Directly or indirectly, that strange and powerful genius Hegel has
done more to strengthen idealistic pantheism in thoughtful circles than
all other influences put together. I must talk a little about him
before drawing my final conclusions about the cogency of the arguments
for the absolute. In no philosophy is the fact that a philosopher's
vision and the technique he uses in proof of it are two different
things more palpably evident than in Hegel. The vision in his case was
that of a world in which reason holds all things in solution and
accounts for all the irrationality that superficially appears by taking
it up as a 'moment' into itself. This vision was so intense in Hegel,
and the tone of authority with which he spoke from out of the midst of
it was so weighty, that the impression he made has never been effaced.
Once dilated to the scale of the master's eye, the disciples' sight
could not contract to any lesser prospect. The technique which Hegel
used to prove his vision was the so-called dialectic method, but here
his fortune has been quite contrary. Hardly a recent disciple has felt
his particular applications of the method to be satisfactory. Many have
let them drop entirely, treating them rather as a sort of provisional
stop-gap, symbolic of what might some day prove possible of execution,
but having no literal cogency or value now. Yet these very same
disciples hold to the vision itself as a revelation that can never pass
away. The case is curious and worthy of our study.
It is still more curious in that these same disciples, altho they
are usually willing to abandon any particular instance of the dialectic
method to its critics, are unshakably sure that in some shape the
dialectic method is the key to truth. What, then, is the dialectic
method? It is itself a part of the hegelian vision or intuition, and a
part that finds the strongest echo in empiricism and common sense.
Great injustice is done to Hegel by treating him as primarily a
reasoner. He is in reality a naively observant man, only beset with a
perverse preference for the use of technical and logical jargon. He
plants himself in the empirical flux of things and gets the impression
of what happens. His mind is in very truth impressionistic; and
his thought, when once you put yourself at the animating centre of it,
is the easiest thing in the world to catch the pulse of and to follow.
Any author is easy if you can catch the centre of his vision. From
the centre in Hegel come those towering sentences of his that are
comparable only to Luther's, as where, speaking of the ontological
proof of God's existence from the concept of him as the ens
perfectissimum to which no attribute can be lacking, he says: 'It
would be strange if the Notion, the very heart of the mind, or, in a
word, the concrete totality we call God, were not rich enough to
embrace so poor a category as Being, the very poorest and most abstract
of all—for nothing can be more insignificant than Being.' But if
Hegel's central thought is easy to catch, his abominable habits of
speech make his application of it to details exceedingly difficult to
follow. His passion for the slipshod in the way of sentences, his
unprincipled playing fast and loose with terms; his dreadful
vocabulary, calling what completes a thing its 'negation,' for example;
his systematic refusal to let you know whether he is talking logic or
physics or psychology, his whole deliberately adopted policy of
ambiguity and vagueness, in short: all these things make his
present-day readers wish to tear their hair—or his—out in
desperation. Like Byron's corsair, he has left a name 'to other times,
linked with one virtue and a thousand crimes.'
The virtue was the vision, which was really in two parts. The first
part was that reason is all-inclusive, the second was that things are
'dialectic.' Let me say a word about this second part of Hegel's
vision.
The impression that any naif person gets who plants himself
innocently in the flux of things is that things are off their balance.
Whatever equilibriums our finite experiences attain to are but
provisional. Martinique volcanoes shatter our wordsworthian equilibrium
with nature. Accidents, either moral, mental, or physical, break up the
slowly built-up equilibriums men reach in family life and in their
civic and professional relations. Intellectual enigmas frustrate our
scientific systems, and the ultimate cruelty of the universe upsets our
religious attitudes and outlooks. Of no special system of good attained
does the universe recognize the value as sacred. Down it tumbles, over
it goes, to feed the ravenous appetite for destruction, of the larger
system of history in which it stood for a moment as a landing-place and
stepping-stone. This dogging of everything by its negative, its fate,
its undoing, this perpetual moving on to something future which shall
supersede the present, this is the hegelian intuition of the essential
provisionality, and consequent unreality, of everything empirical and
finite. Take any concrete finite thing and try to hold it fast. You
cannot, for so held, it proves not to be concrete at all, but an
arbitrary extract or abstract which you have made from the remainder of
empirical reality. The rest of things invades and overflows both it and
you together, and defeats your rash attempt. Any partial view whatever
of the world tears the part out of its relations, leaves out some truth
concerning it, is untrue of it, falsifies it. The full truth about
anything involves more than that thing. In the end nothing less than
the whole of everything can be the truth of anything at all.
Taken so far, and taken in the rough, Hegel is not only harmless,
but accurate. There is a dialectic movement in things, if such it
please you to call it, one that the whole constitution of concrete life
establishes; but it is one that can be described and accounted for in
terms of the pluralistic vision of things far more naturally than in
the monistic terms to which Hegel finally reduced it. Pluralistic
empiricism knows that everything is in an environment, a surrounding
world of other things, and that if you leave it to work there it will
inevitably meet with friction and opposition from its neighbors. Its
rivals and enemies will destroy it unless it can buy them off by
compromising some part of its original pretensions.
