The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy
depend on you _the liver_. If you surrender to the nightmare view and
crown the evil edifice by your own suicide, you have indeed made a
picture totally black. Pessimism, completed by your act, is true
beyond a doubt, so far as your world goes. Your mistrust of life has
removed whatever worth your own enduring existence might have given to
it; and now, throughout the whole sphere of possible influence of that
existence, the mistrust has proved itself to have had divining power.
But suppose, on the other hand, that instead of giving way to the
nightmare view you cling to it that this world is not the _ultimatum_.
Suppose you find yourself a very well-spring, as Wordsworth says, of--
"Zeal, and the virtue to exist by faith
As soldiers live by courage; as, by strength
Of heart, the sailor fights with roaring seas."
Suppose, however thickly evils crowd upon you, that your unconquerable
subjectivity proves to be their match, and that you find a more
wonderful joy than any passive pleasure can bring in trusting ever in
the larger whole. Have you not now made life worth living on these
terms? What sort of a thing would life really be, with your qualities
ready for a tussle with it, if it only brought fair weather and gave
these higher faculties of yours no scope? Please remember that
optimism and pessimism are definitions of the world, and that our own
reactions on the world, small as they are in bulk, are integral parts
of the whole thing, and necessarily help to determine the definition.
They may even be the decisive elements in determining the definition.
A large mass can have its unstable equilibrium overturned by the
addition {61} of a feather's weight; a long phrase may have its sense
reversed by the addition of the three letters _n-o-t_. This life is
worth living, we can say, _since it is what we make it, from the moral
point of view_; and we are determined to make it from that point of
view, so far as we have anything to do with it, a success.
Now, in this description of faiths that verify themselves I have
assumed that our faith in an invisible order is what inspires those
efforts and that patience which make this visible order good for moral
men. Our faith in the seen world's goodness (goodness now meaning
fitness for successful moral and religious life) has verified itself by
leaning on our faith in the unseen world. But will our faith in the
unseen world similarly verify itself? Who knows?
Once more it is a case of _maybe_; and once more maybes are the essence
of the situation. I confess that I do not see why the very existence
of an invisible world may not in part depend on the personal response
which any one of us may make to the religious appeal. God himself, in
short, may draw vital strength and increase of very being from our
fidelity. For my own part, I do not know what the sweat and blood and
tragedy of this life mean, if they mean anything short of this. If
this life be not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained
for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private
theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it _feels_ like a
real fight,--as if there were something really wild in the universe
which we, with all our idealities and faithfulnesses, are needed to
redeem; and first of all to redeem our own hearts from atheisms and
fears. For such a half-wild, half-saved universe our nature is
adapted. The deepest thing in our {62} nature is this _Binnenleben_
(as a German doctor lately has called it), this dumb region of the
heart in which we dwell alone with our willingnesses and
unwillingnesses, our faiths and fears. As through the cracks and
crannies of caverns those waters exude from the earth's bosom which
then form the fountain-heads of springs, so in these crepuscular depths
of personality the sources of all our outer deeds and decisions take
their rise. Here is our deepest organ of communication with the nature
of things; and compared with these concrete movements of our soul all
abstract statements and scientific arguments--the veto, for example,
which the strict positivist pronounces upon our faith--sound to us like
mere chatterings of the teeth. For here possibilities, not finished
facts, are the realities with which we have actively to deal; and to
quote my friend William Salter, of the Philadelphia Ethical Society,
"as the essence of courage is to stake one's life on a possibility, so
the essence of faith is to believe that the possibility exists."
These, then, are my last words to you: Be not afraid of life. Believe
that life _is_ worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.
The 'scientific proof' that you are right may not be clear before the
day of judgment (or some stage of being which that expression may serve
to symbolize) is reached. But the faithful 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 Crillon after a great victory
had been gained: "Hang yourself, brave Crillon! we fought at Arques,
and you were not there."
[1] An Address to the Harvard Young Men's Christian Association.
Published in the International Journal of Ethics for October, 1895, and
as a pocket volume by S. B. Weston, Philadelphia, 1896.
[2] Quoted by George E. Waring in his book on Tyrol. Compare A.
Bérard: Les Vaudois, Lyon, Storck, 1892.
{63}
THE SENTIMENT OF RATIONALITY.[1]
I.
What is the task which philosophers set themselves to perform; and why
do they philosophize at all? Almost every one will immediately reply:
They desire to attain a conception of the frame of things which shall
on the whole be more rational than that somewhat chaotic view which
every one by nature carries about with him under his hat. But suppose
this rational conception attained, how is the philosopher to recognize
it for what it is, and not let it slip through ignorance? The only
answer can be that he will recognize its rationality as he recognizes
everything else, by certain subjective marks with which it affects him.
