CHANGED CONCEPTIONS OF THE IDEAL AND THE REAL
It has been noted that human experience is made human through the
existence of associations and recollections, which are strained through
the mesh of imagination so as to suit the demands of the emotions. A
life that is humanly interesting is, short of the results of discipline,
a life in which the tedium of vacant leisure is filled with images that
excite and satisfy. It is in this sense that poetry preceded prose in
human experience, religion antedated science, and ornamental and
decorative art while it could not take the place of utility early
reached a development out of proportion to the practical arts. In order
to give contentment and delight, in order to feed present emotion and
give the stream of conscious life intensity and color, the suggestions
which spring from past experiences are worked over so as to smooth out
their unpleasantnesses and enhance their enjoyableness. Some
psychologists claim that there is what they call a natural tendency to
obliviscence of the disagreeable--that men turn from the unpleasant in
thought and recollection as they do from the obnoxious in action. Every
serious-minded person knows that a large part of the effort required in
moral discipline consists in the courage needed to acknowledge the
unpleasant consequences of one's past and present acts. We squirm,
dodge, evade, disguise, cover up, find excuses and palliations--anything
to render the mental scene less uncongenial. In short, the tendency of
spontaneous suggestion is to idealize experience, to give it in
consciousness qualities which it does not have in actuality. Time and
memory are true artists; they remould reality nearer to the heart's
desire.
As imagination becomes freer and less controlled by concrete
actualities, the idealizing tendency takes further flights unrestrained
by the rein of the prosaic world. The things most emphasized in
imagination as it reshapes experience are things which are absent in
reality. In the degree in which life is placid and easy, imagination is
sluggish and bovine. In the degree in which life is uneasy and troubled,
fancy is stirred to frame pictures of a contrary state of things. By
reading the characteristic features of any man's castles in the air you
can make a shrewd guess as to his underlying desires which are
frustrated. What is difficulty and disappointment in real life becomes
conspicuous achievement and triumph in revery; what is negative in fact
will be positive in the image drawn by fancy; what is vexation in
conduct will be compensated for in high relief in idealizing
imagination.
These considerations apply beyond mere personal psychology. They are
decisive for one of the most marked traits of classic philosophy:--its
conception of an ultimate supreme Reality which is essentially ideal in
nature. Historians have more than once drawn an instructive parallel
between the developed Olympian Pantheon of Greek religion and the Ideal
Realm of Platonic philosophy. The gods, whatever their origin and
original traits, became idealized projections of the selected and
matured achievements which the Greeks admired among their mortal selves.
The gods were like mortals, but mortals living only the lives which men
would wish to live, with power intensified, beauty perfected, and wisdom
ripened. When Aristotle criticized the theory of Ideas of his master,
Plato, by saying that the Ideas were after all only things of sense
eternalized, he pointed out in effect the parallelism of philosophy with
religion and art to which allusion has just been made. And save for
matters of merely technical import, is it not possible to say of
Aristotle's Forms just what he said of Plato's Ideas? What are they,
these Forms and Essences which so profoundly influenced for centuries
the course of science and theology, save the objects of ordinary
experience with their blemishes removed, their imperfections eliminated,
their lacks rounded out, their suggestions and hints fulfilled? What
are they in short but the objects of familiar life divinized because
reshaped by the idealizing imagination to meet the demands of desire in
just those respects in which actual experience is disappointing?
That Plato, and Aristotle in somewhat different fashion, and Plotinus
and Marcus Aurelius and Saint Thomas Aquinas, and Spinoza and Hegel all
taught that Ultimate Reality is either perfectly Ideal and Rational in
nature, or else has absolute ideality and rationality as its necessary
attribute, are facts well known to the student of philosophy. They need
no exposition here. But it is worth pointing out that these great
systematic philosophies defined perfect Ideality in conceptions that
express the opposite of those things which make life unsatisfactory and
troublesome. What is the chief source of the complaint of poet and
moralist with the goods, the values and satisfactions of experience?
