As these lectures are meant to be public, and so few, I have assumed
all very special problems to be excluded, and some topic of general
interest required. Fortunately, our age seems to be growing
philosophical again—still in the ashes live the wonted fires. Oxford,
long the seed-bed, for the english world, of the idealism inspired by
Kant and Hegel, has recently become the nursery of a very different way
of thinking. Even non-philosophers have begun to take an interest in a
controversy over what is known as pluralism or humanism. It looks a
little as if the ancient english empirism, so long put out of fashion
here by nobler sounding germanic formulas, might be repluming itself
and getting ready for a stronger flight than ever. It looks as if
foundations were being sounded and examined afresh.
Individuality outruns all classification, yet we insist on
classifying every one we meet under some general head. As these heads
usually suggest prejudicial associations to some hearer or other, the
life of philosophy largely consists of resentments at the classing, and
complaints of being misunderstood. But there are signs of clearing up,
and, on the whole, less acrimony in discussion, for which both Oxford
and Harvard are partly to be thanked. As I look back into the sixties,
Mill, Bain, and Hamilton were the only official philosophers in
Britain. Spencer, Martineau, and Hodgson were just beginning. In
France, the pupils of Cousin were delving into history only, and
Renouvier alone had an original system. In Germany, the hegelian
impetus had spent itself, and, apart from historical scholarship,
nothing but the materialistic controversy remained, with such men as
Buechner and Ulrici as its champions. Lotze and Fechner were the sole
original thinkers, and Fechner was not a professional philosopher at
all.
The general impression made was of crude issues and oppositions, of
small subtlety and of a widely spread ignorance. Amateurishness was
rampant. Samuel Bailey's 'letters on the philosophy of the human mind,'
published in 1855, are one of the ablest expressions of english
associationism, and a book of real power. Yet hear how he writes of
Kant: 'No one, after reading the extracts, etc., can be surprised to
hear of a declaration by men of eminent abilities, that, after years of
study, they had not succeeded in gathering one clear idea from the
speculations of Kant. I should have been almost surprised if they had.
In or about 1818, Lord Grenville, when visiting the Lakes of England,
observed to Professor Wilson that, after five years' study of Kant's
philosophy, he had not gathered from it one clear idea. Wilberforce,
about the same time, made the same confession to another friend of my
own. “I am endeavoring,” exclaims Sir James Mackintosh, in the
irritation, evidently, of baffled efforts, “to understand this accursed
german philosophy.”[1]
What Oxford thinker would dare to print such naif and
provincial-sounding citations of authority to-day?
The torch of learning passes from land to land as the spirit bloweth
the flame. The deepening of philosophic consciousness came to us
english folk from Germany, as it will probably pass back ere long.
Ferrier, J.H. Stirling, and, most of all, T.H. Green are to be thanked.
If asked to tell in broad strokes what the main doctrinal change has
been, I should call it a change from the crudity of the older english
thinking, its ultra-simplicity of mind, both when it was religious and
when it was anti-religious, toward a rationalism derived in the first
instance from Germany, but relieved from german technicality and
shrillness, and content to suggest, and to remain vague, and to be, in,
the english fashion, devout.
By the time T.H. Green began at Oxford, the generation seemed to
feel as if it had fed on the chopped straw of psychology and of
associationism long enough, and as if a little vastness, even though it
went with vagueness, as of some moist wind from far away, reminding us
of our pre-natal sublimity, would be welcome.
Green's great point of attack was the disconnectedness of the
reigning english sensationalism. Relating was the great
intellectual activity for him, and the key to this relating was
believed by him to lodge itself at last in what most of you know as
Kant's unity of apperception, transformed into a living spirit of the
world.
Hence a monism of a devout kind. In some way we must be fallen
angels, one with intelligence as such; and a great disdain for
empiricism of the sensationalist sort has always characterized this
school of thought, which, on the whole, has reigned supreme at Oxford
and in the Scottish universities until the present day.
But now there are signs of its giving way to a wave of revised
empiricism. I confess that I should be glad to see this latest wave
prevail; so—the sooner I am frank about it the better—I hope to have
my voice counted in its favor as one of the results of this
lecture-course.
