The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy
"Throb thine with Nature's throbbing breast,
And all is clear from east to west."
Even cruelty and treachery may be among the absolutely blessed fruits
of time, and to quarrel with any of their details may be blasphemy.
The only real blasphemy, in short, may be that pessimistic temper of
the soul which lets it give way to such things as regrets, remorse, and
grief.
Thus, our deterministic pessimism may become a deterministic optimism
at the price of extinguishing our judgments of regret.
But does not this immediately bring us into a curious logical
predicament? Our determinism leads us to call our judgments of regret
wrong, because they are pessimistic in implying that what is impossible
yet ought to be. But how then about the judgments of regret
themselves? If they are wrong, other judgments, judgments of approval
presumably, ought to be in their place. But as they are necessitated,
nothing else _can_ be in their place; and the universe is just what it
was before,--namely, a place in which what ought to be appears
impossible. We have got one foot out of the pessimistic bog, but the
other one sinks all the deeper. We have rescued our actions from the
bonds of evil, but our judgments are now held fast. When murders and
treacheries cease to be sins, regrets are theoretic absurdities and
errors. The theoretic and the active life thus play a kind of {164}
see-saw with each other on the ground of evil. The rise of either
sends the other down. Murder and treachery cannot be good without
regret being bad: regret cannot be good without treachery and murder
being bad. Both, however, are supposed to have been foredoomed; so
something must be fatally unreasonable, absurd, and wrong in the world.
It must be a place of which either sin or error forms a necessary part.
From this dilemma there seems at first sight no escape. Are we then so
soon to fall back into the pessimism from which we thought we had
emerged? And is there no possible way by which we may, with good
intellectual consciences, call the cruelties and the treacheries, the
reluctances and the regrets, _all_ good together?
Certainly there is such a way, and you are probably most of you ready
to formulate it yourselves. But, before doing so, remark how
inevitably the question of determinism and indeterminism slides us into
the question of optimism and pessimism, or, as our fathers called it,
'the question of evil.' The theological form of all these disputes is
the simplest and the deepest, the form from which there is the least
escape,--not because, as some have sarcastically said, remorse and
regret are clung to with a morbid fondness by the theologians as
spiritual luxuries, but because they are existing facts of the world,
and as such must be taken into account in the deterministic
interpretation of all that is fated to be. If they are fated to be
error, does not the bat's wing of irrationality still cast its shadow
over the world?
The refuge from the quandary lies, as I said, not far off. The
necessary acts we erroneously regret {165} may be good, and yet our
error in so regretting them may be also good, on one simple condition;
and that condition is this: The world must not be regarded as a machine
whose final purpose is the making real of any outward good, but rather
as a contrivance for deepening the theoretic consciousness of what
goodness and evil in their intrinsic natures are. Not the doing either
of good or of evil is what nature cares for, but the knowing of them.
Life is one long eating of the fruit of the tree of _knowledge_. I am
in the habit, in thinking to myself, of calling this point of view the
_gnostical_ point of view. According to it, the world is neither an
optimism nor a pessimism, but a _gnosticism_. But as this term may
perhaps lead to some misunderstandings, I will use it as little as
possible here, and speak rather of _subjectivism_, and the
_subjectivistic_ point of view.
Subjectivism has three great branches,--we may call them scientificism,
sentimentalism, and sensualism, respectively. They all agree
essentially about the universe, in deeming that what happens there is
subsidiary to what we think or feel about it. Crime justifies its
criminality by awakening our intelligence of that criminality, and
eventually our remorses and regrets; and the error included in remorses
and regrets, the error of supposing that the past could have been
different, justifies itself by its use. Its use is to quicken our
sense of _what_ the irretrievably lost is. When we think of it as that
which might have been ('the saddest words of tongue or pen'), the
quality of its worth speaks to us with a wilder sweetness; and,
conversely, the dissatisfaction wherewith we think of what seems to
have driven it from its natural place gives us the severer pang.
Admirable artifice of {166} nature! we might be tempted to
exclaim,--deceiving us in order the better to enlighten us, and leaving
nothing undone to accentuate to our consciousness the yawning distance
of those opposite poles of good and evil between which creation swings.
We have thus clearly revealed to our view what may be called the
dilemma of determinism, so far as determinism pretends to think things
out at all. A merely mechanical determinism, it is true, rather
rejoices in not thinking them out. It is very sure that the universe
must satisfy its postulate of a physical continuity and coherence, but
it smiles at any one who comes forward with a postulate of moral
coherence as well. I may suppose, however, that the number of purely
mechanical or hard determinists among you this evening is small. The
determinism to whose seductions you are most exposed is what I have
called soft determinism,--the determinism which allows considerations
of good and bad to mingle with those of cause and effect in deciding
what sort of a universe this may rationally be held to be. The dilemma
of this determinism is one whose left horn is pessimism and whose right
horn is subjectivism. In other words, if determinism is to escape
pessimism, it must leave off looking at the goods and ills of life in a
simple objective way, and regard them as materials, indifferent in
themselves, for the production of consciousness, scientific and
ethical, in us.
