The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy
speculative task. Let the voluminous considerations by which all
modern thought converges toward idealistic or pan-psychic conclusions
speak for me. Let the pages of a Hodgson, of a Lotze, of a Renouvier,
reply whether within the limits drawn by purely empirical theism the
speculative faculty finds not, and shall not always find, enough to do.
But do it little or much, its _place_ in a philosophy is always the
same, and is set by the structural form of the mind. Philosophies,
whether expressed in sonnets or {143} systems, all must wear this form.
The thinker starts from some experience of the practical world, and
asks its meaning. He launches himself upon the speculative sea, and
makes a voyage long or short. He ascends into the empyrean, and
communes with the eternal essences. But whatever his achievements and
discoveries be while gone, the utmost result they can issue in is some
new practical maxim or resolve, or the denial of some old one, with
which inevitably he is sooner or later washed ashore on the _terra
firma_ of concrete life again.
Whatever thought takes this voyage is a philosophy. We have seen how
theism takes it. And in the philosophy of a thinker who, though long
neglected, is doing much to renovate the spiritual life of his native
France to-day (I mean Charles Renouvier, whose writings ought to be
better known among us than they are), we have an instructive example of
the way in which this very empirical element in theism, its confession
of an ultimate opacity in things, of a dimension of being which escapes
our theoretic control, may suggest a most definite practical
conclusion,--this one, namely, that 'our wills are free.' I will say
nothing of Renouvier's line of reasoning; it is contained in many
volumes which I earnestly recommend to your attention.[10] But to
enforce my doctrine that the number of volumes is not what makes the
philosophy, let me conclude by recalling to you the little poem of
Tennyson, published last year, in which the speculative voyage is made,
and the same conclusion reached in a few lines:--
{144}
"Out of the deep, my child, out of the deep,
From that great deep before our world begins,
Whereon the Spirit of God moves as he will,--
Out of the deep, my child, out of the deep,
From that true world within the world we see,
Whereof our world is but the bounding shore,--
Out of the deep, Spirit, out of the deep,
With this ninth moon that sends the hidden sun
Down yon dark sea, thou comest, darling boy.
For in the world which is not ours, they said,
'Let us make man,' and that which should be man,
From that one light no man can look upon,
Drew to this shore lit by the suns and moons
And all the shadows. O dear Spirit, half-lost
In thine own shadow and this fleshly sign
That thou art thou,--who wailest being born
And banish'd into mystery,...
...our mortal veil
And shattered phantom of that Infinite One,
Who made thee unconceivably thyself
Out of his whole world-self and all in all,--
Live thou, and of the grain and husk, the grape
And ivyberry, choose; and still depart
From death to death through life and life, and find
Nearer and ever nearer Him who wrought
Not matter, nor the finite-infinite,
_But this main miracle, that thou art thou,
With power on thine own act and on the world_."
[1] Address delivered to the Unitarian Ministers' Institute at
Princeton, Mass., 1881, and printed in the Unitarian Review for October
of that year.
[2] See some Remarks on Spencer's Definition of Mind, in the Journal of
Speculative Philosophy for January, 1878.
[3] "No amount of failure in the attempt to subject the world of
sensible experience to a thorough-going system of conceptions, and to
bring all happenings back to cases of immutably valid law, is able to
shake our faith in the rightness of our principles. We hold fast to
our demand that even the greatest apparent confusion must sooner or
later solve itself in transparent formulas. We begin the work ever
afresh; and, refusing to believe that nature will permanently withhold
the reward of our exertions, think rather that we have hitherto only
failed to push them in the right direction. And all this pertinacity
flows from a conviction that we have no right to renounce the
fulfilment of our task. What, in short sustains the courage of
investigators is the force of obligation of an ethical idea."
(Sigwart: Logik, bd. ii., p. 23.)
This is a true account of the spirit of science. Does it essentially
differ from the spirit of religion? And is any one entitled to say in
advance, that, while the one form of faith shall be crowned with
success, the other is certainly doomed to fail?
[4] Concerning the transformation of the given order into the order of
conception, see S. H. Hodgson, The Philosophy of Reflection, chap. v.;
H. Lotze, Logik, sects. 342-351; C. Sigwart, Logik, sects. 60-63, 105.
[5] Haeckel has recently (Der Monismus, 1893, p. 37) proposed the
Cosmic Ether as a divinity fitted to reconcile science with theistic
faith.
[6] See the admirably original "Illustrations of the Logic of Science,"
by C. S. Peirce, especially the second paper, "How to make our Thoughts
clear," in the Popular Science Monthly for January, 1878.
[7] On this subject, see the preceding Essay.
[8] "As soon as it is recognized that our thought, as logic deals with
it, reposes on our _will to think_, the primacy of the will, even in
the theoretical sphere, must be conceded; and the last of
presuppositions is not merely [Kant's] that 'I think' must accompany
all my representations, but also that 'I will' must dominate all my
thinking." (Sigwart; Logik, ll. 25.)
