IV

It is the purity of the value-forms imagined in philosophy that makes

philosophy "normative." The arts, which it judges, have an identical

origin and an indistinguishable intent, but they are properly its

subordinates because they have not its purity. They, too, aim at

remodeling discordant nature into harmony with human nature. They, too,

are dominated by value-forms which shall satisfy as nearly as possible

all interests, shall liberate and fulfil all repressions, and shall

supply to our lives that unity, eternity, spirituality, and freedom

which are the exfoliations of our central desire--the desire to live.

But where philosophy has merely negated the concrete stuff of experience

and defined its reality in terms of desire alone, the arts acknowledge

the reality of immediate experience, accept it as it comes, eliminating,

adding, molding, until the values desiderated become existent in the

concrete immediacies of experience as such. Art does not substitute

values for existence by changing their roles and calling one appearance

and the other reality: art converts values into existences, it realizes

values, injecting them into nature as far as may be. It creates truth

and beauty and goodness. But it does not claim for its results greater

reality than nature's. It claims for its results greater immediate

harmony with human interests than nature. The propitious reality of the

philosopher is the unseen: the harmonious reality of the artist must be

sensible. Philosophy says that apparent actual evil is merely apparent:

art compels potential apparent good actually to appear. Philosophy

realizes fundamental values transcendentally beyond experience: art

realizes them within experience. Thus, men cherish no illusions

concerning the contents of a novel, a picture, a play, a musical

composition. They are taken for what they are, and are enjoyed for what

they are. The shopgirl, organizing her life on the basis of eight

dollars a week, wears flimsy for broadcloth and the tail feather of a

rooster for an ostrich plume. She is as capable of wearing and enjoying

broadcloth and ostrich plume as My Lady, whose income is eight dollars

a minute. But she has not them, and in all likelihood, without a social

revolution she never will have them. In the novels of Mr. Robert

Chambers, however, or of Miss Jean Libbey, which she religiously reads

in the street-car on her way to the shop; in the motion picture theater

which she visits for ten cents after her supper of corned beef, cabbage,

and cream puffs, she comes into possession of them forthwith,

vicariously, and of all My Lady's proper perquisites--the Prince

Charming, the motor-car, the Chinese pug, the flowers, and the costly

bonbons. For the time being her life is liberated, new avenues of

experience are actually opened to her, all sorts of unsatisfied desires

are satisfied, all sorts of potentialities realized. All that she might

have been and is not, she becomes through art, here and now, and

_continuously with_ the drab workaday life which is her lot, and she

becomes this without any compensatory derealization of that life,

without any transcendentalism, without any loss of grip on the

necessities of her experience: strengthened, on the contrary, and

emboldened, to meet them as they are.

I might multiply examples: for every object of fine art has the same

intention, and if adequate, accomplishes the same end--from the

sculptures of Phidias and the dramas of Euripides, to the sky-scrapers

of Sullivan and the dances of Pavlowa. But there is need only to

consider the multitude of abstract descriptions of the aesthetic

encounter. The artist's business is to create the other object in the

encounter, and this object, in Miss Puffer's words, which are completely

representative and typical, is such that "the organism is in a

condition of repose and of the highest possible tone, functional

efficiency, enhanced life. The personality is brought into a state of

unity and self-completeness." The object, when apprehended, awakens the

active functioning of the whole organism directly and harmoniously with

itself, cuts it off from the surrounding world, shuts that world out for

the time being, and forms a complete, harmonious, and self-sufficient

system, peculiar and unique in the fact that there is no passing from

this deed into further adaptation with the object. Struggle and aliency

are at end, and whatever activity now goes on feels self-conserving,

spontaneous, free. The need of readjustment has disappeared, and with it

the feeling of strain, obstruction, and resistance, which is its sign.

There is nothing but the object, and that is possessed completely,

satisfying, and as if forever. Art, in a word, supplies an environment

from which strife, foreignness, obstruction, and death are eliminated.

It actualizes unity, spirituality, and eternity in the environment; it

frees and enhances the life of the self. To the environment which art

successfully creates, the mind finds itself completely and harmoniously

adapted by the initial act of perception.

In the world of art, value and existence are one.

V

If art may be said to create values, religion has been said to conserve

them. But the values conserved are not those created: they are the

values postulated by philosophy as metaphysical reality. Whereas,

however, philosophy substitutes these values for the world of

experience, religion makes them continuous with the world of experience.

For religion value and existence are on the same level, but value is

more potent and environs existence, directing it for its own ends. The

unique content of religion, hence, is a specific imaginative extension

of the environment with value-forms: the visible world is extended at

either end by heaven and hell; the world of minds, by God, Satan,

angels, demons, saints, and so on. But where philosophy imaginatively

abolishes existence in behalf of value, where art realizes value in

existence, religion tends to control and to escape the environment which

exists by means of the environment which is postulated. The aim of

religion is salvation from sin. Salvation is the escape from experience

to heaven and the bosom of God; while hell is the compensatory

readjustment of inner quality to outer condition for the alien and the

enemy, without the knowledge of whose existence life in heaven could not

be complete.