To escape pessimism is, as we all know, no easy task. Your own studies
have sufficiently shown you the almost desperate difficulty of making
the notion that there is a single principle of things, and that
principle absolute perfection, rhyme together with {167} our daily
vision of the facts of life. If perfection be the principle, how comes
there any imperfection here? If God be good, how came he to
create--or, if he did not create, how comes he to permit--the devil?
The evil facts must be explained as seeming: the devil must be
whitewashed, the universe must be disinfected, if neither God's
goodness nor his unity and power are to remain impugned. And of all
the various ways of operating the disinfection, and making bad seem
less bad, the way of subjectivism appears by far the best.[6]
For, after all, is there not something rather absurd in our ordinary
notion of external things being good or bad in themselves? Can murders
and treacheries, considered as mere outward happenings, or motions of
matter, be bad without any one to feel their badness? And could
paradise properly be good in the absence of a sentient principle by
which the goodness was perceived? Outward goods and evils seem
practically indistinguishable except in so far as they result in
getting moral judgments made about them. But then the moral judgments
seem the main thing, and the outward facts mere perishing instruments
for their production. This is subjectivism. Every one must at some
time have wondered at that strange paradox of our moral nature, that,
though the {168} pursuit of outward good is the breath of its nostrils,
the attainment of outward good would seem to be its suffocation and
death. Why does the painting of any paradise or Utopia, in heaven or
on earth, awaken such yawnings for nirvana and escape? The white-robed
harp-playing heaven of our sabbath-schools, and the ladylike tea-table
elysium represented in Mr. Spencer's Data of Ethics, as the final
consummation of progress, are exactly on a par in this
respect,--lubberlands, pure and simple, one and all.[7] We look upon
them from this delicious mess of insanities and realities, strivings
and deadnesses, hopes and fears, agonies and exultations, which forms
our present state, and _tedium vitae_ is the only sentiment they awaken
in our breasts. To our crepuscular natures, born for the conflict, the
Rembrandtesque moral chiaroscuro, the shifting struggle of the sunbeam
in the gloom, such pictures of light upon light are vacuous and
expressionless, and neither to be enjoyed nor understood. If _this_ be
the whole fruit of the victory, we say; if the generations of mankind
suffered and laid down their lives; if prophets confessed and martyrs
sang in the fire, and all the sacred tears were shed for no other end
than that a race of creatures of such unexampled insipidity should
succeed, and protract _in saecula saeculorum_ their contented and
inoffensive lives,--why, at such a rate, better lose than win the
battle, or at all events better ring down the curtain before the last
act of the play, so that a business that began so importantly may be
saved from so singularly flat a winding-up.
{169}
All this is what I should instantly say, were I called on to plead for
gnosticism; and its real friends, of whom you will presently perceive I
am not one, would say without difficulty a great deal more. Regarded
as a stable finality, every outward good becomes a mere weariness to
the flesh. It must be menaced, be occasionally lost, for its goodness
to be fully felt as such. Nay, more than occasionally lost. No one
knows the worth of innocence till he knows it is gone forever, and that
money cannot buy it back. Not the saint, but the sinner that
repenteth, is he to whom the full length and breadth, and height and
depth, of life's meaning is revealed. Not the absence of vice, but
vice there, and virtue holding her by the throat, seems the ideal human
state. And there seems no reason to suppose it not a permanent human
state. There is a deep truth in what the school of Schopenhauer
insists on,--the illusoriness of the notion of moral progress. The
more brutal forms of evil that go are replaced by others more subtle
and more poisonous. Our moral horizon moves with us as we move, and
never do we draw nearer to the far-off line where the black waves and
the azure meet. The final purpose of our creation seems most plausibly
to be the greatest possible enrichment of our ethical consciousness,
through the intensest play of contrasts and the widest diversity of
characters. This of course obliges some of us to be vessels of wrath,
while it calls others to be vessels of honor. But the subjectivist
point of view reduces all these outward distinctions to a common
denominator. The wretch languishing in the felon's cell may be
drinking draughts of the wine of truth that will never pass the lips of
the so-called favorite of fortune. And the peculiar consciousness of
{170} each of them is an indispensable note in the great ethical
concert which the centuries as they roll are grinding out of the living
heart of man.
So much for subjectivism! If the dilemma of determinism be to choose
between it and pessimism, I see little room for hesitation from the
strictly theoretical point of view. Subjectivism seems the more
rational scheme. And the world may, possibly, for aught I know, be
nothing else. When the healthy love of life is on one, and all its