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MODERN THINKERS 
 
 AND \ r{ 
 
 PRESENT PROBLEMS 
 
 AN APPROACH TO MODERN PHILOSOPHY 
 THROUGH ITS HISTORY 
 
 BY 
 
 EDGAR A. SINGER, Jr., Ph.D. 
 
 PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY 
 IN THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 
 
 1923 
 
Copyright, 1023, 
 
 BY 
 
 HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 
 
 November, igag 
 
 PRINTED IN 
 UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
PREFACE 
 
 These papers, which had been written from time 
 to time and for various occasions, have been brought 
 together without any attempt to make them tell a 
 smooth unbroken story, yet not without regard to 
 their connectedness. They have sometimes served 
 me to bring before the mind of youth certain prob- 
 lems on which philosophers have thought again and 
 again. But if they have had any interest for youth, 
 if they are to have any for maturity, it can only be 
 because the names that stand over the chapters might, 
 if moments had names, be those of moments in each 
 man's history. 
 
 And as such, unless I have altogether failed to 
 make my characters real, these names will be recog- 
 nized. Who has not sometime been that Bruno 
 who stepped from his Father's House, where all had 
 revolved so solicitously about himself, to find with- 
 out the cold stars gazing down on his atomy from 
 their places in endless emptiness? 
 
 Who has not come to feel, with Spinoza, those in- 
 violable laws of mechanism which govern the world 
 about him creeping into his own inmost being, threat- 
 
 iii 
 
PREFACE 
 
 ening there all that he had so simply and yet so 
 dearly clung to as his freedom and autonomy? 
 
 How many reflecting in their maturity on the un- 
 questioning faiths of their childhood have thought 
 to bring these to the test of such experience as natu- 
 ral science depends on, only to find, as Hume found, 
 these faiths unconfirmed? 
 
 And of those who have lived through this moment 
 of disillusionment, there will always be some who 
 will have come in their own way to the position 
 severe reasoning forced on Kant: The spiritual as- 
 pects of reality are not issues of science and intellec- 
 tion, but belong to that other order of truth grasped 
 by the " practical reason." 
 
 Others, meanwhile, will have refused to let their 
 speculation go beyond the insight experience yields, 
 and of these some at least will have found that ex- 
 perience holds out nothing hopeful for now or for- 
 ever. They will have seen with Schopenhauer intp 
 the " deep abyss " and found at the bottom of it only 
 this counsel: Not-being is better than being. 
 
 Or if perhaps they have for a moment thought, 
 with Nietzsche, that evolutionary science had brought 
 to view a goal that gave heart to the pitiless struggle 
 of life by holding before it the vision of the '^ far 
 future man," they may in the end have come to see 
 beyond this Superman. But to have seen beyond 
 
 iv 
 
PREFACE 
 
 him nothing but the super-superman is to have seen 
 the goal vanish and the heart lose its hope. 
 
 And what then? The pages on " Pragmatism " 
 and on " Progress " may ofiFer suggestions of an 
 answer. They are still historical in their spirit, and 
 like those that had gone before them mean to illus- 
 trate, not to demonstrate or affirm. They, too, 
 would stand for moments of any thoughtful life 
 and will have done all they were intended to do if 
 they inform such a life with, and give it a sense of 
 attachment to the world that has gone before and is 
 going on 'round. 
 
 But if one would at the outset know something of 
 what the writer suspects to be the outcome of 
 ordered and historically guided reflection on these 
 subjects, let him turn to the closing chapter, if not 
 for encouragement then for warning. 
 
 Every one will remember the word to his reader 
 with which Montaigne closes the preface to his Es- 
 says. 'Tis but of himself he would write and " it 
 is then no reason thou shouldst employ thy time 
 about so frivolous and vain a subject. Therefore 
 farewell." 
 
 I cannot close my preface without confessing a 
 misgiving that must have beset everyone who ever 
 wrote of the past: that whereas he set out to lose 
 
PREFACE 
 
 himself in history, he may have found in history 
 nothing but himself. But on the bare chance of this 
 having befallen me, I need not say " farewell " be- 
 forehand 5 for well I know no reader will accom- 
 pany me far through this past save one who finds 
 himstli there too. 
 
 •VI 
 
TABLE OF CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I. Giordano Bruno, i 548-1600 . . 3 
 
 II. Benedict de Spinoza 1632-1677 37 
 
 III. A Disciple of Spinoza (An Illus- 
 tration) 65 
 
 -*IV. David Hume, 1711-1776 .... 97 
 
 V. Immanuel Kant, 1724-1804 . . 129 
 
 --VI. Arthur Schopenhauer, 1788- 
 
 1860 ISS 
 
 VII. Friederich Nietzsche, 1844-1900 183 
 
 VIII. Pragmatism 213 
 
 IX. Progress 249 
 
 X. RoYCE ON Love and Loyalty . 283 
 
 XL Retrospect and Prospect .... 303 
 
 Vll 
 
GIORDANO BRUNO 
 I 548-1 600 
 
GIORDANO BRUNO 
 
 The straightest way to the heart of old matters 
 is an old letter. Here is one written on the twenty- 
 third of May, 1592, by a gentleman of Venice to the 
 Father of the Venetian Inquisition. 
 " Very Reverend Father and Most-to-be-observed 
 Sir: 
 
 " I, Gioanni Mocenigo, son of the Clarissimo 
 Messer Marcoantonio, compelled by my conscience 
 and ordered by my confessor, denounce to Your Very 
 Reverend Paternity Giordano Bruno of Nola, whom 
 I have heard say on various occasions when he was 
 conversing with me in my own house, that Catholics 
 do but blaspheme when they hold the Bread to be 
 transubstantiated into the Flesh j that he is against 
 the Mass 5 that no religion satisfies him 3 that Christ 
 was a charlatan who, since he resorted to tricks to 
 fool people, might well enough have foreseen that 
 he would die a criminal's death j that there is no 
 distinction of Persons in God; . . . that the world 
 is eternal and that there are an infinite number of 
 worlds, and that God is continually making an in- 
 finity of them because He wants as many as He can 
 
 3 
 
GIORDANO BRUNO 
 
 have 5 that Christ performed specious miracles 3 that 
 he was a magician and the apostles were magicians 
 too." . . . 
 
 The letter runs on in breathless denunciation, but 
 already one begins to make out the image of Bruno 
 reflected in the average mind of his time. The 
 limited intelligence of Mocenigo has honestly mis- 
 understood some of Bruno's utterances, his malice 
 has distorted others j but the perversity of the whole 
 is not due to these faults of detail. Lost in 
 this jumble of stock heresies lies hidden a great idea, 
 the greatest perhaps that has ever been contributed 
 by a single mind to the cause of our science. " And 
 he says the world is eternal and that there are an 
 infinity of worlds." This sentence has brought the 
 old world to an end, has shattered the heavens 
 under which Christendom was then living, yet it falls 
 on the ear of its time with no more meaning or por- 
 tent than a doubt respecting the doctrine of trans- 
 substantiation or the authenticity of miracles. Bruno, 
 throughout the course of his driven life and up to 
 the moment of his tragic death, knew most forms of 
 martyrdom. He bore none of these meekly, for his 
 was a lusty soul that did not love to suffer. But 
 neither the hatred nor the cruelty of his world seems 
 to have hurt him so to the quick as did its stupidity. 
 Doubt him and hate if you will 5 but value him you 
 
 4 
 
GIORDANO BRUNO 
 
 must! He was master of a great idea and unac- 
 quainted with modesty. 
 
 Meanwhile Mocenigo has more to say of this 
 sinner: " He has expressed the intention of making 
 himself the founder of a new sect under the name of 
 the new philosophy. He has said that the Virgin 
 could not have brought a child into the world, and 
 that our Catholic faith is full of blasphemies against 
 the majesty of Godj that it would be better to sup- 
 press the largesses of wrangling friars because they 
 befoul the world j that they are all asses and that 
 our common opinions are the teaching of asses 5 that 
 we have no proof that our faith has merit with God 5 
 that the simple rule of not doing unto others what 
 we would not have done unto us is sufficient for 
 right living.". . . Perhaps I may stop here. Evi- 
 dently one who could be guilty of all these follies 
 would be ingenious in inventing others, and Moce- 
 nigo's letter may run endlessly on. 
 
 While this letter was writing, Bruno lay locked in 
 a room of Mocenigo's house. " I had thought to 
 learn from him," Mocenigo explains, " not knowing 
 him to be the wicked man he is, and having noted all 
 these things to lay before your Very Reverend Pa- 
 ternity, and fearing that he would take his departure 
 as he said he wished to do, I have locked him in a 
 room at your disposal. As I think him possessed 
 
GIORDANO BRUNO 
 
 of the devil, I hope you will decide quickly what is 
 to be done with him. . . ." 
 
 It has sometimes been wondered how Bruno came 
 to accept the invitation of Mocenigo to take up his 
 residence in Venice. Italy was for him a place of such 
 peril that it seems incredible he should have ventured 
 to set foot in it. " Tell me one thing more," con- 
 cludes a letter written in this same year 1592 by a 
 gentleman of Bologna to a friend in Padua, " tell 
 me one thing more. Giordano Bruno, whom you 
 knew at Wittenberg, the Nolan, is said to be living 
 among you just now at Padua. Is it really so? 
 What sort of man is this that he dares to enter Italy, 
 which he left in exile as he himself used to confess? 
 I wonder, I wonder. I cannot yet believe the rumor, 
 although I have it on good authority. You shall 
 tell me whether it is true." And history has won- 
 dered all the more seeing that Bruno himself had 
 long before prophesied the result. " Torches," he 
 had written, " fifty or a hundred, will not fail me 
 though the march be at noonday should it be my fate 
 to die in a Catholic country." 
 
 So far as documents furnish any answer to this 
 question, it lies suggested in a second letter written 
 by Mocenigo to the Holy Inquisition two days after 
 the denunciation. " In the course of the day that I 
 
 6 
 
GIORDANO BRUNO 
 
 kept Giordano Bruno locked up, I asked him whether 
 the things that he would not teach me, as he promised 
 to do in return for the many kindnesses I had done 
 him and the many gifts that I had given him, whether 
 he would not consent to teach me them if I abstained 
 from denouncing him for all the criminal things he 
 had uttered to me against our Lord Jesus Christ and 
 against the Holy Catholic Church. He answered 
 that he did not fear the Inquisition, for he had 
 harmed no one by living in his own way, and more- 
 over he could not recall having said anything sinful, 
 but that if he had said such things he had said them 
 only to me, and he need not fear that I would do him 
 harm in the way I suggested." Those who can may 
 believe that Bruno is here telling the truth about 
 himself. Those who can may believe that he who 
 eight years before and at a safe distance from Italy 
 had so clearly seen the torches that awaited him 
 there, had since grown blind to them or indifferent. 
 The next document of the trial is brief enough. 
 Under date of the following day — that is, Tuesday, 
 the twenty-sixth of May — is found this entry: 
 " Clarissimo Dom Aloysius Fuscari presiding. Pre- 
 sented himself Dom Matheus de Avantio, Captain 
 of the Constabulary, and reported as follows: Sab- 
 bath at three o'clock of the night,^ I arrested 
 
 ^ This would be Saturday afternoon. 
 
 7 
 
GIORDANO BRUNO 
 
 Giordano Bruno of Nola, whom I found in a house 
 over against Saint Samuels, in which dwells the 
 Clarissimo Ser Gioanni Mocenigo, and I have im- 
 prisoned him in the Prisons of the Holy Office, and 
 this I have done by order of this Holy Tribunal." 
 
 The doors of the prison closing on Bruno bring to 
 an end the story of his life, but from behind these 
 doors there come to us fragments of the story itself 
 as Bruno retells it to his judges. For on the very 
 day of his arrest he is examined by a tribunal com- 
 posed of the Apostolic Nuncio, the Patriarch of 
 Venice, the Very Reverend Father Inquisitor. Be- 
 fore these, as the clerk of the tribunal records it, was 
 brought a certain man of ordinary height with a 
 chestnut beard, who, when he had been admonished 
 to speak the truth, and before any question could 
 be put to him, burst out of his own accord : " I will 
 tell the truth. Several times have I been threatened 
 with being brought before this Holy Office, but I 
 have always taken the threat for a joke, because I 
 am ever ready to give account of myself." Where- 
 upon he tells how, having found himself at Frank- 
 furt the previous year, he received there two letters 
 from Gioanni Mocenigo, inviting him to come to 
 Venice to instruct Mocenigo in the art of memory 
 and the art of invention, for which this Venetian 
 gentleman had promised to pay him well and treat 
 
 8 
 
GIORDANO BRUNO 
 
 him in a way that should content him. And so 
 Bruno had come to Venice seven or eight months be- 
 fore, living first in lodgings, then for a brief space 
 in Padua, until some two months prior to his arrest 
 he had taken up his residence in Mocenigo's own 
 house. We already know how, " compelled by his 
 conscience and ordered by his confessor," Mocenigo 
 finally disposed of his guest. 
 
 Then Bruno questioned by the tribunal, laid be- 
 fore it a formal account of his life. " My name is 
 Giordano Bruno, of the family of the Bruni, of the 
 city of Nola, twelve miles from Naples. In this 
 place I was born and raised, and my profession was 
 and is letters and the sciences. My father was named 
 Gioanni, and my mother Fraulissa Savolina, and my 
 father's calling was that of a soldier. He is dead 
 since, and my mother too. 
 
 " I am about forty-four years of age, and I was 
 born, so far as I have heard from my people, in the 
 year 1548. I remained in Naples learning the hu- 
 manities, logic, and dialectics until fourteen years of 
 age . . . and then I took the habit of Saint Dominic 
 in the monastery or convent of Saint Dominic in 
 Naples, and was invested by a Padre who was then 
 prior of that convent, called Maestro Ambrosio 
 Pasqua. When the year of probation was passed, I 
 was admitted by him to profession, which was 
 
 9 
 
GIORDANO BRUNO 
 
 solemnly made in the same convent. . . . Later I 
 was promoted to holy orders and at the usual season 
 to the priesthood. I sang my first mass in Cam- 
 pagnia, a city of the same state at a distance from 
 Naples, residing the while in a convent of the order, 
 the San Bartholomeo, and continued in the religious 
 habit of Saint Dominic, celebrating masses and the 
 divine offices, obedient to the superior of the Order 
 and to the priors of the monasteries and convents 
 where I was stationed until 1576. . . .'* 
 
 I have not wanted to interrupt Bruno, nor to hurry 
 him in his story, tedious as it is in the telling. Little 
 event after little event of his secular and of his 
 religious life befalls with the trivial monotony of 
 dropping rain. But is it not just so that these little 
 events and endless others like them must have fallen 
 on the soul of the living Bruno, soaking in, soaking in, 
 unnoticed as rain, until his very humors ran with their 
 humor? Now their humor was the spirit of the old 
 world, the spirit of his Father's House. Would it 
 not be curious if, having pulled down this ridiculous 
 old dwelling and in the very act of dancing among 
 its ruins, Bruno should suddenly come to see that it 
 was the only house his soul, being such a soul as 
 it was, could dwell in? If something of this kind 
 did not happen at a moment of his life we are fast 
 approaching, then only the gods know what did hap- 
 
 10 
 
GIORDANO BRUNO 
 
 pen. But I am anticipating, or rather laying up re- 
 flections against our hour of need. For the moment 
 we have no more than come to the day in Bruno's 
 life when he stepped out of his Father's House to 
 make his way ins Freie hincms. 
 
 Fifty years ago, before Berti had unearthed the 
 documents of this trial, it was difficult to trace the 
 life of Bruno. Since then it has become well-nigh 
 impossible. Documents are a great embarrassment 
 to the conscientious historian. They are there, these 
 documents, and have to be put in the textj the truth 
 about the case must be relegated to the foot-notes. 
 Now the text runs in this wise: "In 1576 . . . I 
 was in Rome at the Convent of Minerva, obedient 
 to the orders of Maestro Sisto de Luca, Procurator 
 of the Order. Thither I had gone to present myself 
 because at Naples two processes had been instituted 
 against me, the first for having given away certain 
 images of the saints and retaining only a crucifix, it 
 being thought that this showed a lack of respect for 
 the images of the saints j and the other for having 
 said to a novice who was reading a story of the Seven 
 Beatitudes in verse. What did he think he was doing 
 with a book like that? — why didn't he throw it 
 away and read rather some other book, as the lives 
 of the Holy Fathers? This process was renewed at 
 
 II 
 
GIORDANO BRUNO 
 
 the time I went to Rome, with other articles added 
 to it which I do not know, for I abandoned the order 
 and threw aside the habit and went to Noli in the 
 region of Genoa, where I supported myself four or 
 five months teaching grammar to young boys." 
 
 This is indeed the text, but is not a comment in- 
 evitable? What! Bruno would have us believe that 
 in 1576 he is of such fearful mood and timid temper 
 that, having no more on his conscience than the 
 events recited, he abandons church and country, peace 
 and security at the mere frown of his Order, but 
 that in 1592, having in the meanwhile upset, 
 smashed, and abused the Christian world, he can 
 look upon the Inquisition without fear, bethinking 
 him that he had harmed no man in living in his own 
 way? 
 
 However, flee he did. What followed on this 
 flight he recounts to his judges as his trial proceeds. 
 Sixteen years of as hard-driven a life as one could 
 wish for one's dearest foe, from Italy to Switzerland 
 (to the Geneva of Calvin's day, where one may 
 imagine that Bruno was as much at home as fire on 
 an iceberg), then across to France, from Lyons to 
 Toulouse, from Toulouse to Paris, from France to 
 England, from London back to Paris, then hastily 
 to Germany, through many German and Bohemian 
 cities! Sixteen years of homeless, friendless pov- 
 
 12 
 
GIORDANO BRUNO 
 
 erty, now teaching small boys, now lecturing at great 
 universities, now living with fine gentlemen, received 
 by a king or a queen, now gathering a few curious 
 students about him, who somehow confused the 
 promise of the great idea with old mysteries and the 
 arts we call black. Until at last we find him at 
 Frankfurt receiving Mocenigo's letters promising 
 him a home in Italy, his native land, and a treatment 
 that should content him. 
 
 Yet these years of travail were those in which his 
 works were written, the Italian dialogues in Eng- 
 land, the Latin poems in Germany. The great idea 
 had received full expression, the " Excubitor," as 
 Bruno called himself, the Awakener of sleeping 
 minds, had blown his trumpet and the walls of the 
 world had fallen. Splendid is the enthusiasm with 
 which Bruno first announces this new vision of the 
 morning: "Lo! here is one who has swept the air, 
 pierced the heavens, sped by the stars and passed be- 
 yond the bounds of the world, who has annihilated 
 the fantastic spheres with which foolish mathemati- 
 cians and vulgar philosophers had closed us in. The 
 key of his diligent curiosity has opened to the view 
 of every sense and every power of reason such closets 
 of truth as can be opened by us. He has stripped 
 nature of her robe and veil. He has given eyes to 
 the mole, vision to the blind. . . • No longer is our 
 
 13 
 
GIORDANO BRUNO 
 
 reason imprisoned within the confines of imaginary 
 heavens. . . . We know that there is but one 
 heaven, one immense ether, where magnificent fires 
 maintain their proper distances by reason of that 
 eternal life in which they have part. These flaming 
 bodies are the ambassadors which announce the ex- 
 cellence of God's glory and majesty." 
 
 This is indeed the voice of an Awakener. But, 
 alas for awakeners! the vision of the morning is 
 never fair to those just shaken out of their dreams. 
 In an introductory letter to the last of the dialogues 
 we catch an echo of the sleeper's complaint: " If I 
 shoved a plow, if I kept a flock, if I cultivated a 
 garden, if I mended old clothes, no one would notice 
 me, few would consider me, not many would find 
 fault with me, and I could easily please everybody. 
 But for having been studious of the field of nature, 
 solicitous for the pasture of the soul, enamored of 
 the cultivation of the mind, a very Daedalus fashion- 
 ing raiment for the intellect, every passer-by 
 threatens me, every one who sees me attacks me, who 
 comes upon me rends me, who lays hold on me de- 
 vours. It is not one, it is not a few 3 it is many, it is 
 almost all. If you would know why this is, I will 
 tell you the reason of it — I despise the crowd, I 
 hate the mob, the multitude contents me not. One 
 thing I love, one thing for whose sake I am free in 
 
 14 
 
GIORDANO BRUNO 
 
 bondage, content in pain, rich in poverty, alive in 
 very death. One thing for whose sake I envy not 
 those who are slaves in their liberty, troubled in their 
 pleasure, poor in their riches, dead in their life. 
 Their body is the chain that binds them, in their 
 mind is the hell that tortures them, in their spirit the 
 falsehood that makes them sick, in their soul the 
 lethargy that kills. Not theirs the greatness of mind 
 which frees, the breadth of view which ennobles. 
 Not theirs the splendor which illumines, nor the sci- 
 ence which gives life." It is a brave, even an over- 
 brave flourish with which Bruno ends this proemial 
 epistle: " And so the gods deliver me from all those 
 who unjustly hate me, and my God be always propi- 
 tious unto me! . . . The stars let my sowing fit the 
 field and the field my sowing, that the world be made 
 content with the useful and glorious fruits of my 
 labors! . . . And if I err, I truly do not believe 
 myself to err 5 whether speaking or writing, I do not 
 dispute for the love of victory. . . . For love of 
 true wisdom and desire for true insight I exhaust, I 
 crucify, I torture myself. . . ." 
 
 Brave is the flourish, how over-brave we realize 
 with unexpected intensity as we follow this solemn 
 trial to its last scene. Having recounted the episodes 
 of his life, Bruno proceeds to the explanation and 
 
 IS 
 
GIORDANO BRUNO 
 
 defense of his teachings. At first the new philoso- 
 phy is presented with no little boldness and confi- 
 dence, its difference from the formal teaching of 
 Christianity admitted and even pointed out. But 
 always with a certain reserve, as of one who would 
 say, " Yes, I have broken the frame and melted 
 the flesh of your religion, but if you will let me, I 
 will show how much more nobly its divine spirit 
 dwells in the new body I have made for it." Now 
 thi^ new body differs in no important way from the 
 physical universe as we see it today, so that Bruno's 
 problem has been the problem of all Christian 
 thought since his time. What Aquinas had done in 
 the way of making the spirit of Christianity at home 
 in the finite heaven-enclosed world of Aristotle, 
 that Bruno felt must be done over again, now 
 that the world was no longer finite and the distinc- 
 tion between heaven and Earth had vanished. This 
 is the thought that pervades the first days of Bruno's 
 account of himself before the Venetian tribunal, but 
 as one by one the accusations of Mocenigo's letter 
 fall on him, he seems to lose hope and confidence in 
 himself. He denies, and denies, and denies! 
 
 I am not convinced that he is telling the truth in 
 these denials. I am not convinced that Mocenigo's 
 account of him, barring a few obvious misunder- 
 standings, is false in spirit. No more am I convinced 
 
 i6 
 
GIORDANO BRUNO 
 
 that Bruno has been frightened into lying himself 
 out of danger. He seems to me to say, " Alas! if 
 these matters on which you question me are of the 
 essence of Christianity, then have I been wrong in 
 supposing that the old wine can be put in the new 
 bottle." Driven and perplexed, he has to decide 
 which lies nearest to his heart, the new bottle or the 
 old wine. Remember him fleeing in his early man- 
 hood from his Father's House, ostensibly in childish 
 fear and unwillingly, but really perhaps because he 
 needed space, endless space, through which to follow 
 the new idea. Remember him coming back to Italy 
 sixteen years later, ostensibly because he realized 
 that his manner of living and thinking had hurt no 
 man and so ought to bring down no judgment on his 
 head, but really perhaps because the craving for the 
 old wine was deeper in him than the enthusiasm for 
 the new bottle. Perhaps then we can understand the 
 closing scene of his trial at Venice. " It may be," 
 he cries, " in the long time that has passed I have 
 committed other sins and departed from the Church 
 in other ways than those which I have explained, and 
 that I have not cleansed myself of all matters of 
 censure, but although I have thought much over 
 these things, I can recall nothing more. I have con- 
 fessed, and I now confess anew my errors, and I am 
 here in the hands of Your Most Illustrious Lord- 
 
 17 
 
GIORDANO BRUNO 
 
 ships to receive punishment for the saving of my 
 soul. My soul cannot express the depth of its con- 
 trition for my fault." And falling on his knees, he 
 said, " I humbly ask pardon of the Lord God and of 
 Your Most Illustrious Lordships for all the errors 
 which I have committed and which I now stand 
 ready to expiate in such wise as your wisdom may 
 think proper and judge expedient for my soul. And 
 moreover, I beg that you give me a punishment 
 which shall exceed in severity rather than set any 
 public example which may throw dishonor on the 
 sacred religious habit I have worn. And if 
 by God's mercy and the mercy of Your Most Illus- 
 trious Lordships, life shall be spared me, I promise 
 to make such notable reform of my life as shall pay 
 for the scandal I have given with equal and greater 
 edification." 
 
 In this unhappy posture I leave Bruno the man to 
 take up the story of his great idea. We shall see him 
 once more indeed, at the moment when, eight years 
 later, he calmly dies for the idea he now so abjectly 
 abandons J but no understanding of the alternating 
 enthusiasm and despair that filled this life can afford 
 to neglect the qualities of the gospel it stood for, 
 forsook, then died for in the end. 
 
 Like all very great ideas, this one is of the sim- 
 
 i8 
 
GIORDANO BRUNO 
 
 plest. It begins with the observation that the flame of 
 a candle grows bigger as we approach it, smaller as we 
 recede from it. Nothing very new in this, you say, 
 nor very imposing. No, it is the next step that was 
 so new in Bruno's day, and of such tremendous de- 
 structive and creative power. Yet it is just as simple 
 as the first. What is true of a candle flame must be 
 true of a sun and of a star. Is it not indeed simple? 
 Yes, but in all the long while the world had lasted 
 it had occurred to no one before Bruno to seize upon 
 this simple idea and to follow whither it led. It led 
 far, wonderfully far. It led Bruno to journey in im- 
 agination out and out toward those most distant stars 
 that were then called fixed, and were indeed sup- 
 posed to be fixed in one great sphere that enclosed 
 all things, beyond which was nothing, and not even 
 nothing, for there was no beyond 5 space ended where 
 matter ended, at the walls of the world. But Bruno 
 as he journeyed saw this great sun of ours growing 
 smaller and smaller as he receded from it, and 
 yonder star growing larger and larger as he ap- 
 proached it, until the most wonderful thing hap- 
 pened. The sun began to look more and more like 
 a star, and the star more and more like a sun. There 
 was now no escaping the conclusion — the stars that 
 had been called fixed are other suns, our sun but a 
 near-lying star. 
 
 19 
 
GIORDANO BRUNO 
 
 A child might have grasped this idea which 
 brought a world to an end. Do I say a child? It 
 may be that Bruno was that child, for his mind 
 throughout had much of the waywardness, some- 
 thing of the random and tumultuous association of 
 a child's mind. The past might interest him, might 
 even inspire him 5 it never had the power of captur- 
 ing and holding him. But childish as it was, this 
 idea did destroy the old world, for if stars were in 
 no wise different from the sun we know, nor the sun 
 from a star, evidently there was at least one star that 
 was not fixed to the ethereal sphere that contained 
 all things. There could then be no longer any mo- 
 tive for supposing these other suns to be all at the 
 same distance from the center. They might be any- 
 where, they might even (Bruno had this very 
 modern idea) be moving with respect to each other. 
 Inevitably Bruno must come to look upon the stars 
 as suns sprinkled irregularly throughout the regions 
 of infinite space. 
 
 Nor was this all. Coming after Copernicus as he 
 did, Bruno had from the first grasped with enthu- 
 siasm Copernicus' idea that not the Earth but the 
 Sun was the center of the sphere. I say the center 
 of the sphere, for we must remember that Coperni- 
 cus never touched the boundary of the world, but 
 only changed its center from Earth to Sun. In 
 
 20 
 
GIORDANO BRUNO 
 
 Copernicus' thought we still lived within a star- 
 spangled heaven. But now that Bruno had shat- 
 tered this heaven and sprinkled these stars through 
 space, he could not well help surrounding those 
 other suns with planets, until not merely an infinity 
 of suns but an infinity of solar systems spread them- 
 selves out before his imagination. But could he stop 
 here? When one has once destroyed the distinction 
 between Heaven and Earth, when one has once begun 
 to think of nature as everywhere alike, it is not easy 
 to stop. Was not one of the planets making its 
 journey around our sun inhabited with manifold 
 forms of life? Then why should they not all be? 
 And is it likely that one solar system should be a 
 scene of life and the infinity of others not? So it was 
 that Bruno, looking out into space, saw as many in- 
 habited globes as there were " hundreds of thou- 
 sands of stars.'' 
 
 These are the matters which Bruno brought back 
 with him from his journey to the stars and beyond 
 the confines of the world. I have told them simply, 
 for eloquence is wasted in describing such feats of 
 the imagination. They are of themselves eloquent. 
 And we recall with what enthusiasm Bruno himself 
 recounted his journey. Is it not possible, however, 
 that when he returned to earth ^nd told his jour- 
 
 21 
 
GIORDANO BRUNO 
 
 neyings to merij he came to perceive, as these men at 
 once perceived, that his new vision was not all made 
 of beauty? Is there not in this infinite cosmos that 
 which may depress and even terrify? 
 
 In his " Garden of Epicurus," Anatole France has 
 put the two worlds side by side. One has only to do 
 this to feel that Bruno, who at first held out his hands 
 to the new vision, may afterwards have snatched 
 them back again to shut it out. 
 
 " We have some trouble," says France, " in im- 
 agining the state of mind of a man in olden times 
 who firmly believed that the Earth was the center 
 of the Universe, and that all the stars turned round 
 it. He felt under his feet damned souls writhing 
 in flames, and perhaps he had seen with his own eyes, 
 and smelled with his own nostrils the sulphurous 
 fumes of Hell escaping from some fissures in the 
 rocks. Lifting his head he contemplated the spheres, 
 . . . those bearing the Moon, Mercury, Venus — 
 the one that Dante visited on Good Friday of the 
 year 1300 — the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, then 
 the incorruptible firmament from which the stars 
 were suspended like lamps. Beyond, his mind's eye 
 discerned the Ninth Heaven to which the saints were 
 rapt, the Primum Mobile or Crystalline^ and finally 
 Empyrean, dwelling of the blessed, toward which, 
 he firmly hoped, two angels robed in white would 
 
 22 
 
Dante's Conception of the Universe 
 (From Hearnshaw's MedicBval Contributions to Modern Civilization.^) 
 
GIORDANO BRUNO 
 
 bear away, as it were a little child, his soul washed 
 in baptism and perfumed with the oil of the last 
 sacraments. In those days God had no other chil- 
 dren than man, and all his creation was ordered in a 
 fashion at once childlike and poetic like an immense 
 cathedral. Thus imagined, the universe was so 
 simple that it was represented in its entirety with 
 its true figure and motions in certain great clocks 
 run by machinery and appropriately painted." 
 
 But now ! " We are done with the spheres and 
 the planets under which one was born lucky or un- 
 lucky, jovial or saturnine. The solid vault of the 
 firmament is shattered. Our eye and our thought 
 plunge into infinite abysses of heaven. Beyond the 
 planets we discover no longer the Empyrean of the 
 elect and of the angels, but a hundred millions of 
 rolling suns escorted by their cortege of obscure 
 satellites invisible to us. In the midst of this in- 
 finity of worlds our own Sun is but a bubble of gas 
 and our Earth but a fleck of mud." 
 
 The contrast speaks for itself and needs no com- 
 ment. It is enough to point out the eflFect it must 
 have had upon the ethical and religious notions of 
 him who first realized it. What in such a world are 
 we to make of the central episode of Christianity? 
 Bruno's imagination that had swept through space 
 and sped by the stars had found these worlds inhab- 
 
 23 
 
GIORDANO BRUNO 
 
 ited by beings " perhaps better, perhaps worse than 
 we are." If there was no evidence that these dwell- 
 ers in distant solar systems were so much better 
 than we as to need no saving, neither was there any 
 evidence that they were so much worse as to deserve 
 none. We were no longer the only children of God. 
 What then? Are we to suppose that the drama of 
 Redemption is being enacted over and over again 
 throughout the infinity of worlds? Is the Son of 
 God being sacrificed over and over again for the sake 
 of His other children? Is He at this moment per- 
 haps redeeming with His life the dwellers on some 
 star in the night yonder? 
 
 But destruction did not stop here. Not only the 
 gentler aspects which Christianity had given to the 
 sterner religion of pagandom were threatened. That 
 older religion itself, with its well-thought-out theory 
 of the relation between God and man, must either be 
 rejected or remodeled. For Aristotle as well as for 
 Aquinas, God and man had formed the real plot of 
 the universe. God, revealing himself most clearly 
 in the turning of the enclosing heaven, set thereby 
 the rest of nature in motion and stirred things down 
 to their very center. So that in the region of earth, 
 water, air and fire there came to be composed bodies 
 mixed of all these. They were the living beings 
 we know, which, holding their ingredients in proper 
 
 24 
 
GIORDANO BRUNO 
 
 proportion for a while, fell apart again and passed 
 away. 
 
 These living beings differed in power. As we pass 
 from the vegetable through the animal to the human 
 they show themselves increasingly able to control 
 the matter in which and of which they are. Highest 
 of all is the human male. It is for the sake of pro- 
 ducing him that the mechanism which fills the region 
 between Heaven and Earth exists and is operated. 
 One might almost say that Nature is God's workshop 
 for producing man. But why should God be thus 
 interested in producing this particular kind of an- 
 imal? Aristotle's answer comes less clearly than one 
 could wish, yet it comes. It is because man differs 
 from the animals not only in degree but in kind. 
 He is not altogether animal. In his superior body 
 there is contained a soul which is not only of God's 
 making, but of God's very substance. That is why 
 man alone can know God. It is as though God 
 needed to be known, recognized, reflected as in a 
 mirror. As for man, he is a bit of divinity momen- 
 tarily estranged from his home and dwelling, but 
 with the privilege of returning thither can he but 
 free his soul from earthly and sensuous entangle- 
 ments and interest himself in knowing his Father 
 which is in Heaven. 
 
 And now that Bruno has destroyed this difference 
 
 25 
 
GIORDANO BRUNO 
 
 between Heaven and Earth, has he not destroyed 
 along with it the distinction between God and man? 
 Has not his infinite homogenous world left man 
 a mere mite shivering on his fleck of mud as it rolls 
 around its bubble of gas? Man is no longer the 
 center of interest; he no longer plays an important 
 part in any thinkable plot. " Man is no more than 
 an ant in the presence of the infinite," cries Bruno. 
 " A star is no more than a man." 
 
 We can understand that Bruno's awakening, with 
 however great an enthusiasm it may have been her- 
 alded, can be no pleasant awakening for the sleeper. 
 The world of his dreams was infinitely fairer and 
 warmer than that reality to whose garish light his 
 eyes have been opened. It cannot be expected that 
 the awakened should feel any gratitude, and he did 
 not. But what is less obvious is the matter of Bruno's 
 own feeling as the consequences of his new idea grad- 
 ually unfold themselves to him. Can that first en- 
 thusiasm be sustained to the end, or must he too 
 shrink before the fuller vision of what he has done? 
 
 If we were to classify men in terms of their re- 
 actions to new ideas, I think we should all hit upon 
 these three types. Let me call the first the radical. 
 He is easy to initiate into a new truth, bold to accept 
 
 26 
 
GIORDANO BRUNO 
 
 it at all costs, loses at once all perspective and sees 
 in the past only a bundle of errors without beauty 
 and with no other interest than to furnish matter for 
 jest. And then there is the conservative. The hold 
 that the past has on such a mind is sometimes enor- 
 mous. He is capable of clinging to it at the expense 
 of all the rest of his science and experience. If it has 
 enthralled his heart and imagination, he falls into 
 a mood which the Renaissance called the acceptance 
 of " two-fold truth." He believes against all evi- 
 dence. He believes as Tertullian had it, just because 
 the thing is absurd. He insists with Pascal, that 
 the heart has its reasons which the reason cannot 
 understand. He is a creature of faiths and of mys- 
 ticisms. Finally there is the philosopher, the only 
 one of the three completely made for unhappiness. 
 He gets no thrill from novelty. He has followed 
 human thought through too many revolutions to ex- 
 pect the most violent of cataclysms to change things 
 much. He struggles to keep his perspective as he 
 would keep his reason, and the views of older hu- 
 manity do not lose their beauty because their expres- 
 sion has been proved wrong. Required to readjust 
 his thought of yesterday to the new fact of today, 
 he undertakes the task cheerfully enough as part of 
 the day's work. That is what yesterdays, todays, 
 and if it may be, tomorrows are given to him for. 
 
 27 
 
GIORDANO BRUNO 
 
 He measures his success by the extent to which he 
 can mold new thought to the satisfaction of old de- 
 sire, to old desire newly instructed. 
 
 And Bruno — to which of these classes does he 
 belong? Is he the radical who would light-heart- 
 edly take his place on the fleck of mud and watch it 
 roll around its bubble of gas, while he laughs at his 
 neighbors, who in the face of such a universe charm 
 themselves into a continued faith that they are some- 
 how divine souls in whom a God of Heaven is in- 
 terested? Or will he, on the other hand, become one 
 of those thus held by the past? Will the awakener, 
 now himself fully awakened, try to snatch at the 
 fading dream and somehow manage to keep his faith 
 in what he knows can't be true? Or will he set 
 laboriously to work, as a philosopher should, to find 
 that interpretation of the new facts which lies closest 
 to the meaning, though it may differ from the verbal 
 expression of world-old desires and longings? 
 
 Alas! if Bruno would but make up his mind to 
 be any one of these three, the task of his biographer 
 would be easy. But the real Bruno, the Bruno who 
 mocked, who thought, who recanted, and who died, 
 was not a type. He was a man, and as he was the 
 most human of men, he gathered the greatest pos- 
 sible number of inconsistencies to his heart. Yes, he 
 was a radical who mocked and jeered. Yes, he was 
 
 28 
 
GIORDANO BRUNO 
 
 a philosopher who labored and thought. And yes, 
 finally, he was a mystic who could hold as a splendid 
 if inexplicable possession of his faith, all the things 
 his reason showed to be impossible. I have shown 
 you Bruno's mockery reflected in the somewhat 
 muddy and turbid medium of Mocenigo's denunci- 
 ation. I have shown you Bruno the mystic, kneel- 
 ing before the Inquisition, completely abandoning 
 the great idea. It remains for me to show Bruno 
 the philosopher, Bruno the Pantheist, Bruno the un- 
 acknowledged inspiration of much that is recognized 
 as great in Spinoza and Leibnitz, the acknowledged 
 and highly honored forerunner of much we take to 
 be greatest in the German Idealism that centers 
 about 1800. 
 
 We left the great idea at the moment, when, hav- 
 ing pierced the heavens, it had come to realize the 
 consequences of its act. The gentle meaning of 
 Christ, the sterner pagan wisdom of God and man 
 had been lost in an infinity that knew no enclosing 
 heaven, in a dreary waste of sameness that knew no 
 distinction, not even that between man and God. 
 Bruno the philosopher was not one to let this work 
 of scientific devastation go on unchallenged. What 
 if there were a God who could dwell just as clearly 
 in a heaven that was everywhere as in a Heaven that 
 
 29 
 
GIORDANO BRUNO 
 
 was above? What if man could have an interest for 
 and could serve this God, not because he was diflFer- 
 ent in kind from the ant, but because he was, or rather 
 in proportion as he was, different in degree? Does 
 not the life that quickens an animate thing pervade 
 that thing? Is it not the same life which in me 
 beckons with my finger, beats with my heart, thinks 
 with my brain? What then if this infinite world 
 of ours were one great living thing made up of 
 other living things, as our body is made up of finger, 
 and heart, and brain, each of which in doing its own 
 work does consciously or unconsciously the work of 
 the whole? " Natura est Deus in rebus." This is 
 one of the phrases Bruno found in trying to express 
 his philosophy. Nature is God in things, or let us 
 put it — God is the lifej suns and planets, men and 
 ants, falling rain and mounting mist are but the ges- 
 tures of this life. Each thinks it does what it does 
 for its own sake, but those who think clearest realize 
 that the joy of their doing as well as the solace of 
 their undoing is the part they play in working out 
 the ideal of the whole. " And He lives in me as I 
 live in my hand " — the phrase is Von Hof- 
 mannsthaPs, the thought is Bruno's, and it is the 
 whole thought of Bruno the Pantheist. 
 
 The end of this life is told in a letter written by 
 
 30 
 
GIORDANO BRUNO 
 
 one Gaspard Schopp ( a converted Lutheran) to his 
 friend Rittershausen, rector of the University of 
 Altdorf: 
 
 " If I write to you now, it is because this very 
 day Giordano Bruno was publicly burned for heresy 
 in the Field of Flowers in front of the theater of 
 Pompey. ... If you were in Rome, you would learn 
 from each and every Italian that a Lutheran was 
 burned, and so you would be not a little strengthened 
 in your opinion of our savage hatred. But you must 
 know, my Rittershausen, that our Italians do not 
 draw a sharp line between heretics and heretics, nor 
 do they know fine distinctions, but if any one is a 
 heretic they take him for a Lutheran, in which sim- 
 plicity I pray that God may continue them. . . . 
 
 " Now Bruno was that Nolan ... a professed 
 Dominican who some twenty-three years agone be- 
 gan to doubt of Transubstantiation . . . then 
 forthright to deny it, and likewise the virginity of 
 the Blessed Mary. He migrated to Geneva, . . . 
 whence, not approving himself altogether sound in 
 his Calvinism (than which, nevertheless, nothing 
 leads straighter to atheism), he was driven to Lyons, 
 whence to Toulouse, from whence he passed on to 
 Paris, where he was a professor, but extraordinarius, 
 as he found that the professor ordinarius was obliged 
 to attend Mass. Thence to London, where he pub- 
 
 31 
 
GIORDANO BRUNO 
 
 lished a little book called the ' Beast Triumphant,' 
 meaning thereby the Pope, whom your party is wont 
 to honor with the name of beast/ From here to 
 Wittenberg, where, if I am not mistaken, he lec- 
 tured publicly for two years. Having gone on to 
 Prague, he published there the works, ' On the 
 Boundless,' ^ On the Innumerable Worlds,' and yet 
 one other, ' On the Shadows of Ideas,' in which he 
 taught horrible and moreover most absurd things, 
 as that there are innumerable worlds, that the soul 
 passes from one body into another, . . . that magic 
 is a good thing and permissible, the Holy Spirit is 
 nothing but the soul of the world, and that this was 
 what Moses meant when he wrote, ^ The spirit of 
 God moved on the face of the waters,' that the world 
 is eternal. ... In a word, whatever is asserted by 
 the Pagan philosophers, whatever by our older or 
 newer heretics he (Bruno) maintained. 
 
 " From Prague he went on to Brunswick and 
 Helmstadt, and there for a time is said to have 
 taught. Then to Frankfurt for the publishing of 
 certain books, and later fell into the hands of the 
 Inquisition at Venice, whence when they had had 
 enough of him, he was sent to Rome. Frequently 
 examined by the Holy Office ... of the Inqui- 
 
 ^ A curious ignorance of the content of the " Spaccio! " 
 There are numerous other faults of detail in this account, 
 
 32 
 
GIORDANO BRUNO 
 
 sition, convicted by the highest theologians, he now 
 besought eighty days that he might consider, now 
 promised recantation, now defended his point anew, 
 now obtained another eighty days 5 but was really 
 doing nothing but make a fool of the Pontiff and the 
 Inquisition. 
 
 " So that, nearly eight years after he had come be- 
 fore the Inquisition here, on the ninth of February 
 in the Palace of the Grand Inquisitor, there being 
 present the Most Illustrious Cardinals of the Holy 
 OfSce of the Inquisition, . . . theologians of coun- 
 sel, and the secular magistrate, governor of the city, 
 Bruno was brought in, and on bended knees heard 
 sentence pronounced against him. And it was in 
 this way: the story of his life was told, of his studies 
 and teachings, and with what diligence and fraternal 
 admonishment the Inquisition had sought to effect 
 his conversion, and what obduracy and impiety he 
 had shown. Then they defrocked him, as we say, 
 and straightway excommunicated him and handed 
 him over to the secular arm to be punished, asking 
 that this be done with clemency and without the 
 shedding of blood. 
 
 " While this was passing he answered nothing, 
 except this word: ' In greater fear, perhaps, do you 
 impose sentence upon me than I do receive it.' So, 
 taken away to prison by the governor's lictors, he was 
 
 33 
 
GIORDANO BRUNO 
 
 allowed a fortnight in case he should wish to recant 
 his errors J but in vain. Today he was led to the 
 stake. When the image of our Saviour on the Cross 
 was shown to him as he was about to die, he turned 
 away his head and sullenly rejected it. In great 
 misery he thus died, and is gone, I think, to tell in 
 those other worlds of his imagining after what man- 
 ner the men of Rome are wont to treat impious 
 blasphemers. . . ." 
 
 Surely, he came to that other world of his imagin- 
 ing. It is our world and he dwells among us. Little 
 does he remember of the men of Rome, of their 
 Illustrious Lordships of Venice, of all the toil and 
 travail of that old life of his — hardly enough to 
 fill an idle hour in the telling. But we know him 
 easily for the unchanged soul he was. He is that 
 one who came to us of a day and opened our eyes to 
 new and troubling visions. " Now you are free," 
 he said, " be glad! " He is that same one who stole 
 back another day and whispered, " But you are 
 afraid! Remember your Father's House, how safe 
 it was and warm." He may be there to close the 
 eyes that have seen enough, with what counsel then, 
 who can tell? But once he was fond of saying, 
 " Not only he who wins deserves the laurels 5 but 
 also he who dies no coward." 
 
 34 
 
II 
 
 BENEDICT DE SPINOZA 
 
 1632-1677 
 
BENEDICT DE SPINOZA 
 
 ^^ All things excellent are as difficult as they are 
 rare." These words which bring to a close Spinoza's 
 masterpiece, " Ethics, after the manner of Geom- 
 etry," sum up the experience of a life as rare as it 
 was difficult. 
 
