The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy
The highest flights of theistic mysticism, far from pretending to
penetrate the secrets of the _me_ and the _thou_ in worship, and to
transcend the dualism by an act of intelligence, simply turn their
backs on such attempts. The problem for them has simply
vanished,--vanished from the sight of an attitude which refuses to
notice such futile theoretic difficulties. Get but that "peace of God
which passeth understanding," and the questions of the understanding
will cease from puzzling and pedantic scruples be at rest. In other
words, theistic mysticism, that form of theism which at first sight
seems most to have transcended the fundamental otherness of God from
man, has done it least of all in the theoretic way. The pattern of its
procedure is precisely that of the simplest man dealing with the
simplest fact of his environment. Both he and the theist tarry in
department Two of their minds only so long as is necessary to define
what is the presence that confronts them. The theist decides that its
character is such as to be fitly responded to on his part by a
religious reaction; and into that reaction he forthwith pours his soul.
His insight into the _what_ of life leads to results so immediately and
intimately rational that the _why_, the _how_, and the _whence_ of it
are questions that lose all urgency. 'Gefühl ist Alles,' Faust says.
The channels of department Three have drained those of department Two
of their contents; and happiness over the fact that being has made
itself what it is, evacuates all speculation as to how it could make
itself at all.
But now, although to most human minds such a position as this will be
the position of rational equilibrium, it is not difficult to bring
forward certain {137} considerations, in the light of which so simple
and practical a mental movement begins to seem rather short-winded and
second-rate and devoid of intellectual style. This easy acceptance of
an opaque limit to our speculative insight; this satisfaction with a
Being whose character we simply apprehend without comprehending
anything more about him, and with whom after a certain point our
dealings can be only of a volitional and emotional sort; above all,
this sitting down contented with a blank unmediated dualism,--are they
not the very picture of unfaithfulness to the rights and duties of our
theoretic reason?
Surely, if the universe is reasonable (and we must believe that it is
so), it must be susceptible, potentially at least, of being reasoned
_out_ to the last drop without residuum. Is it not rather an insult to
the very word 'rational' to say that the rational character of the
universe and its creator means no more than that we practically feel at
home in their presence, and that our powers are a match for their
demands? Do they not in fact demand to be _understood_ by us still
more than to be reacted on? Is not the unparalleled development of
department Two of the mind in man his crowning glory and his very
essence; and may not the _knowing of the truth_ be his absolute
vocation? And if it is, ought he flatly to acquiesce in a spiritual
life of 'reflex type,' whose form is no higher than that of the life
that animates his spinal cord,--nay, indeed, that animates the writhing
segments of any mutilated worm?
It is easy to see how such arguments and queries may result in the
erection of an ideal of our mental destiny, far different from the
simple and practical religious one we have described. We may well
begin {138} to ask whether such things as practical reactions can be
the final upshot and purpose of all our cognitive energy. Mere outward
acts, changes in the position of parts of matter (for they are nothing
else), can they possibly be the culmination and consummation of our
relations with the nature of things? Can they possibly form a result
to which our godlike powers of insight shall be judged merely
subservient? Such an idea, if we scan it closely, soon begins to seem
rather absurd. Whence this piece of matter comes and whither that one
goes, what difference ought that to make to the nature of things,
except so far as with the comings and the goings our wonderful inward
conscious harvest may be reaped?
And so, very naturally and gradually, one may be led from the theistic
and practical point of view to what I shall call the _gnostical_ one.
We may think that department Three of the mind, with its doings of
right and its doings of wrong, must be there only to serve department
Two; and we may suspect that the sphere of our activity exists for no
other purpose than to illumine our cognitive consciousness by the
experience of its results. Are not all sense and all emotion at bottom
but turbid and perplexed modes of what in its clarified shape is
intelligent cognition? Is not all experience just the eating of the
fruit of the tree of _knowledge_ of good and evil, and nothing more?
These questions fan the fire of an unassuageable gnostic thirst, which
is as far removed from theism in one direction as agnosticism was
removed from it in the other; and which aspires to nothing less than an
absolute unity of knowledge with its object, and refuses to be
satisfied short of a fusion and solution and saturation of both
impression and action with reason, and {139} an absorption of all three
departments of the mind into one. Time would fail us to-day (even had
I the learning, which I have not) to speak of gnostic systems in
detail. The aim of all of them is to shadow forth a sort of process by
which spirit, emerging from its beginnings and exhausting the whole
circle of finite experience in its sweep, shall at last return and
possess itself as its own object at the climax of its career. This
climax is the religious consciousness. At the giddy height of this
conception, whose latest and best known form is the Hegelian
philosophy, definite words fail to serve their purpose; and the
ultimate goal,--where object and subject, worshipped and worshipper,
facts and the knowledge of them, fall into one, and where no other is
left outstanding beyond this one that alone is, and that we may call
indifferently act or fact, reality or idea, God or creation,--this
goal, I say, has to be adumbrated to our halting and gasping
intelligence by coarse physical metaphors, 'positings' and
'self-returnings' and 'removals' and 'settings free,' which hardly help
to make the matter clear.
