of a common understanding, in
thought, in language, in outlook, of the philosopher and the common
man. What would not the philosopher give, did he not have to part
with some of his common humanity in order to join a class? Does he
not always, when challenged, justify himself with the contention that
all men naturally philosophize, and that he but does in a conscious
and orderly way what leads to harm when done in an indiscriminate
and irregular way? If philosophy be at once a natural history _and_
a logic--an art--of beliefs, then its technical justification is at
one with its human justification. The natural attitude of man, said
Emerson, is believing; “the philosopher, after some struggle, having
only reasons for believing.” Let the struggle then enlighten and
enlarge beliefs; let the reasons kindle and engender new beliefs.
Finally, it is not a solution, but a problem which is presented. As
philosophers, our disagreements as to conclusions are trivial compared
with our disagreement as to problems. To see the problem another
sees, in the same perspective and at the same angle--that amounts to
something. Agreement in solutions is in comparison perfunctory. To
experience the same problem another feels--that perhaps is agreement.
In a world where distinctions are as invidious as comparisons are
odious, and where intellect works only by comparison and distinction,
pray what is one to do?
But beliefs are personal matters, and the person, we may still
believe, is social. To be a man is to be thinking desire; and the
agreement of desires is not in oneness of intellectual conclusion,
but in the sympathies of passion and the concords of action:--and yet
significant union in affection and behavior may depend upon a consensus
in thought that is secured only by discrimination and comparison.
EXPERIENCE AND OBJECTIVE IDEALISM[30]
I