 But then, the things that make life difficult are so 
 much a question of the nature that accepts or invites 
 them ! We may be sure that few, brought to the lap 
 of Lachesis, would have the courage to pick there- 
 from Spinoza's lot. To be born of exiled Jews, to 
 be cast off by family and race as an offender against 
 holy traditions, to live then in loneliness among 
 Christians whose faith one does not accept, to die by 
 inches at the age of forty-five, — even as lives go 
 this would hardly be called an easy one. How se- 
 riously then must we take the sustaining power of 
 a philosophy which enabled Spinoza, partly accept- 
 ing, partly inviting his destiny, to lend it an aspect 
 of calm beauty that touches our wonder! 
 
 One is tempted to recall the unhappy Bruno; with- 
 out, tossed and hunted; within, torn by a conflict 
 between a new science at once grand and desolate, 
 
 37 
 
BENEDICT DE SPINOZA 
 
 and a memory of things lovable but untrue. In him 
 a lofty philosophy was to have quieted this struggle 
 and consoled this isolation but did not, unless indeed 
 it did at that last moment when he stood at his stake 
 in the Field of Flowers. 
 
 There is much likeness but an all-important dif- 
 ference between Bruno and Spinoza, whose names a 
 curious fate linked together first in general condem- 
 nation, then in general praise. The two were alike 
 in this, that if anything more lonely can be conceived 
 than the fugitive existence of Bruno, it is the monlc- 
 like reclusion of Spinoza j if anything more desolate 
 than the infinite wind-swept universe of Bruno, it 
 is this same universe bereft of the quivering life and 
 all-inspiring purpose that Bruno found in it, this 
 world left on our hands a rolling mechanism fatal 
 and purposeless. But the difference is profound. 
 The philosophy, yes, one may boldly say the religion 
 of Spinoza, sustained him from day to day, from 
 hour to hour. Bruno's was rather the poet's vision, 
 vivid enough while it lasted, but dispelled by the 
 shock of reality to return only at such moments as 
 that in which his life went out. Is it in the power of 
 a thought, is it in the temperament of a man that this 
 difference lies explained? 
 
 38 
 
BENEDICT DE SPINOZA 
 
 Spinoza's thought, whatever its worth, owned a 
 distinguished lineage. When in 1658 he was ex- 
 communicated by the Jews at Amsterdam, he turned 
 with eager curiosity to the learning if not to the 
 faith of the Christians. In particular the Dutch 
 physician, Francis Van den Ende, himself a free- 
 thinker, became his teacher and friend. From him 
 Spinoza acquired his knowledge of Latin and Ger- 
 man, by him was initiated into the sciences and intro- 
 duced to the works of Giordano Bruno and of one 
 other destined to play a determining part in his 
 thought, Rene Descartes — " the father of modern 
 philosophy " as he is sometimes called. 
 
 Descartes, whose life overlaps that of Bruno at 
 the one end and of Spinoza at the other, is founder 
 of the school of thought the historian calls Ration- 
 alistic. Now a rationalist is obviously enough one 
 who is bent on following his reason, but reason as 
 opposed to what? We think first of reason as op- 
 posed to authority and revelation 5 but although 
 rationalism came inevitably to discard these sources 
 of belief — had already discarded them in the 
 thought of our very Spinoza — the father of ra- 
 tionalism had left some room for bothj partly be- 
 cause it might furnish a convenient refuge if the 
 official church with which he desired to live in com- 
 fortable relation should press himj partly because 
 
 39 
 
BENEDICT DE SPINOZA 
 
 Descartes was in one or two respects less of a 
 rationalist than his school. 
 
 On the other hand the master was emphatic 
 enough on the distinction between the reason and the 
 senses. It might seem to us moderns that the old 
 saying " seeing is believing," with its implied pro- 
 hibition against believing aught that might not be 
 seen, erred, if at all, from a very excess of reasonable- 
 ness. To Descartes, seeing with the body's eye was 
 still but flimsy evidence. This organ had too often 
 deceived him to be implicitly trusted, and to back 
 its testimony with that of the other senses, — touch, 
 taste, smell, hearing — was but to multiply unreliable 
 witnesses. Their combined voices might give a cer- 
 tain presumption in favor of their opinion but never 
 an assurance amounting to certainty. Not indeed 
 with the eye of the body but with the eye of the 
 mind could we see truth in its nakedness. But what 
 is this organ, this eye of the mind, and who is to 
 teach us to use it? The mathematicians, Descartes 
 replies, have long possessed it and long used it. It is 
 to them we must turn for instruction. 
 
 If we do — if we turn to Euclid, say — we find 
 that the whole complex and difficult body of truth 
 that we call geometery is made to follow from a few 
 simple truths so certain that we call them self-evi- 
 dent. Why should not all truths be susceptible of 
 
 40 
 
BENEDICT DE SPINOZA 
 
 the same kind of proof? Why should we not be 
 able to find an axiom of axioms whose certainty was 
 no mere matter of observation, and why, if we find 
 it, should we not be able to draw from it all pos- 
 sible truth, as we deduce the theorems of geometry 
 from its axioms? 
 
 It was this idea that Descartes followed and it 
 was this idea that Spinoza accepted at his hands: To 
 construct a theory of life that should be no mere 
 summing up of various peoples' experiences, but 
 should, after the manner of geometry, draw from 
 an indubitable source the certainties of morals and 
 religion no less than the truths of science. 
 
 But when we learn what is this axiom of axioms 
 that Spinoza received from Descartes and made the 
 fountain head of all truth, we find ourselves specta- 
 tors of one of those curious tricks of the human mind 
 that make its history always diverting. It may well 
 seem to us as though rationalism were not so much 
 standing on its reason as standing on its head. For 
 that axiom which is to be the simplest and most cer- 
 tain of all truths, more elementary than that 2 and 2 
 make 4, or that a straight line is the shortest distance 
 between two points, — that axiom is the very propo- 
 sition before which most of us find our reason stag- 
 gering, our faith panting and breathless. That ax- 
 iom consists of two words: " God is.^^ 
 
 41 
 
BENEDICT DE SPINOZA 
 
 I do not propose to develop here the tortured 
 processes of reasoning by which the rationalists were 
 wont to convince themselves that what God is and 
 that He is, were no mere questions of experience. It 
 seemed to them as though the very meaning of God 
 assured his existence. But I question if in the end 
 any of our day would be strongly convinced by their 
 argument about it. The whole matter is of the less 
 importance that Spinoza's results in the domain of 
 ethics are not so dependent on his method but that 
 one may readily reword the problem of 1 7th century 
 rationalism in the language of modern science. 
 
 Nevertheless it is in the first instance devotion to 
 the method he had received from Descartes that re- 
 quires Spinoza to differ with his master on two points 
 of the greatest importance to the sequel. This God, 
 this " all-perfect being " as the rationalists com- 
 monly defined Him, plays a rather capricious part 
 in Descartes' thinking. He is represented as the Cre- 
 ator of the physical universe, and in this act of cre- 
 ation as quite arbitrarily choosing this sort of a world 
 rather than another, a world working out a destiny 
 that is not chosen because it is good but is good be- 
 cause it is chosen of God, For the rest, what this 
 end may be is beyond the ken of human reason, and 
 after having done homage to the divine purpose 
 Descartes feels at liberty to confine his attention to 
 
 42 
 
BENEDICT DE SPINOZA 
 
 studying the mechanism and reconstructing the his- 
 tory of nature as we find it. 
 
 Here one can imagine Spinoza exclaiming " What ! 
 You would follow the guidance of the geometers, 
 deducing all truth from the axiom of God's exist- 
 ence, and you leave it to God to decide what shall 
 and what shall not follow from his nature! " Do 
 then the axioms of geometry select the theorems 
 they shall establish, accepting some and rejecting 
 others for a motive whether good or bad? No, says 
 Spinoza, God has neither intellect nor will : facts and 
 laws follow from His nature as the properties of a 
 triangle from its definition. 
 
 The other element of caprice in Descartes' final 
 picture of the world is just man. He alone of all 
 things occupying a place in God's universe is not 
 subjected to mechanical law. But how, Spinoza may 
 well ask, can we conceive ourselves to be following 
 the lead of mathematicians if we violate the first 
 principles of their science? Does the geometry of 
 a triangle depend upon the place in which the tri- 
 angle finds itself? How then can the laws of the 
 behavior of bodies depend upon these bodies being 
 in or out of the human machine? The human body 
 must be determined by the same laws of physics that 
 govern all extended things. " And as for the mind," 
 Spinoza adds, " the order and connection of its ideas 
 
 43 
 
BENEDICT DE SPINOZA 
 
 are parallel to the order and connection of the 
 bodily states." 
 
 " There is," he concludes, " in mind no absolute 
 or free willj but the mind is determined to this or 
 that volition by a cause which has itself been deter- 
 mined by another cause, this again by another and 
 so on in injinitum,^^ 
 
 That the world reflects God's choice, that it might 
 to a perfect understanding reveal God's purpose, 
 that in it the human being is free in body or mindj 
 these are aspects of irrationality which Spinoza is 
 eager to remove from the fair creation of reason. 
 They represent to him last vestiges of vulgar 
 thought of which the master had after all been un- 
 able to rid himself. Spinoza is at his best in expos- 
 ing the psychology of the multitude with its quaint 
 illusions respecting God and man. In the famous 
 appendix to the first book of the Ethics he summons 
 these prejudices as he calls them before the bar of 
 reason: "They all," he lays it down, "depend on 
 just this onej that men commonly suppose all things 
 in nature to act as they themselves do with a view to 
 some end, nay, even assume that God himself di- 
 rects all things to some definite end, saying that God 
 has made all things for man, and man that he might 
 worship God. I shall therefore consider this preju- 
 
 44 
 
BENEDICT DE SPINOZA 
 
 dice. I shall inquire in the first place why most 
 persons assent to it and all are by nature so prone 
 to embrace it. In the second place I shall show that 
 it is false 5 and lastly I shall show how there have 
 sprung from it prejudices respecting good and evil, 
 merit and sin, praise and blame, beauty and ugliness, 
 and other things of the sort. . . . 
 
 " It will here suffice to assume certain facts all 
 must admit, namely, that all men are born ignorant 
 of the causes of things, and that all men have, and 
 are conscious of having, an impulse to seek their own 
 advantage. From this it follows first that men think 
 themselves free for the reason that they are con- 
 scious of their volitions and desires, and, being ig- 
 norant of the causes by which they are led to will 
 and desire, they do not so much as dream of these. 
 It follows second that men do everything with some 
 purpose in view; that is, with a view to the advantage 
 they seek. Hence it is they always desire to know 
 the motives of action, and when they have learned 
 these, are satisfied." 
 
 Against this background Spinoza sketches in with 
 a few quick, vigorous strokes what we may call his 
 psychology of popular religion. 
 
 " Since men find in themselves," he writes, " and 
 external to themselves, many things which are of no 
 small assistance in obtaining what is to their advan- 
 
 45 
 
BENEDICT DE SPINOZA 
 
 tage, as for example, the eyes for seeing, the teeth 
 for chewing, plants and animals for food, the sun 
 for giving light, and so on, this has led them to re- 
 gard all things in nature as means to their advantage. 
 And knowing these means to have been discovered, 
 not provided by themselves, they have made this a 
 reason for believing that there is some one else who 
 has provided them for their use. But as they had 
 never had any information concerning the character 
 of this being, they had to judge it from their own. 
 Hence, they maintained that the gods direct all 
 things with a view to man's advantage, to lay men 
 under obligation to themselves, and to be held in 
 the highest honor; whence it has come to pass that 
 each one has thought out for himself, according to 
 his disposition, a different way of worshipping God, 
 that God might love him above others, and direct 
 all nature to the service of his . . . desire. But 
 while they sought to show that nature does nothing 
 uselessly (in other words nothing that is not to man's 
 advantage) they seem to have shown only that na- 
 ture and gods and men are all equally mad." 
 
 And Spinoza seizes the opportunity to pay tribute 
 to a respectable, well-worn theology: 
 
 " Just see how far the thing has been carried! 
 Among all useful things in nature they could not 
 help finding a few harmful things, as tempests, 
 
 46 
 
BENEDICT DE SPINOZA 
 
 earthquakes, diseases, etc. They maintained that 
 these occurred because the gods were angry on ac- 
 count of injuries done them by men or on account of 
 faults committed in their worship. And although 
 experience daily contradicted this and showed by an 
 infinity of instances that good and evil fall to the lot 
 of the pious and of the impious indifferently, that 
 did not make them abandon their inveterate preju- 
 dice. They found it easier to class these facts with 
 other unknown things whose use they could not 
 name and thus to retain their present and innate con- 
 dition of ignorance, than to destroy the whole fabric 
 of their reasoning and think out a new one. Hence 
 they assumed that the judgment of the gods very far 
 surpasses man's power of comprehension." This 
 in itself, Spinoza concludes, would have been suffi- 
 cient to hide the truth forever from mankind had not 
 science, which looks into the why and not the where- 
 fore of things, shown men a different standard of 
 truth. 
 
 The second paragraph in which he fulfils his 
 promise to show the folly of the popular belief in a 
 providence is pervaded by a dry humor: 
 
 " I must not overlook the fact that the adherents 
 of this doctrine who have chosen to display their in- 
 genuity in assigning final causes to things, have em- 
 ployed in support of their doctrine a new form of 
 
 47 
 
BENEDICT DE SPINOZA 
 
 argument, namely, a reductio, not ad absurdum, 
 but ad ignorantiamj which shows that there was no 
 other way to set about proving this doctrine. If, for 
 example, a stone has fallen from a roof upon some- 
 one's head and has killed him, they will prove as 
 follows: If it did not fall in accordance with God's 
 will for this purpose, how could there have been a 
 chance concurrence of so many circumstances? . . . 
 Perhaps you will answer, It happened because the 
 wind blew and the man had an errand there. But 
 they will insist, Why did the wind blow at that 
 time? and why had that man an errand that way at 
 just that time? If you answer again. The wind rose 
 at that time because on the day before, while the 
 weather was still calm, the sea began to be rough and 
 the man had an invitation from a friend, they will 
 again insist, since one may ask no end of questions, 
 But why was the sea rough? and why was the man 
 invited at that time? And so they will keep on 
 asking the causes of causes until you take refuge in 
 the will of God, that asylum of ignorance. ... 
 Hence it happens that he who seeks for the true 
 causes of miracles and endeavors like a scholar to 
 comprehend things in nature, and not like a fool 
 to wonder at them, is everywhere regarded and pro- 
 claimed an heretic and an impious man by those 
 whom the multitude reverence as interpreters of 
 
 48 
 
BENEDICT DE SPINOZA 
 
 nature and the gods. But this I leave and pass on to 
 the third point I promised to treat here." 
 
 The treatment of this third point, our perverted 
 notions of good and evil, beauty and ugliness, etc., 
 may readily be imagined. " Since men as we have 
 just said believe that everything was made for their 
 sake, they call the nature of a thing good or bad, 
 sound or corrupt, according as it affects them?^ And 
 from this springs the world-old froblem of evil 
 as it is called. " Many are accustomed to reason 
 as follows: If everything has followed from the 
 necessity of God's most perfect nature, whence so 
 many imperfections in nature, the stinking rottenness 
 of things, their disgusting ugliness, confusion, evil, 
 sin and so forth? " But those who ask thus are 
 merely confused, for " the perfection of things is 
 to be determined solely from their nature and power, 
 nor are things more or less perfect because they 
 please or displease men's senses, are helpful or 
 harmful to man's nature." 
 
 Were we to lay aside our Spinoza at this point, 
 we should be inclined to agree with the judgment of 
 most of his contemporaries and of his successors for 
 more than a century, that although the name of God 
 is constantly on his lips his thought makes the name 
 an empty one, that he is at bottom an atheist. Fur- 
 
 49 
 
BENEDICT DE SPINOZA 
 
 thermore we should fail to see how he could have 
 called his great work an " ethics," inasmuch as it is 
 hardly to be understood how in a world where every 
 act of the body is necessitated by eternal laws of 
 physics, every thought of the mind by equally rigid 
 laws of psychology, there could be such a thing as 
 a good or bad act, a good or bad thought. Where 
 there is no freedom, how can there be right and 
 wrong, worth and unworthiness? 
 
 And yet we shall find that into this hard inhos- 
 pitable world-picture, Spinoza has set a theory of 
 life that not only recognizes and defines the dif- 
 ference between the good and the bad, but culminates 
 in a phrase whose religious feeling is unmistakable: 
 Virtue is knowledge j the only knowledge is to 
 know Godj to know God is to love him. If one 
 grasp this part of his philosophy, one will under- 
 stand how it came about that him whom the eight- 
 eenth century called atheist, the nineteenth remem- 
 bered as a gottrunkener Mensch — a God-intox- 
 icated man. 
 
 It would be too much to attempt to follow the 
 technical expression that Spinoza gives to his 
 thought. Every word is heavy with the burden of 
 long centuries of scholasticism. But I think it is 
 not impossible to put oneself in possession of one 
 
 SO 
 
BENEDICT DE SPINOZA 
 
 principal idea on which the rest follows, not without 
 jolt, yet with a fair degree of ease. 
 
 Let us then put the problem clearly before us. 
 Suppose Nature, including the incident of human 
 life, were one great machine without purpose in the 
 whole, without freedom in the detail, how would it 
 be possible to regard any part of nature, a given man 
 for example, as either good or bad? If this man 
 lives as he must, what use, nay what meaning in 
 advising him how he ought to live? 
 
 Spinoza's answer involves this fundamental point. 
 There are some machines that exist for a purpose. 
 We may, if we choose, regard it as the nature of such 
 a machine to accomplish this purpose. In proportion 
 as it accomplishes it we call it good 5 in proportion 
 as it fails we call it bad. Thus a clock is mechanical 
 enough, a matter of cogwheels and springs, but 
 that is not the nature of a clock, for we can recog- 
 nize such an implement without knowing anything 
 about these same cogwheels and springs, if only 
 we know that the thing keeps time. As it keeps 
 accurate time we call it a good clock, and as it loses 
 or gains we call it a bad one. It is true that we 
 do not exactly blame the clock if it goes wrongs 
 we rather blame the clock-maker. But there is no 
 reason why we should cease to blame the clock-maker, 
 were we to convince ourselves that he too was a 
 
 SI 
 
BENEDICT DE SPINOZA 
 
 mechanism, and owed his lack of skill to the physical 
 constitution of hands and brain. In a word, a mech- 
 anism whose nature is to perform a certain function 
 may nevertheless be a good or a bad mechanism for 
 the purpose, and is praiseworthy or blameworthy in 
 so far as it performs its function well or ill. 
 
 It is only then a mechanism that reveals in its be- 
 havior the pursuit of a purpose that may be regarded 
 as good or bad. So too it is only such a mechanism 
 that may be regarded as more or less free, more or 
 less bound. This notion of freedom and bondage that 
 Spinoza here introduces, turns on a distinction which 
 all of us make without realizing the difficulty of 
 defining what we mean by it. It is the distinction 
 between a being and its environment. With respect 
 to each thing Spinoza divides nature into two parts: 
 one part he calls the inner nature of the things the 
 other, nature external to it. Now in one use of the 
 term " nature " this distinction seems to be an im- 
 possible one 5 for in so far as I regard a man^s body 
 as composed of atoms obeying the laws of mechanics, 
 everything that takes place among these atoms is the 
 resultant of the relation of these atoms to all others 
 in the universe. " It is impossible," Spinoza him- 
 self sees it — " it is impossible for a man not to be 
 a part of nature and not to follow its general order." 
 
 But suppose in reference to a given kind of body 
 
 52 
 
BENEDICT DE SPINOZA 
 
 we neglect all those diflFerences in behavior that 
 make neither for nor against the accomplishment of 
 a purpose we have ascribed to it. Will not the grain 
 of corn spring up in this field or in that? Will not 
 the human being pass through the cycle of life in 
 this age and country, or in that? And in so far as 
 he carries out the purposes of his being in various 
 surroundings, whatever difference of detail in his 
 way of doing it, may we not say that man has a 
 nature of his own independent of his environment? 
 Finally is not this just what we mean by being free: 
 the ability to carry out one's end independently of 
 the circumstances in which one is placed? On the 
 other hand is not an inability to win out under all 
 circumstances just what we mean by bondage? 
 
 There is then no reason why we should not recog- 
 nize freedom and bondage, good and evil, in certain 
 farts of a world that atom by atom is mechanical 
 and purposeless in its constitution. 
 
 Having presented this central idea, we may now 
 follow with greater ease Spinoza's account of the 
 degree of freedom of which a man is capable, of the 
 use of this freedom which we should call good, and 
 finally of the rewards of a " good life." 
 
 Here we seem to have asked three questions be- 
 cause we have followed the general ideas on the sub- 
 
 53 
 
BENEDICT DE SPINOZA 
 
 ject. To these questions, however, Spinoza would 
 return a single answer. To be good, to be free, to 
 be blessed mean one and the same thing. It is a 
 divine thought, if only it can be made to appear. 
 
 First then let us note that we habitually distin- 
 guish the forms of life as higher and lower 5 the 
 grain of corn is lower than the bee, the bee is lower 
 than the man. If we ask ourselves what we mean 
 by this distinction, we shall find I think that we refer 
 to the difference of the degree to which these forms 
 are capable of carrying out a given purpose what- 
 ever the environment. The biologist would say they 
 differ in adaptability. Take merely the common 
 end of self-preservation: the grain of corn is lost if 
 it fall on rocky ground or among the thorns. It can 
 do nothing to save itself. To the bee these circum- 
 stances are indifferent, yet it in turn would succumb 
 to a blight of the flowers. To the man, this would 
 be but a small matter and we enjoy losing ourselves 
 in admiration of the ingenuity with which he man- 
 ages to subsist under the most unusual and threat- 
 ening conditions. In a word, the higher the form 
 of life, the greater the freedom from environment 5 
 the lower, the greater the bondage to circumstance. 
 
 What now in the nature of a thing determines 
 its degree of freedom? Spinoza studies the question 
 only within the domain of human life. Within this 
 
 54 
 
BENEDICT DE SPINOZA 
 
 domain his answer is striking: Freedom comes with 
 knowledge^ ignorance is bondage. 
 
 But there is more than one sense in which this say- 
 ing may be taken. We have for example the Ba- 
 conian thought, "knowledge is power." That is, 
 given any end to be striven for, other things being 
 equal the one who brings science to bear is the more 
 likely to conquer circumstances, to triumph, to be 
 free. This sense of the power of knowledge is not 
 lacking in Spinoza. 
 
 But the freedom that comes with knowledge may 
 be of a higher kind than the mere bettering of our 
 chances of success. After all, human skill is ex- 
 tremely limited j defeat is every man's portion, and 
 one of the most important questions in life is how to 
 bear failure. 
 
 If knowledge is our best arm to ward off defeat, 
 so is it our best solace when defeat, the inevitable, 
 comes. For do we but understand that the fate that 
 has come upon us was not to be escaped but was im- 
 posed by the eternal laws of nature, repining be- 
 comes impossible. Pain is a fact, we cannot escape 
 it altogether, we cannot deny it when it has seized us. 
 We can though prevent the sourness and bitterness 
 that the ignorant fall prey to when they suffer. 
 For pain is one thing, hate another. Pain is not 
 to be escaped j hate may be. And the way to kill 
 
 55 
 
BENEDICT DE SPINOZA 
 
 hate in our hearts is to connect the individual fact 
 that is painful with the whole order of nature which 
 makes this as every other fact necessary. Now the 
 order of nature as we have seen flows from God as 
 the theorems of geometry flow from its axioms. To 
 understand the necessity of any fact is to recognize 
 God as its cause. When we have done this the bit- 
 terness of defeat is gone. No man, says Spinoza, can 
 hate God. 
 
 I have mentioned two senses in which knowledge 
 meant freedom: (i) the sense in which it reduces 
 the chances of failure and pain to a minimum j (2) 
 the sense in which it frees us from the bondage of 
 passion and bitterness, when the unavoidable re- 
 mainder of pain comes upon us. There is still one 
 deepest sense in which knowledge is freedom. So 
 far, the excellence of knowledge has been made to 
 depend upon its fitness as a means — either to the 
 end of obtaining a maximum of success, or to the 
 end of bearing the still inevitable minimum of de- 
 feat. We have now to consider knowledge as an 
 end in itself. 
 
 Since, as we have seen, the pain of life is the sense 
 of defeat, of limitation j its pleasure the sense of 
 triumph, of freedom, we should expect to find Spi- 
 noza urging as the blessed way of life that one, if 
 any such there be, which could meet no defeat j that 
 
 56 
 
BENEDICT DE SPINOZA 
 
 one whose success did not hang upon circum- 
 stances in which a man's life happened to be castj 
 that life, in a word, that was at each moment abso- 
 lute freedom. 
 
 You will doubtless have anticipated that these 
 blessings are claimed by our philosopher for that 
 way of life which is a single hearted pursuit of 
 knowledge. " Wherefore," he has written, " the 
 ultimate aim of the man who is controlled by reason, 
 that is, the highest desire with which he strives to re- 
 strain all others, is that which impels him adequately 
 to know himself and all other things that can fall 
 within the scope of his understanding." 
 
 And again he has said : " There is nothing in na- 
 ture that is opposed to the understandings nothing 
 that can destroy it." (The word " understanding " 
 replaces the original expression " intellectual love." 
 We shall see presently that for Spinoza to under- 
 stand is to love God.) 
 
 It is to be regretted that Spinoza did not deal as 
 minutely with the question: Are we free to obtain 
 knowledge, as he did with the thesis: Knowledge 
 when obtained is freedom. For one feels that what- 
 ever the blessedness of knowledge, if understanding 
 is denied us we are not blessed. And has not Spi- 
 noza himself said that the path to knowledge is 
 a difficult one? And he adds " surely it must be 
 
 57 
 
BENEDICT DE SPINOZA 
 
 difEcult, since it is so rarely found. For if salvation 
 were easily attained and could be found without 
 great labor, how could it be neglected by nearly 
 every one? " 
 
 Had Spinoza maintained that not only knowledge 
 but the pursuit of knowledge was blessed, then in- 
 deed salvation must lie at every man's door. For 
 is not life itself one long education? And if it bring 
 its share of disillusionment, may we not repeat the 
 words of a distinguished German scientist of our own 
 day, "All disillusionment is enlightenment"? And 
 this I think is the burden of Spinoza's teaching: " Let 
 the pain of life teach you to understand and you will 
 not hate life, but in the joy of understanding, 
 love it.'' 
 
 You will learn to love life! But Spinoza has 
 a loftier word for it: You will learn to love God. 
 A clearing up of this expression may well end our 
 account of the religion of Spinoza. You must recall 
 our saying that for Spinoza and his fellow rational- 
 ists, all truths were deducible from the single one 
 " God is," as all theorems of geometry are proved 
 from its axioms. If the truths respecting triangles 
 follow from the nature of a triangle and are not 
 merely the result of physical measurement, so too, 
 the truths about the world follow from the nature 
 
 58 
 
BENEDICT DE SPINOZA 
 
 of God and are not merely brute facts that we have 
 to accept because we are continually bumping against 
 them. To understand a particular experience is to 
 recognize God as its cause. But we have seen that 
 such understanding is the greatest happiness that 
 can come to man, for it is his assurance of power, of 
 freedom from pain. Now Spinoza defines love as 
 " pleasure accompanied with the idea of an external 
 cause." If understanding is pleasure, and if it is 
 at the same time recognition of God as a cause, it ful- 
 fils the condition of being love, and of course, love 
 of God. It is this love of God that is at once knowl- 
 edge, freedom, virtue and blessedness. " For bless- 
 edness," our philosopher has written, " blessedness 
 is not the reward of virute, but virtue itself 5 nor do 
 we rejoice in it because we restrain our desires, but 
 on the contrary because we rejoice in it we are able 
 to restrain our desires." 
 
 " I know," he writes, " that the belief of the mul- 
 titude is different. Most men seem to think that 
 they are free just in so far as they are permitted to 
 gratify desire, and that they give up their independ- 
 ence just in so far as they are obliged to live accord- 
 ing to the precept of the divine law. 
 
 " Piety, then, and religion and all things without 
 restriction that are referred to as greatness of soul, 
 they regard as burdens 5 and they hope after death 
 
 59 
 
BENEDICT DE SPINOZA 
 
 to receive the reward of their bondage, that is, of 
 piety and religion. And not by this hope alone, but 
 also and chiefly by fear — the fear of being punished 
 after death with dire torments — are they induced 
 to live according to the precept of the divine law 
 so far as their poverty and feebleness of soul permit. 
 If men had not this hope and fear, but if on the 
 contrary they thought that minds perished with the 
 body, and that for the wretched, worn out with the 
 burden of piety, there was no continuance of exist- 
 ence, they would return to their inclinations, and 
 decide to regulate everything according to their lusts 
 and to be governed by chance rather than by them- 
 selves. This seems to me no less absurd than it 
 would if someone because he does not believe he 
 can nourish his body with good food to eternity 
 should choose to stuff himself with what is poisonous 
 and deadly; or because he sees that his mind is not 
 eternal or immortal should choose on that account 
 to be mad and to live without reason." 
 
 And Spinoza closes his doctrine of life with a 
 calm hymn to science. "I have completed all that 
 I intended to show regarding the power of the mind 
 over the emotions, and the freedom of the mind. 
 From what I have said it is evident how much 
 stronger and better the wise man is than the igno- 
 rant man, who is held by mere desire. For the igno- 
 
 60 
 
BENEDICT DE SPINOZA 
 
 rant man, besides being agitated in many ways by 
 external causes and never attaining to true satisfac- 
 tion of the soul, lives as it were without consciousness 
 of himself, of God, and of things, and just as soon 
 as he ceases to be acted upon, ceases to be. While 
 on the contrary the wise man is little disturbed in 
 mind, but conscious by a certain eternal necessity of 
 himself, of God, and of things, he never ceases to be, 
 but is always possessed of true satisfaction of soul. 
 If indeed, the path that I have shown to lead to 
 this appear difficult, yet it may be found, and all 
 excellent things are as difficult as they are rare." 
 
 6i 
 
Ill 
 
 A DISCIPLE OF SPINOZA 
 
 An Illustration 
 
A DISCIPLE OF SPINOZA 
 
 I HAVE somewhere found it recorded that as 
 Johann Gottlieb Fichte progressed with his first 
 reading of Kant's " Critique of Pure Reason," he 
 was moved to tears. To those who have labored 
 through the tortured pages of the great German 
 thinker this would be no matter for surprise, were it 
 not for the quality of the tears: — not those of vexa- 
 tion and baffled understanding, indeed, but of enthu- 
 siasm and sheer gratitude. For Fichte had fallen 
 into the melancholy persusasion of Spinoza. At 
 least, certain views of this austere thinker of the 
 seventeenth century appeared to Fichte as no less 
 gloomy in their implication than irresistible in the 
 logic which led to them. Irresistible were the 
 reasons which had driven Spinoza to look upon na- 
 ture as governed by inexorable Fate. In the world 
 as a whole there was no purpose, in its parts there 
 was no freedom. Gloomy, then, was the implication 
 few but Spinoza himself could escape, that man in 
 such a machine had lost all the familiar marks of a 
 moral being. It was from the heavy chains of such 
 bondage that Kant seemed to free the poor Spinozist 
 by holding out to him the hope of a deeper-lying 
 
 65 
 
A DISCIPLE OF SPINOZA 
 
 freedom, while not denying his apparent subjection 
 to the universal and necessary laws of physical na- 
 ture. It was by this promise of freedom that Fichte 
 was moved to the enthusiasm, the gratitude, the tears 
 of which I have spoken. 
 
 If I have mentioned these matters, it is not because 
 our present reflections are to dwell upon the philos- 
 ophy of Fichte, nor yet upon the historic contrast 
 between Spinoza and Kant. It is rather because the 
 seriousness with which Fichte faced the issue between 
 these two thinkers is shared by the men of all times 
 and of all countries who have given themselves to 
 the pleasures and to the burdens of reflection. The 
 issue was not first raised by the seventeenth century, 
 and was not laid with the eighteenth. That it re- 
 mains one of the most interesting to which we of the 
 twentieth century can turn our attention is just the 
 point which I wish to bring out in the form of an ex- 
 ample — an example taken, not indeed from the 
 technical philosophy of our day, but from a writer 
 holding a distinguished place among its novelists. 
 Those of you who have enjoyed the more mundane 
 writings of M. Paul Bourget, — his " Cosmopolis," 
 his " Coeur de Femme," his " Complications Sen- 
 timentales," — are perhaps not prepared to meet in 
 him the philosopher and moralist that shows through 
 his less widely known, but sometimes more admired 
 
 66 
 
A DISCIPLE OF SPINOZA 
 
 work, " Le Disciple." You will allow me, then, to 
 present so much as is indispensable of the story o£ 
 Bourget's " Disciple." 
 
 Let me begin by giving some idea of the way in 
 which the plot of the tale may have worked itself 
 out in the author's mind. If a mass of rock were to 
 fall from a cliff, and at its foot to crush before your 
 eyes a human being — and not a mere vague hu- 
 manity, but, let us say, a young girl just entering 
 upon the promise of life — you would, of course, 
 feel the full horror of the catastrophe. More than 
 that, you would not be a descendant of the myth- 
 makers, as we all of us are, were you not to cast about 
 for some soul in the order of things on whom to 
 blame the calamity as though it were a crime. Such 
 shadowy beings from out of the past as the Fates, 
 the " purblind doomsters," are creatures of this hu- 
 man instinct to transform physical nature into a 
 moral being. But it is no longer easy to take these 
 inventions of our fancy as seriously as did our fore- 
 fathers. Galileo and Newton have come between us 
 and the myth-makers. They have enabled us, and at 
 the same time have constrained us, to envisage the 
 event I have just depicted as essentially a conflict 
 between gravitational and elastic forces, not one be- 
 tween the human soul and the soul of Fate. The 
 
 67 
 
A DISCIPLE OF SPINOZA 
 
 thing moves us more, no doubt, than it would had 
 the heavy mass rolled quietly on to the bottom of 
 the valley, because the young girl as a possible ob- 
 ject of sympathy and love is nearer to ourselves than 
 is a mere topographical contour j but our emotions, 
 be they what they may, are not of themselves enough 
 to transform a physical fact into a moral event, a 
 catastrophe into a crime. 
 
 Robert Greslou, the Disciple of our story, is not 
 indeed made to kill such a young girl, but in a 
 singularly detestable fashion to render it inevitable 
 that she should kill herself. The author has taken 
 care that we should have no feeling but loathing for 
 this creature of his brain. We cannot even extend 
 to him that pity and half -forgiveness that the in- 
 stinctive man commonly feels for the aberrations of 
 passion. To Robert the whole episode was a care- 
 fully planned piece of psychological research, — a 
 vivisection of the emotional life. The author, in his 
 anxiety that we should not be tempted to excuse, but 
 should confine ourselves to understanding, has cre- 
 ated a monster. " Non, monsieur," says Andre de 
 Jussat, the brother of Charlotte, to Robert who has 
 offered him all the satisfaction left in his power, 
 " Non, monsieur, people do not fight men like you, 
 they execute them." 
 
 Now, Bourget's interest in the situation thus cre- 
 
 68 
 
A DISCIPLE OF SPINOZA 
 
 ated I conceive to be this : May we not gain sufficient 
 insight into the causes of this young man's conduct 
 to make it appear as inevitable as the fall of the rock 
 from the cliflF? And if we do this, must we not 
 view the catastrophe in which a human being happens 
 to play a part as no less void of moral aspects 
 than that in which a falling mass is concerned? 
 There we could not blame the stone j here, if the 
 case is made out, we should not blame the man. In 
 neither situation is it meaningful to blame the facts 
 and laws of nature. 
 
 It is for the right so to regard his own conduct that 
 the Disciple pleads with his old master, Adrien Sixte. 
 At the end of his autobiography he makes a tragic 
 appeal to the man whose writings had formed his 
 mind. " I felt assured," he writes, " that I should 
 be able to tell you my story as you develop your 
 problems of psychology in the books I have so con- 
 stantly read, and having finished, I find nothing to 
 offer you but the despairing cry, De profundis! 
 Write to me, cher maitre, guide me. Strengthen me 
 in the doctrine which was, which still is, my own, — 
 in that conviction of universal necessity which holds 
 that even our most detestable, our most damning 
 acts, even this cold enterprise of seduction, even my 
 weakness when it came to keeping my side of the 
 compact of death, are the outcome of laws that gov- 
 
 69 
 
A DISCIPLE OF SPINOZA 
 
 ern this immense universe. Tell me that I am not a 
 monster, that there is no such thing as a monster, 
 that you will still be there when I come out of this 
 supreme crisis to welcome me as your disciple, as 
 your friend." 
 
 What, then, is the philosophy of this Adrien Sixte 
 that, having brought a human being to such a pass, 
 it could still be appealed to to bring him through? 
 
 Adrien Sixte had made two contributions to phil- 
 osophy. The first was a negative analysis of what 
 Herbert Spencer calls the Unknowable. "Many 
 excellent minds," the author assures us, "catch a 
 glimpse of the probable reconciliation of science and 
 religion on this ground of the Unknowable. For 
 M. Sixte it is a last illusion which he is hot to destroy 
 with an energy of argument that has not been 
 equalled since Kant." 
 
 " M. Sixte's second title to honor as a psychologist 
 consists in a quite new and ingenious development of 
 the animal origin of human sensibility. . . . He 
 undertook for the genesis of types of thought the 
 work that Darwin essayed for the forms of life. 
 Applying the laws of evolution to all the facts that 
 make up the human heart, he thought to show that 
 our most exquisite sensibilities, our most delicate 
 moral discriminations, as well as our most shameful 
 
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A DISCIPLE OF SPINOZA 
 
 degradations, are the final development, the ultimate 
 metamorphosis of very simple instincts, themselves 
 transformations of the properties of the primitive 
 cell: in such wise that the moral universe exactly 
 reproduces the physical, and that the former is only 
 the consciousness, now painful, now ecstatic, of the 
 latter." 
 
 We owe to M. Sixte some phrases that translate 
 with extreme energy this conviction that all is neces- 
 sitated in the soul — even the illusion that the soul 
 is free. 
 
 " Every act," he writes, " is but an addition. To 
 say that it is free, is to say that there is in a sum more 
 than there is in the elements added. This is as ab- 
 surd in psychology as in arithmetic." 
 
 And elsewhere he put it thus: " If we knew truly 
 the relative position of all the phenomena which con- 
 stitute the actual universe, we could at this moment 
 with a certainty equal to that of the astronomers, tell 
 the day, the hour, the minute at which, say, England 
 will evacuate India, when Europe will have burned 
 its last lump of coal, when such a criminal, still to 
 be born, will assassinate his father, when such a 
 poem, yet to be conceived, will be composed. The 
 future is contained in the present as all the properties 
 of a triangle are contained in its definition." 
 
 The provenance of this type of thought is ob- 
 
 71 
 
A DISCIPLE OF SPINOZA 
 
 vious enough to the experienced reader. Our author 
 has in an ingenious way translated his Spinoza into 
 the language of contemporary science. Let us 
 merely catch up a note or two that will render our 
 Spinozist's attitude toward common morality, and 
 his understanding of the master's doctrine of emanci- 
 pation through science. 
 
 In the first sense we find that Adrien Sixte has 
 somewhere written, "All conscious beings must be 
 looked upon by the scientist as experiments set up by 
 nature. Among these experiments some are useful 
 to society, and one hears of virtue j others are de- 
 structive, and one hears of vice and of crime." And 
 he adds, a little by way of flourish, " These last are 
 nevertheless the most significant, and we should lack 
 an essential datum for the science of mind if Nero, 
 say, or such and such a tyrant of the fifteenth cen- 
 tury had not existed." Or again he has said, "To 
 consider one's destiny as a corollary of this living 
 geometry which is nature, and therefore as an in- 
 evitable consequence of the eternal axiom whose in- 
 definite development is prolonged through all time 
 and all space, this is the unique way to emancipation." 
 
 To show that human conduct is so necessitated as 
 to be without moral aspects: " this is the unique way 
 to emancipation." It was just for the master's aid 
 
 72 
 
A DISCIPLE OF SPINOZA 
 
 over the last rough steps of the path to this emanci- 
 pation that we left our Disciple crying, "De pro- 
 fundis." Can the aid be given? Can it not? This 
 is the singularly philosophical catastrophe of this 
 singularly reflective novel. 
 
 For us the issue depends upon an analysis of what 
 our philosopher would regard as determinants of 
 human conduct. That it is not meaningless to seek 
 explanations of human acts all admit, for all alike 
 are engaged in the search for them, and much that 
 is of importance to daily life depends upon one's 
 ability correctly to explain and so to predict the con- 
 duct of one's fellows. The only question is whether 
 the laws by which we explain and predict could con- 
 ceivably be increased in precision until they com- 
 pletely determined conduct. To judge this we must 
 consider of what nature these laws are, i.^., in the 
 present context, with what illustrations of such laws 
 our author furnishes us. 
 
 We are familiar with the idea that the explanation 
 of a fact consists in pointing out its likeness to others. 
 We are not surprised, then, to find our young an- 
 alyst, following the guide of a master who, we have 
 heard, regarded "our most exquisite sensibilities" 
 as " the development of very simple instincts," look- 
 ing upon his relations with a singularly pure young 
 woman as not without likeness to the battle of life 
 
 73 
 
A DISCIPLE OF SPINOZA 
 
 throughout the animal kingdom. " It is the law of 
 the world," he reasons, " that all existence is a con- 
 quest carried on and maintained by the stronger at 
 the expense of the weaker. This is as true of the 
 moral universe as of the physical. There are souls 
 of prey as there are wolves, tiger-cats, and hawks," 
 and he kept repeating to himself, " I am a soul of 
 prey, a soul of prey," with a furious access of what 
 the mystics call the p-'tde of life. 
 
 But if the animal instincts are the most widely 
 related of those that display themselves in human 
 conduct, more special instincts must be appealed to 
 to account for what is special in the act. Well, in its 
 proper place we find that the family of Robert Gres- 
 lou had its roots in war-trodden Lorraine. Of no 
 very remote peasant origin, son of a conquered race, 
 he catches himself at certain moments reacting with 
 instinctive hate toward an individual whom he 
 hardly knows and who has done him no personal in- 
 jury, yet whose every aspect shows him to have 
 sprung from the conquerors, in whose most courteous 
 gesture there lurks a polished insolence of aristocracy. 
 
 When, then, a human pity for his prospective 
 victim comes upon this " soul of prey," it is such a 
 hate that neutralizes it. " Why," he cries, " in so 
 many of my imaginings does Charlotte appear by the 
 side of her brother Andre? What secret fibre of 
 
 74 
 
A DISCIPLE OF SPINOZA 
 
 hatred had this man by his mere existence touched in 
 my heart, that simply to imagine him with his sister 
 dried up the fountain of my pity and left nothing in 
 me but the will to win? " 
 
 In answer we are expected to recall the moment 
 when Robert Greslou, introduced into the family of 
 the Marquis de Jussat as tutor to the younger son, 
 finds himself for the first time in the presence of the 
 Comte Andre, heir and dominating spirit of the 
 house. " I felt then," our young analyst records, 
 " in its full force, in the depths of that instinct of 
 life into which it is so hard for thought to descend, 
 the revelation of that sense of race which modern 
 science attributes to all nature, and which conse- 
 quently must be found in man. . . . Why should 
 not this hostility be an heredity like the rest? The 
 horse that has never approached a lion trembles with 
 fear when his stall is made up with straw on which 
 such a beast of prey has lain. Then fear is inherited, 
 and is not fear a form of hate? Why should not 
 hate be inherited too? And in a thousand cases envy 
 is probably nothing but that — was nothing more 
 than that in my case, certainly, — the echo in us of 
 hatreds long ago acquired by those whose sons we 
 are, and which continue in us the battle of hearts be- 
 gun hundreds of years ago." 
 
 No less carefully does our author work out an- 
 
 75 
 
A DISCIPLE OF SPINOZA 
 
 other group of influences: those that fall within the 
 experience of the individual. Influences of family, 
 of school, of books read, of friends, of adventures 
 of sex, of religious education, all culminating in the 
 forming of a character whose foundations have al- 
 ready been laid in its heredities, in this case a type 
 for which the French have invented the expressive 
 term, a cerebral. The rest one can readily imagine, 
 the delicate suggestions of daily life, the influences, 
 slight in themselves, that play upon the attuned char- 
 acter and to which it resounds with acts of this kind 
 or that, an instrument touched by the fingers of 
 Fate. 
 
 Such, then, is our author's understanding of what 
 it means so to explain a human act that it shall appear 
 to follow inevitably from recognized laws of nature. 
 If it do so follow, we ask again: Can it in the end 
 be regarded as either good or bad? 
 
 It is not to our author that we may turn for an 
 answer. M. Bourget is an artist, and owes his alle- 
 giance to the interests of the heart, not to the curi- 
 osities of the intellect. For him it is sufficient to have 
 shown that to have lived out a Spinozistic philosophy 
 would in extreme cases lead to very ugly results. 
 He is addressing himself, as he tells us in his pref- 
 ace, to the youth of France, and it may not be with- 
 
 76 
 
A DISCIPLE OF SPINOZA 
 
 out interest to note the place he gives to the type 
 of philosophy we have just been considering among 
 the influences dangerous to the young France of his 
 day. 
 
