The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy
forms and its appetites seem so unutterably real; when the most brutal
and the most spiritual things are lit by the same sun, and each is an
integral part of the total richness,--why, then it seems a grudging and
sickly way of meeting so robust a universe to shrink from any of its
facts and wish them not to be. Rather take the strictly dramatic point
of view, and treat the whole thing as a great unending romance which
the spirit of the universe, striving to realize its own content, is
eternally thinking out and representing to itself.[8]
No one, I hope, will accuse me, after I have said all this, of
underrating the reasons in favor of subjectivism. And now that I
proceed to say why those reasons, strong as they are, fail to convince
my own mind, I trust the presumption may be that my objections are
stronger still.
I frankly confess that they are of a practical order. If we
practically take up subjectivism in a sincere and radical manner and
follow its consequences, we meet with some that make us pause. Let a
subjectivism {171} begin in never so severe and intellectual a way, it
is forced by the law of its nature to develop another side of itself
and end with the corruptest curiosity. Once dismiss the notion that
certain duties are good in themselves, and that we are here to do them,
no matter how we feel about them; once consecrate the opposite notion
that our performances and our violations of duty are for a common
purpose, the attainment of subjective knowledge and feeling, and that
the deepening of these is the chief end of our lives,--and at what
point on the downward slope are we to stop? In theology, subjectivism
develops as its 'left wing' antinomianism. In literature, its left
wing is romanticism. And in practical life it is either a nerveless
sentimentality or a sensualism without bounds.
Everywhere it fosters the fatalistic mood of mind. It makes those who
are already too inert more passive still; it renders wholly reckless
those whose energy is already in excess. All through history we find
how subjectivism, as soon as it has a free career, exhausts itself in
every sort of spiritual, moral, and practical license. Its optimism
turns to an ethical indifference, which infallibly brings dissolution
in its train. It is perfectly safe to say now that if the Hegelian
gnosticism, which has begun to show itself here and in Great Britain,
were to become a popular philosophy, as it once was in Germany, it
would certainly develop its left wing here as there, and produce a
reaction of disgust. Already I have heard a graduate of this very
school express in the pulpit his willingness to sin like David, if only
he might repent like David. You may tell me he was only sowing his
wild, or rather his tame, oats; and perhaps he was. But the point is
{172} that in the subjectivistic or gnostical philosophy oat-sowing,
wild or tame, becomes a systematic necessity and the chief function of
life. After the pure and classic truths, the exciting and rancid ones
must be experienced; and if the stupid virtues of the philistine herd
do not then come in and save society from the influence of the children
of light, a sort of inward putrefaction becomes its inevitable doom.
Look at the last runnings of the romantic school, as we see them in
that strange contemporary Parisian literature, with which we of the
less clever countries are so often driven to rinse out our minds after
they have become clogged with the dulness and heaviness of our native
pursuits. The romantic school began with the worship of subjective
sensibility and the revolt against legality of which Rousseau was the
first great prophet: and through various fluxes and refluxes, right
wings and left wings, it stands to-day with two men of genius, M. Renan
and M. Zola, as its principal exponents,--one speaking with its
masculine, and the other with what might be called its feminine, voice.
I prefer not to think now of less noble members of the school, and the
Renan I have in mind is of course the Renan of latest dates. As I have
used the term gnostic, both he and Zola are gnostics of the most
pronounced sort. Both are athirst for the facts of life, and both
think the facts of human sensibility to be of all facts the most worthy
of attention. Both agree, moreover, that sensibility seems to be there
for no higher purpose,--certainly not, as the Philistines say, for the
sake of bringing mere outward rights to pass and frustrating outward
wrongs. One dwells on the sensibilities for their energy, the other
for their sweetness; one speaks with a voice of {173} bronze, the other
with that of an Æolian harp; one ruggedly ignores the distinction of
good and evil, the other plays the coquette between the craven
unmanliness of his Philosophic Dialogues and the butterfly optimism of
his Souvenirs de Jeunesse. But under the pages of both there sounds
incessantly the hoarse bass of _vanitas vanitatum, omnia vanitas_,
which the reader may hear, whenever he will, between the lines. No
writer of this French romantic school has a word of rescue from the
hour of satiety with the things of life,--the hour in which we say, "I
take no pleasure in them,"--or from the hour of terror at the world's
vast meaningless grinding, if perchance such hours should come. For
terror and satiety are facts of sensibility like any others; and at
their own hour they reign in their own right. The heart of the
romantic utterances, whether poetical, critical, or historical, is this
inward remedilessness, what Carlyle calls this far-off whimpering of
wail and woe. And from this romantic state of mind there is absolutely
no possible _theoretic_ escape. Whether, like Renan, we look upon life
in a more refined way, as a romance of the spirit; or whether, like the
friends of M. Zola, we pique ourselves on our 'scientific' and
'analytic' character, and prefer to be cynical, and call the world a
'roman experimental' on an infinite scale,--in either case the world
appears to us potentially as what the same Carlyle once called it, a
vast, gloomy, solitary Golgotha and mill of death.