Rarely is the complaint that such things do not exist; it is that
although existing they are momentary, transient, fleeting. They do not
stay; at worst they come only to annoy and tease with their hurried and
disappearing taste of what might be; at best they come only to inspire
and instruct with a passing hint of truer reality. This commonplace of
the poet and moralist as to the impermanence not only of sensuous
enjoyment, but of fame and civic achievements was profoundly reflected
upon by philosophers, especially by Plato and Aristotle. The results of
their thinking have been wrought into the very fabric of western ideas.
Time, change, movement are signs that what the Greeks called Non-Being
somehow infect true Being. The phraseology is now strange, but many a
modern who ridicules the conception of Non-Being repeats the same
thought under the name of the Finite or Imperfect.
Wherever there is change, there is instability, and instability is proof
of something the matter, of absence, deficiency, incompleteness. These
are the ideas common to the connection between change, becoming and
perishing, and Non-Being, finitude and imperfection. Hence complete and
true Reality must be changeless, unalterable, so full of Being that it
always and forever maintains itself in fixed rest and repose. As
Bradley, the most dialectially ingenious Absolutist of our own day,
expresses the doctrine "Nothing that is perfectly real moves." And while
Plato took, comparatively speaking, a pessimistic view of change as mere
lapse and Aristotle a complacent view of it as tendency to realization,
yet Aristotle doubted no more than Plato that the fully realized
reality, the divine and ultimate, is changeless. Though it is called
Activity or Energy, the Activity knew no change, the energy did nothing.
It was the activity of an army forever marking time and never going
anywhere.
From this contrast of the permanent with the transient arise other
features which mark off the Ultimate Reality from the imperfect
realities of practical life. Where there is change, there is of
necessity numerical plurality, multiplicity, and from variety comes
opposition, strife. Change is alteration, or "othering" and this means
diversity. Diversity means division, and division means two sides and
their conflict. The world which is transient _must_ be a world of
discord, for in lacking stability it lacks the government of unity. Did
unity completely rule, these would remain an unchanging totality. What
alters has parts and partialities which, not recognizing the rule of
unity, assert themselves independently and make life a scene of
contention and discord. Ultimate and true Being on the other hand, since
it is changeless is Total, All-Comprehensive and One. Since it is One,
it knows only harmony, and therefore enjoys complete and eternal Good.
It _is_ Perfection.
Degrees of knowledge and truth correspond with degrees of reality point
by point. The higher and more complete the Reality the truer and more
important the knowledge that refers to it. Since the world of becoming,
of origins and perishings, is deficient in true Being, it cannot be
known in the best sense. To know it means to neglect its flux and
alteration and discover some permanent form which limits the processes
that alter in time. The acorn undergoes a series of changes; these are
knowable only in reference to the fixed form of the oak which is the
same in the entire oak species in spite of the numerical diversity of
trees. Moreover, this form limits the flux of growth at both ends, the
acorn coming from the oak as well as passing into it. Where such
unifying and limiting eternal forms cannot be detected, there is mere
aimless variation and fluctuation, and knowledge is out of the question.
On the other hand, as objects are approached in which there is no
movement at all, knowledge becomes really demonstrative, certain,
perfect--truth pure and unalloyed. The heavens can be more truly known
than the earth, God the unmoved mover than the heavens.
From this fact follows the superiority of contemplative to practical
knowledge, of pure theoretical speculation to experimentation, and to
any kind of knowing that depends upon changes in things or that induces
change in them. Pure knowing is pure beholding, viewing, noting. It is
complete in itself. It looks for nothing beyond itself; it lacks nothing
and hence has no aim or purpose. It is most emphatically its own excuse
for being. Indeed, pure contemplative knowing is so much the most truly
self-enclosed and self-sufficient thing in the universe that it is the
highest and indeed the only attribute that can be ascribed to God, the
Highest Being in the scale of Being. Man himself is divine in the rare
moments when he attains to purely self-sufficient theoretical insight.