 "There are two types of young men," he 
 says, " that I see before me at the present moment, 
 which are before you too, as two forms of temptation 
 equally redoubtable and dangerous. The one is cyn- 
 ical and by preference jovial. He has, since his 
 twentieth year, discounted life, and his religion is 
 contained in the single word, to enjoy y — which is 
 translated by this other, to succeed. Whether he 
 go into politics or business, literature or art, sport 
 or industry, whether he be an ofiicer, diplomat, or 
 lawyer, he has only himself for god, for beginning 
 and for end. This young man is a monster, is he 
 not? For it is to be a monster, to have lived but 
 twenty-five years and to have by way of a soul a 
 calculating machine at the service of a pleasure-ma- 
 chine. Yet I fear him less for you than I do a 
 certain other type. This one has all the aristocratic 
 traits of nervous organization, all those of mental- 
 ity. He is an intellectual and refined epicure, as 
 the first was a brutal and scientific epicure. This 
 delicate nihilist, how unpleasant he is to encounter, 
 and how he abounds in the land! At twenty-five 
 years he has made the tour of all ideas. His critical 
 
 77 
 
A DISCIPLE OF SPINOZA 
 
 spirit, precociously awakened, has grasped the last 
 results of the most subtle philosophy of this age. 
 Do not speak to him of impiety or materialism. He 
 knows that the word matter has no very precise sense. 
 He is, on the other hand, too intelligent not to admit 
 that all religions may have been legitimate in their 
 time, only he has never believed and never will be- 
 lieve any one of them any more than he will ever 
 believe in anything in particular, if not in the amus- 
 ing play of his mind which he has transformed into 
 an instrument of elegant perversity. Good and evil, 
 beauty and ugliness, vice and virtue appear to him 
 objects of simple curiosity. The human soul is for 
 him a clever mechanism which it amuses him to take 
 apart by way of experiment. To him nothing is 
 true, nothing is false j nothing is moral, nothing is 
 immoral. He is an egoist, subtle and refined, whose 
 one occupation lies in adorning his Self, in dressing it 
 out with new sensations. The religious life of hu- 
 manity is for him only a pretext for such sensations, 
 as is the intellectual life, as is the life of feeling. 
 His corruption is vastly more profound than that of 
 the barbarian of pleasure, is vastly more complicated, 
 and the pretty name of dilettantism with which he 
 covers it hides its cold ferocity, its appalling hard- 
 ness. Ah, we know him too well, this young man; 
 we have all just missed being such as he is, we whom 
 
 78 
 
A DISCIPLE OF SPINOZA 
 
 the paradoxes of too eloquent masters have too much 
 charmed. We have all been this man for a day, for 
 an hour, and if I have written this book, it is to show 
 you, you who are not yet like him, child of twenty 
 whose soul is yet in process of making, what base 
 things such egoism may hide in its depths." 
 
 For Bourget, then, to have justified this picture 
 of the youthful Spinozist, is enough. But for us, 
 who for the moment have become philosophers, who 
 have given ourselves up to the curiosities of the 
 mind, it is not enough to have convinced ourselves 
 that certain teachings are ugly and unpleasant to 
 contemplate 5 we must know whether they are true 
 or false. While much that is unlovely is also un- 
 true, who but the poet can feel sure in his heart that 
 only the beautiful is true? Well, then, if we were 
 to face the issue that seems to be drawn between that 
 universal necessity which science hopes to establish 
 throughout the domain of nature, and that freedom 
 which ethics regards as indispensable to the existence 
 of moral beings, — if we are to face this issue 
 squarely, on which side should we range ourselves? 
 
 I answer: On both sides. If you say: But this is 
 difBcult to do, I should not be inclined to dispute itj 
 were it otherwise, opinions on this subject would not 
 be so much at variance. Yet it may not be impossible 
 to do. And that the satisfaction of the result has 
 
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A DISCIPLE OF SPINOZA 
 
 been thought to be worth any effort it may cost to 
 reach it, is evidenced by the long struggle which the 
 history of human reflection records, to hold at the 
 same time the vital ideals of science and the no less 
 vital ideals of morality. To consider a way in which 
 I believe this may be done, will occupy us throughout 
 the remainder of the present discussion. 
 
 Let us begin by making clear just what is the ideal 
 which guides the scientist in his expectations respect- 
 ing the world he studies. Perhaps no one accom- 
 plishment of science has been more inspiring than the 
 picture of certain large aspects of nature that Newton 
 succeeded in drawing, — such aspects, namely, as are 
 presented in the behavior of suns, and planets, and 
 moons. All these huge masses are governed by a 
 single law, called the law of gravitation. Now to 
 say that they are governed by this law means no more 
 than this, that if we knew the mass, the position, and 
 the velocity of each of these heavenly bodies at a 
 given moment, we should be able by means of the 
 law to predict their masses, positions, and velocities 
 for all future moments. This result is, to be sure, 
 only an approximation, for we know that gravitation 
 is not the only force which bodies exert on each other. 
 We have never succeeded, e.g., in reducing the attrac- 
 tions and repulsions of electrified bodies to gravita- 
 
 80 
 
 A 
 
A DISCIPLE OF SPINOZA 
 
 tion, nor do we any longer try to do this. But New- 
 ton's degree of success provides us with an ideal to 
 which we seem ever more and more closely to ap- 
 proach. Instead of considering such huge bodies as 
 suns and planets and their satellites, we divide these 
 up into extremely minute parts, which we may call for 
 the moment atoms, . We struggle then to conceive a 
 law as completely determining the behavior of these 
 atoms, as the law of gravitation determines that of 
 planets. So that, if we knew a limited number of 
 characteristics of each of these atoms at a given mo- 
 ment, our law would enable us to predict their future 
 and to reconstruct their past history. As we ap- 
 proach more and more closely to this ideal, less and 
 less in the behavior of these small parts of nature 
 is left to guess-work. In so far as we hope this ideal 
 may be continuously approached, we hope that in its 
 atomic parts nature is entirely devoid of freedom. 
 And if we hope this, we must inevitably hope, too, 
 that what we have called an atom is neither a moral 
 nor an immoral being. This hope is usually called 
 the mechanical idealy and nature in the light of it is 
 viewed as a mechanism. It has guided science to vic- 
 tory after victory, and I venture to think that no 
 result of philosophical experience is more firmly es- 
 tablished than this, that whatever theory we may in 
 the end accept respecting human nature, its freedom, 
 
 8i 
 
 ^^ 
 
 \9 
 
A DISCIPLE OF SPINOZA 
 
 its moral responsibilities, no assumption of that the- 
 ory may stand in contradiction with the mechanical 
 ideal. To have recognized this truth and to have 
 had the courage to maintain it at all costs, was the 
 heroic service rendered by Spinoza at a moment in 
 human history when such service was badly needed. 
 It is also the reason why Spinozism, in spite of its 
 apparently gloomy outlook upon the world, has 
 made such a forcible and lasting appeal to the imag- 
 ination of thinking men. In what follows it is 
 against certain false implications that have been 
 thought to lie in this mechanical ideal, and not against 
 the ideal itself, that our criticism must be directed. 
 
 Now there is one implication that lies so near the 
 surface I doubt not most who have followed so 
 far will already have drawn it. If, namely, the 
 atoms of which we have spoken are bound by strict 
 mechanical law, if it is these same atoms that make 
 up the human body and that are concerned in its 
 every act, must not the conduct of that body be an 
 outcome of this same mechanical necessity? And if 
 this be so, must not the science whose ideal we have 
 described set itself once for all against the hope of 
 finding in human conduct any vestige of freedom, 
 any trace of moral responsibility? You remember 
 with what vigor Adrien Sixte drew this very conclu- 
 sion. " Every act," he said, " is but an addition. 
 
 82 
 
A DISCIPLE OF SPINOZA 
 
 To say that it is free, is to say there is in a sum more 
 than there is in its elements added. This is as ab- 
 surd in psychology as in arithmetic." 
 
 Yet natural as this inference may seem, we should, 
 I think, see that it is unjustified, that the instinct 
 which has led mankind to read moral aspects into 
 nature was possessed of a deeper insight than was 
 our philosopher with his plausible mathematics. If, 
 indeed, we could construct the notion of a man out of 
 that of atoms by a process of addition, we could not 
 escape the conclusion of Adrien Sixte. Then, truly, 
 moral aspects would be as completely lacking to the 
 whole being as they are to the atoms which enter 
 into his composition. That we cannot do this, — 
 that we can, indeed, ojBFer no mechanical definition of 
 life, is just the insight which permits us, nay, prac- 
 tically forces us, to treat man as a free moral agent. 
 
 We can frame no mechanical definition of life! 
 Nor is this the only example offered by experience 
 of a term applied exclusively to mechanisms and 
 yet meaning nothing mechanical. Let me give a 
 homely illustration. There is, I presume every 
 one would admit, no time-piece which is not a 
 machine. And yet we can offer no mechanical 
 definition of a time piece, for the simple reason that 
 the various machines to which this term applies have 
 
 83 
 
A DISCIPLE OF SPINOZA 
 
 no mechanical principle in common. A class which 
 may include such divers mechanisms as a sun dial, 
 an hour glass, a water clock, a pendulum clock, a 
 spring watch, a chronograph, has evidently not been 
 given a single name to mark in the members com- 
 posing it a single mechanical nature* The only 
 thing these members have in common is a cer- 
 tain function or purpose, — that of producing a 
 movement keeping pace with the apparent mo- 
 tion of the sun. Just so with the class of beings 
 we call living. Each of them at each moment 
 of its existence is a complete illustration of mechan- 
 ical law, yet all of them offer such divers illustra- 
 tions of this law that they cannot have been put into 
 a single class because of a common mechanical nature. 
 That which they have in common, by virtue of which 
 they have been grouped under one name, is once 
 more a function or a purpose. For we observe that 
 living things, by whatever mechanical devices, ac- 
 complish for the most part a common result, that of 
 self-preservation. 
 
 In these two examples, the one taken from the in- 
 animate, the other comprising the animate world, 
 we see how well it may come about that a certain 
 character belong to a whole, no vestige of which is 
 to be found in its constituent parts. A single atom 
 cannot, if the mechanical ideal is maintained, be re- 
 
 84 
 
A DISCIPLE OF SPINOZA 
 
 garded as acting purposefully, yet a sufficiently com- 
 plex group of atoms may well enough display pur- 
 pose in its behavior and to that purpose owe its right 
 to the name we give it. In such cases the real ab- 
 surdity we are in danger of committing is not the one 
 that Adrien Sixte scoffs at, but the one he unsus- 
 pectingly falls into. Axioms of addition are excel- 
 lent guides for those whose problem is to add. But 
 not all composition of parts into a whole is so simple 
 as the business of forming a sum. And where we are 
 not adding, the axioms of addition may prove the 
 worst of company. 
 
 Let us proceed to an immediate consequence of 
 this last observation. If no mechanical definition 
 can be offered for a given term, it is impossible that 
 the things to which this term applies should be gov- 
 erned by mechanical law. We may easily convince 
 ourselves, however, that although not subjected to 
 mechanical law, they are frequently, indeed gener- 
 ally, governed by another kind of law that is of the 
 greatest interest to us. Let me recur to our illustra- 
 tion of the time-piece. There is a trite truth about 
 time-pieces, which we may say holds as a rule^ to 
 wit, that cheap time-pieces are poor ones. Yet it 
 would be meaningless to ask for a mechanical ex- 
 planation of this law, for the mechanical imperfec- 
 tion of the cheap sun dial bears no resemblance what- 
 
 85 
 
A DISCIPLE OF SPINOZA 
 
 ever to the mechanical imperfection of the cheap 
 watch. The former may be a poor time-keeper be- 
 cause inexpensively (and so grossly) graduated 5 
 the latter because the escapement is inexpensively 
 (and so crudely) constructed. So it is in the an- 
 imal world. Of its members we may lay down the 
 rule, say, that each must eat if it would live, but the 
 physics and chemistry of nutrition in an oak tree are 
 so different from the physics and chemistry of nutri- 
 tion in a human being, that if anyone were to ask for 
 a mechanical explanation of this rule we could not 
 offer it, or rather we should have to offer a different 
 one for each type of organism we considered. These 
 examples will be sufficient to illustrate the sense of 
 the saying, " Beings whose nature is not capable of 
 mechanical definition cannot be subjected to mechan- 
 ical law." 
 
 But we said further, that the laws to which such 
 beings were subject were of a peculiar nature, and it 
 is particularly important to point out one respect in 
 which these laws differ from the mechanical. Such 
 laws as we find controlling the behavior of organ- 
 isms, for example, are of the kind that may be called 
 laws of furfose. We explain, that is to say, the con- 
 duct of organisms in terms of the end or purpose for 
 the sake of which that conduct has taken place. This 
 holds from the lowest biological functioning to the 
 
 86 
 
A DISCIPLE OF SPINOZA 
 
 highest form of deliberate human behavior. If we 
 consider the explanation which our author offers of 
 the conduct of his unhappy hero, we see that in the 
 end he has been exclusively interested in pointing out 
 the motives to which the young man reacted. To 
 point out motives is simply to recognize the end for 
 the sake of which the act is accomplished. Now, 
 although this type of explanation is in daily use 
 among all men of all times, it was not erected into 
 a scientific system before the reflections of Plato and 
 Aristotle had shown of what extension it was suscep- 
 tible. Aristotle in particular is responsible for hav- 
 ing pushed to the very limit the notion that the 
 greater part of nature's happenings can be explained 
 in terms of the end for the sake of which they occur. 
 The whole drama of nature was to him what that of 
 organic life is to most of us, the struggle of individ- 
 ual beings to accomplish their natural purposes. 
 But, interested as Aristotle was in pushing this con- 
 cept of purpose in nature to the limit, he could not 
 blind himself to the fact that no purpose could be 
 found in nature which was always and invariably ac- 
 complished or attained by the beings whose nature 
 it was to struggle for it. Consequently, he was in the 
 habit of saying that " laws of nature (by which he 
 meant of laws of purpose) were descriptions of 
 what happens always, or for the most part." That is 
 
 87 
 
A DISCIPLE OF SPINOZA 
 
 to say, they pointed out the behavior that was normal, 
 but not free from exception. Nature was full of the 
 accidental, of the abortive j and although later 
 science did its best to exclude this notion of the ac- 
 cidental in nature's happenings, the effort was uni- 
 formly unsuccessful and, I think, wrongly inspired. 
 For it is exactly to the circumstance that laws of pur- 
 pose are statements of average and not of unexcep- 
 tional fact, that they owe their scientific value as 
 labor-saving devices. And what is perhaps of more 
 interest in the present connection, it is to this very 
 lack of rigor in the laws governing animal and hu- 
 man behavior that we owe our right to regard the 
 individual to which they apply as free. 
 
 In this respect the contrast between laws of pur- 
 pose with the situation of the things to which they 
 apply, and the laws of mechanics with the predica- 
 ment of the things they govern, is complete. For 
 example, the most inveterate statistician will hardly 
 venture beyond the point of asserting that the man 
 of alcoholic heredity will for the most part be unable 
 to resist the attraction of drink. Yet sometimes he 
 will be able to, for sometimes he does resist. Can 
 one conceive of the student of mechanics contenting 
 himself with the result that bodies generally fall to 
 earth with an acceleration of thirty-two feet per 
 second? During all the while Mercury's un- 
 
 2>2, 
 
A DISCIPLE OF SPINOZA 
 
 orthodox behavior baffled Newtonian physics, could 
 any astronomer be found suggesting that per- 
 haps this was a case of exceptional gravitation? As 
 with heredity, so with all the other so-called forces 
 our author brings to bear upon the conduct of 
 his hero, giving in the end the illusion of mechan- 
 ically determined action. Heredity, environment, 
 education, serve their purpose well enough as terms 
 that point out an analogy between the ends that at- 
 tract beings of like history, but they yield only an ex- 
 pectation of the normal, not an assurance of the inevi- 
 table. Nor could any increase of statistical data of 
 this kind do more than give us the materials for a 
 closer calculus of probabilities. It is for the reason 
 that all the laws which apply to human conduct are 
 of this statistical nature, that, being permanently 
 unable to predict it, we must regard it as free. And 
 to be free to attain or not to attain a given end, is to 
 be responsible, is to possess the first condition of a 
 moral nature. Nor, in attaining to this insight have 
 we sacrificed aught of our mechanical ideal. Only, 
 who cares that atoms may neither be saved nor 
 damned, if the beings they so fleetingly compose may 
 be both? One might almost say that moral beings 
 pass over the surface of mechanism as waves upon 
 the face of the waters. But they constitute its beauty 
 and its terror. 
 
 89 
 
A DISCIPLE OF SPINOZA 
 
 May we not then sum up our conclusions in some 
 such form as this? — Mechanical laws do completely 
 determine the conduct of everything to which they 
 may be applied, but they cannot be applied to an 
 animate being, since no mechanical definition of such 
 a being is possible. Laws of purpose can be applied 
 to such a being, but they do not completely determine 
 his conduct. It is because the only law which can 
 thus apply to a human being does not necessitate his 
 behavior, that we are obliged to regard that behavior 
 as free and the being himself as responsible. The 
 most that we can do in terms of such laws is to cal- 
 culate the chances for or against the individual's suc- 
 cess, for or against his ultimate worth. 
 
 Here let us stop. Our discussion shows signs of 
 falling into the abstract and mathematical, and one 
 may wonder whether anything practical can come of 
 it. One will recall the unhappy disciple of Adrien 
 Sixte, and will ask onself : What answer, after all, 
 are we return to his cry, " De prof undis ! " Can we 
 offer him any solace in his wretchedness? I think 
 we can, only it is not the kind of solace he asks for, 
 nor can it come from the direction in which he seeks 
 it. I should be inclined to say to him, to Fichte in 
 his Spinozistic mood, to any other over whom the 
 mechanical ideal hangs heavily: This ideal is a safe 
 
 9P 
 
A DISCIPLE OF SPINOZA 
 
 guide in all thinking for which it has a meaning 5 
 no atom in your body nor out of it, but what is de- 
 termined by mechanical necessity j but the sum of 
 these atoms is not youj there is a difference between 
 the whole we call a man, and the sum of the atoms 
 that make up the machine that is to him. These 
 atoms may come and go, the man remains. What 
 constitutes his nature as a living being, an animal, 
 a man, can receive no definition in terms of the 
 atoms now in his body, nor those that may later take 
 their place. You as living, as animal, as man, can be 
 defined only in terms of the ends common to the in- 
 dividuals of these classes. In so far as thus natured, 
 you fall under laws not of a mechanical order. They 
 are laws of average which determine not you, but 
 your chances of accomplishing the ends that define 
 your being. In so far as you accomplish such ends, 
 you are good of your kindj in so far as you fail, you 
 are evil, — and if you fail egregiously enough, you 
 are a monster. The most your self -analysis could 
 have made out by the way of excuse is that the 
 chances were against you. And this indeed you may 
 have made out, for who could maintain that all men 
 have equal chances in this world? But to have had 
 the chances against you, is not to have been deter- 
 mined as a falling rock is determined^ there is no 
 chance for it. 
 
 91 
 
A DISCIPLE OF SPINOZA 
 
 In the most mechanical system, then, there is, so 
 long as classification of its parts in terms of purpose 
 is possible, a distinction between good and bad, with 
 enough freedom to make this distinction meaningful. 
 But such a philosophy may still seem hard. Even 
 to have the chances against one, is not this a gloomy 
 situation? Is there, then, no supreme end to ac- 
 complish which all men's chances are equal, so that 
 at each moment of life the road to perfection is 
 equally open to all, and equally wide for all? We 
 know how many and how beautiful the dreams of 
 such a world-view, recorded in man's long history. 
 To judge their rationality is for a deeper insight than 
 mine. But be they real or be they dreams, there is 
 yet one voice from the past whose sanity comes home 
 to us. It is that of our old philosopher of Koenigs- 
 berg, which keeps repeating at this moment the sen- 
 tence, " There is nothing good but a good will." 
 With this saying of Kant's I should even hope to 
 breathe inspiration into the souls that cry, " De pro- 
 fundis! " My last word to them would be: Trouble 
 yourselves with nothing but to make the best of the 
 chances that are left to you. There is nothing good 
 but a good will. 
 
 I would willingly take it as evidence that the in- 
 stinct of the artist and the reflection of the philoso- 
 
 92 
 
A DISCIPLE OF SPINOZA 
 
 pher are not unsympathetic, that when Bourget's 
 Disciple is at last brought out of his ordeal, it is not 
 to be comforted with the longed-for assurance that 
 all is necessitated in the soul 5 but rather to find for 
 himself the way to redemption by making the best — 
 the tragic best — of the chances that are left him. 
 
 93 
 
IV 
 
 DAVID HUME 
 1711-1776 
 
DAVID HUME 
 
 The characters that have occupied us on two pre- 
 vious occasions, different as they are, have yet this in 
 common j that their most passionate interest was cen- 
 tred in God, and their theory of what man is and 
 ought to be depended upon the likeness in which 
 God in the end appeared to them. 
 
 I have felt that our illustrations of modern 
 thought would be incomplete, were I not to include 
 in the series an example of ^n attejupLlOL work out 
 th e duty and d estjny of man without wai ting for an 
 i nsight into the mystery of Go d. It is the more ad- 
 visable that we examine one such character, that this 
 way of thinking is neither newly invented, nor yet 
 grown out of fashion. 
 
 We recall that Lucretius, the enthusiastic disciple 
 of Epicurus, claimed for his master the glory of 
 haying Jif ted frorn, tbe^world the terror of the gods, 
 of haymg left man free to study his own nature and 
 to work out his own happiness. And I find on my 
 shelves a recent work that bears the title " Morals 
 without the Sanctions of Religion," one of many that 
 might be cited whose purpose is to study the good^of 
 
 97 
 
DAVID HUME 
 
 m an with ou t, making it^dep endent on God. It is, 
 then, as an expression of a common enough idea, 
 but as an uncommonly good expression of this idea, 
 that I have settled upon David Hume for our third 
 illustration of modern thought. 
 
 It has for some time been rather the fashion to 
 find the grounds of a man's scientific beliefs in his 
 personality and in the character of the environment 
 in which he lives. And doubtless thinking, like any 
 other activity, has its psychology, an insight into 
 which is helpful enough, though it is notoriously 
 easy to find that characteristic apres cowp which we 
 should never have been able to predict beforehand. 
 
 When I say, then, that Hume had many human 
 traits reminding us of the Philosophers of the 
 Garden whose science is so sympathetic with his own, 
 it must not be supposed that only such as are of like 
 easy habit of body and companionable temper of 
 mind should take to his principles. But it is interest- 
 ing to note, after having followed the furious career 
 of Bruno, looked in on the sober reclusion of Spi- 
 noza, that a different type of man may utter great 
 thoughts 3 the type that could look back, at fifty- 
 eight years, on a life well filled with profitable in- 
 dustry, and forward to one thus comfortably pic- 
 tured in a letter to a friend: " I have been settled 
 
 98 
 
DAVID HUME 
 
 here [in Edinburgh] for two months, and am here 
 body and soul, without casting the least thought of 
 regret to London, or even Paris. I live still, and 
 must for a twelvemonth, in my old house in James's 
 Court which is very cheerful and even elegant, but 
 too small to display my great talent for cookery, the 
 science to which I intend to addict the remaining 
 years of my life! I have just now, lying on the table 
 before me, a receipt for making soufe a la reiney 
 copied with my own handj for beef and cabbage (a 
 charming dish) and old mutton and old claret no- 
 body excels me. I make also sheep-head broth in 
 a manner that Mr. Keith speaks of it for eight days 
 after J and the Due de Nivernois would bind himself 
 apprentice to my lass to learn it. I have already sent 
 a challenge to David MoncreifF: you will see that in 
 a twelvemonth he will take to writing history, the 
 field I have deserted; for as to the giving of dinners, 
 he can now have no further pretensions. I should 
 have made very bad use of my abode in Paris if I 
 could not get the better of a mere provincial like 
 him. All my friends encourage me in this ambition, 
 as thinking it will redound very much to my honor." 
 These " friends " to whom Hume refers, were at 
 that time, as they had been throughout his life, the 
 best of good company, that is, the kind for whom a 
 good dinner would have been nothing had not good 
 
 99 
 
DAVID HUME 
 
 conversation been its sauce, but for whom the sauce 
 was none the worse for dressing out a good dinner. 
 In such good company, it is not a great matter that 
 Hume should have been free of pleasant sallies 
 after the manner of the letter I have quoted. It 
 throws a higher light on his character when we find 
 him preparing to receive his last, the unbidden guest 
 in the same cheerful humor. " I now reckon upon a 
 speedy dissolution," he writes at the conclusion of 
 his little sketch " My own Life." " I have suflFered 
 very little pain from my disorder 3 and what is more 
 strange, have, notwithstanding the great decline of 
 my person, never suffered a moment's abatement of 
 spirits J insomuch that were I to name the period of 
 my life which I should most choose to pass over 
 again, I might be tempted to point to this latter 
 period. I possess the same ardor as ever in study, 
 and the same gaiety in company. I consider, besides, 
 that a man of sixty-five, by dying, cuts off only a 
 few years of infirmities 3 and though I see many 
 symptoms of my literary reputation's breaking out 
 at last with additional lustre, I knew that I could 
 have but a few years to enjoy it. It is difficult to be 
 more detached from life than I am at present." 
 
 And there follows a characterization of himself 
 that could indeed be hardly more detached were it 
 written by a stranger. " I am," he says, " or rather 
 
 100 
 
DAVID HUME 
 
 was (for that style I must now use in speaking of 
 myself, which emboldens me the more to speak my 
 sentiments) j I was, I say, a man of mild disposi- 
 tions, of command of temper, of an open social and 
 cheerful humor, capable of attachment, but little 
 susceptible of enmity, and of great moderation in all 
 my passions. . . . My company was not unaccep- 
 table to the young and careless, as well as to the 
 studious and literary: and as I took a particular pleas- 
 ure in the company of modest women, I had no 
 reason to be displeased with the reception I met with 
 from them. . . . My friends never had occasion to 
 vindicate any one circumstance of my character and 
 conduct: not but that the zealots, we may well sup- 
 pose, would have been glad to invent and propagate 
 any story to my disadvantage, but they could never 
 find any which they thought would wear the face of 
 probability. I cannot say there is no vanity in mak- 
 ing this funeral oration of myself, but I hope it is 
 not a misplaced onej and this is a matter of fact 
 which is easily cleared and ascertained." 
 
 It is hardly to convict this worthy Scot of mis- 
 statement, to point out that his pl easing p icture, nf 
 good will toward all men omits to jrecord his two 
 Ji atreds3 hatreds as whole-hearted and_ constant as 
 one co uld wish. One wa s for those he called 
 j[<jTriftRfg3 ^> the, nther y ^ as reserved for Englishmen. 
 
 lOI 
 
DAVID HUME 
 
 " O! how I long to see America and the East Indies 
 revolted, totally and finally — the revenue reduced 
 to half — public credit fully discredited by bank- 
 ruptcy — the third of London in ruins, and the ras- 
 cally mob subdued! I think I am not too old to 
 despair of being witness to all these things." This, 
 to his friend Sir Gilbert Elliot in 1768. It is curious 
 to note that Hume lived just long enough to have 
 heard of the signing of the Declaration of Inde- 
 pendence, 
 
 If, then, something of the nonchalance with which. 
 Hume throws off comfortable tradition is due to his 
 personal character, much may be gathered respecting 
 his motives for so treating common opinion from 
 a study of his philosophical ancestry. For Hume is 
 the fine fleur of a growth flourishing in the England 
 of the 17th and i8th centuries, which in contrast to 
 the Rationalism of the Continent, is usually called 
 Empiricism. We find anticipations of an empirical 
 philosophy in Bacon and Hobbesj but perhaps we 
 should regard John Locke as the real founder of the 
 school. Rationalism, as we saw in connection with 
 Descartes and Spinoza, was inspired by the example 
 of the mathematicians to hope that all science might 
 be, as their science seemed to be, deduced from axioms 
 called self-evident. These axioms appeared to be 
 
 102 
 
DAVID HUME 
 
 something more than the mere summing up of expe- 
 riences. Between the undependable predictions of 
 a weather prophet, who has frequently observed that 
 a " twinge of rheumatism means coming storm," and 
 the confidence of the geometer that if two angles of 
 a triangle measure 120° the other will be found to 
 measure 60°, there seemed to the rationalist not 
 merely a difference in degree of certainty, but a dif- 
 ference in kind of evidence. The former knowledge, 
 unsatisfactory as it was, could only come after expe- 
 rience j the latter, beautiful in its precision, would 
 seem to be at the command of a thoughtful man be- 
 fore experience. Hence, for the rationalist, experi- 
 ence fell to the level of a mere suggestor of truth, 
 an awakener of thought j reason alone could demon- 
 strate the suggestion. 
 
 In complete contrast with such a view-point, the 
 empiricist came in the end to make experience the 
 sole test of truth, even of such truth as the math- 
 ematician possessed. Jf Jhe^ksue^s between taking 
 thought respecting all things with the rationalist, or 
 everywhere trusting to observation with the empir- 
 icist, it is clear the latter has plausibility on his side. 
 Who, closing his eyes and reasoning it out, could 
 learn that there were just eight planets, and not 
 sevea or nine? If we must do one thing or the 
 other exclusively, is it not easier to imagine that the 
 
 103 
 
DAVID HUME 
 
 axioms of geometry embody the experience of the 
 jges and nothing more, than to suppose that 
 equipped only with the pure reason, i.e., with the 
 principles of logic, one could discover the one think- 
 able world to be that in which a person that is " I " 
 should exist with a sheet of paper this moment be- 
 fore him and a fly buzzing by his ear? 
 
 So it seemed more and more as empiricism was 
 developed at the hands of Locke, Berkeley and 
 Hume. Belief, we find_ Hume maintaining in the 
 end, is all of a kindj it is the inference from an ac- 
 tual impression (A) to an expected impression (B), 
 based on the remembered experience that_A has 
 
 aliKays.,in.,..the past been followed by^. .Since-thi^L 
 
 past experience is limited and since the remembrance 
 
 of it may be defective, the belief based on the two 
 
 ,111,1 I I - .. Ill' — 
 
 can neyer^a mount to certainty. 
 
 Such an attitude may well be called sceptical when 
 contrasted with the older rationalism, in that it 
 denies the possibility of cojiiplete-xerta4nty.iiij^ny 
 field of science, substituting as the ideal of scientific 
 evidence an ever-increa^ng__balani:^e--of--^^babli£y;m 
 favor of the opinion we are constrained to accept. 
 But though to think of our body of accepted opin- 
 ion after this manner is to induce an extreme flex- 
 ibility of the imagination, which must be pre^gxfed 
 toxonceive that the firmest truth may be untrue and 
 
 104 
 
DAVID HUME 
 
 has only a more or less inadequate array of facts be- 
 hind which to defend itself, yet it does not follow 
 that nature is a fa ntastic dr eam, without order and 
 coherence. Jndeed, that experience which is to.. be 
 our guide from now on^ ass ures us.. Qf.4u&t.,the con- 
 Jtrary, and the new evidence that would be required 
 to make us admit that an event in exception to any 
 well-founded law had really occurred would have 
 to be overwhelming. 
 
 Nowhere does Hume's faith in the evidence upon 
 which the best tested uniformities of experience base 
 their claim to acceptance as nature's laws, show itself 
 more clearly than in his treatment of miracles. To 
 an analysis of the evidence for such miracles as his- 
 tory records he devotes an entire section of his 
 " Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding," 
 
 ^''^^^\ . . '^f\j> 
 
 " A miracle " he there writes, " is a violation of /^'*7> ,a^^ 
 
 thejg-.ws.of nat ure^ and as a firm and unalterable ex-^-^"^^ ;x^ ., 
 . ^erience has established t hese laws, the proof against '^ . ,)r^ 
 a miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is zs(, Jjy^ 
 ^entire as any argument from experience can possibly j 
 be irnagined. Why is it more than probable that all 
 men must diej that lead cannot, of itself, remain sus- 
 pended in the air 3 that fire consumes wood, and is 
 extinguished by water j unless it be that these events 
 
 105 
 
DAVID HUME 
 
 are found agreeable to the laws of nature, and there 
 
 is required a violation of these laws, or in other 
 
 words, a miracle to prevent them? Nothing is ever 
 
 esteemed a miracle if -it^ever. happen in the common 
 
 course of nature4=^=..=*=jrh£re__mus^^^ therefore, be 
 
 a uniform experience against every miraculou^jevent, 
 
 otherwise the event would not merit thataj)pellation. 
 
 And as a uniform experience amounts to proof, there 
 
 isTiere a direct and full froofy from the nature of 
 
 the fact, against the existence of any miracle j nor can 
 
 such proof be destroyed or the miracle rendered 
 
 credible, but by an opposite proof which is superior. 
 
 " The plain consequence is (and it is a general 
 
 . i^^iajum) maxim worthy of our attention), ^ Tharfno testimony 
 
 ^ '^'^-^ is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testi- 
 
 *^* "^ I'^niony be of such kind that its falsehood would be 
 
 ^ ^ " more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors 
 
 to establish.' " i And Hume illustrates — " When 
 
 %kArJ 
 
 anyone tells me that he saw a dead man restored to 
 life, I immediately consider with myself whether 
 it is more probable that this person should either 
 deceive or be deceived, or that the fact which he 
 relates should really have happend. I weigh the 
 one miracle against the other j and according to the 
 superiority which I discover I pronounce my decision, 
 and always reject the greater miracle. If the false- 
 hood of his testimony would be more miraculous 
 
 io6 
 
DAVID HUME 
 
 than the event which he relates j then, and not till 
 then, can he pretend to command my belief or 
 opinion." 
 
 As a specimen of the manner in which Hume 
 would have one weigh the probabilitites for and 
 against miracles, we may take the oft-cited passage 
 with which the discussions closes. "... Let us ex- 
 amine those miracles related in scripture ^ and not to 
 lose ourselves in too wide a field, let us confine our- 
 selves to such as we find in the Pentateuch^ which we 
 shall examine, . . . not as the word or testimony of 
 God himself, but as the production of a mere human 
 writer and historian. Here, then, we are first to 
 consider a book presented to us by a barabarous and 
 ignorant people, written in an age when they are still 
 more barbarous, and in all probability long after the 
 facts which it relates, corroborated by no concurring 
 testimony, and resembling those fabulous accounts 
 which every nation gives of its origin. £ Upon read- 
 ing this book, we find it full of prodigies and mir- 
 acles. It gives us an account of a state of the world 
 and of human nature entirely different from the 
 present j of our fall from that state 3 of the age of 
 man extended to nearly a thousand years j of the 
 destruction of the world by a deluge j of the arbi- 
 trary choice of one people as the favorites of heaven, 
 and that people the countrymen of the author j of 
 
 107 
 
DAVID HUME 
 
 their deliverance from bondage by prodigies the 
 most astonishing imaginable: I desire any one to lay 
 his hand upon his heart, and after a serious consid- 
 eration declare whether he thinks that the falsehood 
 of such a book, supported by such testimony, would 
 be more extraordinary and miraculous than all the 
 miracles it relates j which is, however, necessary to 
 make it to be received, according to the measure of 
 probablity above established^^! 
 
 Higher critical ability and wider knowledge have 
 since Hume's day been brought to bear upon the in- 
 terpretation of such documents as the books of the 
 Old Testament, and it is not as an ethnologist that 
 he has any claim upon our attention. But the cita- 
 tion will serve to show that the skepticism of the 
 empirical method is not of a kind greatly to disturb 
 our confidence in the commonly accepted laws of 
 nature. It will further serve to establish one point 
 respecting Hume's theology, a point which through- 
 out all his hesitating utterances on this subject he 
 never abandons, that, namely, if aught Jn thejyorld 
 as we know it points to a God,^it is not the strange 
 and exceptional, but the regular and law-abiding as- 
 pects of nature._ To him, a wonder-working God is 
 a superstition of the ages of ignorance and of the 
 ignorant of all ages. 
 
 " Even at this day, and in Europe," he writes in 
 
 io8 
 
DAVID HUME 
 
 his " Natural History of Religion," " ask any of the 
 vulgar, why he believes in an omnipotent creator of 
 the worlds he will never mention the beauty of final 
 causes, of which he is wholly ignorant. He will not 
 hold out his hand, and bid you contemplate the sup- 
 pleness and variety of the joints in his fingers, their 
 bending all one way, the counterpoise which they 
 receive from the thumb, the softness and fleshy parts 
 of the inside of his hand, with all other circum- 
 stances which render that member fit for the use to 
 which it is destined. To these he has been long ac- 
 customed, and he beholds them with listlessness and 
 unconcern. He will tell you of the sudden and 
 unexpected death of such a one 5 the fall and bruise 
 of such another j the excessive drought of this 
 season 5 the cold and rains of another. These he 
 ascribes to the immediate operations of providence j 
 and such events as with good reasoners are the chief 
 difficulties in admittting a supreme intelligence, are 
 with him the sole arguments for it." j 
 
 But, he adds on this occasion, " many theists, 
 even the most zealous and refined, have denied a 
 f articular providence, and have asserted that the 
 Sovereign mind or first principle of all things, having 
 fixed general laws, by which nature is governed, 
 gives free and uninterrupted course to these laws, and 
 disturbs not, at every turn, the settled order of events 
 
 109 
 
DAVID HUME 
 
 by particular volitions. From the beautiful connec- 
 tion, say they, and rigid observance of established 
 rules, we draw the chief argument for theism^ and 
 from the same principles are enabled to answer the 
 principal objections against it." 
 
 It is in this " refined " variety that we shall ex- 
 pect to find Hume in the end, if among theists at all. 
 Meanwhile it will be interesting to follow up this 
 reference to a particular providence, belief in which 
 Hume associates so closely with the acceptance of 
 miracles. 
 
 Section XI of Hume's " Enquiry Concerning Hu- 
 man Understanding," is entitled " Of a Providence 
 and of a Future State." A literary device puts the 
 argument in the mouth of a friend who has been in- 
 vited by one referred to in the first person to imagine 
 himself making a speech for Epicurus before an 
 audience of enlightened Athenians. Accepting the 
 challenge the friend opens his apology as follows: 
 " The religious philosophers [O, ye Athenians], not 
 satisfied with the tradition of your forefathers and 
 doctrine of your priests (in which I willingly acqui- 
 esce) indulge a rash curiosity in trying how far they 
 can establish religion on the principles of reason j 
 and they thereby excite, instead of satisfying, the 
 doubts which naturally arise from a diligent and 
 
 no 
 
DAVID HUME 
 
 scrutinous enquiry. They paint in the most magnifi- 
 cent colors the order, beauty and wise arrangement 
 of the universe j and then ask, if such a glorious dis- 
 play of intelligence could proceed from the fortui- 
 tous concourse of atoms, or if chance could produce 
 what the greatest genius can never sufficiently ad- 
 mire. I shall not examine the justness of this argu- 
 ment. I shall allow it to be as solid as my antagonists 
 and accusers can desire. It is sufficient if I can prove, 
 from this very reasoning, that the question is entirely 
 speculative and that when I deny a providence and a 
 future state, I undermine not the foundations of 
 society, but advance principles which they them- 
 selves, upon their own topics, if they argue consist- 
 ently, must allow to be solid and satisfactory. 
 
 " You then, who are my accusers, have acknowl- 
 edged that their chief or sole argument for a divine 
 existence is derived from the order of nature. . . . 
 From the order of the work you infer that there must 
 have been project and forethought in the workman." 
 Now, " if the cause be known only by the effect, we 
 never ought to ascribe to it any qualities beyond what 
 are precisely requisite to produce the effect. . . . No 
 one, merely from the sight of one of Zeuxis's pic- 
 tures, could know that he was also a statuary or 
 architect. . . . 
 
 " Allowing, therefore, the gods to be authors 
 
 III 
 
DAVID HUME 
 
 of the existence or order of the universe, it follows 
 that they posses that precise degree of power, intel- 
 ligence and benevolence which appears in their work- 
 manship. . . . The supposition of farther attributes 
 is mere hypothesis 5 much more the supposition that 
 in distant regions of space or periods of time there 
 has been or will be a more magnificent display of 
 these attributes and a scheme of administration more 
 suitable to such imaginary virtues. . . . Let your 
 gods, therefore, O philospohers, be suited to the 
 present appearances of nature, and presume not to 
 alter these appearances by arbitrary suppositions in 
 order to suit them to attributes which you so fondly 
 ascribe to your deities." 
 
 And the pleader proceeds to show that it is as use- 
 less to practice as unsupported by reason, to supple- 
 ment the order of things we know by another for 
 which there is no evidence. 
 
 " Are there any marks of a distributive justice in 
 the. world? " he puts it to his hearers. " If you an- 
 swer in the affirmative, I conclude that since justice 
 here exerts itself, it is satisfied. If you reply in the 
 negative, I conclude that you have then no reason to 
 ascribe justice in our sense of it to the gods. If you 
 hold a medium between affirmation and negation by 
 saying that the justice of the gods at present exerts 
 itself in part, but not in its full extent, I answer that 
 
 112 
 
DAVID HUME 
 
 you have no reason to give it any particular extent, 
 but only as far as you see it at fresent exert itself." 
 
 We had rather anticipated that we should find 
 Hume among those " zealous and refined theists " 
 who point to the " beautiful connection " and 
 " single plan " of nature as to the ultimate evidence 
 of an intelligence back of it. But now that we have 
 gathered together his important denials, we begin 
 to feel that Hume's " zeal " for theism must be of 
 the most restrained order, that the " refinement " 
 of his proof must approach attenuation. 
 
 And so in the end, it proves. Not but that there 
 are emphatic enough avowals of conviction : " The 
 whole frame of nature bespeaks an intelligent 
 author;" we find it written, ^\ and no rational en- 
 qu irer can ^ after ser ious-^reflection, suspend his be- 
 lief a moment with regard t:Q the primary principles 
 .oLge nuine Theism and Relip^ion." But this firmness 
 of assertion is not an enduring mood. Elsewhere we 
 find at least one " rational enquirer " suspending his 
 belief, not for a moment, but indefinitely. The essay 
 which opens with the passage just quoted concludes 
 with these words: ifjrhe whole is a riddle, an enigma, 
 an inexplicable mystery. Doubt, uncertainty, sus- 
 pense of judgment appear the only result of our 
 most accurate scrutiny concerning this subject. But 
 
 "3 
 
DAVID HUME 
 
 such is the frailty of human reason, and such the irre- 
 sistible contagion of opinion, that even this deliberate 
 doubt could scarcely be upheld did we not enlarge 
 our view, and opposing one species of superstition 
 to another, set them a-quarrellingj while we our- 
 selves, during their fury and contention, happily 
 make our escape into^ the calm, though obscure 
 regions of philosophy."/ 
 
 To explain this flickering mood, one is abandoned 
 to one's own insight into the nature of the man and 
 into the conditions of his problem. In the first con- 
 nection, we make it out that Hume's genial bearing 
 before men cloaked, in a seemly well-bred fash- 
 ion, a deep seriousness of character, just as the light 
 tone of certain of Plato's dialogues is chosen as a fit 
 medium for the setting forth of lofty ideas in polite 
 company. At sixteen, before he had acquired this 
 fudeur of high sounding discourse, we find him writ- 
 ing to his friend Michael Ramsay with the shame- 
 less solemnity of a Roman sage: "The perfectly 
 wise man that outbraves fortune is much greater 
 than the husbandman who slips by her, and indeed 
 that pastoral and saturnian happiness I have in a 
 great measure come at just now — " and more of 
 the like! We may safely take it that the sage of 
 sixteen had not died in the man of sixty, for all that 
 the latter preferred to talk with his worldly friends 
 
 114 
 
DAVID HUME 
 
 of " soufe a la reme and beef and cabbage (a charm- 
 ing dish). " Well, then, in common with most na- 
 tures possessed of a like " high seriousness,"; Hume 
 would have preferred to see the world in a religious 
 light, would instinctively have looked in it too for 
 high purpose. And this high purpose, he seemed 
 to see it out of the corner of his eye as one does the 
 first star in the twilight. But when he sought it 
 with full, clear vision — it was gone. 1 
 
 The reason for this phenomenon may, perhaps, 
 lie in the nature of the problem as Hume habitually 
 thought of it. It was, there could be no doubt of it, 
 the order and uniformity of nature that was to reveal 
 to us an intelligent cause. But in daily life, as in 
 the highest philosophy, we recognize two kinds of 
 order and uniformity in our experience. It is an 
 established rule that a stone will fall to the earth, 
 that all stones will fall in the same way, that a single 
 law describes a behavior common to this stone's fall- 
 ing and to the planets' swinging in their orbits, a 
 law we imagine to hold for every particle of matter 
 in the universe in its reaction toward every other, 
 and which we call the law of gravitation. | The law of 
 gravitation is about as high an expression of a uni- 
 formity holding throughout nature as we have as yet 
 come upon. Such laws as those of physics and chem- 
 istry are among the best attested results of experi- 
 
 115 
 
DAVID HUME 
 
 ence, and we may stare at them quite boldly without 
 fear of putting them out of countenance j but then, 
 too, we may examine them as intently as we will 
 without finding in them the revelation of an intel- 
 ligence that framed them. For merely as such laws 
 they make no reference to a purgose to which the 
 mechanism they govern is adap ted, j 
 /Bu t there is quite another type of uniformity 
 which we are ever discovering and appealing to, 
 if not in the whole of nature, at least in many of its 
 parts. Hume calls it " unity of plan," and he points 
 to the general adaptation of the organs of the body 
 to the end of preserving the life of that body. And 
 where we find such adaptation of various means to 
 a single end, we ascribe life and even intelligence to 
 the organic whole. Nature, from this point of view, 
 is full of life and intelligence. Or, rather, should 
 we not say it is full of lives and intelligences? Here 
 indeed, is the difficulty: can we treat the whole cos- 
 mos as one great organismpj Can we find one su- 
 preme end that all the oBvious minor ends subserve, 
 as they in turn are served by diverse means? Or, as 
 another similar possibility, can we establish an anal- 
 ogy between the cosmos and a machine of human 
 invention, an implement of the arts, — a watch, say, 
 to follow Paley's argument? Here, too, we must 
 
 ii6 
 
DAVID HUME 
 
 find a purpose, for a machine is not merely a mechan- 
 ism — it is a mechanism with a function. 
 