But Hegel saw this undeniable characteristic of the world we live in
in a non-empirical light. Let the mental idea of the thing work
in your thought all alone, he fancied, and just the same consequences
will follow. It will be negated by the opposite ideas that dog it, and
can survive only by entering, along with them, into some kind of
treaty. This treaty will be an instance of the so-called 'higher
synthesis' of everything with its negative; and Hegel's originality lay
in transporting the process from the sphere of percepts to that of
concepts and treating it as the universal method by which every kind of
life, logical, physical, or psychological, is mediated. Not to the
sensible facts as such, then, did Hegel point for the secret of what
keeps existence going, but rather to the conceptual way of treating
them. Concepts were not in his eyes the static self-contained things
that previous logicians had supposed, but were germinative, and passed
beyond themselves into each other by what he called their immanent
dialectic. In ignoring each other as they do, they virtually exclude
and deny each other, he thought, and thus in a manner introduce each
other. So the dialectic logic, according to him, had to supersede the
'logic of identity' in which, since Aristotle, all Europe had been
brought up.
This view of concepts is Hegel's revolutionary performance; but so
studiously vague and ambiguous are all his expressions of it that one
can hardly tell whether it is the concepts as such, or the sensible
experiences and elements conceived, that Hegel really means to work
with. The only thing that is certain is that whatever you may say of
his procedure, some one will accuse you of misunderstanding it. I make
no claim to understanding it, I treat it merely impressionistically.
So treating it, I regret that he should have called it by the name
of logic. Clinging as he did to the vision of a really living world,
and refusing to be content with a chopped-up intellectualist picture of
it, it is a pity that he should have adopted the very word that
intellectualism had already pre-empted. But he clung fast to the old
rationalist contempt for the immediately given world of sense and all
its squalid particulars, and never tolerated the notion that the form
of philosophy might be empirical only. His own system had to be a
product of eternal reason, so the word 'logic,' with its suggestions of
coercive necessity, was the only word he could find natural. He
pretended therefore to be using the a priori method, and to be
working by a scanty equipment of ancient logical terms—position,
negation, reflection, universal, particular, individual, and the like.
But what he really worked by was his own empirical perceptions, which
exceeded and overflowed his miserably insufficient logical categories
in every instance of their use.
What he did with the category of negation was his most original
stroke. The orthodox opinion is that you can advance logically through
the field of concepts only by going from the same to the same. Hegel
felt deeply the sterility of this law of conceptual thought; he saw
that in a fashion negation also relates things; and he had the
brilliant idea of transcending the ordinary logic by treating advance
from the different to the different as if it were also a necessity of
thought. 'The so-called maxim of identity,' he wrote, 'is supposed to
be accepted by the consciousness of every one. But the language which
such a law demands, “a planet is a planet, magnetism is magnetism, mind
is mind,” deserves to be called silliness. No mind either speaks or
thinks or forms conceptions in accordance with this law, and no
existence of any kind whatever conforms to it. We must never view
identity as abstract identity, to the exclusion of all difference. That
is the touchstone for distinguishing all bad philosophy from what alone
deserves the name of philosophy. If thinking were no more than
registering abstract identities, it would be a most superfluous
performance. Things and concepts are identical with themselves only in
so far as at the same time they involve distinction.'[1]
The distinction that Hegel has in mind here is naturally in the
first instance distinction from all other things or concepts. But in
his hands this quickly develops into contradiction of them, and
finally, reflected back upon itself, into self-contradiction; and the
immanent self-contradictoriness of all finite concepts thenceforth
becomes the propulsive logical force that moves the world.[2] 'Isolate
a thing from all its relations,' says Dr. Edward Caird,[3] expounding
Hegel, 'and try to assert it by itself; you find that it has negated
itself as well as its relations. The thing in itself is nothing.' Or,
to quote Hegel's own words: 'When we suppose an existent A, and
another, B, B is at first defined as the other. But A is just as much
the other of B. Both are others in the same fashion.... “Other” is the
other by itself, therefore the other of every other, consequently the
other of itself, the simply unlike itself, the self-negator, the
self-alterer,' etc.[4] Hegel writes elsewhere: 'The finite, as
implicitly other than what it is, is forced to surrender its own
immediate or natural being, and to turn suddenly into its opposite....
Dialectic is the universal and irresistible power before which nothing
can stay.... Summum jus, summa injuria—to drive an abstract
right to excess is to commit injustice.... Extreme anarchy and extreme
despotism lead to one another. Pride comes before a fall. Too much wit
outwits itself. Joy brings tears, melancholy a sardonic smile.'[5] To
which one well might add that most human institutions, by the purely
technical and professional manner in which they come to be
administered, end by becoming obstacles to the very purposes which
their founders had in view.
