Ht ten i aN OF PRIN Seiten dO. a ANC? 1924 by > QLagiont sew Division 4 J PL TI Ny SF » FN bef Section Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2022 with funding from Princeton Theological Seminary Library https://archive.org/details/moralphilosophycOOfite_0 MORAL PHILOSOPHY THE CRITICAL VIEW OF LIFE BY THE SAME AUTHOR INDIVIDUALISM, New York, Longmans, Green & Co., 1911 \ OF PR} JAN 27 19276 MORAL PHILOSOPHY THE CRITICAL VIEW OF LIFE By yi WARNER FITE ‘O 8 aveEéracros Bios > \ > , ov Bwrtds avOpworw The unexamined life is not fit for human living. Socrates, in “The Apoloay”. NEW YORK LINCOLN MAC VEAGH THE DIAL PRESS CopyrieuT, 1925, py THE Drau Press, Inc. PRINTED IN U. 8. A. THE VAIL-BALLOU PRESS BINGHAMTON AND NEW YORK PREFACE The purpose of this essay is to present a moral philoso- phy in the form of what may be called a philosophy of life. It is not my purpose to offer a ‘‘constructive system”’, such as to display an increasing conclusiveness as it ap- proaches completion. What I will present is a point of view; which becomes necessarily less distinct, and raises ever deeper questions, as it broadens towards the horizon. And a point of view, because I believe that nothing in philosophy, however truly objective (and it is my purpose to offer something objective), is either intelligent or intelli- gible except as the expression of a point of view, in the last analysis inevitably personal. For this reason I have not hesitated to speak in the first person, to draw upon personal experience, or to give expression to personal opinion, taste, or feeling, whenever this would best convey my meaning. Somewhat for the same reason the book is not addressed exclusively, or perhaps primarily, to students of philosophy. It has been my hope to speak intelligibly to every cultivated man; to every person curious about the meaning of human life as presented, not in philosophy only, but in literature, art, and science. To those acquainted with my “Individualism”, printed in 1911, I would suggest that the point of view of the present volume is a further development (and therefore, I hope, a juster and more mature expression) of the point of view of the former volume. There I was interested in Vv v1 PREFACE tracing the consequences of self-consciousness in social and political relations; here in the working of self-consciousness throughout human life. The present volume is an attempt to follow the motif of self-consciousness—not to the end, for there is no end—but until I can follow it no further. I take the opportunity of expressing my obligations to the friends who have given me the benefit of their judg- ment; to Mr. Herbert Agar and Mrs. Agar, whose criticism convinced me of the necessity of rewriting some more im- portant passages; to Professor Charles W. Hendel, Jr. of Princeton University, Dr. Laurence Buermeyer of The Barnes Foundation, and Professor $. McClellan Butt of the University of North Carolina, former pupils and some- time colleagues, who have helped me by their counsel in matters innumerable. It will be understood that the author alone is responsible for the views expressed in the essay. W. F. Princeton University June, 1925 CHAPTER I. ite III. IV. VI. VII. CONTENTS PREFACE MoraLiry—Wuat Is Ir? . § 1. The meaning of “morality”. § 2. Obligation vs, choice. THE MorsaL PHILOSOPHER § 3. The orthodox moralist. § 4. The moralist as a naturalist. §5. Moral insight. THE Many Morat WorxLpDs § 6. Orthodox morality and the aaa eat § 7. The moralities of race, class, and occupa- tion. § 8. Differing moral _ tastes. § 9. The good men of the moral philosophies. THE Locic oF THE STANDARD . § 10. The odiousness of comparisons. § 11. The moral standard and the business point of view. § 12. Social utility in law and orthodox moral- ity. §13. “Positive” morality. THe MorTive or AUTHORITY . § 14. The categorical imperative. § 15. The basis of authority. § 16. The authoritarian tradition. §17. Austere morality. § 18. Au- thority vs, morality. §19. The sentiment of reverence. THE ORDERED SOCIETY . a ber tr re ae eeLe § 20. The order of reverence. § 21. The utility of the reverential order. § 22. The ordered society and the biological species. § 23. Or- dered relations vs. social relations. _§ 24. The decay of reverence and the dawn of morality. Tue UNITY oF THE SPIRIT . § 25. Morality among the een § 26. Utility and the system of means and ends. vii PAGE 24 40 “yi 76 95 vill OHAPTER VIII. IX. XI. XII. XITI. XIV. CONTENTS PAGE THE PRAGMATIC ATTITUDE . But moral philosophy is not limited to the first glance, nor again to what are called the plain facts of experience. Of the aesthetic quality of these plain facts I shall have something to say in the next chapter. Here I will say that appreciations of beauty, at any rate, are not such ~ plain facts. They are not something stamped upon us instantaneously once for all as by a rubber stamp, but highly complicated and subtle continuing processes. Any ThE BEAUTY 10m VLEET UE 151 appreciation worthy to be called a judgment of beauty is developed through a series of experiences. I hear Richard Strauss’s “Also Sprach Zarathustra” for the first time (harking back twenty years), and I loathe it; the second time, and I wonder about it; the third time, and I am deeply impressed by it. On the other hand the seasonal popular song may upon first hearing have all the spark- ling charm of a freshly opened bottle of champagne; to be flatter after a week than stale champagne. It might be a good rule of thumb to say that the test of beauty is its b staying power. But this would be only a crude way of * saying that the test of true beauty is reflective experience: reflective analysis and reflective taste. And this means that the question of beauty and virtue is not a question of whether they are found apart as a matter of unreflective fact—while beauty and vice, virtue and ugliness, rest comfortably together—but a question whether they can remain apart in the course of reflective experience and reflective taste. My thesis is that they cannot remain apart. You may easily say upon first ac- quaintance that this woman is wonderfully beautiful, while yet you know her to be treacherous and false. ‘There is nothing that we may not say while the vocal organs re- main unimpaired. “Beautiful” and “treacherous and false” are thus far for you only a word and a phrase. The question is whether beauty will be an experience after “treacherous and false” has also become an experience. And for the answer we need not quite passively wait for the bitter experience. We may try what Royce called a “thought-experiment”, or an experiment in imagination —where, I suspect, the decisive experiments are usually 152 MORAL PHILOSOPHY performed. As one form of experiment I will propose that you take the following sentences: A lovely and beautiful woman. A beautiful woman, but what a liar! A beautiful woman, but stupid as a beast! Then ask yourself whether these three women are equally beautiful and equally likely to remain beautiful upon further acquaintance. To carry out the experiment I will ask my male reader to suppose that by some mischance he had married the second or the third of these beautiful women. Is it a bad guess that after a year or two we should find him contem- plating with ironical amusement the fact that other men thought her beautiful? On the other hand suppose a man to have married a beautiful woman with a rather dis- reputable ‘“‘past” and then to have found in her a loyal wife, an intelligent and sympathetic companion: must we not suppose that any jealous bitterness with regard to her past will be modified, at least, by the thought that it was a tribute to her loveliness? And must he not also then conclude that chastity in women is a virtue rather over- rated? It should be remembered that no youth under the spell of an infatuation doubts that his siren is good. She is not the conventionally “good woman”, but then why should she be? In any case it seems that when beauty is associated with vice and virtue with ugliness there is a mistake somewhere. Suppose, once more, that in the midst of the description of a person in a novel you read that “his countenance which expressed nobility and intelli- gence was ugly and repulsive’—surely, before accepting this, you would read the sentence twice. How, then, do we come to believe that beauty is one TILE BEAU TV AOR VIRTUE L5G thing and virtue another? Because, I will suggest, the question as commonly treated is referred not to our ex- perience of beauty and virtue but to conventions of beauty and virtue. The moral world of daily intercourse is peopled largely by dramatic conventions—such as ‘“‘the clever rogue” and “‘the simple honest man”. In the world of conventions the moral man is the “Puritan”. The in- telligent man is represented by Mephistopheles or Iago— or by Edison. And the aesthetic man is the disciple of Oscar Wilde wearing long hair and a red carnation. But in the special question of morality and beauty I suspect that, even by more discerning persons, the issue is con- ceived vaguely as lying between the Ten Commandments and the Parthenon; or between Christianity and paganism. Morality is conceived as the special and peculiar property of the ancient Hebrew people, beauty as the exclusive property of the Greeks. This is a strange assumption if you pause to think of it; stranger than the assumption of one race of people born blind, another born deaf—since these functions can easily be separated. It is upon such an assumption, however, that the Greek profile comes to be the standard of human beauty, the Puritan (whose views of life are mainly from the Old Testament) the standard of goodness—as if God had by a frat fixed the standard type of beauty once for all and had thus ordained that beauty of countenance should be forever unattainable by a negro, an American Indian, or even by an Anglo- Saxon! If this be the issue of beauty versus virtue, it is clear enough that the two need not go together. Yet I suppose that all of us have known persons whose faces bore all the conventional marks of ugliness, whom nevertheless we 4 154 MORALE HOS Or HW have found to be altogether attractive and delightful, noble and high-minded. And after learning to know them we have not merely tolerated their ugliness, or put it out of our minds. Rather we have come to find it fascinating and significant, their faces “‘distinguished’’, if not now vaguely beautiful. And thus perhaps we have come to see what is meant by saying that beauty is a matter of mere association, or convention. It is precisely “‘a mere convention” so far as beauty is a matter of standard, habit, or fashion. And then we see too that if all the snub-nosed men had the genial wisdom of Socrates, while all the Greek profiles marked the “Hoi Polloi”, it would presently become diffi- cult to see in a snub-nose an aesthetic defect or in a Greek profile a mark of beauty. Suppose that all of the lovely and delightful women weighed more than two hundred and twenty-five—or less than a hundred: what is now referred to in a pitying whisper as “obesity” or “‘scrawniness’’, as the case may be, would soon be hailed openly as a mark of transcendent beauty. The cynical critic may object that “nature” would still fasten the sexual attraction to the Venus of Milo or, better, to the lovely ‘‘Sleeping Venus” of Giorgione. But if he is right (and the many divaga- tions of sexual passion suggest that he is wrong), it would mean only that sexual attraction had lost its last shred of sentiment or of moral significance. Yet the question is after all not quite exclusively con- cerned with the beauty of persons. The souls of persons are expressed also in objects either of art or of use made by- human hands. And here it is a question, not quite of beauty and utility, as we shall presently see, but of beauty and significance, involving the question of sincerity. We face here the perplexing question of decoration, or THe BEAU LYAOn VLR TUE 155 adornment. Such indeed is the power of habit and asso- ciation that things continue to give the impression of beauty after they have ceased to be significant. A coat- sleeve without buttons still looks ugly, though the buttons have long since ceased to function. A generation ago, after side-pockets had disappeared from cut-away coats, it seemed that beauty still demanded the pocket-flaps. Yet mere “impression” is never final in the life of a conscious being. The pocket-flaps have now disappeared. Within little more than five years the bobbed-haired girl has begun to be beautiful; and I wonder if we may not soon begin to think of a rich and luxuriant mass of hair, so impressive to Victorian taste, as a stupid and uncom- fortable survival of the aesthetics of primitive man. At any rate when the conviction of absurdity is become finally clear the impression of beauty is dissipated. There are modern office-buildings which present a fine appearance of massiveness, gigantic columns at the entrance seeming fittingly to support the many stories of wall above them. But no architectural genius avails to preserve this impres- sion of massive beauty in the mind of one who knows— 7. €., that the columns support nothing and that the walls are like so much wall-paper, set into and supported by the steel frame of the building. Once more, this is not to say that beauty is merely sub- conscious utility. Beauty, we shall see presently, is if anything deliberately chosen utility—which is quite an- other matter. I have read that Henry Ward Beecher used to carry with him a small bag of gems for the sheer delight of handling them and feasting his eyes upon their colors. For myself I can sympathize with the man who is willing to pay the price, and forego something else, for the 156 MORAL PHILOSOPHY pleasure of having his clothes made of those fine, soft, fluffy woolens so caressing to the hand that rests upon the knee—provided that he will not then basely turn about and explain that such cloths wear longer. And so if the lover of the massive appearance should claim that this gives delight and comfort to the eye I shall conceive his taste to be justified if he can explain himself. Unfortunately for his explanation, it seems that the appeal is here not to the eye but to the mind. The beauty of the massive columns lies in what they suggest, and what they suggest is false.* § 39 The question of the beauty of virtue brings with it the question of the beauty of utility. In what has just been said reference was made to the view that beauty is only a kind of refined utility, utility in the larger view. And among those holding this view, it seems we must reckon Croce, who says that an object is beautiful “if perfectly adapted to its practical purpose”. Now it is quite possi- ble, I should say, to hold that beauty is only a larger view of utility if we utter the word “only” with a certain accent of caution and of irony—if, that is to say, we have taken into account the possibly revolutionary character of the transformation effected by the larger view. For my own part I prefer the so-called beauty of utility, I dislike all adornment, and I am suspicious of “objects of art’. 1In A Theory of Knowledge (1923), p. 89, C. A. Strong says, referring to the kind of considerations just mentioned, that this “is to forget that our enjoyment of it [i.e., architecture] is, after all, primarily a pleasure of see- ing.” Does he mean seeing without imagination—is this aesthetic enjoyment? How, then, does aesthetic enjoyment differ from the purely sensual? But if imagination is involved I wonder how he manages to halt the mental process at the point of merely seeing. THEO BEAUTY: OF VIETUE How Beauty, I will say with Croce, is perfect adaptation to the=- practical purpose. And this seems to me a comfortably simple and definite view—until I endeavor to state for myself the meaning of the practical purpose. When the practical man explains that a writing-table, for example, is for him purely a matter of utility, it is pertinent to ask how sensitively he has questioned his need for the writing-table. He thinks possibly that a packing-box turned on its side would really serve the pur- pose and that anything more is a concession to reputability. If so we may point out to him that a packing-box would probably be unsteady—to build a solid and durable piece of furniture is, by the way, a matter of engineering art and skill. The rough surface would offer impediments to writing and to the easy disposition of papers, and it would be unpleasant to touch. It would also gather dirt. We might go further and suggest that, if the table is to be used for any length of time, it should be of a color and form comfortable to the eye. Here the practical man will doubtless object that we are introducing consid- erations that go beyond utility. Perhaps he is one of those who can see the utility of a warm overcoat, but despises the silk lining which makes the coat so much easier to put on and off (thus mitigating the nuisance of an overcoat) and so much more comfortable on the body. Then we may ask why the appeal to certain sensibilities is to be described as purely utilitarian, to certain others as purely aesthetic. Why is the convenience of the writing-table to be credited to its utility, an unpleasing color and form to be charged against its beauty? Or why is the noise of my typewriter to be accounted a merely aesthetic defect? If our practical man boasts that he is untouched by these 158 MORAL PHILOSOPHY so-called aesthetic defects, alas! that means, I fear, that he wishes to be classed among the cruder forms of animal life. If, on the other hand, he undertakes to question > his need for the writing-table deeply and then to satisfy this need completely, he will discover at the end, I think, that he has achieved a work of art and created a thing of beauty, if he has not also expended a considerable sum of money. > From utility to beauty is then, I should say, a passage from the crude mechanism of life to life itself; from the relatively unconsidered gratification of desire to its deliberately conscious gratification; in other words, from the uncritical to the critical life. Utility, as I have pointed out above, marks the presence of ends taken for granted. ‘When the practical man says, This serves my practical purpose (and there is no more to be said), what he means is that the purpose itself is not to be questioned. But this means, not that it really satisfies any purpose intimately personal, but that it removes a present difficulty and en- ables life in some fashion to go on. The “strictly utili- tarian” consideration is limited to what will just pass. If he will refer the question seriously to his own purpose, asking, say, What must this writing-table be if it is to be comprehensively satisfying, and satisfying to me? he will discover that his purpose implies much more than any conventional utility has provided for. It is only by an artificial limitation—imposed perhaps by business con- siderations of time or money—that he can exclude from the purpose of this or that object of use any of the purpose of his life. Then he will discover that nothing manu- factured will really serve his purpose, nothing indeed but a work of art created by himself, embodying and expressing TH EAB EAUTIV OREVER TUE 159 his personal life as that life is already embodied in his face and his hands. And when from this point of view he recalls the original “practical purpose” it seems now that the practical purpose represented only a schematic outline of life, workable indeed, yet from the standpoint of life itself a kind of caricature, and related to life much as a saw-horse is related to a real horse or as the painter’s manikin is related to what he will express with his brush. This means, again, that from utility to beauty is a passage from the dumb, relatively speaking, to the con- sciously articulate. Art, as Croce says, is expression.’ This element of expression will be clearer if from the prac- tical man’s writing-table we turn our attention to his coat. When a man says, A coat is for me a matter of pure utility, and therefore I consider nothing but price, dura- bility, and warmth, it means either that he forgets or that he will deny that the clothes express the man. The fact, that a man is indeed known by his clothes, he can hardly deny. He may condemn the fact as standing for an artificial association; but then he may have to explain why the use of c-a-t to indicate a certain soft furry animal with claws is not the product of an association even more artificial. When the consciousness of expression is borne home to him it seems that, simply as an honest man, he is faced with a problem; which is now indistinguishably an aesthetic and a moral problem. He may seek to evade the problem by wearing only the most neutral of coats. But hardly with success. It does not indeed follow that a severely plain choice in matters of dress and household equipage marks an insensibility to beauty; it may mark only a mute rejection, despairing or contemptuous, of the satisfactions available. But any attitude whatever implies 160 MORAL PHILOSOPHY a certain judgment, which is both moral and aesthetic, upon the values represented in the current conceptions of life. § 40 Finally it will be said on behalf of the separateness of beauty and virtue, but mainly now for the protection of , art and beauty, that it is not the function of art to teach .moral lessons. But neither, if I am right, is this the function of moral philosophy. And here I think we have the root of the whole matter: the separation of beauty and virtue is inspired mainly by a fear of that authoritarian conception of morality which defines virtue as right con- duct and makes it the function of ethics to ‘‘teach”’. Yet, though it is not the artist’s function to teach, it is surely his function to express; and if not moral lessons, then impressions, conceptions, appreciations of life; and thus to express what is in the most significant sense moral. If moral philosophy is a study of life, I think we must find in art and literature, and most clearly in poetry and fiction, its most important experimental laboratory; and to me a study of the aims and motives of literary criticism reveals far more adequately than most of the treatises on ethics the distinctive logic and motif of the ‘‘moral” world. There is indeed a superficial literary criticism which is concerned with style—and a more superficial study of literature which, seeking to be accounted scientific, calls itself philology. But the style is after all the man. And the fundamental peculiarity of any distinctively “literary” treatment of a subject—that which makes it seem so trivial and unworthy to any properly scientific mind—is just that it tends to regard the form and even the subject- matter of any writing as somewhat less interesting than the PHBE AUT Va-O.b) VLR DUE 161 mind and personality of the writer himself. And thus the ~ really critical question for literary criticism becomes’ the question of the man himself and his outlook upon life. I have referred above to the Carlylean ‘‘strong man’. When we “study Carlyle” the chief point of interest is—just Carlyle. In his ‘Heroes’, in ‘Frederick the Great’’, in the Abbot Samson of ‘“‘Past and Present” he has given us Carlyle’s own ideal of man; and what is more, a comprehensive view of what he conceives to be worth while in human life. His style is a subject for dispute. But this is only to say that Carlyle is a conspicuous illustration of the fact that the style is the man. So long as you find * a suggestion of worth and greatness in his presentation of life you will find him eloquent and impressive; and while he remains eloquent he remains significant. If this im-- pression is dissipated his eloquence becomes tirade. Likewise of Dickens. What makes “David Copper- field” to most persons the most impressive of his novels is the fact that there clearly you have Dickens himself. In his characters and in their difficulties the writer of fiction reveals his personal conception of the problem of life. If you are a lover of Dickens and rank him as in some manner a true artist it means that in the sober middle- class ideals that stand forth in his pages and in his sympathetic handling of lower-class life you find some of the value and essence of genuine humanity; and if you dismiss him as a sentimentalist, it means that you question the significance of middle and lower-class virtue. I suppose, again, that Arthur Pendennis is largely Thackeray himself—Thackeray taking himself humorously yet none the less offering an apologia. Pendennis, I fancy, is just the sort of decent, wholesome, yet withal clever and in- 162 MORAL PHILOSOPHY telligent young Englishman most congenial to Thackeray’s taste. He is not quite a man of genius, and he is no hero; but this only means that Thackeray has no very high appreciation of heroes—a moral estimate, be it noted, in which there will be others to agree with him. Granting that seemingly great artists are sometimes seemingly the most immoral of men—seemingly, I mean, for the first look—it will be no less true that the final estimate of the art will coincide closely with the final esti- mate of the man. One cannot remain for long an admirer of Villon and also a Puritan moralist. Nor, again, will Tolstoi’s four volumes of “War and Peace” remain an artistic monstrosity for one who has come to share Tolstoi’s belief in a mystical humanity, the life of which is revealed not in the passing acts of individuals but in the slower movements of nations and races; by one, in other words, whose moral ideal for the individual is self-effacement and absorption of self into humanity. For my own part, though I find Balzac’s novels fascinating and com- pelling when once I am past the beginning, I cannot rate him as the great artist that his admirers usually find in him; and mainly because to my taste his slavish admira- tion of the manners of high life casts a blemish of vul- garity upon nearly every scene. And I have little ap- preciation of the much-praised “art” of de Maupassant because it seems to me that his “effects”, so far from in- dicating either breadth or depth of experience of life, are just the customary shallow tricks of the newspaper feature- writer. On the other hand, I am disposed to rate Tourgenieff as a very great artist because I seem to find in him (possibly indeed because I know him to have been a serious student of philosophy) a background of gravity ThHEeha BE AUT. 7 O Bsa VLR E 163 and brooding contemplation, a sense of the tragic com- &~ plexity of all human motive, which gives suggestiveness to the simplest of his sketches of Russian country life and to his revolutionists, such as Basarof and Roudine, a significance almost Shakespearian. Any of these judgments of mine may be disputed. But it will be found, I think, that the ground of the dispute ~ will include the moral ground. It will be claimed that I : have wrongly estimated not merely the artist but the man. CHAPTER XI THE BEAUTY OF KNOWLEDGE § 41. Aesthetic impressions and scientific facts. §42. History as a branch of art. NE of the more obvious objections to any concep- tion of the unity of the spirit is that which takes the form of saying that there is no element either of the moral or of the aesthetic, no element of choice or of taste, in our knowledge of facts. Facts, it is said, are in no sense formed or created, they are simply given. The question is too large for comprehensive treatment, and the present brief chapter is merely to suggest what can be said for the thesis that knowledge of fact involves creative imagination. This suggestion I will convey through a more or less free rendering of Croce’s theory of “impres- sions” and of his seemingly paradoxical theory that his- tory is a branch of art. § 41 According to Croce art is expression; the expression of an impression, as he also says—that and nothing more. This means that in a certain perhaps proper sense of the word art is absolutely democratic. A peasant or a duke, a mill-worker or a poet, a hotel-waiter or a gentleman-and- scholar—one subject has as much of the possibility of beauty in him as the other. There is no intrinsically ugly. And thus Croce takes issue with an authoritarian aesthetics 164 THE BEAUTY OF KNOWLEDGE 165 which, like authoritarian ethics, believes that God in his wisdom has put a finer kind of human nature into some frames than into others and has marked each with an appropriate sign.* But he also faces a scepticism more coldly factual. Art the communication of impressions! one may exclaim. What nonsense! When the cook tells me that she finds in the refrigerator only one pound of butter and four eggs she communicates an impression, but the communication is not art. It seems (so runs the objection) that Croce has’ missed the difference between two kinds of impressions. On the one hand we have the painter’s impression of a landscape, or of a person, which he tries to express on canvas. Of this kind are the properly aesthetic impres- sions, and these we welcome as art. On the other hand are those ordinary impressions of matter of fact which the psychologist calls sensations, or sense-perceptions. The communication of these impressions is not art but plain information, or perhaps science. Now to the reader of Croce it will be clear that he has not for a moment forgotten this difference. It is rather the chief purpose of his argument to show that this differ- ence, the difference between the aesthetic and the matter- of-fact impression, is not in the last analysis a real difference. At best it is a difference of degree and cir- cumstance. And if we remember that in the Greek the term “aesthetic” covers both the artistic impression and the matter-of-fact perception we shall find ourselves asking whether after all every experience of matter of fact is not 1 Here let me repeat a caveat. Croce also offends authoritarian ethics by teaching “art for art’s sake’—along with, as it happens, “duty for duty’s sake”. This blind service of two irresponsible masters implies that art is irrelevant to morality, and this it is my chief purpose to disprove. 166 MORAL PHILOSOPHY in its own measure an artistic experience. If so it will mean that all of our experience is in its own measure— so far indeed as it is any conscious experience—aesthetic experience; in other words, that all experience is, just as experience, a “‘sense of life’’. This I believe to be profoundly true, but how to make it demonstratively true is another matter. For in most of our experience we seem to take the world just as it is given, most of all the world of common fact. Here we talk about “data” and ‘presentations’. And here at least it seems that the mind is truly a tabula rasa, taking what comes just as it comes, without exercise of taste, with no regard for taste; nay, forewarned—by the scientist and the logi- cian, by the psychiatrist, and most effectively by the brutal common sense of the plain man—against any exercise of taste. And thus the word “impression” comes to mean an inertly passive experience, to be described not as an activity of mind but as a “mental state’’. Yet to any one initiated into the practice of self- consciousness, to one become curious about his ‘‘mental states’, it will be clear, I think, that the passive character of the perceptive ‘‘states” is chiefly a convention. Even those who insist most upon the “given” character of sense- experience recognize the seeming activity of “apperception”’, or selective attention. But what this means we may best realize in the fatigue that follows a multitude of impres- sions—for example, after a day spent in a comfortable Pullman car. Then it seems that, so far from receiving passive impressions, it has required a day-long strain of attention to keep our world straight through a welter of shifting scenes. Here at least, it seems that the world is not given to us in a rational, intelligible, and harmonious THE BEAUTY OF KNOWLEDGE 167 picture. We have to form the picture. And to form an intelligible picture out of the daily run of modern ex- perience is often a terrible effort. A pupil of mine just recovering from nervous prostration told me that in Chicago, where he lived, he could not venture down into the business district, since the sign-boards alone were too much for him. One need not succumb to nervous prostra- tion to understand this. ‘Perception of fact is not, then, as it seems, a case of having an impression stamped upon us; it is always a process of forming and creating. We do not simply get an impression of the world before us, we form an impres- sion. If the activity of forming is not always in evidence it is because in our transactions with the routine of daily fact the process is more or less mechanical and stereotyped. It is in the experience of, so to speak, coming back to fact that we best catch ourselves in the act of forming. Wak- ing from sleep in the morning, especially from a sound sleep—if you attend to this, I think you will see that it is never instantaneous and never a mere change of state, a substitution of one picture for another, but a complex and very interesting logical and artistic process of re- forming out of chaotic matter a world that you have for the time lost. Sitting before the fire, let your mind wander; in other words, loosen for a moment your “grip on reality”; at once your world, now indeed rather passively perceived, assumes shapes most illogical and fantastic; suggestions present themselves which at other times never even show their faces; and ideas and images (so-called) assume new and strange and often forbidden fellowships. It is thus, I will suggest, that dreams occur; by a relative cessation of the forming process; and thus also the ravings 168 MORAL PHILOSOPHY of delirium and the obsessions of the insane. For the matter of that, if you are looking for a world of passively received impression, a world characterized by the inno- cence of the mind, I suspect that in the experience of the insane you will find it at its passive best. When you have once caught the forming in the act— in the process of coming back to fact—you may then, I believe, find it, vestigially at least, in half of the percep- tions of daily life; especially if you happen to be an absent-minded philosopher and college professor whose punctual engagements, demanding alertness when they occur, are few as compared with those of the business man, and who may thus let his mind wander from fact a good part of the time. The clock strikes; the telephone rings; I need the scissors which lie just before me on the desk. Even the scissors I seem not to perceive without a complex, though exceedingly rapid, formative activity, logical and aesthetic. And if you say, Yes, but it is the fact of the scissors that determines the outcome, well, that is just the question, the very big question, that I wish to suggest as lying in the background. It is true that prac- tical perception is confronted by a seemingly resistant “matter”, but so also in some degree is artistic creation. And it may be that the resistance is a question only of my insistent demand for the scissors. For my own part, at any rate, I can see no essential difference between com- ing back to fact after a night of sleep and coming back to any other interrupted activity of the spirit; coming back to a pleasant day-dream after an unwelcome ring of the telephone, or to the composition of a novel, a poem, or a song, a philosophical or a scientific theory. And for a typically aesthetic activity give me the process of con- THE BEAUTY OF KNOWLEDGE 169 structing a scientific theory; for the sake of which obser- vations are emphasized here, others minimized there, still others (no less factually observations) rejected as positive errors, all on behalf of the author’s intuition. Nothing is more suggestive of the sculptor’s process of modelling in clay. But in all of these cases alike, it seems that coming back means only that the course of imagination is resumed. It is a persistent illusion—and no less an illusion be- cause so necessary to the business of life—that we all live in the same world. The illusion is so persistent that even for the instructed it requires an effort of imagination to realize that an infant six months old in the same room with grown-ups cannot see what they see; or that what they see could not be seen by an Australian blackfellow suddenly set down among them. ‘The ordinary modern living-room contains chairs in which we imagine persons to sit—and this defines and forms what we see. Again rugs which we may imagine to be removed from the floor—as merely seen they might as well be built in. Glass bulbs which we imagine to become incandescent; a huge box, called a piano, which (strangely) we can imagine to give forth sweet sounds; and book-shelves displaying rows of rec- tangular patches in various colors which we imagine to be removable, and then to be capable of developments and transformations which our blackfellow would surely at- tribute to magic. It would be very interesting to get his impression as his eye falls upon the book-shelves. But no, I fear it would be very uninteresting; for what I sus- pect is that the book-shelves