When he gets the marks, he may know that he has got the rationality.
What, then, are the marks? A strong feeling of ease, peace, rest, is
one of them. The transition from a state of puzzle and perplexity to
rational comprehension is full of lively relief and pleasure.
But this relief seems to be a negative rather than a positive
character. Shall we then say that the feeling of rationality is
constituted merely by the absence {64} of any feeling of irrationality?
I think there are very good grounds for upholding such a view. All
feeling whatever, in the light of certain recent psychological
speculations, seems to depend for its physical condition not on simple
discharge of nerve-currents, but on their discharge under arrest,
impediment, or resistance. Just as we feel no particular pleasure when
we breathe freely, but a very intense feeling of distress when the
respiratory motions are prevented,--so any unobstructed tendency to
action discharges itself without the production of much cogitative
accompaniment, and any perfectly fluent course of thought awakens but
little feeling; but when the movement is inhibited, or when the thought
meets with difficulties, we experience distress. It is only when the
distress is upon us that we can be said to strive, to crave, or to
aspire. When enjoying plenary freedom either in the way of motion or
of thought, we are in a sort of anaesthetic state in which we might say
with Walt Whitman, if we cared to say anything about ourselves at such
times, "I am sufficient as I am." This feeling of the sufficiency of
the present moment, of its absoluteness,--this absence of all need to
explain it, account for it, or justify it,--is what I call the
Sentiment of Rationality. As soon, in short, as we are enabled from
any cause whatever to think with perfect fluency, the thing we think of
seems to us _pro tanto_ rational.
Whatever modes of conceiving the cosmos facilitate this fluency,
produce the sentiment of rationality. Conceived in such modes, being
vouches for itself and needs no further philosophic formulation. But
this fluency may be obtained in various ways; and first I will take up
the theoretic way.
{65}
The facts of the world in their sensible diversity are always before
us, but our theoretic need is that they should be conceived in a way
that reduces their manifoldness to simplicity. Our pleasure at finding
that a chaos of facts is the expression of a single underlying fact is
like the relief of the musician at resolving a confused mass of sound
into melodic or harmonic order. The simplified result is handled with
far less mental effort than the original data; and a philosophic
conception of nature is thus in no metaphorical sense a labor-saving
contrivance. The passion for parsimony, for economy of means in
thought, is the philosophic passion _par excellence_; and any character
or aspect of the world's phenomena which gathers up their diversity
into monotony will gratify that passion, and in the philosopher's mind
stand for that essence of things compared with which all their other
determinations may by him be overlooked.
More universality or extensiveness is, then, one mark which the
philosopher's conceptions must possess. Unless they apply to an
enormous number of cases they will not bring him relief. The knowledge
of things by their causes, which is often given as a definition of
rational knowledge, is useless to him unless the causes converge to a
minimum number, while still producing the maximum number of effects.
The more multiple then are the instances, the more flowingly does his
mind rove from fact to fact. The phenomenal transitions are no real
transitions; each item is the same old friend with a slightly altered
dress.
Who does not feel the charm of thinking that the moon and the apple
are, as far as their relation to the {66} earth goes, identical; of
knowing respiration and combustion to be one; of understanding that the
balloon rises by the same law whereby the stone sinks; of feeling that
the warmth in one's palm when one rubs one's sleeve is identical with
the motion which the friction checks; of recognizing the difference
between beast and fish to be only a higher degree of that between human
father and son; of believing our strength when we climb the mountain or
fell the tree to be no other than the strength of the sun's rays which
made the corn grow out of which we got our morning meal?
But alongside of this passion for simplification there exists a sister
passion, which in some minds--though they perhaps form the minority--is
its rival. This is the passion for distinguishing; it is the impulse
to be _acquainted_ with the parts rather than to comprehend the whole.
Loyalty to clearness and integrity of perception, dislike of blurred
outlines, of vague identifications, are its characteristics. It loves
to recognize particulars in their full completeness, and the more of
these it can carry the happier it is. It prefers any amount of
incoherence, abruptness, and fragmentariness (so long as the literal
details of the separate facts are saved) to an abstract way of
conceiving things that, while it simplifies them, dissolves away at the
same time their concrete fulness. Clearness and simplicity thus set up
rival claims, and make a real dilemma for the thinker.
A man's philosophic attitude is determined by the balance in him of
these two cravings. No system of philosophy can hope to be universally
accepted among men which grossly violates either need, or {67} entirely
subordinates the one to the other. The fate of Spinosa, with his