Once catch well the knack of this scheme of thought and you are
lucky if you ever get away from it. It is all you can see. Let any one
pronounce anything, and your feeling of a contradiction being implied
becomes a habit, almost a motor habit in some persons who symbolize by
a stereotyped gesture the position, sublation, and final reinstatement
involved. If you say 'two' or 'many,' your speech betrayeth you, for
the very name collects them into one. If you express doubt, your
expression contradicts its content, for the doubt itself is not doubted
but affirmed. If you say 'disorder,' what is that but a certain bad
kind of order? if you say 'indetermination,' you are determining just
that. If you say 'nothing but the unexpected happens,' the
unexpected becomes what you expect. If you say 'all things are
relative,' to what is the all of them itself relative? If you say 'no
more,' you have said more already, by implying a region in which no
more is found; to know a limit as such is consequently already to have
got beyond it; And so forth, throughout as many examples as one cares
to cite.
Whatever you posit appears thus as one-sided, and negates its other,
which, being equally one-sided, negates it; and, since this
situation remains unstable, the two contradictory terms have together,
according to Hegel, to engender a higher truth of which they both
appear as indispensable members, mutually mediating aspects of that
higher concept of situation in thought.
Every higher total, however provisional and relative, thus
reconciles the contradictions which its parts, abstracted from it,
prove implicitly to contain. Rationalism, you remember, is what I
called the way of thinking that methodically subordinates parts to
wholes, so Hegel here is rationalistic through and through. The only
whole by which all contradictions are reconciled is for him the
absolute whole of wholes, the all-inclusive reason to which Hegel
himself gave the name of the absolute Idea, but which I shall continue
to call 'the absolute' purely and simply, as I have done hitherto.
Empirical instances of the way in which higher unities reconcile
contradictions are innumerable, so here again Hegel's vision, taken
merely impressionistically, agrees with countless facts. Somehow life
does, out of its total resources, find ways of satisfying opposites at
once. This is precisely the paradoxical aspect which much of our
civilization presents. Peace we secure by armaments, liberty by laws
and constitutions; simplicity and naturalness are the consummate result
of artificial breeding and training; health, strength, and wealth are
increased only by lavish use, expense, and wear. Our mistrust of
mistrust engenders our commercial system of credit; our tolerance of
anarchistic and revolutionary utterances is the only way of lessening
their danger; our charity has to say no to beggars in order not to
defeat its own desires; the true epicurean has to observe great
sobriety; the way to certainty lies through radical doubt; virtue
signifies not innocence but the knowledge of sin and its overcoming; by
obeying nature, we command her, etc. The ethical and the religious life
are full of such contradictions held in solution. You hate your
enemy?—well, forgive him, and thereby heap coals of fire on his head;
to realize yourself, renounce yourself; to save your soul, first lose
it; in short, die to live.
From such massive examples one easily generalizes Hegel's vision.
Roughly, his 'dialectic' picture is a fair account of a good deal of
the world. It sounds paradoxical, but whenever you once place yourself
at the point of view; of any higher synthesis, you see exactly how it
does in a fashion take up opposites into itself. As an example,
consider the conflict between our carnivorous appetites and hunting
instincts and the sympathy with animals which our refinement is
bringing in its train. We have found how to reconcile these opposites
most effectively by establishing game-laws and close seasons and by
keeping domestic herds. The creatures preserved thus are preserved for
the sake of slaughter, truly, but if not preserved for that reason, not
one of them would be alive at all. Their will to live and our will to
kill them thus harmoniously combine in this peculiar higher synthesis
of domestication.
Merely as a reporter of certain empirical aspects of the actual,
Hegel, then, is great and true. But he aimed at being something far
greater than an empirical reporter, so I must say something about that
essential aspect of his thought. Hegel was dominated by the notion of a
truth that should prove incontrovertible, binding on every one, and
certain, which should be the truth, one, indivisible, eternal,
objective, and necessary, to which all our particular thinking must
lead as to its consummation. This is the dogmatic ideal, the postulate,
uncriticised, undoubted, and unchallenged, of all rationalizers in
philosophy. 'I have never doubted,' a recent Oxford writer says,
that truth is universal and single and timeless, a single content or
significance, one and whole and complete.[6] Advance in thinking, in
the hegelian universe, has, in short, to proceed by the apodictic words
must be rather than by those inferior hypothetic words may be, which are all that empiricists can use.
Now Hegel found that his idea of an immanent movement through the
field of concepts by way of 'dialectic' negation played most
beautifully into the hands of this rationalistic demand for something
absolute and inconcussum in the way of truth. It is easy to see
how. If you affirm anything, for example that A is, and simply leave
the matter thus, you leave it at the mercy of any one who may supervene
and say 'not A, but B is.' If he does say so, your statement doesn't
refute him, it simply contradicts him, just as his contradicts you. The
only way of making your affirmation about A self-securing is by
getting it into a form which will by implication negate all possible
negations in advance. The mere absence of negation is not enough; it
must be present, but present with its fangs drawn. What you posit as A
must already have cancelled the alternative or made it innocuous, by
having negated it in advance. Double negation is the only form of
affirmation that fully plays into the hands of the dogmatic ideal.