convey to him no impression whatever, just as they appear to convey little or no im- pression to the infant. But what, then, of our own impression? ‘The answer 170 MORAL PHILOSOPHY seems to be that our own impression of this apparently given and self-existent room is the last expression of an infinitely subtle and complex activity of imagination, co- ordinately logical and aesthetic, the motives and grounds of which we shall never finally bring to light. It is as distinctly an artistic product—expressing, if we go into the finer points of the character and quality of what we see and of what we refuse to see, the nature of our souls —as the work of any painter. And as for what is “given” as a basis for the activity of imagination—seen and not imagined—it seems that nothing is absolutely given. The given, the datum, resolves itself in the last analysis into a kind of formless something which is saved from being nothing only by a seemingly inert stubbornness. The room, the object of our formed impression, seems to be even less given than the angel which Michelangelo saw in the block of marble. Croce puts this point neatly, if somewhat too summarily, when he disposes of the common idea that the difference between the artist and the plain man is a difference of skill or technique. This common idea Croce takes to be that, while all men see alike, only the artist knows how to express what he sees. Against this Croce points out that the superiority of the artist lies in what he sees; it is a dif- ference not of technique but of vision. This difference we can all readily appreciate when it comes to the painting of a portrait, especially of one who is near to us. The painter’s impression is awaited as a kind of possibly fate- ful revelation. But the point applies no less to the cook’s humbler impression of the pound of butter and the four eggs in the refrigerator. The painter of still life might well see more than the cook; and yet the cook’s impression PbS ReEAUT VY ORNKNOWLEDGE ity ak is also an activity of the human spirit. She too is no merely passive photographic plate but, in Croce’s words, a creator of life. And since (as Croce himself insists) we are all artists, the advantages of superior vision will not lie exclusively with those who make art their profession. It is a too com- mon vice of aesthetic philosophy to consult only the pro- fessional artist. The cook may conceivably see something in the butter and eggs which is hidden from the painter of still life; and the physician may see that in a man’s face which the painter happily misses. The criminologist or the life-insurance agent may each see something else. And in the end what I would emphasize (as expressing my own idea, at least) is that every impression of the world is an individual impression. It is no doubt practically con- venient to assume that we all live in the same world of fact, but it marks a lack of imagination if we believe it to be true. The machinist and the carpenter, the sailor and the miner, the railway-conductor and the salesman, the lawyer, the physician, and the clergyman, the zoologist, geologist, mathematician, or literary critic—no two of these lives in the same world of fact. Each of these worlds stands for a certain type of imagination; a certain point of view, unconsciously embodied in metaphor and trick of speech, for the determination of reality and of fact; and for the literary artist each contains, no less than the sailor’s point of view, the potentiality of romance. But the profession is not yet the individual; and what is true of the class is truer still, and perhaps only then true, of the individual himself, and only so far as he is a con- scious and genuine individual. Every thinking man’s im- pression of the world is an artistic intuition. As a think- 172 MORAL PHILOSOPHY ing man he is not a mere recipient of impressions, but the artist and architect of a universe; or, once more, a creator of life. And yet his impression of the world is knowledge of the world. How this may be, our imagination may not easily grasp. But we may appreciate the cognitive quality of our impressions, and at the same time the aesthetic quality of our cognitions, if from the world of “things”, seemingly given once for all, we return to the more sociable and negotiable world of persons; where indeed the unity of the spirit, the identity of the moral, the aesthetic, and the logical, is most clearly in evidence. Suppose that some one asks me about Smith—say that he is considering Smith as a candi- date for an important appointment. Since Smith’s family and mine have always been neighbors I know all about Smith. But it will not answer his question to give him, however completely and accurately, a coldly impersonal record of the facts. Though the facts be important, such a restricted account may even arouse suspicion. And he is likely to interrupt me with something like, Yes, but what is your impression of Smith? What he wants is not scientific fact but aesthetic ap- preciation—a task of another dimension. The facts are easy to convey; but my impression? If I have any intimate insight into the character of Smith my impression is bound to be complex and perhaps problematic. It will not suffice to use the customary slang and say, ‘“‘Oh! first- class” or “no good”. And if I succeed in really conveying my impression it will mean that I have the art of a poet. But it will be no less a matter of art even to give that impression form to myself; that is, to form the impression. Yet my questioner in seeking my impression is not merely THE BEAUTY OF KNOWLEDGE 173 curious about the quality of my taste; he is paying a com- pliment to my intelligence, to my capacity for knowledge. The facts about Smith he will take from any reasonably careful person, but for impressions he wishes to be assured of a discriminating insight. And that cognitive insight he expects to find in the expression of my taste. § 53 So much for the matter of impressions. And now we may perhaps see why for Croce history is a branch of art. For history in any worthy sense is not a chronicle of events but an insight into the life of persons. Even if we adopt the (to me repugnant) theory that history deals with movements and tendencies we have still to answer the question—if history is to bear any relation to human life —what was the movement or the tendency for those who lived within it? What was the twelfth century for those who lived in the twelfth century? What was Locke’s essay for those living in the year 1690, or in 1700? Surely not a “dear old book’’, as it was for William James. But this insight is just the limit, in the mathematical sense, of all historical inquiry; even the limit defined, as by Royce, as the point just beyond any possible concrete attainment —as the number 2 lies ever beyond the sum of 1, 4%, %, etc. And scientific historical inquiry, however important as an accessory, will never quite yield it. A man may spend a lifetime reading the twelfth century, and the result may be only a card catalogue. Insight into the twelfth century—a grasp of that impression of the twelfth century of which the literature and events of the twelfth century are the corresponding expression—is reserved for imagina- tion and for art. Historical criticism, literary criticism, 174 MORAL PHILOSOPHY art criticism, and moral criticism are in the last analysis identical activities. A very important illustration of the Crocean logic of his- tory is suggested by Albert Schweitzer’s genial and fascinat- ing “Geschichte der Leben-Jesu-Forschung”’, or history of the investigation of the life of Jesus. It would be not too much to say that for the part of the world called Christen- dom the life of Jesus is history’s greatest problem. No field of historical inquiry has been overridden by a greater number of theories or by a stranger variety; and none has raised questions more poignantly personal. The world has never seen, says Schweitzer, such a bitter, intense, and self- denying struggle for truth as we find in this field during the century or more past. What is the problem? ‘The records of the life of Jesus are full of yawning gaps. How are they to be filled? At the worst, says Schweitzer,” by phrases; at the best by his- torical imagination (historische Phantasie). The sources give us, so to speak, the phenomena; but we do not under- stand them historically—they are not history—until we comprehend them as consistent and intelligible and grasp them as expressions of the life of a specific individual per- son. And this can be doné, according to Schweitzer, only by an historical experiment; by which he means an experi- ment in imagination of the same kind as that which I have proposed in the last chapter as Royce’s “thought- experiment”’. In other words, if we are to comprehend the facts of the life of Jesus in their true sequence and inner consistency, and if we are to distinguish fact from fiction, it will be through imaginative insight into the mind of Jesus. We must grasp the life of Jesus from the stand- 2See his introductory chapter, entitled ‘Das Problem”, zweite Auflage, Tiibingen, 1913. THE BEAUTY OF KNOWLEDGE 175 point of his own self-consciousness, feeling that life as he felt it, seeing the world as he saw it. Now to the orthodox Christian this is almost suggestive of blasphemy; to the student of history I fear it may be equally suggestive of irony. Yet in all soberness it seems to me to state the his- torian’s problem, a problem which is possibly never finally to be solved, yet to be solved more or less as other problems of life are solved. Could we once see Jesus as he saw himself, then all of the critical questions, the vexing ques- tions of chronology, of sources, of genuine documents and spurious, of original accounts and interpolations—for all of these questions we should soon find the answer; and the key to the answer would be the happy insight. And thus the life of Jesus is an artistic and aesthetic problem—a problem of the same order as the problem of painting a portrait of Jesus. The portrait could never by any scientific method be constructed from the ‘‘data’”’, yet the successful portrait would account finally for all of the data. So much, then, for the beauty of knowledge. I will close the chapter by suggesting a question. It will not be doubted that history is knowledge. Yet history is at once an exercise of intelligence, of taste, and of moral judgment —in a word, of imagination. But it seems that what is thus true of knowledge directed upon a world of persons is true also in some degree when knowledge is dealing with impersonal facts about “things”. There too we have imagination. And what is more, it seems that, even in this impersonal region, whenever knowledge becomes eager and passionate, the assertion of an experience rather than of the fulfilment of a criterion, of realities rather than of “phenomena”, it tends to personify its things. My belief 176 MORAL PHILOSOPHY is that Kant’s “things in themselves” which scientific method could never know, were metaphorical persons. This suggests the deeply interesting question whether, if knowledge is to be an experience, and not the formal ful- filment of a logical requirement, we human beings can pos- sibly have the experience of knowing anything but persons; or, putting it otherwise, whether a world of impersonal fact, or of inanimate things—an ‘“‘unthinking substratum’, as Berkeley calls it—must not always be a world which is thus far not known. A successful development of this sugges- tion would be the consummation of ‘‘the unity of the spirit”. CHAPTER XII JUSTIFICATION BY KNOWLEDGE § 43. Judgment vs. criticism. § 44. Objectivity and rationality. §45. The illusion of deliberate wickedness. § 46. “Tout com- prendre’ and “tout pardonner’. §47. The moral question and the practical. oe OU do not receive an education that you may learn to judge, but that you may learn to under- stand.” These words of the peasant-mother to her son (quoted above) might stand as the text for the present chapter. The motive of an enlightened morality is not ‘to award praise or blame” but to understand. Moral intelligence is not judgment but criticism. Yet to understand is certainly in some fashion to dis- criminate, and thus to distinguish the real from the merely apparent, the true from the false. If morality is just any- thing you please—anything you choose to call ‘“‘life’-—the word is without meaning and we understand nothing. Morality cannot be “purely subjective”. There must be an objectively real quality in any genuine morality even though we refuse to abide by any objective “criterion’’. Now in the first chapter my thesis was stated simply, by saying that morality is knowing what you are doing; it is not then a question of what you do. The present chapter is to show how the reality of the knowing constitutes the objective moral quality; how action or expression is justified by knowledge. 177 178 MORAL PHILOSOPHY § 43 Morality, I say, is criticism. Let us look, then, at the logic of literary criticism. Suppose that you have a book to review. ‘The authoritative method of criticism is to com- pare the thesis of the book with what is recognized by the best authorities and to measure its style by the recognized standards of style. But this method, while useful for dis- posing of the common run of inconsiderable literature, is not criticism. It is no true judgment of the book. For a true judgment it matters not at all whether the message of the book is warranted by the authorities. As for such “authorities”, the history of any subject is a succession of conflicting authorities. The important question is, Is the author familiar with the authorities? This we mean when we ask, Does he know his subject? Or perhaps not even this. He may be one of those rare cases of the untaught genius who knows his subject without knowing any of the authorities; who by native insight has anticipated the au- thorities. And so the question is resolved into this: is he prepared to meet the authorities? Does the development of his position indicate that he is alive to the questions to which such a position is open and that he is is prepared to meet them? Or is he writing blindly and naively, repeat- ing possibly what many have said before him, unconscious of pitfalls that await him? If he does know, he is writing intelligently; and his book, whatever its thesis, is worthy of respect. By virtue of his knowing his treatment of his subject is objective. And as for his style—I recall the words of an architect who once said to me, ‘You may break all the rules of architecture if you have mastered them.” Likewise may you break all the rules of manners if you have mastered PUserrLOATT ON (BY EN OWLEDGE 179 them. But here again it is not a question of mastering the “rules” but of being a master of style—there are seem- ingly untaught masters of style. And this question is best answered by asking how finely and justly, and with what deliberateness of expression, the style communicates the meaning. Does he know how to make words respond to and express his thought? If so he is a master of style no matter how strange his style. Such I take to be the logic of literary criticism. Such is likewise the logic of art criticism as understood by Croce. According to Croce art is expression. It matters not what you choose to express. There are no laws determining for the artist what is beautiful or ugly. Yet not everything is art that calls itself art. Croce speaks of “absolute art”’; that is, of art as having an objective quality. Art is the expression of an impression. Of any work of art we may therefore ask how perfectly the impression is expressed or conveyed. But this is only to ask how far the words, the statue, the song, or what not, contain a meaning. Is there “speculation in those eyes which thou dost glare with’? So far as there is meaning there is beauty and art—absolute and objective art whatever the meaning. And such precisely, as I conceive it, is the logic of moral criticism. To select a possibly crucial example from the standpoint of the orthodox view, suppose that a man and woman are planning to live together without the form of marriage, or to form some sort of conventionally illicit union. Where the parties are free to marry there might seem to be no important question, and the increasing ease of divorce would seem to dispose of most of the other cases. Yet one may conceive of cases where divorce might be un- desirable and of others where parties free to marry might 180 MORAL PHILOSOPHY nevertheless wish to escape the complications imposed by legal and social convention. In any case we are here fac- ing the question whether one’s life is one’s own or the prop- erty of the social order; whether marriage (so to speak) is a personal relation or a public institution. Authoritarian judgment would of course condemn any illicit union as simply forbidden by the ordinances of so- ciety. Such judgment, as I have pointed out in Chapters V and VI, would be the judgment not of morality but of utility. Such criticism would not be moral criticism. On the other hand it would be as little in accord with the logic of moral criticism for the parties in question to toss their heads and say that they will do what they please; and that what they please is nobody’s business. This animal ges- ture suggests the morality of the slums. Other persons may at least raise the issue of whose business it is by ask- ing questions. The questions may well be impertinent questions, but they are not demonstrated to be such by a refusal to answer them. The only moral way of meeting a question is either to give it an intelligible answer or to show that it is the question of a fool. And though—on grounds mainly utilitarian—you may reasonably refuse to answer anybody’s and everybody’s question, the important consideration remains—and this is the moral consideration ——could you give an answer to the question if you wished to do so? The moral question will then be something like this: the parties in question propose, quite properly, to do as they please, but do they know clearly what they please to doP Have they considered the matter “prayerfully”’, in all of its bearings? Have they, to begin with, faced the external consequences; the economic consequences, if they are not MUGCLLELCATION «BV rANOWLEDGE £81 pecuniarily independent; then the social ostracism and relative isolation, with the possible limitation of their ac- quaintance to the relatively undesirable; the probable rup- ture of old ties—have they considered for each case what answer they will have to give? Again the scorn of the self-righteous and the abuse of the vulgar? Have they not merely faced these things as facts, but realized them in imagination as experience? And are they then prepared to meet the consequences cheerfully and uprightly without whimpering about wounded feelings? Have they also faced the more intimately personal consequences? What these may be, cannot of course be predicted; or just as little as we may predict the outcome of an authorized mar- riage. But the unrecognized union is on its personal side beset with peculiar difficulties—forcibly set forth by Tolstoi in his “Anna Karenina’’—and here even oftener than in marriage what has begun with ideal devotion has ended in personal aversion and mortification. They are undertak- ing something difficult and perilous—have they faced the nature of their undertaking? So far as for such questions they have found satisfactory answers I say that they have answered the moral question. The questions are not essentially different from those in- volved in any regular marriage. Only here it seems that. we are ready to take the will for the deed, the form for the reality. In either case, however, the essentially moral ques- tion is the question of the thoughtfulness (if you please, the conscientiousness) embodied in the act. Meanwhile the act is transformed by consciousness of the act (if indeed you may call anything an act apart from consciousness of the act). Here as everywhere in life con- sciousness makes a difference. Or self-consciousness, if 182 MORAL PHILOSOPHY you prefer—to me they are the same. Now when I say that morality is not a question of what you do, but wholly a question of knowing what you do, I expect to be greeted by the unimaginative with a scornful scepticism, by the pragmatic with the statement that the knowing must at least make a difference in what you do. And by both 1 may be asked to explain—possibly “‘to figure out’—just how knowing what you do will transform what you do. Such a test I must reject as irrelevant. It presupposes all the logic of authoritarian morality: namely, that moral action is determinate and predictable, and that the prin- ciples of action, if not also the particulars demanded by the principles, are laid down once for all without reference to individual motive and significance. It presupposes also that to become conscious of one’s action is a fact of the same order as that of attaching, say, a governor to a steam- engine, the effect of which upon the behavior of the engine can of course be calculated. Knowing, I say, is of the nature of art. That knowing will make a difference in the doing stands as a matter of course. What you will say next will ever depend upon your realization of the meaning of what you are saying now. But what in fact you will say, though possibly to be anticipated more or less in sym- pathetic imagination, is beyond the possibility of logical or scientific prediction. All that we can predict is that those who understand will see the moral significance. Compare, however, the man and woman of our illustra- tion, assumed now to have formed the illicit union, with any man and woman—of the slums or of the so-called fast set of fashionable society—who have been drawn together simply by the present excitement of a good time. The difference comprehends most of the difference between the RUstirloATLON eB YS KNOWLEDGE «183 man and the beast. We may expect a difference in be- havior; in the one case an observation of the decencies and delicacies appropriate to relations intimately personal which we may not find in the other. And a probable difference in the outcome: those who know what they are doing are thus far fortified against disloyalty. But these are out- lying considerations. The morally important difference is the immediate difference of quality, expressed in the dis- tinction of spiritual and animal. Those who in mutual intelligence know what they do have precisely thereby formed a “‘spiritual’” union; a bond never to be created, ex- cept magically, by the ceremony of marriage, of which this ceremony can never be more than an outward and visible sign. And in this fact of intelligence they have become re- sponsible, in the strictly etymological and at the same time the most significantly ethical use of that term. To be responsible is to be capable of giving an intelligent answer to an intelligent question: it does not presuppose, rather it distinctly repudiates the presupposition of an expected answer. ‘What do you mean by doing this?” The child who struggles to reply to your impatient question, protest- ing that he had perfectly good intentions which you would appreciate if only you could understand, has in him the ele- ment of moral responsibility however strange his intentions may seem to you. He is socially and morally accessible; his attitude is reasonable. The child who meets you with sullen defiance, with stolid indifference, or with dumb sub- mission, protesting nothing because he has no protest to make, is thus far morally impossible. His attitude is char- acteristic of those whom among adults we call ‘“morons’’. Such, then, is the logic common to criticism, literary, 184 MORAL PHILOSOPHY aesthetic, ethical. It may help to confirm and possibly further to clarify the conception if I add that such also is the logic of historical criticism. And history, as I have said above, is criticism—and moral criticism. But the moral attitude of historians is commonly very unsatisfactory to orthodox moralists. For while interested at every point in the moral quality of policies and persons, historians are curiously little interested in correcting the course of history or in classifying its important persons as good and bad. The historian takes any of the interesting personages— such as Napoleon, Frederick the Great, Plato, Martin Luther, Macchiavelli, Bismarck, Edmund Burke, or Ben- jamin Franklin—more or less as he finds them; and then he asks what measure of genius, of greatness of thought or conception, may be found to be expressed in their careers. The effect of the question itself will be doubtless to transform them—to create, at the same time to bring out, a new region of fact with regard to the careers. The question will still be the question of moral justification. Was there a greatness of political wisdom embodied in the policy of Napoleon, or was he only a vulgar bandit and politician favored by extraordinary circumstances? Was Moham- med, as Carlyle would have him, a case of where “the inspiration of the Almighty giveth him understanding” or, as suggested by Eduard Meyer, a prophet of the same order and on the same level with the Mormon prophet, Joseph Smith? Otherwise expressed, was the gospel of Mohammed the expression of a spiritual experience or was it simply words? Such a question, it would seem, is asking about an objective reality, however difficult the answer. Such is the question of historical criticism and such also is the ques- tion of moral criticism. WEUSil bho oA LO NEE Yak N OW LE DG Bt loo And such, then, is the meaning of justification by knowl- edge. So far as any form of expression, 7. e., of action or behavior, is intensively conscious—so far as it is thoughtful, reflective, self-conscious, so far indeed as it is in any proper sense experience—it is thus far morally significant and morally justified whatever its factual character. One might even say, with Pater, so far as it is a “‘passion”’, if we add his significant warning, ‘Only be sure that it is a passion—that it does yield you the fruit of a quickened and multiplied consciousness.’ On the other hand the nature and course of the action will then be transformed by the consciousness of the action. Take any action you please. Then put consciousness into the action. You cannot say how the action will be transformed; and no law can prescribe how it ought to be transformed. But this you can say: those who understand will mark the presence of moral quality and for them it will have moral dignity. § 44 I will now point out briefly that this conception of moral- ity is not so very foreign to the categories of common sense, however it may be opposed to orthodox doctrine. And first the category of objectivity. An experience, I have just said, is objective—and it is objectively an experience—so far as it is critical; and this means that it is cognizant—objectively cognizant—of other experiences. Now when the term ‘‘ob- jective” is used by philosophers and men of science it is likely to suggest a set of rules formulated on behalf of logic or of scientific method. But these rules are nothing but more or less ineffectual attempts to define the ex- perience of objectivity; an experience suggested more directly when the literary critic speaks of objective criticism. 186 MORAL PHILOSOPHY And this experience of objectivity is only the experience that we have when we think our thoughts in the light of (not in conformity with) the thoughts of other persons. It does not mean that we follow a rule or that we substitute the thoughts or plans of other persons for our own. Objective thinking is, so to speak, fresh-air thinking or broad- daylight thinking while subjective thinking is chamber- thinking fearing to expose itself even to itself. Objective decisions are decisions reached after criticism. And as thus objective and responsible I may also point out that morality is in the true sense “‘social”—as against the cus- tomary sense of sacrifice for the common good. Next the category of rationality. Thoughtful action is per se rational action. Yet not to be measured by any “‘rule of reason”. Here again the rule is but an ineffectual at- tempt to transcribe an experience. This is shown in a very interesting way when we inquire into the motive of that most resolute of all attempts to reduce morality to a rule of reason which is embodied in Immanuel Kant’s ‘categorical im- perative”; which commands us to “act as if the maxim from which you act were to become through your will a universal law of nature”. What did Kant have in mind here as the aspect most characteristic of the action of a moral or ra- tional being—uniformity of action or consciousness of uniformity? The answer he has already given by saying: “Everything in nature acts in conformity with law. Only a rational being has the faculty of acting in conformity with the idea of law.” * Note carefully the implications of this, and you will see that the one certain mark of a ra- tional being is that he knows what he is doing; and whether 1 From Section II of The Metaphysic of Morality. The translation is from Watson’s Selections from Kant, p. 235. JUSTIFICATION BY KNOWLEDGE 187 such a being will then feel bound to emulate the uniformity of nature is another question. In the end it seems that what Kant had before him was the simple eighteenth-century distinction to the effect that men have reason while brutes (and a fortiori inanimate na- ture) have it not. This man-brute distinction marks the experience of rationality; it is par excellence the ex- periential meaning of morality. All of moral philosophy is an attempt to say how man differs from the brute. Kant’s categorical imperative was an attempt to reduce the distinction to a kind of mathematical definition. For my- self I prefer simply to point to the experience which Kant tried to define, the experience, namely, of knowing what you are doing. But this, I should say, is just what any man whose mind is undebauched by logic means by acting rationally. When we say of a man emerging from delirium that “he talked rationally” we do not mean that he talked in syllogisms. We mean simply that he knew where he was. ‘The darkness of delirium had been succeeded by “the light of reason”, And the concrete designation for an irrational impulse is invariably that it is “blind”’. There remains, however, an implication which I would probably best not pretend to reconcile with the usual cate- gories either of common sense or of orthodox ethics. And the implication is vital. Moral action, I say, is thoughtful action, and this is sufficient. Moral action, in other words, is deliberate action. Now in the common view moral action must indeed be deliberate. But this common view is likely then to insist upon the reality of deliberately immoral ac- tion. And this of course I deny. I do not say, be it noted, that deliberate action is certain to end in being right—thus 188 MORAL PHILOSOPHY implying a miraculously pre-established harmony between deliberate choice and an orthodox standard. I say rather that it is “right” in being deliberate. The distinction of deliberate wrong-doing is then a distinction introduced by the authoritarian standard. The reader will perceive that we have again before us one of the dramatis personae of an earlier chapter in the person of “‘the clever rogue”. One of the most interesting of his kind is the great American humbug; who, however, is not exclusively American. There are two beautiful studies of the humbug by Alphonse Daudet, one in a lighter tone in the trilogy of “Tartarin”, the other in a graver, almost vindictive, tone in ‘Numa Roumestan”. We find him everywhere in life—and never quite certainly not in ourselves; in the college professor who, having lost his zeal for study, will now authenticate his profession by oracular observation and edifying sentiment; in the politician who, his pockets lined with tainted money, lays his hand upon his heart and talks about his service to his country. The divergence between profession and fact seems so obvious that we assume the deception to be deliberate. Carlyle betrays this assumption when he seeks to vindicate the character of Mohammed by denying that he was ‘“‘a poor conscious ambitious schemer’”. Yet we reveal our per- plexity by putting the assumption in the form of a ques- tion: how is such deliberate mendacity and hypocrisy possible? How can the fellow expect any one to believe him? Why should we, however, assume deliberate mendacity? Why not adopt the more probable assumption (nicely worked out by Daudet in “Numa Roumestan’’) that the fellow deceives himself? Not that he may not suffer from Us Lee A TO Neb ak NO W LEDC Ee 189 occasional terrible moments of self-revelation. But when he gets out before the audience, and hears the intoxicating sound of his own voice and the plaudits of the crowd, why should he not believe that after all he must be very much what he pretends to be? Does this mean, however, that he is to be reckoned among the rather innocent citizens of a moral world? By no means, I reply; the citizens of the moral world are not among the “innocent”. The fact that he deceives himself is just the most decisive ground for banishing him. ‘The habit of deceiving other persons is sufficiently doubtful as a mark of intelligence, but he who deceives himself must be set down as hopeless. Alas, these conscious hypocrites, these clever rogues, these shrewd diplomats, they have so little in them! Were they delib- erate hypocrites, it would mean that they had sounded depths of wisdom by you or me unsuspected. And then for us they would be adding to the significance of human life. And thus I continue to reject the distinction of the good man and the bad, as a distinction morally irrelevant; and the discrimination that I have in mind is between the presence of moral significance and the absence of it; which seems to me to mark the critical attitude. For my own part, I seem to find ever less use for such terms as “wicked”, “sinful”, “nefarious”, and the like. They seem to me to correspond to nothing real. And I tend rather to think of those who are morally inadmissible as “coarse’’, “‘brutal’’, or ‘‘insensitive’’. Nor can J very easily digest the simple distinction suggested by ‘“‘the criminal classes”. I doubt very much whether the criminal classes | have that character for themselves; and I suspect that many of them are only persons born belatedly, out of due 190 MORAL PHILOSOPHY time, persons who might have won a title of nobility in the free-booting ages of Elizabeth or of Anne, for whom however the present age is too civilized and sophisticated. And as for Milton’s Satan with his “Evil, be thou my good”, he is only the reductio ad absurdum of orthodox morality. I believe I am not the first to note that Milton has here invested Satan with a sublime moral dignity. § 46 The motive of morality, I have said, is not to judge but to understand. Now I dare say that the attentive reader has been already reminded by this of “tout comprendre est tout pardonner’’; often translated to mean that to under- stand is to forgive. And this French saying is commonly accounted to be the last word in sentimentalism. For what it seems to mean is that morally there is in the end no real difference between men. We are all well-meaning men, and the only problem of the moral life is to under- stand one another. Am I to confess, then, that sentimen- talism is the final meaning of the morality of intelligence? Now I am not certain that “tout comprendre est tout pardonner” may not be a fair expression of my meaning— although personally I do not care to consider the moral problem under the aspect of forgiveness. For aught I know there may be behind the action of any man and of every man a depth of reflection beyond my grasp. And I should say that a truly critical imagination will not easily be satisfied to abandon the search for meaning and the hope of discovering a meaning. Meanwhile, how- ever, this is not to say that every man has for me an achieved moral quality; and I am not so much of a sen- JUSTIFICATION BY KNOWLEDGE 191 timentalist as to assume the moral quality without some verifying experience. That which is already compre- hended has its moral significance assured. But of any form of behavior raising the issue of criticism, it still re- mains to ask whether it is comprehensible; and behavior is not made comprehensible by showing that it is merely to be expected. The point is so interesting—and so full of dramatic significance when it comes into the more intimate personal life—that I must regret my inability to offer more than a seemingly trivial and prosaic illustration. Many years ago I went into a Chicago department-store for a pair of shoes. The salesman, a man between twenty-five and thirty, whom I marked at once as a blundering, “feckless” sort of fellow, and rather shabby for so pretentious an establishment (he was probably an extra man), showed me four pairs, all, he explained, of the same price. I selected one pair as being clearly better than the others, besides being of the shape I wanted. The salesman picked up another pair and began volubly to assure me that of the shoes he had