IV

Our lengthy effort to define the work and the place of the reason has

brought us to the threshold of an appreciation of its relation to the

religious insight which we are seeking.

In looking for salvation, we discover that our task is defined for us

by those aspects of individual and social experience upon which our

two previous lectures have dwelt. We have learned from the study of

these two sorts of experience that, whatever else we need for our

salvation, one of our needs is to come into touch with a life that in

its unity, in its meaning, in its perfection, is vastly superior to

our present human type of life. And so the question has presented

itself: Have we any evidence that such a superhuman type of life is a

real fact in the world? The mystics, and many of the faithful, answer

this question by saying: "Yes. We have such evidence. It is the

assurance that we get through intuition, through feeling, through the

light revealed to us {103} in certain moments when thought ceases, and

the proud intellect is dumb, and when the divine speaks quite directly

to the passive and humbled soul." Now when we calmly consider the

evidence of such moments of inarticulate conviction, they strongly

impress upon us what we have called the religious paradox. Faith, and

the passive and mysterious intuitions of the devout, seem to depend on

first admitting that we are naturally blind and helpless and ignorant,

and worthless to know, of ourselves, any saving truth; and upon

nevertheless insisting that we are quite capable of one very lofty

type of knowledge--that we are capable, namely, of knowing God's voice

when we hear it, of distinguishing a divine revelation from all other

reports, of being sure, despite all our worthless ignorance, that the

divine higher life which seems to speak to us in our moments of

intuition is what it declares itself to be. If, then, there is a pride

of intellect, does there not seem to be an equal pride of faith, an

equal pretentiousness involved in undertaking to judge that certain of

our least articulate intuitions are infallible? Surely here is a

genuine problem, and it is a problem for the reason. We know that men

differ in faith. We know that one man's intuition regarding the way of

salvation may seem to another man to be a mere delusion, a deceitful

dream. We know, from the reports of religious experience, that at

times even the saints of greatest renown have doubted whether some of

their most persuasive visions of the {104} divine were not, after all,

due to the cunning deceit of an enemy of souls whom they more or less

superstitiously feared. We know that to common-sense, despite its

interest in salvation, the reports of the mystics and of the faithful

have often appeared to be but the tale of private and vain imaginings.

It is fair to ask what are the criteria whereby the true spiritual

gifts, the genuine revelations, are to be distinguished. And this, I

insist, is a question for the reason, for that aspect of our nature

which has to do with forming estimates of wholes rather than of

fragments--estimates of life in its entirety rather than of this or

that feeling or moment of ecstasy in its isolation.