What do the terms empiricism and rationalism mean? Reduced to their
most pregnant difference, empiricism means the habit of explaining
wholes by parts, and rationalism means the habit of explaining parts by
wholes. Rationalism thus preserves affinities with monism, since
wholeness goes with union, while empiricism inclines to pluralistic
views. No philosophy can ever be anything but a summary sketch, a
picture of the world in abridgment, a foreshortened bird's-eye view of
the perspective of events. And the first thing to notice is this, that
the only material we have at our disposal for making a picture of the
whole world is supplied by the various portions of that world of which
we have already had experience. We can invent no new forms of
conception, applicable to the whole exclusively, and not suggested
originally by the parts. All philosophers, accordingly, have conceived
of the whole world after the analogy of some particular feature of it
which has particularly captivated their attention. Thus, the theists
take their cue from manufacture, the pantheists from growth. For one
man, the world is like a thought or a grammatical sentence in which a
thought is expressed. For such a philosopher, the whole must logically
be prior to the parts; for letters would never have been invented
without syllables to spell, or syllables without words to utter.
Another man, struck by the disconnectedness and mutual accidentality
of so many of the world's details, takes the universe as a whole to
have been such a disconnectedness originally, and supposes order to
have been superinduced upon it in the second instance, possibly by
attrition and the gradual wearing away by internal friction of portions
that originally interfered.
Another will conceive the order as only a statistical appearance,
and the universe will be for him like a vast grab-bag with black and
white balls in it, of which we guess the quantities only probably, by
the frequency with which we experience their egress.
For another, again, there is no really inherent order, but it is we
who project order into the world by selecting objects and tracing
relations so as to gratify our intellectual interests. We carve out
order by leaving the disorderly parts out; and the world is conceived
thus after the analogy of a forest or a block of marble from which
parks or statues may be produced by eliminating irrelevant trees or
chips of stone.
Some thinkers follow suggestions from human life, and treat the
universe as if it were essentially a place in which ideals are
realized. Others are more struck by its lower features, and for them,
brute necessities express its character better.
All follow one analogy or another; and all the analogies are with
some one or other of the universe's subdivisions. Every one is
nevertheless prone to claim that his conclusions are the only logical
ones, that they are necessities of universal reason, they being all the
while, at bottom, accidents more or less of personal vision which had
far better be avowed as such; for one man's vision may be much more
valuable than another's, and our visions are usually not only our most
interesting but our most respectable contributions to the world in
which we play our part. What was reason given to men for, said some
eighteenth century writer, except to enable them to find reasons for
what they want to think and do?—and I think the history of philosophy
largely bears him out, 'The aim of knowledge,' says Hegel,[2] 'is to
divest the objective world of its strangeness, and to make us more at
home in it.' Different men find their minds more at home in very
different fragments of the world.
Let me make a few comments, here, on the curious antipathies which
these partialities arouse. They are sovereignly unjust, for all the
parties are human beings with the same essential interests, and no one
of them is the wholly perverse demon which another often imagines him
to be. Both are loyal to the world that bears them; neither wishes to
spoil it; neither wishes to regard it as an insane incoherence; both
want to keep it as a universe of some kind; and their differences are
all secondary to this deep agreement. They may be only propensities to
emphasize differently. Or one man may care for finality and security
more than the other. Or their tastes in language may be different. One
may like a universe that lends itself to lofty and exalted
characterization. To another this may seem sentimental or rhetorical.
One may wish for the right to use a clerical vocabulary, another a
technical or professorial one. A certain old farmer of my acquaintance
in America was called a rascal by one of his neighbors. He immediately
smote the man, saying,'I won't stand none of your diminutive epithets.'
Empiricist minds, putting the parts before the whole, appear to
rationalists, who start from the whole, and consequently enjoy
magniloquent privileges, to use epithets offensively diminutive. But
all such differences are minor matters which ought to be subordinated
in view of the fact that, whether we be empiricists or rationalists, we
are, ourselves, parts of the universe and share the same one deep
concern in its destinies. We crave alike to feel more truly at home
with it, and to contribute our mite to its amelioration. It would be
pitiful if small aesthetic discords were to keep honest men asunder.