shown me these were in every respect the best. I told him that I would none the less stand by my choice. Then in great confusion he explained that he had made a mistake; those that I preferred were considerably higher in price. And he added, rather sullenly, that if I insisted, he must sell them to me at the price named—and himself make up the difference. When I explained that I did not wish to save money at his ex- pense, he seemed pathetically relieved—and the transaction was closed. But the point of my tale is this. As I was leaving the 192 MORAL PHILOSOPHY place the salesman said to me in a confidential tone, half in bravado, half beseechingly, ““You see why I didn’t talk "em up to you, don’t you?” Did I see? That question, very amusing at the time, has stuck in my imagination for twenty-five years, and has come to embody for me one of the deepest questions of moral philosophy. Of course I saw that he had lied to me. But I also seemed to see more. I seemed to see in him one of those pathetic, well-meaning incompetents who will never be good for much and will never know why. And I guessed that after the fashion of his improvident kind he had probably taken to him a wife and begotten a child or two for whom it was a desperate task to provide. The discovery that by his blunder he had made a hole in his week’s wages was more than he could bear. And so, naturally and inevitably, he lied. Was this a case of “tout comprendre est tout pardonner’’? Hardly, I should say. I could not resent the lie. But absence of resentment is not, except for authoritarian morality, moral justification. To note that an action takes place “naturally and inevitably”, as I have just put it, is by no means to comprehend the action. To compre- hend an action is nothing less than to appreciate the meaning of the action from the agent’s point of view. This is to assume that there is such a point of view; in other words, that the action has moral quality. Suppose, then, that reading my thoughts, he had re- plied with something like this: “I know what you are thinking; and what you suppose is mostly true. I am indeed one of the incompetents. But don’t suppose that I lied to you unwittingly; because I couldn’t help it; be- cause I had no sense of the offensiveness of a lie. I did JUSTIFICATION BY KNOWLEDGE 193 know, and it was in spite of knowing—or, if you please, in the light of knowing—that I lied deliberately. I resent as an imposition a rule that compels an employee to make good out of his own pocket, for the supposed honor of the establishment, a blunder that might easily and harm- lessly be rectified; and I feel that I am justified in pro- tecting myself against the customer who will use this for his own advantage. In your case I seem to have made a mistake; but as a matter of general policy I say that the lie was justifiable.” To put this speech into the mouth of the person I have described may seem far from realistic. But if so it will only bring out the point of the illustration, namely, the realistic character of the moral distinction and the difference between a true moral judgment and a mere outburst of sentiment. The moral question is the very nice question of interpretation: how much consciousness of meaning may I believe to lie in or behind this act? How far is it self- conscious, how far merely automatic—how much “specu- lation in those eyes”? And had I encountered such a rationalized justification as I have endeavored to suggest, then, even while loathing a liar on general principles, I must certainly have abandoned with shame the superior attitude I was tempted to assume, and I must then have recognized in the man before me a person of moral dignity. I need not have assented to the necessity of lying. I might have thought, vainly perhaps, that I my- self could have found a better way out. But this will only help us to see how remote are the casuistic questions— such as, Is a lie ever justifiablePp—from the vital issues of morality. In justification of my general thesis I will venture to 194 MORAL PHILOSOPHY offer one more illustration. Some time ago I chanced upon an autobiographical work by a Jewish writer, an Ameri- can of foreign birth. The book was a very personal document, in which an interesting experience and an in- teresting point of view were presented with genius and literary skill. At one point the writer was at pains to ex- plain to his reader that he could find none of the supposedly Jewish traits in himself. Evidently it was his purpose to prove that there is no difference between a Jew and a gentile. Personally I do not understand why a Jew, representing a people which has contributed so much to the culture of the race, should wish to deny that there is any distinctive quality in a Jew. It happens, however, that other gentile readers have agreed with me in thinking that the book in question exhibited rather markedly some of the more unpleasant traits commonly attributed by gentiles to Jews. And in particular the following. The writer referred more than once to his wife and to his married life in terms that should win respect, yet with a certain defensive, not to say truculent, eloquence which made one wonder at the necessity. At the same time he commented in terms most contemptuous upon the “commonplace” and ‘‘uninterest- ing” wives of men with whom he had been associated; men who, it seemed, had not only done him no ill but had been generally friendly to him, and whose chief fault seemed to be that they preferred the society of their wives to his own society. Now this lack, I will not say of chivalry, but of objective decency and fairness—this child- ish and ill-mannered disposition to write one’s own sensi- bilities large and the sensibilities of others small—is unfortunately just what the common gentile world— JUSTIFICATION BY KNOWLEDGE 195 whether truly or falsely, matters not for our purpose—is most inclined to regard as the peculiar mark of the Jew. And whether truly or falsely, how could he fail to be alive to the nature of the prejudice and to provide for it? Either, it seems, he must then have deleted these offensive passages or he must have justified them by explaining his point of view. And I think he must then have gone on to make as persuasive as possible the beauty of the Jewish character. The difficulty with this writer, I guess, was precisely that he was unaware of these so-called Jewish traits. He did not know what his attitude would mean to his reader, nor just what it meant to himself. This was the root of the moral difficulty, and this constituted his offence and his offensiveness. After all, one can permit a man to say anything he pleases to one—or, apart from its practical aspect, to do anything he pleases—provided he makes clear the significance of what he is saying or doing. And in spite of all race prejudices, any racial trait tends to justify itself and to compel recognition when it expresses itself consciously and responsibly. The unconscious race- tendency is a trait merely brutal; the self-conscious expres- sion of tendency is a contribution to life. § 47 So much for the justification by knowledge. Now I fear very much that some obstinately practical reader will be certain at this point to ask me what we are going to do about it when the carefully meditated purposes of dif- ferent persons issue in conflicting lines of action—when, for example, one of a married pair is thoughtfully resolved upon divorce, the other no less thoughtfully resolved against 196 MORAL PHILOSOPHY it. To him I can only repeat what has been said before, namely, that it is not the purpose of moral philosophy to draft a schedule of what to do. Such a task is reserved for those—the law, or possibly the police—whose function it is to frame utilitarian schemes of social order; in which I am here not interested. Meanwhile I may remind him once more of the dif- ference between settling a question and answering it, be- tween the disposal of a problem and its solution. The only conceivable moral resolution of a conflict is that which issues in mutual understanding after conference and dis- cussion. The moral world knows nothing of judges, umpires, courts, and laws. If the parties should appeal to me I could give them only the rather easy advice to state their case, each to the other, with the utmost possible frankness. Putting it very vulgarly I might say, Begin by laying your cards on the table—if only you know what cards you are really holding. Any card-player will be reminded by this figure that consciousness makes an im- portant difference; after seeing your careless opponent’s hand at bridge it is very difficult to play as if you had not seen it—you do not now know what your own hand alone would have suggested. In like fashion your own case is likely to look very different after you have grasped the point of view of the other party; and the difference makes the two more negotiable, more capable of a resolution satisfying to both. But it may be that with the best will to negotiate there will remain elements of flat opposition of interest. This will mean only that, humanly speaking, the problem is morally insoluble. But if the problem is not morally soluble, in the sense of yielding complete mutual satisfac- MUSTIEILCATION BYVENOWLEDGE 197 tion, there may still be found a compromise, involving reciprocal sacrifice, which it will pay both parties to accept. Let us not, however, mistake this mutual sacrifice for a moral solution. And if no practicable compromise is dis- coverable—well, if I were one of the parties I should then make the typical utilitarian calculation of profit and loss and ask myself how far it would pay me to yield the points now left in dispute, how far to fight for them. But when it comes to this we have left the moral world well in the distance. CHAPTER XIII THE ENJOYMENT OF LIFE § 48. The Epicurean attitude. §49. An Epicurean confession. § 50. Epicurus and Pater. § 51. Enjoyment and imagination. § 52. The enjoyment of friendship and the enjoyment of religion. § 53. Serious enjoyment. N connection with the pragmatic attitude it was said that the significance of any temporal moment of life, or the meaning of any present desire, might be any- thing you please; ‘“‘the present” is a question of the present scope of imagination. The same indefinite possibility confronts us when we think to define the boundaries of human nature. Could we think of the human being simply as an organism with a definite habitat and a re- stricted span of life, we might then formulate a definite “science of ethics’, based upon human nature as a natural fact, undisturbed by suggestions metaphysical. But such a science of ethics would hardly merit the name of moral philosophy. The “moral nature” of man implies that he is not a mere organism but an organism which is self- conscious and critical, an organism with imagination. To human nature as thus conceived it seems difficult to assign any “natural” boundaries. In the previous chapters I have found it convenient to take human nature, generally speaking, as it “is”, But now it seems that to leave the story at this point is to omit all the deeper issues of moral philosophy; and to impose upon the critical life a termination artificially abrupt— 198 THE ENJOYMENT OF LIFE 199 even though we foresee that further inquiry will be inquiry without end. Acordingly I shall go on, in these remain- ing chapters, to pursue as certainly as I can the more re- flective implications of the critical life. I shall begin in the present chapter by asking what is meant by the enjoy ment of life. § 48 The question relates to the possibility of maintaining in the form of a critical life what in general terms may be described as an Epicurean attitude. Now it happens that the Epicurean (using the term in its broadest sense) is the person who is supposed to make the critical life his special profession; by which I mean that he lays a special claim to sophistication, regarding himself perhaps as the finally sceptical and disillusioned. It is he who has laid bare the vanity of most of the satisfactions that men seek, the vanity of social or political or literary distinction, the vanity of wealth and no less the vanity of the satisfaction afforded by the crude gratification of sensual appetite. But above all it is he who has demonstrated the vanity of religious hopes or fears, the vanity of all considerations relating to the fact of death. Reading Epicurus or\ Lucretius, one feels that in their view the one thing neces- | sary for human salvation is indifference to death. The gods exist—perhaps; but whether they exist or not, we may be sure that the matter is no concern of ours. Human life must stand upon its own basis. Therefore let us cultivate our garden and not look beyond. What, then, has life to offer? Well, for the Epicurean not a great deal, but something worth while if we moderate our expectations. The enjoyment of friendship, for ex- 200 MORAL PHILOSOPHY ample, if we are careful not to expect too much of our friends; and this calls for an attitude of amiability and cheerfulness, of urbanity and graciousness, and a kindly tolerance of human weaknesses. The art of life is to take men and things as we find them and to cultivate a taste for what they actually have to give us. To Epicurus and his friends it seemed that the chief fruits of the garden were the persons of one’s inner circle. The Epicurean of the modern sort attaches more importance to the enjoyment of beauty and he may even add to this the enjoyment of religion. Any aspect of life may conceivably appeal to his taste for enjoyment simply as an aspect of life; that is, as a variety of sensation or of feeling. But in all such he conceives that he is dealing only with immediate and tangible realities. The sensation or the feeling is a realized fact; the cognitive significance of a sensation or a feeling is a vain speculation. And whatever may be true or false in the realm of speculation, it cannot change the nature of what is perceived, or felt, as a matter of fact. § 49 Whether I am by nature and temperament an Epicurean, I hardly know—certainly I find the Epicurean urbanity a difficult achievement. But as a moral philosopher I should be willing to call myself an Epicurean if only I might be permitted to remain a critical Epicurean; and in any case it has been my purpose in the foregoing chapters to justify the Epicurean demand for the enjoy- ment of life as an element essential to morality. I will therefore venture to illustrate my Epicurean sympathies somewhat as follows. When I see a group of children playing happily together, or at least with fair success THE ENJOYMENT OF LIFE 201 managing their own affairs, my instinctive feeling is, Leave them alone. It seems to me something of an im- pertinence to show them how they ought to manage their affairs and especially to show them how they ought to play their game. And if it be said that the game if properly supervised could be made an instrument of self- culture and of moral discipline, my reply would be that they are getting the best sort of discipline as it is if only they are alive and playing the game. It may be only too necessary presently to interrupt them for the purpose of “training” them, along lines not spontaneously suggested by their interests, to meet the demands of a sternly prac- tical world. But I do not feel called upon to add to the sternness of the world. I suspect indeed that sternness closes the mind instead of opening it." And I should really like to believe that education could be left to the play of native interests. I am compelled rather to believe that native interests might fail to assert themselves apart from the discipline of life. Even so I can see no reason why I should artificially intensify the discipline of life. As an Epicurean I should like to extend to men in general the kind of indulgence—deference, I prefer to call it—that I have in mind for the children. I wish to respect men’s enjoyments, to let them live and grow through living. I have no desire to “organize” them; and I refuse to be organized myself beyond what is plainly necessary for practical purposes. I might almost say, with Mr. Santayana, that I wish them only “simple happiness’. 1 Bosanquet, the high-priest of absolutism, quotes from Mark Pattison “the force of individual character generated by the rule of Calvin at Geneva’; which means, I suspect, that dogmatism on the part of the master generates an equally dogmatic opposition on the part of the pupil. Calvinism is a system by which each exacts retribution from his children for the discipline inflicted by his parents. 202 MORAL PHILOSOPHY At any rate I will quote his words as saying so much better than any of my own very nearly what I mean: “JT find that I am sometimes blamed for not laboring more earnestly to bring down the ideal good of which I prate into the lives of other men. My critics suppose, apparently, that I mean by the ideal good some particular way of life or some type of character which is alone virtuous, and which ought to be propagated. Alas, their propagandas! How they have filled this world with hatred, darkness, and blood! How they are still the eternal obstacle, in every home and every heart, to a simple happiness! I have no wish to propagate any particular character, least of all my own; my con- ceit does not take that form. I wish individuals, and races, and nations to be themselves, and to multiply the forms of perfection and happiness, as nature prompts them. The only thing which I think might be propagated without injustice to the types thereby suppressed is harmony; enough harmony to prevent the interference of one type with another, and to allow the perfect development of each type.” ? And yet “a simple happiness”? Alas! I suspect that there is no simple happiness. The search for happiness inevitably develops complications and problems. And above all that supreme happiness which we hope to find in the intimacies of personal love and _ understanding. Happiness seems to be nowhere uncomplicated with “dis- cipline”. Yet even so I will let my neighbor find his discipline for himself. If he must go out of his way to find it and follow William James’s moralizing advice (so incongruous, by the way, with William James) to do something disagreeable every day just for the sake of dis- cipline—well, his demands upon life must be rather simple. But why men—but more especially women—should de- light in the imposition of discipline passes my compre- hension. When I see a young working-girl exulting in *From his essay, “On My Friendly Critics”, in Soliloquies in England, London, 1922. THE ENJOYMENT OF LIFE 203 outrageously gaudy finery, her young man presenting the glass to fashion in the most grotesque of ready-made clothes, I feel in myself no disposition to rebuke their taste however little it be mine. What I mainly ask is that she should genuinely enjoy her fine feathers and that she should not be wearing them in imitation of fashionable ladies or in blinder obedience to department-store advertise- ments. And if her fine feathers bring her to shame—well, alas! When I read in “Adam Bede” of poor Hetty Sorrel driven by a terror of shame to causing the death of her illegitimate child I am apt to forget all that has been said about her vanity and selfishness, and I am impressed chiefly by the brutal cruelty of a social order which in- flicts such terrible penalties upon the irregular satisfac- tion of impulses so essentially innocent—so remote, at any rate, from anything malign or treacherous. And it is just this desire to punish others for their sins of sex, or any desire to regulate the sex-relations of others beyond the minimum of utility, that as an Epicurean I find most unintelligible. If Brown has married a woman with a past I feel no impulse to push Brown off the side- walk. If Brown and Mrs. Brown are happy together what more is there to be said? And who knows whether a shady experience may not turn out to be after the fact a superior opportunity for moral insight? All that I ask of them is a decent reticence. Or if I should hear that Smith and Mrs. Jones are suspected of being too intimate —well, as a gentleman it is not for me to inquire further ex- cept perhaps as I may be in a relation of personal respon- sibility to Jones or Mrs. Smith. As for the other two they have set themselves a task sufficiently hazardous— why should I wish them disaster? Sufficiently hazardous 204 MORAL PHILOSOPHY indeed is the task undertaken by any young man and woman who are seeking in marriage their happiness in one another. Surely the problem contains its own discipline, and failure is sufficiently humiliating; why should we care to add to the discipline imposed by the problem itself? And all of this is not because I would treat the sex-relation lightly; rather because to my own feeling even as an Epicurean the sex-relation is so deeply committing; al- though I will not say that it must be such for all persons under all circumstances. But in a relation so essentially private who but the principals can say where the real loyalties lie? And if there has been a betrayal what but the free conviction of the traitor himself can ever make good? And therefore as an Epicurean, but also if you like as a very serious moralist, I believe in “birth-control”; be- cause it would add freedom to the sex-relation, and moral freedom in the sense of separating the personal motive from the utilitarian. Authoritarian moralists are gen- erally united in the endeavor to suppress knowledge of methods of contraception and to hinder the attainment of any clearer knowledge. They claim that it would en- courage “immorality”. But I wonder how, except from a motive meanly curious, this could concern themselves. And I also wonder about the immorality. JI wonder if this is not a case of Macaulay’s Puritan who forbade bear- baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectator. Moreover, I suspect that it is not immorality that they most fear: what they dread, for their children perhaps, is the significance of the issue which will be presented when sexual intercourse is definitely freed from the fear of consequences; and they fear to face a question purely moral. As for those who THE ENJOYMENT OF LIFE 205 condemn birth-control as an interference with nature, their point of view I am obliged to put upon the level of that of the Mohammedan of the desert. I have dwelt upon the sex-problem because it seems to me to embody in acute form all of the problems of personal relations. And in my view all moral problems are in the end problems of personal relations. Accordingly, I do not deny that from the standpoint of social convenience and utility the rules of sex-morality may have an important justification, and therefore for the individual from the standpoint of worldly wisdom. And I would not be too disdainful of worldly wisdom. I even suspect that those may be right who tell us that happiness, in the sense of contentment, would be increased if marriages could be arranged in the good old-fashioned way by the consulta- tion of parents. But, precisely as an Epicurean, I cannot identify contentment with the enjoyment of life, or social respectability with personal chastity. Since all moral problems are problems of personal re- lations, I am disposed, here again as an Epicurean, to refer all morality to the principle of good manners. In sex- morality I feel that good manners would supply the determining principle. And above all in matters of reli- gion. A man’s wife, a man’s religion—these two most momentous choices of his life good manners forbid me to challenge or rudely to question. And on the other hand since I am not called upon to worship his wife why must he insist that I worship at the shrine of his religion? As an Epicurean it seems to me that religious differences ought of all things to present the least practical difficulty. That, I shall be told, is because I have no anxiety for other men’s souls, because religion is for me a matter of 206 MORAL PHILOSOPHY no significance. No, it is because I would respect their souls, and therefore their privacy, and because, precisely from this standpoint, I take their religion to be the matter of most significance. And I might go further to suggest the validity of good manners as a principle for broader fields, even for the field of international relations. If the moral ideas gov- erning these relations could be made to approximate those governing the relations of decent individuals; if national honor meant what honor means today to a man of intelli- gence and a gentleman, namely, a scrupulous sincerity and a scrupulous regard for obligations instead of a swagger- ing challenge to the issue of force; if peoples could re- frain from expressing contempt for one another’s stock and for one another’s religion and if such contempt could cease to be regarded as an evidence of patriotism; if jealousy and revenge could be thought as vain and un- worthy in a nation as in an individual—my impression is that the necessary economic adjustments would come rather easily and that we should presently have peace on earth and good will to men. Here, therefore, I differ from those who would dis- tinguish manners from morals, and the difference is one of principle. JI am not thinking of course of merely formal manners though I appreciate their great convenience. Nor do I feel it to be an important sign of good manners that a man knows the proper tone to use towards a servant. The motive of good manners, as I understand it, is the motive of respect for the personality of your fellow. Good manners properly conceived thus constitute the perfection of moral refinement. Those who would distinguish THE ENJOYMENT OF LIFE 207 manners from morals will reply to me, Not good manners, but brotherly love. To me, however, brotherly love di- vorced from the motive of good manners is morally offensive. What doth it profit a man to heap him with benefits if you respect not his soul? And I think that it calls for a peculiarly Epicurean sort of imagination to sense the nature and varieties of soul. § 50 So much for the Epicurean confession. A few words now about Epicurean philosophers. As an Epicurean who is also a student of philosophy I refuse to interpret even the ancient and classical Epicureanism as meaning, Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die. ‘This is per- haps what logically Epicurus ought to have meant, since it seems that for him and his school the chief fact of life was that life is short. But it seems also that the Epicureans, with a painful inconsistency perhaps, arrived at a very different conclu;:ion. We are but beasts that perish, therefore—shall we, therefore, enjoy the life of the beast? By no means. Therefore, rather, let us rescue from life what possibilities of sweetness and humanity it may have while yet there is time.* Epicurean morality, in other words, though confronted with the fact that man is a perishing animal, is based, like every other morality, upon the idea that man is an intelligent animal. Its question then is, What is the best life for an intelligent being? The Stoics replied to this question by an attempt to invest life with dignity and greatness. The Epicurean 3 As expressions of the Epicurean motif, without the Epicurean pessimism, IT know of nothing better than Milton’s two graceful sonnets, “To Mr. Law- rence’ and “To Cyriack Skinner”. 208 MORALOPHILOSOPEHY doubted the possibility. But he still hoped to make life genial and humane. And this was his conception of the enjoyment of life. | I would not, however, pin Epicureanism to the philos- ophy of Epicurus. Epicurus seems to have been a saintly person, but his philosophy of life was rather homely and matter-of-fact, prosaic and unimaginative. The classical Epicurean appears to have been neither an “‘epicure’’ nor an exquisite. At the same time the Epicurean conception of intelligence suggests a mechanical and calculating in- telligence such as the intelligence conceived by modern utilitarians; an intelligence about life, occupied in sorting and ordering the sensations forming the opaque material of life, but hardly an intelligence within life, within the sensations themselves. It is the attempt to make the sen- sations themselves intelligent that marks, I should say, the distinctive quality of the Epicureanism of today and constitutes its aesthetic motif. The philosophy of this motif, very properly called a philosophy, is contained in the writings of Walter Pater, whose version of “humanism” I have quoted in Chapter VIII. According to Pater the good life consists in the enjoyment of exquisite sensations. By moralists of the sober sort this philosophy of life is condemned with a_ vehemence almost vindictive as representing what Carlyle calls “the pig-philosophy” in only its most insidious and seductive form. On behalf of this criticism they can doubtless fairly quote chapter and verse. For my own part, however, I prefer to class Pater among the most suggestive of the greater moralists. Personally I do not wholly enjoy him. I seem to be in the presence of an obstructed mind—obstructed possibly by a too exquisite THE ENJOYMENT OF LIFE 209 honesty; which, by the way, is the “lesson” of Pater’s essay on style. And young Marius the Epicurean strikes me as not a very stimulating companion. The picture of him somewhere in a room furnished solely with a vase containing one rare flower—for concentrated contemplation —tempts me to irreverence. Moreover, I am sometimes tempted to wonder for a moment how much meaning lies behind Pater’s words, and how far they may not be— words. And yet as I dwell upon them further I am im- pressed by their suggestiveness and they seem to work together into a significant if somewhat vaguely imagina- tive philosophy of life. This I look for in the later “Marius” rather than in “The Renaissance”. I have just noted that Epicurus’s conception of intelligence suggests an intelligence about sensations and not within them; as if life were a game of playing with pictures. I think that, in spite of certain very suggestive counteracting motives, much the same may be said for the Epicureanism (or Cyrenaicism) of Pater’s “Conclusion” to the volume on ‘The Renaissance”, To think only of giving “‘the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake’; “‘to burn always with this hard gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy” of the concentrated moment; in the presence of which ‘“‘we shall hardly have time to make theories [i. e., to exercise any imagination] about the things we see and touch’”—this especial kind of worship of “art for art’s sake”, of impression for impression’s sake, seems to leave little room for any quality of soul, of humanity, even of experience, within the impressions themselves. It is not properly sensations that Pater is dealing with here, but simply the counters or poker-chips which function as 210 MORAL PHILOSOPHY “entities” for Mr. Bertrand Russell and the mathematical logicians, only now agreably colored and _ illuminated. Thus far the aesthetic Epicureanism differs not essentially from the prosaic. In a footnote to this “‘Conclusion”’ in a later edition Pater says, “I have dealt more fully in Marius the Epicurean with the thoughts suggested by it.” To the reader of “Marius” it seems rather that he has arrived at a new point of view; or at least at a view not quite foreseen in “The Renaissance”. And now we may see why Marius’s contemplation of the lone flower was a religious exercise, and what is meant by “art for art’s sake”. The point of the aesthetic philosophy is now that it will put meaning into that great region of life, represented by sense- preception, which for the dull mind is merely opaque fact. It will put intelligence within the sensation. An impres- sion is now no longer a fact, a thing, even a “flame”, but a vision—‘‘vision” is Pater’s favorite word. And the enjoyment of impressions is an exercise of imagination. And what is more, it seems that imagination may possibly reach the dimensions of religious insight and become an intuition of life eternal. Of one of the episodes in the spiritual development of Marius we read that ‘“He seemed to lie readier than was his wont to the imaginative in- fluence of the philosophic reason—to the suggestions of a possible open country, commencing just where all actual experience leaves off, but which experience, one’s own ex- perience and not another’s, may some day occupy.” * And so it seems now that the key-word of Epicureanism is not “sensation”? but “imagination”; not sensation as an opaque fact but sensation as vision. And it is in this 4 Marius the Epicurean, 1910, Vol. II, p. 36. THEIENTOY MENTOR CIEE nA! sense that I call myself an Epicurean; as one who looks for the realities of life in the exercise of imagination. § 51 This brings me to the point of the question that I have in mind. Upon what I have called its positive side, Epicureanism stands for the enjoyment of life. On its negative side, however, Epicureanism is marked—tradi- tionally, at least—by an insistence that life is a determ- inately limited natural fact. Sensation is thus a fact; value (i. e., pleasure—or pain) is in like manner a fact. In general the world is simply a fact; and to call it a fact means that it is simply this world, which may be fully defined and apprehended without any implication of a world beyond. And thus life is a fact. My question is, Can life be thus taken by any reflective mind? Can it thus be taken consciously and critically? Or—is it possible to enjoy life while taking life as a matter of fact? Epicureanism stands for the enjoyment of life. Every one, however, is committed to the enjoyment of life, some- where, at some time, in heaven if not on earth. For enjoyment is an indispensable condition of value. En- joyment stands for the realization of value. Vulgarly it is “cash-value”’; and a value which can never be a cash- value is no value whatever. But now, what is the mean- ing of such “realization” as a conscious or spiritual fact? Here, it seems to me, as nearly everywhere else, our ideas of things spiritual are encumbered by vulgar metaphors. We enjoy, and what we enjoy is blankly called “pleasure’’. Now, to enjoy is indeed to realize, to appropriate; and to appropriate most securely is, it seems then, to consume. On the other hand, what is enjoyed must be a realizable 212 MORAL PHILOSOPHY something; and thus, it seems, a quantum, something solid and substantial which is capable of appropriation. Hence the type of all enjoyment, the distinctively “solid” enjoy- ment, becomes the enjoyment of food; and the typical food-enjoyment the enjoyment of the animal. But suppose we reflect. By “enjoyment” we are mean- ing all the while a mental fact, namely, conscious ap- propriation. Observe with this in mind and you will note that the dog, for instance, does not enjoy his food, he simply bolts it. For a clearer realization of values we should turn to the child, say five years old, who, innocent of table-manners but with fine instinct, turns over his piece of bread and jam so that the jammy side may be in direct contact with the taste-organs on the tongue; and then probably licks off the jam before he consumes the bread. Or, better, to the connoisseur who, with due respect, slowly sips his glass of port and holds each sip for a moment on the tongue lest any of its fineness escape him. Here it should readily be seen that enjoyment is not a bare fact. The wine indeed is a fact. The enjoyment, however, is a process of discriminating intelligence—a spiritual even a dialectical process. And a process without a determin- ate end. A realization of value indeed yet never a com- pleted realization. Even the enjoyment of wine is sustained by an unappeased curiosity, a quest for nuances of taste foreshadowed but not quite grasped. When the wine ceases thus to stimulate it becomes insipid. And so of the enjoyment of life. It is doubtless a trifle suspicious when a more than middle-aged college professor undertakes to expose the mere pomp and vanity of a thoughtless world. And a trifle humorous—for what does he know about enjoyment? But this is to raise a question. THE ENJOYMBENT OF LIFE ZAG For my own part, although I cannot for long enjoy the society of youth, I find at times a keen pleasure in ob- serving the enjoyment of a group of healthy and happy children at play, or perhaps of a set of youths and maidens having the time of their life at a dance. And with the other elders I may sigh for the lost capacity thus to enjoy life. But not for long. If I were asked to change places with the youth I should hesitate. For there is something lacking to the completion of their enjoyment which, let us hope, has been won if sadly by the elders around the wall: namely, a thoughtful sense of life. It is delightful to contemplate the young ones. But the re- flection comes, What a pity that they cannot know—as we seem to know—what a good time they are having! Which means, whatever difficulties the thought may sug- gest, that only as they are conscious of enjoying are they really enjoying? And only thus far do we really sympa- thize with their enjoyment. After all it is the deeply earnest little ones who most stir us to