The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy
gives way to more generous idealisms, born of more urgent emotional
needs and wrapping the same facts in far more massive intellectual
harmonies! These are but tackings to the common {129} port, to that
ultimate _Weltanschauung_ of maximum subjective as well as objective
richness, which, whatever its other properties may be, will at any rate
wear the theistic form.
Here let me say one word about a remark we often hear coming from the
anti-theistic wing: It is base, it is vile, it is the lowest depth of
immorality, to allow department Number Three to interpose its demands,
and have any vote in the question of what is true and what is false;
the mind must be a passive, reactionless sheet of white paper, on which
reality will simply come and register its own philosophic definition,
as the pen registers the curve on the sheet of a chronograph. "Of all
the cants that are canted in this canting age" this has always seemed
to me the most wretched, especially when it comes from professed
psychologists. As if the mind could, consistently with its definition,
be a reactionless sheet at all! As if conception could possibly occur
except for a teleological purpose, except to show us the way from a
state of things our senses cognize to another state of things our will
desires! As if 'science' itself were anything else than such an end of
desire, and a most peculiar one at that! And as if the 'truths' of
bare physics in particular, which these sticklers for intellectual
purity contend to be the only uncontaminated form, were not as great an
alteration and falsification of the simply 'given' order of the world,
into an order conceived solely for the mind's convenience and delight,
as any theistic doctrine possibly can be!
Physics is but one chapter in the great jugglery which our conceiving
faculty is forever playing with {130} the order of being as it presents
itself to our reception. It transforms the unutterable dead level and
continuum of the 'given' world into an utterly unlike world of sharp
differences and hierarchic subordinations for no other reason than to
satisfy certain subjective passions we possess.[8]
And, so far as we can see, the given world is there only for the sake
of the operation. At any rate, to operate upon it is our only chance
of approaching it; for never can we get a glimpse of it in the
unimaginable insipidity of its virgin estate. To bid the man's
subjective interests be passive till truth express itself from out the
environment, is to bid the sculptor's chisel be passive till the statue
express itself from out the stone. Operate we must! and the only
choice left us is that between operating to poor or to rich results.
The only possible duty there can be in the matter is the duty of
getting the richest results that the material given will allow. The
richness lies, of course, in the energy of all three departments of the
mental cycle. Not a sensible 'fact' of department One must be left in
the cold, not a faculty of department Three be paralyzed; and
department Two must form an indestructible bridge. It is natural that
the habitual neglect of department One by theologians should arouse
indignation; but it is most _un_natural that the indignation should
take the form of a wholesale denunciation of department Three. It is
the story of Kant's dove over again, denouncing the {131} pressure of
the air. Certain of our positivists keep chiming to us, that, amid the
wreck of every other god and idol, one divinity still stands
upright,--that his name is Scientific Truth, and that he has but one
commandment, but that one supreme, saying, _Thou shalt not be a
theist_, for that would be to satisfy thy subjective propensities, and
the satisfaction of those is intellectual damnation. These most
conscientious gentlemen think they have jumped off their own
feet,--emancipated their mental operations from the control of their
subjective propensities at large and _in toto_. But they are deluded.
They have simply chosen from among the entire set of propensities at
their command those that were certain to construct, out of the
materials given, the leanest, lowest, aridest result,--namely, the bare
molecular world,--and they have sacrificed all the rest.[9]
Man's chief difference from the brutes lies in the exuberant excess of
his subjective propensities,--his pre-eminence over them simply and
solely in the number and in the fantastic and unnecessary character of
his wants, physical, moral, aesthetic, and intellectual. Had his whole
life not been a quest for the superfluous, he would never have
established himself as inexpugnably as he has done in the necessary.
And from the consciousness of this he should draw the lesson that his
wants are to be trusted; that even {132} when their gratification seems
farthest off, the uneasiness they occasion is still the best guide of
his life, and will lead him to issues entirely beyond his present
powers of reckoning. Prune down his extravagance, sober him, and you
undo him. The appetite for immediate consistency at any cost, or what
the logicians call the 'law of parsimony,'--which is nothing but the
passion for conceiving the universe in the most labor-saving
way,--will, if made the exclusive law of the mind, end by blighting the
development of the intellect itself quite as much as that of the
feelings or the will. The scientific conception of the world as an
army of molecules gratifies this appetite after its fashion most
exquisitely. But if the religion of exclusive scientificism should
ever succeed in suffocating all other appetites out of a nation's mind,
and imbuing a whole race with the persuasion that simplicity and
consistency demand a _tabula rasa_ to be made of every notion that does
not form part of the _soi-disant_ scientific synthesis, that nation,
that race, will just as surely go to ruin, and fall a prey to their
more richly constituted neighbors, as the beasts of the field, as a
whole, have fallen a prey to man.