Simply and innocently affirmative statements are good enough for
empiricists, but unfit for rationalist use, lying open as they do to
every accidental contradictor, and exposed to every puff of doubt. The
final truth must be something to which there is no imaginable
alternative, because it contains all its possible alternatives inside
of itself as moments already taken account of and overcome. Whatever
involves its own alternatives as elements of itself is, in a phrase
often repeated, its 'own other,' made so by the methode der
absoluten negativitaet.
Formally, this scheme of an organism of truth that has already fed
as it were on its own liability to death, so that, death once dead for
it, there's no more dying then, is the very fulfilment of the
rationalistic aspiration. That one and only whole, with all its parts
involved in it, negating and making one another impossible if
abstracted and taken singly, but necessitating and holding one another
in place if the whole of them be taken integrally, is the literal ideal
sought after; it is the very diagram and picture of that notion of
the truth with no outlying alternative, to which nothing can be
added, nor from it anything withdrawn, and all variations from which
are absurd, which so dominates the human imagination. Once we have
taken in the features of this diagram that so successfully solves the
world-old problem, the older ways of proving the necessity of judgments
cease to give us satisfaction. Hegel's way we think must be the right
way. The true must be essentially the self-reflecting self-contained
recurrent, that which secures itself by including its own other and
negating it; that makes a spherical system with no loose ends hanging
out for foreignness to get a hold upon; that is forever rounded in and
closed, not strung along rectilinearly and open at its ends like that
universe of simply collective or additive form which Hegel calls the
world of the bad infinite, and which is all that empiricism, starting
with simply posited single parts and elements, is ever able to attain
to.
No one can possibly deny the sublimity of this hegelian conception.
It is surely in the grand style, if there be such a thing as a grand
style in philosophy. For us, however, it remains, so far, a merely
formal and diagrammatic conception; for with the actual content of
absolute truth, as Hegel materially tries to set it forth, few
disciples have been satisfied, and I do not propose to refer at all to
the concreter parts of his philosophy. The main thing now is to grasp
the generalized vision, and feel the authority of the abstract scheme
of a statement self-secured by involving double negation. Absolutists
who make no use of Hegel's own technique are really working by his
method. You remember the proofs of the absolute which I instanced in my
last lecture, Lotze's and Royce's proofs by reductio ad absurdum, to the effect that any smallest connexion rashly supposed in things
will logically work out into absolute union, and any minimal
disconnexion into absolute disunion,—these are really arguments framed
on the hegelian pattern. The truth is that which you implicitly affirm
in the very attempt to deny it; it is that from which every variation
refutes itself by proving self-contradictory. This is the supreme
insight of rationalism, and to-day the best must-be's of
rationalist argumentation are but so many attempts to communicate it to
the hearer.
Thus, you see, my last lecture and this lecture make connexion again
and we can consider Hegel and the other absolutists to be supporting
the same system. The next point I wish to dwell on is the part played
by what I have called vicious intellectualism in this wonderful
system's structure.
Rationalism in general thinks it gets the fulness of truth by
turning away from sensation to conception, conception obviously giving
the more universal and immutable picture. Intellectualism in the
vicious sense I have already defined as the habit of assuming that a
concept ex_cludes from any reality conceived by its means everything
not included in the concept's definition. I called such intellectualism
illegitimate as I found it used in Lotze's, Royce's, and Bradley's
proofs of the absolute (which absolute I consequently held to be
non-proven by their arguments), and I left off by asserting my own
belief that a pluralistic and incompletely integrated universe,
describable only by the free use of the word 'some,' is a legitimate
hypothesis.
Now Hegel himself, in building up his method of double negation,
offers the vividest possible example of this vice of intellectualism.
Every idea of a finite thing is of course a concept of that
thing and not a concept of anything else. But Hegel treats this not
being a concept of anything else as if it were equivalent to the
concept of anything else not being, or in other words as if it were
a denial or negation of everything else. Then, as the other things,
thus implicitly contradicted by the thing first conceived, also by the
same law contradict it, the pulse of dialectic commences to beat
and the famous triads begin to grind out the cosmos. If any one finds
the process here to be a luminous one, he must be left to the
illumination, he must remain an undisturbed hegelian. What others feel
as the intolerable ambiguity, verbosity, and unscrupulousness of the
master's way of deducing things, he will probably ascribe—since divine
oracles are notoriously hard to interpret—to the 'difficulty' that
habitually accompanies profundity. For my own part, there seems
something grotesque and saugrenu in the pretension of a style so
disobedient to the first rules of sound communication between minds, to
be the authentic mother-tongue of reason, and to keep step more
accurately than any other style does with the absolute's own ways of
thinking. I do not therefore take Hegel's technical apparatus seriously
at all. I regard him rather as one of those numerous original seers who
can never learn how to articulate. His would-be coercive logic counts
for nothing in my eyes; but that does not in the least impugn the
philosophic importance of his conception of the absolute, if we take it
merely hypothetically as one of the great types of cosmic vision.
