The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy
concern us at all. Whoso debates them presupposes the essential
features of theism to be granted already; and it is with these
essential features, the bare poles of the subject, that our business
exclusively lies.
{122}
Now, what are these essential features? First, it is essential that
God be conceived as the deepest power in the universe; and, second, he
must be conceived under the form of a mental personality. The
personality need not be determined intrinsically any further than is
involved in the holding of certain things dear, and in the recognition
of our dispositions toward those things, the things themselves being
all good and righteous things. But, extrinsically considered, so to
speak, God's personality is to be regarded, like any other personality,
as something lying outside of my own and other than me, and whose
existence I simply come upon and find. A power not ourselves, then,
which not only makes for righteousness, but means it, and which
recognizes us,--such is the definition which I think nobody will be
inclined to dispute. Various are the attempts to shadow forth the
other lineaments of so supreme a personality to our human imagination;
various the ways of conceiving in what mode the recognition, the
hearkening to our cry, can come. Some are gross and idolatrous; some
are the most sustained efforts man's intellect has ever made to keep
still living on that subtile edge of things where speech and thought
expire. But, with all these differences, the essence remains
unchanged. In whatever other respects the divine personality may
differ from ours or may resemble it, the two are consanguineous at
least in this,--that both have purposes for which they care, and each
can hear the other's call.
Meanwhile, we can already see one consequence and one point of
connection with the reflex-action theory of mind. Any mind,
constructed on the {123} triadic-reflex pattern, must first get its
impression from the object which it confronts; then define what that
object is, and decide what active measures its presence demands; and
finally react. The stage of reaction depends on the stage of
definition, and these, of course, on the nature of the impressing
object. When the objects are concrete, particular, and familiar, our
reactions are firm and certain enough,--often instinctive. I see the
desk, and lean on it; I see your quiet faces, and I continue to talk.
But the objects will not stay concrete and particular: they fuse
themselves into general essences, and they sum themselves into a
whole,--the universe. And then the object that confronts us, that
knocks on our mental door and asks to be let in, and fixed and decided
upon and actively met, is just this whole universe itself and its
essence.
What are _they_, and how shall I meet _them_?
The whole flood of faiths and systems here rush in. Philosophies and
denials of philosophy, religions and atheisms, scepticisms and
mysticisms, confirmed emotional moods and habitual practical biases,
jostle one another; for all are alike trials, hasty, prolix, or of
seemly length, to answer this momentous question. And the function of
them all, long or short, that which the moods and the systems alike
subserve and pass into, is the third stage,--the stage of action. For
no one of them itself is final. They form but the middle segment of
the mental curve, and not its termination. As the last theoretic pulse
dies away, it does not leave the mental process complete: it is but the
forerunner of the practical moment, in which alone the cycle of
mentality finds its rhythmic pause.
{124}
We easily delude ourselves about this middle stage. Sometimes we think
it final, and sometimes we fail to see, amid the monstrous diversity in
the length and complication of the cogitations which may fill it, that
it can have but one essential function, and that the one we have
pointed out,--the function of defining the direction which our
activity, immediate or remote, shall take.
If I simply say, "Vanitas vanitatum, omnia vanitas!" I am defining the
total nature of things in a way that carries practical consequences
with it as decidedly as if I write a treatise De Natura Rerum in twenty
volumes. The treatise may trace its consequences more minutely than
the saying; but the only worth of either treatise or saying is that the
consequences are there. The long definition can do no more than draw
them; the short definition does no less. Indeed, it may be said that
if two apparently different definitions of the reality before us should
have identical consequences, those two definitions would really be
identical definitions, made delusively to appear different merely by
the different verbiage in which they are expressed.[6]
My time is unfortunately too short to stay and give to this truth the
development it deserves; but I will assume that you grant it without
further parley, and pass to the next step in my argument. And here,
too, I shall have to bespeak your close attention for a moment, while I
pass over the subject far more {125} rapidly than it deserves. Whether
true or false, any view of the universe which shall completely satisfy
the mind must obey conditions of the mind's own imposing, must at least
let the mind be the umpire to decide whether it be fit to be called a
rational universe or not. Not any nature of things which may seem to
be will also seem to be _ipso facto_ rational; and if it do not seem
rational, it will afflict the mind with a ceaseless uneasiness, till it
be formulated or interpreted in some other and more congenial way. The
study of what the mind's criteria of rationality are, the definition of
its exactions in this respect, form an intensely interesting subject
into which I cannot enter now with any detail.[7] But so much I think
you will grant me without argument,--that all three departments of the
mind alike have a vote in the matter, and that no conception will pass
muster which violates any of their essential modes of activity, or
which leaves them without a chance to work. By what title is it that
every would-be universal formula, every system of philosophy which
rears its head, receives the inevitable critical volley from one half
of mankind, and falls to the rear, to become at the very best the creed
of some partial sect? Either it has dropped out of its net some of our
impressions of sense,--what we call the facts of nature,--or it has
left the theoretic and defining department with a lot of
inconsistencies and unmediated transitions on its hands; or else,
finally, it has left some one or more of our fundamental active and
emotional powers with no object outside of themselves to react-on or to
live for. Any one of these defects is fatal to its complete success.