In contrast with such knowing, the so-called knowing of the artisan is
base. He has to bring about changes in things, in wood and stone, and
this fact is of itself evidence that his material is deficient in Being.
What condemns his knowledge even more is the fact that it is not
disinterestedly for its own sake. It has reference to results to be
attained, food, clothing, shelter, etc. It is concerned with things that
perish, the body and its needs. It thus has an ulterior aim, and one
which itself testifies to imperfection. For want, desire, affection of
every sort, indicate lack. Where there is need and desire--as in the
case of all practical knowledge and activity--there is incompleteness
and insufficiency. While civic or political and moral knowledge rank
higher than do the conceptions of the artisan, yet intrinsically
considered they are a low and untrue type. Moral and political action is
practical; that is, it implies needs and effort to satisfy them. It has
an end beyond itself. Moreover, the very fact of association shows lack
of self-sufficiency; it shows dependence upon others. Pure knowing is
alone solitary, and capable of being carried on in complete,
self-sufficing independence.
In short, the measure of the worth of knowledge according to Aristotle,
whose views are here summarized, is the degree in which it is purely
contemplative. The highest degree is attained in knowing ultimate Ideal
Being, pure Mind. This is Ideal, the Form of Forms, because it has no
lacks, no needs, and experiences no change or variety. It has no desires
because in it all desires are consummated. Since it is perfect Being, it
is perfect Mind and perfect Bliss;--the acme of rationality and
ideality. One point more and the argument is completed. The kind of
knowing that concerns itself with this ultimate reality (which is also
ultimate ideality) is philosophy. Philosophy is therefore the last and
highest term in pure contemplation. Whatever may be said for any other
kind of knowledge, philosophy is self-enclosed. It has nothing to do
beyond itself; it has no aim or purpose or function--except to be
philosophy--that is, pure, self-sufficing beholding of ultimate reality.
There is of course such a thing as philosophic _study_ which falls short
of this perfection. Where there is learning, there is change and
becoming. But the function of study and learning of philosophy is, as
Plato put it, to convert the eye of the soul from dwelling contentedly
upon the images of things, upon the inferior realities that are born and
that decay, and to lead it to the intuition of supernal and eternal
Being. Thus the mind of the knower is transformed. It becomes
assimilated to what it knows.
Through a variety of channels, especially Neo-Platonism and St.
Augustine, these ideas found their way into Christian theology; and
great scholastic thinkers taught that the end of man is to know True
Being, that knowledge is contemplative, that True Being is pure
Immaterial Mind, and to know it is Bliss and Salvation. While this
knowledge cannot be achieved in this stage of life nor without
supernatural aid, yet so far as it is accomplished it assimilates the
human mind to the divine essence and so constitutes salvation. Through
this taking over of the conception of knowledge as Contemplative into
the dominant religion of Europe, multitudes were affected who were
totally innocent of theoretical philosophy. There was bequeathed to
generations of thinkers as an unquestioned axiom the idea that knowledge
is intrinsically a mere beholding or viewing of reality--the spectator
conception of knowledge. So deeply engrained was this idea that it
prevailed for centuries after the actual progress of science had
demonstrated that knowledge is power to transform the world, and
centuries after the practice of effective knowledge had adopted the
method of experimentation.
Let us turn abruptly from this conception of the measure of true
knowledge and the nature of true philosophy to the existing practice of
knowledge. Nowadays if a man, say a physicist or chemist, wants to know
something, the last thing he does is merely to contemplate. He does not
look in however earnest and prolonged way upon the object expecting
that thereby he will detect its fixed and characteristic form. He does
not expect any amount of such aloof scrutiny to reveal to him any
secrets. He proceeds to _do_ something, to bring some energy to bear
upon the substance to see how it reacts; he places it under unusual
conditions in order to induce some change. While the astronomer cannot
change the remote stars, even he no longer merely gazes. If he cannot
change the stars themselves, he can at least by lens and prism change
their light as it reaches the earth; he can lay traps for discovering
changes which would otherwise escape notice. Instead of taking an
antagonistic attitude toward change and denying it to the stars because
of their divinity and perfection, he is on constant and alert watch to
find some change through which he can form an inference as to the
formation of stars and systems of stars.