 Many excellent minds have expended themselves 
 on this problem, whose difficulty is supreme, and I 
 think we shall not be far wrong in asserting that it 
 is at moments when the issue presents itself in this 
 way to Hume's mind that " doubt," as he says, " un- 
 certainty, suspense of judgment appear the only re- 
 sult of our most accurate scrutiny." There seems 
 something beyond Hume's usual imperturbability 
 in the words with which one of his dialogues con- 
 cludes : " Believe me, Cleanthes, the most natural 
 sentiment which a well-disposed mind will feel on 
 this occasion, is a longing desire and expectation that 
 Heaven would be pleased to dissipate, at least alle- 
 viate, this profound ignorance, by affording some 
 more particular revelation to mankind, and making 
 discoveries of the nature, attributes and operations of 
 the divine object of our faith." ^ But perhaps this 
 is only a phrase, for nowhere else do the lips of 
 Hume shape the words " revelation " and " faith " 
 but that the lines of mockery are seen to form around 
 them. 
 
 In this state of mind respecting theology, it is 
 inevitable that Hume should struggle in quite a 
 
 ^ Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, XII. 
 
 117 
 
DAVID HUME 
 
 pagan spirit with the problem of human wisdom. 
 Our experience of life being what it is, how may man 
 most successfully attain to happiness, and what rela- 
 tion has the line of conduct which prudence would 
 recommend to that which has been traditionally re- 
 garded as virtuous? 
 
 But first, has there been any one principle o£ 
 conduct that defines it as virtuous j or are there as 
 many notions of virtue as there are communities 
 with more or less independent traditions? It is a 
 problem of ethics upon which every inquirer from 
 Socrates down has spent his best thought. 
 
 There is a little dialogue of Hume's that suggests 
 the nature of the problem and hints at a solution in 
 a way altogether charming. " My friend, Pala- 
 medes," the narrator begins, " who is as great a ram- 
 bler in his thoughts as in his person, . . . surprised 
 me lately with an account of a nation with whom he 
 told me he had passed a considerable part of his life, 
 and whom he found, in the main, a people extremely 
 civilized and intelligent. 
 
 " ^ There is a country,' said he, 'in the world called 
 Fourli, no matter for its longitude and latitude, 
 whose inhabitants have ways of thinking in many 
 things, particularly in morals, diametrically opposite 
 to ours. . . . 
 
 " ' As it was my fortune to come among this peo- 
 
 ii8 
 
DAVID HUME 
 
 pie on a very advantageous footing, I was immedi- 
 ately introduced to the best company 3 and being 
 desired by Alcheic to live with him, I readily accepted 
 his invitation, as I found him universally esteemed 
 for his personal merit, and indeed regarded by every 
 one in Fourli as a perfect character.' " 
 
 And we are thereupon regaled with a display of 
 Alcheic's virtues. We accompany him first in a ser- 
 enade that he offers, not indeed to his lady-love, 
 but to a certain youth, and we learn in this connection, 
 that Alcheic, himself, who had been very handsome 
 in his youth, had been courted by many lovers, 
 but had bestowed his favors chiefly on the sage 
 Elcouf, to whom he was supposed to owe, in great 
 measure, the astonishing progress he had made in 
 philosophy and wisdom. " It gave me great sur- 
 prise," the traveller adds, " that Alcheic's wife (who 
 by-the-by, happened also to be his sister) was no wise 
 scandalized at this species of infidelity." 
 
 Later it appears that Alcheic was a murderer and 
 a parricide j and when asked what was his motive for 
 this action, he replies coolly that he " was not then so 
 much at ease in his circumstances as he is at present, 
 and that he had acted in that particular at the advice 
 of all his friends." 
 
 But that, of all his actions, which was most highly 
 applauded by the Fourlians, was the assassination of 
 
 119 
 
DAVID HUME 
 
 Usbek. " This Usbek had been to the last moment 
 Alcheic's intimate friend, had laid many high obli- 
 gations upon him, had even saved his life on a cer- 
 tain occasion, and had, by his will, which was found 
 after the murder, made him heir to a considerable 
 part of his fortune. Alcheic, it seems, conspired with 
 about twenty or thirty more, most of them also 
 Usbek's friends j and falling all together on that 
 unhappy man when he was not aware, they had torn 
 him with a hundred wounds, and given him that re- 
 ward for all his past favors and obligations." Usbek 
 " had many great and good qualities j . . . but this 
 action of Alcheic's sets him far above Usbek in the 
 eyes of all judges of merit 5 and is one of the noblest 
 that ever perhaps the sun shone upon." 
 
 Other splendid achievements of this gentleman 
 are recounted, and the list might have been longer 
 had not the narrator interrupted his friend. 
 " Pray," said he, " Palamedes, when you were at 
 Fourli, did you also learn the art of turning your 
 friends into ridicule by telling them strange stories, 
 and then laughing at them if they believed you?" 
 " I assure you," replied the traveller, " had I been 
 disposed to learn such a lesson there was no place in 
 the world more proper. My friend did nothing 
 from morning to night but sneer and banter and 
 rally 5 and you could scarcely ever distinguish 
 
 120 
 
DAVID HUME 
 
 whether he were in jest or earnest. But you think, 
 then, that my story is improbable, and that I have 
 used, or rather abused, the privilege of a traveller? " 
 
 " To be sure," said I, " you were but in jest. Such 
 barbarous and savage manners are not only incom- 
 patible with a civilized intelligent people, such as 
 you said those were 5 but are scarcely compatible with 
 human nature. They exceed all we ever read 
 among the Mingrelians and Topinamboues." 
 
 " Have a care," cried Palamedes, " have a care ! 
 You are not aware that you are speaking blasphemy, 
 and are abusing your favorites, the Greeks, espe- 
 cially the Athenians, whom I have couched all along 
 under these bizarre names I employed. If you con- 
 sider aright, there is not one stroke of the foregoing 
 character which might not be found in the man of 
 highest merit at Athens. . . . The amours of the 
 Greeks, their marriages (the laws of Athens allowed 
 an to marry his sister by the father), and the ex- 
 posing of their children cannot but strike you im- 
 mediately. The death of Usbek is an exact counter- 
 part to that of Cassar," — and so the parallel runs 
 on until Palamedes concludes triumphantly, " I 
 think I have fairly made it appear that an Athenian 
 man of merit might be . . . incestuous, a parricide, 
 an assassin, an ungrateful perjured traitor, and some- 
 thing else too abominable to be named and having 
 
 121 
 
DAVID HUME 
 
 lived in this manner, his death might be entirely 
 suitable 5 he might conclude the scene by a desparate 
 act of self-murder, and die with the most absurd 
 blasphemies in his mouth. And notwithstanding this 
 he shall have statues, if not altars, erected to his 
 memory." 
 
 I need hardly say that Hume has in the " Dia- 
 logue " from which I quote made use of a pleasant 
 artifice to force on the reader's attention the nature 
 and difficulty of his problem: to find, namely, a com- 
 mon meaning for the words " virtue " and " vice," by 
 whomsoever used 5 in spite of the fact that nearly 
 kindred civilizations will be the one confident it has 
 found virtue, where the other is certain it has found 
 vice. " How shall we pretend to fix a standard for 
 judgments of this nature? " he finally puts the ques- 
 tion. " By tracing matters," he answers himself, " a 
 little higher. . . . The Rhine flows north, the Rhone 
 south J yet both spring from the same mountain, and 
 are also actuated in their opposite directions by the 
 same principle of gravity. The diflferent inclina- 
 tions of the ground on which they run cause all the 
 differences of their courses." And one by one with 
 admirable skill, he takes up the virtues of our friend 
 Alcheic, which to us are such conspicuous vices, to 
 show that under the conditions of Greek life most 
 had a quality in common with those perhaps directly 
 
 122 
 
DAVID HUME 
 
 opposite acts, which, under the conditions of our life 
 we should commend, and that qualit y, whi ch is the 
 keynote of all Hume^s ethics, is ^^ utility.'^ 
 ij^ It appears," he puts it, " that there never was 
 any quality recommended by anyone as a virtue or 
 moral excellence, but on account of its being useful 
 or agreeable^ to a man himself or to others. For 
 what other reason can ever be assigned for praise or 
 approbation? Or where would be the sense of ex- 
 tolling a good character or action, which at the same 
 time is allowed to be good for nothing^ All the 
 differences, therefore, in morals may be reduced to 
 this one general foundation, and may be accounted 
 for by the different views which people take of these 
 circumstances." 
 
 I- Given Hume^s world-view, it is evident that the 
 only ones whom we have a right to count in estimat- 
 ing the agreeable or disagreeable effects of our ac- 
 tions are such other sentient beings as experience re- 
 veals to us: to wit, our fellow humans and perhaps 
 the higher animals. Moreover, the only period 
 which we have a right to consider as containing a 
 life's measure of happiness and unhappiness is that 
 which experience confirms to us: to wit, that bounded 
 by birth and deatL^ 
 
 Thus defined, the calculus of utility involved in 
 
 123 
 
DAVID HUME 
 
 judging the merit of an act may be difficult, but is 
 possible of an empirical solution. There remains 
 only one question of human destiny to be settled, 
 but it is an important one. What, namely, is the re- 
 lation between the happiness experience gives me a 
 right to expect, and the virtue of my conduct? For 
 /Hume's ethics are not egoistic. The utility that 
 measures the excellence of my act is not merely, nor 
 even primarily, its agreeableness to me 3 but also, and 
 perhaps in larger measure, its agreeableness to others^ 
 How for this large element of altruism in all good 
 actions am I, the actor, to be paid, if paid I am to be? 
 To this question Hume gives an elaborate reply in 
 a section of his " Enquiry Concerning the Principles 
 of Morals " entitled " Why Utility Pleases." The 
 answer is simple enough. /There is in the human 
 heart a sentiment we call sympathy, or, to use 
 Hume's favorite word, " humanity." To possess this 
 sentiment is to rejoice in another's joy, grieve with 
 another's grief. To possess such a sentiment is to 
 possess the reward of all altruism 3 for happiness be- 
 stowed upon another is bread cast upon the waters 
 that returns to us after days as few or as many as 
 may be required to produce in our own soul the 
 sympathetic image of the happiness we have wrought 
 in another's. / 
 
 124 
 
DAVID HUME 
 
 Such is the theory of human duty and of human 
 destiny which Hume has worked out by the method 
 of Empiricism, which pretends not to a knowledge 
 of God, nor of a system of things broader than the 
 world of our experience. We may allow his own 
 words to contrast the resulting attitude toward life 
 and duty with the theological: "I deny a provi- 
 dence, you say, and supreme governor of the 
 world, who guides the course of events and punishes 
 the vicious with infamy and disappointment, and re- 
 wards the virtuous with honor and success in all their 
 undertakings. But surely I deny not the course it- 
 self of events, which lies open to every one's enquiry 
 and examination. I acknowledge that in the present 
 order of things virtue is attended with more peace 
 of mind than vice and meets with a more favorable 
 reception from the world. I am sensible that accord- 
 ing to the past experience of mankind, friendship is 
 the chief joy of human life, and moderation the only 
 source of tranquillity and happiness. I never balance 
 between the virtuous and the vicious course of life 
 but am sensible that to a well-disposed mind every 
 advantage is on the side of the former. And what 
 can you say more, allowing all your suppositions and 
 reasonings? " 
 
 125 
 
IMMANUEL KANT 
 
 I 724-1 804 
 
IMMANUEL KANT 
 
 The religion of Immanuel Kant can be put in one 
 phrase, " We cannot know that there is a Godj but 
 we ought to live as though there were one " — the 
 diiEculty lies in interpreting the phrase. 
 
 That we cannot know there is a God is a conclu- 
 sion to which we have seen the decline of rationalism 
 and the growth of empiricism slowly tending. But 
 that we ought to live as though there were a God — 
 what can such a phrase mean? What manner of 
 life does it prescribe? Above all, what sort of an 
 ought is this and how does it bind us? 
 
 There is no deeper interest for Kant than that 
 which invites one to consider the meaning of the 
 word " ought." I say, the meaning of " ought," 
 yet it may be that the word has more than one mean- 
 ing. For compare these two examples of its use, — 
 first this: If you want to bisect a line you ought to 
 describe certain arcs and draw a certain straight line. 
 And then this: "You ought to speak the truth." 
 
 We notice at once a rhetorical difference in these 
 two uses of the ought. In the first, a certain pro- 
 cedure is commanded if and only if we want to bisect 
 
 129 
 
IMMANUEL KANT 
 
 a line. Leave out the condition this if introduces, 
 and the ought with all that follows on it loses its 
 meaning. No decalogue could be imagined to con- 
 tain among its commands an injunction to describe 
 arcs and draw lines. Let us call this use of the 
 ought the hypothetical use, let us call the command 
 such an ought introduces a hypothetical command or 
 in Kant's own phrase a " hypothetical imperative?^ 
 An ought that is inseparable from an if is a hypo- 
 thetical imperative. 
 
 On the other hand when I say, " You ought to 
 speak the truth," " You ought not to steal," I seem 
 to be using the ought in a sense that needs no if to 
 make its meaning clear. More than that, attempts 
 to supply an i/, so far from making the meaning of 
 the ought clearer, have more often than not the 
 effect of changing, of travestying the meaning we 
 instinctively see in it. Truthful speaking and honest 
 dealing be indeed useful devices for getting along in 
 the world, but one who is honest because honesty is 
 the best policy seems to us hardly honest — at all 
 events he seems to have missed the point that honesty 
 is enjoined on us without ifs or huts. The obliga- 
 tion to be honest is an unconditional command, a 
 " categorical imperative?^ It is of such stuff as dec- 
 alogues are made on — it is so the voice of duty 
 speaks in us. 
 
 130 
 
IMMANUEL KANT 
 
 It needs no pointing out that so far as our examples 
 go, the hypothetical ought has no moral flavor. No 
 sin attaches to one who has left undone the things 
 he ought to have done tj he aimed at bisecting a line. 
 Sin does attach to one who has done what he 
 ought not to have done in the way of lying, no 
 matter what end seemed to justify the means. This 
 hypothetical ought finds its reason in pure science, 
 this categorical in pure morality. 
 
 All this is true, and yet one would form a poor 
 opinion of Kant's thoroughness if one represented 
 him as having rushed from one or two examples to 
 the generalization: All hypothetical uses of the 
 ought are scientific and non-moral; all categorical 
 uses are moral and non-scientific. To such a gen- 
 eralization Kant does indeed come, and to it he clings 
 through difficulties more than enough to discourage 
 one in whom the conviction of its truth were less a 
 matter of heart than it was to Kant. But however it 
 fitted in with Kant's character to view the command 
 of duty as sternly categorical, it was equally part of 
 his character patiently to seek a reason for the faith 
 that was in him. 
 
 If Kant had wished to establish no more than that 
 there must be something categorical about the moral 
 ought distinguishing it from the many oughts that 
 suggest nothing of morality, his task would not 
 
 131 
 
IMMANUEL KANT 
 
 have been hard. For suppose that to every com- 
 mand there was really a hidden condition attached j 
 suppose that the categorical was really a hypothet- 
 ical imperative in disguise. Then the goodness of 
 the act commanded could mean no more than its fit- 
 ness to bring about a certain result. But what of the 
 result? Is it J too, good? The question can obvi- 
 ously have no meaning, for only the way can be 
 good 5 the goal cannot. And yet we seem to revolt 
 against such meaning of goodness: there is a diflfer- 
 ence to us between a good way of cheating one's 
 neighbor and a way of being good. Either then 
 there is some way of defining a good end — an 
 end which justifies the means — or else there must 
 be a moral excellence that belongs to certain types 
 of act irrespective of what they may lead to, if in- 
 deed they lead to aught in common. In either 
 case we come upon the categorical ought — the end 
 that ought to be pursued for its own sake, or else 
 the type of act that ought to be followed for its 
 own sake with no view to consequences. The first 
 interpretation of the moral ought would be illus- 
 trated in a theory that pointed, as did Hume's, to the 
 happiness of the community as an end imposed with- 
 out condition, while it defined good actions to be 
 such as were well calculated to bring about this end. 
 The second interpretation is in the spirit of the Dec- 
 
 132 
 
IMMANUEL KANT 
 
 alogue, or of the classic saying, Let justice be done 
 though the heavens fall. It is not the business of 
 the actor to consider the consequences of his just 
 dealings if the world is so divinely ordered that not 
 the heavens but heaven's blessing fall on the just 
 man, this is a truth to be independently established. 
 Duty first, consequences after! 
 
 No theory of the moral ought can escape a 
 recognition of a categorical command j but we must 
 choose between the end and the act as that to which 
 the ought applies. If we are sometimes doubtful 
 whether Kant abides at all points by the decision he 
 first' makes in this matter, there can be no doubt that 
 he comes to a decision at once in favor of the view 
 that the moral ought applies to a type of act, not to 
 an end this type of act might be calculated to bring 
 about. We should still know our duty if we knew 
 of no such end, we ought still to follow duty if there 
 were no such end. It is in trying to carry through 
 this idea, which we may call the Decalogue idea, of 
 the categorical oughty that Kant meets his most se- 
 rious difiiculties. Yet the motives which made him 
 accept and cling to such an interpretation are such 
 as the simplest may grasp — yes, the simpler one is 
 of heart, the more easily may one sympathize with 
 them. 
 
 In the first place a scientific insight into the means 
 
 133 
 
IMMANUEL KANT 
 
 best calculated to bring about an end is obtainable 
 only by study and thought. Even the simple device 
 by which a line may be bisected is not at every one's 
 disposal, while the highest science has but imperfect 
 means to suggest for accomplishing the ends we most 
 crave. But it seemed to Kant that duty must make 
 a universal appeal, to the poor understanding as 
 clearly as to the richly endowed 5 morality must be 
 no privilege of the high, but a treasure of the 
 humble. " Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be 
 clever," is a word of homely counsel that has crept 
 into our language to show how good a Kantian the 
 plain man may be. 
 
 Or again — but really it is the same thought dif- 
 ferently expressed — duty ought to make no hesi- 
 tating uncertain appeal. No one should have a 
 chance to excuse himself on the ground that he was 
 ignorant of the law. But ignorance of scientific law 
 is the portion of all of us. Alas, if we should have 
 to grope after goodness as we do after wisdom ! The 
 intellectuality of pagan Greece might and did con- 
 template such a state of affairs with equanimity 
 or even with favor. The spirit of Christianity ex- 
 pressed the deep desire of the unintellectual that at 
 least virtue might be theirs for the willing. 
 
 Kant had a name for any law that was thus uni- 
 versal (that is, applying to everybody) and neces- 
 
 134 
 
IMMANUEL KANT 
 
 sary (that is, free from uncertainty). He called 
 such laws a priori; that is, not dependent for their 
 authority upon the slow uncertain gathering of ex- 
 perimental evidence. To him then, the one chance 
 of possessing a moral law a p-iori lay in the recogni- 
 tion that such a law must in decalogue fashion pre- 
 scribe a type of act, not an end which might be un- 
 certainly tried for now by truth-telling, now by 
 lying — not an end in short which justified the 
 means so dubiously that it might be taken to justify 
 any means. 
 
 To us mortals wandering in the mazes of life and 
 perplexed — we think honestly perplexed — by the 
 way issues of right and wrong present themselves, 
 the possession of an indubitable law of duty whose 
 authority was higher than any consideration of con- 
 sequences would be a godsend. Tet because such a 
 thing is desirable, it does not follow that it is pos- 
 sible, and we are quite prepared to find Kant at this 
 point setting up as the deepest problem of ethics the 
 question, " How is a categorical imperative pos- 
 sible? " That is, what sort of a world would it be 
 in which men recognized the authority of such an 
 ought and were free and willing to obey it? 
 
 An image of one such world is the common pos- 
 session of our race. God created this world, and the 
 
 135 
 
IMMANUEL KANT 
 
 beings that dwell in it. On these beings he lays cer- 
 tain commands in the form of a decalogue, and their 
 authority rests on the will of God regarded now as 
 King. If God had purpose in laying these com- 
 mands on his subjects, their duty to God's will must 
 not wait on their insight into his purpose and their 
 acceptance of it as theirs. Man has been created free 
 to obey or not to obey God's commands, and is told 
 that happiness will be meted out to him in the meas- 
 ure of his obedience, unhappiness in the measure of 
 his disobedience. But to deserve reward, he must 
 not only obey God's law, but do it uniquely because 
 it is God's will. He must conceive himself as pre- 
 pared to obey without promise of reward or threat of 
 punishment. Moreover, it is not pretended that this 
 justice will accomplish itself within the limits of hu- 
 man life on this earth, but in a future life and in 
 another world whose existence must be taken on 
 faith. Here then we have an image of a world in 
 which a categorical imperative in the form of a dec- 
 alogue is possible, and not only is possible, but has 
 exactly the relations to purpose and to happiness that 
 Kant required of such an imperative. Duty may 
 serve a purpose j but the assurance we have of this 
 is no part of the authority duty has for us. The per- 
 formance of duty may bring happiness j but duty 
 
 136 
 
IMMANUEL KANT 
 
 would remain authoritative if we knew nothing of 
 any happiness it would bring.^ 
 
 This world, we might call it the Old Testament 
 World, is then exactly the kind of a world in which 
 morality as Kant defines morality could and would 
 exist. Moreover Kant is prepared to show that it is 
 the only kind of a world in which true morality could 
 exist. If we are to have such a thing as a command 
 of duty, we must have the three things characteristic 
 of our Old Testament world-image: the freedom 
 of man, the immortality of the soul, the ruling 
 power of God. If we take these, as well we may, 
 to be the essential beliefs of religion, then it ap- 
 pears that for Kant morality is inseparable from 
 religion. 
 
 I say that Kant is prepared to prove that with- 
 out these three assumptions, God, freedom and im- 
 mortality, no categorical imperative is possible 5 but 
 I am far from asserting that a conscientious thinker 
 will be prepared to follow Kant in every step of this 
 proof. It is in most parts a tortured process of 
 reasoning at once over subtle and over simple, and 
 back of it all, one feels that Kant's deepest motives 
 
 ^ This image of the Old Testament World is not of course 
 supposed to be that of the ancient Hebrews. Rather does it 
 represent this world as reflected in the thought of a modern 
 Christian community. 
 
IMMANUEL KANT 
 
 for arriving at his conclusions are the instinctive de- 
 mands of his heart, which demands a marvelous in- 
 tellect is made to serve as best it may. 
 
 However, the first step is obvious enough: un- 
 less there is a sense in which the being on whom a 
 duty is laid is free to follow or not to follow its 
 command, there is no sense in which duty is possible. 
 This ought ye to doj but alas you cannot! This 
 ought ye to do, and besides you can't help doing it! 
 These expressions equally rob the ought of meaning. 
 We can quite see that without freedom, duty is 
 meaningless. Yet the beings on whom the commands 
 of duty are laid are men like you and me, and in 
 such beings we notice that what freedom they have 
 is limited in a peculiar way. We are in the habit of 
 attributing to each a certain nature or character that 
 we try to regard as working itself out — if not in 
 all — yet in many and various situations. But in 
 this attempt to explain conduct in terms of character 
 and its expression, we are constantly baffled by what 
 seems to us a duality or even multiplicity of char- 
 acters in the same individual. In this man we explain 
 a certain part of his conduct as the outcome of a 
 strong imperious animalityj but another part shows 
 his passion restrained by motives of honor, kindness, 
 sympathy. Two natures are at war in him, and as 
 we are likely to think of one of these as more really 
 
 138 
 
IMMANUEL KANT 
 
 his than the other, we represent him as struggling 
 to conquer himself. 
 
 Well, this warfare of a man with himself is one 
 of the commonest things in life, and life itself 
 shows that a higher or better self may often enough 
 win the victory over and free itself from a baser 
 and lower disposition. But life shows too that the 
 struggle is long and bitter, so long that a lifetime 
 is too short a span in which to secure a complete 
 victory. Just in proportion as the higher self is 
 high, does the struggle grow hard and lengthen 
 itself out. If we conceive the self whose struggles 
 we are watching to be the moral self as Kant de- 
 scribes it, all the love and lust of life seem to be 
 arrayed against it. If it is to free itself, that is if 
 we are to become completely moral agents, not a 
 lifetime, nor a century, nor a million years, but the 
 whole of eternity must be allowed us for our bat- 
 tling. But this means that the actor must be im- 
 mortal, and so it is that for Kant the possibility of 
 a completely moral being, free to act out his moral 
 nature, presupposes immortality. 
 
 The existence of a moral being then involves the 
 acceptance of him as a free immortal being. But 
 though these are important traits of the Old Testa- 
 ment world image which Kant is trying to show to 
 be the only image that makes morality possible, yet 
 
 139 
 
IMMANUEL KANT 
 
 the recognition of a man's freedom and immortality 
 is not peculiar to it, but may be found in many phi- 
 losophies. Bothj for example, have a place in Spi- 
 noza's system which is as far as possible from giv- 
 ing us an Old Testament account of reality. 
 
 When we add a third condition, the ruling power 
 of God, we have a difference indeed, but also a dif- 
 ficulty in understanding the necessity of the assump- 
 tion. To be sure, if we add the idea of justice to that 
 of moral worth, if we require that worth s-hould be 
 rewarded with proportional happiness, then indeed 
 we should have to go beyond experience to convince 
 ourselves that such justice obtains, and we might very 
 well identify the ideal of justice with the idea of a 
 God-governed world. But Kant has insisted 
 throughout that the idea of right and the idea of re- 
 ward are independent, why then are they not sep- 
 arable? Why in order that there may be a thing 
 that we ought to do, must there be an assurance that 
 we shall be happy in the doing or because of the 
 doing of it? 
 
 It is easy to give Kant's answer to this question — 
 it is difficult to make sure that one has understood it. 
 His answer is simply that while morality may be the 
 highest desire of the human heart, it cannot be its 
 whole desire. It must desire happiness as well as 
 virtue. 
 
 140 
 
IMMANUEL KANT 
 
 Kant defines the happy man as one whose desires 
 are satisfied. But if we think of this desire as being 
 directed toward a tyfe of object, any atempt to in- 
 terpret Kant's motives for introducing a God into his 
 system must meet the obvious difficulty that since 
 morality is the highest type of desire and since it 
 is admitted that all are free to be moral, then the 
 Stoic happiness in virtue is assured quite without 
 reference to a divine government of the world. 
 
 The only way we can hope to explain in what 
 sense the will to do one's duty cannot be a complete 
 definition of the object of human desire is to under- 
 stand that happiness depends upon our obtaining, not 
 a type of thing, — morality or wealth or power or 
 science — but an individual thing. Our demand for 
 moral satisfaction may be realized in one situation as 
 well as another. " To tell the truth," if that be all 
 we want, lays no conditions on the particular cir- 
 cumstances under which we tell the truth. We want 
 to follow a principle, and principles are abstract 
 enough. But is it not true that the kind of desire 
 of which finite beings have the deepest experience 
 is bent on just those things that cannot be generalized 
 nor made abstract? What we want in them, and that 
 on which our happiness depends, seems to be offered 
 but this once in all possible life, and nothing like it 
 
 141 
 
IMMANUEL KANT 
 
 could be imagined that would meet our desires just 
 as well. 
 
 For example, when desire is for the love of a 
 woman, it is for the love of this woman, not of some 
 woman. Ask such love what it sees to love in this 
 individual that could not just as well be found in 
 another, and the lover will laugh you out. You 
 are not speaking his language. You are looking for 
 qualities, types, principles — what he wants with all 
 his soul is not a kind of a woman but just his woman. 
 And to her he sings. 
 
 Who is it says the most? which can say more 
 Than this rich praise, — that you alone are you? 
 
 Or do you ask as the thing on which all your 
 happiness hangs that death keep his hands off just 
 this child? Then what meaning would it have 
 for you if a condoling friend were to point out that 
 you had other children far more remarkable? It 
 was not for his qualities you cared when you cared 
 for him, nor yet for his value as a unit in counting 
 your offspring. 
 
 I don't pretend to explain why this is, or what 
 it all means 5^ but when Kant maintains that to will 
 a principle and nothing but a principle is not what 
 
 ■•■ The individuating quality of love is again discussed in 
 Chap. X, on " Love and Loyalty." 
 
 142 
 
IMMANUEL KANT 
 
 we mean by willing, these instances of objects of 
 desire that are purely individual and can not be 
 reduced to principle naturally present themselves 
 as facts of experience that may help us to catch 
 Kant's meaning. 
 
 Of all principles of willing, the moral principle 
 is the highest j but the willing of individual human 
 beings cannot from its very nature be completely 
 defined by principle. The only world in which 
 will can have an object^ i,e,y the only world in 
 which there can be such a thing as will, must be 
 a world of individual things. If it is to be a moral 
 world, it must be possible to struggle for these in- 
 dividual things without disobeying the law of duty. 
 
 Happiness, defined as getting the individual 
 thing you want, must be guaranteed, or else, since 
 you can only want something that is individual, 
 willing is objectless. Who or what is to guarantee 
 that the world in which we willers of concrete 
 things may will consistently with moral principle 
 exists? Not experience, surely j that has a way of 
 arranging things so that the woman one wants is 
 just the one principle denies one 3 the child one has 
 set one's heart on is just the one death has set his 
 seal on. The chapter of " life's little ironies " is 
 a full one. Then does it not require the guaran- 
 tee of a world maker or a world ruler that life's 
 
 143 
 
IMMANUEL KANT 
 
 indifference or irony have not the last word? 
 Does not the possibility of a moral will hang upon 
 the assurance of God? So at least for Kant, God 
 makes goodness possible. 
 
 "God, freedom and immortality," these three 
 are traits inseparable from a world in which duty 
 can speak and be obeyed 3 the Old Testament world 
 is not only a moral world, it is the only moral world. 
 And if, so far, Kant has clung very closely to the 
 Old Testament, we should find him in his later 
 writing — his " Religion within the Domain of Pure 
 Reason" — clinging just as closely to the spirit of 
 the New Testament. Those who find his reason- 
 ing obscure and faulty, would explain all this in 
 terms of his personal psychology and his early 
 environment, for Kant was a child of that deep 
 Pietism, one might say Quakerism, that character- 
 izes the Germany of the eighteenth century. 
 
 But if we look upon him as the child of his age 
 in his devotion to Christianity, he was no less pro- 
 foundly influenced by that other and equally charac- 
 teristic movement of his day and generation — the 
 inheritance of Rationalism. The Old Testament 
 and even the New Testament world images may 
 have deep truth hidden in their symbolism — so 
 the child of pietism would be likely to think — but 
 
 144 
 
IMMANUEL KANT 
 
 the authority of this truth was not to be sought 
 in revelation. It must be established, if at all, by 
 one's reason — so the disciple of rationalism was 
 bound to maintain. Now Kant is not only a ration- 
 alist, rejecting revelation as a source of authority. 
 He is also a critic, to whom the arguments of ration- 
 alism for the existence of God appear flimsy and 
 irrational. Neither in reason nor in experience can 
 we find grounds for accepting the existence of God 
 as a scientific facf. Hume could be no more con- 
 vinced than Kant that no aspect of the world with 
 which our experience acquaints us justifies a belief 
 in divine purpose. Kant went further — no exten- 
 sion of experience in future ages could give us the 
 assurance we now lack. God is unknown to our 
 science and unknowable. 
 
 Well then, if neither the necessities of thought 
 nor the facts of experience, however we conceive 
 our knowledge of them extended, can force upon 
 us a belief in God and all that hangs on him, what 
 is left of religion and of morality that cannot be 
 separated from religion? Kant's answer to this 
 question is so confusing that it is little wonder the 
 interpreters of Kant are confused, in disagreement 
 with each other and each doubtful of himself. I 
 am obliged then, since we have not the time to try 
 out all the ifs and huts of the case, to present dog- 
 
 145 
 
IMMANUEL KANT 
 
 matically one line of thought that is to be found in 
 Kant, the one along which post-Kantian thought 
 developed. If anyone tell me that he fails to find 
 this thought in his edition of Kant, or that he finds 
 others that do not run parallel with it, we shall not 
 quarrel about a matter commentators have always 
 quarreled about. 
 
 If Kant as a critic has been keen to point out the 
 inadequacy of any proof of God, he has been no 
 less earnest in his purpose of showing that no dis- 
 proof can come to us. This world is one that for 
 aught we know fnay be God's world, and if we 
 choose to live as though it were God's world and 
 we were of his kingdom, we need fear to meet no 
 facts that would block our way and deny us. 
 
 Doesn't it lie near to hand to say — You can 
 make this God's world if you want to? You can 
 make yourself free, immortal and blest of heaven 
 if that is the deepest desire in you, for in all its 
 moral aspects this world of yours is a plastic world 
 and will respond delicately to your touch. Live 
 then as though there were a God, and there will 
 indeed be onej the world will be divine. 
 
 I have called Kant's world the Old Testament 
 world and you have seen in what sense it may be 
 called soj but if you try to think of this world as 
 the mediaeval writers are supposed to have thought 
 
 146 
 
IMMANUEL KANT 
 
 of it, then Kant's religion must be in flat con- 
 tradiction with itself. If God is such a God, if 
 his creative act is such a gesture as a Michael Angelo 
 might paint, if life after death is such a life and 
 spent in such places as a Dante might describe, then 
 all Kant's religion is but a leap in the dark. The 
 thing reduces to something like Pascal's wager — 
 bet on God, and if you lose you lose nothing j if 
 you win you win everything. If God, freedom, 
 and immortality are facts hid behind a curtain that 
 we may never tear aside, we can only take a chance 
 with such facts. I have already made my bow to 
 those who find other things in Kant than the 
 religion I pretend to have drawn from him — and 
 I had particularly in mind such as understand Kant 
 throughout to be thinking of the truths of religion 
 as just such facts hid behind the curtain. I have 
 refused to quarrel with those interpreters because 
 Kant does think, because Kant can not cure himself 
 of thinking in such terms through many pages. 
 But this I take to be obvious — if this fashion of 
 thinking were the only one possible in view of the 
 situation in which science and religion find them- 
 selves, if it is not merely a peculiarity of the man 
 Kant and his personal psychology, then those who 
 followed on him, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, were 
 deeply deceived in supposing that Kant was their 
 
 147 
 
IMMANUEL KANT 
 
 inspiration 5 the post-Kantian development was not 
 a development but a new creation. 
 
 Viewing Kant then in the light of the appeal 
 which he made to his own times, we may see that 
 for him religion is not a matter of what one decides 
 to believe, but of what one decides to do. And 
 the religious consciousness may express the law of 
 its doing in the determination to live as though 
 there were a God. But we must ask it of Kant to 
 explain to us what sort of a life this religious life 
 would be. 
 
 One can quite make it out that the first condition 
 to the living of such a life is to obey the voice of 
 duty as though it were the voice of God. That 
 is, to obey it without letting our obedience hang on 
 our insight into the purpose to be worked out, or 
 on the satisfaction we are to find in or because of 
 the doing. Just so was the Decalogue presented for 
 the acceptance of the Children of Israel. But for 
 them the way of duty was revealed by God himself j 
 for Kant it must be revealed by the reason which 
 accepts it. What sort of a law does this " practical 
 reason," as Kant calls it, reveal? 
 
 Kant's first formulation is imperfect enough, and 
 seems to be based on an efFort to deduce the con- 
 tent of moral law from the meaning of law itself 
 
 148 
 
IMMANUEL KANT 
 
 — as though to say, the command " Be law-abid- 
 ing " furnished one with all needed information 
 respecting the law by which one was to abide. For, 
 as Kant puts the matter, law must prescribe a type 
 of action that is possible for everybody — a mean- 
 ing of law which is well rendered by the common 
 phrase, " What is right for one is right for all." 
 And just as one might try to convince a man of the 
 iniquity of some particular act of his by putting to 
 him the question. Suppose everybody were to do 
 that? so Kant at this stage feels that we could try 
 out the validity of any given type of act by putting 
 the same question to ourselves. Suppose the right 
 to lie were up for consideration j if lying is morally 
 right, then it must be possible for everybody to lie. 
 But if everybody tried to lie, there would be no such 
 thing as a lie, for a lie requires someone to believe 
 it as well as someone to utter it. Universal lying 
 would be impossible 3 the maxim, " Be a good liar," 
 could not be generalized into a law. 
 
 " So act that the maxim of your conduct could 
 become a universal law." ^ This is the formula that 
 Kant finds first of all for the full duty of man. 
 But of course on this basis one could not sell a share 
 
 ^ The exact wording: " Handle so, dass die Maxlme deines 
 Willens jederzeit zugleich als Princip einer allgemeinen Gesetz- 
 gebung gelten konne." K. d. p. V., i, i, i. 
 
 149 
 
IMMANUEL KANT 
 
 of stock, for if everybody were to try it, there 
 would be no market. On the other hand Kant 
 himself has only a tortured and inadequate account 
 to give of the reason why one should not commit 
 suicide, for it looks as though we might all do that 
 much together. 
 
 More interesting is Kant's second attempt to 
 formulate the law of duty. Almost against his 
 will, one would say, Kant is forced to consider the 
 act from the point of view of its purpose. The 
 purpose of a moral act must be such that everybody 
 may pursue the same purpose.^ An immoral world 
 is one in which many want a thing that can not be 
 shared — Kant recalls with humor the remark of 
 King Francis, that he and his brother Charles were 
 in perfect accord for both wanted the same thing 
 — namely the possession of Milan. A moral world 
 is one in which no desires are contradictory. 
 
 The moment Kant has said this he has made the 
 
 ^ Cf : " In der ganzen Schopfung kann alles was man will, 
 und voriiber man etwas vermag, auch bloss ah Mittel gebraucht 
 werden; nur der Mensch . . . ist Zweck an sich selbst. . . . 
 Eben um dieser willen ist jeder Wille . . . auf die Bedingung 
 der Einstimmung mit der Autonomie des verniinftigen Wesens 
 eingeschrankt, es namlich keiner Absicht zu unterwerfen, die 
 nicht nach einem Gesetze, welches aus dem Willen des leiden- 
 den Subjects selbst entspringen konnte, moglich ist. . . ." K. 
 d. p. v., I, I, 3. 
 
 150 
 
IMMANUEL KANT 
 
 moral world an ideal, an image of a world not 
 identical with this present one, but into which our 
 faith demands that the present one may by our 
 effort evolve. It is impossible so far as I can see 
 to make Kant^s first impression of duty square with 
 this account of it. It cannot be that duty is a 
 simple certain command that the humblest under- 
 standing can grasp. It must be that duty is a more 
 or less vague striving toward this ideal, a striving 
 to make the world in which we live with one an- 
 other approximate more and more closely to this 
 beautiful republic whose motto might be modeled 
 after Rabelais, " ^ Fais ce que voudras,' et ne nuis 
 pas a ton voisin." ^ Religion then is the determina- 
 tion to allow nothing to divert us from this struggle 
 which it would not be out of place to call the struggle 
 after divinity. Immortality would be a direction, 
 not a condition. Happiness — the religious happi- 
 ness — the sense of the progress to which we are 
 contributing. All this seems to flow naturally from 
 the Kantian conception, but Kant has that in him 
 which will not let such results follow. He stands 
 divided against himself. His theory of duty as 
 decalogue law, his less confident but no less endur- 
 ing conception of the object of religion as facts 
 behind a veil, stand in contradiction with his view 
 
 ^ Pierre Louys. 
 
IMMANUEL KANT 
 
 of duty as a struggle that must be more or less 
 blind, baffled, and empirical toward a goal infinitely 
 remote. 
 
 In this contradiction we must leave him. Re- 
 ligion, as the name for a search after the kind of 
 reality in which are reconciled the multiple strivings 
 that leave us divided each within himself and one 
 from another, was the deep inspiration of those who 
 followed Kant. They thought they owed this in- 
 spiration to the master, and so indeed they didj but it 
 is not surprising that Kant himself refused to recog- 
 nize his immediate ofFspring (Fichte) and would 
 probably have been greatly shocked at the specula- 
 tions of his more remote progeny. Nor is it sur- 
 prising to one accustomed to the disappointments 
 of which the history of thought is the living 
 chronicle that one of those inspired by Kant to this 
 very search should have ended his seeking with the 
 tragic finding that the harmonious will is an illusion 
 and a contradiction. Will is essentially war, cries 
 Schopenhauer, There is that in the experience of 
 every man which forces him to give ear to this cry, 
 voicing though it does the deepest and final denial 
 of all that is religious. 
 
 152 
 
VI 
 
 ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER 
 
 1788-1860 
 
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER 
 
 We live in a room that has a dark corner. The 
 shadows are there and we know they are there j but 
 we will not look their way. We busy ourselves 
 with a thousand things that are doubtless important j 
 we sit by the lamp and are doubtless full of cheer- 
 ful thoughts. It is held to be wise to behave in 
 this way, and if the things we busy ourselves with 
 are really important then it may be admitted that 
 our conduct is really wise. But back there among 
 the shadows, the darkest of them all, lurks the 
 spirit of questioning. " What is the use? " it keeps 
 asking, " What is the use? " If we listen we are 
 lost, yet those who have listened and lost them- 
 selves tell us that there is such peace to be had of 
 knowing the worst that compared with it the prizes 
 of struggling life are but children's toys. 
 
 " To see where the worst problems of life lie," 
 writes a philosopher of our own day, " is a very 
 black experience. And yet, so much does human 
 reason live on insight that I have never met a man 
 who was alive to those deepest problems and who 
 repented him of his insight."^ 
 
 ^ Royce. 
 
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER 
 
 Now the one to whom of all men this insight 
 into the deep abyss has been vouchsafed was Arthur 
 Schopenhauer. According to the older ideas of 
 tragedy, the world has at times and in spots seemed 
 sad enough 5 but Schopenhauer invented a new con- 
 ception of tragedy, more ingeniously painful than 
 any that had gone before, and then he showed that 
 the play which most completely set forth this idea 
 was just the whole of life. 
 
 The work in which this thought is most system- 
 atically developed bears the double title, " On the 
 World as Will and Idea (Vorstellung)," whose 
 first edition appeared in 1818. We may safely con- 
 fine ourselves to this single work in our present 
 study of Schopenhauer, for his life was one of those 
 lives that move rapidly to a moment of maturity 
 then subside into a ruminating reflection on their 
 achievement. 
 
 To have reached at thirty a life-view from which 
 one never afterwards departs might be taken to 
 argue either a certain shallowness of mind or an 
 unusual depth of conviction. One recalls the sixty- 
 year-old Kant, painfully struggling with a bare 
 theory of method, and then for some twenty years 
 more laboring to apply this method to the prob- 
 lems of life with results so vigorously reacting on 
 the method itself as to have created a suspicion of 
 
 156 
 
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER 
 
 change of view. It is certain that in contrast with 
 Kant, Schopenhauer leaves an impression of facility 
 in thought and style. This effect is no doubt partly 
 to be accounted for by a difference in upbringing 
 and in the circumstances surrounding production. 
 Kant was the very complete university professor j 
 Schopenhauer, a man of the world whose one early 
 experiment in academic life was a most convincing 
 failure. He alone of all the great names that 
 recognize Kant as master — Fichte, Schelling, 
 Hegel — had the assured position and material 
 means to spare himself the laborious training of one 
 who would enter the academic lists. Free then to 
 live as he would, he develops the tastes and the 
 methods of the private scholar of means, reflecting 
 the experience of an easy bachelor existence of inns, 
 and travel, and wide unsystematic reading. 
 
 It is the early training doubtless of one intended 
 for a higher social stratum, that imposes on Schopen- 
 hauer a sense of obligation to be lordly 3 a style that 
 is free, rather grand, perhaps a bit overdressed j a 
 certain insolence of tone from which even his 
 friends suffer at times, and which when it is ques- 
 tion of his enemies sinks to a level of abuse whose 
 epithets must be shadowed forth with initial and 
 dash. 
 
 But apart from these external conditions, one 
 
 157 
 
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER 
 
 recognizes in Schopenhauer the spirit of the fighter 
 rather than that of the critic. He is a man of one 
 idea, embraced as soon as encountered, then de- 
 fended with boldness and eloquence and wit. Such 
 a character hardly develops the great thinker 5 but it 
 may well be possessed of a great thought. The 
 thought of Schopenhauer is none the less great for 
 being gloomy and repellant. 
 
 The double title, "The World as Will and 
 Idea," hints at a double aspect that experience pre- 
 sents, the one to the eye of the observer, the other 
 to the mind of the thinker. To the observing eye, 
 it is a spread of bodies in space and time, obeying 
 the laws of mechanical necessity j just such a world 
 as Kant has described in his " Kritik der reinen Ver- 
 nunft." Schopenhauer, following Kant, calls this 
 the world of appearance, the phenomenal world. 
 
 But when we say " a world of appearances " we 
 seem to hint at a something that appears, and ap- 
 pears not to the eye that follows the mechanical 
 behavior of bodies in space and time but as revealed 
 to the thought of one who asks: Wherefore this 
 agitated phenomenon? Just as, watching my neigh- 
 bor move and gesticulate, I ask myself: What is it 
 all about? so, seeing Nature a-quiver, I ask myself: 
 What does she mean? And just as my neighbor's 
 
 158 
 
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER 
 
 conduct is understood when I have caught the pur- 
 pose, the motive that inspires it, so I may be 
 expected to have reached the " real nature '' of the 
 fleeting world if I can but find the will which it 
 expresses. 
 
 It is then the World as Will that profoundly 
 interests Schopenhauer, as it has profoundly inter- 
 ested all men, from the most primitive that have 
 implored the gods, to the most cautiously reflective 
 who, like Kant, have felt confident of at least this 
 much, that no definition of a good life was possible 
 that did not postulate a world-purpose. 
 
 Now the plainest man can assure himself that 
 there are enough — alas, too many — purposes to 
 be found in nature for the looking. There are 
 mine and yours, that of our country, of our human 
 race, of other races too, for the lower animals have 
 disputed the world with us, as the vegetables have 
 disputed it with them. But when one asks one- 
 self: What ultimate purpose is served by all this 
 disputing for a foothold? then indeed one's imagi- 
 nation is put to the test. There are too many pur- 
 poses, there is too little purpose, to let this search 
 for nature's will with us end in a quick and happy 
 finding. 
 
