The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy
foreground, and background are created solely by the interested
attention of the looker-on; and if the small difference between the
genius and his tribe interests me most, while the large one between
that tribe and another tribe interests Mr. Allen, our controversy
cannot be ended until a complete philosophy, accounting for all
differences impartially, shall justify us both.
An unlearned carpenter of my acquaintance once said in my hearing:
"There is very little difference between one man and another; but what
little there {257} is, _is very important_." This distinction seems to
me to go to the root of the matter. It is not only the size of the
difference which concerns the philosopher, but also its place and its
kind. An inch is a small thing, but we know the proverb about an inch
on a man's nose. Messrs. Allen and Spencer, in inveighing against
hero-worship, are thinking exclusively of the size of the inch; I, as a
hero-worshipper, attend to its seat and function.
Now, there is a striking law over which few people seem to have
pondered. It is this: That among all the differences which exist, the
only ones that interest us strongly are those _we do not take for
granted_. We are not a bit elated that our friend should have two
hands and the power of speech, and should practise the matter-of-course
human virtues; and quite as little are we vexed that our dog goes on
all fours and fails to understand our conversation. Expecting no more
from the latter companion, and no less from the former, we get what we
expect and are satisfied. We never think of communing with the dog by
discourse of philosophy, or with the friend by head-scratching or the
throwing of crusts to be snapped at. But if either dog or friend fall
above or below the expected standard, they arouse the most lively
emotion. On our brother's vices or genius we never weary of
descanting; to his bipedism or his hairless skin we do not consecrate a
thought. _What_ he says may transport us; that he is able to speak at
all leaves us stone cold. The reason of all this is that his virtues
and vices and utterances might, compatibly with the current range of
variation in our tribe, be just the opposites of what they are, while
his zoölogically human attributes cannot possibly go astray. There
{258} is thus a zone of insecurity in human affairs in which all the
dramatic interest lies; the rest belongs to the dead machinery of the
stage. This is the formative zone, the part not yet ingrained into the
race's average, not yet a typical, hereditary, and constant factor of
the social community in which it occurs. It is like the soft layer
beneath the bark of the tree in which all the year's growth is going
on. Life has abandoned the mighty trunk inside, which stands inert and
belongs almost to the inorganic world. Layer after layer of human
perfection separates me from the central Africans who pursued Stanley
with cries of "meat, meat!" This vast difference ought, on Mr. Allen's
principles, to rivet my attention far more than the petty one which
obtains between two such birds of a feather as Mr. Allen and myself.
Yet while I never feel proud that the sight of a passer-by awakens in
me no cannibalistic waterings of the mouth, I am free to confess that I
shall feel very proud if I do not publicly appear inferior to Mr. Allen
in the conduct of this momentous debate. To me as a teacher the
intellectual gap between my ablest and my dullest student counts for
infinitely more than that between the latter and the amphioxus: indeed,
I never thought of the latter chasm till this moment. Will Mr. Allen
seriously say that this is all human folly, and tweedledum and
tweedledee?
To a Veddah's eyes the differences between two white literary men seem
slight indeed,--same clothes, same spectacles, same harmless
disposition, same habit of scribbling on paper and poring over books,
etc. "Just two white fellows," the Veddah will say, "with no
perceptible difference." But what a difference to the literary men
themselves! Think, Mr. Allen, of {259} confounding our philosophies
together merely because both are printed in the same magazines and are
indistinguishable to the eye of a Veddah! Our flesh creeps at the
thought.
But in judging of history Mr. Allen deliberately prefers to place
himself at the Veddah's point of view, and to see things _en gros_ and
out of focus, rather than minutely. It is quite true that there are
things and differences enough to be seen either way. But which are the
humanly important ones, those most worthy to arouse our interest,--the
large distinctions or the small? In the answer to this question lies
the whole divergence of the hero-worshippers from the sociologists. As
I said at the outset, it is merely a quarrel of emphasis; and the only
thing I can do is to state my personal reasons for the emphasis I
prefer.
The zone of the individual differences, and of the social 'twists'
which by common confession they initiate, is the zone of formative
processes, the dynamic belt of quivering uncertainty, the line where
past and future meet. It is the theatre of all we do not take for
granted, the stage of the living drama of life; and however narrow its
scope, it is roomy enough to lodge the whole range of human passions.
The sphere of the race's average, on the contrary, no matter how large
it may be, is a dead and stagnant thing, an achieved possession, from
which all insecurity has vanished. Like the trunk of a tree, it has
been built up by successive concretions of successive active zones.
