The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy
necessity, "is the last and highest point that we can reach.... It is
not only the interest of ultimate and definitive knowledge, but also
that of the feelings, to find a last repose and an ideal equilibrium in
an uttermost datum which can simply not be other than it is."
Such is the attitude of ordinary men in their theism, God's fiat being
in physics and morals such an {74} uttermost datum. Such also is the
attitude of all hard-minded analysts and _Verstandesmenschen_. Lotze,
Renouvier, and Hodgson promptly say that of experience as a whole no
account can be given, but neither seek to soften the abruptness of the
confession nor to reconcile us with our impotence.
But mediating attempts may be made by more mystical minds. The peace
of rationality may be sought through ecstasy when logic fails. To
religious persons of every shade of doctrine moments come when the
world, as it is, seems so divinely orderly, and the acceptance of it by
the heart so rapturously complete, that intellectual questions vanish;
nay, the intellect itself is hushed to sleep,--as Wordsworth says,
"thought is not; in enjoyment it expires." Ontological emotion so
fills the soul that ontological speculation can no longer overlap it
and put her girdle of interrogation-marks round existence. Even the
least religious of men must have felt with Walt Whitman, when loafing
on the grass on some transparent summer morning, that "swiftly arose
and spread round him the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument
of the earth." At such moments of energetic living we feel as if there
were something diseased and contemptible, yea vile, in theoretic
grubbing and brooding. In the eye of healthy sense the philosopher is
at best a learned fool.
Since the heart can thus wall out the ultimate irrationality which the
head ascertains, the erection of its procedure into a systematized
method would be a philosophic achievement of first-rate importance.
But as used by mystics hitherto it has lacked universality, being
available for few persons and at few times, and {75} even in these
being apt to be followed by fits of reaction and dryness; and if men
should agree that the mystical method is a subterfuge without logical
pertinency, a plaster but no cure, and that the idea of non-entity can
never be exorcised, empiricism will be the ultimate philosophy.
Existence then will be a brute fact to which as a whole the emotion of
ontologic wonder shall rightfully cleave, but remain eternally
unsatisfied. Then wonderfulness or mysteriousness will be an essential
attribute of the nature of things, and the exhibition and emphasizing
of it will continue to be an ingredient in the philosophic industry of
the race. Every generation will produce its Job, its Hamlet, its
Faust, or its Sartor Resartus.
With this we seem to have considered the possibilities of purely
theoretic rationality. But we saw at the outset that rationality meant
only unimpeded mental function. Impediments that arise in the
theoretic sphere might perhaps be avoided if the stream of mental
action should leave that sphere betimes and pass into the practical.
Let us therefore inquire what constitutes the feeling of rationality in
its _practical_ aspect. If thought is not to stand forever pointing at
the universe in wonder, if its movement is to be diverted from the
issueless channel of purely theoretic contemplation, let us ask what
conception of the universe will awaken active impulses capable of
effecting this diversion. A definition of the world which will give
back to the mind the free motion which has been blocked in the purely
contemplative path may so far make the world seem rational again.
Well, of two conceptions equally fit to satisfy the logical demand,
that one which awakens the active {76} impulses, or satisfies other
aesthetic demands better than the other, will be accounted the more
rational conception, and will deservedly prevail.
There is nothing improbable in the supposition that an analysis of the
world may yield a number of formulae, all consistent with the facts.
In physical science different formulae may explain the phenomena
equally well,--the one-fluid and the two-fluid theories of electricity,
for example. Why may it not be so with the world? Why may there not
be different points of view for surveying it, within each of which all
data harmonize, and which the observer may therefore either choose
between, or simply cumulate one upon another? A Beethoven
string-quartet is truly, as some one has said, a scraping of horses'
tails on cats' bowels, and may be exhaustively described in such terms;
but the application of this description in no way precludes the
simultaneous applicability of an entirely different description. Just
so a thorough-going interpretation of the world in terms of mechanical
sequence is compatible with its being interpreted teleologically, for
the mechanism itself may be designed.
If, then, there were several systems excogitated, equally satisfying to
our purely logical needs, they would still have to be passed in review,
and approved or rejected by our aesthetic and practical nature. Can we
define the tests of rationality which these parts of our nature would
use?
Philosophers long ago observed the remarkable fact that mere
familiarity with things is able to produce a feeling of their
rationality. The empiricist school has been so much struck by this
circumstance {77} as to have laid it down that the feeling of
rationality and the feeling of familiarity are one and the same thing,
and that no other kind of rationality than this exists. The daily
contemplation of phenomena juxtaposed in a certain order begets an
acceptance of their connection, as absolute as the repose engendered by
theoretic insight into their coherence. To explain a thing is to pass
easily back to its antecedents; to know it is easily to foresee its
consequents. Custom, which lets us do both, is thus the source of
whatever rationality the thing may gain in our thought.