 All this is matter of common knowledge and 
 common experience, yet how few have had the 
 
 159 
 
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER 
 
 courage to give up hope in an ultimate happy find- 
 ing, and how easily is this hope deceived with 
 dreams, how willingly does it dispense with proof. 
 Here indeed is the region in which " the heart has 
 its reasons that the reason does not understand." 
 Well, it is Schopenhauer's great act of courage that 
 the purpose he was unable to find he refused to hope 
 for 5 the reason that the reason could not understand 
 he closed his heart to. Resolutely, he searched the 
 the dark corner and finally stared at the shadow. 
 
 " Everywhere in nature we see strife, conflict and 
 alternation of victory." 
 
 " Every kind of being fights for the matter, the 
 space, and the time of the others. This strife may 
 be followed throughout the whole of nature, but 
 most distinctly in the animal kingdom. For the 
 animals have the whole of the vegetable kingdom 
 for their food, while within the animal kingdom 
 every beast is the prey and food of another. So 
 does the will to live everywhere prey upon itself 
 till finally we come to the human race. This, be- 
 cause it subdues all others, regards nature as a 
 manufactory of things for its use. Yet even the 
 human race reveals within itself with terrible dis- 
 tinctness the same conflict j the same variance with 
 itself of the will to live, and we cry homo homini 
 
 lufUS,^^ ^ 1 Abridged. 
 
 1 60 
 
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER 
 
 This picture of universal warfare is the first scene 
 in Schopenhauer's world-tragedy j but it is far from 
 the climax. It is in itself not even tragic, for is it 
 not an aspect of nature that however much it may 
 suggest of defeat and suffering it must reveal just 
 as much of triumph and glory? For every victim 
 a victor, and may we not suppose that some prin- 
 ciple of justice awards the pains and pleasures of 
 it all? 
 
 But no, Schopenhauer goes relentlessly on. The 
 conqueror is crowned with vanity and his spoils are 
 illusions: 
 
 " The inner being of nature is a striving without 
 rest and without respite. ... a willing and striv- 
 ing that may very well be compared to an unquench- 
 able thirst. But since the basis of all willing is 
 need, deficiency and thus pain, the nature of brute 
 and man alike is originally and of its very essence 
 subject' to pain. If on the other hand, it is deprived 
 of objects of desire through too easy satisfaction, 
 such void and ennui fills the heart that existence 
 becomes an unbearable burden to it. Thus life 
 swings like a pendulum from pain to ennui, from 
 ennui to pain." And Schopenhauer finds an odd 
 unconscious recognition of this truth in the popular 
 imaginings concerning heaven and hell. " After 
 man had transferred all pain and torments to hell," 
 
 i6i 
 
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER 
 
 he notes with an amused cynicism, " there then re- 
 mained nothing but ennui to furnish heaven with.^' 
 The survivor of the struggle for existence is on 
 these terms hardly a being to be envied, and the 
 " terque quaterque beati ^^ must often come to his 
 lips as he recalls those who have fallen. Indeed, 
 it is exactly that place in the scale of existence 
 which gives advantage in the struggle, that brings 
 with it a consciousness of the vanity of this same 
 struggle. It is exactly to man, who in his moment 
 of pride has thought nature a " manufactory of 
 things for his use," that is given the most poignant 
 sense of alternating hunger and satiety. This most 
 necessitous of all beings " stands upon the earth, 
 left to himself, uncertain about everything except 
 his own lack and misery. Consequently the care 
 for the maintenance of that existence under exact- 
 ing demands which are renewed every day occupies 
 as a rule the whole of human life. To this is 
 directly related a second claim, the propagation of 
 the species. Here he is threatened from all sides 
 by the most different kinds of danger, from which 
 it requires constant watchfulness to escape. With 
 cautious steps and casting anxious glances around he 
 pursues his path — thus he went as a savage, thus 
 he goes in civilized life 3 and there is no security for 
 him. 
 
 162 
 
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER 
 
 Qualibus in tenebris vitae, quantisque periclis 
 Degitur hoc oevi, quodcumquest. 
 
 " Life is a sea full of rocks and whirlpools which 
 man avoids with the greatest care and solicitude, 
 although he knows that even if he succeeds in get- 
 ting through with all his efforts and skill, he comes 
 thus but the nearer at every tack to the greatest, the 
 total, the inevitable shipwreck, death." 
 
 And Schopenhauer rounds off the whole with 
 these lines, " Thus, between desiring and attaining 
 all human life flows on. The wish is in its nature 
 pain, the attainment . . . satiety: the end is an 
 illusion and possession takes away charm. The wish, 
 the need, presents itself under a new form, or when 
 it does not, follows desolateness, emptiness, ennui 
 against which the conflict is just as painful as against 
 want." And just as the superior animal is the most 
 suffering of all animals, so the superior man is the 
 most suffering of all men. The calm joy of sci- 
 ence, the pleasure of the beautiful, the delight in art 
 — " these things demanding rare talents are granted 
 to very few, and to those few only as a passing dream. 
 And then even these few on account of their higher 
 intellectual power are made susceptible of far 
 greater suffering than duller minds can ever feel. 
 Moreover such men are placed in lonely isolation by 
 
 163 
 
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER 
 
 a nature obviously different from that of others, so 
 that here too accounts are squared." 
 
 As for the ordinary man, his being " is a weary 
 longing and complaining, a dreamlike staggering 
 through the four ages of life to death — accompa- 
 nied by a series of trivial thoughts." 
 
 " Every human being and his course of life is but 
 another short dream of the endless spirit of nature, 
 the persistent will to live^ is only another fleeting 
 form which [nature] carelessly sketches in its infi- 
 nite pages . . . allows to remain for a time so 
 short it vanishes into nothing . . . and then ob- 
 literates to make new room." 
 
 From a previous passage touching on the life and 
 character of Schopenhauer it may have been gath- 
 ered that his was no very lovable personality. And 
 being unlovable, it is not surprising that he was little 
 loved j neither by wife nor child, which he had notj 
 neither by mother nor sister, which he had and of- 
 fended 3 nor yet by close friends which if he had for 
 a moment he usually managed to estrange. It is 
 true, perhaps, that his dog loved him, the inseparable 
 poodle whom the children of the neighborhood used 
 to call der junge Schopenhauer, for the tenderest 
 side of Schopenhauer's make-up was turned toward 
 dumb animals. But the love of a dog is a poor sub- 
 
 164 
 
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER 
 
 stitute for all other loves, and it is not surprising 
 that certain minds to whom optimism is a foregone 
 conclusion should have dismissed Schopenhauer with 
 the observation that to him who looks through 
 clouded glasses the world must needs be dark. 
 
 If we are tempted to make this easy comment, 
 we should remember the note that Schopenhauer is 
 never tired of appending to his pages, the reminder 
 that he stands not alone but is the expression of 
 whole races and civilizations. He is heir to the deep 
 pessimism of the East, of Brahminism, of Buddhism, 
 that called life a " veil of illusion," and figured one 
 attached to its purposeless turning as " tied to the 
 wheel of things." He is the voice of that Christian- 
 ity that fled to the desert, and hid itself in monas- 
 teries. He could repeat after the " Imitation of 
 Christ," "Truly it is misery even to live upon the 
 earth. The more spiritual a man desires to be, the 
 more bitter does this life become to him; because 
 he sees more clearly and perceives more sensibly the 
 defects of human corruption. For to eat and to 
 drink, to sleep and to watch, to labor and to rest, to 
 be subject to the necessities of nature is a great mis- 
 ery and affliction to a religious man, who would 
 gladly be set loose." 
 
 No, Schopenhauer did not stand alone — the past 
 was behind him, and as it proved the future ready 
 
 i6s 
 
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER 
 
 for his message. Not merely among the technical 
 philosophers is his influence to be traced, but in that 
 sensitive expression of what is passing in the heart 
 of his age — the artist. Never has art had the cour- 
 age it now displays to conceive the tragedy of life as 
 Schopenhauer thought it out — not indeed the 
 drama of guilt and its punishment, the ideal of 
 justice working itself out at the cost of individual 
 pain. This is the older conception of tragedy — 
 Schopenhauer would say it is not tragedy at all. To 
 the modern conception tragedy lies in the percep- 
 tion that there is no justice in the world — only 
 indifference, only chance, only stupidity. One 
 might cite works of Flaubert, tales of Maupassant, 
 pages of Anatole France j but most notable of all, 
 pretty much the whole literary output of Thomas 
 Hardy, that tireless recorder of " Life's Little 
 Ironies," that bold acknowledger of crass casualty 
 as the only god of things. Schopenhauer does not 
 stand alone against a background of forgotten 
 gloom if one may still hear the voice of nature 
 questioning as Hardy heard it: 
 
 ** When I look forth at dawning, pool, 
 Field, flockj and lonely tree 
 All seem to look at me 
 Like chastened children sitting silent in a school. 
 
 i66 
 
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER 
 
 " Their faces dulled, constrained and worn, 
 As though the master's ways 
 Through the long teaching days 
 Their first terrestrial zest had chilled and overborne. 
 
 " And on them stirs, in lippings mere 
 
 (As if once in clear call, 
 
 But now scarce breathed at all) 
 * We wonder, ever wonder, why we find us here. 
 
 (C ( 
 
 Has some vast Imbecility 
 
 Mighty to build and blend 
 
 But impotent to tend 
 Framed us in jest, and left us now to hazardry? ' 
 
 Thus things around. No answer I . . . " 
 
 It is time we come to the question: What then? 
 Life is a misery, and then what? 
 
 " The door is open," said Marcus Aurelius. " The 
 door is open, if the house is smoky, leave it." It 
 is the solution of antiquity, and Schopenhauer him- 
 self finds it much more reasonable than most of 
 the reasons that have been urged against it. Yet it 
 is not through this easily opened door that he sees 
 a way of escape from the ironic will to live. If that 
 will had a date and a local habitation, then indeed 
 to kill the body in which it dwelt would put an end 
 to the monster. But such is not the case. Among 
 
 167 
 
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER 
 
 the accidents of time and space you happen to be 
 one 3 but had you not been one, or were you no 
 longer one, the game would play itself out by the 
 same rules, only another pawn would be on the spot 
 that was yours. Now the evil of the game is not 
 that you happen to be one of the pieces, but rather 
 that it should be played at all. Not the pawn, but 
 the player must be killed, and the player is always 
 that brutal Will to Live, pitted against itself, win- 
 ning as it loses and losing as it wins. Step out of it 
 if you will, what does he care? But stay in it, and by 
 doing your part not with but against him you may 
 not only emancipate yourself but have your share 
 in putting an end to the game itself. What is this 
 part to be played by each against the Will to Live? 
 We shall come to Schopenhauer's account of it in 
 due time, meanwhile it is certainly not the impatient 
 gesture of self-destruction. 
 
 From the past again comes another answer to the 
 question: What then? It takes the form of a wine 
 song, and we catch its refrain from the lips of singer 
 after singer. " Another and another cup," cries 
 Omar, " to drown the memory of this insolence." 
 
 Well, for this solution too Schopenhauer has his 
 sympathy. Not for the wine that is red, to be sure, 
 — its intoxication is too brief, the awakening too 
 bitter — but for the wine of beauty wherever it is 
 
 i68 
 
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER 
 
 to be found in nature or in art. It is most natural 
 that Schopenhauer — for whom the woe of life 
 springs from the possession of an aggressive, fight- 
 ing selfhood — should have looked for solace to 
 that beauty in which, we say, we forget ourselves, 
 before which we stand rapt. The eiffect every one 
 knows — the cause? That was Schopenhauer's pe- 
 culiar contribution to the theory of the beautiful. 
 In a word his explanation is this. We forget our 
 own individuality with all its torment, because we 
 are seduced by the beauty of the thing we look at 
 to forget its individuality. 
 
 There is in the Louvre a somewhat dirty piece 
 of marble whose size and weight with the story of 
 how it came to be where it is, may be found in the 
 guide books. This at least is its individual descrip- 
 tion. But to the many human beings who have 
 stood rapt before the Venus de Milo there has ap- 
 peared not this dirt, nor yet this marble, nor yet 
 the effigy of a woman j but just the vision of woman- 
 hood. And therewith, Schopenhauer would suggest, 
 we have taken a step out of the contentious world. 
 It is no longer a human being but human nature we 
 are in presence of, and to lose oneself in nature is, 
 while the vision lasts, to have forgotten the will to 
 live in its troublesome individuality. 
 
 While the vision lasts! But the trouble here 
 
 169 
 
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER 
 
 is that such visions will not last. In the contempla- 
 tion of beauty we have the foretaste of peace j but 
 not the peace eternal. And the question comes back 
 upon us: What is to be done? 
 
 The answer now in progressive completeness 
 comes from three sources. The first suggestion, 
 imperfect though it is, we catch from the institution 
 of civil law. Now law, and the penalties it provides, 
 is a conscious effort to restrain the individual from 
 doing wrong. " Wrong," meanwhile, Schopen- 
 hauer defines as " that quality of the conduct of an 
 individual in which he extends the assertion of the 
 will appearing in his own body so far that it becomes 
 the denial of the will appearing in the bodies of 
 others." It is then the province of law to fix as 
 best it can the boundaries that enclose a man's rights 
 to the exercise of his individual will and to prevent 
 his trespassing or being trespassed upon. 
 
 But this rough and partial method of restraining 
 the will to live from multiplying the misery which 
 it creates in proportion as it is untrammeled is but 
 palliative. A deeper suggestion than that offered 
 by formal law comes from an examination of the 
 moral sense. For the distinction between right and 
 wrong as drawn by temporal justice is by no means 
 identical with that between good and bad as intuited 
 by the conscience of man. For wrong, as we have 
 
 170 
 
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER 
 
 seen, means merely aggression, and right, the exer- 
 cise of will that commits none of the aggressions 
 law recognizes. But it is by no means enough 
 to keep within one's rights to possess moral worth. 
 " For example," our philosopher points out, " the 
 refusal of help to another in great need, the quiet 
 contemplation of the death of another from starva- 
 tion while we ourselves have more than enough, is 
 certainly cruel and fiendish, but it is not a wrong." 
 What then constitutes goodness? The quality of 
 goodness consists in an infinite sympathy, such an 
 intuition of the misery of others as gives us a horror 
 of inflicting pain, a delicate skill in alleviating it. 
 Now all the misery of life comes from the assertion 
 of the individual will, which if justice may indeed 
 feebly hold in check, goodness alone can eflfectively 
 still by destroying the distinction between soul and 
 soul. " To the noble man," we find Schopenhauer 
 writing, " this distinction is not significant. . . . 
 The suffering which he sees in others touches him 
 quite as his own. He therefore tries to strike a 
 balance between them, denies himself pleasures, 
 practices renunciation, in order to mitigate the suf- 
 ferings of others. He sees that the distinction be- 
 tween himself and others, which to the wicked man 
 is so great a gulf, only belongs to a fleeting and 
 illusive phenomenon. He recognizes directly and 
 
 171 
 
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER 
 
 without reasoning that the in-itself of his own mani- 
 festation is also that of others, the will to live which 
 constitutes the inner nature of everything and lives 
 in all 5 indeed, that this applies also to the brutes 
 and the whole of nature, and therefore he will not 
 cause suffering even to a brute." And yet this con- 
 ception of the good life, this living in sympathy 
 and doing works of love, beautiful as the ideal of 
 it is, is not the final cure for the world's misery. 
 The will to live, even so chastened, has not lost all 
 of its genius for harm. 
 
 " If the veil of Maya," our thinker has it, " is 
 lifted from the eyes of a man to such an extent 
 that he no longer makes the egotistical distinction 
 between his person and that of another, . . . then it 
 clearly follows that such a man, who recognizes all 
 beings as his own inmost and true self, must also 
 regard the infinite suffering of all suffering beings 
 as his own, and take on himself the pain of the 
 whole world. . . . All the miseries of others 
 which he sees and is so seldom able to alleviate, all 
 the miseries he knows directly, and even those which 
 he only knows as possible, work upon his mind as 
 his own. . . . Why should he now, with such 
 knowledge of the world assert this very life through 
 constant acts of will, and thereby bind himself ever 
 more closely to it, hug it ever more closely to hira- 
 
 172 
 
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER 
 
 self? " Should not rather, we ask, this bitter world- 
 knowledge become a permanent and final quieter 
 of all and of every volition? Should not the will 
 now turn away from life, shuddering at the pleas- 
 ures it once craved, but in which it has come to rec- 
 ognize that assertion of life which is the fountain 
 of misery? 
 
 And Schopenhauer expounds his meaning in a 
 parable. "If we compare life to a course which 
 we must unceasingly run — a path of glowing coals, 
 with a few cool places here and there j then he who 
 is entangled in illusion is consoled by the cool places, 
 on which he now stands or which he sees near him, 
 and sets out to run the course. But he who sees 
 through the [illusion that separates the ^ here ' and 
 * there '] and thus recognizes the whole, is no longer 
 susceptible of such consolation j he sees himself at 
 all places at once — and withdraws." 
 
 This is the transition from virtue to asceticism 
 and here we have the last word of Schopenhauer's 
 doctrine of the cure. Suicide is a mistake j enjoy- 
 ment of beauty a true solace, but a momentary one. 
 Restrictions devised by society are a corrective, but 
 the misery they can prevent is as a drop to an ocean j 
 morality which is at bottom a charity born of sym- 
 pathy is the best the world has dreamed, it destroys 
 
 173 
 
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER 
 
 more and more the individual will and makes all 
 things one, but though men in the ideal state moral- 
 ity might produce would suffer together, they 
 would still suffer, for from Schopenhauer's point 
 of view the disjunction is final j " Either desire un- 
 satisfied, which is pain, or satisfied desire, which is 
 
 ennui." 
 
 Well, this infinite wretchedness of the man who 
 has made the round of experience in seeking relief, 
 who has rejected suicide, who has awakened from 
 the dream of beauty to find the old pain still there, 
 who has tried, then lost faith in, the devices of law, 
 who has become at last a " Beautiful Soul," to find 
 himself then the sharer of all the world's misery, 
 — the infinite wretchedness of such a man is a dis- 
 ease, not of the wrong kind of will, but of will 
 itself. All will is evil will, and if one would have 
 an end of pain one must refuse to will at allj is not 
 this, the asceticism of Indian sage and Christian 
 saint, the oldest and the ultimate wisdom? 
 
 Schopenhauer takes his word " asceticism " quite 
 seriously. To this last expression of human insight 
 it no longer suffices that a man should love others 
 as himself and do as much for them as for himself; 
 " but there arises within him a horror of the nature 
 of which his own (phenomenal) existence is an ex- 
 pression, the will to live, the kernel and inner being 
 
 174 
 
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER 
 
 of that world which is recognized as full of misery. 
 He therefore disowns his own nature which appears 
 in him and is already expressed through his body. 
 His body, healthy and strong, expresses the sexual 
 impulse^ but he denies the will and gives the lie to 
 the body. It thereby denies the assertion of the 
 will which extends beyond the individual life, and 
 gives the assurance that with the life of this body, 
 the will, whose manifestation it is, ceases. 
 
 "Asceticism shows itself further in voluntary 
 poverty, which not only arises fer accidens because 
 the possessions are given away to mitigate the suflFer- 
 ings of others, but is here an end in itself, is meant 
 to serve as a constant mortification of will, so that 
 the satisfaction of the wishes, the sweet of life shall 
 not again arouse the will against which self-knowl- 
 edge has conceived a horror. He who has attained 
 to this point compels himself to refrain from doing 
 all that he would like to do, and to do all that he 
 would not like to do, even if this has no further 
 end than that of serving as a mortification of will." ^ 
 
 And Schopenhauer becomes the exponent of that 
 aspect of Christianity, as of other ascetic creeds, 
 which is so unintelligible to the pagan ideals of man- 
 hood, — the doctrine of meekness. Since the ascetic 
 " himself denies the will which appears in his own 
 
 ^ Abridged. 
 
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER 
 
 person, he will not resist if another does the same, 
 i.e. inflicts wrongs upon him. Therefore, every suf- 
 fering coming to him from without, through chance 
 or the wickedness of others, is welcome, every in- 
 jury, ignominy, and insult j he receives them gladly 
 as the opportunity of learning with certainty that he 
 no longer asserts the will, but gladly sides with every 
 enemy of the manifestation of will which is his own 
 person." 
 
 In his manner of life the Schopenhauerian as- 
 cetic is in every detail a copy of the Eastern and 
 Western monk. His body he nourishes sparingly, 
 lest its excessive vigor should animate the will. 
 When at last death comes, it is most welcome, and 
 is gladly received as a longed-for deliverance. " For 
 him who thus ends, the world has ended also." 
 
 " For him who thus ends, the world has ended 
 also." The seriousness with which this statement 
 is taken marks the difference between the two great 
 philosophies of asceticism, the Buddhistic and the 
 Christian. Whatever the Master may himself have 
 taught, the Christianity of the Church, say of 
 Augustine, is a pessimism respecting the world we 
 know, backed by an optimism respecting the world 
 we know not, in which however the meaning of 
 the whole plot is made clear. The nothingness of 
 
 176 
 
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER 
 
 the world, as it appears to the eyes of the Christian 
 ascetic is then the nothingness of this world, but for 
 him who leaves it there awaits a much richer life in 
 another. For the Buddhist saint, no optimism of 
 this kind supplements his pessimism, no other world 
 is called upon to explain this one, and when he 
 leaves this one through the door of asceticism it is 
 into the eternal peace of Nirvana, of nothingness, 
 that he sinks. 
 
 It is the latter understanding of the outcome that 
 Schopenhauer accepts at the hands of the mystic 
 East. " We have recognized," he writes, " the in- 
 most nature of the world to be will, and all its 
 phenomena to be but embodiments of the will, and 
 we have followed this embodiment from the uncon- 
 scious working of the obscure forms of nature up to 
 the completely conscious action of man. Therefore 
 we shall by no means evade the consequence that 
 with the free denial, the surrender of the will, all 
 these phenomena are also abolished; that constant 
 strain and effort without end and without rest at all 
 the grades of objectivity in which and through which 
 the world consists; the multifarious forms succeed- 
 ing each other in gradation; the whole manifesta- 
 tion of the will and finally the universal forms of 
 this manifestation, time and space, and also its 
 
 177 
 
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER 
 
 last fundamental form, subject and object, all are 
 abolished. No will: no idea, no world." 
 
 " Before us there is certainly only nothingness," 
 Schopenhauer concludes, but if this prospect be any- 
 thing but grateful to a man, it must be because he 
 has not really seen or accepted the truth that Scho- 
 penhauer would demonstrate and impart. " That 
 we abhor annihilation," he insists, " is simply 
 another expression of the fact that we so strenuously 
 will life." Of that folly and the pain of it enough 
 has been said. " But if we turn our glances from 
 our own needy and embarrassed condition to those 
 who have overcome the world . . . then instead 
 of the useless striving and eflfort, . . . instead of 
 the never satisfied and never dying hope which con- 
 stitutes the life of the man who wills, we shall see 
 that peace which passeth understanding, that perfect 
 calm of the spirit, that deep rest, that inviolable 
 confidence and serenity, the mere reflection of which 
 in the countenance as Raphael or Correggio has rep- 
 resented it is an entire and certain gospel j only 
 knowledge remains, the will has vanished." 
 
 And it is exactly in this way " by contemplation 
 of the life and conduct of saints, whom it is cer- 
 tainly rarely granted us to meet with in our own 
 experience, but who are brought before our eyes by 
 their written history, and, with the stamp of entire 
 
 178 
 
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER 
 
 truth, by art, that we may banish the dark impression 
 of that nothingness which we discern behind all vir- 
 tue and holiness as their final goal, and which we 
 fear as children fear the dark . . . What re- 
 mains after the abolition of the will is for all those 
 who are still full of will certainly nothing j but 
 conversely to those in whom the will has denied 
 itself, this world which is so real, with all its suns 
 and milky-ways — is nothing." 
 
 179 
 
VII 
 FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 
 
 1 844-1900 
 
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 
 
 " God is dead. God is dead : He died of pity " 
 — the phrase runs refrain-like through the " Say- 
 ings of Zarathustra." It is the bright news that 
 Nietzsche brings as his peculiar contribution to the 
 cause of human hope. These are the glad tidings 
 for whose bringing he expects that his feet shall be 
 called beautiful upon the mountain. Therefore they 
 dance, these feet, and bear toward us one who laughs 
 and sings. At least Nietzsche would have us believe 
 that truth — his truth — " comes on light feet " 
 and that it steps to music. " Let the day be counted 
 lost," he cries, " in which we have not somewhat 
 danced, and let us know that truth to be false which 
 brings no laughter with it." Yet, whether it was 
 that truth — Nietzsche's truth — had somehow not 
 the quality of joyousness in it, or whether the poor 
 messenger of these " glad tidings " was the victim 
 of ironical chance, certain it is that his dance brought 
 him to the doors of the mad-house, and that behind 
 these melancholy doors he died. 
 
 There is however nothing but a certain strange- 
 ness of phrase that would lead one to associate this 
 
 183 
 
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 
 
 particular message of Nietzsche with his later insan- 
 ity. It is no new idea that God is dead, no new 
 expectation that the news will be grateful to all who 
 understand its import. Xenophanes near the be- 
 ginning, Epicurus and Lucretius toward the end of 
 pagan thought had brought the same intelligence. 
 Only, according to Xenophanes the Gods had died 
 not of pity but of vice. " Liars, adulterers, cheats 
 are the vaunted Lords of Olympus." And accord- 
 ing to Lucretius it was again not of pity but of 
 their cruelty the Gods were dead, the gods of that 
 religion 
 
 Quae caput a caeh* regionibus ostendebat 
 horribih super aspectu mortalibus instans. 
 
 Nor are the ancients the only ones to whom the 
 world has appeared godless. If for Hume God was 
 only suspiciously silent, for Schopenhauer he was 
 conspicuously absent. Still, it was far enough from 
 Schopenhauer's thought that a God could die of pity. 
 Pity was for him the one divine thing left to a God- 
 forsaken world J it at least might soften, even if it 
 could not cure the fundamental cruelty of life. It 
 was rather the unreason of the world that forbade 
 us to see in its course a divine guidance. For 
 Schopenhauer, God had died quite mad. 
 
 Vice, cruelty, reticence, irrationality — these had 
 
 184 
 
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 
 
 been variously recognized as ills of which a God 
 might die. It remained for Nietzsche to suggest 
 that the most fatal of all disorders, whether in God 
 or man, was just that gentlest of all Christian vir- 
 tues — Pity or, as the German tongue has it, 
 Mitleid: fellow-suflfering. In the understanding of 
 the motives that led Nietzsche to this utterance lies 
 the key to his whole philosophy — if the " light- 
 ning flashes " of his thought may, somewhat against 
 his will, be called a " philosophy." 
 
 Virtues like races — perhaps I should say with 
 races — have their ascendancy and their decline. 
 The quality of pity is not greatly admired of strong 
 young peoples. The virtues of triumphant pagan- 
 dom were made of sterner stuff: one hears much of 
 temperance, of courage, of wisdom, of justice j little 
 indeed of compassion. It is with Christianity that 
 faith, hope, and charity are introduced into our 
 culture, and throughout Christendom the greatest of 
 these remains charity. Thus it is that Nietzsche al- 
 ways refers to these virtues as the " modern idea," 
 and since modernity is to his mind desperately sick, 
 he seeks the cause of its disease in its " fixed idea." 
 
 Now in imagining that charity or pity might well 
 be a symptom of weakness, Nietzsche does not stand 
 alone even among modern thinkers. Spinoza for 
 
 I8S 
 
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 
 
 one is inclined to be critical of the excellence of pity. 
 Why pity one's neighbor more than oneself? And 
 Why pity oneself at all? Is not such self-pity a 
 form of repining? But the cure for repining is 
 understanding — the understanding that all things 
 are of God. One might as well regret that the area 
 of one's field is not greater than the product of its 
 base and side, as that the length of one's days does 
 not exceed three-score years and ten. And Kant 
 again is no sympathetic witness to the virtue of pity. 
 " There is but one thing good," he has said, " and 
 that is a good will " — the will, namely, to obey the 
 command of duty. If one have this one cannot need 
 pity 5 if one have it not one cannot deserve pity. 
 
 But Spinoza and Kant are in this, as in other re- 
 spects, exceptions to the soft mood of modern senti- 
 ment. With Schopenhauer, the very embodiment of 
 modernity, we have seen pity once more set on high 
 as the unselfish virtue. It is the self-less man that 
 becomes the holy manj it is the holy man that be- 
 comes the sage, denying the world with its pitiless 
 Will-to-live. 
 
 Now it is against this very philosophy of Scho- 
 penhauer, against this conception of the beauty and 
 wisdom of self -surrender that Nietzsche reacts. If 
 to Spinoza pity is a folly, if to Kant it is a superflu- 
 ity, to Nietzsche it is a vice — more than a vice, a 
 
 i86 
 
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 
 
 disease, that deep sickness of modernity which spells 
 decadence. Schopenhauer, and all that older wis- 
 dom which Schopenhauer loved, of Jesus and of 
 Buddha, these were Nietzsche's great denials, these 
 were the false physicians of the soul that had made 
 the soul sick in making it sad. 
 
 If Nietzsche reacts so violently against the teach- 
 ing of Schopenhauer, it is not because he is by 
 nature precluded from appreciating its seduction. It 
 is rather because he had at one time in his life too 
 deeply understood and too completely yielded to 
 its soothing counsel of surrender that he later bends 
 all his energies to its destruction. This complete 
 revulsion of feeling was not a unique episode in 
 Nietzsche's experience. On the contrary his intel- 
 lectual life is largely a history of such accepting and 
 rejecting. Born into a clergyman's family, passing 
 his childhood in quiet Naumburg, Nietzsche in his 
 last years claims the name of Antichrist. Eagerly 
 connecting himself in his student days at Bonn with 
 one of those corps that treasured the republican 
 ideals of '48, he advocates in his later years a social 
 organization modeled on the caste-system of the 
 East. An ardent patriot in '70, he becomes the con- 
 temner of the organized state in general, a contemp- 
 tuous critic of Germanism in particular. A trained 
 student of history, a distinguished professor of phil- 
 
 187 
 
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 
 
 ology at Basel, some of his most cunning and cutting 
 analyses expose the weakness of the learned temper- 
 ament. In his first important work, " The Birth 
 of Tragedy," we find him an apostle of Wagner 5 
 his later " Case of Wagner " is perhaps the cruelest 
 polemic against a man and his art of which modern 
 letters give example. 
 
 The bare enumeration of these changes is bound 
 to leave an impression of waywardness. Yet this 
 impression would be in so far false that it is clear 
 each accepting was a matter of deep feeling with 
 Nietzsche, each rejecting cost its price. At times, 
 to be sure, he would put on a brave front before the 
 spectacle of his thought's inconstancy. Only those 
 that can change can grow: " I love those that 
 change," he writes. But at other times there is more 
 of melancholy in his recalling of abandoned ideals. 
 " If thinking be thy destiny, then honor that des- 
 tiny with divine honors 3 sacrifice to it thy best and 
 thy dearest." It is not without reason that he calls 
 the progress of his thoughts a " Selbstuberwindung " 
 and one may best understand the fierce bitterness of 
 his attack upon those he has put behind him if one 
 remember that nothing less than hatred could re- 
 place an old love in this too tenacious heart. 
 
 It is then of a piece with the rest, if a philosophy 
 which in the end represented the dearest foe of his 
 
 188 
 
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 
 
 thought should have been the friend and guide of 
 Nietzsche's youth. How deep a meaning Schopen- 
 hauer had once possessed for him may be judged 
 from the following extracts. The first is from a 
 letter written in 1867 to his friend the Baron von 
 Gersdorff on the occasion of the death of von Gers- 
 dorff's brother: 
 
 " Perhaps this death is the greatest grief that 
 could have come to you. And now, dear friend, 
 you have experienced for yourself — I gather from 
 the tenor of your letter — why our Schopenhauer 
 esteems pain and trouble a great gift of fate, 
 the devrepos wXovs to the resigning of the will. 
 You too have felt and lived through the enlight- 
 ening, deeply quieting and settling power of 
 pain. It is a time in which you can yourself try 
 out the teaching of Schopenhauer. If the fourth 
 book of his masterpiece now make on you an ugly 
 disturbing downweighing impression, if it have not 
 the power to uplift you, to carry you through outer 
 violent grief to that chastened yet serene mood that 
 comes over us as we listen to noble music, to that 
 mood in which one feels the earthy shell to have 
 dropped from one, — then I too will have no more 
 of this philosophy. Only the deeply suffering can 
 and may speak the final word on such matters. The 
 rest of us standing in the current of things, only 
 
 189 
 
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 
 
 longing for that denial of the will as for the blessed 
 isles, can not judge whether the solace of such phi- 
 losophy is adequate to times of deep sorrow." ^ 
 
 And some three years later, Nietzsche invalided 
 home from the hospital corps of the Prussian army 
 writes to this same friend at the front: " This 
 morning brought me the happiest surprise and a 
 relief from much inquietude and anxiety — your 
 letter. . . . Everything that you write affects me 
 deeply, above all the sincere earnest tone with 
 which you speak of this test by fire of our common 
 philosophy of life. I too have been through a like 
 experience, for me too these months have proved 
 a time in which my beliefs have shown themselves 
 deep-rooted. One can die with themj that means 
 much more than saying, one can live by them." ^ 
 
 One may die by the light of Schopenhauerian 
 principles! To die by them — the taunt comes 
 from an older Nietzsche — is all that one can do 
 with them. But by this later time, dying, voluntary 
 dying, dying with the breath still left in the body — 
 all this has lost its charm for Nietzsche. He is now 
 all for living 3 for more than living, for fightings 
 for conquering^ for, if need be, killing. 
 
 " One who like me," he writes in these later days, 
 
 ^ Gesammelte Briefe, p. 6 1. 
 * Ibid., p. 1 70. 
 
 190 
 
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 
 
 " has long busied himself with curious interest in 
 thinking out pessimism to its bitter end . . . has 
 probably in this very pursuit — without precisely 
 having willed it — turned his eyes toward the op- 
 posite ideal: toward the ideal of the most domineer- 
 ing, the most living, the most aggressive of men, 
 toward him who has not merely reconciled and ad- 
 justed himself to things as they are and have beenj 
 but who wants more of them, just as they are and 
 have been — more in all eternity, crying insatiably 
 da cafo not to his own life only, but to the whole 
 scene and all the play." 
 
 The passage is not without a hint of Nietzsche's 
 personal psychology. No doubt he loved contrast 
 for the sake of contrast 5 no doubt he loved drama — 
 particularly the dramatic conflict of ideas — for the 
 play's sakej no doubt he loved paradox not a little 
 for its noise. Yet it is not hard for the student to 
 make out motives deeper than the personal, and 
 more general, that impelled Nietzsche to turn his 
 eyes from the ethics of self -sacrifice to the opposite 
 ideal, to the ideal of " the most living, the most 
 aggressive of men," to the ideal of the " Caesarian 
 Conqueror." 
 
 No understanding of these motives can leave out 
 of account the great scientific idea that had made its 
 
 191 
 
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 
 
 appearance in the nineteenth century — the idea of 
 organic evolution. It is difficult to overestimate 
 the suggestion that would lie in such an idea for one 
 imbued with the thought of Schopenhauer. In its 
 Darwinian form, the essential mechanism of evolu- 
 tion is seen to be a struggle, a war between race and 
 race, between individual and individual. That such 
 warfare is the necessary expression of the will to 
 live, the most universal principle of that troubled 
 phenomenon we call nature, Schopenhauer had in- 
 deed grasped, had insisted upon, had made the 
 cornerstone of his theory of life. But then Scho- 
 penhauer had dwelt with equal insistence on the 
 uselessness, the irrationality of the struggle. It was 
 all cruel, then, nowhere benign, because nowhere 
 directed toward an end. But now a purpose in the 
 struggle is just what the evolutionary hypothesis 
 seems to suggest. What if life's pitiless cruelty were 
 justified as the indispensable means to a supreme 
 end — the end namely of producing a being higher 
 than any of those that take part in it? By the selec- 
 tion of the fittest, would not this warfare result in 
 the production of the superior? And if the superior 
 could be produced only at the cost of the inferior, 
 is there not in this sacrifice something more than 
 wanton and irrational cruelty? 
 
 It is little wonder that one already impressed 
 
 192 
 
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 
 
 with the " self-contradiction " involved in a will not 
 to live should seize upon this suggestion. " I bring 
 you a goal," cries Zarathustra. And this goal he 
 calls the " Uebermensch." 
 
 " I preach to you the Superman. Man is some- 
 thing to be overcome. What have you done to 
 overcome him? 
 
 " All things before you have produced something 
 beyond themselves, and would you be the ebb of 
 this great flood? Would you rather go back to the 
 animal than overcome man? 
 
 " What is the ape to man? A jest or a bitter 
 shame. And just that shall man be to the Super- 
 man, a jest or a bitter shame. 
 
 " You have traveled the way from worm to man, 
 and much in you is still worm. . . . 
 
 " Lo, I preach to you the Superman. 
 
 " The Superman is the meaning of the earth." 
 
 To produce the higher race! that is " the meaning 
 of the earth," the meaning that Schopenhauer had 
 missed, that only one coming after Darwin could 
 have seized J a meaning that does not mask the cru- 
 elty of life, yet takes from it its tragedy — the 
 tragedy of senseless casual pain. 
 
 But now that we have found the goal, we may 
 also define the worth of life and its duties. In 
 
 193 
 
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 
 
 deducing these we meet the most astonishing " Um- 
 werthung aller Werthe," the complete inversion of 
 those notions of worth which we dwellers in Chris- 
 tendom have inherited. " I sit," says Zarathustra, 
 " with old shattered tables of the law around me — 
 and with new tables, too, half made out." We ap- 
 proach an understanding of Nietzsche's meaning 
 when he wrote that God and man dies of pity. For 
 if with him we make whatever promotes progress 
 toward the superman our good, whatever retards 
 it our evil, then must it not be that a pity which 
 spares the weak for pity's sake is the very vice, the 
 moral disease, which makes for decadence? Is not 
 pity the anodyne of those who despair of life, and 
 is not hope in the future necessarily cruel? 
 
 Before we who are of necessity touched with 
 modernity react against a doctrine so little in accord 
 with our profession of self-sacrifice, it would be 
 well to ask ourselves how seriously we take this our 
 profession. Is the quality of mercy indeed never 
 strained for us? For example, are we citizens of a 
 young and prosperous country eager to throw open 
 its doors to the unhappy dregs of outworn lands and 
 exhausted civilizations? For this would be the char- 
 itable thing to do. How many are prepared to en- 
 courage the mentally unsound or physically diseased 
 
 194 
 
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 
 
 to propagate? Yet pity must deny itself something 
 if it would condemn misfortune to wed loneliness. 
 
 To be sure one expects at this point to hear of 
 " the deeper pity "j to be told that such deeper pity 
 must let some perish in their misery that more may 
 not be made wretched. Even so, we have passed 
 from the doctrine of the supremacy of charity to 
 the theory of " the greatest happiness to the greatest 
 number." Already we must occasionally cry with 
 Nietzsche, " Be hard ! " and must at moments under- 
 stand his phrase, " The will not-to-help may be 
 higher than the sympathy that springs to aid." 
 
 And we might carry our criticism of sympathy 
 a step further. What sanction has the formula " the 
 greatest happiness to the greatest number " ? Obvi- 
 ously, the sanction of the approval of the greatest 
 number j it is the complete expression of the egoism 
 of the mob. But egoism for egoism, is there any- 
 thing to recommend the ideal of the mob as against 
 that of the exceptional being? Surely, if we make 
 progress our guide, those who have done the most 
 to bring about modern conditions are just those 
 whom the mob has condemned and suppressed as 
 working against its welfare. Socrates was poisoned, 
 Jesus crucified, Caesar assassinated, Bruno burned. 
 Napoleon isolated, for their crimes. It makes little 
 difference whether the crime was against the state, 
 
 195 
 
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 
 
 the priestly tradition, the republic, the church, the 
 nations 5 the power to punish in each case came from 
 the masses. Each of these conquerors was and had 
 to be a pitiless egoist, hesitating not at all to over- 
 turn the world of his day for the sake of his own 
 ideal. Looking back on these historic figures, one is 
 tempted to say that the glory of the world abides 
 in its criminals, those lonely men, those egoists. 
 
 If I have included the gentle figure of Jesus in 
 a list of the conquerors, it is not because Nietzsche 
 would regard him as one who had made for the 
 world's progress, however much he may have con- 
 tributed to its history. Nietzsche would, however, 
 include the founder of the gospel of love among 
 the master egoists. Of course, modernity will cry 
 paradox! "Granted," it will say, "granted he 
 brought a sword into the world, was it not an enor- 
 mous pity for the humanity that was to be that 
 moved him to destroy the world that was, and with 
 it, himself? " 
 
 Nietzsche's handling of this par,adox is one of 
 the significant movements of his thought. To 
 understand it we must go back a little. It is not 
 the question of the personality of Jesus, of the 
 motives that were clearly present to his own con- 
 sciousness that Nietzsche would discuss. In gen- 
 eral, he is completely indifferent to the kind of 
 
 196 
 
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 
 
 evidence furnished by self -analysis respecting the 
 motives of conduct and the ground of opinion. 
 Even those whose powers of analysis might be sup- 
 posed to give them a right to speak — the great 
 philosophers and lovers of truth — are to Nietzsche 
 deceivers or self-deceived. " What tempts me to 
 look upon all philosophers half with mistrust, half 
 with amusement is not that one discovers again and 
 again what innocents they are, how often and how 
 easily mistaken and misled, not, in a word, their 
 prattle and childishness. It is rather that, in spite 
 of the great and virtuous noise made by the whole 
 company the moment the question of truth is even 
 remotely touched on, they do not deal ingenuously 
 with us. They all pose as believing that they have 
 arrived at their own opinions by the self -develop- 
 ment of a cool pure and divinely impassible dialectic 
 (in contrast with the mystics of all shades, who, 
 honest fools, will speak of Inspiration). At bottom, 
 however, it is some idea loved at first sight, most 
 frequently some heart's desire made abstract and 
 well refined that they defend with reasons found 
 for the purpose. Advocates denying the name, cun- 
 ning special pleaders for their prejudices, they chris- 
 ten these The TruthJ*^ 
 
 If then the lover of truth cannot tell the truth 
 about himself, if the cool thinker is unable to reveal 
 
 197 
 
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 
 
 the grounds of his thought, how much less can the 
 man of heart tell what is at the bottom of his heart, 
 the man of passion tell where his deepest passion 
 lies? It remains for Nietzsche to make good these 
 short-comings. 
 
 And Nietzsche makes them good in a way that 
 lacks neither simplicity nor decision. He lays it 
 down that there is one motive to which all others 
 reduce, and to which everything that lives instinc- 
 tively reacts. This motive is not the mere desire 
 to preserve oneself, the desire that many have sup- 
 posed sufficient to explain even the phenomenon of 
 evolution. It goes beyond self-defense to strive 
 after the maximum of aggression. Nietzsche calls 
 it " der Wille zur Macht " — ^the Lust of Power. It 
 is this that makes the world dance, that makes the 
 brute prepare the way for man, that drives man 
 to produce the superman. It is consequently this 
 that compels the thinker to his thought, the meek 
 to his resignation, the crucified to his cross. 
 
 ^' I am not of those of whom one asks ' why? ' " 
 Nietzsche has once written. If you cannot accept 
 his assurance that the deepest spring of conduct is 
 the will to conquer, then accept the contrary doc- 
 trine: Nietzsche is prepared to trust his insight that 
 you do this because the contrary doctrine is just the 
 one you need to work out your own scheme of con- 
 
 198 
 
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 
 
 quest, — as a wolf may on occasion sincerely prefer 
 the pelt of a lamb to his own natural coat. 
 
 It is to the lust of power in men's hearts that the 
 gospel of the crucified one appeals! The paradox 
 is perhaps most completely worked out in Nietz- 
 sche's " Genealogie der Moral." Here history is 
 made to reveal a long conflict between two contra- 
 dictory estimates of worth. For the one standard a 
 contrast exists between high morals and lowj for the 
 other, between holiness and sin. The code of 
 ethics based on the first of these contrasts embodies, 
 as the etymology of its terms indicates, the aristo- 
 cratic conception of worth. " High morals " are 
 simply the manners of the upper, the ruling class j 
 " low morals," the habits of the underlings. This 
 standard of valuation is accepted by the high and 
 low alike of a race in its youth and strength. The 
 second standard defining the opposition between 
 good and evil is an invention of the miserable and op- 
 pressed 5 it is their reaction against their conquerors, 
 the expression of their resentment. It can only be- 
 come dominant in decadent races j its triumph in 
 Christianity is evidence that the modern world has 
 sunk to the ideals of the lowly — that is to say, of 
 the low. 
 
 If we place these two codes side by side, we real- 
 ize how completely the acceptance of either demands 
 
 199 
 
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 
 
 the " Umwerthung aller Werthe " acknowledged 
 by the other. The highest worth in the aristocratic 
 morality is the pride of strength j the great wicked- 
 ness to the lowly moralist is just this same pride o£ 
 strength. The great virtue of the slave-morality 
 is humility J to the aristocratic taste this humility is 
 abject. Of the history of the warfare between the 
 two, Nietzsche gives a sufficiently dramatic account. 
 Characteristic is his picture of the triumph of the 
 slaves: 
 
 "All that has been accomplished on the earth 
 against the higher orders is as nothing compared 
 with what the Jews have done: the Jews, that priest- 
 led people that finally contrived to have satisfaction 
 of its enemies by a complete upsetting of all their 
 ethical standards, in other words, by an act of intel- 
 lectual revenge. It was the Jews who with inexor- 
 able logic dared to deny the aristocratic equation 
 (good = lofty = powerful = beautiful = f ortu- 
 nate = god-favored) and who with bottomless 
 hatred — the hatred born of impotence — set their 
 teeth in a formula: to wit, ' only the wretched are 
 the good J only the poor, the weak, the lowly are 
 the good 5 the suffering, the sick, the unlovely are 
 indeed the only servants of God and the only ones 
 blessed of God — while you, O ye high and mighty, 
 you are in all eternity the men of sin, of violence, 
 
 200 
 
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 
 
 of lust, the insatiable, the Godless, and you shall be 
 in all eternity the unblessed, the accursed, the 
 damned! ' . . . With the Jews begins the slave- 
 morality, that morality which has a struggle of two 
 thousand years behind it, one which we fail to note 
 to-day, just because — it is victorious." 
 