I shall myself have use for the diminutive epithets of empiricism.
But if you look behind the words at the spirit, I am sure you will not
find it matricidal. I am as good a son as any rationalist among you to
our common mother. What troubles me more than this misapprehension is
the genuine abstruseness of many of the matters I shall be obliged to
talk about, and the difficulty of making them intelligible at one
hearing. But there two pieces, 'zwei stuecke,' as Kant would have said,
in every philosophy—the final outlook, belief, or attitude to which it
brings us, and the reasonings by which that attitude is reached and
mediated. A philosophy, as James Ferrier used to tell us, must indeed
be true, but that is the least of its requirements. One may be true
without being a philosopher, true by guesswork or by revelation. What
distinguishes a philosopher's truth is that it is reasoned.
Argument, not supposition, must have put it in his possession. Common
men find themselves inheriting their beliefs, they know not how. They
jump into them with both feet, and stand there. Philosophers must do
more; they must first get reason's license for them; and to the
professional philosophic mind the operation of procuring the license is
usually a thing of much more pith and moment than any particular
beliefs to which the license may give the rights of access. Suppose,
for example, that a philosopher believes in what is called free-will.
That a common man alongside of him should also share that belief,
possessing it by a sort of inborn intuition, does not endear the man to
the philosopher at all—he may even be ashamed to be associated with
such a man. What interests the philosopher is the particular premises
on which the free-will he believes in is established, the sense in
which it is taken, the objections it eludes, the difficulties it takes
account of, in short the whole form and temper and manner and technical
apparatus that goes with the belief in question. A philosopher across
the way who should use the same technical apparatus, making the same
distinctions, etc., but drawing opposite conclusions and denying
free-will entirely, would fascinate the first philosopher far more than
would the naif co-believer. Their common technical interests
would unite them more than their opposite conclusions separate them.
Each would feel an essential consanguinity in the other, would think of
him, write at him, care for his good opinion. The simple-minded
believer in free-will would be disregarded by either. Neither as ally
nor as opponent would his vote be counted.
In a measure this is doubtless as it should be, but like all
professionalism it can go to abusive extremes. The end is after all
more than the way, in most things human, and forms and methods may
easily frustrate their own purpose. The abuse of technicality is seen
in the infrequency with which, in philosophical literature,
metaphysical questions are discussed directly and on their own merits.
Almost always they are handled as if through a heavy woolen curtain,
the veil of previous philosophers' opinions. Alternatives are wrapped
in proper names, as if it were indecent for a truth to go naked. The
late Professor John Grote of Cambridge has some good remarks about
this. 'Thought,' he says,'is not a professional matter, not something
for so-called philosophers only or for professed thinkers. The best
philosopher is the man who can think most simply. ... I wish
that people would consider that thought—and philosophy is no more than
good and methodical thought—is a matter intimate to them, a
portion of their real selves ... that they would value what they
think, and be interested in it.... In my own opinion,' he goes on,
'there is something depressing in this weight of learning, with nothing
that can come into one's mind but one is told, Oh, that is the opinion
of such and such a person long ago. ... I can conceive of nothing more
noxious for students than to get into the habit of saying to themselves
about their ordinary philosophic thought, Oh, somebody must have
thought it all before.'[3] Yet this is the habit most encouraged at our
seats of learning. You must tie your opinion to Aristotle's or
Spinoza's; you must define it by its distance from Kant's; you must
refute your rival's view by identifying it with Protagoras's. Thus does
all spontaneity of thought, all freshness of conception, get destroyed.
Everything you touch is shopworn. The over-technicality and consequent
dreariness of the younger disciples at our american universities is
appalling. It comes from too much following of german models and
manners. Let me fervently express the hope that in this country you
will hark back to the more humane english tradition. American students
have to regain direct relations with our subject by painful individual
effort in later life. Some of us have done so. Some of the younger
ones, I fear, never will, so strong are the professional shop-habits
already.