Change in short is no longer looked upon as a fall from grace, as a
lapse from reality or a sign of imperfection of Being. Modern science no
longer tries to find some fixed form or essence behind each process of
change. Rather, the experimental method tries to break down apparent
fixities and to induce changes. The form that remains unchanged to
sense, the form of seed or tree, is regarded not as the key to knowledge
of the thing, but as a wall, an obstruction to be broken down.
Consequently the scientific man experiments with this and that agency
applied to this and that condition until something begins to happen;
until there is, as we say, something doing. He assumes that there is
change going on all the time, that there is movement within each thing
in seeming repose; and that since the process is veiled from perception
the way to know it is to bring the thing into novel circumstances until
change becomes evident. In short, the thing which is to be accepted and
paid heed to is not what is originally given but that which emerges
after the thing has been set under a great variety of circumstances in
order to see how it behaves.
Now this marks a much more general change in the human attitude than
perhaps appears at first sight. It signifies nothing less than that the
world or any part of it as it presents itself at a given time is
accepted or acquiesced in only as _material_ for change. It is accepted
precisely as the carpenter, say, accepts things as he finds them. If he
took them as things to be observed and noted for their own sake, he
never would be a carpenter. He would observe, describe, record the
structures, forms and changes which things exhibit to him, and leave the
matter there. If perchance some of the changes going on should present
him with a shelter, so much the better. But what makes the carpenter a
_builder_ is the fact that he notes things not just as objects in
themselves, but with reference to what he wants to do to them and with
them; to the end he has in mind. Fitness to effect certain special
changes that he wishes to see accomplished is what concerns him in the
wood and stones and iron which he observes. His attention is directed to
the changes they undergo and the changes they make other things undergo
so that he may select that combination of changes which will yield him
his desired result. It is only by these processes of active manipulation
of things in order to realize his purpose that he discovers what the
properties of things are. If he foregoes his own purpose and in the name
of a meek and humble subscription to things as they "really are" refuses
to bend things as they "are" to his own purpose, he not only never
achieves his purpose but he never learns what the things themselves are.
They _are_ what they can do and what can be done with them,--things that
can be found by deliberate trying.
The outcome of this idea of the right way to know is a profound
modification in man's attitude toward the natural world. Under differing
social conditions, the older or classic conception sometimes bred
resignation and submission; sometimes contempt and desire to escape;
sometimes, notably in the case of the Greeks, a keen esthetic curiosity
which showed itself in acute noting of all the traits of given objects.
In fact, the whole conception of knowledge as beholding and noting is
fundamentally an idea connected with esthetic enjoyment and
appreciation where the environment is beautiful and life is serene, and
with esthetic repulsion and depreciation where life is troubled, nature
morose and hard. But in the degree in which the active conception of
knowledge prevails, and the environment is regarded as something that
has to be changed in order to be truly known, men are imbued with
courage, with what may almost be termed an aggressive attitude toward
nature. The latter becomes plastic, something to be subjected to human
uses. The moral disposition toward change is deeply modified. This loses
its pathos, it ceases to be haunted with melancholy through suggesting
only decay and loss. Change becomes significant of new possibilities and
ends to be attained; it becomes prophetic of a better future. Change is
associated with progress rather than with lapse and fall. Since changes
are going on anyway, the great thing is to learn enough about them so
that we be able to lay hold of them and turn them in the direction of
our desires. Conditions and events are neither to be fled from nor
passively acquiesced in; they are to be utilized and directed. They are
either obstacles to our ends or else means for their accomplishment. In
a profound sense knowing ceases to be contemplative and becomes
practical.