If, hereupon, without for the moment attempting to discuss how others,

as, for instance, James himself, deal with the problem of the

reasonable estimate of the value of our religious intuitions, I sketch

for you my own opinion as to how reason does throw light upon the

religious paradox, I must again emphasise a matter that I mentioned in

my opening lecture and that is much neglected. Religious faith does,

indeed, involve a seemingly paradoxical attempt to transcend the

admitted ignorance of the needy human being, to admit that of himself

this being knows almost nothing about the way of salvation, and

nevertheless to insist that he is able to recognise his Deliverer's

voice as the voice of a real master of life when he hears that voice,

or--apart from metaphor--that he is able to be sure what revelation of

a divine life, not {105} his own, is the true one when he happens to

get it. But religion is not alone in this paradoxical pride of

humility. Science and common-sense alike involve a similar admission

of the depths of our human fallibility and ignorance, on the one hand,

and an analogous assurance that, despite this our fragmentariness of

experience, despite our liability to be deceived, we nevertheless can

recognise truth when experience once has not wholly verified it, but

has sufficiently helped us to get it. For, as individuals, we are

constantly confident beyond what our present experience, taken by

itself, clearly reveals to us. We, for instance, trust our individual

memory in the single case, while admitting its pervasive fallibility

in general. We persistently view ourselves as in reasonably close

touch with the general and common results of human experience, even at

the moment when we have to admit how little we know about the mind or

the experience of any one fellow-man, even our nearest friend. We say

that some of our opinions, for instance, are warranted by the

common-sense of mankind. That is, we pretend once for all to know a

good deal about what the common experience of mankind is. And yet, if

we look closer, we see that we do not directly see or experience the

genuine inner life of any one of mankind except the private self which

each one of us regards as his own, while, if we still further consider

the matter, we can readily observe how little each one of us really

knows even about himself. When {106} we appeal then to what we call

common-sense, we pretend to know what it is that, as we say, the mind

of mankind finds to be true. But if we are asked to estimate the real

state of mind of any individual man, how mysterious that state is! In

brief, the paradox of feeling confidence in our own judgment, even

while regarding all human opinion as profoundly fallible, is not

merely a religious paradox, but also pervades our whole social and

personal and even our scientific types of opinion. Not to have what is

called a reasonable confidence in our own individual opinions is the

mark of a weakling. But usually, if our personal opinions relate to

important matters, they bring us into more or less serious conflict

with at least some of the opinions of other men. Conflict is one mark

that your opinions are worth having. When the conflict arises, we are

usually led to consider how fallible other men are. They are fallible,

we say, because they are human. How little any poor man knows! Yes,

but if this principle holds true, how doubtful are my own opinions!

Yet if I fill my mind with that reflection, to the exclusion of all

other reasonable considerations, I condemn myself not to mere

fallibility, but to certain failure.

The paradox is universal. It pervades all forms and activities of

human inquiry. That is the first synthetic observation of the reason,

when it surveys the field of human opinion. Everywhere we live by

undertaking to transcend in opinion what the {107} evidence before us,

at any one moment, directly and infallibly warrants. But is it

rational to do this? And if so, _why_ is it rational?

The answer is that while there is much irrational presumption and

overconfidence in our human world, there is also a perfectly rational

principle which warrants certain forms and methods of thus

transcending in our opinions the immediately presented evidence of the

moment when we judge. This principle is as universal as it is

generally neglected. Rightly understood, it simply transforms for you

your whole view of the real universe in which you live.

An opinion of yours may be true or false. But when you form an

opinion, what are you trying to do? You are trying to anticipate, in

some fashion, what a wider view, a larger experience of your present

situation, a fuller insight into your present ideas, and into what

they mean, would show you, if you now had that wider view and larger

experience. Such an effort to anticipate what the wider view would

even now show, if you were possessed of that view, involves both what

are usually called theoretical interests and what pragmatists, such as

James himself, have often characterised as practical interests. One

can express the matter by saying, that you are trying, through your

opinions, to predict what a larger insight, if it were present to you,

would show or would find, that is, would experience. You can also say

that you are trying to define what {108} a fuller apprehension and a

fairer estimate of your present purposes, and intentions, and

interests, and deeds, and of their outcome, and of their place in

life, would bring before your vision. In brief (whether you lay more

stress upon deeds and their outcome, or upon experiences and their

contents), any expression of opinion, made at any time, is an appeal

of the self of the moment to the verdict, to the estimate, to the

experience of a larger and better informed insight, in the light of

which the self of the moment proposes to be judged. The special

criteria by which your momentary opinion is tested, at the time when

you form that opinion, vary endlessly with your mood and your training

and your feelings, and with the topics and tasks in which you happen

to be interested. But the universal form in which any opinion comes to

your consciousness, and gets its definition for your own mind, is this

form of an appeal to an insight that is superior in grasp, in unity,

in coherence, in reasonableness to your momentary insight.

Now you can indeed say: "When I form and express an opinion, I appeal

from my present experiences to some wider insight that I view _as if

it were_ possible. My opinion asserts that _if I were_ permitted to

see what I just now do not directly experience, I should find the

facts to be so and so." But no such account of the matter is quite

complete. Everything that you regard as possible has to be conceived

as somehow based upon what you regard {109} as actual. And so, in

fact, your opinions are always appeals to some form of wider or larger

or deeper or richer insight that, in the act of appealing to it, you

regard as a present or as a past or as a future reality--in brief, as

a live and perfectly concrete insight to whose verdict you appeal.

Philosophers often express this by saying that all opinions are

nothing but efforts to formulate the real contents of experience. This

view I accept.