In a subject like philosophy it is really fatal to lose connexion
with the open air of human nature, and to think in terms of
shop-tradition only. In Germany the forms are so professionalized that
anybody who has gained a teaching chair and written a book, however
distorted and eccentric, has the legal right to figure forever in the
history of the subject like a fly in amber. All later comers have the
duty of quoting him and measuring their opinions with his opinion. Such
are the rules of the professorial game—they think and write from each
other and for each other and at each other exclusively. With this
exclusion of the open air all true perspective gets lost, extremes and
oddities count as much as sanities, and command the same attention; and
if by chance any one writes popularly and about results only, with his
mind directly focussed on the subject, it is reckoned
oberflaechliches zeug and ganz unwissenschaftlich. Professor
Paulsen has recently written some feeling lines about this
over-professionalism, from the reign of which in Germany his own
writings, which sin by being 'literary,' have suffered loss of credit.
Philosophy, he says, has long assumed in Germany the character of being
an esoteric and occult science. There is a genuine fear of popularity.
Simplicity of statement is deemed synonymous with hollowness and
shallowness. He recalls an old professor saying to him once: 'Yes, we
philosophers, whenever we wish, can go so far that in a couple of
sentences we can put ourselves where nobody can follow us.' The
professor said this with conscious pride, but he ought to have been
ashamed of it. Great as technique is, results are greater. To teach
philosophy so that the pupils' interest in technique exceeds that in
results is surely a vicious aberration. It is bad form, not good form,
in a discipline of such universal human interest. Moreover, technique
for technique, doesn't David Hume's technique set, after all, the kind
of pattern most difficult to follow? Isn't it the most admirable? The
english mind, thank heaven, and the french mind, are still kept, by
their aversion to crude technique and barbarism, closer to truth's
natural probabilities. Their literatures show fewer obvious falsities
and monstrosities than that of Germany. Think of the german literature
of aesthetics, with the preposterousness of such an unaesthetic
personage as Immanuel Kant enthroned in its centre! Think of german
books on religions-philosophie, with the heart's battles
translated into conceptual jargon and made dialectic. The most
persistent setter of questions, feeler of objections, insister on
satisfactions, is the religious life. Yet all its troubles can be
treated with absurdly little technicality. The wonder is that, with
their way of working philosophy, individual Germans should preserve any
spontaneity of mind at all. That they still manifest freshness and
originality in so eminent a degree, proves the indestructible richness
of the german cerebral endowment.
Let me repeat once more that a man's vision is the great fact about
him. Who cares for Carlyle's reasons, or Schopenhauer's, or Spencer's?
A philosophy is the expression of a man's intimate character, and all
definitions of the universe are but the deliberately adopted reactions
of human characters upon it. In the recent book from which I quoted the
words of Professor Paulsen, a book of successive chapters by various
living german philosophers,[4] we pass from one idiosyncratic personal
atmosphere into another almost as if we were turning over a photograph
album.
If we take the whole history of philosophy, the systems reduce
themselves to a few main types which, under all the technical verbiage
in which the ingenious intellect of man envelops them, are just so many
visions, modes of feeling the whole push, and seeing the whole drift of
life, forced on one by one's total character and experience, and on the
whole preferred—there is no other truthful word—as one's best
working attitude. Cynical characters take one general attitude,
sympathetic characters another. But no general attitude is possible
towards the world as a whole, until the intellect has developed
considerable generalizing power and learned to take pleasure in
synthetic formulas. The thought of very primitive men has hardly any
tincture of philosophy. Nature can have little unity for savages. It is
a Walpurgis-nacht procession, a checkered play of light and shadow, a
medley of impish and elfish friendly and inimical powers. 'Close to
nature' though they live, they are anything but Wordsworthians. If a
bit of cosmic emotion ever thrills them, it is likely to be at
midnight, when the camp smoke rises straight to the wicked full moon in
the zenith, and the forest is all whispering with witchery and danger.