Some one {126} will be sure to discover the flaw, to scout the system,
and to seek another in its stead.
I need not go far to collect examples to illustrate to an audience of
theologians what I mean. Nor will you in particular, as champions of
the Unitarianism of New England, be slow to furnish, from the motives
which led to your departure from our orthodox ancestral Calvinism,
instances enough under the third or practical head. A God who gives so
little scope to love, a predestination which takes from endeavor all
its zest with all its fruit, are irrational conceptions, because they
say to our most cherished powers, There is no object for you.
Well, just as within the limits of theism some kinds are surviving
others by reason of their greater practical rationality, so theism
itself, by reason of its practical rationality, is certain to survive
all lower creeds. Materialism and agnosticism, even were they true,
could never gain universal and popular acceptance; for they both,
alike, give a solution of things which is irrational to the practical
third of our nature, and in which we can never volitionally feel at
home. Each comes out of the second or theoretic stage of mental
functioning, with its definition of the essential nature of things, its
formula of formulas prepared. The whole array of active forces of our
nature stands waiting, impatient for the word which shall tell them how
to discharge themselves most deeply and worthily upon life. "Well!"
cry they, "what shall we do?" "Ignoramus, ignorabimus!" says
agnosticism. "React upon atoms and their concussions!" says
materialism. What a collapse! The mental train misses fire, the
middle fails to ignite the end, the cycle breaks down half-way to its
conclusion; and the active {127} powers left alone, with no proper
object on which to vent their energy, must either atrophy, sicken, and
die, or else by their pent-up convulsions and excitement keep the whole
machinery in a fever until some less incommensurable solution, some
more practically rational formula, shall provide a normal issue for the
currents of the soul.
Now, theism always stands ready with the most practically rational
solution it is possible to conceive. Not an energy of our active
nature to which it does not authoritatively appeal, not an emotion of
which it does not normally and naturally release the springs. At a
single stroke, it changes the dead blank _it_ of the world into a
living _thou_, with whom the whole man may have dealings. To you, at
any rate, I need waste no words in trying to prove its supreme
commensurateness with all the demands that department Number Three of
the mind has the power to impose on department Number Two.
Our volitional nature must then, until the end of time, exert a
constant pressure upon the other departments of the mind to induce them
to function to theistic conclusions. No contrary formulas can be more
than provisionally held. Infra-theistic theories must be always in
unstable equilibrium; for department Number Three ever lurks in ambush,
ready to assert its rights, and on the slightest show of justification
it makes its fatal spring, and converts them into the other form in
which alone mental peace and order can permanently reign.
The question is, then, _Can_ departments One and Two, _can_ the facts
of nature and the theoretic elaboration of them, always lead to
theistic conclusions?
The future history of philosophy is the only {128} authority capable of
answering that question. I, at all events, must not enter into it
to-day, as that would be to abandon the purely natural-history point of
view I mean to keep.
This only is certain, that the theoretic faculty lives between two
fires which never give her rest, and make her incessantly revise her
formulations. If she sink into a premature, short-sighted, and
idolatrous theism, in comes department Number One with its battery of
facts of sense, and dislodges her from her dogmatic repose. If she
lazily subside into equilibrium with the same facts of sense viewed in
their simple mechanical outwardness, up starts the practical reason
with its demands, and makes _that_ couch a bed of thorns. From
generation to generation thus it goes,--now a movement of reception
from without, now one of expansion from within; department Number Two
always worked to death, yet never excused from taking the most
responsible part in the arrangements. To-day, a crop of new facts;
to-morrow, a flowering of new motives,--the theoretic faculty always
having to effect the transition, and life growing withal so complex and
subtle and immense that her powers of conceiving are almost ruptured
with the strain. See how, in France, the mummy-cloths of the academic
and official theistic philosophy are rent by the facts of evolution,
and how the young thinkers are at work! See, in Great Britain, how the
dryness of the strict associationist school, which under the
ministration of Mill, Bain, and Spencer dominated us but yesterday,