So then, as I insist, whatever your opinions, your expression of them

is an appeal to some wider insight that you regard as real, and that

you view as a live insight which comprehends your ideas, and which

sees how they are related to genuine experience. This, I affirm, is

the universal form which all opinion takes. A true opinion is true,

because in fact it expresses what the wider insight confirms. A false

opinion is false, because it is refuted by the light of this same

wider view. Apart from such a confirmation or refutation in the light

of such a larger view, the very concepts of truth and error, as

applied to opinions which are not wholly confirmed or set aside by the

instantaneous evidence of the moment when the opinions are formed or

uttered, have no meaning. True is the judgment that is confirmed by

the larger view to which it appeals. False is the assertion that is

not thus confirmed. _Upon such a conception the very ideas of truth

and error depend. Without such a conception truth and error have no

sense_. If such a conception is not itself {110} a true view of our

situation, that is, if there is no wider insight, our opinions have

neither truth nor error, and are all of them alike merely meaningless.

When you are ignorant, you are ignorant of what the wider view makes

clear to its own insight. If you blunder or are deluded, your blunder

is due to a defective apprehension which the wider view confirms. And

thus, whether you are ignorant or blundering, wise or foolish, whether

the truth or the falsity of your present opinion is supposed to be

actual, one actuality is equally and rationally presupposed, as the

actuality to which all your opinions refer, and in the light of which

they possess sense. _This is the actuality of some wider insight with

reference to which your own opinion gets its truth or its falsity_.

To this wider insight, to this always presupposed vision of experience

as it is, of the facts as they are, you are always appealing. Your

every act of assertion displays the genuineness of the appeal and

exemplifies the absolute rational necessity of asserting that the

appeal is made to an insight that is itself real.

Frequently you do, indeed, call this insight merely the common-sense

of mankind. But, strange to say, this common-sense of mankind is

always and inevitably conceived by you in terms that distinguish it

from the fleeting momentary views of any or of all merely individual

men. Men--if I may judge them by my own case, and by what I hear other

{111} men confess--men, when taken merely as individuals, always live

from moment to moment in a flickering way, normally confident, indeed,

but clearly seeing at any one instant very little at a time. They are

narrow in the span of the more direct insight. They grasp data bit by

bit, and comprehend, in their instantaneous flashes of insight, only

little scraps and tiny bundles of ideas. I who now speak to you cannot

hold clearly and momentarily before my mind at once even all of the

meaning that I try to express in two or three of my successive

sentences. I live looking before and after, and pining for what is

not, and grasping after unity; and I find each moment crumbling as it

flies; and each thought and each sentence of my discourse drops into

momentary forgetfulness so soon as I have carefully built up its

passing structure. In our life all thus flows. We fly from one flash

of insight to another.

But nevertheless our opinions, so we say, reflect sometimes the

common-sense of mankind. They conform to the verdict of humanity. But

who amongst us ever goes beyond thus confidently holding that he

reflects the common-sense of mankind? Who amongst us personally and

individually experiences, at any moment, the confirmation said to be

given by the verdict of humanity? The verdict of humanity? What man

ever finds immediately presented to his own personal insight that

totality of data upon which this verdict is said to depend? {112} The

common-sense of mankind? What mortal man is there who ever finds

incorporated in his flickering, fleeting, crumbling, narrow moments of

personal experience the calm and secure insight which this

common-sense of mankind, or of enlightened mankind, is said to

possess?

No, the common-sense of mankind is, for us all, a sort of

super-individual insight, to which we appeal without ourselves fully

possessing it. This "_common_"-sense of mankind is just the sense

_which no man of us all ever individually possesses_. For us all it

is, indeed, something superhuman. We spend part of our busy little

lives in somewhat pretentiously undertaking to report its dicta. But

it is simply one of the countless forms in which we conceive the wider

insight to be incorporated. _The true rational warrant for this

confidence of ours lies in the fact that whatever else is real, some

form of such a wider insight, some essentially super-individual and

superhuman insight is real_. For unless it is real our opinions,

including any opinion that we may have that doubts or questions or

denies its reality, are all equally meaningless. Thus even when we

appeal to common-sense we really appeal to a genuine but super-human

insight.

Let us not here spend time, however, upon analysing this or that

special form in which we are accustomed, for one special purpose or

another, to conceive the wider insight. What is clear is that we

constantly, and in every opinion, in every confession of {113}

ignorance appeal to such an insight. That such an insight is real,

must be presupposed even in order to assert that our present opinions

are errors. What interests us most at this point is, however, this,

that whatever else the whole real universe is, the real universe

exists only in case it is the object, and the very being, of such an

insight, of such an inclusive experience, of such a view of what is.