The eeriness of the world, the mischief and the manyness, the
littleness of the forces, the magical surprises, the unaccountability
of every agent, these surely are the characters most impressive at that
stage of culture, these communicate the thrills of curiosity and the
earliest intellectual stirrings. Tempests and conflagrations,
pestilences and earthquakes, reveal supramundane powers, and instigate
religious terror rather than philosophy. Nature, more demonic than
divine, is above all things multifarious. So many creatures that
feed or threaten, that help or crush, so many beings to hate or love,
to understand or start at—which is on top and which subordinate? Who
can tell? They are co-ordinate, rather, and to adapt ourselves to them
singly, to 'square' the dangerous powers and keep the others friendly,
regardless of consistency or unity, is the chief problem. The symbol of
nature at this stage, as Paulsen well says, is the sphinx, under whose
nourishing breasts the tearing claws are visible.
But in due course of time the intellect awoke, with its passion for
generalizing, simplifying, and subordinating, and then began those
divergences of conception which all later experience seems rather to
have deepened than to have effaced, because objective nature has
contributed to both sides impartially, and has let the thinkers
emphasize different parts of her, and pile up opposite imaginary
supplements.
Perhaps the most interesting opposition is that which results from
the clash between what I lately called the sympathetic and the cynical
temper. Materialistic and spiritualistic philosophies are the rival
types that result: the former defining the world so as to leave man's
soul upon it as a soil of outside passenger or alien, while the latter
insists that the intimate and human must surround and underlie the
brutal. This latter is the spiritual way of thinking.
Now there are two very distinct types or stages in spiritualistic
philosophy, and my next purpose in this lecture is to make their
contrast evident. Both types attain the sought-for intimacy of view,
but the one attains it somewhat less successfully than the other.
The generic term spiritualism, which I began by using merely as the
opposite of materialism, thus subdivides into two species, the more
intimate one of which is monistic and the less intimate dualistic. The
dualistic species is the theism that reached its elaboration in
the scholastic philosophy, while the monistic species is the
pantheism spoken of sometimes simply as idealism, and sometimes as
'post-kantian' or 'absolute' idealism. Dualistic theism is professed as
firmly as ever at all catholic seats of learning, whereas it has of
late years tended to disappear at our british and american
universities, and to be replaced by a monistic pantheism more or less
open or disguised. I have an impression that ever since T.H. Green's
time absolute idealism has been decidedly in the ascendent at Oxford.
It is in the ascendent at my own university of Harvard.
Absolute idealism attains, I said, to the more intimate point of
view; but the statement needs some explanation. So far as theism
represents the world as God's world, and God as what Matthew Arnold
called a magnified non-natural man, it would seem as if the inner
quality of the world remained human, and as if our relations with it
might be intimate enough—for what is best in ourselves appears then
also outside of ourselves, and we and the universe are of the same
spiritual species. So far, so good, then; and one might consequently
ask, What more of intimacy do you require? To which the answer is that
to be like a thing is not as intimate a relation as to be substantially
fused into it, to form one continuous soul and body with it; and that
pantheistic idealism, making us entitatively one with God, attains this
higher reach of intimacy.
The theistic conception, picturing God and his creation as entities
distinct from each other, still leaves the human subject outside of the
deepest reality in the universe. God is from eternity complete, it
says, and sufficient unto himself; he throws off the world by a free
act and as an extraneous substance, and he throws off man as a third
substance, extraneous to both the world and himself. Between them, God
says 'one,' the world says 'two,' and man says 'three,'—that is the
orthodox theistic view. And orthodox theism has been so jealous of
God's glory that it has taken pains to exaggerate everything in the
notion of him that could make for isolation and separateness. Page upon
page in scholastic books go to prove that God is in no sense implicated
by his creative act, or involved in his creation. That his relation to
the creatures he has made should make any difference to him, carry any
consequence, or qualify his being, is repudiated as a pantheistic slur
upon his self-sufficingness. I said a moment ago that theism treats us
and God as of the same species, but from the orthodox point of view
that was a slip of language. God and his creatures are toto genere
distinct in the scholastic theology, they have absolutely nothing
in common; nay, it degrades God to attribute to him any generic nature
whatever; he can be classed with nothing. There is a sense, then, in
which philosophic theism makes us outsiders and keeps us foreigners in
relation to God, in which, at any rate, his connexion with us appears
as unilateral and not reciprocal. His action can affect us, but he can
never be affected by our reaction. Our relation, in short, is not a
strictly social relation. Of course in common men's religion the
relation is believed to be social, but that is only one of the many
differences between religion and theology.