 The master is made to accept the slave-morality, 
 the tyrant is made afraid! Our English poet 
 Browning has given a picture of this moment in 
 history which surpasses even Nietzsche's in vividness. 
 The man-forsaken, cowering yonder in his self- 
 less humility — tempts the tyrant to wring from him 
 one gesture of rebellion, one word that suggests 
 pride of self. In vain! The slave's arm of defense 
 is just non-resistance, just a mimicry of non-entity. 
 
 When sudden . . . how think ye the end? 
 
 Did I say " without friend " ? 
 
 Say rather, from marge to blue marge 
 
 The whole sky grew his targe 
 
 With the sun's self for visible boss, 
 
 While an Arm ran across 
 
 Which the earth heaved beneath like a breast 
 
 Where the wretch was safe prest! 
 
 Do you see? Just my vengeance complete. 
 
 The man sprang to his feet, 
 
 Stood erect, caught at God's skirts, and prayed! 
 
 — So, / was afraid! 
 
 201 
 
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 
 
 But the psychology of this fear of the Lord that 
 is the beginning of decadence? How is the tyrant 
 to be made to accept the " Sklavenmoral," to re- 
 spect, even to imitate humility and to call it holy? 
 Well, the slave has on his side two things that make 
 for success: superior numbers and superior cunning. 
 For " only those who have need of cunning," 
 Nietzsche writes, " acquire it." And the strong has 
 one vulnerable point — his superstition. It is this 
 point that the instinct of slave-hatred has found j 
 with cunning and with numbers it has managed to 
 inculcate a belief in the God of Pity, to overthrow 
 the aristocratic appreciation of high and low, to sub- 
 stitute for it a morality of the miserable that sets 
 up the distinction between holiness and sin. It is 
 the denial of the will to conquer implied by such a 
 standard of conduct that makes modernity decadent, 
 that unfits it to produce the superman. No wonder 
 Nietzsche should have claimed the gratitude of 
 higher men for his glad tidings, the God of Pity is 
 dead! 
 
 In passing beyond the morality of decadence, 
 every suggestion of a plan of life that might be sub- 
 stituted for it, must come from the past: the young 
 races not yet fallen into decrepitude give us our 
 models of the heroic. We cannot however turn the 
 
 202 
 
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 
 
 clock back, we cannot repeat their acts today without 
 becoming such anachronisms as a Cervantes could 
 make laughter of. It may be however that our own 
 institutions, foremost of which is the well-organized 
 state, leave ample room for the heroism that pre- 
 pares the way for the superman. 
 
 "Where the state ends — there begins the man 
 who is not superfluous. . . . 
 
 "Where the state ends — Look, my brothers! 
 Do you not see the rainbow and the bridges that 
 lead to the Superman? ^' 
 
 Where the state ends! only there does Nietzsche's 
 interest begin. But would he have the state end 
 much nearer its beginning j yes, before its beginning 5 
 would he return to the condition that has no social, 
 no political organization? Perhaps — it is hard to 
 say 3 but it is not necessary that one advocate anarchy 
 in order that one should prepare a field for that 
 great struggle of man against man out of which 
 are to emerge the victors, the fathers of the super- 
 man. 
 
 Huxley suggests another solution. For him too 
 where the state ends a new struggle begins. The 
 state assures security of life, and of this security is 
 born a new desire — the aviditas vitaSy let us say 
 the desire for the maximum of life measured in 
 terms of power and enjoyment. With this struggle 
 
 203 
 
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 
 
 born of the aviditas vitae^ begins Nietzsche's theory 
 of ethical values. Here indeed there can be no 
 question of unselfishness, of self-sacrifice for 
 another. Within this domain the meaning of good 
 and bad stands out with perfect clearness. 
 
 " What is good? " Nietzsche asks. " All that 
 heightens in man the feeling of power, the desire 
 for power, power itself. 
 
 " What is bad? All that comes from weakness. 
 
 " What is happiness? The feeling that our 
 strength grows, that an obstacle is overcome. 
 
 " Not contentment, but more power j not universal 
 peace, but war 3 not virtue, but forcefulness. 
 
 "The weak and ineffective must go under j first 
 principle of our love of humanity. And one should 
 even lend one's hand to this end. 
 
 " What is more harmful than any vice? Pity for 
 the condition of the ineffectives and weak — Chris- 
 tianity." 
 
 Yet one must not imagine that this pitiless strug- 
 gle of which is to be born the man of tomorrow is 
 gloomy and hate-inspired. On the contrary it is 
 joyous, and gives scope for a much nobler love than 
 that which is pitiful. I know of no institution of 
 modern life that so nearly realizes Nietzsche's idea 
 of this struggle together with the virtues it engen- 
 ders, as does that of sport among gentlemen. Here 
 
 204 
 
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 
 
 one plays to win, and to spare one's opponent or to 
 be spared by him merely mars sport. Yet one does 
 not hate one's opponent, but loves him for his good 
 sportsmanship. Only, this love, this friendship 
 among strong men must not weaken the arm, must 
 not soften the willj if it do, it destroys itself and is 
 returned with contempt. We do not hate men be- 
 cause we fear them, Nietzsche makes it out, but just 
 because we do not fear them. The hatred that 
 leads one to shun one's kind is born of disdain. Life 
 that has for its joy the joy of battle, for its reward 
 the sense of strength that grows with its exercise, 
 for its delight the love of brother warriors, a brother 
 that can give and take death generously! It is only 
 the many too many, weakly looking on and trem- 
 bling before the spectacle of a strength they fear 
 and hate, that have no joy of life and cry, " Let 
 there be peace." 
 
 I would willingly describe this Homeric scene 
 more in detail, consider the part that certain heroes, 
 the warrior, the artist, the philosopher, play in it. 
 But we must sweep on to larger issues, for there is a 
 question that must have occurred to everyone as our 
 description of the Nietzschian battle has advanced. 
 It is the old question, Cui bono! We fight, sup- 
 pose we win? Little Peterkin, who was surely 
 
 205 
 
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 
 
 brought up on Schopenhauer, is there to ask, What 
 good has come of it? A little power more or less, 
 what does it matter? Our brief hour is still a brief 
 hour, our atomic selves cannot greatly swell, what 
 after all is the use of fighting when we cannot befool 
 ourselves as to the nature of the spoils? 
 
 For answer, we might point once more to the Su- 
 perman. For him we kill pity in our hearts j for 
 him, and not for spoils, is the battle fought. Surely 
 the conqueror is conquered and his winnings cannot 
 warm a grave. It is for the sake of them that come 
 after that the costly struggle is maintained. Every 
 fighter should know this 5 it should fire his heart and 
 give him courage to be hard. " Higher than the 
 love of thy nearest stands the love of those most 
 remote from thee, thine offspring, the far future 
 man. Higher than the love of thy kind is for me 
 the love of a Shadow. This Shadow that runs be- 
 for thee is more beautiful than thouj why dost thou 
 not give him thy flesh and thy bones? " 
 
 But this Superman? Can things stop with him? 
 Is he really a goal? Or only a transition, a bridge 
 to the super-superman? Has evolution really 
 changed the situation that Schopenhauer depicts? In 
 the endless flux can one find a purpose that abides? 
 
 This phrase — the endless flux — brings us to 
 one of the strangest phases of Nietzsche's doctrine. 
 
 206 
 
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 
 
 One who, with Schopenhauer, has deeply questioned 
 the evidence of purpose, the harmony of purposes 
 in this world of ours, one who has groped in the 
 night of things for that which might inspire one's 
 will to live has perhaps been caught by the great 
 idea of evolution, has perhaps cried with Nietzsche, 
 " I will live and struggle for to-morrow." Then, 
 to such an one, the old questioning spirit returns as 
 it is bound to return to men who think. The mor- 
 row of to-morrow looms up before him; the eternal 
 flux of to-morrows stretches itself out and loses itself 
 in a vague " Whither? " 
 
 If now this one turn to Nietzsche for an answer, 
 he receives one certainly; but, surely, a mocking one! 
 
 " I preach," cries Nietzsche, " the Wiederkunft." 
 
 One day Zarathustra and his Dwarf come to a 
 certain portal. 
 
 "Look on this portal. Dwarf. It has two faces; 
 two ways come together here which no man has 
 traveled to the end. 
 
 " This long road back of us measures an eternity. 
 And that long road before us — that is another 
 eternity. 
 
 " They are opposed, these two ways; they meet 
 each other head-on and it is here at this portal that 
 they come together. The name of this portal is 
 written over it; it is the ^ NowJ* 
 
 207 
 
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 
 
 " But if one were to follow one of these roads 
 further, and always further, — thinkest thou. 
 Dwarf, they would always be opposed? 
 
 " Look upon this ^ Now * / From this portal 
 there runs a long way back; behind us lies an eternity. 
 
 " Must not all things that can come to pass already 
 have passed along this road? Must not everything 
 that can happen already have happened and run its 
 course? 
 
 " And if all things already have come to pass, 
 what thinkest thou, Dwarf, of this ^ Now ^P Must 
 not this portal have been here before? And are 
 not all things in such wise fast knotted together that 
 this ^ Now ^ drags with it all things to come? That, 
 consequently, it drags itself back again? 
 
 " For what of all things can come to pass, must 
 they not again pass along this endless road that 
 stretches before us? 
 
 " And this slow spider crawling in the moon- 
 light j aye, and this moonlight, and I and thou in 
 the portal whispering together, whispering of 
 eternal things, must we not all of us have been 
 before? 
 
 " And must we not return again and again along 
 that long road — must we not eternally return? 
 
 " So spake he, and always lower and lower j 
 
 208 
 
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 
 
 for he was afraid of his thoughts — and after- 
 thoughts! " 
 
 Surely Nietzsche is mocking us with his Wieder- 
 kunf t, — with his doctrine of the eternal returning 
 of things! What! he teaches that the struggle has 
 a goal, and that goal is just — tomorrow? Then, 
 when bewildered by the vision of the infinite stretch 
 of tomorrows we turn to him for explanation, he 
 tells us that the stream is not even infinite but 
 like ancient Ocean " flows in upon itself." 
 
 " Tied to the wheel of things," India said we 
 were, " therefore, let us give up." 
 
 " Tied to the wheel of things," Nietzsche agrees 
 we are, " therefore, let us keep on." 
 
 " Courage is the best of them that kill. Courage 
 kills even pity. Now, pity is the deep abyss: deep 
 as one sees into life, just so deep does one see into 
 pain. 
 
 " But courage is the best of them that kill; cour- 
 age that lays hold on things j courage puts even 
 Death to death, for it says to life: ^ War das das 
 Leben? Wohlan! Noch einmal ! ' " 
 
 Noch einmal ! To make one ready to cry da cafo 
 to life, that is the test of a philosophy! Nietzsche's 
 doctrine of the Wiederkunft has no scientific im- 
 portance, but this fact is itself unimportant. It 
 
 209 
 
^^ FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 
 
 makes little difference whether the River Ocean flows 
 in upon itself, or flows endlessly on, or falls at last 
 into Hades. The important thing is that worth and 
 happiness lie in playing the game of life as experi- 
 ence reveals it to us, no matter what that game 
 may be. 
 
 " Thy will be my will, O Nature," cried the Stoic 
 Emperor. Is this will the will to conquer, is it the 
 will to produce the higher type, is it the will to flow, 
 is it the will wheel-like to turn in saecula saecu- 
 lorum — the word of life is " That also will I "3 the 
 word of sickness and death is, " That will I not." 
 
 There is enough of the dramatic for such as have 
 a taste that way in the circumstance that just this 
 lonely, pain-wracked, finally brain-sick man should 
 have begun his philosophy with the phrase: " God 
 is dead of pity for men," and should have concluded 
 it with that other: " War das das Leben? Wohlan! 
 Noch einmal! " 
 
 210 
 
VIII 
 
 PRAGMATISM 
 
PRAGMATISM 
 
 Nothing could be easier, you would say, than to 
 distinguish the things man has made from those he 
 has merely stumbled upon and found. The suns 
 and their satellites, with the laws of their turning j 
 the earth, with its seas and continents and the ways 
 of its winds and weather — surely no man took 
 thought on these things to make them. Whereas, 
 from the first bit of flint chipped to serve a human 
 need to all our world has now to show of instru- 
 ments of power and works of art we have a record 
 of human ideals wrought in material, while man, 
 surrounded by his handiwork, has come to live more 
 and more under laws of his own making. 
 
 Aristotle thought the difference between products 
 of nature and works of art so plain that he need 
 not pause to explain it. The years that have passed 
 since then have developed no better mind than Aris- 
 totle's, no keener wit than Plato's, but they have 
 brought us a wealth of experience — of an experi- 
 ence at once enlightening and disillusioning, until 
 
 Jetzt sind wir so klug und witzig 
 Es verblutet uns das Herz. 
 
 213 
 
PRAGMATISM 
 
 We are no longer sure of very much, and among 
 the things we are most doubtful about is just this 
 distinction between what man has made and what 
 he has found. To prove this, no one need go fur- 
 ther afield than just to consider himself. Surely 
 I may say of myself, my character, my private life 
 that it is man-made, for am not I the man that made 
 it? It expresses all my ideals so far as I could 
 realize them, and never would it have been just 
 what it is had I not moulded it that way. And yet, 
 who among us has not sat up of nights with that 
 strange being he calls himself, and wondered how- 
 ever he came to bring so uncompanionable a com- 
 panion home with him and where the devil he found 
 him? Ernst Mach tells an amusing anecdote at his 
 own expense. One day he was mounting the steps 
 of a bus when he noticed at the other end of the 
 aisle a man's face peering into his. He had no more 
 than asked himself " Where have I seen that de- 
 generate looking pedagogue before? " — when he 
 discovered he was looking into a mirror. 
 
 And who, wearying of this sorry companion, has 
 not tried to change him for a better, only to find 
 himself after a longer or shorter while with the 
 same old fellow at his elbow — a trifle more set in 
 his ways, perhaps, but otherwise little altered? Of 
 the sadder sort of autobiographies I should put the 
 
 214 
 
PRAGMATISM 
 
 Journal Intime of Henri-Frederic Amiel easily 
 first. Not from pain or poverty, not from the mal- 
 ice of other men nor any disgrace of outer fortune 
 did he suffer, but just from the being that was him- 
 self. " From the beginning," he writes in 1858, " I 
 have been a dreamer fearing to act — in love with 
 perfection and as incapable of renouncing her de- 
 mands as of meeting them. In short, a mind of 
 wide vision and a character of no strength; curious 
 to feel all that is to be felt, unfit for any action." 
 " Here," comments his friend, Edmond Scherer, 
 " we have Amiel 's cross. He wanted — he wanted 
 to want — to will, and will-power was wanting in 
 him. He cursed the inner spell that was on him, 
 but he could not shake it off. After each attempt 
 to break it he fell back into himself again, more 
 bewildered, more weary and bruised than ever. In 
 the waging of these combats the years wore on, until 
 the moment was near when Amiel would have to 
 acknowledge to himself that the circle was definitely 
 closed behind him." Would you say that Amiel 
 had made his destiny or found it? Would you say 
 that any of us is of his own workmanship, or does 
 our life slowly unfold itself to us as to Oedipus his 
 fate? 
 
 What is thus suggested by self-examination is 
 confirmed by the study of other lives. The friend 
 
 215 
 
PRAGMATISM 
 
 whose wayward course has made your affection anx- 
 ious for him — can you, with the best will in the 
 world, change him from himself? Some, out of 
 bitterness of their experience, have said it would be 
 easier to repeal the law of gravitation than in any 
 way to alter human destiny. Others to be sure 
 are more sanguine, and will not give up seeking a 
 way so long as there is a will to save. But whether, 
 even when they appear to succeed, it is not rather 
 their patience that is rewarded by being allowed to 
 live long enough to witness what would have come 
 about without any of their doing, or whether char- 
 acter is more truly a thing made by human effort 
 than a thing found and unfolded to our observation 
 — respecting these matters there is divergence of 
 opinion. 
 
 Now, confidence in our ability to tell what we 
 have made from what we have found once shaken, 
 there is no saying how far our questioning mind may 
 carry us. No saying, I mean, in the case of any 
 individual man — for it is easy enough to tell the 
 general history of this doubt and uncertainty. It 
 reaches all the way from those who think that back 
 of all apparent creating by finite beings there is a 
 Nature with its laws that was never made, but can 
 only little by little be made out. Let us call those 
 who think in this way " Realists." Historic uncer- 
 
 216 
 
PRAGMATISM 
 
 tainty then reaches all the way from the realists to 
 those who think that heaven, the earth, and all that 
 in them is, have no reality save as they are the 
 thought and work of finite minds. We will call 
 these thinkers " Idealists." From realist to idealist 
 and back again, through all intermediate phases, the 
 dialectic of history swings j but it does not merely 
 mark time therefore, it also measures progress. It 
 is of one moment — I think a rather interesting 
 moment — of this progress that I would speak in 
 due order. Let this, then, be my prologue — and 
 so to the tale. 
 
 In 1907, William James wrote of the philosophy 
 to which he had devoted the last ten or twelve years : 
 " I fully expect to see the pragmatist view," so he 
 called this philosophy, " run through the classic 
 stages of a theory's career. First, you know, a new 
 theory is attacked as absurd 3 then, it is admitted to 
 be true, but obvious and insignificant j finally, it is 
 seen to be so important that its adversaries claim 
 they themselves discovered it. Our doctrine of truth 
 is at present in the first of these three stages, with 
 symptoms of the second stage having begun in cer- 
 tain quarters." 
 
 Looking back over the years that have lapsed 
 since this was written, I cannot say that James's 
 
 217 
 
PRAGMATISM 
 
 prophecy as to the future of pragmatism has been 
 fulfilled J but that the world, at least the world in 
 which I have lived, has lost its first sense of the ab- 
 surdity of pragmatism is undoubtedly true. No one 
 was more bitten than I with this first feeling of the 
 absurd, unless it was some other of my kind among 
 those who gathered of an evening in 1896 to listen 
 to a reading of James's now famous little essay on 
 " The Will to Believe " — the essay which, so far 
 as James was concerned, opened the campaign for 
 pragmatism. James had written the paper that 
 winter as a lecture to be delivered before the Phi- 
 losophical Clubs of Yale and Brown Universities, 
 and I cannot recall what the occasion was that 
 brought a small number of us graduate students at 
 Harvard together to hear it re-read j but I do recall 
 that we were very much bewildered and not a little 
 shocked by the reading. 
 
 Not all, I dare say, who afterwards read this 
 " Will to Believe " will have experienced any such 
 shock and bewilderment, nor will many have felt 
 what we found so upsetting in a bit of writing that 
 was, as writing, certainly, altogether delightful. 
 But you must know that this particular gathering 
 was made up of students who had been brought up 
 in that theory of truth which I have called the real- 
 istic, and their habitual attitude toward truth was 
 
 218 
 
PRAGMATISM 
 
 such that they held their truth the truer the more 
 they were its discoverers and the less they had had 
 to do with the making of it. 
 
 There were, to begin with, the laboratory men. 
 Now, a laboratory is a school of the most rigid dis- 
 cipline — a discipline whose first principle is " keep 
 yourself out of your experiment." I think you will 
 understand what I mean by this when I say that 
 a scrupulous experimenter about to take conclusive 
 readings in a matter that promises to be of some 
 value to science will, if possible, get another observer 
 ignorant of their import to take these readings for 
 him, lest something of his own excitement and 
 anxiety corrupt his very touch, sight and hearing, 
 and warp his result to his will. And, what was this 
 James was defending — a " Will to Believe "? No 
 wonder some wag of the lot dubbed it " The Will 
 to Make Believe " ! And what was this again 
 James was saying — " For purposes of discov- 
 ery . . . indifference is to be less highly recom- 
 mended, and science would be far less advanced 
 than she is if the passionate desires of individuals 
 to get their own faiths confirmed had been kept out 
 of the game. ... On the other hand, if you want 
 an absolute duffer in an investigation, you must, after 
 all, take the man who has no interest v/hatever in 
 its results: he is the warranted incapable, the pos- 
 
 219 
 
PRAGMATISM 
 
 itive fool." Had James addressed a gathering of 
 the Sons of St. Patrick, in the sense of demonstrating 
 to them that the Pope of Rome was the Beast men- 
 tioned in Revelations, he might have called forth a 
 noisier response, but none less sympathetic than ours. 
 One who would invite a man to bring his enthusi- 
 asms, his likings and dislikings, in short, any will of 
 his other than the will to persevere, into a laboratory 
 with him would naturally not forbid him to keep 
 all this equipment by him in whatever pursuit of 
 truth he might engage, whether of history, econom- 
 ics, morals or religion. And just as James shocked 
 the realist spirit of that little Harvard gathering of 
 a score of years ago, so have his writings fallen afoul 
 of realism wherever they have been read — and 
 perhaps few writers on philosophy have been more 
 widely read than William James. This is to have 
 made enemies indeed, for the genius of realism, the 
 spirit of the seeker who would find what he might 
 find and call it truth, naked, unclothed upon with 
 garments of human interpretation, has sometime 
 breathed in every science and every art. 
 
 Take the realistic historian now — but you will 
 doubtless know this character better if I show him 
 to you, and the effect he produces upon other temper- 
 aments, than if I merely describe him as a type. 
 
 220 
 
PRAGMATISM 
 
 Among the most entertaining of the reviews that 
 Anatole France contributed to " Le Temps," in the 
 late Bo's and early 90's, is one that he devotes to a 
 work " tout a fait solide et puissant " of Louis Bour- 
 deau, " L'Histoire et les Historiens, essai critique " 
 — a critical essay on history considered as an ob- 
 jective science — " in which," as France remarks, 
 " M. Bourdeau puts works on history in a class with 
 fables and Mother Goose tales. 
 
 " ^ History,' says M. Bourdeau, ^ is not and can- 
 not be a science.' The reasons he gives for this have 
 not failed to make an impression on my mind, and 
 perhaps there is a special reason why they should 
 impress me — the sum of which is that I had tried 
 to point out these reasons before he did. I had 
 thrown out suggestions of them flippantly and in a 
 spirit of badinage ten years ago in a little book of 
 mine called the ' Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard.' I 
 set no store by them then, but, now that I see they 
 are worth something, I am in haste to claim them. 
 
 " ^ In the first place,' I said in this little book, — 
 * In the first place, what is history? History is the 
 written presentation of past events. But what is an 
 event? Is it any fact whatever? No, sir. It is a 
 noteworthy fact. Now, how is the historian to judge 
 whether a fact is noteworthy or not? He judges 
 according to his taste and caprice, follows his own 
 
 221 
 
PRAGMATISM 
 
 idea, in short, proceeds after the manner of an artist. 
 For facts do not of their own accord divide them- 
 selves into historical facts and non-historical facts. 
 Again, a fact is something extremely complex. Does 
 the historian represent facts in all their complexity? 
 No, that is impossible. He will represent them 
 stripped of the greater part of their detail, conse- 
 quently truncated, mutilated, different from what 
 they were. As to the interrelation of these facts, the 
 less said of that the better. If a so-called historic 
 fact is brought about (which is possible) by one or 
 more non-historic facts — and for that very reason 
 unknown — how can the historian establish a rela- 
 tion between these facts? ' 
 
 " These, if I am not mistaken, are the fundamen- 
 tal ideas upon which M. Louis Bourdeau rests his 
 right to refuse to history any scientific value. . . . 
 
 " Indulgent minds find a way to get along with 
 the treacheries of history. This muse is false, they 
 think, but she no longer deceives us when we have 
 found out that she is deceiving us. Constant doubt 
 shall be our kind of certitude, they say. Prudently, 
 we will go our way from error to error toward a 
 relative kind of truth, for even a lie is some kind 
 of a truth. . . . 
 
 " But as for M. Bourdeau, he does not wish to 
 be deceived even knowingly, and he absolutely re- 
 
 222 
 
PRAGMATISM 
 
 pudiates history. He drives her from his door as 
 deceitful, shameless, dissolute, having sold herself 
 to the powerful, a courtesan in the pay of kings, an 
 enemy of the people, wanton and false." 
 
 So far, the picture of non-objective history in all 
 its ugliness — history as it has been written in the 
 past. But now the history of the future, objective 
 history, realistic history — ah, that will be quite 
 another story. It is Bourdeau who speaks: " The 
 historians of the future will have for their first task 
 the gathering and interpreting of statistical data con- 
 cerning the common events of life. The activity of 
 thought always expresses itself in acts, and the only 
 way to take account of these is, after having classified 
 them under definite functions, to set them down at 
 the moment of their happening, to count them under 
 given conditions of population, of time and place, 
 then to compare these results whether simultane- 
 ous or successive, to note the variations of the func- 
 tion and to make the inductions that they warrant. 
 Thus, and only thus, may we some day know what 
 the multitudes that make up humanity are doing. 
 
 " This is the way we must write history from now 
 on, not only in the young countries which, like Aus- 
 tralia, Canada, La Plata, are founded under new 
 conditions, but even in the old societies of Europe 
 that, like the others, hope to work out for them- 
 
 223 
 
PRAGMATISM 
 
 selves an ideal order of labor, of peace and of lib- 
 erty. For one who has reached our point of 
 advancement, any other way of studying history is 
 inexact and childish. A reform is coming, and will 
 either be made by the historians or in spite of them. 
 The age of literary historiography is about to close j 
 that of scientific history about to open. When it 
 shall be able to reconstruct for us the life of a people 
 in the way we have indicated, we shall see that no 
 story can oflFer so much of interest, of instruction 
 and of grandeur." 
 
 I do not know that every one is bound to share 
 Bourdeau's enthusiasm for statistical history. Per- 
 haps some will hope with France that they may not 
 be spared to read history written in this way, and 
 will solace themselves the meanwhile with their 
 Thucydides and Herodotus. But at least, all will 
 have caught the martial tread of realism resounding 
 through these passages. 
 
 In the laboratory sciences the objective spirit sits 
 as a strong man in his castle, impregnable, unattack- 
 able. There we see him dreaming dreams of con- 
 quest, the fair domain of history, in which we may 
 include economics, seems ready to fall to his bow 
 and spear for the world's endless betterment. And 
 what lies beyond? Lands that are the fairest, rich- 
 
 224 
 
PRAGMATISM 
 
 est, most desired of allj and yet which will take all 
 his daring, all his courage, all his steadfastness and 
 an undying enthusiasm to make his own. They are 
 the lands of morals and religion. 
 
 I like those chapters of history that tell how the 
 spirit of the experimenter sets out to conquer the 
 realms that have so long been ruled by masters with 
 whom he can have no sympathy — tradition, coming 
 out of the vague mists of the pastj superstition, born 
 of human ignorance j mysticism, inarticulate, ecstatic, 
 offering reasons for itself that are reasons only to 
 those who ask for none. To win all this for ob- 
 jectivity, for the kingdom of the kind of truth that 
 believes only because the experiment says so, the 
 experiment that any unbeliever may repeat for him- 
 self and abide by the result — this is surely a brave 
 adventure, and whether they meet victory or defeat 
 one cannot refuse one's enthusiasm to those who 
 have had courage to make it. 
 
 Of those who set forth in this way, I should call 
 David Hume the father. Would you, for example, 
 know what is right and what is wrong? Then turn 
 not to inspired writings, but travel widely through 
 the civilizations of diflFerent countries and different 
 times and seek as you would seek any other historical 
 fact, first, what people called good and what they 
 called bad. Then, if underlying the vast contra- 
 
 225 
 
PRAGMATISM 
 
 dictions of historic precept you find nevertheless an 
 agreement in the purpose these precepts, set in their 
 native settings, served, why, then, you will have ar- 
 rived at the only meaning good and bad can have. 
 
 Or, would you know whether this is God's world 
 or no? Turn not to reputed miracles, and indulge 
 not in idle dreams of another world in which the 
 faulty humanity and utter finiteness of this one will 
 have found its supplement and correction j but, take 
 just the order and purpose of this world as your best 
 experience reveals it to you. It may be that this 
 seeking will leave you dark, puzzled, uncertain 5 but 
 better the unrest of judgment suspended than the 
 dream-like peace of faith unfounded. 
 
 It fortifies my soul to know 
 That, though I perish, truth is so. 
 
 wrote Arthur Clough. And, again, he has written: 
 
 To spend uncounted years of pain, 
 
 Again, again and yet again. 
 
 In working out in heart and brain 
 
 The problem of our being here; 
 To gather facts from far and near. 
 Upon the mind to hold them clear, 
 And, knowing more may yet appear, 
 Unto one's latest breath to fear 
 The premature result to draw — 
 Is this the object, end and law. 
 
 And purpose of our being here? 
 
 226 
 
PRAGMATISM 
 
 Over these verses Clough has written : " Perche 
 pensa? Pensando s'invecchia." 
 
 Why think, indeed, when thinking leaves one old 
 — so old, so cold, so sadly wise? That thinking — 
 the realist's way of thinking — does leave one in 
 melancholy mood may be no objection to thinking 
 in this way j but it may not be ignored as a fact of his- 
 tory. Realism's hymn of triumph is written by the 
 best of its poets and the most sincere of its prophets 
 — Leconte de Lisle. One does not attempt to trans- 
 late a Leconte de Lisle, but the thought of the final 
 verses of his poem on the Southland may be put in 
 some such way as this — 
 
 Man, if with heart full of joy or bitterness 
 Thou go at noonday through these radiant fields — 
 Flee! Nature is empty and the sun consumes; 
 Nothing here is alive, nothing sad, nothing joyous. 
 
 But if having put tears behind thee and laughter 
 Thou be turned to forgetfulness of this troubled world, 
 No longer knowing how to pardon nor how to curse, 
 And would taste a last sad volupte — 
 
 Come! The sun speaks to thee a glorious language; 
 Lose thyself in its implacable flame 
 And return slow-footed to the vile city of men. 
 Thy soul seven times steeped in divine nothingness. 
 
 227 
 
PRA.GMATISM 
 
 It is like that. This wandering in a world we did 
 not make and cannot change, in which all our creat- 
 ing is illusory — a chance trivial expression of what 
 the world has made us — with no other purpose in 
 our wandering but 
 
 For to admire and for to see, 
 For to be'old this world so wide, 
 
 — why yes, the fulness of such experience comes as 
 near as can be to bringing us to a seven-fold sense 
 of the neant divin. 
 
 Well, when a man's philosophy has turned bitter 
 to his tongue and hangs heavy on his heart, there 
 are three things he may do. He may abide by the 
 consequences of his philosophy, and seeing no fault 
 in the premises accept the conclusion with all val- 
 iance. Or, he may rebel against all logic and reason 
 and trust that sympathies and antipathies are safer 
 guides to truth than any evidence could be. Or, 
 finally, he may examine the premises anew. It is, 
 I must confess, only to the last — to the reasoners 
 and critics who go patiently to work to re-examine 
 old beliefs — that I lend a respectful ear. But I 
 do not know that I can begin an account of the back- 
 ward swing from such extreme realism as I have 
 pictured to such extreme idealism as I can tell only 
 part of before I close, better than by letting the 
 
 228 
 
PRAGMATISM 
 
 mere spirit of unreasoning revolt against this selfless 
 objectivity express itself. 
 
 With an exquisite insight into the psychology of 
 those he calls " Wir Gelehrten," and with no care 
 for the truth or error of the ways of the objective 
 spirit, Nietzsche registers his revolt against all this 
 spirit stands for. " However gratefully we may 
 still welcome the objective spirit," he writes in his 
 " Jenseits von Gut und Bose," " in the end we must 
 learn to put some caution into our gratitude and 
 some restraint on the enthusiasm with which selfless- 
 ness and impersonality of mind have come to be 
 extolled as ends in themselves, as an emancipation 
 and an enlightenment. The objective man who no 
 longer curses or upbraids, the ideal scholar in whom 
 the scientific instinct after a thousand whole or half 
 failures has at last come to full growth and blossom- 
 ing, is surely the most precious tool there isj but his 
 proper place is in the hands of a stronger man than 
 he is. We say he is an instrument — he is a mirror, 
 he is no end in himself. The objective man is in- 
 deed a mirror. Accustomed to subject himself to 
 all that is to be known, without any other pleasure 
 than such as the knowing, the mirroring gives, he 
 waits till something comes his way, then spreads him- 
 self delicately before it so that the light foot-steps 
 
 229 
 
PRAGMATISM 
 
 and ghostly passing of spirit things may not be lost 
 to his surface and integument. What there is of a 
 person still left in him seems to him accidental, 
 often arbitrary, oftener still disturbing j so much 
 has what was his very self become a medium 
 through which pass and in which are reflected for- 
 eign forms and happenings. If he tries to think 
 about himself at all, it is an effort for him and more 
 often than not a failure. He changes easily j he tries 
 to grasp his own needs, and only then is he clumsy 
 and awkward. Perhaps it is his health that bothers 
 him, or the petty pent-up character of wife or friend, 
 or the lack of companions and companionship. Oh, 
 yes, he tries to think out what is the matter with him. 
 No use! Already his thought has swept on to the 
 more general case, and tomorrow he will know as 
 little as he did yesterday what^s to be done about it. 
 He has lost serious interest in himself, time spent 
 on himself is wasted. He is cheerful, not for want 
 of things to worry about, but for want of fingers 
 and hands to lay hold on his trouble. His way of 
 taking whatever turns up, his sunny unconstrained 
 hospitality to anything that comes along, his way of 
 wishing everybody well, his dangerous indifference 
 to the difference between yes and no — ah, how 
 often he has to pay for these his virtues! And, as 
 just a man, he is too often taken for the caput mor- 
 
 230 
 
PRAGMATISM 
 
 tuum of these virtues. Would you have him love 
 or hate — I mean love or hate as God, women and 
 brutes understand love and hate — why, he will do 
 the best he can and give what he can. But no one 
 should be disappointed if this is not muchj if just 
 here he shows himself ungenuine, unattached, un- 
 reliable — rotten. His love is thought out, his hates 
 are trumped up and rather a tour de force, little side 
 issues and exaggerations. He is only genuine when 
 nothing prevents him from being objective. His 
 mirroring and everlastingly even soul can no longer 
 say " yes," no longer say " no." It imposes nothing 
 on anything, neither does it upset anything. It 
 says with Leibnitz, " Je ne meprise presque rien." 
 If in this passage Nietzsche reveals his delicate 
 antipathy for a character we had all been taught to 
 worship, in others he shows himself a pragmatist 
 before that word had been heard of. The philos- 
 opher for him is no wanderer of the seas, accepting 
 what shores he comes upon whether they smile on 
 him or frown. For Nietzsche, the philosopher is 
 a Caesarian conqueror who has his way with truth, 
 and truth is such a thing as a strong man may have 
 his way with. 
 
 But, " I am not of those of whom one asks 
 ^ why? ' " Nietzsche has somewhere written, and 
 
 231 
 
PRAGMATISM 
 
 this is so true that I can use him for no more than 
 a vehement example of spleen. If I am to enter 
 upon the path of a more or less reasoned reaction 
 against that objectivity we have all sometime held 
 sacred, I must turn to those of whom one can ask 
 " why? '' And, notably, to William James. 
 
 Now, if I do turn to James to ask him " why? " 
 — Why is not the realist, with all his sad heroism 
 and resigned courage, the noblest and best that man 
 has imagined? — he answers, or I take him to. 
 Because realism is a philosophy of little faith! 
 Faith it is that makes worlds, realistic science has 
 only the wit to acknowledge and the strength to 
 sufiFer what faith has wrought. Bold to endure, it 
 is timid to change, and a world in the making needs 
 its makers, needs its poets and actors more than it 
 needs audience or spectator. At the bottom of the 
 realist's brave heart lurks an abiding fear — the fear 
 of making a fool of himself. But a world in the 
 making like a battle in the fighting cries out for 
 fools and the foolhardy. Fiaith risks to the point 
 of folly, and because all making anew is a colossal 
 risk, let us have colossal faith. 
 
 Here, if I am not mistaken, you have the prin- 
 cipal difference between the realism that went be- 
 fore and the pragmatism that came after. The 
 faith which the builders rejected is become the head 
 
 232 
 
PRAGMATISM 
 
 of the corner. For there are such things, the prag- 
 matist contends, as faiths that realize themselves, be- 
 liefs that come true only because they are firmly 
 held and courageously acted upon, hopes that would 
 never have been fulfilled had not he who held them 
 gone ahead in the confident expectation that they 
 would be fulfilled. Take, James would have you, 
 just that familiar class of questions of fact, " ques- 
 tions concerning personal relations, states of mind 
 between one man and another. Do you like me or 
 not? — for example. Whether you do or not de- 
 pends, in countless instances, on whether I meet you 
 half way, am willing to assume that you must like 
 me, and show you trust and expectation. The pre- 
 vious faith on my part in your liking's existence is 
 in such cases what makes your liking come. But if 
 I stand aloof, and refuse to budge an inch until I 
 have objective evidence, until you shall have done 
 something apt [as the realists say] ad extorquen- 
 dum assensufn meuniy ten to one your liking never 
 comes. How many women's hearts are vanquished 
 by the mere sanguine insistence of some man that 
 they must love him! He will not consent to the 
 hypothesis that they cannot. The desire for a cer- 
 tain kind of truth here brings about that special 
 truth's existence, and so it is in innumerable cases 
 of other sorts. Who gains promotions, boons, ap- 
 
 233 
 
PRAGMATISM 
 
 pointments, but the man in whose life they are seen 
 to play the part of live hypotheses, who discounts 
 them, sacrifices other things for their sake before 
 they have come, and takes risks for them in advance? 
 His faith acts on the powers above him as a claim, 
 and creates its own verification." 
 
 These be but trifling affairs of commonplace life 
 if you will, but the imagination sweeps easily on 
 from the relation of man and man to all that man's 
 work which is done shoulder to shoulder. " A social 
 organism," James goes on, " of any sort whatever, 
 large or small, is what it is because each member 
 proceeds to his own duty with a trust that the other 
 members will simultaneously do theirs. Wherever 
 a desired result is achieved by the co-operation of 
 many independent persons, its existence as a fact is 
 a pure consequence of the precursive faith in one 
 another of those immediately concerned. A gov- 
 ernment, an army, a commercial system, a ship, a 
 college, an athletic team, all exist on this condition, 
 without which not only is nothing achieved, but 
 nothing is even attempted. A whole train of pas- 
 sengers (individually brave enough) will be looted 
 by a few highwaymen, simply because the latter can 
 count on one another, while each passenger fears 
 that if he makes a movement of resistance, he will 
 be shot before anyone else backs him up. If we 
 
 234 
 
PRAGMATISM 
 
 believed that the whole car-full would rise at once 
 with us, we should each severally rise, and train 
 robbing would never even be attempted." 
 
 Have you ever, O patient reader, in the heat of 
 a political campaign for what you thought were 
 better things met with that cool chilling intelligence 
 that hastens to warn you against trying to change 
 human nature? As it was in the beginning it is now 
 and ever shall be, gangs without end. Amen! And 
 he is right, this unduped and undupable intelligence 
 is right — but on one condition only: The world 
 will always be as it was at the beginning if it is 
 exclusively inhabited by unduped and undupable in- 
 telligences — by realists, in short. Or, have you 
 ever tried to refresh your tired soul with what the 
 Germans have written of Realpolitik? If so, you 
 will already know a great deal of what pragmatism 
 is not. It is not a philosophy of the " what never 
 has been never can be " temper of mind. 
 
 " There are cases," James puts it, " where a fact 
 cannot come at all unless a preliminary faith exists 
 in its coming. And where faith in a fact can help 
 create the fact, that would be an insane logic which 
 would say [with Huxley] that faith running ahead 
 of scientific evidence is the ^ lowest kind of immor- 
 ality into which a thinking being may fall.' . . ." 
 
 I am afraid there is about the pragmatist some- 
 
 235 
 
PRAGMATISM 
 
 thing of that dangerous citizen who will not hesitate 
 on occasion to grasp this sorry scheme of things en- 
 tire and shatter it to bits, full of the faith that it 
 can be remoulded closer to the heart's desire. 
 
 " But now," James returns to his argument, 
 " these are all childish human cases, and have noth- 
 ing to do with the great cosmical matters, like the 
 question of religious faith. Let us then pass on to 
 that. . . . 
 
 " To most of us religion comes in a way that makes 
 a veto on our active faith illogical. The more perfect 
 and more eternal aspect of the universe is represented 
 in our religions as having a personal form. The uni- 
 verse is no longer a mere It to us, but a ThoUy if we 
 are religious j and any relation that may be possible 
 from person to person might be possible here. For 
 instance, although in one sense we are passive por- 
 tions of the universe, in another we show a curious 
 autonomy, as if we were small active centers on our 
 own account. We feel, too, as if the appeal of re- 
 ligion to us were made to our own active good-will, 
 as if evidence might be forever withheld unless we 
 met the hypothesis half way. To take a trivial il- 
 lustration: just as a man who, in a company of 
 gentlemen made no advances, asked a warrant for 
 every concession, and believed no one's word with- 
 
 236 
 
PRAGMATISM 
 
 out proof, would cut himself off by such churlishness 
 from all the social rewards that a more trusting 
 spirit would earn, — so here, one who should shut 
 himself up in snarling logicality and try to make 
 the gods extort his recognition willy-nilly, or not 
 get it at all, might cut himself off forever from his 
 only opportunity of making the gods' acquaintance. 
 This feeling . . . that by obstinately believing 
 that there are gods ... we are doing the uni- 
 verse the deepest service we can, seems part of the 
 being and essence of the religious hypothesis." 
 
 I do not lay this passage before you as an example 
 of clear thinking and cogent reasoning. Who does 
 not find it baffling, elusive, leading to no kind of 
 action, must have a mind differently constituted 
 from mine or from any with which I am more in- 
 timately acquainted. It is, if you please, the groping 
 of a faith that feels it has a right to exist, but does 
 not know as yet what is right for it to do. All of 
 which is most unpragmatic — not at all practical. 
 But perhaps this very quality, this manner of 
 James's of feeling his way through the dark en 
 tdtonnanty with his heart's courage for his only light, 
 is what most endears him to our age. We sit with 
 Zarathustra midst shattered tables of the law, and 
 our awkward fingers cannot grave new ones hur- 
 riedly. We fumble, we hesitate, we begin again. 
 
 237 
 
PRAGMATISM 
 
 We fumble, we hesitate, but we do^ if we are ideal- 
 ists, begin again. 
 
 Now, one of the new things we have tried is just 
 this manner of meeting the universe half way in the 
 matter of religious faith. And this trial has been 
 no interchange of philosophical abstractions j but a 
 struggle of very living men. To tell about it will 
 perhaps illustrate better than anything else the ap- 
 peal pragmatism made to some and the oflFense it 
 gave to others. 
 
 We have all known, though doubtless our fathers 
 knew him better, that studious theologian who, as 
 proof of a devout life's industry, left behind him 
 a Testament worn to something like its elemental 
 dust. He was a realist in temperament, and sought 
 God and God's meaning in documents as an his- 
 torian might seek to reconstruct some character of 
 the past from the archives. He was supplemented 
 in his labors by learned indefatigable searchers of 
 other remains of the past from whose ruins they 
 sought to bring corroborative testimony. He was 
 opposed only by other students who had pored over 
 their Testaments with equal devotion, if to opposite 
 purpose, and by other archaeologists who had 
 searched the ruins with equal pains, if with other 
 result. But protagonist and antagonist alike of the 
 
 238 
 
PRAGMATISM 
 
 Christianity into which we were born were realists. 
 Neither dreamt that the existence or non-existence, 
 the benevolence or cruelty, the oneness or manyness 
 of God were matters with which his personal wishes 
 and strivings, his finite wantings and not wantings 
 could have anything to do. If you had suggested 
 to either that perhaps God was still in the making 
 and that those who would know Him must strain 
 their eyes toward the future, not keep them fixed 
 on the past — it is a question which would have 
 been first to put you down as an impious fellow and 
 a blasphemer. 
 
 How different from all this is the spirit of that 
 recent movement within the Christian church that is 
 generally called Modernism! "Defined and con- 
 demned in the encyclical Pascendiy^ writes J. Bour- 
 deau, in 1 907, " modernism continues to fill the 
 reviews and the periodicals, even those that ordi- 
 narily treat of matters profane. This internal crisis 
 of Catholicism, this new attempt to reconcile the 
 church with the times, aimed at internal reform, not 
 at schism. It was destined to end in the excommu- 
 nication or interdiction of some of its more refrac- 
 tory spirits and in the submission of almost all. 
 And yet, by those who shared its hopes, modernism 
 is not looked upon as the bed of a torrent from now 
 on to be dryj it runs like an underground river, and 
 
 239 
 
PRAGMATISM 
 
 some day, perhaps, will come to the surface again 
 with sufficient force to sweep away the dikes." 
 
 Well, this modernism which M. Bourdeau, in his 
 little volume, " Pragmatisme et Modernisme," 
 brackets with pragmatism as being of the same 
 temper, is, like all other modernities, not very new. 
 We associate it with such names as Father Tyrrel, 
 in England j I'Abbe Loisy, in France j the senator 
 and novelist Fogazzaro, in Italy, and if the matter 
 has interested us, with a host of other writers no less 
 distinguished. But it is really of the essence of 
 Newman, and goes back to Pascal. For " The 
 heart," Pascal has said, " has its reasons that the 
 reason does not understand." It was to these rea- 
 sons that Newman listened, and offers us again in 
 his " Grammar of Assent," and it is these reasons 
 that modernism would have to be the only ones on 
 which Christianity can be safely founded. 
 