In the broad sense in which rationality was defined at the outset of
this essay, it is perfectly apparent that custom must be one of its
factors. We said that any perfectly fluent and easy thought was devoid
of the sentiment of irrationality. Inasmuch then as custom acquaints
us with all the relations of a thing, it teaches us to pass fluently
from that thing to others, and _pro tanto_ tinges it with the rational
character.
Now, there is one particular relation of greater practical importance
than all the rest,--I mean the relation of a thing to its future
consequences. So long as an object is unusual, our expectations are
baffled; they are fully determined as soon as it becomes familiar. I
therefore propose this as the first practical requisite which a
philosophic conception must satisfy: _It must, in a general way at
least, banish uncertainty from the future_. The permanent presence of
the sense of futurity in the mind has been strangely ignored by most
writers, but the fact is that our consciousness at a given moment is
never free from the ingredient of expectancy. Every one knows how when
a painful thing has to be undergone in the {78} near future, the vague
feeling that it is impending penetrates all our thought with uneasiness
and subtly vitiates our mood even when it does not control our
attention; it keeps us from being at rest, at home in the given
present. The same is true when a great happiness awaits us. But when
the future is neutral and perfectly certain, 'we do not mind it,' as we
say, but give an undisturbed attention to the actual. Let now this
haunting sense of futurity be thrown off its bearings or left without
an object, and immediately uneasiness takes possession of the mind.
But in every novel or unclassified experience this is just what occurs;
we do not know what will come next; and novelty _per se_ becomes a
mental irritant, while custom _per se_ is a mental sedative, merely
because the one baffles while the other settles our expectations.
Every reader must feel the truth of this. What is meant by coming 'to
feel at home' in a new place, or with new people? It is simply that,
at first, when we take up our quarters in a new room, we do not know
what draughts may blow in upon our back, what doors may open, what
forms may enter, what interesting objects may be found in cupboards and
corners. When after a few days we have learned the range of all these
possibilities, the feeling of strangeness disappears. And so it does
with people, when we have got past the point of expecting any
essentially new manifestations from their character.
The utility of this emotional effect of expectation is perfectly
obvious; 'natural selection,' in fact, was bound to bring it about
sooner or later. It is of the utmost practical importance to an animal
that he should have prevision of the qualities of the objects {79} that
surround him, and especially that he should not come to rest in
presence of circumstances that might be fraught either with peril or
advantage,--go to sleep, for example, on the brink of precipices, in
the dens of enemies, or view with indifference some new-appearing
object that might, if chased, prove an important addition to the
larder. Novelty _ought_ to irritate him. All curiosity has thus a
practical genesis. We need only look at the physiognomy of a dog or a
horse when a new object comes into his view, his mingled fascination
and fear, to see that the element of conscious insecurity or perplexed
expectation lies at the root of his emotion. A dog's curiosity about
the movements of his master or a strange object only extends as far as
the point of deciding what is going to happen next. That settled,
curiosity is quenched. The dog quoted by Darwin, whose behavior in
presence of a newspaper moved by the wind seemed to testify to a sense
'of the supernatural,' was merely exhibiting the irritation of an
uncertain future. A newspaper which could move spontaneously was in
itself so unexpected that the poor brute could not tell what new
wonders the next moment might bring forth.
To turn back now to philosophy. An ultimate datum, even though it be
logically unrationalized, will, if its quality is such as to define
expectancy, be peacefully accepted by the mind; while if it leave the
least opportunity for ambiguity in the future, it will to that extent
cause mental uneasiness if not distress. Now, in the ultimate
explanations of the universe which the craving for rationality has
elicited from the human mind, the demands of expectancy to be satisfied
have always played a fundamental part. {80} The term set up by
philosophers as primordial has been one which banishes the
incalculable. 'Substance,' for example, means, as Kant says, _das
Beharrliche_, which will be as it has been, because its being is
essential and eternal. And although we may not be able to prophesy in
detail the future phenomena to which the substance shall give rise, we
may set our minds at rest in a general way, when we have called the
substance God, Perfection, Love, or Reason, by the reflection that
whatever is in store for us can never at bottom be inconsistent with
the character of this term; so that our attitude even toward the
unexpected is in a general sense defined. Take again the notion of
immortality, which for common people seems to be the touchstone of
every philosophic or religious creed: what is this but a way of saying
that the determination of expectancy is the essential factor of
rationality? The wrath of science against miracles, of certain
philosophers against the doctrine of free-will, has precisely the same
root,--dislike to admit any ultimate factor in things which may rout
our prevision or upset the stability of our outlook.