Chapter XIII: Thinking and Acting

It is true we do not, as a rule, act without thinking, or without some sort of psychic process, but thinking and acting are radically different. Or, we may say that the practical reason is alone concerned in action, and the abstract intellect in general reasoning. When we come to act, we know that we are free to choose between two or more objects or courses; when we think or reason abstractly, we know the will is not free. Every act has its antecedent cause. But we are practically free because we feel no restraint or compulsion. We feel responsible for our acts. We do not blame our red-haired father, or our grandfather of Irish blood, for our hasty temper; we feel that this is our very selves. What we call moral responsibility rests upon this sense of freedom. We are not aware of the fatality that binds us, any more than we are of the weight of the atmosphere that presses upon us so tremendously. At the court of absolute reason we see what puppets and automata we are, but at the court of practical justice we see and feel that we are free to do right as we see the right. The contradictions which Balfour sees, in his chapter on “Naturalism and Ethics,” between the results of practical life and of abstract reasoning is of a kind which one sees everywhere in the universe. The circle is a perpetual contradiction. How can a line go in all directions?--and in no direction? In our practical lives there is an upper and an under, an up and a down, but away from the earth, or considering the earth as a whole, there is no such thing.

Righteous indignation at the misconduct of others, or self-condemnation, repentance, remorse, are reasonable feelings because we actually feel them. We have no choice in the matter. To whatever conclusion abstract reason leads us in regard to them, it does not affect our practical conduct, because our conduct is founded upon the sense of freedom. We are here to act, to do, and not to reason abstractly. This is the tree of the forbidden fruit. When we eat of it we know things that may stand in the way of our practical living. Balfour should see that we are determinists or naturists when we reason, but free agents when we act, and that there is no getting away from the contradiction.

I may be the duplicate of my father, or of my grandfather; every one of my traits may be inherited; but that does not prevent me from feeling that they are my own; they are vital in me as they were in him, and I feel responsible for my own acts just as he did for his, though I could not act otherwise. I could not, but I did not know it. I thought I could act as I pleased.

The world which philosophy reveals to us is vastly different from the world practical life reveals. We are sure that light and sound are real entities, but philosophy tells us that one is the sensation which vibrations in the ether, set going by the sun, make upon the optic nerve, and that sound is the sensation which vibrations in the air make upon the auditory nerve. When we know this we do not change our action in reference to them--they are still just as real to our senses as ever they were. The moral law is not discredited or overthrown when we discover through the abstract reason that fate, or necessity, rules our lives. We made the moral law and we try to live up to it. We do not always succeed. All trees aim at the vertical position; it is the position which gravity imposes upon them; but owing to various accidents and conditions the trees are not all plumb. How free they seem to grow at almost any angle with the plane of the earth’s surface! How they run out their branches horizontally in defiance of the gravity that rules them and lift up in their trunks and leaves tons of water and other minerals against the pull of gravity! How free they seem, how they bend to the wind that would overthrow them, how various they are in form and habit of growth, in the shape of their leaves, the kinds of their fruits, the character of their roots! Yet science shows us how the unalterable physical laws rule them. They lean toward the light and the free air in obedience to physical and chemical laws. And yet, no doubt, if the trees were conscious of themselves, as we are, every oak-tree would say, “I feel free to be an oak,” and every pine-tree and beech and willow and maple would feel a like freedom. The Irishman feels no compulsion or necessity in being an Irishman, nor the Frenchman in being a Frenchman. All life is held in the leash of physical and chemical laws, and yet knows it not.

We feel that there is beauty in nature; when we reflect, we know that the feeling for beauty is an emotion of our own minds, and not a quality of outward things. Scenes radically different awaken the emotion in us, or may awaken it in one and not in another (see Emerson’s ecstasy on a bare moor). The world is what we make it, and duty is what we make it, and the ugly is what we make it. Putrefaction, repulsive to us, is to science a beautiful chemical process. Odors that are offensive to us are evidently agreeable to the dog. Sounds which please us seem to disturb him. The absolute is outside of life. If the orbs of the heavens were conscious, they would doubtless feel free to go where they do go; it would be their choice; it would pain them to do otherwise. The comet rushes toward the sun with joy; the music of the spheres is the expression of their freedom and contentment. Can you help winking when the flashlight goes off, or when a missile passes near your eyes? Our voluntary actions are equally based upon physical laws.