 But what are they, these reasons, and what does 
 this voice of the heart say? Its first clear utterance 
 is negative. It does not care who wrote the various 
 books of the Scriptures, or what corroborative or 
 contradictory evidence those who study the docu- 
 ments and monuments of the past may come upon. 
 " Higher critics," so far from being its enemies, are 
 welcome participants in its cause. As little does it 
 cling to the literal sense of the various dogmatic in- 
 
 240 
 
PRAGMATISM 
 
 terpretations the Church has from time to time put 
 upon the sacred writings. Would you know, for 
 example, whether there is a Real Presence? Mod- 
 ernism would answer: The Eucharist is indeed 
 meaningless unless there be a Real Presence j but 
 whether Christ is really there for you or not depends 
 on you alone. And the like of other dogmas. 
 
 Yet it would appear that history, sacred, ecclesi- 
 astical, or profane, is no dead letter to the modernist. 
 He is intensely conscious and amply studious of the 
 past. Nor will he, if I make him out, permit its 
 episodes to be treated as symbols, parables and al- 
 legories. No, the past tells the story of a great 
 religious truth in the making. If you ask him what 
 Christianity is, he will tell you it isn't, it never has 
 been, it never will be any definitely finished thing 5 
 but for him it is the best guide to living that he 
 with all his devotion and all his thought can make it. 
 The modernists are Christians because they are heirs 
 to, and imbued with the spirit of Christianity, as 
 they are not inspired of the Buddha or of Confucius. 
 Yes, they are devout Catholics because they can 
 work better at the making of a religion in the at- 
 mosphere of their ancestral church than in any other 
 air. Religion to them is to aid in the way best 
 suited to their temperaments and traditions in the 
 evolution of religion 5 for them Christianity is in 
 
 241 
 
PRAGMATISM 
 
 process, and we are the potters that mould it, not the 
 explorers that discover it. 
 
 Well, J. Bourdeau is not wrong j modernism 
 and pragmatism are indeed of like temper and chil- 
 dren of the same age — an age of troubled outlook, 
 but of brave if chastened hope. The contrast be- 
 tween the realistic theologian with his ancient texts, 
 documents, monuments, and the idealistic theologian 
 who turns to the past not for authority but for 
 guidance, not for facts but for a sense of tendency 
 and direction — this contrast is not unlike that other 
 one pragmatism has brought about between " Natu- 
 ral Religion " and what I may call " Human Re- 
 ligion." Natural religion sought in the order of 
 nature evidence of its designer, of a thoughtful pur- 
 pose back of or in it, the same spirit that a 
 naturalist might hunt for the tracks of a mastodon 
 or follow the wanderings of a glacier. For the 
 humanist, the purpose of nature is a thing in the 
 making, and we are here to help make it. It will 
 turn out as our finite efforts form it — good or bad, 
 as we are good or badj wise or not, as we are. The 
 practical message of " Human Religion " is pretty 
 much that with which James closes his little essay, 
 " Is Life Worth Living? " " Be not afraid of life. 
 Believe that life is worth living and your belief 
 helps create the fact. The ^ scientific proof ' that you 
 
 242 
 
PRAGMATISM 
 
 are right may not be clear before the day of judg- 
 ment (or some stage of being which that expression 
 may serve to symbolize) is reached. But the faith- 
 ful fighters of this hour, or the beings that then and 
 there will represent them, may then turn to the faint- 
 hearted who here decline to go on with words like 
 those with which Henry IV. greeted the tardy Cril- 
 lon after a great victory had been gained : ^ Hang 
 yourself, brave Crillon! we fought at Arques, and 
 you were not there.' " 
 
 I have tried to show pragmatism as a moment in 
 the swing of thought from realism to idealism, and 
 how for it the most vital, that is to say, the moral 
 and religious aspects of our world are things to 
 work and fight for, to make and to mould, not 
 just to find and come across. Its god is indeed a 
 god of battles, and we are his soldiers on whom his 
 victory depends. But as I view this battle, it is not 
 to be fought out in heart throes and outpourings of 
 sentiment. These may indeed change and better 
 human relationships j but it must not be forgotten 
 that human relationships exist in a physical universe 
 that is older than they, and promises to outlast them. 
 Now, just the physics of things show a strong tend- 
 ency to be amoral and atheistic. "You all know 
 the picture of the last state of the universe which 
 
 243 
 
PRAGMATISM 
 
 evolutionary science foresees. I cannot state it bet- 
 ter than in Mr. Balfour's words: ^ The energies of 
 our system will decay, the glory of the sun will be 
 dimmed, and the earth, tideless and inert, will no 
 longer tolerate the race which has for a moment dis- 
 turbed its solitude. Man will go down into the pit 
 and all his thoughts will perish. The uneasy con- 
 sciousness which in this obscure corner has for a brief 
 space broken the contented silence of the universe 
 will be at rest. Matter will know itself no longer. 
 " Imperishable monuments " and " immortal 
 deeds," death itself, and love stronger than death, 
 will be as if they had not been. Nor will anything 
 that is be better or worse for all that the labor, 
 genius, devotion, and suffering of man have striven 
 through countless ages to effect.' 
 
 " That," comments James, " is the sting of it, 
 that in the vast drifting of the cosmic weather, 
 though many a jeweled shore appears, and many 
 an enchanted cloud-bank floats away, long lingering 
 ere it be dissolved — even as ours now lingers for 
 our j oy — yet, when these transient products are 
 gone, nothing, absolutely nothing remains to repre- 
 sent those particular qualities, those elements of 
 preciousness which they may have enshrined. Dead 
 and gone are they, gone utterly from the very 
 sphere and room of being. Without an echoj with- 
 
 244 
 
PRAGMATISM 
 
 out a memory^ without an influence on aught 
 that may come after to make it care for similar 
 ideals." ' 
 
 Has not, then, realism the last word in this argu- 
 ment and does not the rolling mechanism of things 
 have its way with us in the end — since it compasses 
 not only our death, but the collapse of the very 
 theatre in which our little lives have played them- 
 selves out? 
 
 No, I should say, this is not the moral of the 
 tale, though there is a moral to the tale. " Knowl- 
 edge," writes Francis Bacon, in his " Novum 
 Organum," " knowledge and human power are 
 synonymous." So are human impotence and human 
 ignorance synonymous. The child that dips a cup of 
 water from the fountain is subduing nature's mech- 
 anism to its needs. It is only a question of how great 
 is our knowledge if we would know how great is our 
 power. 
 
 We die, our world dies, only because we know no 
 better, have thought of no way of preventing j but 
 knowledge and human power are indeed synony- 
 mous, and I know of no end to either. But, as for 
 those of us bound to die before we have learned 
 how not to, and as for our children whose world 
 may well vanish before they have thought of a way 
 
 ^ Pragmatism, p. 1 04. 
 245 
 
PRAGMATISM 
 
 of saving it, we have always this solace — that we 
 know we are facing the only way salvation can come 
 from when our face is toward science. " For na- 
 ture," says Bacon, with his queer crooked smile, — 
 " nature is only subdued by submission." 
 
 246 
 
IX 
 
 PROGRESS 
 
PROGRESS 
 
 We little realize, until we have met them socially, 
 how engaging the manners of cannibals can be. It 
 is unfortunate that so many obstacles lie in the way 
 of our making their better acquaintance, — they live 
 so far out of town for one thing, and for another 
 are so clannish a set that only occasionally is one of 
 our sort welcomed to their inner circles. Yet when 
 one who has had this fortune returns to tell about 
 it, — which happens too rarely — we can see it has 
 been a revelation to him and an enlightenment. 
 There is that friend of our youth, Herman Mel- 
 ville, who about the year 1840 was entertained by 
 the Marquesan Islanders — I swear that as I read 
 him I find something very winning about the ways 
 of these people. It is true they were what Melville 
 calls " occasional cannibals "5 but although canni- 
 balism, however occasional, cannot win our entire 
 approval (perhaps because, as Montaigne suggests, 
 we have learned how much better it is to torment 
 our enemies alive than to consume them dead) yet 
 it is not wise or just to allow our prejudice against 
 an odd local custom to blind us to so much that is 
 fair in their lives. 
 
 249 
 
PROGRESS 
 
 For much there is that is fair in the lives of the 
 T)^pees. Dwelling on that enchanted island of the 
 Pacific, their lines are cast in pleasant places. The 
 asperities which civilization seems rather to have 
 aggravated than smoothed do not roughen their way. 
 Their existence is passed in the midst of tropical 
 plenty, on which their numbers, few and not on 
 the increase, make light demand. They toil not to 
 cover what nature has conceived in innocence, and 
 spin but lightly to adorn what nature has fashioned 
 fair. Little thought do they take on their housing. 
 " There are few villages," Melville tells us, " the 
 houses stand here and there in the shadow of groves 
 or are scattered along the banks of the winding 
 stream J their bamboo sides and their gleaming white 
 thatch forming a beautiful contrast to the perpetual 
 verdure in which they are embowered. There are 
 no roads of any kind in the valley^ nothing but a 
 labyrinth of foot paths twisting and turning without 
 end." Yet the morals of these people do not seem 
 to have been so far below our standards as their 
 benighted condition might lead us to expect. 
 " There seemed," says Melville, " to be no rogues 
 of any sort in Typee. In the darkest nights the 
 natives slept securely with all their worldly wealth 
 around them, in houses the doors of which were 
 never fastened. The disquieting thought of theft 
 
 250 
 
PROGRESS 
 
 and assassination never disturbed them. Each 
 islander reposed beneath his own palmetto thatch- 
 ing, or sat under his own breadfruit tree, with none 
 to molest or alarm him. There was not a padlock 
 in the valley." 
 
 I had gone so far in one of my readings of Mel- 
 ville, and was beginning to wonder in the back of 
 my head what a Typee introduced into our civi- 
 lization could find to say of us half as pleasant as 
 the things their guest had noted of them, when I 
 recalled that another had long ago put the like ques- 
 tion to himself when he was in much better position 
 to answer it. It was when the New World was very 
 much newer than it is now, that Villegaignon landed 
 in a country he surnamed Antarctic France, where 
 dwelt a people of cannibals the very counterpart (as 
 I judge) of our friends the Typees. " Three of 
 these people," the Sieur de Montaigne records, 
 "were at Rouen in the reign of our late King, Charles 
 the Ninth, who talked with them a great while. 
 They were showed our fashions, our pomp, and the 
 form of a fair cityj afterwards some demanded their 
 advice, and would needs know of them what things 
 of note and admirable they had observed amongst us. 
 They answered three things," ... of which Mon- 
 taigne seems particularly impressed with this one: 
 " They had perceived [they said] there were men 
 
 251 
 
PROGRESS 
 
 among us full gorged with all sorts o£ commodities, 
 and others which hunger-starved and bare with need 
 and poverty begged at their gates: and found it 
 strange these moieties [they have a phrase whereby 
 they call men but a moiety one of another] — strange 
 these moieties so needy could endure such an in- 
 justice, and that they took not the others by the 
 throat, or set fire to their houses." 
 
 I do not suppose Montaigne approved, any more 
 than we can, the touch of savagery that concludes 
 these observations j but on the whole they seem to 
 have confirmed him in certain opinions he had al- 
 ready formed on the pretended advantages of civ- 
 ilized over barbarous life. For this occasion on 
 which he actually met and conversed with the canni- 
 bals was not the first acquaintance he had with them. 
 There had long been with him a certain serving-man 
 who had spent some ten or twelve years in their 
 country, and seems to have given his master much 
 the same account of them as Melville has given us 
 of the Typees. I cannot refrain from recalling in 
 Montaigne's own words his reflections on the whole 
 spectacle of savagery and civilization: 
 
 "Now I find," he says, " as far as I have been 
 informed, there is nothing in that nation that is 
 either barbarous or savage, — unless men call that 
 barbarism which is not common to them. . . ., 
 
 252 
 
PROGRESS 
 
 They are even savage as we call those fruits wild 
 which nature of herself and of her ordinary progress 
 hath produced, — whereas, indeed, they are those 
 which ourselves have ordered by our artificial de- 
 vices and diverted from their common order we 
 should rather term savage. In those are the true 
 and most profitable virtues, and natural properties 
 most lively and vigorous, which in these we have 
 bastardized, applying them to the pleasure of our 
 corrupted taste. . . . And if notwithstanding, in 
 diverse fruits of those countries that were never 
 tilled, we shall find that in respect of ours they are 
 most excellent and as delicate to the taste, there is 
 no reason art should gain the point of honor over 
 our puissant mother Nature. We have so much by 
 our invention surcharged the beauties and riches of 
 her works, that we have altogether choked her j yet 
 wherever her purity shineth, she maketh our vain 
 and frivolous enterprises wonderfully ashamed. 
 
 Et veniunt hederae sponte sua melius, 
 Surgit et in solis formosior arbutus antris, 
 Et volucres nulla dulcius arte canunt. 
 
 All our endeavor or wit cannot so much as reach 
 to represent the nest of the least birdlet, , . . no, 
 nor the web of a silly spider. . . . 
 
 253 
 
PROGRESS 
 
 " Those nations seem therefore so barbarous unto 
 me because they have received very little fashion 
 from human wit, and are yet near their original 
 naturality. The laws of nature do yet command 
 them which are but little bastardized by ours, and 
 that with such purity as I am sometimes grieved the 
 knowledge of it came not sooner to light, what time 
 there were men that, better than we, could have 
 judged of it. I am sorry Lycurgus and Plato had 
 it not J for me seemeth that what in these nations 
 we see by experience doth not only exceed all the 
 pictures wherewith licentious poesy hath proudly 
 embellished the Golden Age, but also the conception 
 and desire of philosophy. ... It is a nation, 
 would I answer Plato, that hath no kind of traffic, 
 no knowledge of letters, no name of magistrate nor 
 of politic priority, no use of service, of riches or of 
 poverty, no occupation but idle, no respect of kin- 
 dred but common, no apparel but natural, no meas- 
 uring of lands, no use of wine, corn or metal. . . . 
 The very words that import lying, falsehood, 
 treason, dissimulation, covetousness, envy, detraction 
 and pardon were never heard of amongst them. 
 How dissonant would Plato find his imaginary com- 
 monwealth from this perfection? 
 
 Hos natura modos primum dedit.. " 
 254 
 
PROGRESS 
 
 I had thought to begin a sound philosophical ac- 
 count of the nature of progress with a picture, not, 
 if I could help it, unsympathetic, of man's condition 
 before he had felt its benefits. The plan would 
 recommend itself to any philosopher as suitable and 
 convenient to its purpose, yet here am I well beyond 
 the beginning of my discourse, still lingering with 
 the cannibals, and, what is worse, sensible that I 
 have not been diligent to uncover the many causes 
 there must be for rejoicing that we are not as they 
 were. Not that there is any difficulty in pointing 
 to the host of things we can do which they could 
 not. We have only to mount in one of our winged 
 ships and look down on the simple Typee rubbing 
 two sticks together for their spark, to see in all the 
 distance that lies between us the like of what Pro- 
 metheus scaled Heaven for. But what in all this is 
 there to rejoice over? 
 
 It is singular how many have asked this question 
 and found no answer, or have answered — Nothing. 
 I do not cite the licentious poets Montaigne refers 
 to as having invented a Golden Age and feigned 
 a happy condition of man before progress had 
 spoiled the world for him 3 although these are many, 
 and if their wisdom is not of the philosopher's kind, 
 yet is it all the closer to that " ancient wisdom of 
 childhood " a wise man does well to keep near him. 
 
 255 
 
PROGRESS 
 
 But even learned academies have thought the ques- 
 tion not beyond their interest and study. In 1749, 
 the Academy of Dijon set for the prize competition 
 of the following year the question, " Whether the 
 progress of the arts and sciences had contributed to 
 the purification of life? " The prize was won by J.- 
 J. Rousseau. His little essay, generally known as 
 the " Discours sur les Sciences et les Arts," worked 
 on the thought of its time as seldom so casual a 
 thing. " One cannot," Jean-Jacques wrote then, 
 " one cannot reflect on the ways of life without 
 finding pleasure in recalling the image of its first 
 simplicity. That was a fair shore, bedecked by only 
 Nature's hand, toward which our eyes are ever turn- 
 ing back regretfully as we watch it fade in the 
 distance." 
 
 There may be, nay, I think there must be, a mean- 
 ing and a moral to this disgust of the enlightened 
 here and now, this longing for a life not all " sick- 
 lied o'er with the pale cast of thought." But the 
 interpretations of this feeling we most commonly 
 meet with are not I hope to be taken very seriously, 
 for if they are, there is no counsel for us but one 
 of despair. Thus, whatever could come of the 
 lament for the good old days, the golden days, 
 before science had done this or that to cloud our first 
 innocence? No history written in such ancient times 
 
 256 
 
PROGRESS 
 
 but that it can recall times still more ancient when 
 things went better with the sons o£ the gods because 
 then they knew less. And it is still open to any one 
 
 — traveler, philosopher, poet — to draw what pic- 
 ture he will of far away lands wherein, for that no- 
 body wanted very much, everybody found all he 
 wanted. The subject of this sketch may vary from 
 Diogenes snarling in his tub to a Typee girl dancing 
 in her flowers^ from the desert to which the Chris- 
 tian cenobites withdrew to Tasso's bosky places, 
 where, before that vain word Onore had mingled 
 its grief with love, 
 
 Sedean pastori e ninfe, 
 Meschiando alle parole 
 Vezzi e susurri, ed ai susurri i bad 
 Strettamente tenaci . . . 
 
 But of all this, nothing is serious, nothing sincere, 
 
 — of all those who lament the past not one would 
 take the first step toward it, so little is it in man's 
 nature to retreat. Or if anyone would, yet what 
 could he do, save drag his own sadness into the 
 desert with him? As for the world, it must even 
 go on with its science, though it be but the science of 
 hurting itself. 
 
 Wherefore, no less futile than regret for a past 
 we cannot recover, is fear for a future we cannot 
 
 257 
 
PROGRESS 
 
 avert. It is natural that certain conditions arising 
 out of the progress of science should make gentle 
 souls anxious for what is to come. Science is power, 
 and as no man can commit the sins he is impotent 
 to commit, there is a certain safeguard for innocence 
 in ignorance. Only after having eaten of the Tree 
 of Knowledge did our first parents come to mourn 
 outside the gates. No shepherds and shepherdesses 
 conceived the iniquity of BabePs tower, and Egypt 
 and great Babylon were of no children's dream- 
 ing. Yet must man go on gathering unto himself 
 knowledge with all its power for harm and no warn- 
 ing gesture of the fearful can stay him. Our only 
 comfort can be that however great a power for harm 
 science may bring, it ought to enhance in equal 
 measure the power for good, — did we but know 
 what good and evil were. 
 
 Did we but know good and evil! In the sug- 
 gestion that perhaps we do not, in the suspicion 
 that this is just the knowledge to which science does 
 not help us, — yes, in the fear that it is science 
 itself which throws doubt on ethical standards — is, 
 I conceive, a motive for deprecating the progress 
 of science more serious than the others, and more 
 sincere. Science is, indeed, endlessly critical j no 
 authority of tradition or of general acceptance im- 
 poses upon it J nothing for it is finished, nothing 
 
 258 
 
PROGRESS 
 
 fixed j and to those to whom all goodness is in dan- 
 ger the moment one asks, What is good? science 
 may well seem a dangerous growth, — unhallowed 
 in its origin, curiosity j damnable in its outcome, un- 
 rest. And yet if as we assume science must pro- 
 gress, stayed neither by regret for the past nor by 
 fear for the future, then must its questioning spirit 
 invade every realm of opinion, examine the most 
 sacred of beliefs, look into the very meaning of 
 good and evil. 
 
 For this reason we did well, I conceive, to begin 
 a consideration of progress with some account of 
 the skeptics. Science itself cannot quarrel with those 
 who meet its advances with the question. What is 
 the good of you? But it can only begin its answer 
 by asking another, What do you take to be good? 
 
 What do you take to be good? Evidently there 
 cannot be two minds, one of which points to the 
 advance of civilization with every confidence that 
 it means the world's betterment, the other conceiv- 
 ing that men may grow wiser and none the better for 
 that, unless the good is understood by them in dif- 
 ferent senses. What are these two meanings tangled 
 in the single word, — the good? 
 
 It is this question that Immanuel Kant has stud- 
 ied with peculiar care and thoughtfulness in his 
 
 259 
 
PROGRESS 
 
 ethical writings, and there he has made a distinction 
 between two such meanings that seems very much 
 to our purpose. The first, in his stiff academic way, 
 he calls the hypothetical use. Thus, if you were to 
 enquire what would be the best thing to do in order 
 to attain a certain object, your answer would recom- 
 mend a certain procedure as " good," certainly, but 
 good only on the hypothesis that such and such is 
 your end. Your hypothetical good washes its 
 hands of any responsibility for what, if anything, 
 of some other kind of good or evil may attach to 
 your purpose j it only places its wits at your disposal 
 in devising the best means to this end. Is your 
 purpose to rob a bank? — Then will science set 
 itself to think out for you the best way of robbing 
 a bank. After that, let who will complain that bank- 
 robbing is not a good thing to set about, he cannot 
 deny that you have set about it in a good way. 
 
 But it seemed to Kant, as I suppose it would to 
 anyone, that we do not restrict ourselves to this 
 hypothetical use of the term good. There seems 
 to us to be a distinction between a good way of 
 thieving and a way of being good. If so, must 
 there not be a good that is sought for its own sake 
 and not merely for the sake of what it may lead 
 to? Is there not a categorical ^ an absolute good? 
 And surely Kant was not very far from the thought 
 
 260 
 
PROGRESS 
 
 of all of us when he sought to identify this absolute 
 good with the moral good and with the object of 
 virtue. Plainly we see that however good a thief a 
 man may become, he does not increase in virtue as 
 he advances in science. And have we not here come 
 upon the ultimate meaning of those who contend 
 that, let the world advance never so in its science, 
 it grows no whit better? Its increase is altogether 
 measured in those hypothetical goods thanks to 
 which the thieves of today are indeed better thieves 
 than the crude ones that used to bej but as 
 little as ever do they know, and still less do they 
 care, for that absolute good, that moral world, to 
 have progressed away from which is to have gone 
 backward indeed. 
 
 What, we asked of the critics of civilization, do 
 you take to be good? And setting aside those who 
 have idly answered. It was good when the world 
 was young, before Onor " bound in nets the tresses 
 Zephyr used to scatter," — setting aside " licentious 
 poesy " we have found the answer of serious men 
 to be. The world will only be good when it has 
 become moral. Not the growth of science, but the 
 increase in morality is real progress, progress toward 
 the absolute good. We have then only to make 
 plain morality's meaning to have found what prog- 
 ress is. 
 
 261 
 
PROGRESS 
 
 Morality no doubt first presents itself to most of 
 us as a set of laws or maxims of conduct to follow 
 which is virtue. These laws we may think of as 
 delivered unto man in God's own voice, and carved 
 upon tables of stone. Or, if our image of their 
 origin and authority be not so definite, we may still 
 find moral peace in the thought that what words the 
 still small voice of conscience whispers to us are no 
 less God's words. They are what Antigone took 
 them to be — 
 
 The immutable unwritten law of Heaven. 
 
 They were not born today or yesterday; 
 
 They die not, and none knoweth whence they sprang. 
 
 If many have been unable to keep the sweet 
 moral confidence of childhood until the end, it is 
 because riper experience has not confirmed to them 
 Antigone's premises, nor mature reflection borne out 
 her conclusions. Do they not die, these unwritten 
 laws: are new ones, indeed, never born? For a 
 little searching we may find that not a precept marks 
 a virtue for one people at one time, but that else- 
 where or elsewhen its ordinance is taken to be 
 vicious. And conversely, we do not have to travel 
 far to find vice turning into virtue. Antigone's own 
 people are not so remote from us as the Mingre- 
 lians and Topinambouesj we owe them much that 
 
 262 
 
PROGRESS 
 
 we prize most in our culture, and would be proud to 
 match them in more ways than one. And yet, con- 
 sider their admiration in the way of a man, which, 
 if it was any one, was surely the Wise Ulysses. 
 Now, if there are any two principles of Christian 
 morals more firmly planted in our souls than others, 
 they are the maxims. Be truthful, and. Be kind. 
 But was Ulysses truthful? was Ulysses kind? To 
 leave for one's unconquered enemies a wooden 
 horse as it were a parting token may be an inno- 
 cent enough thing to do, however pagan. But to 
 make of this wooden horse a disguised troop ship is 
 not within the strict letter of truthfulness 3 and to 
 sally forth therefrom to slay your quondam foes 
 while they sleep in the security of your peace does 
 not show a kindly spirit. Yet it does not appear 
 that the Greek gods resented any more than did the 
 Greek people Ulysses^ cruel craft: all of which 
 would lead one to suspect that the unwritten law of 
 peoples, if indeed it come from Heaven, must come 
 from only that part of it which is directly overhead 
 at the time. 
 
 But let time and place be never so circumscribed, 
 and men never so in accord as to their moral maxims, 
 are these maxims at least consistent with one 
 another? Does one bid us be truthful? — then an- 
 other bids us be kind! But how in this vale of 
 
 263 
 
PROGRESS 
 
 perplexities is one always to be truthful yet never 
 unkind? " Yes I know," writes an old gossip of 
 mine and fellow philosopher, " I know. Morality 5 
 Duty. But how hard it is to discover what is duty! 
 I assure you that for three quarters of my time I 
 do not know where duty lies. It is like the hedge- 
 hog that belonged to our English governess at Join- 
 ville. We used to spend the evening looking for 
 it under the furniture, and when we had found it, 
 it was time to go to bed." ^ 
 
 For these reasons, most have abandoned the at- 
 tempt to define the moral good in terms of maxims, 
 which they take rather to be hypothetical goods in 
 disguise. They are rules indeed, but only rules of 
 thumb holding " for the most part." If they vary 
 with the time and place, if within the most circum- 
 scribed communities they contradict one another, 
 this is because they cannot pretend to be good in 
 themselves, but are only the means which the com- 
 munity accepting them has found by experience to 
 be best fitted for attaining a certain end. It is in- 
 deed the end that justifies the means, it alone is the 
 categorical good, and the whole meaning of moral- 
 ity is to be sought in its purpose. 
 
 But those who, like David Hume, have sought 
 the purpose common to all the discordant moral 
 
 ^ Anatole France, 
 264 
 
PROGRESS 
 
 maxims of history, have found it not in some 
 quality this purpose might be assumed to have, with- 
 out question of him whose purpose it was. No, the 
 moral purpose founds its right to have all other 
 purposes bow to it on nothing but the authoritative 
 position of the one that has chosen this purpose as 
 his. Suppose, with Hume, we found no harmony 
 in the moral ordinances of all the many peoples 
 of history save that each maxim at the time and 
 under the conditions of its acceptance was held to 
 serve the well-being of the community. Now 
 communities are not so different from particular 
 men but that they must, like men, hold their well- 
 being to lie in having the objects of their desire 
 accorded to them. From which it follows that to 
 act virtuously is to make your will conform to the 
 will of the community to which you belong. Des- 
 cartes has somewhere said that God did not choose 
 this world because it was good, but the world is 
 good because God chose it. Just so, a community 
 does not choose its purpose because it is good, but 
 that purpose is good which the community chooses. 
 We might say that, not the good will, but the Good 
 Wilier is morality's last word on the subject of the 
 categorical good. 
 
 Thus it would seem that all virtues melt into 
 one, and that one is what the late Professor Royce 
 
 26s 
 
PROGRESS 
 
 was fond of calling " loyalty/' the devotion of 
 my will to the will of another. I am aware that 
 not just any other-will, whosesoever it may be, is 
 contemplated by moralists as a fit object of loyalty's 
 devotion. The Other to whom my will should bow, 
 if I would be moral, is generally conceived to be 
 more numerous than I (e.g. the majority), or 
 more inclusive (the family, the state, the cause), 
 or in some sense higher (God). In short, the Other- 
 will is taken to be, in one way or another, an Over- 
 will, and moralists may differ widely as to which 
 one of several conceivable Over-wills should be 
 recognized as the Absolute. But for the purpose 
 of this discussion, one illustration of moral loyalty 
 is as good as another, for the difficulty that moral- 
 ity has found in making good its claim to have laid 
 hold on the absolute good lies not, I conceive, in 
 deciding which Other-will is sovereign, but in con- 
 vincing a man that he ought to acknowledge as sov- 
 ereign any other will than his own. One who is 
 told that it is not good for him to remain captain 
 of his soul is bound to ask. Why not? It is moral- 
 ity's way of dealing with this why that I would con- 
 sider in an example which, for being simple, loses 
 nothing that I can think essential to the issue. 
 
 In Thomas Hobbes's " Leviathan," one finds an 
 
 266 
 
PROGRESS 
 
 account, clear, legalistic, unsentimental, of the 
 meaning of duty interpreted as the obligation of 
 your will and mine to bow to a Sovereign-will. The 
 title-page of the first edition (1651) of this work 
 bears the image of a man of heroic size whose body 
 is made up of little men. The little men stand for 
 you and me, the big man is Leviathan. The story 
 of the generation of the living giant made up of 
 living men is in this wise: 
 
 " Nature it seems hath made men so equal . . . 
 as though there be found one man manifestly 
 stronger in body or quicker in mind than another, 
 yet when all is reckoned together the difference be- 
 tween man and man is not so considerable as that 
 one man can therefore claim to himself any benefit 
 to which another man may not pretend as well as 
 he. . . . From this equality of ability arises 
 equality of hope in attaining of our ends. And 
 therefore if any two men desire the same thing, 
 they become enemies, and in the way to their end 
 . . . endeavor to destroy or subdue one an- 
 other. . . . From this diffidence of one another, 
 there is no way for any man to secure himself so 
 reasonable as anticipation j that is, by force or wiles 
 to master the persons of all the men he can, so long 
 till he see no other power great enough to endanger 
 him. . • • 
 
 267 
 
PROGRESS 
 
 " Hereby is manifest that during the time men 
 live without a common power to keep them all in 
 awe, they are in that condition which is called war, 
 and such a war as is of all against all. ... In 
 Guch condition there is no place for industry, because 
 the fruit thereof is uncertain, ... no arts, no 
 letters, no society, and, what is worst of all, contin- 
 ued fear and danger of violent death, and the life 
 of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. . . . 
 
 " And consequently, it is a precept, or general 
 rule of reason, that every man ought to endeavor 
 feace^ as jar as he has hofe of obtaining it; and when 
 }ie cannot obtain it, that he may seek and use all 
 helfs and advantages of war. . . . From this 
 fundamental law of nature, by which men are 
 commended to endeavor peace, is derived this sec- 
 ond law J that a man be willing when others are so 
 tooy as far forth as for feace and defence of him- 
 self he shall think it necessary y to lay down this 
 right to all things, and be contented with so much 
 liberty against other m^en as he would allow other 
 men against himself,^* 
 
 Thus " the final cause, end, or design of men, 
 who naturally love liberty and dominion over others, 
 in the introduction of restraint upon themselves in 
 which we see them live in commonwealths, is the 
 foresight of their own preservation, and of a more 
 
 268 
 
PROGRESS 
 
 contented life thereby 5 that is to say, of getting 
 themselves out from the condition of war, which is 
 necessarily consequent to the natural passions of 
 men when there is no visible power to keep them 
 in awe and tie them by fear of punishment to the 
 performance of their covenants." 
 
 Now " the only way to erect such a common 
 power ... is to confer all their power and 
 strength upon one man or upon an assembly of 
 men that may reduce all their wills . . . unto 
 one will, . . . which is as much as to say, to 
 appoint one man or an assembly of men to bear 
 their person, and every one to own and acknowledge 
 himself to be author of whatsoever he that so beareth 
 their person shall act ... in those things which 
 concern the common peace and safety j and therein 
 submit their wills every one to his will, and their 
 judgments to his judgment. . . . This done, the 
 multitude so united in one person is called a Com- 
 monwealth, in Latin, Civitas. This is the genera- 
 tion of that great Leviathan, or rather, to speak 
 more reverently, of that mortal god to which we 
 owe under immortal God our peace and defence." 
 
 Seldom has the " generation " of an Absolute 
 been so clearly set forth. We do not suppose, any 
 more than Hobbes himself did, that this word " gen- 
 eration " has any historical significance. Men never 
 
 269 
 
PROGRESS 
 
 lived in the state of nature here defined, they never 
 foregathered to reason out in this way the advis- 
 ability of organizing themselves into common- 
 wealths. Instead of " generation," read, if you will, 
 " justification," i.e., the justification in reason for 
 the commonwealth's existence and dominion. Then 
 observe that not only does this great loyalist (the 
 whole Leviathan is one of the loyalist documents of 
 the Civil Wars) — not only does he demand a rea- 
 son for the loyal faith that is in him, but in the de- 
 velopment of this reason it turns out that the 
 absolute is not another will at ally but only one's own 
 will thoughtfully dealing with others to win for it- 
 self a " more contented life." 
 
 Now of course it is an absurdity to try to give a 
 reason why any will whatever should be taken for 
 absolute and expect to keep it so^ for the very func- 
 tion of this reason is to show what more ultimate 
 end is served by acknowledging this will as master. 
 But if we do follow Hobbes's reason for bowing as 
 deep as we do bow to Leviathan, this reason is that 
 our own deepest desire — or what Hobbes takes to 
 be such — is thereby best served. " For it is," says 
 he, "a voluntary actj and of the voluntary acts of 
 every man, the object is some good to himself." 
 
 Why then, that morality which promised to give 
 us a meaning of the good that would enable us to 
 
 270 
 
PROGRESS 
 
 understand how the progress of science with its hy- 
 pothetical goods might let us stray from or even 
 lead us away from the good, has turned out to be 
 itself offering us a hypothetical good, to he itself an 
 effort of science y — the science of many wills meet- 
 ing in presence of but a single world. And this I take 
 to be the fate, not only of Hobbes's but of all 
 moralities : differ as they may respecting that Other- 
 will they take to be absolute, they all alike recom- 
 mend a sacrifice of my will to another will, not 
 indeed for the sacrifice' sake, nor yet for that other 
 will's sake when all is said, but that my own will 
 may find " a more contented life thereby." 
 
 Most of us have let our thoughts respecting the 
 good of life stop with the acceptance of those moral 
 goods that the opinion of our time takes to be 
 absolute. These standard objects of loyalty, the 
 state, the hearth, the cause, we serve with devotion 
 and to them make our sacrifice. It is natural we 
 should look with distrust, even with hostility, upon 
 those who have let their thought go further and 
 have asked. How in serving these Other-wills is 
 our own deeper desire the better fulfilled? And 
 yet, if our analysis is so far correct, this is the most 
 intelligent, the most dignified of questions j for no 
 historic morality has really meant to present itself 
 
 271 
 
PROGRESS 
 
 as a system of sacrifices with no corresponding 
 satisfactions. 
 
 But if we ask of the current morality of loyalty, 
 What is the greater contentment bought by each of 
 us at the price of the sacrifices we make in loyalty's 
 name? we come upon serious matters for reflection. 
 There have been those who maintain that current 
 morality cannot meet the demands of intelligence, 
 and as there are two ways in which in buying a thing 
 for a price one may drive an unprofitable bargain, 
 so there are two critics of current morality. The 
 one thinks the price morality asks too high j the other 
 esteems the thing bought of no value. Let me call 
 the one the Reforming Moralist; the other the 
 Amoralist, 
 
 Now the reward morality holds out to all who 
 make sacrifice to it is some ideal of peace, whether 
 it be peace on earth and good will among men, or 
 that peace which passeth understanding. Our re- 
 forming moralist then holds fast to the ideal of 
 peace as the deepest of human desires, but questions 
 whether current morality in its uncritical acceptance 
 of traditional loyalties has found the most intelli- 
 gent, i.e., the least sacrificial way of peace. Thus if 
 he is not blind to the citizen-peace that comes from 
 living in Commonwealths to whose Over-will we 
 particular men make our loyal sacrifices, neither will 
 
 272 
 
PROGRESS 
 
 he accept such nationalism as refuses to sanction cov- 
 enants of nation with nation to the establishment of 
 their more peaceful, if less autonomous, relations. 
 He sees in that group-will we call the national-will 
 but an historic device for improving the conditions 
 of private life. He sees nothing but unreformed, 
 that is, atavistic and stupid morality in such national- 
 ism as would make the autonomy of the state an end 
 in itself to which private life must forever yield its 
 contentment. There is a sense in which he would 
 say with Remy de Gourmont — 
 
 " The life of nations, of groups, of individuals is 
 one struggle against morality. Man pushes on to- 
 ward liberty, and can accept only such discipline 
 as assures him at the cost of temporary subjection 
 a more agreeable and more complete exercise of this 
 supreme good. All discipline that is not founded in 
 liberty is caduque, and it is for this reason that 
 civilization has always succeeded in surmounting 
 systems of morals." ^ 
 
 But if our reforming moralist acknowledges the 
 supreme value of peace and would only make the 
 pursuit of it more intelligent, our amoralist denies 
 that the human heart can ever rest in peace or even 
 really wants to. Peace, if it were complete, would 
 
 ^ The meaning and value of " loyalty " is more fully dis- 
 cussed in Chap. X, on " Love and Loyalty." 
 
 273 
 
PROGRESS 
 
 mean stagnation, will-less apathy, that ennui of life 
 Schopenhauer judges to be worse than any misery 
 the war of aggressive wills can engender. In the 
 Nietzschian man-of-might our amoralist sees his 
 ideal, a will that knows no Over-will, acknowledges 
 no loyalty, but whose motto is " Weltmacht oder 
 Untergang." For him, life shall at least know 
 nothing of ennui, no static stagnant peace, no 
 Nirvana. 
 
 Thus if we approach in an historian's spirit the 
 attempt to think out the world-desirable to make for 
 which is to progress in the only sense the word can 
 have, we find humanity divided between those who 
 desire peace and those who want war. 
 
 On behalf of peace the moralist points not alone 
 to the misery war brings to the vanquished, not alone 
 to its cost to the victor and to the vanity of his 
 ephemeral winnings j but to that utter loneliness 
 which the war of all upon all makes the only lasting 
 portion of each. A solitude of struggle, without 
 one to cheer the effort, without one to share the joy 
 (if joy it can then be called) of triumph — can 
 any human heart endure, let alone desire war? 
 
 But the amoralist, full of the certaminis gaudiay 
 turns in disgust from the hopeless state of the peace- 
 ful who having nothing more to fear can have noth- 
 ing left to hope for. Our longing for peace is an 
 
 274 
 
PROGRESS 
 
 illusion of certain moments of war-weariness, but a 
 picture of eternal peace, stagnant, ambitionless, dead 
 — and yet not dead enough — who could endure 
 it, who could really desire peace? 
 
 Lonely ambition — peaceful acquiescence in a 
 common lot! The history of human relations is a 
 struggle, more often than not a compromise between 
 these ideals. There is enough inspiring in each 
 to make any man of understanding long for 
 it, there is enough repulsive in each to turn any 
 thoughtful soul against it. Wherefore the grue- 
 some spectacle of world war is but the outward and 
 visible sign of the struggle that goes on every silent 
 moment within the heart of each, as the volcano is 
 but the overt violence of long sullen rumblings that 
 have gone before. And so things must last if and 
 so long as we really want two irreconcilable ideals: 
 compromise must follow makeshift, war must 
 punctuate peace, world without end. 
 
 Into a world so distraught comes that child of 
 God, that messenger of heaven, the modest philoso- 
 pher. His cheerful gospel is that all men's ills are 
 curable by taking thought, that men suffer only for 
 their false philosophy. Now, of all philosophies 
 none is so false as that which pretends one cannot 
 have his penny and his cake. True it may be in the 
 
 275 
 
PROGRESS 
 
 letter that I cannot keep a certain copper in my 
 pocket and honestly entice a sweet-meat out of the 
 baker's window. But I must be a sorry philosopher if 
 I cannot keep all the potentiality of future enjoy- 
 ment the penny stands for, and yet have all the 
 actual satisfaction I happen for the moment to vis- 
 ualize in the form of cake. Or to put the thought 
 in less poetic and more general terms, the heart that 
 thinks itself torn by conflicting desires owes its 
 plight to the failure of its imagination to realize 
 that only the formulas in which it has so far ex- 
 pressed its desires are in contradiction 3 the desires 
 themselves may well enough be reconciled in a 
 larger world-view. 
 
 Take our present problem for example. It is 
 impossible, you say, that I should deny the ambition 
 to conquer for the sake of the love of my neighbor 
 without killing what is most vital in myself. And 
 it is equally impossible that I should give play to 
 my ambition to conquer without losing my neigh- 
 bor's love and living a lonely struggle. These 
 things are indeed impossible in the world to which 
 the imagination of the past has been fettered, — this 
 little finite earth the fulness whereof is so easily 
 emptied. If to have all that I can win of such 
 meagre fulness is the only meaning I can give to 
 ambition, either I must kill ambition and love my 
 
 276 
 
PROGRESS 
 
 neighbor across a fence, or I must tear down the 
 fence and kill my neighbor. But what if the fault 
 of all this lay not with the darkness of reality, but 
 with the blindness of untrained imagination? What 
 if we could set before ambition a boundless prospect, 
 so that never, far as conquest might reach, could 
 it find cause to weep for lack of more to conquer? 
 What if, in the very conquering of such a world, 
 the gain of one, so far from being another's loss, 
 were the equal spoil of all, yes, and a weapon forged 
 to the hand of all for new victories? Wherefore 
 then should ambition yield or love be denied? 
 
 But perhaps you will say, this is but an imagining 
 and a dream. Our humdrum world, the only real 
 one, offers no such object of ambition j and if it did, 
 our nature, just human nature, is not such as could 
 understand, still less be fascinated and inspired by it. 
 
 Does it sound ridiculous to say that our world 
 is one that holds out just such a prospect to all who 
 will but see? Aye, and that many a human eye has 
 seen, and having seen remained single to this vision? 
 I will call the promised land the Kingdom of Na- 
 ture Subdued: I will call the vision the Vision of 
 Science. 
 
 In the beginning, Man was Nature's creature and 
 her plaything. Sometimes she seems to have f on- 
 
 277 
 
PROGRESS 
 
 died her toy and been good to it, given it pleasant 
 places to dwell in and let the light of her counte- 
 nance shine upon it. Those who think only of these 
 rare moments may sing, O bella eta dell' oro! O 
 Paradise J O Paradise! They forget how rare were 
 these moments and how capriciously bestowed. 
 Elsewhere were many griefs of which man could 
 not so much as guess the reason, and if he dared 
 raise his questioning gaze to God he was mocked for 
 his impotence and nothingness : " Where wast thou 
 when I laid the foundation of the earth? declare, 
 if thou hast understanding." 
 
 But need makes for perspicuity. Time passed, 
 and some few caught a glimpse of the vision of 
 science j caught it, widened it, brightened it and 
 passed it on. Perhaps their lives were not very 
 happy in a world where they were much alone 5 but 
 it is easier to tell of their ostensible hardships than 
 of their enthusiasms — who knows but that even 
 they found here their compt? Time went on, and 
 that Nature which had begun by being so cruel and 
 capricious a mistress became through man's science 
 more and more his slave. Human eyes were not 
 so often turned to the gods in supplication. A Greek 
 slave rang out to his fellows, " Why call ye upon 
 the gods? Ye have hands? Wipe your own nose." 
 
 The earth yields 3 step by step death itself gives 
 
 278 
 
PROGRESS 
 
 ground j and shall we think of the stars only to fear 
 them and to read our fate in them? Shall they for- 
 ever whisper to us their old taunting questions: 
 " Canst thou bind the sweet influences of the Plei- 
 ades, or loose the bands of Orion? Canst thou bring 
 forth Mazaroth in his season? or canst thou guide 
 Arcturus with his sons? Knowest thou the ordinances 
 of heaven? canst thou set the dominion thereof on 
 the earth? " — And shall we always answer, Alas! 
 
 But I am dreaming a dream. Is it though so ill 
 a thing to dream, if one docs not forget how to 
 laugh the while? Yes, I know, the stars are rather 
 big for our frail hands to play with even as all 
 Nature once played with us. But how else am I to 
 say that there is nothing in Nature that can forever 
 resist the onward march of science? What else am 
 I to say when the same master equations hold in 
 heaven as on the earth, and Arcturus with all his 
 sons is but a falling pebble painted large? 
 
 Let us dream then and laugh with Aesop at his 
 frog. It is certain that neither our laughter nor 
 our dreams can hurt our wise neighbor very much, 
 and if we go the toilsome way toward the conquest 
 we dream of, he or one that comes after may some- 
 time look back on us and say. Yes, that was Progress. 
 The measure of man^s cooperation with man in the 
 conqiiest of nature measures progress, 
 
 279 
 
X 
 
 ROYCE ON LOVE AND 
 LOYALTY 
 
 A Footnote in Illustration 
 
ROYCE ON LOVE AND LOYALTY 
 
 [Something we had to say, in clarifying the thought 
 of Kant, of a quality of human love that holds its 
 object single and unique. And again, in estimating 
 the part played by morality in the ideal of progress, 
 we had occasion to remark the unwillingness of 
 some to admit the finality of those sacrifices loyalty 
 calls for. 
 
 These matters are not so simple but that history, 
 in dealing with them, shows sharp discord where 
 it does not uncover sheer confusion. The love that 
 sets its heart on one has been held the highest; it 
 has also been put the lowest of all loves. Loyalty 
 that lives on sacrifice has been prized as an enduring 
 condition of all worth 3 it has not escaped disparage- 
 ment as a human makeshift. Above all, " love " 
 and " loyalty " are so mixed in men's minds that, 
 although any pair of lovers could tell a service of 
 love from a servitude to loyalty, philosophers can- 
 not always. 
 