Taken thus hypothetically, I wish to discuss it briefly. But before
doing so I must call your attention to an odd peculiarity in the
hegelian procedure. The peculiarity is one which will come before us
again for a final judgment in my seventh lecture, so at present I only
note it in passing. Hegel, you remember, considers that the immediate
finite data of experience are 'untrue' because they are not their own
others. They are negated by what is external to them. The absolute is
true because it and it only has no external environment, and has
attained to being its own other. (These words sound queer enough, but
those of you who know something of Hegel's text will follow them.)
Granting his premise that to be true a thing must in some sort be its
own other, everything hinges on whether he is right in holding that the
several pieces of finite experience themselves cannot be said to be in
any wise their own others. When conceptually or
intellectualistically treated, they of course cannot be their own
others. Every abstract concept as such excludes what it doesn't
include, and if such concepts are adequate substitutes for reality's
concrete pulses, the latter must square themselves with
intellectualistic logic, and no one of them in any sense can claim to
be its own other. If, however, the conceptual treatment of the flow of
reality should prove for any good reason to be inadequate and to have a
practical rather than a theoretical or speculative value, then an
independent empirical look into the constitution of reality's pulses
might possibly show that some of them are their own others, and
indeed are so in the self-same sense in which the absolute is
maintained to be so by Hegel. When we come to my sixth lecture, on
Professor Bergson, I shall in effect defend this very view,
strengthening my thesis by his authority. I am unwilling to say
anything more about the point at this time, and what I have just said
of it is only a sort of surveyor's note of where our present position
lies in the general framework of these lectures.
Let us turn now at last to the great question of fact, Does the
absolute exist or not? to which all our previous discussion has
been preliminary. I may sum up that discussion by saying that whether
there really be an absolute or not, no one makes himself absurd or
self-contradictory by doubting or denying it. The charges of
self-contradiction, where they do not rest on purely verbal reasoning,
rest on a vicious intellectualism. I will not recapitulate my
criticisms. I will simply ask you to change the venue, and to
discuss the absolute now as if it were only an open hypothesis. As
such, is it more probable or more improbable?
But first of all I must parenthetically ask you to distinguish the
notion of the absolute carefully from that of another object with which
it is liable to become heedlessly entangled. That other object is the
'God' of common people in their religion, and the creator-God of
orthodox christian theology. Only thoroughgoing monists or pantheists
believe in the absolute. The God of our popular Christianity is but one
member of a pluralistic system. He and we stand outside of each other,
just as the devil, the saints, and the angels stand outside of both of
us. I can hardly conceive of anything more different from the absolute
than the God, say, of David or of Isaiah. That God is an
essentially finite being in the cosmos, not with the cosmos in
him, and indeed he has a very local habitation there, and very
one-sided local and personal attachments. If it should prove probable
that the absolute does not exist, it will not follow in the slightest
degree that a God like that of David, Isaiah, or Jesus may not exist,
or may not be the most important existence in the universe for us to
acknowledge. I pray you, then, not to confound the two ideas as you
listen to the criticisms I shall have to proffer. I hold to the finite
God, for reasons which I shall touch on in the seventh of these
lectures; but I hold that his rival and competitor—I feel almost
tempted to say his enemy—the absolute, is not only not forced on us by
logic, but that it is an improbable hypothesis.
The great claim made for the absolute is that by supposing it we
make the world appear more rational. Any hypothesis that does that will
always be accepted as more probably true than an hypothesis that makes
the world appear irrational. Men are once for all so made that they
prefer a rational world to believe in and to live in. But rationality
has at least four dimensions, intellectual, aesthetical, moral, and
practical; and to find a world rational to the maximal degree in all
these respects simultaneously is no easy matter. Intellectually,
the world of mechanical materialism is the most rational, for we
subject its events to mathematical calculation. But the mechanical
world is ugly, as arithmetic is ugly, and it is non-moral. Morally, the
theistic world is rational enough, but full of intellectual
frustrations. The practical world of affairs, in its turn, so supremely
rational to the politician, the military man, or the man of conquering
business-faculty that he never would vote to change the type of it, is
irrational to moral and artistic temperaments; so that whatever demand
for rationality we find satisfied by a philosophic hypothesis, we are
liable to find some other demand for rationality unsatisfied by the
same hypothesis. The rationality we gain in one coin we thus pay for in
another; and the problem accordingly seems at first sight to resolve
itself into that of getting a conception which will yield the largest
balance of rationality rather than one which will yield perfect
rationality of every description. In general, it may be said that if a
man's conception of the world lets loose any action in him that is
easy, or any faculty which he is fond of exercising, he will deem it
rational in so far forth, be the faculty that of computing, fighting,
lecturing, classifying, framing schematic tabulations, getting the
better end of a bargain, patiently waiting and enduring, preaching,
joke-making, or what you like. Albeit the absolute is defined as being
necessarily an embodiment of objectively perfect rationality, it is
fair to its english advocates to say that those who have espoused the
hypothesis most concretely and seriously have usually avowed the
irrationality to their own minds of certain elements in it.
