The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy
current of life which runs in at our eyes or ears is meant to run out
at our hands, feet, or lips. The only use of the thoughts it occasions
while inside is to determine its direction to whichever of these organs
shall, on the whole, under the circumstances actually present, act in
the way most propitious to our welfare.
The willing department of our nature, in short, dominates both the
conceiving department and the feeling department; or, in plainer
English, perception and thinking are only there for behavior's sake.
I am sure I am not wrong in stating this result as one of the
fundamental conclusions to which the entire drift of modern
physiological investigation sweeps us. If asked what great
contribution physiology has made to psychology of late years, I am sure
every competent authority will reply that her influence has in no way
been so weighty as in the copious illustration, verification, and
consolidation of this broad, general point of view.
I invite you, then, to consider what may be the possible speculative
consequences involved in this great achievement of our generation.
Already, it dominates all the new work done in psychology; but {115}
what I wish to ask is whether its influence may not extend far beyond
the limits of psychology, even into those of theology herself. The
relations of the doctrine of reflex action with no less a matter than
the doctrine of theism is, in fact, the topic to which I now invite
your attention.
We are not the first in the field. There have not been wanting writers
enough to say that reflex action and all that follows from it give the
_coup de grâce_ to the superstition of a God.
If you open, for instance, such a book on comparative psychology, as
der Thierische Wille of G. H. Schneider, you will find, sandwiched in
among the admirable dealings of the author with his proper subject, and
popping out upon us in unexpected places, the most delightfully _naïf_
German onslaughts on the degradation of theologians, and the utter
incompatibility of so many reflex adaptations to the environment with
the existence of a creative intelligence. There was a time, remembered
by many of us here, when the existence of reflex action and all the
other harmonies between the organism and the world were held to prove a
God. Now, they are held to disprove him. The next turn of the
whirligig may bring back proof of him again.
Into this debate about his existence, I will not pretend to enter. I
must take up humbler ground, and limit my ambition to showing that a
God, whether existent or not, is at all events the kind of being which,
if he did exist, would form _the most adequate possible object_ for
minds framed like our own to conceive as lying at the root of the
universe. My thesis, in other words, is this: that some outward
reality of {116} a nature defined as God's nature must be defined, is
the only ultimate object that is at the same time rational and possible
for the human mind's contemplation. _Anything short of God is not
rational, anything more than God is not possible_, if the human mind be
in truth the triadic structure of impression, reflection, and reaction
which we at the outset allowed.
Theism, whatever its objective warrant, would thus be seen to have a
subjective anchorage in its congruity with our nature as thinkers; and,
however it may fare with its truth, to derive from this subjective
adequacy the strongest possible guaranty of its permanence. It is and
will be the classic mean of rational opinion, the centre of gravity of
all attempts to solve the riddle of life,--some falling below it by
defect, some flying above it by excess, itself alone satisfying every
mental need in strictly normal measure. Our gain will thus in the
first instance be psychological. We shall merely have investigated a
chapter in the natural history of the mind, and found that, as a matter
of such natural history, God may be called the normal object of the
mind's belief. Whether over and above this he be really the living
truth is another question. If he is, it will show the structure of our
mind to be in accordance with the nature of reality. Whether it be or
not in such accordance is, it seems to me, one of those questions that
belong to the province of personal faith to decide. I will not touch
upon the question here, for I prefer to keep to the strictly
natural-history point of view. I will only remind you that each one of
us is entitled either to doubt or to believe in the harmony between his
faculties and the truth; and that, whether he doubt or {117} believe,
he does it alike on his personal responsibility and risk.
"Du musst glauben, du musst wagen,
Denn die Götter leihn kein Pfand,
Nur ein Wunder kann dich tragen
In das schöne Wunderland."
I will presently define exactly what I mean by God and by Theism, and
explain what theories I referred to when I spoke just now of attempts
to fly beyond the one and to outbid the other.