The only escape is by the practical way. And since I have mentioned
the nowadays much-reviled name of Carlyle, let me mention it once more,
and say it is the way of his teaching. No matter for Carlyle's life,
no matter for a great deal of his {174} writing. What was the most
important thing he said to us? He said: "Hang your sensibilities!
Stop your snivelling complaints, and your equally snivelling raptures!
Leave off your general emotional tomfoolery, and get to WORK like men!"
But this means a complete rupture with the subjectivist philosophy of
things. It says conduct, and not sensibility, is the ultimate fact for
our recognition. With the vision of certain works to be done, of
certain outward changes to be wrought or resisted, it says our
intellectual horizon terminates. No matter how we succeed in doing
these outward duties, whether gladly and spontaneously, or heavily and
unwillingly, do them we somehow must; for the leaving of them undone is
perdition. No matter how we feel; if we are only faithful in the
outward act and refuse to do wrong, the world will in so far be safe,
and we quit of our debt toward it. Take, then, the yoke upon our
shoulders; bend our neck beneath the heavy legality of its weight;
regard something else than our feeling as our limit, our master, and
our law; be willing to live and die in its service,--and, at a stroke,
we have passed from the subjective into the objective philosophy of
things, much as one awakens from some feverish dream, full of bad
lights and noises, to find one's self bathed in the sacred coolness and
quiet of the air of the night.
But what is the essence of this philosophy of objective conduct, so
old-fashioned and finite, but so chaste and sane and strong, when
compared with its romantic rival? It is the recognition of limits,
foreign and opaque to our understanding. It is the willingness, after
bringing about some external good, to feel at peace; for our
responsibility ends with the {175} performance of that duty, and the
burden of the rest we may lay on higher powers.[9]
"Look to thyself, O Universe,
Thou art better and not worse,"
we may say in that philosophy, the moment we have done our stroke of
conduct, however small. For in the view of that philosophy the
universe belongs to a plurality of semi-independent forces, each one of
which may help or hinder, and be helped or hindered by, the operations
of the rest.
But this brings us right back, after such a long detour, to the
question of indeterminism and to the conclusion of all I came here to
say to-night. For the only consistent way of representing a pluralism
and a world whose parts may affect one another through their conduct
being either good or bad is the indeterministic way. What interest,
zest, or excitement can there be in achieving the right way, unless we
are enabled to feel that the wrong way is also a possible and a natural
way,--nay, more, a menacing and an imminent way? And what sense can
there be in condemning ourselves for taking the wrong way, unless we
need have done nothing of the sort, unless the right way was open to us
as well? I cannot understand the willingness to act, no matter how we
feel, without the belief that acts are really good and bad. I cannot
understand the belief that an act is bad, without regret at its
happening. I cannot understand regret without the admission of real,
genuine possibilities in the world. Only _then_ is it {176} other than
a mockery to feel, after we have failed to do our best, that an
irreparable opportunity is gone from the universe, the loss of which it
must forever after mourn.
If you insist that this is all superstition, that possibility is in the
eye of science and reason impossibility, and that if I act badly 'tis
that the universe was foredoomed to suffer this defect, you fall right
back into the dilemma, the labyrinth, of pessimism and subjectivism,
from out of whose toils we have just wound our way.
Now, we are of course free to fall back, if we please. For my own
part, though, whatever difficulties may beset the philosophy of
objective right and wrong, and the indeterminism it seems to imply,
determinism, with its alternative of pessimism or romanticism, contains
difficulties that are greater still. But you will remember that I
expressly repudiated awhile ago the pretension to offer any arguments
which could be coercive in a so-called scientific fashion in this
matter. And I consequently find myself, at the end of this long talk,
obliged to state my conclusions in an altogether personal way. This
personal method of appeal seems to be among the very conditions of the
problem; and the most any one can do is to confess as candidly as he
can the grounds for the faith that is in him, and leave his example to
work on others as it may.
Let me, then, without circumlocution say just this. The world is
enigmatical enough in all conscience, whatever theory we may take up
toward it. The indeterminism I defend, the free-will theory of popular
sense based on the judgment of regret, represents {177} that world as
vulnerable, and liable to be injured by certain of its parts if they
act wrong. And it represents their acting wrong as a matter of
possibility or accident, neither inevitable nor yet to be infallibly
warded off. In all this, it is a theory devoid either of transparency
or of stability. It gives us a pluralistic, restless universe, in
which no single point of view can ever take in the whole scene; and to
a mind possessed of the love of unity at any cost, it will, no doubt,
remain forever inacceptable. A friend with such a mind once told me