The moving present in which we live with its problems and passions, its
individual rivalries, victories, and defeats, will soon pass over to
the majority and leave its small deposit on this static mass, to make
room for fresh actors and a newer play. {260} And though it may be
true, as Mr. Spencer predicts, that each later zone shall fatally be
narrower than its forerunners; and that when the ultimate lady-like
tea-table elysium of the Data of Ethics shall prevail, such questions
as the breaking of eggs at the large or the small end will span the
whole scope of possible human warfare,--still even in this shrunken and
enfeebled generation, _spatio aetatis defessa vetusto_, what eagerness
there will be! Battles and defeats will occur, the victors will be
glorified and the vanquished dishonored just as in the brave days of
yore, the human heart still withdrawing itself from the much it has in
safe possession, and concentrating all its passion upon those
evanescent possibilities of fact which still quiver in fate's scale.
And is not its instinct right? Do not we here grasp the
race-differences _in the making_, and catch the only glimpse it is
allotted to us to attain of the working units themselves, of whose
differentiating action the race-gaps form but the stagnant sum? What
strange inversion of scientific procedure does Mr. Allen practise when
he teaches us to neglect elements and attend only to aggregate
resultants? On the contrary, simply because the active ring, whatever
its bulk, _is elementary_, I hold that the study of its conditions (be
these never so 'proximate') is the highest of topics for the social
philosopher. If individual variations determine its ups and downs and
hair-breadth escapes and twists and turns, as Mr. Allen and Mr. Fiske
both admit, Heaven forbid us from tabooing the study of these in favor
of the average! On the contrary, let us emphasize these, and the
importance of these; and in picking out from history our heroes, and
communing with their {261} kindred spirits,--in imagining as strongly
as possible what differences their individualities brought about in
this world, while its surface was still plastic in their hands, and
what whilom feasibilities they made impossible,--each one of us may
best fortify and inspire what creative energy may lie in his own
soul.[1]
This is the lasting justification of hero-worship, and the pooh-poohing
of it by 'sociologists' is the ever-lasting excuse for popular
indifference to their general laws and averages. The difference
between an America rescued by a Washington or by a 'Jenkins' may, as
Mr. Allen says, be 'little,' but it is, in the words of my carpenter
friend, 'important.' Some organizing genius must in the nature of
things have emerged from the French Revolution; but what Frenchman will
affirm it to have been an accident of no consequence that he should
have had the supernumerary idiosyncrasies of a Bonaparte? What animal,
domestic or wild, will call it a matter of no moment that scarce a word
of sympathy with brutes should have survived from the teachings of
Jesus of Nazareth?
The preferences of sentient creatures are what _create_ the importance
of topics. They are the absolute and ultimate law-giver here. And I
for my part cannot but consider the talk of the contemporary
sociological school about averages and general laws and predetermined
tendencies, with its obligatory undervaluing of the importance of
individual {262} differences, as the most pernicious and immoral of
fatalisms. Suppose there is a social equilibrium fated to be, whose is
it to be,--that of your preference, or mine? There lies the question
of questions, and it is one which no study of averages can decide.
[1] M. G. Tarde's book (itself a work of genius), Les Lois de
l'Imitation, Étude Sociologique (2me Édition, Paris, Alcan, 1895), is
the best possible commentary on this text,--'invention' on the one
hand, and 'imitation' on the other, being for this author the two sole
factors of social change.
{263}
ON SOME HEGELISMS.[1]
We are just now witnessing a singular phenomenon in British and
American philosophy. Hegelism, so defunct on its native soil that I
believe but a single youthful disciple of the school is to be counted
among the privat-docenten and younger professors of Germany, and whose
older champions are all passing off the stage, has found among us so
zealous and able a set of propagandists that to-day it may really be
reckoned one of the most powerful influences of the time in the higher
walks of thought. And there is no doubt that, as a movement of
reaction against the traditional British empiricism, the hegelian
influence represents expansion and freedom, and is doing service of a
certain kind. Such service, however, ought not to make us blindly
indulgent. Hegel's philosophy mingles mountain-loads of corruption
with its scanty merits, and must, now that it has become
quasi-official, make ready to defend itself as well as to attack
others. It is with no hope of converting independent thinkers, but
rather with the sole aspiration of showing some chance youthful
disciple that there _is_ another point of view in philosophy that I
fire this skirmisher's shot, which may, I hope, soon be followed by
somebody else's heavier musketry.
{264}
The point of view I have in mind will become clearer if I begin with a
few preparatory remarks on the motives and difficulties of
philosophizing in general.
To show that the real is identical with the ideal may roughly be set
down as the mainspring of philosophic activity. The atomic and
mechanical conception of the world is as ideal from the point of view
of some of our faculties as the teleological one is from the point of
view of others. In the realm of every ideal we can begin anywhere and
roam over the field, each term passing us to its neighbor, each member
calling for the next, and our reason rejoicing in its glad activity.
Where the parts of a conception seem thus to belong together by inward
kinship, where the whole is defined in a way congruous with our powers
of reaction, to see is to approve and to understand.
Much of the real seems at the first blush to follow a different law.