sympathetic affection, those whose play is not in their own eyes mere play. And these, it seems, come nearest to realizing our idea of healthy, happy children. The utterly thoughtless, the silly, giggling little children, the dissipated youth—these represent not so much enjoyment as benumbed sensibility. Accordingly there would seem to be no enjoyment of life apart from a reflective attitude towards life. And this though the reflective attitude come only with a diminished vitality, making enjoyment seem sombre and subdued. When I seek to illustrate the attitude from literature, in the person of one who seems most to enjoy the life that he presents, I find that, paradoxical though it seems, my thought turns to Tourgenieff, albeit that so many of his 214 MORAL PHILOSOPHY pictures of Russian life are grave and sad. Yet the attitude of absorbed contemplation, at once questioning, discerning, sympathetic, which lies in the background of all of Tourgenieff’s realism; a certain sustained gravity which, in the “‘Sportsman’s Annals”, for example, imports the whole problem of life into a series of ostensibly de- scriptive sketches; this ‘‘divinest melancholy”, as Milton calls it, marks an element indispensable to any true en- joyment, to any satisfying taste of life.” Any enjoyment of life implies a sense of the mystery of life. No fool can enjoy life. To some readers this will seem a Pickwickian, perhaps a casuistic, version of enjoyment. They have thought of enjoyment as light-hearted; and heavy-hearted enjoyment appears to be a contradiction in terms. I will not pre- tend that my analysis is free from difficulty. It seems that any analysis of the critical life is bound to raise as many questions as it answers. But this only means that the crowning mystery of life is not so much the mystery of the universe as the mystery of ourselves. What after all is the object of the heart’s desire? If one could answer this—if, for example, ‘“L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso” could be put into a single poem—doubtless all else would be clear. Meanwhile the fact remains that if we enjoy pleasure we also enjoy pain; tragedy no less than comedy. Pain, it seems, becomes our pleasure. And you and I at least would not care to subscribe to an enjoyment solely of comedy. This would mean that we were fit only to be persons in a comedy. Nor does it help matters to suggest that true enjoyment is to be found in a “properly propor- 5 After writing the above I am not sure that George Eliot would not furnish an even better illustration. THE ENJOYMENT OF LIFE 215 tioned mixture” of pleasure and pain, of happiness and disappointment, after the fashion of a well-seasoned dish. The figure is too crude. It suggests once more the con- sumption of physical goods. As a fact of consciousness enjoyment is not a consumption of goods but an experience of life. From this point of view a tragic experience of life may yet be an enjoyment of life, as giving an assured sense of the reality of life. JI may feel perhaps that a less intensive consciousness of life would be easier but this only marks the limits of what I have the strength to enjoy. On the other hand it means that for the deeper ex- perience life is more than ever an unsatisfied aspiration. The merely physical consumption of goods is a fact, com- pleted when the goods are consumed. If the desire for goods were only a fact parallel to the process of consump- tion, enjoyment would be similarly a fait accompli. Desire, however, involves consciousness—the consciousness of desire; and the conscious satisfaction of desire only reveals the further implications of the desire yet to be satisfied. § 52 The point may be illustrated in the matter of friendship. For the disciple of Epicurus, we remember, friendship was the most available and likewise the most fruitful sort of happiness. In ‘Harriet Frean” Miss May Sinclair presents a characteristic episode in which two boarding- school girls exchange pledges of “eternal friendship”, each of course promising the other not to marry. This naive confidence in oneself marks the youth of both sexes. Mature persons smile at these eternal friendships as Jove is said to smile at lovers’ vows. Experience of the condi- 216 MORAL PHILOSOPHY tions of life reveals the difficulty of maintaining a friend- ship; and self-experience reveals, alas! how quickly we forget. The Epicurean would therefore be careful not to demand too much. Carpe diem, he would advise. Re- member that human nature is frail. Jones who dined with you yesterday was delightful, interesting, appreciative. Tomorrow he will dine with your enemy, Brown, who will say unpleasant things about you. Jones will not only not resent them, he may even assent to them. But what difference does it make? You found him well disposed towards you yesterday. Clearly he enjoyed your company and you found him a good companion. That fact is your assured possession. As a person of sophisticated in- telligence you will then take what the gods give and ask no questions. But will this mark an exercise of sophistication or, rather, a repression of sophistication? I am well aware that the question may be answered in different ways. For my own part I can answer it only as follows. I think that an Epicurean tolerance for the weaknesses and diffi- culties of other men is a mark of superior intelligence and also of a fine morality. At this point the Epicurean attitude approaches the Christian forgiveness of sins. And it seems to me that the moral excellence of each con- sists in insight into human nature. But this insight, so far from confirming the substantiality of the enjoyment that you get from the friendship of a not very loyal friend, only reveals how little you actually do get; even less, it would seem, than the disciple of Epicurus, never optimistic, has reckoned upon. I will not deny that it is possible in a loose sense to enjoy the society of Jones though you know that he will laugh at you tomorrow. I deny that THE ENJOYMENT! OF LIFE Zi this is possible, however, in the stricter and the only true sense, in which you put the thought of Jones’s frailty and your enjoyment of his friendship into the same moment of consciousness and combine them into one act of thought. The one will then dissipate the other. To enjoy the society of Jones you will have to forget for the time being what kind of a person he is. You must cease to be sophisticated for the moment, create an illusion, and assume an artificial naiveté. You may indeed preserve your self-consciousness in a cynical enjoyment of Jones’s weakness; but this is | hardly an enjoyment of friendship. The point is not one of sentiment merely, but of logic. It is along the same line, for example, that J. S. Mill denies that a round square is inconceivable; for how may we say in advance of the fact that objects may not be found which will be both round and square? Or both enjoyable and worthless? To my mind the reply is simple. Nobody denies that we can say “round square”. But if our ut- terance is to be more than mere sound, it must mean some- thing. It will then appear that “round” means nothing if it does not mean “‘not-square’’, and that likewise “‘square”’ can mean only “not-round’”’. The effect of asserting the possibility of a round square is then not merely that you “contradict yourself’, or that you are “‘inconsistent’’—this seems possible enough until you see that what it really comes to is that you say nothing whatever, you are merely talking. In like fashion I shall not deny that you may extend to Jones all of the forms of courtesy and apprecia- tion, but with the consciousness of his worthlessness in mind you will not be enjoying his friendship. The Epicurean advises: in the matter of friendship take what you’ve got and ask no questions. My reply, then, is 218 MORAL PHILOSOPHY that if you ask no questions you’ve “got” nothing. For to ask questions is only to exercise your imagination (i. ¢., your intelligence). Without imagination there is no en- joyment; and when imagination raises a question the enjoy- ment must depend upon the answer. The enjoyment of friendship inevitably raises the question of loyalty; and then it appears that the seemingly sentimental consideration of “eternal friendship” is implied in the very logic of friendship. All of our expressions of friendship betray this implication. We speed the parting guest with Au revoir or Auf Wiedersehen and the desire for another visit. In all matters of personal relations the intensity of the present enjoyment is measured precisely by the longing for further intimacy. We may know that the conditions of time and place, the cares of family and business, and the limitations of our courage and our strength, will all conspire to defeat this longing; but these considerations we banish to the back- ground in order that we may now enjoy. Their presence in the background, however, moderates our enjoyment. And if by chance they get into the foreground the effect is chilling. If I am asked to meet a rare and delightful per- son, one who is certain to attract me, with the understand- ing that we are to meet only once, I shall probably say, No, it is not worth while; you might as well offer to lend me a single chapter of a novel. The pain will not merely out- weigh the pleasure, it will paralyse the pleasure. The Epicurean sage may then urge me to forget the temporary side of it. His advice will only sustain my contention that no temporary friendship can be enjoyed except as you forget its temporary character. The motive of friendship is very deeply involved with the motive of immortality, of religion, and of life itself. TIDE ENJOY MENDIOF DIFeE 219 Just as the thought of the finitude of friendship chills the ardor of friendship so does the thought of death dissipate the zest for life. Therefore death is not mentioned in polite society. James points out that no one can think steadily of his own death. Suppose you approach a parent delight- ing in the contemplation of the vitality and promise of his children and then remind him that after not many years as the world goes they will have run their span of life; their bodies, which had already grown old and withered, will then lie mouldering in the ground; and the world will go on comfortably without them. The effect of this cruel experiment will be to show how deeply, even in less imagi- native men, the zest for life is bound up with implications of indefinite duration. If this is what it comes to, one will . feel, then what is the use of it all? It were just as well at least that the children had not been born. It was the aim of Epicurus, and especially of Lucretius, to give a positive value to life by showing that death is nothing: the finitude of life is therefore not an evil. It would be a strange person, however, who should be stimulated to a delight in life by reading Lucretius on death. The logic of the situation may be illustrated once more by considering the possibility of an Epicurean enjoyment of religion. Epicurus indeed wished to banish religion. Modern Epicureanism of the aesthetic sort sees no reason why religion should not be enjoyed as well as art (which indeed raises the same sort of issue) by treating religion, not as a belief in what we may call transcendental realities, but as a pleasing dream or picture. Surely the picture may be enjoyed, for itself, as something that we experience, without regard to its cognitive significance. This concep- tion of the value of religion, it is worth noting, is also pro- 220 MORAL PHILOSOPHY posed today by many who are hardly to be called Epicureans; by all of those indeed who, though treating religion as a merely natural, 7. e., psychological, fact, yet recommend the cultivation of religion on behalf of the com- fort of the individual, or of the welfare of the nation, or of the unity of humanity, or, it may be, of the perpetuation of the species. As a carefully premeditated expression of the Epicurean view I quote the following from Mr. Santayana: “In my adolescence I thought this earthly life (not unintelligibly considering what I had then seen and heard of it) a most hideous thing, and I was not disinclined to dismiss it as an illusion for which perhaps the Catholic epic might be substituted to advantage, as con- forming better to the impulses of the soul; and later I liked to re-+ gard all systems as alternative illusions for the solipsist; but neither solipsism nor Catholicism were ever anything to me but theoretic poses or possibilities; vistas for the imagination, never convictions. I was well aware, as I am still, that any such vista may be taken for true, because all dreams are persuasive while they last; and I have not lost, nor do I wish to lose, a certain facility and pleasure in taking these points of view at will, and speaking those philosophical languages. But though as a child I regretted the fact and now I hugely enjoy it, I have never been able to elude the recurring, invincible, and ironic conviction that whenever I or any other person feign to be living in any of those non-natural worlds, we are simply dreaming awake.” ® “And now I hugely enjoy it”. After what has been said, I need do little more than put the question. What does Mr. Santayana enjoy? The dreams as dreams (i. ¢., as sensuous images) or the freedom of taking them critically? I can conceive that either may be enjoyed by itself; or both alternately, according to mood. Can both, however, be enjoyed by the same person in one moment of conscious- 6 From the essay, “On My Friendly Critics”. THE ENJOYMENT JOF LIFE tA ness? The trouble with the dreams seems to be that they ‘‘are persuasive while they last”. This means that they are not mere pictures, or merely ornamental arrangements of color on the wall, but that they suggest a reference to real- ity. And thus to the critical mind they have the power of raising questions. The questions may conceivably leave the enjoyment untroubled—so long as they are only half- indolent questions and do not force the issue, whether the dream is only a dream. Little as I am fitted tempera- mentally to enjoy ‘“‘the Catholic epic” there are times when I find it impressive—because I suspect that nothing so catholic could be quite without significance. On the other hand one may banish the questions; but not, I should say, in the same breath in which one claims to be sophisticated. One may indeed be too resolutely sophisticated for the traditionally Epicurean repose of mind; but this will mean only that he who makes sophistication his profession should not expect repose. He should not expect to enjoy facts as facts or sensations as sensations. § 53 Accordingly for one who professes sophistication I can see no escape from a certain participation in what is called a “serious view” of life (“‘earnest” is Mr. Santayana’s deprecatory word). The only escape, if that be possible, is to profess nothing whatever; that is, to stop thinking. And “serious” I mean in the sense in which Thackeray speaks, half jestingly, half sympathetically, of “a person of serious views”, and tells us that the worldly Major Pendennis became “‘very serious” in his last days. Hence I am not interested in denying, but I would rather affirm— simply as a derivation from the Epicurean demand for the Leu MORAL PHILOSOPHY enjoyment of life—that a certain preoccupation with “eternal life” (Socratic, if we remember) is a positive mark of intelligence. After all I wonder what can be more char- acteristic of the critical life than wonder about the eternal significance of the life that is in us. It may be likewise intelligent to foresee that the wonder will not be satisfied; it will be no less true that to cease to wonder is to cease to think and thus to place an artificial limit, or to accept the limit of mental weariness, upon the exercise of sophisti- cation. The popular mind is likely to mistake a “stern and aus- tere” dogmatism for a serious view of life. To the really serious view dogmatism is abhorrent. And thus of any ostensibly “serious” person I would ask always how far his seriousness stands for imagination and critical in- telligence; and if not for a cultivated intelligence, yet for a native sympathy and understanding; how far, in short, it stands for an Epicurean sense of the variety and richness of life and of what each man’s life means for himself. I seem to find none of this in the dull and stern dogmatism so often exhibited by “persons of serious views”, or in the type of “‘seriousness” exemplified by many of Carlyle’s “heroes”. To me they are less serious than primitive. Without a critical appreciation of life I can conceive of no true seriousness, no real stirring of soul within the man; and any critical appreciation of life contains within itself the issues of “earnestness” and “‘conscientiousness”. No person destitute of imagination is entitled to be called either ‘“‘serious” or “moral’’. And this in spite of the obvious tendency of the critical attitude towards the sceptical and even towards the cynical. I will not pretend to understand the connection of motive TIME ENTOY MENT OF LIFre 223 here. It is one of the deeper perplexities of human life that the self-consciousness which begets the search for truth is no less the parent of that scepticism which despairs of truth or scoffs at truth. But the two are by no means divergent. There is a scepticism which is mainly indolence or helplessness and a scepticism which is responsible and intelligent. I suspect that, in Freudian fashion, all re- ligious scepticism of the worthier sort is based upon positive religious feeling. Religious scepticism may thus easily stand for a juster sense of the meaning of religion than that religious pragmatism which so readily changes the character of God to suit the needs of the times. A man may say that “there is no God’’, not at all because he is a “‘fool”’, but because, precisely in his “heart”, he knows too certainly what he is seeking. Likewise of the relation between the serious attitude and the sense of humor. Here again there is a difficulty. Theories of humor constitute the least enlightening chap- ters of psychology, though nothing, it seems, is more in- timately connected with the function of intelligence. But here again the distinction is to be drawn between a vulgar and an intelligent sense of humor. Not every sense of humor is equally a mark of intelligence. It depends upon what you find humorous—perhaps upon the breadth of view revealed in the sense of humor. Yet I should say that apart from a fine sense of humor there can be no deep sense of truth. The most deeply religious soul I have ever known, a scholar of world-wide reputation, was at the same time, of all the men whom I have known personally and intimately, the most brilliant and the wittiest. And if this seems paradoxical let us remember that by common agree- ment (how properly, I will not say) the critical life finds its 224 MORAL PHILOSOPHY type and spokesman in the person of Socrates. It seems to me not too much to say that Socrates is presented to us as the subtlest of Greek humorists, finer indeed, to my sense, than either Aristophanes or Lucian. Yet for Plato Socrates is at the same time the embodiment of religious seriousness, while in Xenophon he seems rather oppressively ‘‘Victor- ian”. And it is likewise interesting to note that Augustine in his “Confessions”, perhaps the classical expression of reverential devotion, attributes a sense of humor to God. CHAPTER XIV THE SUBSTANCE OF LIFE § 54. The particular nature of man. § 55. Biological evolution and the experience of thinking. §56. Thinking and imagination. § 57. Imagination and human life. § 58. Imagination, morality, re- ligion. § 59. Imagination and the metaphysical problem. § 54 MONG the deservedly classical documents of moral philosophy are Bishop Butler’s “Fifteen Sermons upon Human Nature’, written in reply to Shaftes- bury. Shaftesbury had derived morality from ‘human nature’. True, is Butler’s reply, but what, then, is human nature? What is “the particular nature of man”? His answer to this question was given in terms of “reflection or conscience”. Butler’s question will be the question of the present chapter, and the answer to be given I conceive to be substantially in accord with the answer that Butler gave. The question may take various forms; among others the form of question implied in the distinction of the natural and the spiritual. Now the moral life I have defined in its various aspects as the critical, the thoughtful, the self- conscious life; and again as the spiritual life. But here a question may be raised. It may be objected that ‘‘the spiritual life’? conveys an implication not to be found in any of these other terms. For none of these other terms— 225 226 MORAL PHILOSOPHY “critical”, ‘thoughtful’, ‘“self-conscious’—implies more than what is known as a temporal and worldly point of view restricted to the contemplation of natural fact, or a mental process which is more than the operation of a natural human faculty. The spiritual life, however, im- plies a preoccupation with a Platonic or Christian ‘“‘other” world of “eternal” realities, and a kind of supernatural insight. Well, then, the general meaning of my reply will be, so in the last analysis, as it seems to me, do all of the other terms. For myself it seems impossible to fix the concep- tion of a thoughtful existence, or of an existence in any proper sense conscious, upon a basis strictly “human” and “natural”. Thought, or consciousness, finds no comfort- able abiding-place in a natural world; nor is she very warmly welcomed by natural scientists. And psychology, which would give us the natural science of thought, is neither good science nor good poetry. In moral terms the humane which is neither the beastly nor the divine is in un- stable equilibrium; and the merely human refuses in the end to be distinguished from the merely animal. The question may also be stated in terms of the concep- tion of “‘life’. What is “life”? In other words, what is it that in the last analysis distinguishes human from animal life; and which of the two is then more distinctively rep- resentative of “‘life’? It is from this point of view that I find the most convenient approach to the question; and in particular through a consideration of the relation of human and animal life suggested by biological views of evolution—which in two generations past have revolu- tionized our thinking about human life and human nature. THE SUBSTANGE OF LIFE 227 § 55 Before evolution, to put it simply, man was distinguished from all of the other animals by having an immortal soul. This was inferred from the fact that man differs from the other animals in his power of thought. Among the ani- mals, therefore, man was sui generis. And this distinction assumed such an importance that the similarities between man and the other animals passed relatively without notice. Evolution, however, has changed all of that. Evolution, we learn, has made it clear that man is only one animal among others. And as for the power of thought—thought is only one of the innumerable varieties of biological function, or organ; only one of those matters of detail that enable this or that species to survive in the competition for existence. As a biological function indeed thought is a unique success. Essentially, however, it belongs in the same category with the speed of the deer, the strength of the elephant, the horns of the bull, and the quills of the porcupine. ‘Thought is a natural fact, one among others; it has no special meaning. Now I have no wish to contest the theory of evolution; and certainly none to reinstate the idea of special creation. Yet as I study the “‘social” sciences of today and note the dominance of the biological point of view in all of their conceptions of human life, it seems to me that this seem- ingly naive pre-evolutionary view was after all curiously right. In our preoccupation with man as an animal we seem to have overlooked the characteristic feature of hu- man life. We have been so deeply absorbed in the “phenomena” of life that we have forgotten the expert- ence of life. Observers of life, we fail to remember that 228 MORAL PHILOSOPHY we ourselves are agents of life. In a word, we have been so strongly fascinated by the biological effects of thinking that we have forgotten what it means to sit down “in a cool hour” (Butler’s phrase) and have the experience of thought. Let me try to paint a picture; a more or less fanciful picture of course, but it must be in the first person. I am sitting before my study fire in the darkening hours of an early December afternoon before the lamps are lighted, and my cocker spaniel is on the rug before me, also con- templating the fire. I have been spending the day in a task of writing, and as my mind slowly frees itself from this, I see other problems ahead; letters to be answered, purchases to be made, courses to be arranged, the beginning of plans for next summer; but meanwhile (dreadful thought! ) Christmas presents to select. And then I think of my Christmases in other places where I have lived, in Germany in my student days, in New England, in the South and West, and on the Pacific Coast; and of the good companions and friends that I have had, here and there, whom I have in the past known so well, and whom now, to my shame, I rarely even remember. And then, strangely, there comes before me the picture of the little Irish newsboy, my admiration and my fear, who delivered our morning paper when I was a very small boy, and of the day when I saw him carried to the hospital, run over by a street-car, to die two days later; and then the picture of a college friend, one of the dearest fellows I have known, who sat on the side of my bed, as I was recovering from a slight illness, on the evening before our graduation, while we mapped out together our plans for the future. He was drowned a few days later. And it strikes me as somehow strange and uncanny that, in the many years THE SUBSTANCE ‘OF LIFE 229 since, the world should have gone on without my college friend and the little newsboy—just as if they had never lived—while it has carried me along with it. And then I reflect that in a few years more or less it will drop me too; and the world which, though I may not like it over- much, I can hardly in thought separate from myself, will forget me as completely as though I had never been. But this seemingly obvious reflection strikes a note of strangeness. And I am suddenly reminded that here is a point of view which for the most part is quietly left out of my world of daily life—of the practical and real world. And viewed in the light of it—viewing time in the light of eternity—this practical and real world becomes rather strangely unsubstantial and illusory. Practical life, I dis- cover now, is sustained by a monstrous forgetting. And it is rather in the reflections of the cool hour—when, indeed, I should seem to others to be withdrawn from the world —it is here that I touch reality. And now in this moment of meditation, when with a kind of blessed relief I seem to be for a time all myself, it becomes suddenly clear to me that even in the broadest daylight of common sense, when spiritual vision is most dazed and blinded, I never do accept as real this world of common objects—stupid, “inert”, “unthinking” things, with no “speculation” in their eyes. What is real, I know certainly, is of a different sort, something living and significant. And this array of seemingly opaque “‘phe- nomena” I can see now, certainly if vaguely, to be in it- self the living expression of some sort of art, human if not also divine. Yet as I try to pursue reality further and get a sure vision of it, I seem to find the task overpowering and my mind appears to stagger under the burden. 230 MORAL PHILOSOPHY And then I begin to fear that I am getting “abnormal”. My neighbors, if they only knew, would suggest a sani- tarium. And so—I will walk down the street and smoke a pipe and exchange a little scandal with a friend before dinner. Meanwhile the dog is surveying the fire with a counte- nance suggesting to an observer hardly less reflection than my own. What is he thinking about? Not indeed about the Disarmament Conference, the unrest in India, or the future of the German mark. (I am writing in the year 1922.) Does he recall his gambols with the neighbor’s dog of last summer in Maine and wonder if they will meet next summer? Or coming nearer home, does he say to himself that in three weeks the children will be home for their Christmas holidays, and then there will be life in the household? I would not venture to say just what the dog thinks, and for my purpose it is sufficient to take him as I find him. But if he knows anything about the approach of Christmas, about last summer and next summer, or possibly even about tomorrow, if he knows that the children are now “away”, at school, and have not: simply ceased to exist; if he can even conceive this dis- tinction; then he must have sources of enlightenment wholly unknown to us. Doubtless he knows that he had his daily meal, a few hours ago, because the sense of repletion is still present. It is probable that he will not begin to anticipate another meal, or even to think of the future in terms of food, until it is again suggested by the pangs of hunger or by the attendant household activities. Shall we say, then, that the dog’s imagination is confined rather closely to the temporal and spatial present while our own ranges broadly? Even this would be hardly ac- THE! SUBSTANCE IOBULIFEE Qaie curate. It would miss the most important point of differ- ence. For I am living, say, in this town and state of the United States of America, on a planet called the earth, in the year of the Lord 1922—all because I have been instructed in history and geography and because in this instruction I have been compelled to reflect, to order, to discriminate, and to form for myself a conception of the world in which I live. My temporal and spatial “present” is the expression of that conception. What the dog’s present may be I am at a loss to say. What, then, is he thinking about? From any human point of view we seem compelled to say, Almost nothing. In what kind and how much of a world, then, is he living? To me it seems, In almost no world. Does he even know that he is a dog? That I doubt most of all. Certainly not as I know that he is a dog, or as I know that I am a man. For this again is the fruit of some knowledge of biology; which, in presenting me with a certain system of distinctions and relations in the living world, enables me —like the sciences of history and geography—to locate myself in the world. Man, it seems, then, is the only animal who knows that he is an animal. He is the only self-conscious animal, let us say; which, so far as it be true, means to me that he is the only really conscious animal. He is a conscious animal just so far as he is a thinking animal. § 56 And thus to be a thinking animal is to have imagination. In this use of “imagination” I am deliberately disregarding the definitions of scientific psychology in favor of the more popular usage of poetry and literary criticism which makes , 232 MORAL PHILOSOPHY imagination equivalent to intelligence and uses “‘lack of 1n- agination” to suggest stupidity. ‘“Imagination” describes to my mind the experience of thinking for one who thinks. To one who merely observes the thinking being, thinking may easily appear to be nothing more than a photographic re- production of the physical environment (as in the older but still popular associational psychology) or than a biological adjustment to the conditions of that environment (in the newer fashion of psychologizing). Neither of these ex- presses the experience of thinking. Nor do I find this experience suggested in the tradition- ally rationalistic description of thought as “reason”. If “reason”? denotes only an operation performed upon symbols, or abstractions (to my mind the same thing)— if reason is only a sorting of cards or poker-chips the term hardly suggests the experience of one who thinks. And likewise if reason or thinking be described in terms of “analysis”; when “analysis’’, like chemical analysis, is an operation performed upon a given material which adds » nothing to the material. To think a given object, I would point out, is always to think beyond it; and therefore to think of possible other, and possibly preferable, objects in place of it. And thus to think is inevitably to question; and the depth and significance of the question is meas- ured by its range of imagination. The traditional psychology, whether rationalistic or as- sociational, marks off “imagination” as a consciousness of the fanciful (peculiar it seems to man, since the beasts are not granted imagination), from sense, or sense-perception, as a consciousness of present and solid reality common to man and beast. But where the boundary lies between the two no one has yet been able to show. I suggest that there THE SUBSTANCE OF LIFE 233 is no boundary. To perceive the present clearly, or to be aware of it in any sense whatever, is just so far to view it in the light of what is not present—that is, of imagination. To be conscious of the temporal is to view it under the ° form of the eternal. When the present ceases to be illuminated by what is not present there is no consciousness even of the present. When in my meditations I become aware only of the fire before me, I am aware of nothing —I am asleep. Consciousness of any kind imples imagi- nation. All consciousness means that you are looking beyond and around the present object. § 57 The modern scientific point of view tends to assume, with prosaic common sense, that as a matter of course, the “content”? of mind must consist exclusively, or almost ex- clusively, of impressions derived from the existing objects of sense, and at each moment mainly of the impressions given by the objects then present. The soul, in a word, is a mirror of physical facts. These at any rate will be the content of every ‘‘normal” mind—which alone is respected by the scientific imagination or by prosaic com- mon sense—of every mind enjoying a normal experience of life. What is then at any moment left to “imagination”’ will consist of impressions of the past reproduced accord- ing to the laws of association, or of anticipations of the future automatically initiated by the operation of the same laws; all of which is prefigured in the photographic con- ception of mind. ‘Free imagination”, if such be con- ceivable, imagination indifferent to fact, present, past or future, or imagination critical of fact, will play the part only of an occasional indulgence like an after-dinner nap. 234 MORAL PHILOSOPHY From this point of view imagination is a waste product which the normal mind reduces to a minimum. I wish now to suggest that as a picture of actual life this view is grotesquely false; and gigantically false if it purports to give us the spiritual history of the race. Per- haps indeed tragically false—for I will face the possibility that the outcome of the suggestion may be only a sense of the vanity of life. Yet even so a sense of the meaning of “life”. The reader may perhaps recall the closing chapter in “Don Quixote” in which the dying gentleman, come as it seems tragically to himself, betrays in his parting words to Sancho the shock and blankness of disillusion. In this impressive conclusion one feels that the hero has turned upon his creator, revealing himself, in pathetic greatness, no longer as the tilter of windmills, but as the type, inevitably absurd from any standpoint of fact, of all who seek to give worth and dignity to life.’ But I think that one can hardly grasp this scene without turning with a certain suspicious insight to self. One begins to wonder whether, after all, the Quixotic world was much further from prosaic fact than the world of many another of us; whose illusions have not yet been revealed to the world, nor possibly to himself. I wonder of how many men it is not true—at least of those whose practical life is 1The reader who is reminded here of the “Quixotic” philosophy of the contemporary Spanish writer, Miguel de Unamuno, may be interested to learn that this and*the following chapters were completed, nearly as they now stand, before I had heard of Unamuno. Since then I have read nearly all of Una- muno with immense appreciation and delight. Besides Del Sentimiento Tragico de la Vida and Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho, he has published several volumes of essays, also novels, short stories, poems, memoirs of travel in Portugal and Spain, and of his childhood and youth in the Basque proy- inces. To the English reader who would make the acquaintance of this re- markable man—a “passionate” writer wha never loses his critical sense—I recommend the two volumes of admirable translation by Mr. J. E. Crawford Flitch, The Tragic Sense of Life (N. Y., Macmillan, 1921) and Essays and Soliloquies (N. Y., Knopf, 1925). THE SUBSTANCE OF LIFE 235 punctuated by moments of critical reflection—that they find themselves living in a world, and will insist upon living in it, which they suspect at times to be non-existent from the standpoint of fact. I myself have lived for thirty-odd years past amidst an academic tradition, some- what faint-hearted indeed, of the dignity of scholarship and culture. When the tradition conflicts with the fact academic men, professional lauditores temporis acti and believers in a Golden Age, turn as a rule to the past, as a sort of evidence that the academic tradition is grounded in fact. One may be permitted to doubt whether the dignity of scholarship has ever been or will ever be a fact. There are men breathing today who are living, however, in the Victorian age. And for myself, when I seek refresh- ment of soul, I turn ever again to the literature, particularly to the novels, of the Victorian age, to Thackeray or Dickens, to George Eliot or Mrs. Gaskell, or even to Trollope or to Mrs. Oliphant, finding there, as I think, something home- like and familiar, civilized and intelligible, and in the fact of the Victorian age a kind of guarantee of the essential dignity of human life. Yet at times I suspect that the Victorian age never existed outside of books; and that present-day lovers of the Victorian age, permitted to re- visit that world as it existed in fact, would be mainly bored and disgusted. Yet I am not quite prepared to condemn the Victorian age as a fiction—not more at least than, with Vaihinger and Poincaré, I would stamp the entities of science as fictions. It may seem that this is true mainly of bookish men. Certainly I take it to be characteristically true of reflec- tive men. But I suspect that every man who lives at alk has a hidden imaginary world carefully guarded from 236 MORAL PHILOSOPHY public ridicule where he really spends his life; and if we could discover that world we should know the man. Anthropology tells us that the primitive man lives mostly in an imaginary world. And the little working-girl seated opposite me in the subway is reading (so I am told) Laura Jean Libbey—surely an imaginary world! Thus pathet- ically will she escape the facts of life. Yet where shall we find those who live in the fact? In the business world it seems that the “live” man is defined by a taste for ad- venture and speculation. And the big business man is likely to disclaim the sober purpose of making a necessary living in favor of a pure delight in the game. This is the man’s way of escaping the facts of life; the wife is prob- ably seeking forgetfulness in afternoon bridge, and dread- ing nothing so much as a day without engagements. All of which suggests a perplexing question, a question I should “like to put to Epicurus or Lucretius: why do men dread death and yet shun the facts of life? Why do they cling to life and yet find it a task to pass the time? Let no one accuse me, however, of desultory moralizing. I am trying to arrive at a sober psychological actuality. Lévy-Bruhl tells us, with some exaggeration indeed, that the primitive man fails to distinguish fact from imagina- tion. Modern science tells us that the civilized man, having achieved this distinction, has properly banished imagination. What I would suggest is that the world of the civilized man is no less a world of imagination, only (let us hope) of a more reflective imagination. Take the Victorian imagination once more. This is the world in which all of us have been educated who, lettered or relatively unlettered, represent in the United States the newly emphasized Anglo-Saxon tradition. This world of bE SS.U BS WAN CeO? DUPE 237 our imagination underlies our sense of values, but no less our view of fact. It is a world unknown to the immigrant from Continental Europe; and hardly less, I fear, to our undergraduate sons; who tell us coolly that Thackeray or George Eliot may be good enough for the older generation but not for them. But what shall we do about it? Shall we see that the younger generation is educated in a world of sober fact, and thus spared the intellectual weakness of a mind burdened with tradition and imagination? Alas! Only the lower animals have no tradition; and they, as I have suggested, live in no world whatever. And if it then be our task only to separate imagination from fact, I think we shall be surprised by the magnitude of the task. Every moderately educated person carries with him as a part of his mental furniture some sort of history of mankind. I wonder how much of this has come from a study of sober history. How much of the history of the Victorian period has not come to us through the Victorian novels? And what else do most persons in this country know about the English people? Yet they do not doubt—and it is a question why they should—that the people whom they thus know are those who live in Eng- land; as little as those of us who have met the Russians only in the pages of Tolstoi or Tourgenieff or Dostoievsky doubt that we have some real knowledge of the Russians. We all think that we have a knowledge of the history of the race; and this knowledge is history and not poetry; yet which of us in his conception of the life of the race can dis- tinguish the history from the poetry? Yet in this kind of historical and geographical world we have a comfortable sense of reality. The question whether Hamlet was really insane, is a genuine question though 238 MORAL PHILOSOPHY referring only to the Hamlet of Shakespeare. Maggie Tulliver seems as real a person as George Eliot—Hamlet is certainly more real than Shakespeare. By the side of Major Pendennis, Napoleon seems, to me at least, rather legendary; and the Major seems to have more certainly the attribute of existence than half the people I read about in the daily paper. It is only the academic historian who appears to have any real interest in separating imagination from fact. And of him we may ask, when imagination is finally ex- cluded, what is left of the fact? Reading “The City of God” lately it seemed to me curious that Augustine, preach- ing the one and only true God, and explaining how the pagan gods were creatures of human imagination, still takes them naively as solemn realities; only not as gods indeed but as devils. But I remembered that in my school- boy reading of Homer and Virgil the gods were certainly real even though my background was that of the Augustin- ian theology. The pagan gods had been superseded by Jehovah and Christ, but they were of the same order. And this leads me to ask what kind of mental activity it would be possible to sustain within the world of Homer and Virgil and the Greek tragedians, or within the Greek civilization generally, while retaining a clear consciousness of the fact that the gods were only—names. One thinks again of the world of mediaeval Europe as a world governed and ordered in a peculiarly intimate fashion by the Christian God. I wonder whether any scientific historian studying this period can fail to think of God as real for the time being; and how he could then cancel God from his reality and leave the rest of his story a story of the real world. If I follow the suggestion of the natural scientist that THE SUBSTANCE OF LIFE 239 he, rather than the historian, is the purveyor of solid facts (which are to be found in their most solid state in the sciences of physics and chemistry) I seem only to be con- fronted more than ever with—imagination. I have been looking lately into a textbook of physical chemistry, which science, I believe, claims above all others to reveal the nature of the hard and solid fact. What I found there was some very beautiful patterns of the arrangement of electrons, or ions, or what not, in the atoms of such sub- stances as common salt. I could find nothing salty in these patterns. And indeed I should say that they differ somewhat more from what is presented to me as common salt or the like than the Paradise of Milton or the De- lectable City of Bunyan or the Utopia of Sir Thomas More differs from what is presented to me as human life. I do not doubt that these physico-chemical patterns are fine products of thought and capable in a real sense of “‘veri- fication”. But then I have to wonder whether they alone among the products of human thought are capable of verification, and whether as products of imagination they are to be distinguished uniquely from its other products. Such, then, if you please, is the substance of life. For if there be no experience apart from imagination, must we not say that there can likewise be no life, in men or in beasts, apart from imagination? Certainly, it seems, if the term “‘life” is to denote any experience of living. If we are then to think of the lower animals as living creatures it seems that we must after all grant them imagination of some kind or degree. For the presence of imagination will then mark the only difference between being alive and not being alive; and this means that it will mark the ulti- 240 MORAL PHILOSOPHY mate difference between life and matter.* If, on the other hand, there may be life without experience of living, in the form of merely ‘“‘organic” life, it seems that we are left with no essential difference between an organism and a mere mechanism. It would be very interesting indeed to examine this conception of organic life, which, based upon the triple classification of matter, life, and mind, would offer us a ‘life’ which is neither matter nor mind, and an “animal” which is not “spiritual” and yet not “material”. But since I am interested mainly in the “particular nature of man’ and its implications, I will return to the difference between man and the lower animals. § 58 And once more let us remember that among the vast multitude of animal species man is the only animal who knows that he is an animal; he is the only animal who is also a biologist.* ‘This statement has a wide range of implica- tion. Man is the only animal that can be said to have a history; that is to say, the only animal that lives today in the light of accumulated racial experience. He is the only animal who has a science; the only animal who can survey the present fact in the light of facts that are tem- porally and spatially remote. He is the only animal who may properly be said to have a society; that is, the only animal who can be conceived to act here and now in the light of recognized relations to his absent fellows. 2 Note the significance in common speech of “being alive” to a fact or an implication; and note also the ground of one’s more instinctive appreciation of the presence of “life”, say in a meadow occupied by horses and cattle through which you are passing. The fact that (and the degree in which) the animals manifest curiosity towards an intruder seems more conclusively an evidence of life than the fact that they reproduce their kind. 3 Some of what follows here is from my article on “Birth-Control and Biological Ethics’ in The International Journal of Ethics, Oct., 1916. Tite SUBSTANCE OF LIFE 241 He is also the only animal who can be conceived to have any clear consciousness of family relations. Think of what the consciousness of family means in human life! Yet if it be a wise child that knows its own father it must surely be a wiser dog. The Australian blacks are said, by Spencer and Gillen, to be ignorant of this relation— though the claim is disputed by Andrew Lang. It may easily be seen, however, that the apprehension of this causal connection, between two events separated by a considerable interval of time, and under conditions of more or less promiscuity, calls for a fairly developed scientific imagina- ation. One may wonder how soon, if the knowledge were lost, it would be rediscovered. And some degree of imag- ination must be attributed to the bitch who recognizes her pup as her own after the period of infancy is past. Hence it is much to be doubted if she does so. In all of these relations it is the presence of imagina- tion that determines what they are for us; and that de- termines the meaning of the words used to refer to them. To speak therefore of “animal marriage” or of ‘animal society”, after the fashion of biological psychologists, is to leave Hamlet out of the play. “Marriage”, for example, denotes indeed a sex-relation; but a sex-relation between two persons who have deliberately avowed a preference for one another; who expect their association to be permanent; who have purposely given their friends ground for the same expectation; who know that the sex-relation is to include a common household and a common social life; who doubtless expect to be common parents of children; who at any rate know that this is the natural outcome. It is precisely this consciousness of the situation that invests marriage with moral responsibility and gives significance 242 MORAL PHILOSOPHY to the word. To apply the term indifferently to the sex- relations of men and of animals suggests to me not so much a significant scientific generalization as an in- dulgence in rather naive sentimentality. In a word, then, as distinguished from the lower animals, man is not merely more ‘“‘developed”, or more “efficient”, or simply more of anything. He differs from all other species by the fact that he has a culture; which means that he offers the only case in the animal kingdom where the processes of life are surveyed and criticized from the stand- point of those in whom they are taking place. And this is to say once more that he is the only animal to whom we may in any significant sense apply the term ‘‘moral’’. But then, just because he is the only moral being, man is the only animal who can be conceived to have a religion. Much mystery has been made of the origin of religion by those who find nothing mysterious in the presence of consciousness in the world. And if the mind be conceived as a photographic reproduction of the natural world, then surely the ideas of God, heaven, and immortality; or of a Platonic supersensible, or metaphysical world; of Kantian things-in-themselves underlying their appearances, or phe- nomena—in brief, all ideas of a realm transcending the realm of sense will constitute a mystery. How shall we account for the idea of the supernatural in a world purely natural? It <2ems that the mystery can only be explained —according to one’s logic of explanation—by recourse to special revelation on the one hand; or on the other to such counterfeit sense-impressions (from the naturalistic point of view—though naturalistically explicable) as dreams and visions of ghosts. For one who reflects upon “‘the particular nature of man”’ THE SUBSTANCE OF LIFE 243 it seems to me that neither explanation is necessary; and there is no mystery—no mystery beyond the mystery of consciousness itself. For imagination, as I suggested above, is not an automatic anticipation of fact; as when, by association, I expect the sun to rise tomorrow or rain to follow thunder. Imagination means that we not only anticipate the fact but criticize the fact; and therefore that we can look for a more satisfactory substitute for the fact. Accordingly, to explain the presence in human thought of the idea of another world and another life we have only to fix our attention upon the fact that man alone among the animals knows that he is to die. I do not deny that animals have experience of dead bodies. Like ourselves they eat them. Yet how many persons entering a butcher’s shop feel themselves in the presence of death? Nor do I deny that animals shrink from death—at least from situations which we know to be fatal to them. This does not mean that they know what they are shrinking from. It calls for a somewhat extended reflection to know that death is the end of life; and especially to realize that this applies to you and me. ‘The primitive man, it seems, does not know this. He has not grasped the fact of natural death. When his friend dies, he asks, Who did it? Who cast a spell upon him? It is one of the seemingly ironical products of culture that in so far as we advance in the examined life, we live our lives in a shadow of certain death of which the unimaginative creatures can know nothing. The social device of banning death as a topic of polite conversation only reveals the shadow in the back- ground. And therefore as between the pre-evolutionary view which distinguished man as having an immortal soul and the evo- 244 MORAL PHILOSOPHY lutionary view which translates his soul into a competitive biological organ, or function, like the horns of the bull or the speed of the deer, I would point out that the older is after all the truer view for any insight into human nature—whatever be suggested by the external study of man as a biological species. Man is the only animal who can form an idea of a life beyond this, of a spiritual world beyond the world of nature. Not only can he form this idea, logically he must form it if he forms an idea of nature herself.* And by a logic no less inevitable he must protest against death. It seems to me therefore strictly true to say—precisely from the standpoint of “human nature”—that man is by nature immortal, even though we say that he is mortal as a matter of fact. Religious belief is no accident of sense-experience, due to ghosts or dreams. It is the inevitable suggestion of any reflective life. § 59 It is this intrinsic connection of religion with the life of a conscious being which (as I venture to conceive the situation) sets for us the central and ultimate problem of all being; the problem of the genuineness of morality, the problem of the meaning of life, the problem of religion, and the major problem of philosophy. For let us remem- ber that if consciousness were not essentially imaginative, at once creative and critical, if mind were indeed only a matter of photographic reproduction, extended by a process of association, then the problem of life would be solely a technical problem. It would be a problem of adjustment 4J have in mind here the argument by which T. H. Green shows, in his Prolegomena to Ethics, that the idea of a natural world is possible only for a consciousness—for a person—who distinguishes himself from nature and there- fore himself transcends nature. THE SUBSTANCE OF LIFE 245 among given values and given facts—a problem of finding among the past experiences that which has been shown to fit the present fact—and not any problem of giving a meaning to life. And the problem of comprehending the world as a whole, which is one way of stating the problem of philosophy, would be the distinctively scientific problem of ordering facts under laws, with never a suggestion of any ulterior reality underlying the fact. But to grasp the full meaning of the problem we need a larger background than the contrast between human and animal life, larger again than the world of animate nature. For in this world of animate nature we are still relatively at home, within the relatively familiar and intelligible; and we may easily forget how insignifi- cant, from any external view, is this world in the universe at large. The full scope of the problem is suggested in that widely quoted saying of Kant that the two things’ most sublime within our imagination are “the starry firma- ment above us” and “‘the moral law within us”. I wonder how many persons pause to ask what it means to put these two things within a single sentence. A few years ago I listened to a distinguished astronomer while for two hours, to an unwearied audience, he explained what had been revealed by the latest developments of the reflecting telescope. As he unfolded step by step the vast- ness beyond all previous imagination of that silent universe, apparently lifeless, mindless, godless, the picture became ever more fascinating, but to me ever more oppressive and horrible. I admired the courage which enabled one to be an astronomer. At the close of his lecture he paused for an impressive moment, and then, to the astonishment of all, he recited, with the eloquence of a perfect sincerity, the 246 MORAL PHILOSOPHY psalm beginning with, “The heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament showeth his handiwork.” If I could convey the effect of this to my reader I should have given him the problem in all of its dramatic significance. How can one—I will not say that one cannot—but how does one face modern astronomy and yet believe in God? For it is in the contemplation of the astronomical uni- verse that we face the deeper mystery of our existence; and of this universe, not as displayed in the calm beauty of a star-lit night, but as unfolded by the science of astronomy. Here we are bidden to remember that the earth, which is to us so vast, is but one of the minor planets in one of countless systems; that only very recently, geologically and astronomically speaking, has the earth supported life, and yet that the human race has existed for hundred thousands, possibly millions, of years. But only for a few thousand years does the race seem to have been very human or to have had any clear consciousness of itself as a race; and of the millions upon millions of souls who have lived dur- ing this historic period, for each of whom doubtless, as for you and me, his own life and the fate of his own soul has seemed to be the central and important fact of the universe, the names of only a few survive. What, then, does the world know about you or me? What indeed is the whole realm of life but a fortuitous concourse of atoms at one point in an infinity of space and time? Man, as I have said above, is the only animal who knows that he is an animal; and this to him means that he is the only important animal. Yet I have sometimes wondered whether this self-consciousness might not mean only that of all animals man is the most ridiculous and contemptible. And one may imagine—though whether one may, is pre- hae SUBSTAN eG EO he LLeE 247 cisely the question—an ironical snail or oyster who, accept- ing the starry heavens above him, thanks God that he at least has no illusions of importance and has been spared the temptation to think of himself as other than he is. And yet again “the moral law within us”. My one pur- pose in this volume has been to present to the reader’s imagination, and to get into my own, all that is implied in “the moral law’’—so vastly more, I believe, than is sus- pected in any of the common talk about ‘sound morality”’. As I see it the moral law means nothing less than the su- preme and exclusive importance of the conscious life—of the person. Nothing is good, it asserts with Kant, but the good will. And with this assertion the moral law faces the starry heavens above and rejects all compromise—all of those utilitarian compromises which would reconcile life to fact by a renunciation of the meaning of life, all those which would make the consciousness of life an instrument of “life”. ‘The moral law” asserts the supreme value of the conscious life for its own sake; and therefore the su- preme value of each person for his own sake. With Kant once more, each is to be regarded always as an end in him- self, never as a means. This implies a truly “social” world; and what is much more, a social universe, a universe in which we may in some sense expect to find God. But this only means again that in the social universe each per- son is all-important. How can this assertion be made in the presence of the starry heavens above us—as the nature of the heavens is revealed by astronomical science? How can the starry heavens and the moral law both be sublime? For if any- thing be sublime it must at least be real. Yet if the firma- ment of science be sublime—which for science can mean 248 MORAL PHILOSOPHY only that it is big—the moral law looks like an accident; nay less, an illusion. And if the moral law be sublime the firmament of science seems similarly an illusion. Or may we say that the scientific firmament is a peculiar and limited version of a universe which in the end, under- stood as we understand the life of our human fellows, is the expression of the same moral law that we find in ourselves? This, I suspect, was in Kant’s mind when he declared the moral law and the starry heavens to be both sublime. And thus among the many problems set by the presence of the moral law is the problem of truth and reality, the problem of knowledge. Life is an activity of imagination; the world in which we live is a world of imagination; is it therefore an imaginary world? CHAPTER XV THE EXPERIENCE OF TRUTH § 60. The man of science and the man of culture. § 61. ““Mere ideas” and the picture-psychology. § 62. ‘Mere feelings.” § 63. Science and anthropomorphic prejudice. § 64. Truth and satisfied imagination. § 65. Error and lack of imagination. § 66. Experi- ence of reality vs. coherence and correspondence. MPORTANT among the moral questions as here con- ceived is the question, What is truth? In the answers commonly given it seems that truth is an impersonal relation: a relation of coherence among our ideas, for one view; for the other a relation of correspondence between ideas and facts. For these views it seems that truth is not a moral question—rather perhaps an “‘intellectual’’ question. I may then distinguish the moral question by asking, What is the experience of truth? But this will compel us to ask, What is the experience of “ideas”? And of “feelings”? And for the purpose of stating all of these questions I will suggest the following situation. § 60 Let us suppose that we have before us, in a college catalogue, the long list of courses constituting a modern curriculum. Half of the courses bear titles that are more or less unintelligible, each of them is to be identified in the end only by its number. The catalogue does not thus far seem to be very lively reading or at first glance very signif- 249 250 MORAL PHILOSOPHY icant. Yet a moment’s reflection will tell us that what lies here listed before us is the greater part of the many and various developments or expressions of the human spirit. And what the curriculum would represent if it could, is a tout ensemble of reflective human life. If we now go a step further we shall find that by com- mon consent these studies are divided roughly into two classes, known respectively as the sciences and the humani- ties; or as scientific studies and culture studies. Typical scientific studies are physics, chemistry, and biology. Typi- cal culture studies are languages with their literatures—in a word, literary criticism; but also art and art criticism; and properly also (though not often found in the college curriculum) music and musical criticism. But to these we should add the study of philosophy, so far at least as philos- ophy includes moral philosophy, the philosophy of beauty, or the philosophy of religion. And thus we find on the one side science; on the other literature and poetry, art, music, morality, religion. On the one side (let us say for the moment) knowledge; on the other, taste, feeling and insight. It seems, then, that in the distinction of science and culture we have two worlds of discourse. By Royce they are named the world of description and the world of appreciation. By others the world of facts and the world of values. Having in mind the foregoing chapter I prefer to call them here the world of fact and the world of imagination. What, then, is the difference? Putting this question to a professor of science, he will probably answer as follows. All of these studies, he may admit, stand for operations of the human spirit. Science no less than the other studies has a human history. But in science—and in science alone —the spirit does more than operate; it operates upon some- Pubes XPERIENCE OOK) TR UT H psy thing. It grasps something which is other than itself. In other words, science is knowledge of reality. In these other fields of the spirit all that happens is a movement of the spirit within itself; a movement which at best yields pleas- ing images, ideas, or feelings—objectively, fiction. The not too developed scientific conscience may tolerate these diversions of the spirit as a kind of justifiable relief from the strain of scientific thought. The more resolute scientist condemns them in his heart as a sinful waste of time, and if unrestrained by the academic amenities he would probably explain that the proper place for a professor of literature is not in a university but in a sanitarium.' In a word, then, the world of science is a revelation of truth and reality; the world of imagination (as I prefer to call the other world) is a world of mere ideas and mere feelings. The attitude of the professor of literature towards the professor of science is probably no less supercilious (in his heart—for he too is restrained by the academic amenities), though in these days less confident. For him, however, I suspect that the scientist is no better than a carpenter or a clever machinist. The professor of literature feels that he himself has a grasp of something which the scientist has missed, and the scientist is then set down as “lacking in finer spiritual insight’. Insight into what? Well, at any rate, insight into human nature. In other words, science is not the only knowledge, criticism is also knowledge, knowledge indeed of human nature and human life. There is nothing in the whole range of literature, poetry, art, re- 1To those who suspect me of exaggeration I will say that such is precisely the kind of recommendation made by a philosopher, an unbending exponent of the scientific point of view, for the benefit of those who differed with him, at a meeting of the American Philosophical Association not half a dozen years ago. 252 MORAL PHILOSOPHY ligion, which is not such knowledge. But it seems that more than this is involved. It is hardly a satisfying theory of poetry to say that poets are occupied in describing to one another their personal states of mind. Rather, it would be said, their insight; insight into a reality which may be variously described as a realm of ideas, a world of imagina- tion, a spiritual world including and also transcending the human world. ‘The professor of literature, I say, is some- what less confident today than the professor of science, but at bottom we may suppose him to be cherishing the convic- tion (vital, it would seem, for any critical justification of his profession) that his world of imagination is somehow not less objectively real—rather it is more truly real than the scientist’s world of fact. If so there are no “mere ideas”. And so, Are there ‘‘mere ideas’? Such, it seems to me, is the deeper question involved in any issue of knowledge and truth. And the question includes the other question, Are there “mere feelings”? I shall meet the question by proposing the following disjunction: either the ideas (or feelings) in question are an insight into reality—into a reality which, like the reality which science claims to re- veal, is other than ourselves—or they are no “ideas”? what- ever, but bare words or other vehicles of expression. § 61 No one, I will venture to say, has ever experienced a mere idea. Modern philosophy, following Descartes’s Cogito, ergo sum, has been full of the notion that, while we may doubt the existence of the things to which our ideas refer, we can never doubt the existence of the ideas them- THE EXPERIENCE OF TRUTH 253 selves; and its ever-recurring scepticism has been, How can we assert the existence of anything except mere ideas? And yet if I ask you what is a chair you will easily tell me, but if I ask you what is an idea of a chair, and how it differs from a chair, you will be at a loss to reply. It seems that these most certain entities are the hardest to locate or to describe. Regarded as an entity, an idea is no more to be found in human experience than the atom of physical science. As a matter of experience we may say that the idea of a tree is one among the other aspects of our experience of the tree. It is that aspect which is suggested by such adjectives as “clearness”, “distinctness”, ‘familiarity’. The physical or “‘real’’ tree is of course neither more nor less ‘‘distinct”’, neither more nor less ‘‘familiar’”. When, however, I speak of an idea of a tree as a duplicate of the real tree I am re- sorting to a metaphor for the purpose of adjusting certain difficulties presented by a comparison of your experience of the tree with mine. When I myself see a tree what I see is just a tree; not any idea of a tree. But when I observe your seeing a tree—and most of what I observe is that you look at it—then I have to wonder how you can see the tree, at least the tree that Isee. For that tree is thirty feet high, and how it can get through your eye, and your smaller optic nerve, and so on, is more than I can understand. More- over, you sometimes claim to see a tree when for me there is no tree there. To settle these difficulties (rather than to explain them), I find it convenient to assume that what you directly perceive is not the tree but a symbol, or repre- sentative, of the tree—something like a picture, a bank- note, a baggage-check, or a poker-chip, the function of 254 MORAL PHILOSOPHY which is to represent. Upon this assumption rest the theory of representative perception and the correspondence-theory, or copy-theory, of truth. Among the possible representative metaphors the picture is the nearly universal choice. It is hardly too much to say that for common sense and for science alike the idea is just a picture—qualified, however, as a “mental picture” or a “mental image”. Upon this metaphorical basis is built most of the traditional psychology, especially that which makes a special claim to be ‘‘empirical”’, to communi- cate the facts of mind just as they are. This view, which makes of human life a gallery of pictures exhibited in succession, has been stigmatized by Bergson as the “cinematograph-psychology”; a comparison so apt in de- tail that we might almost conceive the cinema to have been invented for the purpose of objectifying the traditional view of mind. The synthesis of a succession of instantaneous pictures into an experience of motion illustrates precisely, when the process is reversed, the method by which for two centuries past psychologists have “analysed” all of the life of the soul into coexistences and successions of atomic “‘men- tal states”. As an explanatory metaphor, however, even the simple picture has a unique advantage. For it seems to us that pictures represent their object necessarily and inevit- ably. Their representative function is not a matter of con- vention as in the case of a poker-chip or baggage-check. At the same time there may be a picture to which no reality corresponds; it will then be a “mere picture”. Accordingly, by furnishing the soul with pictures we seem to explain, not only how our ideas always seem to be significant (as they might not seem if they were thought of as poker-chips), but how we may have significant ideas which are yet only THELEXPERIENCE OE TRUTH 255 “mere ideas”. ‘Mere ideas’, of course, are “mere pic- tures”. What I will say, then, is that in our human experience there are, and can be, no mere ideas, mere pictures, or mere symbols. The purpose of the picture-psychology is to offer a ‘“‘scientific” theory of mind which will dispense with the person, that is, with the activity of “‘apperception”, or of imagination. But apart from the activity of imagina- tion a symbol is not a symbol, a picture is not a picture; and it “represents” nothing. As a brute fact a picture of course knows nothing; it is the person looking at it who knows. The plausibility of the picture-psychology, with its apparatus of “mental images’ suggesting one another, all rests upon the idea that pictures are somehow natural conveyors of knowledge. Yet a little reflection must show that the idea is the fruit of sheer innocence; of an innocence comparable only with that of an unlettered person who wonders at the stupidity of a man, though he be born French or German, who derives no intelligence from plain English; or of the innocence (of one of us perhaps) who, surveying a page of Chinese, doubts gravely whether true intelligence could ever be expressed in anything of that kind. I think many persons must have noted that a very young child—say, a child between one and two years old, and thus quite old enough to distinguish many of the ob- jects about him—derives nothing from a picture. Show him a picture of his mother, and he smiles wonderingly in reply. The late Carl Lumholtz tells us that the Aus- tralian blacks saw nothing in a photograph of himself. And what, then, of ourselves? I think we are all inclined to wonder how the cave-man, or the child of four or five, could suppose his crude sketches of animals to be rep- 256 MORAL PHILOSOPHY resentative of reality. And in looking at a Japanese print I can only wonder what idea or scheme of representation the artist had in mind. It does not easily occur to me that, unconscious of any scheme of representation, he might regard this as only the natural way of presenting the object. And yet why should he not? In brief, a picture or an image is one kind of symbol—one kind of language— among others. It has no more meaning per se, and no more self-evident cognitive power, than the Morse code. For it is only imagination that knows. And this means that so far as imagination is awake and active we no longer merely “‘have a picture’; we face reality. This is true even when in the physical sense we are facing a picture. I hold, for example, in my hand a photograph of