Unfortunately men, educated men, cultivated men in particular, are still
so dominated by the older conception of an aloof and self-sufficing
reason and knowledge that they refuse to perceive the import of this
doctrine. They think they are sustaining the cause of impartial,
thorough-going and disinterested reflection when they maintain the
traditional philosophy of intellectualism--that is, of knowing as
something self-sufficing and self-enclosed. But in truth, historic
intellectualism, the spectator view of knowledge, is a purely
compensatory doctrine which men of an intellectual turn have built up to
console themselves for the actual and social impotency of the calling of
thought to which they are devoted. Forbidden by conditions and held back
by lack of courage from making their knowledge a factor in the
determination of the course of events, they have sought a refuge of
complacency in the notion that knowing is something too sublime to be
contaminated by contact with things of change and practice. They have
transformed knowing into a morally irresponsible estheticism. The true
import of the doctrine of the operative or practical character of
knowing, of intelligence, is objective. It means that the structures and
objects which science and philosophy set up in contrast to the things
and events of concrete daily experience do not constitute a realm apart
in which rational contemplation may rest satisfied; it means that they
represent the selected obstacles, material means and ideal methods of
giving direction to that change which is bound to occur anyway.
This change of human disposition toward the world does not mean that man
ceases to have ideals, or ceases to be primarily a creature of the
imagination. But it does signify a radical change in the character and
function of the ideal realm which man shapes for himself. In the classic
philosophy, the ideal world is essentially a haven in which man finds
rest from the storms of life; it is an asylum in which he takes refuge
from the troubles of existence with the calm assurance that it alone is
supremely real. When the belief that knowledge is active and operative
takes hold of men, the ideal realm is no longer something aloof and
separate; it is rather that collection of imagined possibilities that
stimulates men to new efforts and realizations. It still remains true
that the troubles which men undergo are the forces that lead them to
project pictures of a better state of things. But the picture of the
better is shaped so that it may become an instrumentality of action,
while in the classic view the Idea belongs ready-made in a noumenal
world. Hence, it is only an object of personal aspiration or
consolation, while to the modern, an idea is a suggestion of something
to be done or of a way of doing.
An illustration will, perhaps, make the difference clear. Distance is an
obstacle, a source of trouble. It separates friends and prevents
intercourse. It isolates, and makes contact and mutual understanding
difficult. This state of affairs provokes discontent and restlessness;
it excites the imagination to construct pictures of a state of things
where human intercourse is not injuriously affected by space. Now there
are two ways out. One way is to pass from a mere dream of some heavenly
realm in which distance is abolished and by some magic all friends are
in perpetual transparent communication, to pass, I say, from some idle
castle-building to philosophic reflection. Space, distance, it will then
be argued, is merely phenomenal; or, in a more modern version,
subjective. It is not, metaphysically speaking, real. Hence the
obstruction and trouble it gives is not after all "real" in the
metaphysical sense of reality. Pure minds, pure spirits, do not live in
a space world; for them distance is not. Their relationships in the true
world are not in any way affected by special considerations. Their
intercommunication is direct, fluent, unobstructed.
Does the illustration involve a caricature of ways of philosophizing
with which we are all familiar? But if it is not an absurd caricature,
does it not suggest that much of what philosophies have taught about the
ideal and noumenal or superiorly real world, is after all, only casting
a dream into an elaborate dialectic form through the use of a speciously
scientific terminology? Practically, the difficulty, the trouble,
remains. Practically, however it may be "metaphysically," space is
still real:--it acts in a definite objectionable way. Again, man dreams
of some better state of things. From troublesome fact he takes refuge in
fantasy. But this time, the refuge does not remain a permanent and
remote asylum.