But, first of all, let me ask you to linger a moment longer over what I
have called the reflex theory of mind, so as to be sure that we
understand it absolutely before going on to consider those of its
consequences of which I am more particularly to speak. I am not quite
sure that its full scope is grasped even by those who have most
zealously promulgated it. I am not sure, for example, that all
physiologists see that it commits them to regarding the mind as an
essentially teleological mechanism. I mean by this that the conceiving
or theorizing faculty--the mind's middle department--functions
_exclusively for the sake of ends_ that do not exist at all in the
world of impressions we receive by way of our senses, but are set by
our emotional and practical subjectivity altogether.[2] It is a
transformer of the world of our impressions into a totally different
world,--the world of our conception; and the transformation is effected
in the interests of our volitional nature, and for no other purpose
whatsoever. Destroy the volitional nature, the definite subjective
purposes, preferences, {118} fondnesses for certain effects, forms,
orders, and not the slightest motive would remain for the brute order
of our experience to be remodelled at all. But, as we have the
elaborate volitional constitution we do have, the remodelling must be
effected; there is no escape. The world's contents are _given_ to each
of us in an order so foreign to our subjective interests that we can
hardly by an effort of the imagination picture to ourselves what it is
like. We have to break that order altogether,--and by picking out from
it the items which concern us, and connecting them with others far
away, which we say 'belong' with them, we are able to make out definite
threads of sequence and tendency; to foresee particular liabilities and
get ready for them; and to enjoy simplicity and harmony in place of
what was chaos. Is not the sum of your actual experience taken at this
moment and impartially added together an utter chaos? The strains of
my voice, the lights and shades inside the room and out, the murmur of
the wind, the ticking of the clock, the various organic feelings you
may happen individually to possess, do these make a whole at all? Is
it not the only condition of your mental sanity in the midst of them
that most of them should become non-existent for you, and that a few
others--the sounds, I hope, which I am uttering--should evoke from
places in your memory that have nothing to do with this scene
associates fitted to combine with them in what we call a rational train
of thought,--rational, because it leads to a conclusion which we have
some organ to appreciate? We have no organ or faculty to appreciate
the simply given order. The real world as it is given objectively at
this moment is the sum total of all its beings and {119} events now.
But can we think of such a sum? Can we realize for an instant what a
cross-section of all existence at a definite point of time would be?
While I talk and the flies buzz, a sea-gull catches a fish at the mouth
of the Amazon, a tree falls in the Adirondack wilderness, a man sneezes
in Germany, a horse dies in Tartary, and twins are born in France.
What does that mean? Does the contemporaneity of these events with one
another and with a million others as disjointed, form a rational bond
between them, and unite them into anything that means for us a world?
Yet just such a collateral contemporaneity, and nothing else, is the
real order of the world. It is an order with which we have nothing to
do but to get away from it as fast as possible. As I said, we break
it: we break it into histories, and we break it into arts, and we break
it into sciences; and then we begin to feel at home. We make ten
thousand separate serial orders of it, and on any one of these we react
as though the others did not exist. We discover among its various
parts relations that were never given to sense at all (mathematical
relations, tangents, squares, and roots and logarithmic functions), and
out of an infinite number of these we call certain ones essential and
lawgiving, and ignore the rest. Essential these relations are, but
only _for our purpose_, the other relations being just as real and
present as they; and our purpose is to _conceive simply_ and to
_foresee_. Are not simple conception and prevision subjective ends
pure and simple? They are the ends of what we call science; and the
miracle of miracles, a miracle not yet exhaustively cleared up by any
philosophy, is that the given order lends itself to the remodelling.
It shows itself plastic to many of our scientific, to {120} many of our
aesthetic, to many of our practical purposes and ends.
When the man of affairs, the artist, or the man of science fails, he is
not rebutted. He tries again. He says the impressions of sense _must_
give way, _must_ be reduced to the desiderated form.[3] They all
postulate in the interests of their volitional nature a harmony between
the latter and the nature of things. The theologian does no more. And
the reflex doctrine of the mind's structure, though all theology should
as yet have failed of its endeavor, could but confess that the endeavor
itself at least obeyed in form the mind's most necessary law.[4]
Now for the question I asked above: What kind of a being would God be
if he did exist? The word 'God' has come to mean many things in the
history {121} of human thought, from Venus and Jupiter to the 'Idee'
which figures in the pages of Hegel. Even the laws of physical nature
have, in these positivistic times, been held worthy of divine honor and
presented as the only fitting object of our reverence.[5] Of course,
if our discussion is to bear any fruit, we must mean something more
definite than this. We must not call any object of our loyalty a 'God'
without more ado, simply because to awaken our loyalty happens to be
one of God's functions. He must have some intrinsic characteristics of
his own besides; and theism must mean the faith of that man who
believes that the object of _his_ loyalty has those other attributes,
negative or positive, as the case may be.
Now, as regards a great many of the attributes of God, and their
amounts and mutual relations, the world has been delivered over to
disputes. All such may for our present purpose be considered as quite
inessential. Not only such matters as his mode of revealing himself,
the precise extent of his providence and power and their connection
with our free-will, the proportion of his mercy to his justice, and the
amount of his responsibility for evil; but also his metaphysical
relation to the phenomenal world, whether causal, substantial, ideal,
or what not,--are affairs of purely sectarian opinion that need not