For, when you hold any opinions whatever about the real world, or

about any of its contents, characters, or values, your opinions are

either true or false, and are true or false by virtue of their actual

conformity to the live insight which experiences what makes them true

or false, and which therefore _ipso facto_ experiences what the real

world is. If there is no such world-possessing insight, then, once

more, your opinions about the world are neither true nor false. Or,

otherwise stated, if there is no such inclusive insight there is no

world. To the real world, then, this insight which comprehends the

world, and which knows whatever is true to be true, and whatever is

false about the world to be false--to the real world this insight, I

say, belongs. And the whole world belongs to it and is its object and

essence. Whatever is real is real for that insight, and is in its

experience, and exists as its possession, and as its well-known and

well-comprehended content, and as its image and expression and

meaning.

All this I say, as you may note, not because I hold in high esteem any

of our private human {114} opinions, but only because, _except in the

light of such an all-seeing comprehension of facts as they are, our

individual opinions about the world cannot even be false_. For

opinion, in all its fleeting blindness and in its human chaos of

caprices, is ceaselessly an appeal to the judge, to the seer, to the

standard experience, to the knower of facts as they are, to the wider

view, to the decisive insight. And opinions about reality in its

wholeness, about the world, about the all, are appeals to the

all-judging insight, to the all-seeing view, to the knowledge and

experience that grasps the totality of facts, to the widest outlook,

to the deepest insight, to the absolute rational decision. If this be

so, then an opinion to the effect that there exists no such widest and

deepest insight, and no such final view, is itself just such an appeal

to the final insight, simply because it is an opinion about reality.

To assert then that there is no largest view, no final insight, no

experience that is absolute, is to assert that the largest view

observes that there is no largest view, that the final insight sees

that there is no such insight, that the ultimate experience is aware

that there is no ultimate experience. And such an assertion is indeed

a self-contradiction.

This, I assert, is the only rational way of stating the nature of

opinion, of truth or error, and consequently of reality. This is the

synthesis which reason inevitably accomplishes whenever it rightly

views the nature and the implications of even our most flickering and

erroneous and uncertain {115} opinions. We can err about what you

will. But if we err, we simply come short of the insight to which we

are aiming to conform, and in the light of which our ideas get

absolutely all of their meaning. In every error, in every blunder, in

all our darkness, in all our ignorance, we are still in touch with the

eternal insight. We are always seeking to know even as we are known.

I have sought in this sketch to vindicate the general rights of

rational insight as against mere momentary or fragmentary intuition. I

have also tried to show you what synthesis of reason gives us a

genuinely religious insight.

"My first penitent," said the priest of our story, "was a murderer."

"And I," said the nobleman, "was this priest's first penitent."

"I am ignorant of the vast and mysterious real world"--thus says our

sense of human fallibility and weakness when we are first awakened to

our need of rational guidance. The saying is true. The mystery is

appalling. "I am ignorant of the real world." Yes; but reason,

reflecting upon the nature and the essential meaning of opinion, of

truth, of error, and of ignorance, points out to us this thesis: "That

of which I am ignorant is that about which I can err. But error is

failure to conform my momentary opinion to the very insight which I

mean and to which I am all the while appealing. Error is failure to

conform to the inclusive insight which {116} overarches my errors with

the heaven of its rational clearness. Error is failure to grasp the

very light which shines in my darkness, even while my darkness

comprehends it not. That of which I am ignorant is then essentially

the object of a super-human and divine insight."

"I am ignorant of the world. To be ignorant is to fail to grasp the

object of the all-inclusive and divine insight." That is the

expression of our situation. Reason easily makes the fitting synthesis

when it considers the priest and the nobleman. I ask you to make the

analogous synthesis regarding the world and the divine insight. This

synthesis here takes form in concluding that the world is the object

of an all-inclusive and divine insight, which is thus the supreme

reality.

I have but sketched for you the contribution of reason to our quest.

This contribution will seem to many of you too abstract and too

contemplative to meet vital religious needs. In fact, what I have said

will mean little to you unless you come to see how it can be

translated into an adequate expression in our active life. To this

task of such a further interpretation of the mission of the reason as

a guide of life my next lecture shall be devoted.

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