Westminster Abbey upon which my eyes are resting. From a physical point of view the facts are simple. But now when I reproduce the photograph in a mental picture (so to speak) and say that I have also a picture of the Abbey in my mind, the whole situation is dissolved. For so far as the picture I am assumed to have fulfils its functions as a picture I no longer “have” anything. I see Westminster Abbey. Or better, I am in the presence of the Abbey; and thus far the Abbey is not represented but presented. On the other hand so far as the picture is in evidence—so far as I only “‘have a picture” of the Abbey—I have not even a picture. To say, in other words, that I am not in the presence of the Abbey but only in the presence of the picture is to reduce that picture to the meaningless thing it would be if I could view it with what the draftsman calls “the innocence of the eye’, and see it, no longer as a picture, in perspective, but only as a certain distribution of light and shade. THE EXPBERIENGE OF TRUTH bie There are certain ingenious stereoscopic pictures which ‘illustrate the point nicely. Viewing them with the naked eye all that I can make out as a uninitiated observer is a rather complicated tangle of straight lines, all now in one plane—not a picture of anything. I shall be told, how- ever, that this tangle is a picture in perspective of a rather simple arrangement of lines, or threads, in three dimen- sions. And when I survey the card through the stereo- scope (but only then if imagination gives the cue) suddenly the perspective meaning of the picture is revealed. I use the word “‘revealed’”’ because this word alone is just to the dramatic contrast between the two experiences. But now in this second experience it is quite false to say that I “have a picture’. A picture, let us remember, is all in one plane. But what I now see is in three dimensions and in several planes,nearer or more remote with reference to myself. In brief, I am in the midst of an objective situation. The printed page is another illustration. I am reading Doughty’s ‘“‘Arabia Deserta” in the quiet of the midnight hour before going to bed. If I chance to grow dull and sleepy, then what I find before me is just a printed page. But while imagination remains awake I am in the Arabian desert even though I am also in my easy chair. And therefore my thesis: there are no mere ideas. All experience of mind is insight; and thus, as experience, an apprehension of a reality other than myself. The possi- bility so often suggested in modern philosophy that our whole world may be nothing but “mere idea’ and all con- sciousness illusion, is meaningless for mental experience. It presupposes that mental life is life in a picture gallery. This view of mind, as I have pointed out, is the fruit, not 258 MORAL PHILOSOPHY of experience of mind, but of observation of mind, rather of observation of behavior, of other persons. It is thus not more nearly related to the experienced realities of mind than the observation of toothache is related to having a toothache, or the observation of love to being in love. The question as I am thinking of it is not how it looks to have a mind but (if you please) how it feels—what it is to be conscious. For one who is conscious there are no subjective “‘mental states’? waiting to be attached, on the one hand to a knowing person, on the other hand to a thing known. In any degree whatever in which you are con- scious you are aware, however vaguely, of a distinction and a relation between yourself a knowing person and a known which is other than yourself. Any one who thinks is just so far a person confronted with reality. This means that consciousness, or spirit, is not in any sense a “‘state”’ as digestion is a state; or if a state, con- sciousness is a state of knowing something other than my- self. Nor is consciousness an “effect”, the effect of an external object stamping itself upon a tabula rasa; or if an effect, it is an effect which, as a consciousness of effect, somehow knows not only itself but the system of things constituting its cause. Nor is consciousness a “‘reaction”’ (to speak with the vulgar). If a reaction, consciousness is at any rate a reaction which knows why and to what it reacts. As against these banalities of popular psychology, I turn rather to Walter Pater’s characterization of the mind as essentially ‘vision’. Yet this too may be mis- leading. It may be that vision, as the best developed of our senses, is highly significant for the nature and mean- ing of all. But mere vision seems to me too cool, too dry, too possibly superficial and disconnected from all of the THE EXPERIENCE OF ‘TRUTH 259 other functions that make up our spiritual being—through which also we apprehend the various natures of objects— to stand alone as the mark of the spirit. And therefore I prefer the term “insight’”—imaginative insight. § 62 Just as there are no mere ideas, so likewise are there no mere feelings. And not even for the earth-worm—who for popular thought stands close to the boundary between mere physiology and the least possible psychology, and is said to have a vague sort of feeling, but no cognition. Put yourself, then, in the place of such a worm crawling up, after the rain, between the bricks, and just over the edge of a brick, of an old-fashioned sidewalk. Now of course he does not know the brick as we know it, as the product of a brickyard. But what does he feel? If he feels the brick then it seems that thus far he knows that a brick, or something, is there determining for him his scene of action. Or does he feel, not the brick, but only the worm? If so, he is gifted with remarkable powers of abstraction. Or does he feel no difference between the brick and the worm? In that case he feels nothing; and there is no feeling, but only (say) digestion. Pain again is insight; indeed a most illuminating in- sight. Those who keep personal feeling and knowledge of fact in separate psychological compartments should tell us what could be known of the world by a creature which ‘had never suffered pain. The crudest bodily pain is an apprehension of a fact; of a disturbance located some- where, and never indifferently in tooth or toe. Any pain contains indefinite possibilities of vision. In my own very slight experience of pain I recall an instance, not 260 MORAL PHILOSOPHY very tragic as a matter of pain, which amounted to a kind of conversion. At the climax of a splitting headache, just before pain yielded to the sleep of exhaustion, and just as I began to wonder, somewhat impersonally, how a head that throbbed like mine could much longer hold together, my mind seemed suddenly opened to the terrific possibilities of sentience in all organic matter; to sentience indeed as essentially inherent in all matter whatsoever; suggesting, not very cheerfully at that moment, that our human sentience is but the tiniest drop in a world of senti- ent experience. In the same moment I seemed to see before me the tragic experience lying behind the daily record of accident, suicide, murder, even of divorces and of strikes; and for the first time it occurred to me that a pessimistic philosophy of life might have something to say for itself; at any rate that one who had reached the pes- simistic conclusion need not be merely a fool. I dare say I am here only recording the experience of many another. The next morning we forget. Does this mean that the vision was wholly false? But this is to suggest once more that all distinctions between sane and morbid vision, between normal and abnormal views of life, are mainly conventional. And if I were writing a theory of knowledge it would be my chief purpose to show that standards of truth and reality have the same utilitarian status as standards of morality. It is needless of course to deny the comfortableness for all ordinary moods of the society of sane persons—if they are not too obstinately sane. And I suppose that as a worldly-wise parent I should counsel my son to prefer as his wife a sane and sensible woman to a spiritual genius. But this only shows in the end that by sanity we mean a THESE XPERIENCE OF LR UTE 261 convenient similarity or communicableness of temperament and point of view. In the last analysis there are at least as many types of sanity in the world as there are languages; of which your type of sanity or mine is only one. No Anglo-Saxon, I will repeat, can think of a Frenchman as either quite sane or quite moral; and in French literature the Englishman is treated always as a creature strangely, if also splendidly, barbaric. Yet it is certainly a contra- diction in terms, a reductio ad absurdum, to condemn a whole people—for example, the Russian people—as “morbid”. But why, then, visit this condemnation upon any single sentient soul just because he happens to be different? That may mean that he can see what the rest of us fail to see. Surely this has happened often enough in the history of the race. Hence I am disposed to think of each individual organ- ism, of each peculiarity of personal temperament, and of each individual fate as a special opportunity for insight into reality. This applies not alone to “morbid” temperaments, but no less to exceptionally glad and happy natures, and perhaps conspicuously to such exceptionally “vital” per- sonalities as Shakespeare and Goethe. If poverty and disease are revealing, leisure and vital abundance may be no less so. Yet the morbid temperaments are possibly the more instructive because theirs are the deliverances which are most likely to be questioned. It is therefore well to remember that if a man is blind, or crippled, or otherwise debarred from participation in common social activities, this may mean only that some of his senses are exceptionally acute, or that he is exceptionally placed for reflection upon life, and possibly even for stimulating his fellows to a sense of the meaning of their own lives. In a curious 262 MORAL PHILOSOPHY book of some thirty years ago, J. F. Nisbet* sought to prove from a comprehensive survey of men of genius that all men of genius are potentially insane, at least in the sense that genius is inseparable from a morbid excitability. So much, however, was suspected before. Genius, we might say (after Croce), is only a peculiarly intensified consciousness of life. We may therefore reasonably ask whether an absolutely sane person would be quite a human being. A highly interesting study in this connection is the Russian novelist Dostoievsky. Dostoievsky was an epilep- tic. The epileptic fits, I have read somewhere, began, or began to be periodic, after an exceptionally racking ex- perience. Dostoievsky was stationed, blindfolded, with three others, to be shot as a political criminal, and the word to fire had almost been given when the reprieve came and he was sent to Siberia. It is significant that one of his companions went mad on the spot. Dostoievsky’s novels, all written after that date, are morbid, I suppose, if any- thing is morbid; though I think that their morbidity may be exaggerated by a too impressionistic reading. Read carefully, they reveal not only marvellous powers of perception but shrewd judgment. It is recorded by Merejkowsky * that each epileptic fit was the climax of an intensely impetuous mental activity, accompanied by an exceptional clarity of vision. Now I have never enjoyed the experience of an epileptic fit, but in former days it was a frequent experience to discover that an exhilarating sense of mental power was the forerunner of a prostrating nervous headache. But what of it? I suppose that few of us 2 The Insanity of Genius. 8 Tolstoi as Man and Artist; with an Essay on Dostoievsky. English trans- lation, N. Y., 1902. Pit sE xX PER TENCE O ERT 20 rH 263 would care to purchase intensity of vision at the cost of epilepsy. But granting that intensity of vision is a morbid “effect”, does it follow that the vision is any the less true? Does it not rather follow that epilepsy is exceptionally revealing ? If indeed we are to speak of cause and effect in this connection, then we must note that normal experience is the effect of normal conditions and every experience an effect of something. The solution of a mathematical problem may be the effect of a night’s rest or a cup of tea; the solu- tion is not therefore to be suspected. Intellectual clarity after days of dull and hopeless perplexity may be the effect of a cathartic; the clearness will be none the less objective. And thoughts of love are none the less of true love because they are induced by the moonlight. When persons forget themselves they may reveal themselves— even to themselves. Nor is it a final condemnation to say that this or that judgment is the effect of a prejudice. If prejudices are blinding, they are none the less revealing. A man’s enemies are at least well equipped to detect his weaknesses. And on the other hand the mother, who in the daily round of getting the child up and putting him to bed sees him in his most intimate moments, is better situated than others to grasp the uniqueness of his individual per- sonality—which need not, however, be imposed as an article of faith upon visiting bachelors. § 63 For the scientific or matter-of-fact point of view the participation of temperament or feeling in cognition means that reality is viewed “through a medium”; and every medium is per se a distortion. Or it suggests the taint of 264 MORAL PHILOSOPHY ‘“anthropomorphism’’; man creates nature, the world, God, in his own image. But in whose image, I am obliged to ask, can God be made intelligible to man? In whose image can he speak to man? Shall we say, in no image? In no language? In terms purely impersonal? One could better comprehend the possibility of impersonal, unmotived and ‘‘mediumless” thinking if science would furnish an example. For myself, I am impressed rather by the very palpable presence of human motive—of the soberly prac- tical and business-like sort, however, or else of the en- gineering sort—mechanicomorphic rather than anthropo- morphic—in all scientific thinking. And it seems to me that Bergson’s suggestion—that the mechanical theory of life, which construes organic development as a series of distinct operations, like a factory-system, is a reflection of man the machinist—amounts virtually to a demonstration. Yet I would not deny that the mechanical theory may in the end embody one of the possible ways of describing the process of life. As for the unwearied delight of scientific men in sim- plicity of formulation, and in the “law of parsimony”, which implies that the simplest statement is the truest— well, I would not deny the (to me tautological) statement that truth must be in some sense “‘simple” to be intelligi- ble; but it strikes me as a huge anthropomorphism to suppose that simple statements are distinctively statements of reality. This assumes that nature has kindly shaped herself to the measure of our understanding. One might rather suppose that simple statements would be suspicious. Whatever else science may be, it remains, I should say, a medium, a method, a convention, a point of view, no less humanly motived in its own way than other points of Petihe HX PERT ENG E Or sR UT H 265 view, but one among others and no less potentially distort- ing. And when science makes the exclusive claim to be authenticated by facts it is well to remember that only those facts authenticate which are communicated and put to- gether, and that if an age be sufficiently dominated by the scientific convention none will be communicated (if even perceived) which fails to authenticate. In the Middle Ages I fancy that most of the facts authenticated the biblical tradition. And though I have no lively faith in “psychic phenomena’’, yet when I find so many men in their more confidential moments (when encouraged by a similarly confidential attitude in others) avowing experi- ences of the “psychic” sort, I am compelled to wonder whether there may not be here an immense field of ex- perience which is not communicated. At any rate it seems clear that science like any other convention may play the part of a Freudian “repression”. This, I will beg the reader to note, is not to reinstate the crude anthropomorphism of primitive man. There is all the difference in the world between thinking that knows that it is anthropomorphic and thinking that does not know, between thinking that knows that it is prejudiced and thinking that is blissfully unaware of prejudice. The primitive man does not know that his thinking is an- thropomorphic—it is we who know that. And I fear that the man of science very often does not know; at least he commonly refuses to admit that the presuppositions of science have logically the status of human prejudices. It is through the consciousness of prejudice that we escape the bondage of prejudice, through the consciousness of tem- perament that temperament reveals. As Socrates taught long ago, it is precisely our knowledge of self that opens 266 MORAL PHILOSOPHY our eyes to an objective reality. We can never possibly view the world from other than a human or a temperamental point of view, but we may perhaps discover what our point of view is; and then we shall know what our tem- perament discovers in the world. This I conceive to be the true meaning of the critical process, so far as it has gone, whereby science has freed us from primitive supersti- tion. Yet howsoever sophisticated, our thinking remains human thinking; and when our thinking ceases to be hu- man it will cease to be thinking. § 64 To say that all consciousness is insight does not mean that all thought and feeling are indifferently true—not any more at least than to say that all conscious action is moral action means that all conscious action is indifferently moral. For the distinction between truth and error I may then remind the reader of Chapter XII, wherein it was shown that all moral distinctions are distinctions in the degree of self-consciousness. In like fashion is the dis- tinction of truth and error a distinction of self-consciousness. That want is good which after criticism, challenge, trial and error if you please, knows what it wants; and that insight is true which after a similar ordeal knows what it means. It is true, in other words, so far as it knows what it means. From this relativity (if it be such) there is no escape within human life. The distinction between error and truth is then a distinction between before and after a given process of criticism. And just as there is no standard of morality, so is there no standard of truth. The final question about a want is, Do I still want it after knowing what it is I want? And the final question about THE EXPERIENCE OF TRUTH 267 a meaning is, Do I still mean it after knowing what I mean? And just as a want that admits defeat by criticism is shown really to have wanted nothing—not indeed to have been a want, but only some kind of bodily reaction—so is a similarly defeated meaning shown to have meant nothing. And then I was not thinking but only talking. Not thinking, I say. In the sense to be attached to this word lies the point of the whole matter. For “thinking” seems to suggest “ideas”. And the term ‘‘idea’’, very con- venient for marking off a subject of discourse, has a doubtful connotation. Almost inevitably it suggests “‘ab- stract ideas”, “mathematical thinking”, thought divorced from imagination; and thought divorced from imagina- tion is for me simply words. Any experience of thinking is concrete thinking. ‘Thinking in images”, it is some- times called, but for me thinking about something, think- ing directed upon some more or less definite subject-matter —or object-matter. And with Berkeley I am obliged to say that whenever I think about a man, it is about some definite man, or men, each with definite qualities. To think is then to imagine. But this is not to imagine anything you please. And therefore I dispute that state- ment of Berkeley in which he says that “I can imagine a man with two heads, or the upper parts of a man joined to the body of a horse.” The latter, for example, I can easily enough say. But when I come to imagine how the insides of the man are joined to the insides of the horse I find myself in trouble and confusion. And then I dis- cover that I am not at all imagining a real man and a real horse but a stone man and a stone horse which I have seen joined in some gallery of sculpture. Accordingly, I will answer the question about truth by 268 MORAL PHILOSOPHY saying that experience of truth is the experience of a satisfied critical imagination. Or I might say that truth lies in fullness of critical imagination. If imagination is full it is bound to be critical—try to join the insides of the man and of the horse and you will have questions in plenty. And imagination can hardly be critical unless it be full. When Mill tells us that he can conceive of a round square, he offers plenty of opportunity for assertion and counter-assertion but little to think about. This means that the experience of truth is neither the logician’s experience of truth nor the scientist’s experience; neither of which I can recognize as a personal experience. It comes nearer to the conception of artistic truth, or poetic truth; or, if you please, of moral truth. And this truth I hold to be an insight into reality. Hence truth is, once more, a matter of criticism, just as (as shown in Chapter XII) morality is a matter of criti- cism. And criticism, in morality, in art, in logic, is a search for thought, vision, inspiration, behind or in the form of expression. A year or two ago it occurred to me to look again at Poe’s “Raven’’, which had thrilled me as a boy, and which I had not read in many years, to see if I could find any meaning in it. Perhaps it was because the hour was late and I was sleepy, but I found little. But the illustration will enable me to put the truth-situation simply, if baldly. Does the croaking of the raven, viewed critically, convey to you the vision of a dim, mysterious, unearthly realm? Is there any meaning in his ‘“Never- more’? If so, I suggest, that realm is objectively real. And if it be not real there is no meaning and the raven is only croaking. THE*EXPERIENCE OF TRUTH 269 § 65 If this is truth, then what is error? Many a theory of truth has been shattered by this mischievous question. But the question is so important that, although I am not offering here a systematic theory of knowledge, I turn aside for a moment to suggest the answer—by means of a single illustration. The answer is that (if truth is a matter of imagination) error is a lack of imagination. And as an illustration I will take the classical puzzle of the bent stick—the stick half immersed in water which appears broken. We may distinguish several stages of sophistication. At what we may call the lowest stage (to which some present philosophers would have us return) a man may say simply that the stick 7s broken by the water—and makes itself straight again in coming out of the water. But this view would be quickly dissipated by the suggestion, among others, that under the same cir- cumstances one’s leg does not feel broken. The view is too unsophisticated for modern reflection. At a higher stage of sophistication, the stage reached, let us say, by common intelligence of today—also, I suspect, the stage at which many of our standard “illusions” are defined as such—at this stage the bent stick is described as an illusion. By this it is meant that I do not see the stick as it really is or as I ought to see it. But a little further reflection should show that this view is itself an illusion, in the sense that it marks an imperfect imagina- tion. If I see the stick other than bent, or broken, it seems there must be something amiss with my eyes. The view is unconscious and lacking in imagination in two re- spects. First, it takes no account of the circumstance that 270 MORAL PHILOSOPHY half of the stick has passed from air to water. In other words, it takes no account of refraction; and this because the difference of medium, easily perceptible as fact, has somehow failed to suggest any questions. Secondly, it assumes naively that the stick in air is the real or standard- stick—as if in a world where perception occurs under such a variety of conditions a standardized way of seeing things could be anything but a useful convention. When these considerations are introduced the “illusion” disappears. I ought, it seems, to see the stick broken when it is half immersed. But there is a conceivably higher stage of sophistication at which this now asserted ‘‘ought” will itself prove doubt- ful. Suppose that a man had worked the experiences of refraction so completely into his imagination as to be im- mediately conscious under all circumstances of the nature of the medium of vision and of its precise effect upon the image of the object. This would mean that with equal immediacy he could see the precise effect of substituting any other medium. He would then have reached the stage of sophistication of the skilled musician who plays in one key what is written in another and finds it unnecessary to transpose the score in writing. At this stage one key is as good as another, one medium as true as another. Yet there remains the distinction of truth and error—you must not mix the keys. And this distinction is solid and real so far as unsophistication is solid and real. Error is thus real. Its reality is none the less resolvable into a lack of imagination; into a failure to reflect that all vision is mediumed vision, standard-vision with the rest, and a corresponding failure to note what your standard medium is. But all of this is to suggest that the current scientific THEE SPR REEN GE VOR LE UT Ze and every-day view of things, which lives by the habit of standards, is of necessity highly conventional and thus far very incompletely sophisticated. § 66 The picture-theory of mind, as I pointed out above, im- plies the correspondence-theory of truth as opposed to the coherence-theory. In this opposition we have the tradi- tional antithesis of fact and idea, of induction and deduc- tion, of verification by fact as a criterion of truth versus consistency of idea. Truth as fullness of critical imagi- nation I conceive to be committed to neither theory though partaking of the motives of both. Consistency? Yes by all means. With Berkeley I should say that “it is a hard thing to suppose that right deductions from true principles should ever end in consequences which cannot be main- tained or made consistent. We should believe that God has dealt more bountifully with the sons of men.” But “consistency of idea” or of “principles” suggests a bare- ness, a mere-wordiness, which amply justifies those who deny that “ideas” can grasp realities. On the other hand nothing is verified by brute fact. In- deed I do not know whether we might not translate the antithesis of idea vs. fact into a case of words vs. blows. Neither gives truth. The facts must satisfy the imagina- tion. Suppose that twelve honest and intelligent men swear to you that, having carefully measured a small triangular piece of ground, they have found the sides to be three, four, and five yards long respectively, yet all the angles acute angles. Will you believe them? Or, better, take the experience of the inventor—which in the interest of science I have shared in a small way. He draws his 212 MORAL PHILOSOPHY plan; it must work. He constructs a model; it doesn’t work. Does this mean that his plan is wrong? Not yet. He must first examine his design and discover where it is inconsistent—where his imagination was defective. If critical imagination still justifies the plan, then, facts or no facts, it must work; the trouble must lie in the model. And he does not arrive at truth (although he may be over- borne by “‘facts”) until imagination is satisfied. He may easily discover that his imagination was defective. It is very likely to be so. And herein lies the value of laboratory experiment; it helps the imagination. But this only means that imagination may more or less anticipate fact; more in some men, less in others. So far, then, as imagination is in good working-order it gets further into reality, on the basis of the reality already grasped, and needs not to wait passively for the deliverance of fact.* This union of consistency and fact, or of consistency and experience, is well described by Professor A. E. Taylor in his “Elements of Metaphysics” as ‘immediate experi- ence’, though it is not brought out to my own satisfaction that immediate experience implies imagination. What I would drive home, then, if I can, is that this immediate experience is no ‘‘mere experience” but an experience of reality. And therefore another illustration. A few years ago the newspapers were for some time full of a case in which a man and a woman had been found in a lonely * For those who insist upon the ritual of verification I will relate the follow- ing, told me by a salesman in a department-store. A woman came to his counter and asked for a pencil and piece of paper upon which to do some calculation. After a few minutes she returned the pencil and departed, leaving her calculation upon the counter. It was found to be this: $1.00 ahs $1.75 I wonder if any reader of mine could conceive that by such his mental arith- metic had received an added shade of “verification”. TH he be by PLE N.CrwO Bett ® U, To rag hes spot, clearly murdered. There were several clews of more or less significance, but the case has remained a “mystery”. I need give no details. I will simply point out that if your imagination is working on such a case it is working really towards a certain goal: namely, the immediate experience of the murderer. His experience (let us say—it need not be true absolutely) would give us the reality. But how would you get at that experience? There are no rules. It would be a “moral” rather than a logical process, a matter of insight and intuition based upon the situation, including the human situation, as thus far presented. Yet the successful intuition would be a grasp of the whole reality. You would then see the situation as the man himself saw it; and in that seeing there would be a fullness and a coherence of detail which would be—not, as I was about to write, its own authentica- tion of reality, but reality itself. And it matters not for our conception that you never quite get that finally full and critical grasp, and that fact is therefore almost invariably illuminating. For though you get it not before the fact, neither have you got it com- pletely after the fact, and certainly not from the “dead weight” of fact. Truth is relative, and relative to sophistication; and its nature is apprehended if we can see the difference between the earlier and the later stage of sophistication. As a final illustration—very significant for any moral conception of truth—TI will instance the resurrection of Jesus Christ. I do not believe in the resurrection of Christ, and it is unlikely that I shall believe in it—not, however, as I conceive, upon any a priori grounds, logical or scien- tific, but because I do not expect to find the satisfying 274 MORAL. PHILOSOPHY evidence. What would that evidence be? Well, in read- ing the accounts given in the gospels, which tell us that Jesus met several persons after his resurrection and con- versed with them, one’s feeling is, I think, if only those conversations had been recorded! If only those meetings had been presented so vividly and fully that in reading the accounts we could measurably find ourselves there! Then we should know whether Christ had risen or not. And we should know it through a critical appropriation of the experience then offered us. Suppose that a dead friend of yours appeared to you—say in your sleep. Suppose that you then had an old-time heart to heart talk with him. A real conversation; not a Platonic or Berkleian “dialogue” in which it is the chief function of one person to say ‘‘Very true” to the other, but a conversation in which each response stands for fresh thought. Suppose that he communicated and made intelligible to you some of the experience of death and resurrection. Could any logician ever convince you that it was not your friend, and that he had not returned from the dead? And then why is it that the spirit-manifestations of psychical research remain so unconvincing? Not, I should say, because of any de- fect in scientific method, but because the spirits when they return have so little to tell us. CHAPTER XVI THE PRESENCE OF THE DIVINE § 67. Knowledge and “communion with the divine”. § 68. The motive of knowledge and the motive of love. §69. The idea of God and the presence of God. HE purpose of this essay on the critical life has been to develop the motif of self-consciousness; to follow it, I might say, to the end. But to this pur- suit, it should now be clear, there can be none but a temporal end. There can be no logical conclusion: the critical process reduced to a conclusion would be a reductio ad absurdum. And therefore the intention of these two con- cluding chapters (which are to form a continuous discourse) is not to arrive at a conclusion but to suggest the deeper and more comprehensive question; which will yet express the realities of human nature and of human life so far as it be a significant question. In the end what is being presented is a point of view; and the last term in a point of view is not the top-story of a house, its security guaranteed by the solidity of the under-structure, but a horizon, where vision is dimmest and least certain and thought is more than ever of the nature of opinion. Truth, it has just been said, is the expression, not of theoretical consistency, nor of verifying fact, but of satis- fied imagination; and a satisfied imagination (to the degree that imagination is ever satisfied) is an immediate experi- 275 276 MORAL PHILOSOPHY ence of reality, an awareness of the presence of reality. But to speak of a satisfied imagination is at once to ask what will satisfy the imagination deeply and if possible finally: what are the desires, the yearnings, of an unsatis- fied imagination? This is to raise the question of religion; its meaning, its reality as something more than a form of words; and then to ask about the significance of religion for human experience in general, and especially for the experience expressed in poetry and art. § 67 For what I would say of religion I find a convenient text and introduction in the following from Burnet’s “Greek Philosophy”: ‘Greek philosophy is based on the faith that reality is divine, and that the one thing needful is for the soul, which is akin to the divine, to enter into communion with it. It was in truth an effort to satisfy what we call the religious instinct.”” In modern terms this means, as he explains, that Greek philosophy was more akin to reli- gion than to science. The Greek philosophers were not “intellectualists”’. Yet the motive fundamental to the Greek imagination was the desire to know. And it is in connection with this motive that I would consider the faith that reality is di- vine. That reality is divine—what does this mean more than that reality is real? What is meant by “the divine’? To me this can mean only that reality is personal—it surely does not mean that reality is merely big, or that it is merely mysterious—and. therefore it means that impersonal reality is a false or merely conventional appearance. I should put the matter simply, by saying that reality is God, if this were not to suggest an appeal, not as I THE PRESENCE OF THE DIVINE 277 intend, to the religious imagination, but to the current system of theology (the science of God!) for which “God” is a person if not indeed the only person. Now in the logic of the religious instinct it may very well be that for you or for me God is just one person—and for each a different person. The system of theology, however, in which God is conceived as “‘the Lord and Proprietor of the Universe”’ (in Butler’s phrase), the absolute monarch, the sole creator of moral distinctions and the sole arbiter of the worth of men—this “system” is to me less suggestive of the religious instinct than of the logic of authority. Its appeal, I should say, is not to the soul of man but to the conveniences of social order, and in particular to the su- preme convenience of conceiving the human social order as continuous with the order of the universe, thus bringing the fear of God into the government of men. It is in this sense only that I can understand why a faith definitely monotheistic must be the religion of civilization. This means, however, that the conception of God as one and only is the expression of the same administrative con- venience as that which prescribes one President for the United States or for the Pennsylvania Railroad. Hence as against this systematic view I prefer to speak generally, if vaguely, of “the divine”, and of the presence of the divine as in another connection one might speak of the presence of the human. For a concrete sense of the divine presence and an obvious expression of the religious instinct one is likely to turn not to the wise and cultivated but, say, to the Russian peasant, to whom it seems that God is ever