The idea becomes a standpoint from which to examine existing occurrences
and to see if there is not among them something which gives a hint of
how communication at a distance can be effected, something to be
utilized as a medium of speech at long range. The suggestion or fancy
though still ideal is treated as a possibility capable of realization
_in_ the concrete natural world, not as a superior reality apart from
that world. As such, it becomes a platform from which to scrutinize
natural events. Observed from the point of view of this possibility,
things disclose properties hitherto undetected. In the light of these
ascertainments, the idea of some agency for speech at a distance becomes
less vague and floating: it takes on positive form. This action and
reaction goes on. The possibility or idea is employed as a method for
observing actual existence; and in the light of what is discovered the
possibility takes on concrete existence. It becomes less of a mere idea,
a fancy, a wished-for possibility, and more of an actual fact. Invention
proceeds, and at last we have the telegraph, the telephone, first
through wires, and then with no artificial medium. The concrete
environment is transformed in the desired direction; it is idealized in
fact and not merely in fancy. The ideal is realized through its own use
as a tool or method of inspection, experimentation, selection and
combination of concrete natural operations.
Let us pause to take stock of results. The division of the world into
two kinds of Being, one superior, accessible only to reason and ideal in
nature, the other inferior, material, changeable, empirical, accessible
to sense-observation, turns inevitably into the idea that knowledge is
contemplative in nature. It assumes a contrast between theory and
practice which was all to the disadvantage of the latter. But in the
actual course of the development of science, a tremendous change has
come about. When the practice of knowledge ceased to be dialectical and
became experimental, knowing became preoccupied with changes and the
test of knowledge became the ability to bring about certain changes.
Knowing, for the experimental sciences, means a certain kind of
intelligently conducted doing; it ceases to be contemplative and becomes
in a true sense practical. Now this implies that philosophy, unless it
is to undergo a complete break with the authorized spirit of science,
must also alter its nature. It must assume a practical nature; it must
become operative and experimental. And we have pointed out what an
enormous change this transformation of philosophy entails in the two
conceptions which have played the greatest rôle in historic
philosophizing--the conceptions of the "real" and "ideal" respectively.
The former ceases to be something ready-made and final; it becomes that
which has to be accepted as the material of change, as the obstructions
and the means of certain specific desired changes. The ideal and
rational also ceased to be a separate ready-made world incapable of
being used as a lever to transform the actual empirical world, a mere
asylum from empirical deficiencies. They represent intelligently
thought-out possibilities _of_ the existent world which may be used as
methods for making over and improving it.
Philosophically speaking, this is the great difference involved in the
change from knowledge and philosophy as contemplative to operative. The
change does not mean the lowering in dignity of philosophy from a lofty
plane to one of gross utilitarianism. It signifies that the prime
function of philosophy is that of rationalizing the _possibilities_ of
experience, especially collective human experience. The scope of this
change may be realized by considering how far we are from accomplishing
it. In spite of inventions which enable men to use the energies of
nature for their purposes, we are still far from habitually treating
knowledge as the method of active control of nature and of experience.
We tend to think of it after the model of a spectator viewing a finished
picture rather than after that of the artist producing the painting.
Thus there arise all the questions of epistemology with which the
technical student of philosophy is so familiar, and which have made
modern philosophy in especial so remote from the understanding of the
everyday person and from the results and processes of science. For these
questions all spring from the assumption of a merely beholding mind on
one side and a foreign and remote object to be viewed and noted on the
other. They ask how a mind and world, subject and object, so separate
and independent can by any possibility come into such relationship to
each other as to make true knowledge possible. If knowing were
habitually conceived of as active and operative, after the analogy of
experiment guided by hypothesis, or of invention guided by the
imagination of some possibility, it is not too much to say that the
first effect would be to emancipate philosophy from all the
epistemological puzzles which now perplex it. For these all arise from a
conception of the relation of mind and world, subject and object, in
knowing, which assumes that to know is to seize upon what is already in
existence.