But from the midst of the curdling and the circling of it all we seem
dimly to catch a glimpse of a state in which the reality to be known
and the power of knowing shall have become so mutually adequate that
each exhaustively is absorbed by the other and the twain become one
flesh, and in which the light shall somehow have soaked up all the
outer darkness into its own ubiquitous beams. Like all headlong
ideals, this apotheosis of the bare conceiving faculty has its depth
and wildness, its pang and its charm. To many it sings a truly siren
strain; and so long as it is held only as a postulate, as a mere
vanishing {140} point to give perspective to our intellectual aim, it
is hard to see any empirical title by which we may deny the legitimacy
of gnosticism's claims. That we are not as yet near the goal it
prefigures can never be a reason why we might not continue indefinitely
to approach it; and to all sceptical arguments, drawn from our reason's
actual finiteness, gnosticism can still oppose its indomitable faith in
the infinite character of its potential destiny.
Now, here it is that the physiologist's generalization, as it seems to
me, may fairly come in, and by ruling any such extravagant faith out of
court help to legitimate our personal mistrust of its pretensions. I
confess that I myself have always had a great mistrust of the
pretensions of the gnostic faith. Not only do I utterly fail to
understand what a cognitive faculty erected into the absolute of being,
with itself as its object, can mean; but even if we grant it a being
other than itself for object, I cannot reason myself out of the belief
that however familiar and at home we might become with the character of
that being, the bare being of it, the fact that it is there at all,
must always be something blankly given and presupposed in order that
conception may begin its work; must in short lie beyond speculation,
and not be enveloped in its sphere.
Accordingly, it is with no small pleasure that as a student of
physiology and psychology I find the only lesson I can learn from these
sciences to be one that corroborates these convictions. From its first
dawn to its highest actual attainment, we find that the cognitive
faculty, where it appears to exist at all, appears but as one element
in an organic mental whole, and as a minister to higher mental
powers,--the powers {141} of will. Such a thing as its emancipation
and absolution from these organic relations receives no faintest color
of plausibility from any fact we can discern. Arising as a part, in a
mental and objective world which are both larger than itself, it must,
whatever its powers of growth may be (and I am far from wishing to
disparage them), remain a part to the end. This is the character of
the cognitive element in all the mental life we know, and we have no
reason to suppose that that character will ever change. On the
contrary, it is more than probable that to the end of time our power of
moral and volitional response to the nature of things will be the
deepest organ of communication therewith we shall ever possess. In
every being that is real there is something external to, and sacred
from, the grasp of every other. God's being is sacred from ours. To
co-operate with his creation by the best and rightest response seems
all he wants of us. In such co-operation with his purposes, not in any
chimerical speculative conquest of him, not in any theoretic drinking
of him up, must lie the real meaning of our destiny.
This is nothing new. All men know it at those rare moments when the
soul sobers herself, and leaves off her chattering and protesting and
insisting about this formula or that. In the silence of our theories
we then seem to listen, and to hear something like the pulse of Being
beat; and it is borne in upon us that the mere turning of the
character, the dumb willingness to suffer and to serve this universe,
is more than all theories about it put together. The most any theory
about it can do is to bring us to that. Certain it is that the acutest
theories, the greatest intellectual power, the most elaborate
education, are a {142} sheer mockery when, as too often happens, they
feed mean motives and a nerveless will. And it is equally certain that
a resolute moral energy, no matter how inarticulate or unequipped with
learning its owner may be, extorts from us a respect we should never
pay were we not satisfied that the essential root of human personality
lay there.
I have sketched my subject in the briefest outlines; but still I hope
you will agree that I have established my point, and that the
physiological view of mentality, so far from invalidating, can but give
aid and comfort to the theistic attitude of mind. Between agnosticism
and gnosticism, theism stands midway, and holds to what is true in
each. With agnosticism, it goes so far as to confess that we cannot
know how Being made itself or us. With gnosticism, it goes so far as
to insist that we can know Being's character when made, and how it asks
us to behave.
If any one fear that in insisting so strongly that behavior is the aim
and end of every sound philosophy I have curtailed the dignity and
scope of the speculative function in us, I can only reply that in this
ascertainment of the _character_ of Being lies an almost infinite