This essential dualism of the theistic view has all sorts of
collateral consequences. Man being an outsider and a mere subject to
God, not his intimate partner, a character of externality invades the
field. God is not heart of our heart and reason of our reason, but our
magistrate, rather; and mechanically to obey his commands, however
strange they may be, remains our only moral duty. Conceptions of
criminal law have in fact played a great part in defining our relations
with him. Our relations with speculative truth show the same
externality. One of our duties is to know truth, and rationalist
thinkers have always assumed it to be our sovereign duty. But in
scholastic theism we find truth already instituted and established
without our help, complete apart from our knowing; and the most we can
do is to acknowledge it passively and adhere to it, altho such adhesion
as ours can make no jot of difference to what is adhered to. The
situation here again is radically dualistic. It is not as if the world
came to know itself, or God came to know himself, partly through us, as
pantheistic idealists have maintained, but truth exists per se
and absolutely, by God's grace and decree, no matter who of us knows it
or is ignorant, and it would continue to exist unaltered, even though
we finite knowers were all annihilated.
It has to be confessed that this dualism and lack of intimacy has
always operated as a drag and handicap on Christian thought. Orthodox
theology has had to wage a steady fight within the schools against the
various forms of pantheistic heresy which the mystical experiences of
religious persons, on the one hand, and the formal or aesthetic
superiorities of monism to dualism, on the other, kept producing. God
as intimate soul and reason of the universe has always seemed to some
people a more worthy conception than God as external creator. So
conceived, he appeared to unify the world more perfectly, he made it
less finite and mechanical, and in comparison with such a God an
external creator seemed more like the product of a childish fancy. I
have been told by Hindoos that the great obstacle to the spread of
Christianity in their country is the puerility of our dogma of
creation. It has not sweep and infinity enough to meet the requirements
of even the illiterate natives of India.
Assuredly most members of this audience are ready to side with
Hinduism in this matter. Those of us who are sexagenarians have
witnessed in our own persons one of those gradual mutations of
intellectual climate, due to innumerable influences, that make the
thought of a past generation seem as foreign to its successor as if it
were the expression of a different race of men. The theological
machinery that spoke so livingly to our ancestors, with its finite age
of the world, its creation out of nothing, its juridical morality and
eschatology, its relish for rewards and punishments, its treatment of
God as an external contriver, an 'intelligent and moral governor,'
sounds as odd to most of us as if it were some outlandish savage
religion. The vaster vistas which scientific evolutionism has opened,
and the rising tide of social democratic ideals, have changed the type
of our imagination, and the older monarchical theism is obsolete or
obsolescent. The place of the divine in the world must be more organic
and intimate. An external creator and his institutions may still be
verbally confessed at Church in formulas that linger by their mere
inertia, but the life is out of them, we avoid dwelling on them, the
sincere heart of us is elsewhere. I shall leave cynical materialism
entirely out of our discussion as not calling for treatment before this
present audience, and I shall ignore old-fashioned dualistic theism for
the same reason. Our contemporary mind having once for all grasped the
possibility of a more intimate Weltanschauung, the only opinions
quite worthy of arresting our attention will fall within the general
scope of what may roughly be called the pantheistic field of vision,
the vision of God as the indwelling divine rather than the external
creator, and of human life as part and parcel of that deep reality.