Probably the weightiest contribution to our feeling of the
rationality of the universe which the notion of the absolute brings is
the assurance that however disturbed the surface may be, at bottom all
is well with the cosmos—central peace abiding at the heart of endless
agitation. This conception is rational in many ways, beautiful
aesthetically, beautiful intellectually (could we only follow it into
detail), and beautiful morally, if the enjoyment of security can be
accounted moral. Practically it is less beautiful; for, as we saw in
our last lecture, in representing the deepest reality of the world as
static and without a history, it loosens the world's hold upon our
sympathies and leaves the soul of it foreign. Nevertheless it does give
peace, and that kind of rationality is so paramountly demanded by
men that to the end of time there will be absolutists, men who choose
belief in a static eternal, rather than admit that the finite world of
change and striving, even with a God as one of the strivers, is itself
eternal. For such minds Professor Royce's words will always be the
truest: 'The very presence of ill in the temporal order is the
condition of the perfection of the eternal order.... We long for the
absolute only in so far as in us the absolute also longs, and seeks
through our very temporal striving, the peace that is nowhere in time,
but only, and yet absolutely, in eternity. Were there no longing in
time there would be no peace in eternity.... God [i.e. the
absolute] who here in me aims at what I now temporally miss, not only
possesses in the eternal world the goal after which I strive, but comes
to possess it even through and because of my sorrow. Through this my
tribulation the absolute triumph then is won.... In the absolute I am
fulfilled. Yet my very fulfilment demands and therefore can transcend
this sorrow.'[7] Royce is particularly felicitous in his ability to
cite parts of finite experience to which he finds his picture of this
absolute experience analogous. But it is hard to portray the absolute
at all without rising into what might be called the 'inspired' style of
language—I use the word not ironically, but prosaically and
descriptively, to designate the only literary form that goes with the
kind of emotion that the absolute arouses. One can follow the pathway
of reasoning soberly enough,[8] but the picture itself has to be
effulgent. This admirable faculty of transcending, whilst inwardly
preserving, every contrariety, is the absolute's characteristic form of
rationality. We are but syllables in the mouth of the Lord; if the
whole sentence is divine, each syllable is absolutely what it should
be, in spite of all appearances. In making up the balance for or
against absolutism, this emotional value weights heavily the credit
side of the account.
The trouble is that we are able to see so little into the positive
detail of it, and that if once admitted not to be coercively proven by
the intellectualist arguments, it remains only a hypothetic
possibility.
On the debit side of the account the absolute, taken seriously, and
not as a mere name for our right occasionally to drop the strenuous
mood and take a moral holiday, introduces all those tremendous
irrationalities into the universe which a frankly pluralistic theism
escapes, but which have been flung as a reproach at every form of
monistic theism or pantheism. It introduces a speculative 'problem of
evil' namely, and leaves us wondering why the perfection of the
absolute should require just such particular hideous forms of life as
darken the day for our human imaginations. If they were forced on it by
something alien, and to 'overcome' them the absolute had still to keep
hold of them, we could understand its feeling of triumph, though we, so
far as we were ourselves among the elements overcome, could acquiesce
but sullenly in the resultant situation, and would never just have
chosen it as the most rational one conceivable. But the absolute is
represented as a being without environment, upon which nothing alien
can be forced, and which has spontaneously chosen from within to give
itself the spectacle of all that evil rather than a spectacle with less
evil in it.[9] Its perfection is represented as the source of things,
and yet the first effect of that perfection is the tremendous
imperfection of all finite experience. In whatever sense the word
'rationality' may be taken, it is vain to contend that the impression
made on our finite minds by such a way of representing things is
altogether rational. Theologians have felt its irrationality acutely,
and the 'fall,' the predestination, and the election which the
situation involves have given them more trouble than anything else in
their attempt to pantheize Christianity. The whole business remains a
puzzle, both intellectually and morally.
Grant that the spectacle or world-romance offered to itself by the
absolute is in the absolute's eyes perfect. Why would not the world be
more perfect by having the affair remain in just those terms, and by
not having any finite spectators to come in and add to what was perfect
already their innumerable imperfect manners of seeing the same
spectacle? Suppose the entire universe to consist of one superb copy of
a book, fit for the ideal reader. Is that universe improved or
deteriorated by having myriads of garbled and misprinted separate
leaves and chapters also created, giving false impressions of the book
to whoever looks at them? To say the least, the balance of rationality
is not obviously in favor of such added mutilations. So this question
becomes urgent: Why, the absolute's own total vision of things being so
rational, was it necessary to comminute it into all these coexisting
inferior fragmentary visions?