vaguely present, or to the desert Mohammedans in whom religion, “the factious passion of their Semitic souls”, as Doughty 278 MORAL PHILOSOPHY puts it, suggests “the Lord’s hand working in all about them’, and “they call upon God in every mouthful of words”. For them it seems, in the words of Thales, that ‘all things are full of gods”. But in thus appealing to the mujik or to the Bedouin we seem to be clearly turning our backs upon the critical life. And this is to state the question forming my first topic, namely, whether “God” or “the divine’ is a term of significance for any critical imagination. Does “God” express an idea or is it only a word—a verbal expression which sophisticated reflection has shown to be without meaning? This I believe to be the form which the question tends finally to take. He to whom ‘“‘God” conveys an intelligible meaning will, I sus- pect, ever hesitate before a final disbelief. The conclu- sive disbelief expresses itself by saying that, whatever the word may mean to others, it means nothing to me. My suggestion will be, then, that critical reflection, so far from dissolving the conception of the divine, only makes the conception truly significant—if under critical reflec- tion we include the consciousness of self. For it seems true enough that reflection upon “the world’—the world presented by the sciences, notably by astronomy and geology, a world extended in an infinity of space and time in which you and I are nowhere—tends to dissipate the meaning of divinity. But this is not the world in which we live, and reflection confined to such a world is not re- flective human experience. Any least reflective human ex- perience involves a consciousness—an even painful con- sciousness—of self; the presence in me of an activity of intelligence which “naturalistic” explanations of human life persistently overlook. When, for example, naturalism ascribes religion to fear it is usually upon the assumption THE PRESENCE:‘OF THE DIVINE 279 that fear is a blind “impulse”. It makes a difference when (with Marett in his “Threshold of Religion”) we ascribe religion to awe; for “awe” suggests a reaching out of the mind, at least a curious wonder. And when religion is ascribed to an infantile sense of dependence it is well to remember that the child’s sense of dependence upon his mother is not his ‘“‘sense of dependence” upon the floor that supports him. In his mother he is seeking a respon- sive intelligence. In the ninth chapter, in which I said that for me the motive fundamental to life is to know, I distinguished two all-the-world different versions of knowing, namely, im- personal, scientific knowing which yields as its realities “things” and personal knowing, or insight, which yields persons. Now it may help to clarify my present meaning (if also to reveal the peculiar weakness of my mind) if I say that my vocation to philosophy came, all at once, in my last year at college from reading Martineau’s “Types of Ethical Theory”; and that some fifteen years later when I had been several years a teacher of philosophy, and was now utterly weary of it and ready to escape, my vocation was renewed, permanently it has seemed, by reading Royce’s “The World and the Individual”. To the non-academic reader I may explain that among English-speaking phi- losophers of half a century past these two are possibly the clearest representatives of a “dangerously unsound” “‘imag- inative style” which tends to personify its realities. I am not committed to the doctrines of either writer. But it will state my point of view to say that it has become my most assured conviction that the logic of this “style’’ is the only true logic of knowing. This is to say that in the last analysis the only intelli- 280 MORAL PHILOSOPHY gible experience of knowing is a person’s knowing of an- other person; namely, personal insight; and on the other hand that impersonal, scientific knowledge, so called, is not knowledge but the negation of knowledge. To me it seems that, as Kant suggested a century and a half ago, science is not so much knowledge as a method of prediction; and a method of prediction which latter-day pragmatism has shown to be dictated by practical purposes. A marvel- lously successful method indeed—for me this constitutes the perplexing problem. And when I reflect upon science’s power of elaborating its predictions I seem compelled to admit that the conceptions of science, even the most purely mechanical (which means, the most distinctly scientific) must stand for some sort of knowledge. But this is still to say that science is not simple truth but only one point of view, one way of taking the world, among others; and it is likewise still to say that in science as elsewhere truth— as distinguished from so-called ‘‘verification’’—is satisfied imagination. And it seems to me that so far as science is more than bare prediction, so far as its conceptions are more than mere methods, so far as its facts have meaning, it is by the presence and operation of that ‘‘anthropo- morphic” sort of thinking which modern scientists so un- sparingly condemn. To me the more purely “scientific” the form or language in which a subject-matter is presented the blanker it seems, the more meaningless and unreal; and I can begin to believe that (in accordance with Newton’s first law) a body in motion must move until stopped and a body at rest must rest until moved when I reflect that I myself do not feel it necessary to move or to stop moving until I have a reason for doing so. And if you ask me whether I do not know when I am up TivVE PRESENCE /ORVEEUECD IWIN EB 281 against facts—alas! when my money is all spent, or when I knock my head in the dark against the edge of an open door, I know as well as the next man that I am “up against” something. But to be ‘“‘up against” is, I should say, not yet to know; it is rather (to borrow for my own purpose a word from Professor Dewey) to undergo. I do not begin to know the fact, or object, until it is grasped in imagination and made intelligible; I do not know it finally until imagi- nation is satisfied. And it may illustrate the point of view to repeat what I have suggested elsewhere, namely, that in my opinion two centuries of modern philosophy devoted mainly to the problem of knowledge have never really touched the point of knowing. And this because the discussion has been con- ducted wholly in terms of the so-called knowing of in- animate things, supposed to offer a ‘“‘simple”’ and typical case of knowing. Berkeley, for example, begins with “the table I write upon” as his example of knowing. Presently he is reminded of his fellows; and then, with a shameless inconsistency but a no less significant insight, he makes it clear that he knows them far more certainly than he knows “the table I write upon”. But the table remains for him and for all subsequent discussion the typical case of know- ing; and what course the philosophy of knowledge would have taken had our fellow been made the type, remains an interesting speculation. This, I hope, will give a human meaning to the thesis that to live is to know. When Aristotle begins his ‘‘Met- aphysics” by saying that all men desire by nature to know, suggesting indeed that in human nature knowing is funda- mental, he surely does not mean that the soul of man is exhaustively defined by the desire for the successful pre- 282 MORAL PHILOSOPHY diction of fact. Aristotle was not a scientist in the orthodox modern sense, restricted by the rules of his profession to statements of temporal coexistence and succession of ‘“phenomena”’, but what might better be called a naturalist; exercising an imagination more or less animistic in an outreaching curiosity about the inner nature of things, and seeking an insight into Nature of the same sort, ulti- mately, that we seem to have into our fellow-men. This naturalistic curiosity is the most distinctive sign of “life” in men or, as I have suggested above, in the beasts of the field. When the cow raises her head from the grass and slowly looks at you, then you know for certain that she is a living being. It is therefore not properly to be described as “animal curiosity”, rather as “‘a lively curiosity’, a lively intelligence seeking insight. Every pulse of life is such a thirst for insight. The old lady, who, relieved of life’s heavier burdens, now keeps herself alive by playing soli- taire—she too is seeking insight. In a certain unsatisfied curlosity, it might be said, lies all the difference between being alive and being dead. Of this we have a depressing realization when to the struggling self-consciousness it seems that being dead, or being torpid, is the more pervasive aspect of experience; when we note how small the circle of light in most moments of vision, how immense the surrounding dimness, and how helpless our attempts to penetrate it. Royce has pointed to the logical significance of the ‘“‘sluggishness” of our minds. To me it seems that the chiefly striking fact about human experience, surely most significant for any theory of human life, yet mainly overlooked both in logic and in psychology, is the evanescent quality of all actual experience, the rapid fading of impressions as they pass, and the resulting con- THE PRESENCE OF THE DIVINE 283 centration of our mental activity upon the task of reinstat- ing the experience in its living reality. The symphony of César Franck which I heard a few weeks ago—I talk about it today with enthusiasm and with conviction, yet all the while I know that what I now have before me is mainly an echo, an abstraction, a ghost of the living experience. In this sluggishness of the mind I am tempted to formu- late the whole problem of life. To me it seems that the chief “burden” of living, be it great or small, and all the weariness of life, resolves itself into confusion of mind; and all weakness of will amounts in the end to simple uncertainty. The task is never too heavy when we know what we have to do—at least we are resigned. In modern life especially, in which the diminishing necessity for phys- ical effort is overbalanced by a multiplied responsibility, the indulgence we crave from our neighbors is that they should not add to our problems, and their helpfulness in time of stress consists in doing our thinking for us. And thus it seems that all moral weakness and disloyalty and estrangement must mean that men forget—imagination is - dull. When one sees a man and wife facing one another in the divorce court with a venomous bitterness, one’s first impulse is to wonder whether either now recalls what the other was for him twenty years ago. Could we remember, could we only preserve the personal meaning and vividness of the experience of life once actually our own, we might be spared the baser humiliations. Let our experience be as limited as you please, we should still enjoy a fair measure of free and honorable living, true to ourselves and masters of ourselves. The problem of living is the problem of knowing, and the desire to live is the desire to know. Hence the character, as I conceive it, of the unsatisfied _— 284 MORAL PHILOSOPHY imagination: its search for reality in the form of an eternal life in which, simply as the fulfilment of life, all shall be known. ‘For now we see through a glass darkly, but then we shall know, even as we are known.” It will suggest the universality of this appeal to the imagination, its presence as a motive in the religious instinct in whatever form that instinct may take, if by the side of the biblical quotation I put the following from Joseph Conrad: “A heavy atmosphere of oppressive quietude pervaded the ship. . . . The problem of life seemed too voluminous for the narrow limits of human speech and by common consent it was abandoned to the great sea that had from the beginning enfolded it in its immense grip; to the sea that knew all, and would in time infallibly unveil to each the wisdom hidden in all the errors, the certitude that lurks in doubts, the realm of safety and peace beyond the frontiers of sor- row and fear.” § 68 But, as I have suggested, for a more intimate realization of the quality of knowing—and thus of living—we must turn to our relations with our fellows. Now we may be told that in these relations living is not so much a matter of knowing as it is of loving. And therefore, I reply, of knowing. For to me the very meaning of love, and all the charm and delight of loving, lies in understanding. I might then state the motive both of loving and of knowing in terms of the motive of intimacy. In some such motive must we look for that union of feeling and intelligence, of love and knowledge, which is implied in Plato’s conception of love as the inspiration of philosophy and Spinoza’s “intellectual love of God’. Even curiosity about nature seems to imply a desire for personal intimacy; in the words THE PRESENCE OF THE DIVINE 285 of Burnet, we desire to “enter into communion” with her. In human relations this is the pervasive motive—even in the midst of hate. Suppose that in old-fashioned terms we compare the pleasures of life in the quest for the summum bonum: shall we not say that the sensuous value of things is in the end of little consequence compared with their “social” value? What, for example, is the meaning of “wealth”? Here is a man setting up an establishment: without the apparatus of hospitality the establishment would be commonly of little use; and perhaps also apart from the fimpression—involving a recognition—to be made upon those who are to be excluded. It is hard to conceive of any seriously considered action which will not in some fashion be an invitation to one’s neighbors or of any ap- paratus of life which will not turn into a vehicle of ex- pression. And in the development of institutions it is very interesting, and not seldom curious, to see the social motive displacing the useful. ‘College spirit” is commonly a stupid affair; yet even so it means that the human relation- ships consequent upon meeting for a common purpose tend to make themselves the chief meaning of the purpose. But human rather than “‘social’. For the term “‘social”, implying today a public rather than a private and personal relation, conveys only a diluted suggestion of what I mean. And therefore I prefer the term “intimacy” as recalling us to the self-consciousness of the critical life. If from any introspective standpoint (from which we measure the value of things for the critical life) we ask which of the goods of life are of real value for you and for me—rejecting now all of those intrusive ‘‘social” and “public” considerations —for myself I seem to find but one answer: the only deeply satisfying things are the personal intimacies. All of the 286 MORAL PHILOSOPHY casual ‘‘social’’ goods are of value only as they retain the flavor of the personal (which, curiously, they always make a pretence of doing). And all of the ostensibly impersonal interests, such as an interest in books, in scientific investi- gation, in social reform or commercial enterprise—which, it seems, are necessary to give breadth and substance to life—these again take on the quality of life just so far as they furnish the subject-matter of intimate intercourse. To my own imagination indeed the greatest pleasure in life is a quiet talk by the fireside or a stroll in the country with a congenial soul when, business and convention both for- gotten, each is for the time being his unembarrassed self, and there is a mutual unburdening of the spirit, a mutual enlargement of mind. The scholar’s delight in a book is a pleasure of this kind; though he misses the immediate response, he is probably enjoying his author at the author’s best. And it seems to me that he who in this human sense is at home in the world, who in the circle of family and kin finds an ever satisfying affection and understanding, and in his friends an intelligence ever responsive to his tastes, has the best that life has to offer; and that he who lacks these lacks everything. No impersonal breadth of interest can replace this quality of intimacy. But this is once more to think of life as a problem. Of how many persons can it be said that they are thus at home in the world? Unimaginative persons recommend love as the easy cure for human ills as if love, the crown of the virtues, were also the simplest; and they think it simple for a man just to be himeslf. It is simple, I suspect, for a simple person, just as it is easy for an easy-going person to make friends. Of personal intimacy he knows corres- pondingly little. To be oneself sincerely and to take one’s THE PRESENCE. OF THE DIVINE 287 personal relations seriously is at once to appreciate the difficulties of understanding, along with the special delights of understanding between natures highly individuated, and at the same time to become aware of the complications presented by repressions, suspicions, defensive reactions, or what not; of all those contradictions which the Freudian psychology has uncovered in the impulses of sex, making them inarticulate and ashamed by their very intensity, but which, it seems to me, are characteristic of all self-conscious human nature. It is rather notorious that culture, which refines the sympathies and quickens the thirst for them, does not therefore make brotherly love easier. Among persons of good breeding it seems to be agreed that the most distinctive mark of a refined consideration is that we shall not touch one another—which means, somewhat paradoxically, that nothing is so repulsive to our sense of touch as our human fellow. Simplicity and frankness attained in and through these complexities of human nature mark a rarely assured self-consciousness. So remote from the intercourse of every-day life is the natural enjoyment of sympathetic intelligence that in the poetic imagination such enjoyment becomes the special mark of a “Golden Age.” This enjoyment “‘the religious instinct”? then seeks in the experience of “communion with God’. Communion with God is to be an intimacy more deeply satisfying than any possible human intimacy. To the imagination of the mystic it is the final experience both of love and of knowl- edge. But to speak of “intimacy” in this connection is inevitably to be reminded of the current theory which ex- plains religion as only one of the phenomena of unsatis- fied sexual desire—at first glance the least edifying among theories of religion; yet at the same time a theory which 288 MORAL PHILOSOPHY anthropological research makes it difficult to ignore. Primitive religious ceremonies are often sexual orgies, and even in modern religion the language of impassioned devo- tion is full of erotic metaphor. Yet coolly considered I do not see why this association should be especially depressing; or why it should be more depressing at least than the more general consideration, forced upon us by biological evolu- tion, that all of human life, all that is finest in human imagination, has its roots in our animal nature. Or why, in reverse fashion, the association of sex and religion may not be taken to point to the meaning—the personal and spir- itual meaning—of the relation of sex. To the modern imagination this relation stands for the most intimate of personal relations; it is the personal relation par excellence. In modern literature it is connected with most of the poignancy of life, and by the side of it the enjoyment of “friendship”, which appears to be the ideal personal rela- tion of classical literature, seems thin and uninspiring. Marriage, says Jeremy Taylor, is “the queen of the friendships”. Now it is not necessary to say that sex is all of life or all that is personal in life. In the logic of personal rela- tions there are perhaps no a priori necessities. Yet the sex- motive in literature is no mere modern convention, but a revelation—of tragic depths of human nature to which the imagination of classical times was simply obtuse. If (as Plato seems to imagine) the sex-appetite were indeed only a physical appetite, like the appetite for food, there would be no “‘sex-problem”. The sex-problem would then be a simple economic problem, one among the other problems involving an exchange of services. It is because the rela- tion draws into itself so much of ourselves that there is a Poiteerk SEN Col ORS oH ep LV INE 289 special “‘problem”’; it is because marriage embodies so much of personal aspiration that we discuss its “failure”. But this failure of marriage—so often precisely where marriage means most—may then be viewed as simply a crucial il- lustration of a universal spiritual problem; the problem, namely, of satisfying our imagination in intercourse with our fellows—even such a problem as the common sense of social life betrays by substituting the game of bridge for the inadequacies of conversation. The more intensive self- consciousness (always abnormal from any common-sense point of view) serves only to suggest a certain inevitable in- adequacy in every form of social intercourse. The final result of the culture of the spirit is then what a recent writer describes as ‘“‘the awful incommunicability of souls”, ex- pressed in a mutual recognition of the loneliness of any more thoughtful form of life. And therefore, as I have suggested, the quest of the un- satished imagination for communion with God. But here once more we are confronted with doubts and questions re- garding the nature of the motive. Since God is so often the refuge of broken lives, of disappointed love or personal bereavement, we face the suggestions of a theory of “‘com- pensation”’; or once more the suggestion that any intense desire for communion with God, such as marks the mystic or the devotee, is the fruit of a morbid imagination. Yet I wonder why the idea of God should not be a “compensa- tion”. This would mean only that the thought of God is suggested like any other thought, by the presence of a need. How should men think of God as long as human intimacies satisfy? And then IJ need only repeat what was said above, that a morbid imagination may be (even must be, I should rather say) a special source of insight. When I hear men 290 MORAL PHILOSOPHY speak of the religion of a sane and normal mind I am tempted always to ask why a sane and normal mind should be interested in religion; or in anything beyond the foot- ball games and the market-reports. Thoughts of religion are suggested commonly—one might almost say, normally —by the presence of death. Thought itself in any graver sense comes from the tragedy of life. One may conceivably deny (as I suppose Professor Dewey would deny) that there is any “‘tragedy of life”. But this is only to say that when we speak of the “tragedy” of life we locate the quality of “life” in the poignantly personal—not in the impersonally rational and practical. There is nothing properly tragic in losses by fire and flood considered in themselves, or in any losses of a merely “worldly” kind. The tragic loss is the personal loss, typified by personal bereavement, and the tragic unfulfilment is the unfulfilment of those deeper per- sonal longings of which the sex-longing is illustrative—but only illustrative. Illustrative, however, of any of the deeper, i. e., of the religious stirrings of life, whether in the form of personal love or of reflective thought or of aesthetic taste. Let us recall the faith which for Burnet satisfied ‘‘the religious in- stinct”’; ‘“‘the faith”, namely, “‘that reality is divine, and that the one thing needful is for the soul, which is akin to the divine, to enter into communion with it”. It has been my purpose here to suggest that every impulse of the mind is an attempt to “enter into communion”—with a reality such as to respond. ‘‘For at the bottom of much of our desire for great poetry,” writes Vernon Lee, ‘“‘is our desire for the greater life, the deeper temperament, for the more powerful mind, the great man’”—and there is something similar, I suspect, at the bottom of our desire for scientific knowledge. THE PRESENGB*OFR THE DIVINE ~—291 But the desire for the great man inevitably leads the imagi- nation beyond man. ‘The conception of the divine will then be as variously personal, the person of God will be (and in logic must be) as variously temperamental, as the many who seek him; but for each the search for the divine will be a desire for personal communion. ‘Thou hast made us for thyself and our hearts are restless until they find rest in thee.” This classical expression of Christian piety is, it seems to me, a true revelation of the religious motive. We find the same personal motive, however, in a total difference of tone, in the hymn of praise to Zeus of the Stoic Cleanthes, beginning with “O God most glorious”: “We are thy children, we alone, of all On earth’s broad ways that wander to and fro, Bearing thine image wheresoe’er we go.” And again the same motive, strange to say, now clearly un- satisfied and defeated, in Bertrand Russell’s picture, in the peroration of his essay on “A Free Man’s Worship”, of the free man hurling defiance at an insensitive universe. The significant revelation of this striking passage,’ it seems to me, is ‘“‘the heart of man’—for there is surely no logic in defying an insensitive universe. Russell’s free man, sup- posed to represent the ultra-sophisticated man, may then be 1 The passage is as follows: ‘Brief and powerless is Man’s life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way; for Man, condemned today to lose his dearest, tomorrow himself to pass through the gate of darkness, it remains only to cherish, ere the blow falls, the lofty thoughts that ennoble his little day; disdaining the coward terrors of the slave of Fate to worship at the shrine that his own hands have built; undis- mayed by the empire of chance, to preserve a mind free from the wanton tyranny that rules his outward life; proudly defiant of the irresistible forces that tolerate, for a moment, his knowledge and his condemnation, to sustain alone, a weary but unyielding Atlas, the world that his own ideals have fashioned despite the trampling march of unconscious power.” 292 MORAL PHILOSOPHY regarded as almost a perfect expression of the unsatisfied imagination, an eloquent testimony to the loneliness of a universe in which there is no divine presence, and once more an evidence that God—the divine—is the inevitable imagi- nation of the human consciousness of self. § 69 And yet it may seem that all of this is only to demonstrate a difference between the imagination of the divine and any sense of the presence of the divine, between the idea of God and the presence of God. Hence I will carry the theme further by asking what it means to have an idea of God. Here we are reminded of the traditional “‘ontological argu- ment’’ for the existence of God, which, in substance, derives the existence of God from the existence of the idea: I have an idea of God, therefore God exists. Now the question- able feature of this argument, to my mind, is not the “logic” of it. Really to have an idea of God, I will suggest, is to know that God does exist. The question is what might roughly be called the question of fact: Have we an idea of God? And what does this mean? Now in the traditionally “logical” sense of idea—as im- plying a consistently systematic view, complete and free from all internal contradiction—I should say that we have clearly no idea of God. ‘The conception of God as one person, eternally living yet eternally satisfied, omnipotent yet permiting freedom, benevolent yet tolerating evil, be- yond all moral weakness yet sympathetic with weakness— this if anything is a mass of problems and contradictions. And yet if this means that we have no idea of God it seems also to mean that we have no idea of our fellow-men. For any of them, subjected to a sufficiently careful scrutiny, ap- ition > ENCE OF oT BET DIVINE 293 pears to be similarly a mass of contradictions. Not only, then, have we no idea, say of Plato; we have possibly least of all an idea of those who are nearest to us. Yet of them it seems that we have certainly a personal experience, and an assurance of their presence. But when I turn to the personal experience as constituting the idea, I am reminded of those words of Christ: ‘He that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how shall he love God whom he hath not seen?’’ When we remember that “loveth” must include ‘“‘knoweth” this seems to suggest that the experience of God may be for any human capacity of imagination almost impossibly difficult; and thus in the end any real belief in God. And this leads me to ask, What survives of belief in our human fellows (not to speak of love) when they have ceased to be present to the senses— when they have been long absent? What remains of our belief in those who are long ago dead? As I was pondering this question in the middle of a sum- mer vacation and seeking a way of stating what it means to me, I happened to be reading again George Eliot’s “Scenes of Clerical Life’? and it occurred to me that “Mr. Gilfil’s Love Story’ would help me to state the point. The story begins with the death of Mr. Gilfil. Mr. Gilfil was an elderly Church of England clergyman of the kind that George Eliot loved to draw—‘“‘who smoked long pipes and preached short sermons’’; a shrewd, matter-of-fact, and rather sceptical old gentleman, more distinctly “sound” than “spiritually-minded”’. Also a rather reserved man who lived much to himself, an aristocrat and a gentleman, yet popular in his parish because of a benevolence which duly respected the animal want; and welcome at every farmhouse because, himself a man of a little property and a breeder 294 MORAL PHILOSOPHY of cattle, he could discuss breeds of cattle and the like in the farmer’s dialect as man to man. Mr. Gilfil, in short, was an unromantic old gentleman, and as a clergyman probably a fit subject for evangelical suspicion. Forty years before, however, Mr. Gilfil had buried the wife who had been the pet and playmate of his boyhood and youth. She is pictured as a rarely lovely child (one thinks of her as a child), the orphaned daughter of a penniless Italian painter, bred from infancy in the quiet manners and sober traditions of an English country house, yet inheriting the dangerous southern passions which after an experience of treachery and deceit—when for the time her imagination had wandered from Maynard Gilfil—had all but issued in bloodshed. Mr. Gilfil’s brief year of wedded happiness was the sadly peaceful end of a troubled story. The memory of Caterina had then become Mr. Gilfil’s religion. Her room, carefully preserved as she had left it, his sanctuary. Her name was rarely spoken. Few per- sons remembered her existence. This, however, was Mr. Gilfil’s love story. A very sentimental story, it will be said today—“very old-fashioned’’, was the comment of one of my friends, an anti-Victorian. But to suggest that the story is sentimental is precisely to put my question. For as one reads the story one hardly grieves for Mr. Gilfil. It seems indeed that he enjoyed the greatest gift of life, a supreme and satisfying devotion. But as I lay the story down disturbing questions arise. As Mr. Gilfil sat night after night before his fire, with his pipe and his book (or his newspaper) and his glass of gin and water, did the vision of Caterina never waver? Did her presence after the lapse of years never forsake him, leaving him to wonder whether after all she Peter RE SEN CE OF pokey DIVINE 295 had been real, whether his love had been more than a youth- ful infatuation, whether his loyalty had not now become a formal gesture? For myself I prefer not to think so. But the question will serve to mark the issue between sentimentalism and realism. For to call Mr. Gilfil’s story sentimental means simply that we charge his author with claiming for him a depth of experience, a power of imagi- nation, beyond the human capacity. We mean that his worship of Caterina was not a genuine experience, animated by a steady sense of her presence, but a gesture, a form of words. But this is only to put the logic of the issue—the logic of the experience of God, as I have it in mind—in line with the logic of morality as explained in Chapter XII; where it was said that the morality of an action is a ques- tion simply of the intelligence, of the genuineness of the experience lying behind it. And in line with the logic of beauty, the beauty of an object being similarly a question of how far the object is merely an object or an “expression” — of a genuine experience. In all of such matters the logic is neither the logic of mathematics (or of abstract metaphysics) in which truth is determined by the law of contradiction; nor the logic of science, in which truth is determined by the power of fact; but the less determinate logic of interpretation, of ap- preciation, of criticism; the logic of divination, one might almost say, yet the logic of all extra-scientific human inter- course, of all in which it is a question, from your neighbor’s action and his words, not of deducing their consequences, but of realizing the experience of which they are the ex- pression. Such is distinctively the logic of literary and artistic criticism. When the critic tells you briefly that some of William Blake’s verses are poems, others are only 296 MORAL PHILOSOPHY verses, you will be raising the question of logic when you wonder (as I often wonder) how he knows. And such also is the logic of the “inspiration” of any sacred scriptures, Christian, Mohammedan, Mormon, and of their status as a revelation of the divine. Their truth is not a question of historical authenticity, much as this may help to show what they mean; still less of miraculous attestation. Let their origin be what you please, they would be just as true or just as false as they are now. The question is a question of content and significance, of what they have to reveal; the logic of their inspiration is the logic of poetic inspiration. In the logic of criticism, the reader will perceive, the judgment of significance is the affirmation of a ‘“‘presence’’, of the reality somewhere in the spiritual world, if not in the world of space and time, of a personal existence. It was this aspect of the matter that led me to link Mr. Gilfil’s story with the presence of the divine. For what is involved in the story is somewhat more than the preservation of a memory of sense-experience (though one may ask how the perfect preservation of a memory can differ from a present experience). A thoroughly cynical critic may ask whether Maynard Giifil had ever really known Caterina, whether indeed her loveliness was more than a simple illusion of sex. And this will remind us that, even in the case of those who are most distinctly with us in the flesh, our grasp of themselves is a work of insight, of imagination. Do we not know that the prophet may be least recognized in his own country and his own house, and that husband and wife, father and son, may be least fitted to know one another? And it may help to link the logic of our neighbor’s presence with that of the divine presence if I refer once more to what it means to be a “lover of books’, Among under- THE PRESENCE OF THE DIVINE 297 graduate students it seems, strangely, that the presence of the writer is the last thing to be grasped; yet to me it is the one important reality. Take such a work as T. H. Green’s lectures on ‘Political Obligation’, a deservedly classical work in political philosophy, yet assuredly drab and unadorned; brief and compact, yet exasperatingly— conscientiously—repetitious. Green is profoundly con- vinced that the cause of authority is the cause of God—and of Man. But he is too sensitively honorable not to explain where the cause seems weak, too innately respectful of his fellows not to give their opposing views a sympathetic con- sideration, and too much a lover of liberty to preach author- ity except in its name. To grasp these several motives is to find in a sober academic treatise a dramatic conflict, no less dramatic because quietly serious, within a human soul. It is to feel Green thinking; to experience the ‘‘presence”’ of the man even more immediately than if your hand held his pulse. He who expects to find in the book only a system of facts and arguments will miss the point entirely, and it will not be strange if he shall say that, in the mutual destruc- tion of argument by argument, in the sum-total he finds nothing there. Of such sort, as I take it, is the logic of any sense of the presence of the divine; of such sort precisely though imply- ing an exercise of imagination of vastly greater range and import; yet still natural as our knowledge of our fellows is natural, and drawn from life as any inspiration of poetry or intuition of beauty is drawn from life. Hence—just as a matter of sophistication, if you please —I feel that I must treat any ostensible experience of the presence of God with a certain reverent, though never un- discriminating, expectancy. In his introduction to the 298 MORAL PHILOSOPHY Everyman Spinoza, Santayana concludes Spinoza’s message by saying: “It counsels us to say to those little gnostics, those circumnavigators of being [1. e., those who have ven- tured to claim for themselves an experience of God]; I do not believe you: God is