As we have found that spiritualism in general breaks into a more
intimate and a less intimate species, so the more intimate species
itself breaks into two subspecies, of which the one is more monistic,
the other more pluralistic in form. I say in form, for our vocabulary
gets unmanageable if we don't distinguish between form and substance
here. The inner life of things must be substantially akin anyhow to the
tenderer parts of man's nature in any spiritualistic philosophy. The
word 'intimacy' probably covers the essential difference. Materialism
holds the foreign in things to be more primary and lasting, it sends us
to a lonely corner with our intimacy. The brutal aspects overlap and
outwear; refinement has the feebler and more ephemeral hold on reality.
From a pragmatic point of view the difference between living against
a background of foreignness and one of intimacy means the difference
between a general habit of wariness and one of trust. One might call it
a social difference, for after all, the common socius of us all
is the great universe whose children we are. If materialistic, we must
be suspicious of this socius, cautious, tense, on guard. If
spiritualistic, we may give way, embrace, and keep no ultimate fear.
The contrast is rough enough, and can be cut across by all sorts of
other divisions, drawn from other points of view than that of
foreignness and intimacy. We have so many different businesses with
nature that no one of them yields us an all-embracing clasp. The
philosophic attempt to define nature so that no one's business is left
out, so that no one lies outside the door saying 'Where do I
come in?' is sure in advance to fail. The most a philosophy can hope
for is not to lock out any interest forever. No matter what doors it
closes, it must leave other doors open for the interests which it
neglects. I have begun by shutting ourselves up to intimacy and
foreignness because that makes so generally interesting a contrast, and
because it will conveniently introduce a farther contrast to which I
wish this hour to lead.
The majority of men are sympathetic. Comparatively few are cynics
because they like cynicism, and most of our existing materialists are
such because they think the evidence of facts impels them, or because
they find the idealists they are in contact with too private and
tender-minded; so, rather than join their company, they fly to the
opposite extreme. I therefore propose to you to disregard materialists
altogether for the present, and to consider the sympathetic party
alone.
It is normal, I say, to be sympathetic in the sense in which I use
the term. Not to demand intimate relations with the universe, and not
to wish them satisfactory, should be accounted signs of something
wrong. Accordingly when minds of this type reach the philosophic level,
and seek some unification of their vision, they find themselves
compelled to correct that aboriginal appearance of things by which
savages are not troubled. That sphinx-like presence, with its breasts
and claws, that first bald multifariousness, is too discrepant an
object for philosophic contemplation. The intimacy and the foreignness
cannot be written down as simply coexisting. An order must be made; and
in that order the higher side of things must dominate. The philosophy
of the absolute agrees with the pluralistic philosophy which I am going
to contrast with it in these lectures, in that both identify human
substance with the divine substance. But whereas absolutism thinks that
the said substance becomes fully divine only in the form of totality,
and is not its real self in any form but the all-form, the
pluralistic view which I prefer to adopt is willing to believe that
there may ultimately never be an all-form at all, that the substance of
reality may never get totally collected, that some of it may remain
outside of the largest combination of it ever made, and that a
distributive form of reality, the each-form, is logically as
acceptable and empirically as probable as the all-form commonly
acquiesced in as so obviously the self-evident thing. The contrast
between these two forms of a reality which we will agree to suppose
substantially spiritual is practically the topic of this course of
lectures. You see now what I mean by pantheism's two subspecies. If we
give to the monistic subspecies the name of philosophy of the absolute,
we may give that of radical empiricism to its pluralistic rival, and it
may be well to distinguish them occasionally later by these names.
As a convenient way of entering into the study of their differences,
I may refer to a recent article by Professor Jacks of Manchester
College. Professor Jacks, in some brilliant pages in the 'Hibbert
Journal' for last October, studies the relation between the universe
and the philosopher who describes and defines it for us. You may assume
two cases, he says. Either what the philosopher tells us is extraneous
to the universe he is accounting for, an indifferent parasitic
outgrowth, so to speak; or the fact of his philosophizing is itself one
of the things taken account of in the philosophy, and self-included in
the description. In the former case the philosopher means by the
universe everything except what his own presence brings; in the
latter case his philosophy is itself an intimate part of the universe,
and may be a part momentous enough to give a different turn to what the
other parts signify. It may be a supreme reaction of the universe upon
itself by which it rises to self-comprehension. It may handle itself
differently in consequence of this event.