Leibnitz in his theodicy represents God as limited by an antecedent
reason in things which makes certain combinations logically
incompatible, certain goods impossible. He surveys in advance all the
universes he might create, and by an act of what Leibnitz calls his
antecedent will he chooses our actual world as the one in which the
evil, unhappily necessary anyhow, is at its minimum. It is the best of
all the worlds that are possible, therefore, but by no means the most
abstractly desirable world. Having made this mental choice, God next
proceeds to what Leibnitz calls his act of consequent or decretory
will: he says 'Fiat' and the world selected springs into
objective being, with all the finite creatures in it to suffer from its
imperfections without sharing in its creator's atoning vision.
Lotze has made some penetrating remarks on this conception of
Leibnitz's, and they exactly fall in with what I say of the absolutist
conception. The world projected out of the creative mind by the fiat, and existing in detachment from its author, is a sphere of being where
the parts realize themselves only singly. If the divine value of them
is evident only when they are collectively looked at, then, Lotze
rightly says, the world surely becomes poorer and not richer for God's
utterance of the fiat. He might much better have remained
contented with his merely antecedent choice of the scheme, without
following it up by a creative decree. The scheme as such was
admirable; it could only lose by being translated into reality.[10]
Why, I similarly ask, should the absolute ever have lapsed from the
perfection of its own integral experience of things, and refracted
itself into all our finite experiences?
It is but fair to recent english absolutists to say that many of
them have confessed the imperfect rationality of the absolute from this
point of view. Mr. McTaggart, for example, writes: 'Does not our very
failure to perceive the perfection of the universe destroy it? ... In
so far as we do not see the perfection of the universe, we are not
perfect ourselves. And as we are parts of the universe, that cannot be
perfect.'[11]
And Mr. Joachim finds just the same difficulty. Calling the
hypothesis of the absolute by the name of the 'coherence theory of
truth,' he calls the problem of understanding how the complete
coherence of all things in the absolute should involve as a necessary
moment in its self-maintenance the self-assertion of the finite minds,
a self-assertion which in its extreme form is error,—he calls this
problem, I say, an insoluble puzzle. If truth be the universal fons
et origo, how does error slip in? 'The coherence theory of truth,'
he concludes, 'may thus be said to suffer shipwreck at the very
entrance of the harbor.'[12] Yet in spite of this rather bad form of
irrationality, Mr. Joachim stoutly asserts his 'immediate
certainty'[13] of the theory shipwrecked, the correctness of which he
says he has 'never doubted.' This candid confession of a fixed attitude
of faith in the absolute, which even one's own criticisms and
perplexities fail to disturb, seems to me very significant. Not only
empiricists, but absolutists also, would all, if they were as candid as
this author, confess that the prime thing in their philosophy is their
vision of a truth possible, which they then employ their reasoning to
convert, as best it can, into a certainty or probability.
I can imagine a believer in the absolute retorting at this point
that he at any rate is not dealing with mere probabilities, but
that the nature of things logically requires the multitudinous
erroneous copies, and that therefore the universe cannot be the
absolute's book alone. For, he will ask, is not the absolute defined as
the total consciousness of everything that is? Must not its field of
view consist of parts? And what can the parts of a total consciousness
be unless they be fractional consciousnesses? Our finite minds must
therefore coexist with the absolute mind. We are its constituents, and
it cannot live without us.—But if any one of you feels tempted to
retort in this wise, let me remind you that you are frankly employing
pluralistic weapons, and thereby giving up the absolutist cause. The
notion that the absolute is made of constituents on which its being
depends is the rankest empiricism. The absolute as such has objects, not constituents, and if the objects develop selfhoods upon their own
several accounts, those selfhoods must be set down as facts additional
to the absolute consciousness, and not as elements implicated in its
definition. The absolute is a rationalist conception. Rationalism goes
from wholes to parts, and always assumes wholes to be
self-sufficing.[14]
My conclusion, so far, then, is this, that altho the hypothesis of
the absolute, in yielding a certain kind of religious peace, performs a
most important rationalizing function, it nevertheless, from the
intellectual point of view, remains decidedly irrational. The
ideally perfect whole is certainly that whole of which the parts
also are perfect—if we can depend on logic for anything, we can
depend on it for that definition. The absolute is defined as the
ideally perfect whole, yet most of its parts, if not all, are
admittedly imperfect. Evidently the conception lacks internal
consistency, and yields us a problem rather than a solution. It creates
a speculative puzzle, the so-called mystery of evil and of error, from
which a pluralistic metaphysic is entirely free.