Balfour, in his “Foundation of Belief,” talks about the beauty of holiness, the beauty of sanctity, but these things are beautiful only to a certain type of mind. The time will come when they will not be looked upon as beautiful or desirable. These conceptions grew when men lived for another world, when this world stood to them as the sum of evil. Men then saw nothing holy or divine on earth except the denying of earth. That state of mind has largely passed. Holy men have had their day. We see now that this world is a celestial body, and that all our conceptions of heavenly abodes are untenable. For my part the most lovable and admirable men and women I have known had no savor of sanctity. They were wise, kind, helpful, loving, living with zest the life of every day, intent on making their earthly lives square with what is generally accepted as right conduct, and therefore comfortably indifferent to what the theologians are so concerned about--salvation after death, and the securing of their “mansions in the skies.” Martyrdom bravely faced excites our admiration, all heroic acts are beautiful and admirable, and there are good naturalistic reasons why this should be so. But our religious history has begotten a whole brood of ideas that must gradually fade and go out, and our standards will more and more be those of this world.

Mr. Balfour would hardly deny that the organ with which we do our thinking and reasoning and form our deductions, the organ which is the seat of our emotions of the beautiful and of religious aspirations, is a mass of gray and white matter, and that all these things are the result of certain molecular changes or movements in the fluids or solids of the brain substance; in other words, that there is a physical and physiological basis to all our mental and emotional life. Does this material side in any way discredit these faculties and feelings? Does not all that we call the spiritual adhere in the material? Can we find that inner world, or any clue to it, by dissecting the brain? Has it, therefore, any reality except in our imagination? Prove that it exists apart from or independent of the body, and there is no more to be said.

But what I wanted most to say is that the reason of things, or final explanation of things seems to take the poetry and romance out of them. Reduce religion or æsthetics or art to terms of psychology, and they no longer appeal to the emotions or stimulate the imagination. Naturalism is true--reason can reach no other conclusion--but the truths of naturalism do not satisfy the moral and religious nature.

The heart is a big, strong, self-acting, muscular pump, but when we lay our hand upon the heart and refer our emotions, our love, our aspirations, to it, we idealize it, we do not then think of its physical function and character. By this act we are still deferring to the ancient and outworn belief that in this region resides the soul--the part of man that loves and hates and hopes and fears.

The brain is the temple of the mind or the vestibule of the spiritual world, but we can explain it only in terms of anatomy, physiology, and physics which darken and chill our sensibilities.

Things and movements come about through natural processes, not through supernatural ones, but when we state these processes in the only terms in which they can be stated, the religious soul feels hurt and orphaned. All our religious or theological explanations of things discredit matter and the material world, discredit Nature and all her processes. Evolution is anti-religious; that man is of animal origin is still a hard doctrine to the old-fashioned theologian. Why is it not equally a hard doctrine to him that we were ever babies or embryos, carried about and associated with the viscera of our mothers’ bodies? We have got to exalt the natural, the material, and free our minds from the illusions of the old theologies before we can see the truth and beauty of naturalism. The sacred, the celestial, the divine, the holy, all are terms that date from a prescientific age, before man’s relation to the universe was understood. They are significant only in reference to another world and another life of an entirely different order.

The eternal, immutable moral law to which Balfour refers, what is it? Who instituted it? Is it other than the law of right and wrong which mankind is coming more and more clearly to see, and more and more fully to value in the course of evolution? You may set the seal of some hypothetical, supernatural power upon it, but what about supernatural powers in a universe governed by natural laws? The religious enthusiasm of the race, the saints, the devotees, the so-called holy ones, have doubtless had their value; they have helped lubricate the grinding machinery of life; but their day is at an end. We must invest our fund of love, our veneration, our heroism, our martyrdom in this world, and not look to the next.

That Nature is irrational, unhuman, no one can deny, not because she is less, but because she is more; she is above reason, above man. Our reason calls Nature irrational because the reason is a special faculty, and is limited; it takes in the arc, so to speak, but not the full circle. Nature is irrational, not because she is not suffused with mind, but because she does not count the cost, because our economies do not fit her especial scheme. Life is synonymous with intelligence; all organic nature shows the working of the primal mind--the adaptation of means to specific ends, and the steady improvement from lower to higher.

What we think, when trying to render an account to the reason of the enigma of life, often has little relation to what we do, as practical, struggling beings. We are free to think in all directions, free to move in but few. Our thoughts are like the vapors that drift with the winds, or that expand equally in all directions. Our actual lives are like the waters that must flow in definite channels, and turn some wheel or irrigate some tract of land, or quench some creature’s thirst. That naturalism, with minds which take an interest in it, should result in low standards of life, or in any form of disorder or failure, I do not believe. Only clear, strong, truth-loving spirits can accept this explanation of things. Much more mentality is demanded than is demanded by the old conceptions. Hence one has to face the terrible realities and discipline the spirit to accept them. In the old views, in supernaturalism, all this is done for one by the Church and one is a member of a personally conducted party to heaven.