Modern philosophic thought has been so preoccupied with these puzzles of
epistemology and the disputes between realist and idealist, between
phenomenalist and absolutist, that many students are at a loss to know
what would be left for philosophy if there were removed both the
metaphysical task of distinguishing between the noumenal and phenomenal
worlds and the epistemological task of telling how a separate subject
can know an independent object. But would not the elimination of these
traditional problems permit philosophy to devote itself to a more
fruitful and more needed task? Would it not encourage philosophy to face
the great social and moral defects and troubles from which humanity
suffers, to concentrate its attention upon clearing up the causes and
exact nature of these evils and upon developing a clear idea of better
social possibilities; in short upon projecting an idea or ideal which,
instead of expressing the notion of another world or some far-away
unrealizable goal, would be used as a method of understanding and
rectifying specific social ills?
This is a vague statement. But note in the first place that such a
conception of the proper province of philosophy where it is released
from vain metaphysics and idle epistemology is in line with the origin
of philosophy sketched in the first hour. And in the second place, note
how contemporary society, the world over, is in need of more general and
fundamental enlightenment and guidance than it now possesses. I have
tried to show that a radical change of the conception of knowledge from
contemplative to active is the inevitable result of the way in which
inquiry and invention are now conducted. But in claiming this, it must
also be conceded, or rather asserted, that so far the change has
influenced for the most part only the more technical side of human life.
The sciences have created new industrial arts. Man's physical command of
natural energies has been indefinitely multiplied. There is control of
the sources of material wealth and prosperity. What would once have been
miracles are now daily performed with steam and coal and electricity and
air, and with the human body. But there are few persons optimistic
enough to declare that any similar command of the forces which control
man's social and moral welfare has been achieved.
Where is the moral progress that corresponds to our economic
accomplishments? The latter is the direct fruit of the revolution that
has been wrought in physical science. But where is there a corresponding
human science and art? Not only has the improvement in the method of
knowing remained so far mainly limited to technical and economic
matters, but this progress has brought with it serious new moral
disturbances. I need only cite the late war, the problem of capital and
labor, the relation of economic classes, the fact that while the new
science has achieved wonders in medicine and surgery, it has also
produced and spread occasions for diseases and weaknesses. These
considerations indicate to us how undeveloped are our politics, how
crude and primitive our education, how passive and inert our morals.
The causes remain which brought philosophy into existence as an attempt
to find an intelligent substitute for blind custom and blind impulse as
guides to life and conduct. The attempt has not been successfully
accomplished. Is there not reason for believing that the release of
philosophy from its burden of sterile metaphysics and sterile
epistemology instead of depriving philosophy of problems and
subject-matter would open a way to questions of the most perplexing and
the most significant sort?
Let me specify one problem quite directly suggested by certain points in
this lecture. It has been pointed out that the really fruitful
application of the contemplative idea was not in science but in the
esthetic field. It is difficult to imagine any high development of the
fine arts except where there is curious and loving interest in forms and
motions of the world quite irrespective of any use to which they may be
put. And it is not too much to say that every people that has attained a
high esthetic development has been a people in which the contemplative
attitude has flourished--as the Greek, the Hindoo, the medieval
Christian. On the other hand, the scientific attitude that has actually
proved itself in scientific progress is, as has been pointed out, a
practical attitude. It takes forms as disguises for hidden processes.
Its interest in change is in what it leads to, what can be done with it,
to what use it can be put. While it has brought nature under control,
there is something hard and aggressive in its attitude toward nature
unfavorable to the esthetic enjoyment of the world. Surely there is no
more significant question before the world than this question of the
possibility and method of reconciliation of the attitudes of practical
science and contemplative esthetic appreciation. Without the former, man
will be the sport and victim of natural forces which he cannot use or
control. Without the latter, mankind might become a race of economic
monsters, restlessly driving hard bargains with nature and with one
another, bored with leisure or capable of putting it to use only in
ostentatious display and extravagant dissipation.
Like other moral questions, this matter is social and even political.