Now both empiricism and absolutism bring the philosopher inside and
make man intimate, but the one being pluralistic and the other
monistic, they do so in differing ways that need much explanation. Let
me then contrast the one with the other way of representing the status
of the human thinker.
For monism the world is no collection, but one great all-inclusive
fact outside of which is nothing—nothing is its only alternative. When
the monism is idealistic, this all-enveloping fact is represented as an
absolute mind that makes the partial facts by thinking them, just as we
make objects in a dream by dreaming them, or personages in a story by
imagining them. To be, on this scheme, is, on the part of a
finite thing, to be an object for the absolute; and on the part of the
absolute it is to be the thinker of that assemblage of objects. If we
use the word 'content' here, we see that the absolute and the world
have an identical content. The absolute is nothing but the knowledge of
those objects; the objects are nothing but what the absolute knows. The
world and the all-thinker thus compenetrate and soak each other up
without residuum. They are but two names for the same identical
material, considered now from the subjective, and now from the
objective point of view—gedanke and gedachtes, as we would say if we
were Germans. We philosophers naturally form part of the material, on
the monistic scheme. The absolute makes us by thinking us, and if we
ourselves are enlightened enough to be believers in the absolute, one
may then say that our philosophizing is one of the ways in which the
absolute is conscious of itself. This is the full pantheistic scheme,
the identitaetsphilosophie, the immanence of God in his
creation, a conception sublime from its tremendous unity. And yet that
unity is incomplete, as closer examination will show.
The absolute and the world are one fact, I said, when materially
considered. Our philosophy, for example, is not numerically distinct
from the absolute's own knowledge of itself, not a duplicate and copy
of it, it is part of that very knowledge, is numerically identical with
as much of it as our thought covers. The absolute just is our
philosophy, along with everything else that is known, in an act of
knowing which (to use the words of my gifted absolutist colleague
Royce) forms in its wholeness one luminously transparent conscious
moment.
But one as we are in this material sense with the absolute
substance, that being only the whole of us, and we only the parts of
it, yet in a formal sense something like a pluralism breaks out. When
we speak of the absolute we take the one universal known
material collectively or integrally; when we speak of its objects, of
our finite selves, etc., we take that same identical material
distributively and separately. But what is the use of a thing's
being only once if it can be taken twice over, and if being
taken in different ways makes different things true of it? As the
absolute takes me, for example, I appear with everything else in
its field of perfect knowledge. As I take myself, I appear without
most other things in my field of relative ignorance. And practical
differences result from its knowledge and my ignorance. Ignorance
breeds mistake, curiosity, misfortune, pain, for me; I suffer those
consequences. The absolute knows of those things, of course, for it
knows me and my suffering, but it doesn't itself suffer. It can't be
ignorant, for simultaneous with its knowledge of each question goes its
knowledge of each answer. It can't be patient, for it has to wait for
nothing, having everything at once in its possession. It can't be
surprised; it can't be guilty. No attribute connected with succession
can be applied to it, for it is all at once and wholly what it is,
'with the unity of a single instant,' and succession is not of it but
in it, for we are continually told that it is 'timeless.'
Things true of the world in its finite aspects, then, are not true
of it in its infinite capacity. Qua finite and plural its
accounts of itself to itself are different from what its account to
itself qua infinite and one must be.
With this radical discrepancy between the absolute and the relative
points of view, it seems to me that almost as great a bar to intimacy
between the divine and the human breaks out in pantheism as that which
we found in monarchical theism, and hoped that pantheism might not
show. We humans are incurably rooted in the temporal point of view. The
eternal's ways are utterly unlike our ways. 'Let us imitate the All,'
said the original prospectus of that admirable Chicago quarterly called
the 'Monist.' As if we could, either in thought or conduct! We are
invincibly parts, let us talk as we will, and must always apprehend the
absolute as if it were a foreign being. If what I mean by this is not
wholly clear to you at this point, it ought to grow clearer as my
lectures proceed.