I have myself little fear for our Anglo-Saxon race. Its moral,
aesthetic, and practical wants form too dense a stubble to be mown by
any scientific Occam's razor that has yet been forged. The knights of
the razor will never form among us more than a sect; but when I see
their fraternity increasing in numbers, and, what is worse, when I see
their negations acquiring almost as much prestige and authority as
their affirmations legitimately claim over the minds of the docile
public, I feel as if the influences working in the direction of our
mental barbarization were {133} beginning to be rather strong, and
needed some positive counteraction. And when I ask myself from what
quarter the invasion may best be checked, I can find no answer as good
as the one suggested by casting my eyes around this room. For this
needful task, no fitter body of men than the Unitarian clergy exists.
Who can uphold the rights of department Three of the mind with better
grace than those who long since showed how they could fight and suffer
for department One? As, then, you burst the bonds of a narrow
ecclesiastical tradition, by insisting that no fact of sense or result
of science must be left out of account in the religious synthesis, so
may you still be the champions of mental completeness and
all-sidedness. May you, with equal success, avert the formation of a
narrow scientific tradition, and burst the bonds of any synthesis which
would pretend to leave out of account those forms of being, those
relations of reality, to which at present our active and emotional
tendencies are our only avenues of approach. I hear it said that
Unitarianism is not growing in these days. I know nothing of the truth
of the statement; but if it be true, it is surely because the great
ship of Orthodoxy is nearing the port and the pilot is being taken on
board. If you will only lead in a theistic science, as successfully as
you have led in a scientific theology, your separate name as Unitarians
may perish from the mouths of men; for your task will have been done,
and your function at an end. Until that distant day, you have work
enough in both directions awaiting you.
Meanwhile, let me pass to the next division of our subject. I said
that we are forced to regard God as {134} the normal object of the
mind's belief, inasmuch as any conception that falls short of God is
irrational, if the word 'rational' be taken in its fullest sense; while
any conception that goes beyond God is impossible, if the human mind be
constructed after the triadic-reflex pattern we have discussed at such
length. The first half of the thesis has been disposed of.
Infra-theistic conceptions, materialisms and agnosticisms, are
irrational because they are inadequate stimuli to man's practical
nature. I have now to justify the latter half of the thesis.
I dare say it may for an instant have perplexed some of you that I
should speak of conceptions that aimed at going beyond God, and of
attempts to fly above him or outbid him; so I will now explain exactly
what I mean. In defining the essential attributes of God, I said he
was a personality lying outside our own and other than us,--a power not
ourselves. Now, the attempts to fly beyond theism, of which I speak,
are attempts to get over this ultimate duality of God and his believer,
and to transform it into some sort or other of identity. If
infratheistic ways of looking on the world leave it in the third
person, a mere _it_; and if theism turns the _it_ into a _thou_,--so we
may say that these other theories try to cover it with the mantle of
the first person, and to make it a part of _me_.
I am well aware that I begin here to tread on ground in which trenchant
distinctions may easily seem to mutilate the facts.
That sense of emotional reconciliation with God which characterizes the
highest moments of the theistic consciousness may be described as
'oneness' with him, and so from the very bosom of theism a {135}
monistic doctrine seem to arise. But this consciousness of
self-surrender, of absolute practical union between one's self and the
divine object of one's contemplation, is a totally different thing from
any sort of substantial identity. Still the object God and the subject
I are two. Still I simply come upon him, and find his existence given
to me; and the climax of my practical union with what is given, forms
at the same time the climax of my perception that as a numerical fact
of existence I am something radically other than the Divinity with
whose effulgence I am filled.
Now, it seems to me that the only sort of union of creature with
creator with which theism, properly so called, comports, is of this
emotional and practical kind; and it is based unchangeably on the
empirical fact that the thinking subject and the object thought are
numerically two. How my mind and will, which are not God, can yet
cognize and leap to meet him, how I ever came to be so separate from
him, and how God himself came to be at all, are problems that for the
theist can remain unsolved and insoluble forever. It is sufficient for
him to know that he himself simply is, and needs God; and that behind
this universe God simply is and will be forever, and will in some way
hear his call. In the practical assurance of these empirical facts,
without 'Erkentnisstheorie' or philosophical ontology, without
metaphysics of emanation or creation to justify or make them more
intelligible, in the blessedness of their mere acknowledgment as given,
lie all the peace and power he craves. The floodgates of the religious
life are opened, and the full currents can pour through.
It is this empirical and practical side of the theistic position, its
theoretic chastity and modesty, which I {136} wish to accentuate here.