In religion, hence, the conversion of the repressed array of interests

into ideal value-forms is less radical and abstract than in philosophy,

and less checked by fusion with existence than in art. Religion is,

therefore, at one and the same time more carnal and less reasonable than

philosophy and art. Its history and protagonists exhibit a closer

kinship to what is called insanity[93]--that being, in essence, the

substitution in actual life of the creatures of the imagination which

satisfy repressed needs for those of reality which repress them. It is

a somnambulism which intensifies rather than abolishes the contrast

between what is desired and what must be accepted. It offers itself

ultimately rather as a refuge from reality than a control of it, and its

development as an institution has turned on the creation and use of

devices to make this escape feasible. For religion, therefore, the

perception that the actual world, whatever its history, is now _not_

adapted to human nature, is the true point of departure. Thus religion

takes more account of experience than compensatory philosophy; it does

not de-realize existent evil. The outer conflict between human nature

and nature, primitively articulated in consciousness and conduct by the

distress engendered through the fact that the food supply depends upon

the march of the seasons,[94] becomes later assimilated to the inner

conflict between opposing interests, wishes, and desires. Finally, the

whole so constituted gets expressed in the idea of sin. That idea makes

outward prosperity dependent upon inward purity, although it often

transfers the locus of the prosperity to another world. Through its

operation fortune becomes a function of conscience and the one desire of

religious thinking and religious practice becomes to bring the two to a

happy outcome, to abolish the conflicts. This desiderated abolition is

salvation. It is expressed in the ideas of a fall, or a separation from

heaven and reunion therewith. The machinery of this reunion of the

divided, the reconversion of the differentiated into the same, consists

of the furniture of religious symbols and ceremonials--myths, baptisms,

sacraments, prayers, and sacrifices: and all these are at the same time

instruments and expressions of desires. God is literally "the

conservation of values."[95] "God's life in eternity," writes Aristotle,

who here dominates the earlier tradition, "is that which we enjoy in our

best moments, but are unable to possess permanently: its very being is

delight. And as actual being is delight, so the various functions of

waking, perceiving, thinking, are to us the pleasantest parts of our

life. Perfect and absolute thought is just this absolute vision of

perfection."[96]

Even the least somnambulistic of the transcendental philosophies has

repeated, not improved upon Aristotle. "The highest conceptions that I

get from experience of what goodness and beauty are," Royce declares,

"the noblest life that I can imagine, the completest blessedness that I

can think, all these are but faint suggestions of a truth that is

infinitely realized in the Divine, that knows all truth. Whatever

perfection there is suggested in these things, that he must fully know

and experience."

But this aesthetic excellence, this maximum of ideality is in and by

itself inadequate. God, to be God, must _work_. He is first of all the

invisible socius, the ever-living witness, in whose eyes the

disharmonies and injustices of this life are enregistered, and who in

the life everlasting redresses the balances and adjusts the account.

Even his grace is not unconditional; it requires a return, in deed or

faith; a payment by which the fact of his salvation is made visible. But

this payment is made identical by the great religions of disillusion

with nothing other than the concrete condition from which the faithful

are to be saved. If the self is not impoverished, unkempt, and hungry,

in fact, it is made so. Cleanliness may be next to godliness, but

self-defilement is godliness; sainthood, if we are to trust the lives of

saints, whether in Asia or in Europe, is coincident with insanitation;

saintly virtues are depressed virtues,--humility, hope, meekness, pity;

and such conditions of life which define the holy ones are

unwholesome--poverty, asceticism, squalor, filth. Hence, by an ironic

inversion, religions of disillusion, being other-worldly, identify

escape from an actual unpropitious environment with submergence in it;

that being the visible and indispensable sign of an operative grace. So

the beatitudes: the blessed are the poor, the mourners, the meek.

Beginning as a correction of the evils of existence, religion ends by

offering an infallible avenue of escape from them through postulating a

desiderated type of existence which operates to gather the spirit to

itself. For this reason the value-forms of the spirituality or spiritual

control of the universe and of the immortality of the soul have been

very largely the practical concern of religion alone, since these are

the instruments indispensable to the attainment of salvation. In so far

forth religion has been an art and its institutional association with

the arts has been made one of its conspicuous justifications. So far,

however, as it has declared values to be operative without making them

actually existent it has been only a black art, a magic. It has ignored

the actual causes in the nature and history of things, and has

substituted for them non-existent desirable causes, ultimately reducible

to a single, eternal, beneficent spirit, omnipotent and free. To convert

these into existence, an operation which is the obvious intent of much

contemporary thinking in religion,[97] it must, however, give up the

assumption that they already exist _qua_ spirit. But when religion gives

up this assumption, religion gives up the ghost.

What it demands of the ghost, and of all hypostatized or

anthropomorphized ultimate value-forms, is that they shall work, and its

life as an institution depends upon making them work. Christian Science

becomes a refuge from the failure of science, magic from mechanism, and

by means of them and their kind, blissful immortality, complete

self-fulfilment is to be attained--after death. There is a "beautiful

land of somewhere," a happy life beyond, but it is beyond life. In fact,

although religion confuses value and existence, it localizes the great

value-forms outside of existence. Its history has been an epic of the

retreat and decimation of the gods from the world, a movement from

animism and pluralism to transcendentalism and monism; and

concomitantly, of an elaboration and extension of institutional devices

by which the saving value-forms are to be made and kept operative in the

world.