 The brief discussion that follows seemed to the 
 writer to illustrate a difficulty it may not have re- 
 moved. He considered that it could not lack point 
 
 283 
 
ROYCE ON LOVE AND LOYALTY 
 
 for those who in foregoing passages on love and 
 loyalty have found themselves more involved than 
 enlightened. For the rest, it has seemed best to 
 leave this " footnote " in the form and wording 
 its original occasion inspired.^] 
 
 One who like me has gone to Royce for wisdom 
 now this long time and never come away empty, 
 may yet live to know that some of his receivings 
 are more his belongings than others. Thus, if it 
 ever happen to me that I find my hold on the 
 ^ Absolute ' slackening and the thing slipping from 
 me, I cannot think that even in that day I shall 
 have forgotten two words I have heard. Love and 
 loyalty, loyalty and love: this pair I expect will 
 still be singing its burden in my soul after other 
 things have left off singing there. But I hope that 
 when this day comes I shall know better than I do 
 now whether love and loyalty are two names for 
 the same thing; or whether they are not the same, 
 yet brothers and friends j or whether in the end they 
 
 ^ The paper on " Love and Loyalty " was written for the 
 American Philosophical Association at its Philadelphia meeting 
 m 191 5. The occasion was peculiarly dedicated to Royce in 
 honor of his sixtieth birthday. The author's thanks are due to 
 Professor J. E. Creighton for his courteous permission to re- 
 print from the Philosophical Review, XXV, 3, and from the 
 volume "Papers in Honor of Josiah Royce, etc.," 1922. 
 
 284 
 
ROYCE ON LOVE AND LOYALTY 
 
 are not rather enemies, of which one can survive 
 only if the other doesn't. Nor do I know, though 
 I should very much like to, how Royce himself 
 would answer these questions. Sometimes the words 
 fall in such close juxtaposition in his writings that 
 I wonder whether they do not express a single idea 
 whose peculiar quality is just unselfishness. But 
 again I bethink me that to be just unselfish is not 
 enough for an absolutist, if for anyone j that giv- 
 ing up can only be justified when it is a means of 
 acquiring j and I wonder what loyalty can have to 
 say for itself half as convincing as the things love 
 could point to. Until at last I find myself speculat- 
 ing whether if love had its perfect way with us there 
 would be any place left for loyalty in our lives, and 
 whether we could not look back on it then as on a 
 virtue happily outlived. 
 
 And this may be my matter in a nutshell — is not 
 loyalty a thing to be outlived, and is not that which 
 alone can enable us to live it down a love so perfect 
 it calls for no sacrifices? Some such thought has 
 long been with me, but if I am to lay my troubles 
 before you, it is time I put aside a language too rich 
 in sentimental associations and took up the idiom I 
 love best, that of cold and, if may be, mathematical 
 definition. 
 
 28s 
 
ROYCE ON LOVE AND LOYALTY 
 
 Any definition of loyalty that could have meaning 
 for me must assume the existence of something 
 many deny to have either existence or meaning, and 
 which I shall call in my own way the mind of a 
 group, or a group mind. The conception of a mind 
 belonging to a group of beings each one of which 
 has a mind of its own, yet such that the mind of 
 the group is no more to be known from a study of 
 its parts than is the mentality of Peter from the 
 psychology of Paul, is a very old conception and 
 perhaps for that reason supposed by some to be old- 
 fashioned and out-worn. It is a mere analogy, they 
 say, and a very thin one at that, to speak of a group 
 of organisms as itself an organism j it is Plato, it is 
 Cusanus, if you will, but it is not modern. Bene- 
 detto Croce even goes so far as to be polite about 
 the matter. " The State," he writes, " is not an 
 entity, but a fluid complex of various relations 
 among individuals. It may be convenient to delimit 
 this complex and to entify it for the sake of con- 
 trasting it with other complexes. No doubt this is 
 soj but let us leave to the jurist the excogitation 
 of this and the like distinctions — fictions, but op- 
 portune fictions — being careful not to call his work 
 absurd. It is enough for us to be sure we do not 
 forget that a fiction is a fiction." 
 
 To Royce the group mind is far from being a 
 
 286 
 
ROYCE ON LOVE AND LOYALTY 
 
 fiction, though he may prefer to call it by some other 
 name than group mind — maybe universal mind or 
 universal will. But if to him it seems natural, as 
 it does to me, to recognize group minds, while to 
 Croce the entity is but a polite fiction to be pleas- 
 antly dismissed, there must be some lack of defi- 
 nition befogging our issue. Nor can I think of any 
 way in which old issues can better be made clear 
 than by recalling old images. 
 
 Aristotle would not have asked when and where 
 do new entities appear, but where and when must 
 we take account of new forms. Now matter was 
 informed for Aristotle when the behavior of some 
 class of beings was recognized to be predictable in 
 terms of purpose. Thus earth, water, air and fire 
 sought their proper places, one below, another above, 
 and the others in between. But we remember how 
 no sooner had these elements reached their proper 
 places than, transformed by the sun's heat, they 
 were no longer at home where they found them- 
 selves, but must needs seek their new homes anew. 
 Thus homeward bound in opposite directions, they 
 collided and became entangled, so that mixtures of 
 the four appeared, which, as it proved, kept their 
 proportions for a longer or shorter while ere they 
 lost their equilibrium and fell apart again. Among 
 these mixtures were vegetables and animals and men, 
 
 287 
 
ROYCE ON LOVE AND LOYALTY 
 
 but Aristotle is very far from defining this new 
 class, organisms, in terms of the quantities of the 
 elements that enter into their bodily composition. 
 No, what they have in common and all they have 
 in common is a new purpose, that of self-preserva- 
 tion (and, if we are to follow Aristotle rigorously, 
 that of type-preservation). But why in this class of 
 beings does a new form appear when there is nothing 
 in any one of them but so much earth, so much water 
 and so much of the rest? Because, I take it, in 
 order that the purpose of the group may be realized, 
 the purpose of each constituent of that group must 
 be defeated: when the earth in us finds its way 
 back to earth and our fire to fire, then we are no 
 more. Which is the fundamental difference between 
 us and them: if we win they lose 5 if they win we 
 are done for. The whole has a purpose whose real- 
 ization is only possible if the purposes defining the 
 parts are given up for it. 
 
 I suppose Croce would say that nothing better 
 could be offered in support of a modern fiction than 
 an ancient fable 5 and I confess that I can think of 
 nothing better fitted to set forth the complex prob- 
 lem of how beings of one mind can combine to form 
 groups of another mind, than Aristotle's account 
 of the way elements in the form of mechanism com- 
 bine to produce a group with that other form, life. 
 
 288 
 
ROYCE ON LOVE AND LOYALTY 
 
 Perhaps I can make out the connection between old 
 and new ideas by a single example. I know of no 
 fellow easier to get along with than your average 
 Parisian: many a time have I sat at his board, 
 looked in his eyes, listened to his amusing wit and 
 wondered how the great-grandfather of my host 
 could have been part of the Reign of Terror. And 
 yet I suppose the Parisian of today is not very dif- 
 ferent from the Parisian of four generations ago, 
 when groups of these same Parisians were ranging 
 the streets of Paris crying, " A la lanterne ! " How- 
 ever much it was in the character of the Pierre, Paul, 
 Jean and Jacques Bonhomme of those old days to 
 steer for home, their distributive tendency was con- 
 tradicted by their collective tendency. A new form, 
 a new entity had appeared 3 it was the spirit of the 
 mob. It may be pleasant to call such new entities 
 fictions j but it would be a most dangerous fiction to 
 suppose pleasant men made pleasant mobs. 
 
 I must let this single illustration take the place 
 of what might at some other time grow into a sys- 
 tematic account of the varieties of group minds that 
 history and personal experience reveal to us. For 
 my world is highly organized — groups within 
 groups and groups within these in a way one might 
 have learned at the feet of Nicolaus or by gathering 
 one's history from Gierke's " Geschichte des Deut- 
 
 289 
 
ROYCE ON LOVE AND LOYALTY 
 
 schen Rechts." But on this occasion, instead of go- 
 ing into all this literature and all this philosophy, 
 let me come back to the matter of loyalty's worth. 
 There would be no such thing as a demand for 
 loyalty were there no call for a man to deny his 
 wish for home — whether home be on earth or on 
 high for him — for the sake of organizing himself 
 into a group j which means, as we have seen, sacri- 
 ficing his purpose for the group purpose. Now, 
 what you think of the value of this sacrifice depends 
 altogether on the esteem in which you hold group 
 minds. If you can find some principle on which to 
 estimate their dignity as something worth dying for 
 in part or altogether, then loyalty may be the last 
 word of virtue. But if you find that at their very 
 best there is something rather primitive, sometimes 
 amoeboid, sometimes tigerish about such minds, then 
 you should seriously consider whether your biped 
 soul owes anything more to this polypod entity than 
 the entity owes to it. Merging oneself into some- 
 thing big may not be just the same as reaching for 
 something high. 
 
 But I am not belittling loyalty. It is a great 
 virtue so long as it understands itself to be making 
 a virtue of necessity. Just so is it a great virtue to 
 acquire equanimity in the face of death, in such wise 
 
 290 
 
ROYCE ON LOVE AND LOYALTY 
 
 that not being able to invent a way of getting around 
 the thing one may accept it for the time being with- 
 out disturbing oneself or one's friends more than 
 the episode calls for. Still, if I had some genius 
 to spend, I should rather contribute it to the sup- 
 pression of dying than to the cultivation of a cheer- 
 ful manner in dying. So should I rather spend my 
 time, if it were worth while, in wearing away the 
 conditions that make loyalty necessary than in devel- 
 oping a spirit of loyalty. And so, or I mistake him, 
 would Royce; for I can not get over the impression 
 that for him, too, loyalty is but a half-way house 
 on the road to something better — which something 
 better is love. 
 
 It is with relief I find a definition of love can 
 be effected which makes no very heavy demands 
 upon one's sentimental experience^ in fact, requires 
 no more in that way than a fair understanding of 
 the theory of substitutions. For the peculiar quality 
 Royce finds in the idea of love is that love individ- 
 uates. This its quality is for him its virtue also and 
 its excellence, so that the more love individuates 
 the more is it love. We are far enough from the 
 days when a Plato could hold the love to be higher 
 that had detached itself from the individual and 
 attached itself to the quality, had forgotten the 
 beautiful being to think only of his beauty. For 
 
 291 
 
ROYCE ON LOVE AND LOYALTY 
 
 Royce, love is not love unless it has succeeded in 
 making its object irreplaceable. 
 
 Now I do not know whether this constitutes a 
 complete definition of love. There is something 
 hopeful about the suggestion that it may do soj for 
 if no one has been able to say anything very articu- 
 late about love, neither has anyone said much that 
 is intelligible about individuation. But certain diffi- 
 culties occur to one. Is love the only thing that in- 
 dividuates? If there is such a thing as Platonic 
 hate, which I suppose would be the sort of hate 
 that hates the sin and not the sinner, why should 
 there not be such a thing as a romantic hate whose 
 object would be just the sinner and not his fault? 
 Or may not a process of individuation go on, cold 
 and impassible, untouched by either hate or love? 
 
 One day Flaubert took his disciple by the hand 
 and led him into the secret places of art. The 
 talent of the artist, he said, is a long patience spent 
 in learning how to portray so that your portrayal 
 leaves the object it offers just as individual as the 
 thing it found. " When you pass a grocer sitting 
 at his door, or a concierge smoking his pipe, or a 
 stand of cabs, show me this grocer and this con- 
 cierge, their pose, their physical appearance, suggest- 
 ing also by the skill of your image all their moral 
 
 292 
 
ROYCE ON LOVE AND LOYALTY 
 
 nature in such wise that I do not confuse them with 
 any other grocer or with any other concrierge. And 
 make me see with a single stroke in what a certain 
 cab horse is unlike fifty others following him or 
 going before." 
 
 Why, then, besides love and hate, art too claims 
 to be that which individuates — and not because, if 
 we may believe a certain philosophically minded 
 critic, art has borrowed anything of love or hate. 
 This disciple of Flaubert, this Maupassant, carried 
 out his master's teachings if ever an artist did, but 
 there is that in his way of doing it which makes one 
 feel that Anatole France's account of him is not al- 
 together wanting: " He is the great painter of the 
 human grimace. He paints without hate and with- 
 out love, without anger and without pity — hard- 
 fisted peasants, drunken sailors, lost women, obscure 
 clerks dried up in the air of the office, and all the 
 humble folk whose humility is without beauty and 
 without merit. All these grotesques and all these 
 unfortunates he shows us so distinctly that we think 
 we see them with our own eyes and find them more 
 real than reality itself. He is a skillful artist who 
 knows he has done all there is to do when he has 
 given life to things. His indifference is as indiffer- 
 ent as nature." 
 
 I am not so very confident that all these claimants 
 
 293 
 
ROYCE ON LOVE AND LOYALTY 
 
 to the right of individuating — love, hate, art — 
 are equal claimants. As for hate, some poverty of 
 experience may account for the fact that all I know 
 of this romantically valued emotion has sometime 
 been directed against persons unknown, whose man- 
 ner of conducting themselves on the earth beneath 
 and in the waters under the earth showed nothing 
 more clearly than that they had forgotten the human 
 being and were utterly lost in loyalty. A hate of 
 such poor quality cannot well be said to individuate, 
 and it is certainly not any experience of my own 
 that would lead me to suppose romantic hate, as we 
 have imagined it, to be real. Respecting the im- 
 passibility of the creative artist, I am no less skepti- 
 cal, and so I think is France at bottom 5 for of this 
 same artist whose indifference is as indifferent as 
 nature, he says in another passage of the same ap- 
 preciation that his hardened hero " is ashamed of 
 nothing but his large native kindliness, careful to 
 hide what is most exquisite in his soul." 
 
 No, I am not convinced that love has any rivals in 
 the art of individuating, and if not, then to call it 
 that which individuates is to define it completely. 
 But whether it is a deduction from this definition 
 or whether it is an independent element in a fuller 
 definition of love, it must be set down as an impor- 
 tant fact about it that love wants the will and desire 
 
 294 
 
ROYCE ON LOVE AND LOYALTY 
 
 of the beloved to prevail. It wants the will of 
 another to prevail, and as the easiest and most obvi- 
 ous way of bringing about this result is to yield its 
 own will, it has generally been supposed that love 
 was less the art of individuating than the art of 
 yielding. But this is just the mistake that has pre- 
 vented love from taking its place among the more 
 seriously meant categories of philosophy and reali- 
 ties of lifej for this yielding disposition that might 
 be supposed to make for peace in a republic of 
 lovers is the very matter introducing trouble and 
 perplexity there. It is the very matter that has 
 made traditional Christianity less effective than it 
 might have been, failing where it fails, not because 
 there is anything better to be conceived than its 
 gospel of love, but because it has supposed a good 
 heart and convinced will was enough to bring about 
 its kingdom. 
 
 Our two great experiments at loving — the love 
 of man and woman and the love of one's neighbor 
 — have been too much alike in this, that they both 
 supposed love to be the sort of thing one could fall 
 into and be done with. But it is clear this is not at 
 all the way of the matter, and in our poor imagin- 
 ings about the lovers' republic we have been too 
 much guided by our imperfect experience of what 
 our loves have been to think our way into what the 
 
 295 
 
ROYCE ON LOVE AND LOYALTY 
 
 love that individuates ought to be. Oh, yes, our 
 love has yielded j its great vice has been its content- 
 ment in yielding rather than suffer the labor and un- 
 rest of that thinking which alone could have saved 
 its kingdom. In this dear illogical passion for yield- 
 ing, we have been content with a division of the 
 spoils 3 one is allowed to give this, the other that 5 
 one now, the other thenj and so we have patched up 
 our lovers' quarrel as best we could without logic. 
 But logic, which is supposed to have nothing to do 
 with love and has had little enough to do with the 
 old loves of this world, has everything to do with 
 the love that individuates. For, the moment love 
 begins to be a mutual affair, neither lover has the 
 right to usurp the privilege of giving j else what is 
 left for the other lover to do? Without logic our 
 lovers are doomed to stand bowing to each other 
 before the door of promise till time grows gray. 
 
 However, besides logic there is such a thing as 
 bad logic, which is perhaps nothing more than a well- 
 meant half-thoughtfulness in presence of puzzling 
 experience. As a result of this half-thoughtfulness 
 there has sometimes crept a half -reasonableness into 
 the matter we are considering, which would begin 
 by suggesting that the various and contradictory de- 
 sires of lovers, though equally strong, cannot, save 
 by improbable chance, be equally high and worth 
 
 296 
 
ROYCE ON LOVE AND LOYALTY 
 
 while j that, therefore, the logical thing to do would 
 be to let the lower ideal recognize the higher and 
 bow to it, while the higher might somehow forget 
 its longing to give and content its poor heart with 
 being given to. 
 
 There are many difficulties in the way of making 
 such an account of the affair persuasive, but there 
 are more serious troubles ahead of anyone who would 
 try to make it meaningful. Chief of these is the 
 hopelessness of defining high and low in the matter 
 of purposes and ideals. Here, once more, Royce 
 is quick to analyze the difficulty and remove itj for, 
 if I read him aright, he sees no way, and no more 
 do I, by which the value of ultimate objects of de- 
 sire may be compared. It is easy to calculate the 
 better means, but how is one to know the better 
 end? Only this may we do — we may discover that 
 purposes which seem contradictory are not really so, 
 and that neither need sacrifice itself to the other if 
 thought be allowed to work its perfect work. No 
 doubt happiness lies in getting what we wantj but 
 this is not the same as getting what we think we 
 want, as capturing what we go after j for our wants 
 are none the less hard to make out because they are 
 our own. 
 
 297 
 
ROYCE ON LOVE AND LOYALTY 
 
 This, then, is thought's infinitely difficult task in 
 the service of love, to analyze apparent desires until 
 it has found the real want at the core of appearance, 
 while the postulate on which alone the advent of 
 the kingdom becomes possible is that thought may 
 find our real wants not contradictory. The times 
 are not without sign that Christianity as an ethics is 
 coming to realize how very intellectual is the task 
 it has set itself in trying to bring the kingdom of 
 Christ's vision to be on earth. What Christianity 
 most needs, writes Tennant, is a philosophy. 
 
 The brief time we allow ourselves for our utter- 
 ances ought yet to prove ample for a person of 
 industry and thrift to make himself thoroughly mis- 
 understood j and I hope I have used it to no less 
 purpose on this than on former occasions j but among 
 the misunderstandings I would prevent, if I could, 
 is that which would sum up the matter of my dis- 
 course as a defense of individualism against collec- 
 tivism. Such an issue could only be meaningful for 
 one to whom the collectivity was denied some sort of 
 individuality which the " individual " enjoys. But 
 I have tried to show that I could conceive no such 
 difference between the mind of the part and the 
 mind of the group. The group mind may be loved 
 with the human love that individuates, as well as 
 
 298 
 
ROYCE ON LOVE AND LOYALTY 
 
 can the soul of a fellow-man; and no doubt one 
 may love one's country as a mistress. But the dif- 
 ference between the love of equals and the love of 
 constituents is plain. The latter sort of love can 
 last only so long as its object endures, and as long 
 as it lasts its sacrifices are incurable j for in a world 
 that has conquered strife there would no longer be 
 that contradiction between the will of a group and 
 the will of its parts, which alone makes the group 
 entity meaningful. Groups bound in mutual respect 
 of each other and studying to preserve their parts 
 irreplaceable have no minds-, the entity born of 
 struggle and calling for sacrifice has simply disap- 
 peared; where we had a group mind, we have now 
 but an aggregate of minds, " a fluid complex of re- 
 lations among individuals." But the love of equals 
 can push on toward the ideal without destroying the 
 very object of its devotion; it can go on searching 
 the core of concord in the stupid appearance of dis- 
 cord until love has found a way to make loyalty a 
 lost virtue and a group mind a thing that is no more. 
 
 299 
 
XI 
 
 RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT 
 
RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT 
 
 When I had gathered together the pages in 
 which for a time I had been living with these men 
 whose thought had been so real a thing to me, who 
 one by one had said their word and left it to live or 
 die according as men's hearts received it, I was as 
 though suddenly and newly aware of the great mod- 
 ern city without pressing on my window-panes. Little 
 by little its vast insistent presence seemed to push 
 my whilom companions out of the room of being 
 back to their places among the many silent dead. 
 For indeed, I reflected, how few, how vanishingly 
 small a number of those who are out there will be 
 better, worse or different for anything these lives 
 had spent themselves to gain and to give. 
 
 If such thoughts came to me, as to any one they 
 might, must they not have come often and often to 
 those of whom I have been telling? and must not 
 these men have been seized at times with a wistful 
 sense of the humor of their situation? If so, what 
 gave them courage to keep on and to endure until 
 the end? Was it that by some fatality they were 
 bond-slaves to the remote, from whose dom- 
 
 303 
 
RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT 
 
 inance they could not, even if they would, have 
 freed themselves? For one may suppose that all 
 men, even philosophers, are human enough some- 
 times to crave the response of their fellows to the 
 effort of their lives 5 the recognition not merely of 
 some few initiated ones, but of the many or of those 
 who represent the many by the simplicity of their 
 thought. Must not many a one whose labor was 
 with the stars have stopped on his way to envy some 
 singer at the street-corner whose trivial melody had 
 caught the ear and held the steps of passers-by? 
 What reasoning then, or what destiny carried our 
 star-gazer on to his lonely vigil? 
 
 You may say, the psychology of the man who 
 thinks of cosmic things is simple and that his stead- 
 fastness is due to his inability to realize or his abil- 
 ity to forget the homely intimate things of life 
 that to the rest of us are, if not important, yet all 
 the more indispensable. To this I answer: 'tis un- 
 likely! But whether true or not of any of those 
 whose thoughts must seem (if I have not entirely 
 failed to render them) so much our own, let it not 
 be true of us! 
 
 I mean, that no one can think of himself as likely 
 to enrich the world so greatly by his thought and 
 labor that he may count himself to be or encourage 
 himself to become a soul solitary to its toil. Which, 
 
 304 
 
RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT 
 
 being so of our lives as a whole, we frequently feel 
 and wholesomely feel that it is not very well for 
 us to indulge even moments of these lives in studies 
 and reflections so detached from all the give and 
 take of our other time as to leave no trace of in- 
 fluence there. 
 
 Perhaps indeed it cannot be said of any of our 
 momentary flights away from familiar things that 
 we come back from them with no star-dust on our 
 wings, and so these spirit holidays may be excused 
 as may any other holiday on the ground of their 
 quickening and refreshment. But little as I would 
 quarrel with holidays of any kind, and satisfied as 
 I should be had any one found these pages opening 
 to him a door to some fourth dimension where 
 momentary exhilaration or passing forgetfulness 
 might be found, yet I have the feeling that holidays 
 are but a poor imperfect device for making other 
 days more livable. 
 
 In these last reflections, I am sensible that I have 
 been clumsily feeling my way to the asking of a 
 question. It is this: May we not bring the experi- 
 ence of the most thoughtful men of the centuries 
 that have gone before so to bear in our daily living 
 that it will no longer be noble, because no longer 
 necessary, to scorn delights and live laborious days 
 (save holidays)? May not these men have been 
 
 305 
 
RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT 
 
 the prophets of that mediation which will make 
 labor and delight one thing? May it not be possible 
 for us after their leading so to live and strive in the 
 moment that more and more of the whole toward 
 which it tends may be felt in it? And this whole, 
 the while, will it not come so to be conceived that 
 its real presence in the crumb of bread and drop of 
 wine may make of our daily partaking a sacrament 
 as bright as it is enduring? 
 
 If so, and, as it seems to me, only if so, will 
 these thinkers about the whole have found that for 
 which they seemed to waste their being — the re- 
 sponse of the man living the moment, which is 
 everyman. Then will we the studious have brought 
 back from our wanderings with these " souls of men 
 outworn " something more than ineflFable things and 
 memories of dreams dreamt with them. To men 
 bound for the most part to live the moment, that 
 moment would not have lost its throbbing intimacy 
 because it had lost its solitude. 
 
 Now of all desirable things, one may feel and 
 in a poor fashion of words try to tell how desirable 
 they are, without having much hope of securing 
 them for himself or of being able to offer them to 
 others. But it cannot be a bad way to begin winning 
 something for oneself at least by enriching one's 
 reflection with all the stored experience of history. 
 
 306 
 
RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT 
 
 And as history is not always easy to gather, it is at 
 least a generous impulse to tell of what is to be 
 found there a little more simply and compendiously 
 than others have cared to tell it. Which done — 
 and the doing of it has that peculiar quality of 
 giving to the labor of the moment its sense of partic- 
 ipation — it is time to look about one with one's 
 own eyes. 
 
 What under such circumstances the private eye, 
 turning from the past and peering into the future, 
 thinks it sees there, might well be kept private for 
 all the authority it can have and for all the interest 
 it may have for another. Each will have his own 
 vision of the horizon. But it has never been found 
 that the truth is in the end better made out by each 
 holding his own counsel as to what he timidly thinks 
 he descries there. No, out of the confusion of 
 many witnesses comes what little we have guessed 
 or can hope to guess of truth, and no less of that 
 truth which, because it deals with the tie that binds 
 the least with the greatest of things, I venture to 
 call religious. 
 
 In these pages, little or no mention has been 
 made of those great historic religions in whose name 
 temples and cathedrals have been built, and throngs 
 have been moved to worship and to war. This nQg- 
 
 307 
 
RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT 
 
 lect has not been due to indifference: it will perhaps 
 have been felt that these matters were present to the 
 writer as the background against which the thought 
 of the philosophers had to be portrayed if we were 
 to gain insight into their motives and meanings. But 
 our study was to be of those who had given reasons 
 for the faith that was in them, or it might be for 
 their lack of faith. This, the great swaying mass of 
 humanity cannot be expected to do, and if the 
 learned and thoughtful of its various communions 
 have constantly tried to do it for their fellows, 
 these studious devout minds are led by the very 
 diligence of their reflection to interpret the form- 
 ulas of the throng in a way the throng could not 
 understand. Thus they too become philosophers, 
 and for the depth and learning of their thought are 
 as interesting as any of those here presented. It 
 would be hard to find in history a clearer and more 
 judicious mind than Thomas Aquinas. 
 
 But because these theologians are in modern 
 times the exponents of religious views that are 
 widely spread in some manifest form or other, we 
 may assume that they are familiar figures in the 
 thoughts of men of our day and civilization. 
 Wherefore it is of others, churchless and alone, with 
 nothing but their personal writings to make their 
 views known, yet religious in the object of their 
 
 308 
 
RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT 
 
 inquiry and in the conduct of their thought, that I 
 have chosen to speak. 
 
 The immense dialectic of the thought of these 
 men has presented so many aspects of the religious 
 problem that it must have left in the reader a sense 
 of confusion if not of bewilderment. Such a baffled 
 mood comes on every thoughtful student, not once, 
 but again and again, as he reviews the past and tries 
 to estimate the value of its gain 5 to consider what 
 has definitely perished with its time, what perhaps 
 marks development and points somewhither. 
 
 Let me then suggest as well as may be done in 
 a few words some things these men have put behind 
 them and some things to which, with all their mu- 
 tual opposition, they seem resultantly to point. 
 
 In the first place, their common assumption has 
 been that the way of arriving at religious truth was 
 by reason or experience, not by what is commonly 
 called " revelation." There is nothing new or mod- 
 ern in this attitude of mind. The earliest critics 
 of popular religion share the feeling that (as Xeno- 
 phanes wrote, in the sixth century B.C.): 
 
 By no means at the beginning did the gods reveal all things 
 
 to mortals, 
 But mortals themselves, by inquiry, in time have made 
 
 gradual progress. 
 
 309 
 
RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT 
 
 And even among those who did not mean to be 
 critics, we find some devoutly maintaining that di- 
 vine revelation brings naught that reason and ex- 
 perience cannot confirm 3 naught, then, they could 
 not have reached: " Non alia est philosophia, i.e., 
 sapientiae studium, et alia religio," writes John 
 Scotus in the ninth century. " Quid est aliud de 
 philosophia tractare nisi verae religionis regulas ex- 
 ponere? Conficitur inde veram esse philosophiam 
 veram religionem conversimque veram religionem 
 esse veram philosophiam. {De fraedest. proem,) 
 
 But those who from revelation turn to reason and 
 those who turn to experience for evidence in all 
 matters, are of two different tempers of mind and 
 habits of thought. The first we found represented 
 in Spinoza with his Ethlca ordine geometrico demon- 
 strata; the second in Hume with his methods of 
 natural history and human history. 
 
 Of these two schools, I think we may regard 
 the first as definitely closed. That is, to establish the 
 existence of God by logic alone and as a necessity 
 of thought, would only be dreamed of today by those 
 who meant by God, by logic, and by thought's 
 necessity something quite different from anything 
 the seventeenth century rationalist could have meant 
 by those terms. 
 
 Yet to say that the method of a Spinoza is dead, 
 
 310 
 
RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT 
 
 is not to say that his contribution to the spiritual 
 problems with which he dealt is naught. Nothing 
 could be more important to our whole attitude to- 
 ward these problems than Spinoza's insight: The 
 scientific demand that we treat nature as an invio- 
 lable mechanism and the ethical demand that the 
 human element in nature remain a free agent are 
 consistent. It can readily be seen that all the rest 
 of one's thoughts about the world must hang upon 
 one's acceptance or non-acceptance of this reconcilia- 
 tion of mechanical necessity and living freedom. 
 (It must not be supposed, however, that all later 
 thought was agreed that Spinoza had effected this 
 reconciliation 3 perhaps the present writer is without 
 company in thinking that Spinoza's indications in this 
 sense may be followed to a clear and satisfactory 
 issue.) 
 
 If the method of rationalism has lost meaning 
 for us, do we then abide in the confidence that ex- 
 perimental science must find all that is to be found 
 of an object for religion to attach itself to? To 
 my thinking, no! Or rather, the meaning of ex- 
 perience and with it of empirical science has been 
 so altered by later reflection that the relation between 
 human desire and human finding is no longer con- 
 ceived to be that austere separation which a Hume, 
 
 3" 
 
RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT 
 
 a Clifford or a Huxley made the basis of intellectual 
 honesty and even of moral honor. 
 
 There is nevertheless one result of the empirical 
 philosophy which it is hard to believe we shall ever 
 set aside. Whatever we may have come to think 
 experience means, those who have once entered into 
 the spirit of these clear thinkers will not lightly 
 abandon the idea that experience is one. There is 
 not for most of us one kind of experience that con- 
 firms the law of falling stones and revolving 
 planets, another unrelated kind that gives us a sym- 
 pathetic but inarticulate insight into life and its ways, 
 and yet another which in incomparable theophanies 
 reveals to us another world. In a word, empiricism 
 has taught us to accept the postulate that whatever 
 the nature of our beliefs, their meaning must be 
 communicable, their evidence must be demonstrable 
 by one to another. 
 
 What has happened to change things since 
 Hume's day is, first of all, just a deeper searching 
 into the meaning of experience itself, with perhaps 
 this finding: that the reality our empirical science 
 reveals to us is not merely a thing found and re- 
 ceived but also a thing willed and made, Kantian 
 criticism it was that suggested the part played by 
 the knower in the formation of the thing known. 
 This knower was not merely informed by experience 
 
 312 
 
RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT 
 
 as to the world he had chanced on, but of himself 
 he informed his world. Imperfect, disconnected 
 and unconvincing as were Kant's efforts to state and 
 illustrate this conception, it is nevertheless to him 
 that one turns for the first suggestion of that ideal- 
 ism whose more recent expressions have been illus- 
 trated in the chapter on Pragmatism. 
 
 Meanwhile, really unaffected by this development 
 of method are Schopenhauer's gloomy findings and 
 Nietzsche's exaltation of the might of man. Just 
 as the facts of life as he observed it left Hume 
 unable to point to anything in experience that 
 could guide life religiously, so these facts as Scho- 
 penhauer more fully took them in left life irreli- 
 gious and blind. Again, it was but what he took to 
 be a broader experience that led Nietzsche to con- 
 ceive the destiny and perfectibility of life to lie 
 within the control of life itself, and it is only a still 
 broader view of experience that robs this philosophy 
 for us of what inspiration it had and leaves it but 
 a gospel of gritting-the-teeth. 
 
 Yet we may not lay aside these two " findings " 
 regarding life without noting how deeply each has 
 seen into the human heart. If the insight of each 
 is directly contradictory to the insight of the other, 
 it is because the human heart is in contradiction with 
 itself. 
 
 313 
 
RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT 
 
 It can listen, this heart of man, to the voice of 
 Schopenhauer crying for peace. It can understand 
 this voice even to the point of feeling that the 
 peace of those who have ceased to be is happier than 
 the being of those who have lost hope of peace. 
 Not indeed for us is the " melius est ipsum esse 
 quam non esse " of older simpler times. 
 
 But on the other hand, Nietzsche would not make 
 the appeal he does if man did not shrink from every 
 vision of peace that has ever been offered to him, as 
 from something worse than nonentity. Indeed we 
 " envy not the dead that rest. . . . 
 
 What peace could ever be to me 
 The joy that strives with strife? " 
 
 Thus it would seem that the philosophy which 
 alone can bring to pass that gladness of the moment 
 which comes not from its content, but from what 
 there is mixed in it of fulfilment and of promise — 
 that philosophy must give validity to two theses: 
 
 (i) Reality must in all its aspects be shown to 
 be such a thing as human effort may make and 
 mould. 
 
 (2) This effort must set before itself an ideal 
 in which are consistently included all that is genuine 
 in the old ideals calling themselves Peace and War. 
 
 314 
 
RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT 
 
 If the first of these theses was the topic of the 
 chapter on Pragmatism, the second was that which 
 inspired the conception of Progress. Only if to 
 each moment of life there is vividly present the 
 sense that it is a moment of creation, and equally 
 present a satisfaction in the vision of what is to be 
 created, can the moment be a joyous one. Not 
 joyous in a way to wring from us a " Verweile doch! 
 du bist so schon! " But joyous with that quality 
 which would let our Aveht z welcome to the hoped 
 for, our Vale a benediction on a promise left behind. 
 
 If our Modern Thinkers have done aught to 
 help us so to pass a moment, why, so, let them pass. 
 
 Finis 
 
 315 
 
INDEX 
 
 a Kempis, Schopenhauer and, 
 
 165. 
 
 Amiel, 215. 
 
 amoralist, 272, 274. 
 
 Antigone, 262. 
 
 a 'posteriorly 103. 
 
 a pioriy 103, 135. 
 
 Aquinas, 24, 306. 
 
 Aristotle, 24, 25, 87, 287, 
 
 288. 
 art, and the universal, 168— 
 
 1 70 J individuates, 292— 
 
 294. 
 asceticism, Schopenhauer on, 
 
 174-176. 
 assent, Newman's " Grammar 
 
 of," 240. 
 atnditas vitacy Huxley's, 203. 
 
 Bacon, Francis, 55, 102, 245, 
 246. 
 
 Balfour, 244, 245. 
 
 beautiful, Schopenhauer's the- 
 ory of the, 168-170. 
 
 Berti, Vita di Giordano 
 Bruno y i i . 
 
 body, and mind, 43, 44. 
 
 Bourdeau, J., 239, 240. 
 
 Bourdeau, L., 221-224. 
 
 Bourget, " Le Disciple," 66- 
 
 93- 
 
 Brahminism, Schopenhauer 
 and, 165. 
 
 Brow^ning, 201. 
 
 Bruno, iii, Mocenigo's de- 
 nunciation of, 3—8 ; trial 
 at Venice, 9—18; re- 
 cantation, 18; new as- 
 tronomy, 1 8-2 1 ; ethical 
 and religious conse- 
 quences, 21—26; "new 
 philosophy," pantheism, 
 29—31 ; Schoppius on sen- 
 tence and execution of, 
 33-34; and Spinoza, 37, 
 
 38; 195. 
 Buddhism, Schopenhauer and, 
 165, 176, 177, 187. 
 
 cannibals, Melville on, 249— 
 251; Montaigne on, 251— 
 254. 
 
 categorical, good, oughty see 
 imperative. 
 
 Christianity, Kant and, 144, 
 145; Schopenhauer and, 
 165; Nietzsche and, 185, 
 204; its intellectual task, 
 298. 
 
 civilization, a decadence, 255, 
 256. 
 
 Clifford, 312. 
 
 317 
 
INDEX 
 
 Clough, 226. 
 
 Coleridge, Mary, 314. 
 
 Copernicus, 20, 21. 
 
 Croce, 286, 288. 
 
 Cusanus, Nicolaus, 286, 289. 
 
 Dante, his world, 22. 
 
 Darwin, influence on Nietz- 
 sche, 191-193. 
 
 Decalogue, 135, 
 
 Descartes, and Spinoza, 39—43 > 
 102, 265. 
 
 determinism, Spinoza's, 38, 43, 
 44, 51-53, 65, 67-76, 
 308, 309; of mechanical 
 ideal, 80-82. 
 
 disciple, Bourget's " Le Dis- 
 ciple," 66; problem and 
 plot in relation to Spinoza, 
 67—76; discussion of 
 problem, mechanism, pur- 
 pose, and freedom, 79— 
 90; outcome, 90-93. 
 
 empiricism, 102-105, 309, 
 310. 
 
 Epictetus, 278. 
 
 Epicurus, "Garden of," 22; 
 97, no. 
 
 Ethica, ordtne geometrico de- 
 monstratay 37, 310. 
 
 evolution, Nietzsche and doc- 
 trine of organic, 191- 
 193. 
 
 Fichte, 65, I47> IS2> 157' 
 
 Flaubert, 166, 292, 293. 
 
 France, Anatole, contrasts an- 
 cient and modem worlds, 
 22, 23, 166; on realism 
 in history, 221-224; 264, 
 292, 293. 
 
 freedom, consistent with mech- 
 anism, 51-53, 82-90; 
 Kant on, 138. 
 
 Fourlians, morality of, 118— 
 121. 
 
 geometry, ethics after manner 
 of, 37; 40, 41, 43, 310. 
 
 Gierke, 289. 
 
 God, ontological proof of, 41, 
 43; Kant, 129, 140-144, 
 146-147; "is dead," 
 183-185. 
 
 Goethe, 315. 
 
 good, the, see imperative; 
 259-271. 
 
 Gottrunkenefy Spinoza ein, 50. 
 
 Gourmont, Remy de, 273. 
 
 group, mind of, 286—290, 299. 
 
 Hardy, 166, 167. 
 
 Hegel, 147, 157. 
 
 Heine, 213. 
 
 Hobbes, 102, 266-270. 
 
 humanity, Hume on, 124. 
 
 Hume, personality, 98-102; 
 inheritance of empiricism, 
 102—105; on experience 
 vs. miracles, 105-IIO; on 
 Providence and Future 
 
 318 
 
INDEX 
 
 State, lia-113; on Nat- 
 ural Religion, reasons for 
 vacillation, 113-117; on 
 problem of morals and 
 definition of virtue, 1 1 7— 
 123; on virtue and hap- 
 piness, 123-125; 225, 
 226, 264, 265, 309, 310. 
 
 Huxley, his " aviditas vitae^^ 
 203; 310. 
 
 hypothetical, good, ougkty see 
 imperative. 
 
 ideal, mechanical, 80-82; 
 teleological, 87; of prog- 
 ress, 279. 
 
 idealism, German, 29; 217. 
 
 immortality, Kant on, 138, 
 
 139- 
 
 imperative, Kant on hypo- 
 thetical and categorical, 
 129-135; 259-261. 
 
 individuation, effected by love, 
 141-143, 291, 292, 
 294—297; effected by art, 
 292-294. 
 
 Inquisition, Bruno before the 
 Holy, 3-18,33. 
 
 Jesus, Nietzsche^s conception 
 
 of, 187, 195-198. 
 James, see Pragmatism. 
 John Scotus, 310. 
 
 Kant, iv, 65; attitude toward 
 religion, 129; on imper- 
 atives, 129-135; on pre- 
 
 suppositions of morality, 
 135—144; postulates free- 
 dom, immortality, God, 
 144—148; moral law, 
 first formulation, 1 49— 
 150; second formulation, 
 150, 151; on harmony 
 of wills, 151, 152; 185, 
 259-261, 312. 
 
 law, mechanical and teleologi- 
 cal, 84-90, 1 1 5-1 1 7. 
 
 Leconte de Lisle, 227. 
 
 Leibnitz, 29, 231. 
 
 Leviathan, Hobbes's, 266—270. 
 
 Locke, 102. 
 
 logic, and ethics, 40, 41 ; and 
 love, 295-298. 
 
 Loisy, I'Abbe, 240. 
 
 Louys, Pierre, 151. 
 
 love, individuates, 141— 143, 
 291, 292, 294-297; and 
 logic, 295-298. 
 
 loyalty, defines morality, 266, 
 272; defined, 286-288. 
 
 Lucretius, 97, 163, 184. 
 
 Mach, Ernst, 214. 
 
 Marcus Aurelius, 2 10. 
 
 Maupassant, 166, 292, 293. 
 
 mechanism, Spinoza on, 38, 
 43> 44> 5i-53> 65, 67- 
 76, 310, 311 ; ideal of, 
 80-82; consistent with 
 purpose and freedom, ^i— 
 53, 82-90. 
 
 319 
 
INDEX 
 
 Melville, Herman, on Typees, 
 249--251. 
 
 mind, and body, 43, 44; 
 group, 286-290, 299. 
 
 miracles, Hume's treatment in 
 "Enquiry," 1 05-1 08. 
 
 Mocenigo, his denunciation of 
 Bruno, 3-8. 
 
 modernism, and pragmatism, 
 239-242. 
 
 Montaigne, v, 251-254. 
 
 morality, Kant's law of, 149— 
 1 5 1 ; proposed as absolute 
 good, 261-266; ques- 
 tioned as absolute good, 
 266— 270 ; reformed, 272, 
 2733 discarded, 273, 274. 
 
 nature, man in state of, 249— 
 256, 267-269; conquest 
 of, 277-279. 
 
 Newman, 240. 
 
 New Testament, Kant and, 
 144. 
 
 Nicolaus, of Cusa, 289. 
 
 Nietzsche, iv; key-note of, 
 183; historic comparisons 
 with, 183-186; and 
 Schopenhauer, 1 86-191 ; 
 and Darwin, 1 91-193; 
 on superman as goal, 193; 
 on transvaluation, 193— 
 197; on genealogy of 
 morals, 197—202; on an- 
 archy, 202—203; on will 
 to power, 203-205; on 
 
 eternal returning, 206- 
 209; vanishing goal, 209, 
 210; on courage, 210; 
 on scientific spirit, 229— 
 231; 274, 311, 312. 
 
 ought, see imperative. 
 Old Testament, world of, 
 i37> 144. 
 
 parallelism, 43, 44. 
 
 Pascal, 27, 147, 240. 
 
 Pascendiy Encyclical, 239. 
 
 philosophers, Nietzsche's esti- 
 mate of, 197. 
 
 pietism, influence on Kant, 
 144. 
 
 pity, a vice, 185-187. 
 
 Plato, 87, 286, 291, 292. 
 
 pragmatism, v; relation to 
 realism and idealism, 
 2 1 3-2 1 7 ; James's first 
 presentation of, 217, 
 218; reaction of realists 
 against, 218-228; Nietz- 
 sche and, 229—232; 
 "Will to Believe," 232- 
 237; and modernism, 
 238-242; and * human * 
 religion, 242-243; phy- 
 sical science and ideals of, 
 243, 244, 315. 
 
 progress, v; skeptics of, 249- 
 259; conditional and ab- 
 solute, 259—260; toward 
 moral good held absolute, 
 261-266; morality proves 
 
 320 
 
INDEX 
 
 conditional good, 266— 
 271; as viewed by re- 
 formed morality and by 
 amorality, 271—274; and 
 conflicting ideals of peace 
 and war, 275; final defi- 
 nition of, 275-279. 
 
 Providence, Hume on " Partic- 
 ular," 110-113. 
 
 purpose, consistent with mech- 
 anism, 51-53, 82-90. 
 
 quakerism, German, 144. 
 
 Rabelais, 151. 
 
 rationalism, of Descartes, 39-^ 
 43, 102. 
 
 realism, 216; in science, 219; 
 in history, 220-224; in 
 ethics, 225; in religion, 
 226, 238-240; in art, 
 226, 227. 
 
 religion, " Natural History 
 of," 108; Kant's attitude 
 toward, 129; identified 
 with philosophy, 308. 
 
 Rousseau, 256. 
 
 Royce, 155, 265, 284, 285, 
 286, 291. 
 
 Schelling, 147, 157. 
 
 Scherer, on Amiel, 215. 
 
 Schopenhauer, iv, 152; 
 "World as Will," 156- 
 159; on universal strife, 
 160-165; forerunners. 
 
 165, 166; followers, 166, 
 167; on suicide, 167, 
 168; on the beautiful, 
 168— 170; on civil law, 
 170— 171; on moral intu- 
 ition, 171— 173; on de- 
 nial of will, 173-176; 
 on Nirvana, 176-179; 
 and Nietzsche, 184— 191 ; 
 
 313. 314. 
 Schopp, letter describing 
 
 Bruno's trial and execu- 
 tion, 31-34. 
 
 Spinoza, iv; family, life, 
 death, 37; and Bruno, 
 37> 38; and Descartes, 
 39—44; on popular the- 
 ology, 44-49; ein Gott- 
 runkener, 5 o ; purpose 
 and freedom, 51—53; 
 knowledge, goodness, hap- 
 piness, 53—61; 102, 187, 
 310, 311. 
 
 suicide, Schopenhauer on, 167— 
 168. 
 
 superman, iv, 193, 194, 203, 
 206. 
 
 super-superman, iv, 206. 
 
 sympathy, Hume on, 124; 
 Schopenhauer on, 171- 
 173; Nietzsche on, see 
 pity. 
 
 Tasso, 257, 261. 
 
 teleology, see purpose. 
 
 Tennant, 298. 
 
 tragedy, Schopenhauer's con- 
 
 321 
 
INDEX 
 
 ception of, 156, 166, Venice, Bruno before tribunal 
 167. at, 9-18. 
 
 Typees, of Melville, 249-25 1. 
 
 will, to live, see Schopenhauer; 
 
 J. ' ^ ^ ' ./,xri to power, see Nietzsche: 
 
 utility, Hume on, 123; "Why ^ ,^,. 
 
 <_' „ to believe, see pragmatism. 
 
 X leases, 1 24* 
 
 Van den Ende, Francis, 39. Xenophanes, 184, 309. 
 
 322 
 
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