In any pluralistic metaphysic, the problems that evil presents are
practical, not speculative. Not why evil should exist at all, but how
we can lessen the actual amount of it, is the sole question we need
there consider. 'God,' in the religious life of ordinary men, is the
name not of the whole of things, heaven forbid, but only of the ideal
tendency in things, believed in as a superhuman person who calls us to
co-operate in his purposes, and who furthers ours if they are worthy.
He works in an external environment, has limits, and has enemies. When
John Mill said that the notion of God's omnipotence must be given up,
if God is to be kept as a religious object, he was surely accurately
right; yet so prevalent is the lazy monism that idly haunts the region
of God's name, that so simple and truthful a saying was generally
treated as a paradox: God, it was said, could not be finite. I
believe that the only God worthy of the name must be finite, and
I shall return to this point in a later lecture. If the absolute exist
in addition—and the hypothesis must, in spite of its irrational
features, still be left open—then the absolute is only the wider
cosmic whole of which our God is but the most ideal portion, and which
in the more usual human sense is hardly to be termed a religious
hypothesis at all. 'Cosmic emotion' is the better name for the reaction
it may awaken.
Observe that all the irrationalities and puzzles which the absolute
gives rise to, and from which the finite God remains free, are due to
the fact that the absolute has nothing, absolutely nothing, outside of
itself. The finite God whom I contrast with it may conceivably have
almost nothing outside of himself; he may already have triumphed
over and absorbed all but the minutest fraction of the universe; but
that fraction, however small, reduces him to the status of a relative
being, and in principle the universe is saved from all the
irrationalities incidental to absolutism. The only irrationality left
would be the irrationality of which pluralism as such is accused, and
of this I hope to say a word more later.
I have tired you with so many subtleties in this lecture that I will
add only two other counts to my indictment.
First, then, let me remind you that the absolute is useless for
deductive purposes. It gives us absolute safety if you will, but it
is compatible with every relative danger. You cannot enter the
phenomenal world with the notion of it in your grasp, and name
beforehand any detail which you are likely to meet there. Whatever the
details of experience may prove to be, after the fact of them
the absolute will adopt them. It is an hypothesis that functions
retrospectively only, not prospectively. That, whatever it may
be, will have been in point of fact the sort of world which the
absolute was pleased to offer to itself as a spectacle.
Again, the absolute is always represented idealistically, as the
all-knower. Thinking this view consistently out leads one to frame an
almost ridiculous conception of the absolute mind, owing to the
enormous mass of unprofitable information which it would then seem
obliged to carry. One of the many reductiones ad absurdum of
pluralism by which idealism thinks it proves the absolute One is as
follows: Let there be many facts; but since on idealist principles
facts exist only by being known, the many facts will therefore mean
many knowers. But that there are so many knowers is itself a fact,
which in turn requires its knower, so the one absolute knower
has eventually to be brought in. All facts lead to him. If it be
a fact that this table is not a chair, not a rhinoceros, not a
logarithm, not a mile away from the door, not worth five hundred pounds
sterling, not a thousand centuries old, the absolute must even now be
articulately aware of all these negations. Along with what everything
is it must also be conscious of everything which it is not. This
infinite atmosphere of explicit negativity—observe that it has to be
explicit—around everything seems to us so useless an encumbrance as to
make the absolute still more foreign to our sympathy. Furthermore, if
it be a fact that certain ideas are silly, the absolute has to have
already thought the silly ideas to establish them in silliness. The
rubbish in its mind would thus appear easily to outweigh in amount the
more desirable material. One would expect it fairly to burst with such
an obesity, plethora, and superfoetation of useless information.[15]
I will spare you further objections. The sum of it all is that the
absolute is not forced on our belief by logic, that it involves
features of irrationality peculiar to itself, and that a thinker to
whom it does not come as an 'immediate certainty' (to use Mr. Joachim's
words), is in no way bound to treat it as anything but an emotionally
rather sublime hypothesis. As such, it might, with all its defects, be,
on account of its peace-conferring power and its formal grandeur, more
rational than anything else in the field. But meanwhile the
strung-along unfinished world in time is its rival: reality MAY
exist in distributive form, in the shape not of an all but of a set of
caches, just as it seems to—this is the anti-absolutist
hypothesis. Prima facie there is this in favor of the caches,
that they are at any rate real enough to have made themselves at least
appear to every one, whereas the absolute has as yet appeared
immediately to only a few mystics, and indeed to them very ambiguously.
The advocates of the absolute assure us that any distributive form of
being is infected and undermined by self-contradiction. If we are
unable to assimilate their arguments, and we have been unable, the only
course we can take, it seems to me, is to let the absolute bury the
absolute, and to seek reality in more promising directions, even among
the details of the finite and the immediately given.
If these words of mine sound in bad taste to some of you, or even
sacrilegious, I am sorry. Perhaps the impression may be mitigated by
what I have to say in later lectures.