The western peoples advanced earlier on the path of experimental science
and its applications in control of nature than the oriental. It is not,
I suppose wholly fanciful, to believe that the latter have embodied in
their habits of life more of the contemplative, esthetic and
speculatively religious temper, and the former more of the scientific,
industrial and practical. This difference and others which have grown up
around it is one barrier to easy mutual understanding, and one source of
misunderstanding. The philosophy which, then, makes a serious effort to
comprehend these respective attitudes in their relation and due
balance, could hardly fail to promote the capacity of peoples to profit
by one another's experience and to co-operate more effectually with one
another in the tasks of fruitful culture.
Indeed, it is incredible that the question of the relation of the "real"
and the "ideal" should ever have been thought to be a problem belonging
distinctively to philosophy. The very fact that this most serious of all
human issues has been taken possession of by philosophy is only another
proof of the disasters that follow in the wake of regarding knowledge
and intellect as something self-sufficient. Never have the "real" and
the "ideal" been so clamorous, so self-assertive, as at the present
time. And never in the history of the world have they been so far apart.
The world war was carried on for purely ideal ends:--for humanity,
justice and equal liberty for strong and weak alike. And it was carried
on by realistic means of applied science, by high explosives, and
bombing airplanes and blockading marvels of mechanism that reduced the
world well nigh to ruin, so that the serious-minded are concerned for
the perpetuity of those choice values we call civilization. The peace
settlement is loudly proclaimed in the name of the ideals that stir
man's deepest emotions, but with the most realistic attention to details
of economic advantage distributed in proportion to physical power to
create future disturbances.
It is not surprising that some men are brought to regard all idealism as
a mere smoke-screen behind which the search for material profit may be
more effectually carried on, and are converted to the materialistic
interpretation of history. "Reality" is then conceived as physical force
and as sensations of power, profit and enjoyment; any politics that
takes account of other factors, save as elements of clever propaganda
and for control of those human beings who have not become realistically
enlightened, is based on illusions. But others are equally sure that the
real lesson of the war is that humanity took its first great wrong step
when it entered upon a cultivation of physical science and an
application of the fruits of science to the improvement of the
instruments of life--industry and commerce. They will sigh for the
return of the day when, while the great mass died as they were born in
animal fashion, the few elect devoted themselves not to science and the
material decencies and comforts of existence but to "ideal" things, the
things of the spirit.
Yet the most obvious conclusion would seem to be the impotency and the
harmfulness of any and every ideal that is proclaimed wholesale and in
the abstract, that is, as something in itself apart from the detailed
concrete existences whose moving possibilities it embodies. The true
moral would seem to lie in enforcing the tragedy of that idealism which
believes in a spiritual world which exists in and by itself, and the
tragic need for the most realistic study of forces and consequences, a
study conducted in a more scientifically accurate and complete manner
than that of the professed _Real-politik_. For it is not truly realistic
or scientific to take short views, to sacrifice the future to immediate
pressure, to ignore facts and forces that are disagreeable and to
magnify the enduring quality of whatever falls in with immediate desire.
It is false that the evils of the situation arise from absence of
ideals; they spring from wrong ideals. And these wrong ideals have in
turn their foundation in the absence in social matters of that methodic,
systematic, impartial, critical, searching inquiry into "real" and
operative conditions which we call science and which has brought man in
the technical realm to the command of physical energies.
Philosophy, let it be repeated, cannot "solve" the problem of the
relation of the ideal and the real. That is the standing problem of
life. But it can at least lighten the burden of humanity in dealing with
the problem by emancipating mankind from the errors which philosophy has
itself fostered--the existence of conditions which are real apart from
their movement into something new and different, and the existence of
ideals, spirit and reason independent of the possibilities of the
material and physical. For as long as humanity is committed to this
radically false bias, it will walk forward with blinded eyes and bound
limbs. And philosophy can effect, if it will, something more than this
negative task. It can make it easier for mankind to take the right steps
in action by making it clear that a sympathetic and integral
intelligence brought to bear upon the observation and understanding of
concrete social events and forces, can form ideals, that is aims, which
shall not be either illusions or mere emotional compensations.