great.” ‘This is hardly to credit Spinoza with the humility appropriate to a philosopher. And it seems to me that both a juster and a subtler warning is conveyed in the words, ‘“He who loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how shall he love God whom he hath not seen?” For myself, I will not resent my neighbor’s ex- perience of God until he insists upon making this ex- perience the major premise of a “‘system”’ of theology or of metaphysics. Then perhaps I may protest that “God is great.”” Meanwhile, having in mind the logic of human experience, and the arbitrary nature of any limit placed even upon human experience, I feel compelled (at the least) to agree with William James when he says, “I firmly disbelieve, myself, that our human experience is the highest form of experience extant in the universe.” ” In all of this I am speaking mainly from the external standpoint, from the standpoint of the other person who is the critic of religious experience. For myself it often seems as if all of my own religious experience could be summed up in a wonder, curious and critical, yet not irreverent, not unbelieving, and even at times envious, about the religious experience of others. And yet I am not quite certain. When I try to state a fact (in answer perhaps to a ques- tionnaire) about any very personal experience of my own, it seems that the word “‘fact”’ becomes strangely inapplicable, and I seem to find here, in this most intimately personal part of life, a curious lack of distinction between stating a 2 Pragmatism, page 299. THE PRESENCE OF THE DIVINE 299 fact and creating it. And then I wonder what would be a minimum of religious experience. To me so much at least seems certain, that to seek the presence of God in one’s own life is only fundamentally rational; and it may illus- trate my sense of the rationality of this if I point to those two seemingly very simple novels of William Hale White, “Mark Rutherford’s Autobiography” and his ‘“Deliver- ance’’, in which an evangelical sense of the presence of God seems somehow to survive a Spinozistic conviction of the bigness and hardness of the world, as literature which I have read and reread with an absorbing interest and which appeals to me as a dramatically faithful presentation of re- ligious experience. And then I must wonder whether even Bertrand Russell’s “free man’, anathematizing the in- sensitive universe, is not the expression of a religious experience—whether even this attitude, supposed to rep- resent the merest of mere ideas, can fail to imply some sense of a divine presence. Certainly if we found a lower animal, a dog or a monkey, thus expressing himself, we should find it hard to dissociate such an accession of self-consciousness from the idea of a divine revelation. Accordingly, in the “logic” of the situation, it seems to me that we must take any expression of religious experience, as we would take any piece of poetry, both sceptically and expectantly, for what it will reveal of the possibilities of experience and of insight. In such judgments we are not merely expressing a taste, we are analysing realities. The Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Koran, the Book of Mormon— one need not, I think, be committed to any Christian theology to grasp a real difference between the Gospel of Christ and the Koran, and a possibly greater difference between either and the dull inanities of the Book of 300 MORAL PHILOSOPHY Mormon. And yet one might hesitate before pronouncing even the last to be absolutely meaningless, before declaring that there was no vision whatever in the mind of the prophet Joseph Smith. And this measure of criticism I would also apply to any individual religious experience. I will not reject it as simply strange. Take the following from ’ Henry Ward Beecher (quoted by Leuba and James): “In an instant there rose up in me such a sense of God’s taking care of those who put their trust in Him that for an hour all the world was crystalline, the heavens were lucid, and I sprang to my feet and began to cry and laugh.” I can- not conceive of any such exaltation of my own spirit as would make this view of the world presently real to me; yet it does not pass my comprehension. At the worst I can- not make it mere words. And if real as an experience it was an experience of reality; of reality as apprehended by one temperament, one form of receptivity. And what would | be reality apart from any form of receptivity, I do not know; to me this is unreality. If, then, it be objected that the forms of receptivity are possibly infinite, and if I am then asked how are all to be included in a systematic unity of reality, the unity of God the Absolute, the reply must be (as suggested above) that to my view the conception of the Absolute is a derivation from the needs of business administration. For the needs of business I have a wholesome respect, but I will not make them a criterion of divine truth. CHAPTER XVII POETIC ILLUSION AND POETIC TRUTH § 70. Poetry and religious experience. § 71. Experience as ex- perience of the real. § 72. Man as an animal and man as a human being. § 70 66 ND so religion is merely poetry and piety is but one form of aestheticism among others!” Such, I fear, may be the summarizing response of many a reader to what has just been said in the last chapter. But to speak of “merely poetry” would indicate that I have failed to convey my meaning—for me mere poetry is mere words. And in thus identifying the logic of religious ex- perience with the logic of poetry it has been my purpose not to ‘“‘reduce”’ religion to the level of poetry but, if you please, to raise poetry to the level of religion; and thus not to simplify the problem of truth but to make it more por- tentous. Religious inspiration, I say, is of the same order as poetic inspiration. True, but genuine poetry as then conceived will be the expression of an experience of the same order as religious experience. And as such it will be a revelation of reality, of the presence of the divine. On the other hand, any truly religious experience will then be the expression of a poetic nature. I have said above that no person is entitled to be called moral who is lacking in imagination; I will now add that no such person is en- titled to be called religious. The language of personal 301 302 MORAL PHILOSOPHY piety may very well be that of an unschooled mind (not therefore of an unreflective mind) whose experience of the great world is small, whose experience of literature and the arts is little or nothing. It is not impossible that one may thus enjoy a deeper realization of the meaning of life. Per- haps we may say that piety is only the poetry of such a mind—it is at least that; on the other hand, since poetry is at home only in a more or less personal or personified world, it may be that in the language of personal piety we have the most characteristic, even though the less developed, expression of the poetic motive. Be this as it may, to me it is quite inconceivable that a genuine piety may be con- joined with a positive insensitiveness in other matters. There must be some pervasive tenderness in the nature of the man and some fineness of perception, or I cannot grasp the attitude as religious. A religion of finally hard logic, a religion of pure authority, is to me finally brutal and meaningless. For any proper development of this theme I have had un- fortunately too little “experience” of poetry. It may amuse some readers to be told that, though “acquainted with the poets” all my life like any other not illiterate person, I have only rather lately begun to be interested—only after philo- sophical reflection had assured me that poetry ought to be significant. But it may contribute to my question to ex- plain in part why this has been so. First, because poetry has been commonly represented, even by lovers of poetry, in terms of ‘‘the poetic illusion”. This means that poetry is a source of polite amusement and entertainment for cul- tivated persons. And—I do not know whether it is an excess of sophistication or a defect of imagination, but I am not amused by illusions. Nothing interests me very POETIC ILLUSION AND POETIC TRUTH 303 much except as it promises illumination. Nothing is really amusing except as it is also serious. There is for me no humor in a jest, a pun, an epigram, except as it be subtly just; otherwise it is merely tasteless. And I seem to have noted that the smile of.a child indicates that he has grasped something, that the conventional smile of greeting is sup- posed to express recognition; and that the old gentleman sitting opposite me in the library who has been reading for an hour past with a facial expression of mingled per- plexity, irritation, and disgust—when he breaks out into a broad smile I know that he has got the point. More deterrent, however, than the conventions of poets and critics of poetry have been (for a professional teacher of philosophy) the conventions of philosophers, and in par- ticular those of the philosophical tradition in which I have lived. Philosophy, I suppose we may say, is a criticism of life; of all life; a criticism of art and poetry and religion no less than of science. Philosophy is human experience and human life becoming conscious of itself. But not even may philosophers be expected ‘“‘to see life steadily and see it whole’, and philosophical traditions show selective varia- tions. In the rather slender Italian tradition, for example, it seems that philosophy is mainly a criticism of history, of history conceived as an FErlebniss, as something lived through. And thus in the style of Croce and Gentile, and even perhaps of Varisco, there is a suggestion of the dramatic and the poetic which may very well strike our own philosophers as scandalously sentimental. For in our own tradition, inherited chiefly from Britain and Germany, and concentrated in the issue between Hume and Kant, philos- ophy is mainly a criticism of natural science. Kant’s great critique, the “Critique of Pure Reason”, could be justly 304 MORAL PHILOSOPHY entitled, “What is Science?” His critiques of “Practical Reason” (morality) and of “Judgment” (taste) are minor critiques. Accordingly, in framing a formal definition of philosophy almost invariably do we define philosophy in the single relation to science, usually in accord with the traditional conception that philosophy is the ‘“‘science of sciences”. Or if we think of philosophy as criticism we then define it as a criticism of the presuppositions of science—as if there were in human life and human thought no other presup- positions worth criticizing. In much of contemporary philosophy science has ceased merely to supply the material for criticism, she now provides also the standards of criticism. When also it is our purpose to defend or to jus- tify philosophy we do so to, or against, science. And if we wish to distinguish serious philosophy from dilettantism, serious philosophy from popular philosophy, it seems that we must distinguish it as “scientific philosophy. Our whole conception of philosophy is the expression of what I have elsewhere described as ‘“‘the scientific prepossession”’. From this point of view the term precisely antithetical to philosophy is—poetry. A private person may then ex- cusably divert his idle hours by the reading of poetry; or even a natural scientist (if he cares to do so), since poetry is sO uncompromisingly remote from science and the scientist’s strength of mind is already guaranteed. For the professional philosopher the enjoyment of poetry even as recreation is a reflection upon his intellectual chastity. And should he aspire to be himself a poet—or (by way of parallel) a novelist—I may quote for his benefit the most devastating criticism of a philosopher within the range of my personal experience, a remark referring to Royce: ‘Yes, POBTIC FLLUSION AND POETIC TRUTH 305 he has written several books of philosophy—and a novel!” And yet it may also help to give shape to the general question that I have in mind if I confess that, though read- ing little verse, I have not been totally insensitive to poetic impressions, at least of the more vulgar and commonplace sort. I have in mind a charming illustration of a passage in Kingsley’s “Water Babies” in which Tom, the Water Baby, “looked up at the broad yellow moon . . . and he thought that she looked at him.” This is a simple expres- sion of what the philosopher or the sophisticated critic calls “the pathetic fallacy”. But I suspect that this fallacy, this illusion, this Schein, as the Germans call it, is of the order of what Kant calls necessary, at least empirically necessary. For in the solemn stillness of a moonlit night, with a broad expanse of nature lying before me, it seems that the moon also “looks” at me, and to me also she seems to speak with an overpowering directness; not now indeed of thoughts of love, nor precisely of thoughts of death, but of thoughts of eternity; of the immeasurable generations of men whom (as I recall Hans Andersen’s story) she has “seen”, and whose monuments lie now extended before her in a view the significance of which no human imagination, even no his- torian’s imagination, can adequately conceive. Only in such moments do I seem quite to realize that being in time I am also in eternity, and that this experience of present life which seems to vanish towards a horizon of misty vague- ness must yet be continuous with an infinite experience be- yond. In the stuffiness of one’s study, in the sober bareness of the scientific laboratory, the notion of a “communication”’ from nature seems an empty conceit; a poetic convention indeed, but a silly convention. It is different, I think, for 306 MORAL PHILOSOPHY even the less imaginative of men in the presence of nature herself. To me it seems that the mere escape into the open after the confinement of work brings a certain mental ex- pansion. A relief to the nerves, it will be said. But why, I wonder, this postulate of “nerves”? Why not an illumi- nation, a new field of vision? What strikes me most forci- bly in any absorbing experience of nature is the strange- ness, in this view, of the other world of common life. It seems now that it is science that has become the convention; and the scientific description of nature now seems nearly as remote from the immediate experience as the poetic impres- sion is remote from the experience of the laboratory. To confine the realities of the moonlight scene to those of mathematical physics is only less a strain upon the imagi- nation than to conceive one’s best beloved in terms of physi- cal chemistry. And most remote and roundabout seems then the scientific description of the poetic impression, of this my immediate experience, which, to avoid the implication of a “‘communi- cation” suggested by the experience itself, will convert the poetic impression into an “association of ideas”, a play of pictures within the gallery of the mind. This explanation, obliged at the outset to limit the stimuli of association to what can be put through sense-organs and brain-paths, must then complete its story by a chain of reminiscences extend- ing indefinitely backward to the uncertain experiences of primitive man or to the equally uncertain instincts of our animal nature. And the result, it seems to me, in thus dis- posing of communications from nature, is to render equally remote any communications from our fellow-men. Meanwhile it seems that something has been communi- cated. Let it be nothing more, if you please, than a vague BPOPErroc LLU USLON-AND POETIC TRUTH 307 communication of the reality of eternity. Yet in this in- tuition of reality, and in a mass of other communications similarly poetic, lies all of the material of philosophical questioning, all that stimulates philosophy to think about a world; and in such also lies all that sense of living in a world (and not in a picture-gallery) which fills the back- ground of consciousness in daily life. Among the other poetic impressions is the conception of a scientific universe. Kant showed us long ago that while scientific method may indefinitely link fact to fact it can never grasp a universe. - Without the capacity for poetic impressions where should we be? And if these are not communications where are we? And therefore I have to wonder whether Tom, the Water Baby, was guilty of a “fallacy”, pathetic or other- wise, when “‘he looked up at the broad yellow moon... and thought that she looked at him”. The question, it will be perceived, is once more the ques- tion of “mere ideas’. ‘The theory of the poetic illusion means that poetry is a mere idea; and a mere idea is an activity of the soul, yet without illumination. To me this is unintelligible.’ And therefore, whatever the difficulties of the conception, I seem compelled to think of poetry either as somehow a grasp of reality or as having no mental qual- ity whatever. And then my question; which I may put—very seriously —by asking what is implied in a sophisticated sense of humor. For to many persons it marks an undeveloped sense of humor to find no enjoyment in illusions when they are known to be illusions. Let us recall, then, the picture presented above of the professor of science and the pro- fessor of poetry in the academic faculty. By the logic of his profession it would seem that the professor of science is 2 308 MORAL PHILOSOPHY obliged to despise the professor of poetry as a teacher of falsehoods; as a parasite, at best a trifler. To the professor of poetry, on the other hand, the professor of science is a person lacking in insight. Yet the two get along very well together on the basis of “the poetic illusion”. ‘The pro- fessor of poetry takes his illusions very seriously, yet he hardly ventures to teach poetry as sober knowledge. On the other hand, the professor of science is not indisposed to adorn a scientific discourse with a bit of verse at the end; and he may even recommend the courses in poetry to his son as a part of the education of a gentleman; conceiv- ing (strangely) that a taste for what is true should be sup- plemented by a taste for what is false, and that illusions are somehow good for the soul. The question that troubles me is this: whether this unanimity of interest in illusions, known to be illusions, is the mark of a sophisticated sense of humor or a subject for it. I will then close the topic by pointing to a poem of George Herbert which seems to me very nicely to suggest the ques- tion of the logic of the experience both of poetry and of religion. ‘“‘When God at first made Man”’, after bestowing upon him all of the other riches of life, he hesitated and thought best to withhold the gift of mental repose. For if I should (said He) Bestow this jewel also on My creature, He would adore My gifts instead of Me, And rest in Nature, not the God of Nature, So both should losers be. Yet let him keep the rest, But keep them with repining restlessness: Let him be rich and weary, that at least, If goodness lead him not, yet weariness May toss him to My breast. Rogeerct Lt. USLON AND POR TIGsT RUT H.309 In these graceful lines the poet of “The Church Porch”, from whom we expect only a serene and even a childlike confidence, has sounded the whole “tragedy” of life. At the same time he has suggested, in terms very intelligible from the point of view of recent psychology, that in this “repining restlessness”, in this experience of conflict and dissatisfaction with things as they are, lies the only road to a sense of spiritual realities. The poem might then be described as a poetic-religious version of a philosophical truth, at least of a philosophical problem. But (and this is the question) why a “version”? Let us assume, if you please, that you or I would find other terms more im- mediately intelligible. Yet if we have here only a version, in what terms shall we state the original? What, in other words, is God’s language, the language of truth, which describes things as they really are? It is too naive to sup- pose today that the divine language was Hebrew, and it is too cheap to smile at the suggestion; but are we now to say that the language of absolute knowledge is that of mathematical notation and symbolic logic? And if it then be objected that we cannot describe or conceive of reality itself except in one version, finally objective and authori- tative (and for practical purposes it may be that we can- not), then the question will be whether this is not our limita- tion, perhaps our misfortune. § 71 It will be evident, however, that the question is not con- fined to the significance of expression in the form of verse— or in the form of words. ‘The poetic marks only what is typical of all imaginative experience; and in the last analy- sis it becomes the mark of all experience so far as this is 310 MORAL PHILOSOPHY personal experience and not a “registration” (one thinks here of a human adding-machine) of abstract fact. And thus I go on to suggest that the quality of objective il- lumination which has just been claimed for the experience of poetry is a quality of all genuine experience; and that it is therefore especially to be looked for in those regions in which experience has become relatively articulate in the several forms of artistic expression. The several arts may be taken to represent so many dif- ferences in native quality of imagination; and interest in poetry rather than in music, or in music rather than in painting, may then be taken to mark the direction in which, for this man or for that, things become most intelligible; to mark, in other words, the peculiar direction of his personal logic. ‘This personal logic is never indeed wholly to be described as a preference for one form of art to another; nor may it be finally stated, in psychological terms, as a distinction between (e. g.) a “visual” and an “auditory” type of memory or of imagination. Yet it is instructive to be told, for example, by a critic of Walter Pater, that Pater was not so much in love with youth as with “‘pic- tures” of youth. True or false of Pater, it may at once occur to us that this ‘‘picturesque’’, or predominately visual, quality of imagination helps to explain the peculiarity of the point of view which we take to be distinctively “French”; its marvellous lucidity and (to our sense) corresponding “superficiality”; its desperate regard for appearances, what- ever else be lost, its sensitiveness to ridicule and preference for ridicule as a weapon of offence. But such differences of imagination may be found, I suspect, at the roots of abstract science. Enriques, the Italian historian of science, traces two lines of development in modern physics corre- PAyeeetC LLL USTON ANDO POETIC LE UT Hw Stt sponding to national and racial differences in thinking; a French, Cartesian physics, based upon vision, which states its conceptions in the form of mathematical equations, and an English, Newtonian physics, based upon the senses of touch and movement, which thinks in terms of working models. And it seems to have been at bottom an issue be- tween a visual and a muscular imagination when Leibnitz contradicted Descartes by saying that it is not the quantity of motion that remains unchanged in the universe but the quantity of force, or energy. It is then his quality of imagination that determines for each of us, like a Kantian form of thought, what is to be for him intelligible. For most persons it seems that a prop- Osition is best made intelligible by presenting it, in the form of graphs or diagrams, to the eye. And the visual form of presentation has at any rate the “objective” advantage of being easily communicable. But there must be many others to whom, like myself, an important avenue of in- telligence is the ear. To me as to most persons my neigh- bor’s face is an indication of his character and intelligence, yet I seem to be more attentive to what is communicated in the quality of his voice. The face is appearance—it may be true or false; but the voice reverberates directly the in- telligence of the soul. And this preference for the sound of things goes so far that for me the drama is utterly false while the opera is relatively true to nature. I find that I am not believed in this; yet it seems that IJ have never wit- nessed the presentation of a tragedy which did not—and then only in the best moments of such artists as Edwin Booth and Duse—give me that irritating sense of make- believe which we have when some one off the stage is ‘“‘play- ing a part’; on the other hand, when Isolde sings her she MORAL PHILOSOPHY lament by the side of the prostrate Tristram it is to me all most natural, most logical, most real. Hence, granting the deficiency of imagination that may be urged against me, I seem for my own part obliged to believe that the experience which appeals to the ear, so far from being a sign or symbol of some other kind of ex- perience supposed to be intelligible in itself (which is prob- ably the more common view), has a logic of its own and a message of its own. And I suspect that the logic of musical harmonies and relationships enters far more deeply into our criticism of literature and even of philosophy than we are commonly aware. For my own part it does not oc- cur to me to attempt the conventionally logical ‘““demonstra- tion of a proposition” in the case of anything which cannot, like my balance at the bank, be reduced to figures. In all other matters it seems that I must be content to convey an impression. In the effort to do this I seem to discover that “ideas” (so called) refuse to abide by formally logical defi- nitions and insist upon developing infinitely various though characteristic suggestions, like Wagnerian motifs. It is this refusal of ideas to conform to the rules laid down in the logic and grammar of words, that seems to constitute all the difficulties both of thought and of expression in their subtler aspects. The statements may be formally correct and logically coherent, yet the assemblage of words full of discordant suggestions, of ‘‘false notes’’, which reveal them- selves only to something like a musical ear; the effect of which is to convince me that what I am trying to convey is not so much a proposition as an impression. And when I then ask myself what would be satisfying as a form of expression ideally and completely logical, I find that I am not thinking of anything resembling a syllogism, but of POBtrIC ILLUSLONMAIND POETIC TRUTH 313 such a balance of emphasis in the development of a theme, such a suggestion of harmonies among considerations and ideas, as we look for in a symphony or a symphonic poem. Devoted believers in the significance of music find in a great experience of music ‘“‘a revelation of the divine’. To the scientific critic, interested mainly in the historical de- velopment of harmonic relations, of the symphony, or of “the sonata form”, the conception of musical appreciation as insight is a phenomenon of adolescence. And lovers of the plastic and pictorial arts, conceiving that their own taste is more intelligent (or more “‘intellectual’’) because it is more visual, are disposed to treat the lover of music as a sentimentalist, not to say a sensualist. The student of physiological acoustics explains, moreover (following Helm- holtz), that the difference between tone and noise is re- ducible to simple auditory comfort. To my mind, all of these considerations, important and interesting in them- selves, and relevant to the special analysis of musical mean- ing, are irrelevant to the purpose of showing that music has no meaning. If Beethoven was an incident in the develop- ment of the sonata form, equally incidental must have been Shakespeare in the development of the sonnet form; and if consonance and harmony stand for ease in the process of audition what shall we say of the mechanics—the rhyme and the rhythm—of verse; or for the matter of that of the mechanics of prose? Let it be remembered that human audition is a process, not of “registration’’, but of conscious- ness; animated, therefore, by the impulse to grasp and to understand. To say that a certain relation of tones is easier to grasp is then only another way of saying that it is more intelligible. Some sort of physical fitness and physiological adjustment must be postulated for every 314 MORAL PHILOSOPHY vehicle of expression. To point to such conditions in rela- tion to the life of a conscious being is then only more pres- singly to raise the question of meaning. And thus we may ask why the greater and more inspired music should not be conceived as a revelation of the divine. What I have tried to suggest is that in the interpretation of human experience “communion with the divine”, in however slight a sense, offers the only alternative to a merely animal existence. Every genuine creation in the realm of experi- ence is thus in some measure a revelation of the divine— every vision of things that transcends, or breaks in upon, the commonplace experience of fact, as a creation and not a copy. And if this idea is suggested oftener in connection with music, it is probably only because music by its very nature is less obviously exposed than some of the other arts (painting in particular) to the eae interpretation that art is an imitation of fact. In any case I seem to share the adolescent experience— and still after many years in which just this experience has been for me a constantly interesting question. Not indeed that the hearing of great music brings with it necessarily the sense of transcendental insight; but only that this is what I seem to get on the rarer occasions, not of emotional exaltation, but rather when I am capable of the soberest and clearest attention and can grasp, not again all the significance that is there, but the presence of so much beyond that I do not grasp. At any rate, if the words in which we speak of “a divine revelation” stand for anything in human experience, for me it is this experience. Some time ago I heard unexpectedly—having accepted an invitation on the spur of the moment with no prevision of program— an orchestral rendering of Bach’s “‘Passacaglhia’”’, a new and Pattee LUStTONTAND POET LGA RUTH 315 glorious addition to my realm of experience. My mind had been full of a perplexing pedagogical and philosophical problem which called for practical solution in a day or two to come, namely, how to explain to a few hundred immature students the meaning of Plato’s theory of transcendent and supersensible ideas—how, I mean, to make this conception of transcendence intelligible from the point of view of human experience. As I listened to Bach it became suddenly clear to me that if I could convey that experience they would see what Plato meant, and that without some such experience the theory of ideas could never be for them more than a form of words. I will then for convenience put my general suggestion (or question) into the form of a thesis: the thesis, namely, that all human experience, so far as it is experience, and not mere words or the like, is an insight into reality—into an “other” and a “beyond” in reference to any mere “‘presenta- tion” —and that all experience has thus a logical quality, or a quality of intelligence. So much, then, for the remoter suggestions of the critical life. ‘To many readers this may seem a strangely romantic version of critical intelligence; quite fantastic also from the standpoint of fact and common sense. And there may be some to discover in these suggestions of the critical view of life the philosophy of that ingenious gentleman, Don Quixote de la Mancha. I will not venture to dispute the comparison; it is sufficient to indicate that i have it in mind. But if this be taken to mean that “the critical view of life” is indifferent to fact and experience (words commonly con- joined), my reply will be that far as I have indeed strayed from the world of fact I have not wandered so far from the 316 MORAL PHILOSOPHY world of human experience. Fact is one thing, experience is quite another. The world of fact, as I have suggested in Chapter XI, is, whatever else it be, one creation of imagi- nation among others; and precisely what is meant by “fact” in our world of experience, is a nice question. As “point- event” items in the stream of thought it seems that facts have ever been the smallest part of human experience; they are the smallest part of what comes and goes in the mind of any living man. But any resolute pursuit of the ques- tion of fact would call, not for another chapter, but for another volume. § 72 Meanwhile it is human experience that I have had in mind, and human nature. And the point of view of “humanism”. For humanism as I conceive it the issue lies —the moral issue and no less the issue of truth and reality —between man as an animal and man as a human being. And for humanism human nature is not even human un- less it be also divine. For animalism, i. e., for a view of life resolutely biological, truth and reality are restricted to animal fact, defined as “‘sensation”. Sensations are the sole material of reality and test of truth. For humanism there is no aspect of human experience, no working of human imagination, which is not a revelation of reality— “nothing which has ever interested living men and women . no language they have spoken, no oracle beside which they have hushed their voices, no dream which has once been entertained by actual human minds, nothing about which they have expended time and zeal.” And then the other words of Pater: ‘“‘only be sure that it is a passion— Power ic ILLUSION AND POETICOLTRUTH 317 that it does yield you the fruit of a quickened and multiplied consciousness.” Be sure, that is to say, that your words and deeds are significant and not mere sound and gesture. Such I conceive to be the whole meaning of truth and of morality. INDEX OF NAMES Addams, Jane, 125. Addison, 36. Andersen, Hans, 305. Aristippus, 56. Aristophanes, 224. Aristotle, 3, 25, 28, 29, 35, 38, 74, SOM sie logos Ole Augustine, 224, 238, 291. Bach, 314. Balzac, 162. Beecher, H. W., 155, 300. Beethoven, 55, 313. Bentham, J., 30, 37. Bergson, 133, 254, 264. Berkeley, 176, 267, 271, 274, 281. Blake, William, 295. Bonaparte, Napoleon, 184. Bosanquet, Bernard, 76, 77, 201. Bradley, F. H., 78. Burnet, Professor John, 276, 284, 290. Butler, Bishop, 15, 18, 49, 61, 62, 225, Beowed ts Calvin (Calvinism), 201 (note). Carlyle, 67 ff., 161, 184, 188, 208, 222. Cicero, 64. Cleanthes, 291. Conrad, Joseph, 284. Croce, Benedetto, 3, 4, 95 ff., 157, 159, passim in ch, xi, 179, 262, 303. Darwin, 88. Daudet, Alphonse, 188. Descartes, 252, 311. Dewey, John, 57, passim in ch. viii, 281, 290. Dickens, 161, 235. Dostoievsky, 26, 262. Doughty, Charles M., 257, 277. Edison, 114. Eliot, George, 51, 203, 214, 235; “Mr. Gilfil’s Love Story”, 293 ff. Enriques, F., 310. Epicurus (Epicureans), 35 ff., passim In Chae 230: Freud (Freudians), 107, 287. Friends (Quakers), 149. Gaskell, Mrs., 93 (note), 235. Gentile, Giovanni, 303. Giorgione, 154. Green, T. H., 29, 62, 77, 244 (note), 297. Hammurabi, Code of, 15. Helmholtz, 313. Helvetius, 30. Herbert, George, 308. Hobbes, 143. Hume, 303. James, William, 97, 111, 131, 173, 202, 219, 298, 300. Jesus Christ, 121, 174, 175, 273, 293, 299. Jevons, W. S., 138. Jodl, F., 30. Jowett, B., 135. Kant (Kantian), 12, 36, 37, 49, 57 ff., 73, 97, 100, 149, 176, 186 ff., 242, 245 ff., 280, 303, 305, 307, 311. Kingsley, Charles, 305. Koran, The, 299. Lang, Andrew, 241. Lee, Vernon, 290. Leibnitz, 311. Meubaye jib 300; Lévy-Bruhl, L., 236. Lewes, G. H., 51. Locke, 173. Lucian, 224. Lucretius, 62, 199, 219, 236, Lumbholtz, Carl, 255, 319 320 Macaulay, 204. Macchiavelli (Macchiavellians), 126, i275 Marcus Aurelius, 15. Marett, R. R., 279. Martineau, James, 73, 279. Mather, Cotton, 66. Maupassant, de, 162. Merejkowsky, 262. Meyer, Eduard, 184. Michelangelo, 170, Mill, James, 37. Mill, John Stuart, 12, 37, 217, 268. Milton, 190, 207 (note), 214. Mohammed, 184, 188. Mormon, Book of, 299. Nemirovitch-Dantschenko, 65. Newton, 36, 280, 311. Nisbet, J. F., 262. Oliphant, Mrs., 235. Paley, William, 91. Pater, Walter, 115, 185, 208 ff., 258, 310, 316. Pattison, Mark, 201. Pepys, 55 (note). Plato, 6, 25, 28, 35, 46, 77, 88, 132, 224, 226, 242, 274, 284, 288, 315. Poe, 268. Poincaré, H., 235. Quixote, Don (Quixotism), 234, 315. Royce, Josiah, 111, 151, 173, 174, 279, 304. Russell, Bertrand, 134, 210, 291, 299, INDEX OF NAMES Santayana, George, 201, 220 ff., 298. Schiller eh Cy Snel: Schopenhauer, 49. Schweitzer, A., 174. Shaftesbury, 18, 225. Shakespeare, 120, 313. Sinclair, May, 215. Smith, Joseph, 184, 300. Socrates, 3, 62, 132, 222, 224, 265. Sorel, Georges, 29, 30. Spencer and Gillen, 241. Spencer, Herbert, 68, 69, 70. Spinoza, 17, 284, 298. Stephen, J. F., 53, 68. Stephen, Leslie, 12. Stoics, 35, 36, 207. Strong, C. A., 156 (note). Taylor, A. E., 272. Taylor, Jeremy, 288. Thackeray, 109, 161, 221, 235. Tolstoi, 162, 181. Tourgenieff, 162, 213, 214. Trollope, Anthony, 91 (note), 235. Unamuno, Miguel de, 234 (note). Vaihinger, H., 235. Varisco, B., 303. Villon, 162. Voltaire, 64. White, William Hale, 299. Wilde, Oscar, 153. Wundt, W., 12. Xenophon, 224. Ay i 4 Pe 0 7h nt] y va Mg hee i nee % eae ie ail ae Tv wink ' ah Apu aah ; $e + P @ Aib es | Se) fe 4 i rs _ E @ = ap Date Due p= CUL