[9] As our ancestors said, _Fiat justitia, pereat mundus_, so we, who
do not believe in justice or any absolute good, must, according to
these prophets, be willing to see the world perish, in order that
_scientia fiat_. Was there ever a more exquisite idol of the den, or
rather of the _shop_? In the clean sweep to be made of superstitions,
let the idol of stern obligation to be scientific go with the rest, and
people will have a fair chance to understand one another. But this
blowing of hot and of cold makes nothing but confusion.
[10] Especially the Essais de Critique Générale, 2me Edition, 6 vols.,
12mo, Paris, 1875; and the Esquisse d'une Classification Systématique
des Doctrines Philosophiques, 2 vols., 8vo, Paris, 1885.
{145}
THE DILEMMA OF DETERMINISM.[1]
A common opinion prevails that the juice has ages ago been pressed out
of the free-will controversy, and that no new champion can do more than
warm up stale arguments which every one has heard. This is a radical
mistake. I know of no subject less worn out, or in which inventive
genius has a better chance of breaking open new ground,--not, perhaps,
of forcing a conclusion or of coercing assent, but of deepening our
sense of what the issue between the two parties really is, of what the
ideas of fate and of free-will imply. At our very side almost, in the
past few years, we have seen falling in rapid succession from the press
works that present the alternative in entirely novel lights. Not to
speak of the English disciples of Hegel, such as Green and Bradley; not
to speak of Hinton and Hodgson, nor of Hazard here,--we see in the
writings of Renouvier, Fouillée, and Delboeuf[2] how completely changed
and refreshed is the form of all the old disputes. I cannot pretend to
vie in originality with any of the masters I have named, and my
ambition limits itself to just one little point. If I can make two of
the necessarily implied corollaries {146} of determinism clearer to you
than they have been made before, I shall have made it possible for you
to decide for or against that doctrine with a better understanding of
what you are about. And if you prefer not to decide at all, but to
remain doubters, you will at least see more plainly what the subject of
your hesitation is. I thus disclaim openly on the threshold all
pretension to prove to you that the freedom of the will is true. The
most I hope is to induce some of you to follow my own example in
assuming it true, and acting as if it were true. If it be true, it
seems to me that this is involved in the strict logic of the case. Its
truth ought not to be forced willy-nilly down our indifferent throats.
It ought to be freely espoused by men who can equally well turn their
backs upon it. In other words, our first act of freedom, if we are
free, ought in all inward propriety to be to affirm that we are free.
This should exclude, it seems to me, from the free-will side of the
question all hope of a coercive demonstration,--a demonstration which
I, for one, am perfectly contented to go without.
With thus much understood at the outset, we can advance. But not
without one more point understood as well. The arguments I am about to
urge all proceed on two suppositions: first, when we make theories
about the world and discuss them with one another, we do so in order to
attain a conception of things which shall give us subjective
satisfaction; and, second, if there be two conceptions, and the one
seems to us, on the whole, more rational than the other, we are
entitled to suppose that the more rational one is the truer of the two.
I hope that you are all willing to make these suppositions with me;
{147} for I am afraid that if there be any of you here who are not,
they will find little edification in the rest of what I have to say. I
cannot stop to argue the point; but I myself believe that all the
magnificent achievements of mathematical and physical science--our
doctrines of evolution, of uniformity of law, and the rest--proceed
from our indomitable desire to cast the world into a more rational
shape in our minds than the shape into which it is thrown there by the
crude order of our experience. The world has shown itself, to a great
extent, plastic to this demand of ours for rationality. How much
farther it will show itself plastic no one can say. Our only means of
finding out is to try; and I, for one, feel as free to try conceptions
of moral as of mechanical or of logical rationality. If a certain
formula for expressing the nature of the world violates my moral
demand, I shall feel as free to throw it overboard, or at least to
doubt it, as if it disappointed my demand for uniformity of sequence,
for example; the one demand being, so far as I can see, quite as
subjective and emotional as the other is. The principle of causality,
for example,--what is it but a postulate, an empty name covering simply
a demand that the sequence of events shall some day manifest a deeper
kind of belonging of one thing with another than the mere arbitrary
juxtaposition which now phenomenally appears? It is as much an altar
to an unknown god as the one that Saint Paul found at Athens. All our
scientific and philosophic ideals are altars to unknown gods.
Uniformity is as much so as is free-will. If this be admitted, we can
debate on even terms. But if any one pretends that while freedom and
variety are, in the first instance, subjective demands, necessity and
uniformity are something {148} altogether different, I do not see how
we can debate at all.[3]
To begin, then, I must suppose you acquainted with all the usual
arguments on the subject. I cannot stop to take up the old proofs from
causation, from statistics, from the certainty with which we can
foretell one another's conduct, from the fixity of character, and all
the rest. But there are two words which usually encumber these
classical arguments, {149} and which we must immediately dispose of if
we are to make any progress. One is the eulogistic word _freedom_, and