Chapter IV: Part 4

I need hardly say that Hume has in the “Dialogue” from which I quote made use of a pleasant artifice to force on the reader’s attention the nature and difficulty of his problem: to find, namely, a common meaning for the words “virtue” and “vice,” by whomsoever used; in spite of the fact that nearly kindred civilizations will be the one confident it has found virtue, where the other is certain it has found vice. “How shall we pretend to fix a standard for judgments of this nature?” he finally puts the question. “By tracing matters,” he answers himself, “a little higher.... The Rhine flows north, the Rhone south; yet both spring from the _same_ mountain, and are also actuated in their opposite directions by the _same_ principle of gravity. The different inclinations of the ground on which they run cause all the differences of their courses.” And one by one with admirable skill, he takes up the virtues of our friend Alcheic, which to us are such conspicuous vices, to show that under the conditions of Greek life most had a quality in common with those perhaps directly opposite acts, which, under the conditions of our life we should commend, and that quality, which is the keynote of all Hume’s ethics, is “utility.”

“It appears,” he puts it, “that there never was any quality recommended by anyone as a virtue or moral excellence, but on account of its being _useful_ or _agreeable_, to a man _himself_ or to _others_. For what other reason can ever be assigned for praise or approbation? Or where would be the sense of extolling a _good_ character or action, which at the same time is allowed to be _good for nothing_? All the differences, therefore, in morals may be reduced to this one general foundation, and may be accounted for by the different views which people take of these circumstances.”

* * * * *

Given Hume’s world-view, it is evident that the only ones whom we have a right to count in estimating the agreeable or disagreeable effects of our actions are such other sentient beings as experience reveals to us: to wit, our fellow humans and perhaps the higher animals. Moreover, the only period which we have a right to consider as containing a life’s measure of happiness and unhappiness is that which experience confirms to us: to wit, that bounded by birth and death.

Thus defined, the calculus of utility involved in judging the merit of an act may be difficult, but is possible of an empirical solution. There remains only one question of human destiny to be settled, but it is an important one. What, namely, is the relation between the happiness experience gives me a right to expect, and the virtue of my conduct? For Hume’s ethics are not egoistic. The utility that measures the excellence of my act is not merely, nor even primarily, its agreeableness to me; but also, and perhaps in larger measure, its agreeableness to others. How for this large element of altruism in all good actions am I, the actor, to be paid, if paid I am to be? To this question Hume gives an elaborate reply in a section of his “Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals” entitled “Why Utility Pleases.” The answer is simple enough. There is in the human heart a sentiment we call sympathy, or, to use Hume’s favorite word, “humanity.” To possess this sentiment is to rejoice in another’s joy, grieve with another’s grief. To possess such a sentiment is to possess the reward of all altruism; for happiness bestowed upon another is bread cast upon the waters that returns to us after days as few or as many as may be required to produce in our own soul the sympathetic image of the happiness we have wrought in another’s.

Such is the theory of human duty and of human destiny which Hume has worked out by the method of Empiricism, which pretends not to a knowledge of God, nor of a system of things broader than the world of our experience. We may allow his own words to contrast the resulting attitude toward life and duty with the theological: “I deny a providence, you say, and supreme governor of the world, who guides the course of events and punishes the vicious with infamy and disappointment, and rewards the virtuous with honor and success in all their undertakings. But surely I deny not the course itself of events, which lies open to every one’s enquiry and examination. I acknowledge that in the present order of things virtue is attended with more peace of mind than vice and meets with a more favorable reception from the world. I am sensible that according to the past experience of mankind, friendship is the chief joy of human life, and moderation the only source of tranquillity and happiness. I never balance between the virtuous and the vicious course of life but am sensible that to a well-disposed mind every advantage is on the side of the former. And what can you say more, allowing all your suppositions and reasonings?”

V

IMMANUEL KANT

1724-1804

The religion of Immanuel Kant can be put in one phrase, “We cannot know that there is a God; but we ought to live as though there were one”--the difficulty lies in interpreting the phrase.

That we cannot know there is a God is a conclusion to which we have seen the decline of rationalism and the growth of empiricism slowly tending. But that we ought to live as though there were a God--what can such a phrase mean? What manner of life does it prescribe? Above all, what sort of an _ought_ is this and how does it bind us?

There is no deeper interest for Kant than that which invites one to consider the meaning of the word “ought.” I say, _the_ meaning of “ought,” yet it may be that the word has more than one meaning. For compare these two examples of its use,--first this: If you want to bisect a line you ought to describe certain arcs and draw a certain straight line. And then this: “You ought to speak the truth.”

We notice at once a rhetorical difference in these two uses of the _ought_. In the first, a certain procedure is commanded _if_ and only _if_ we want to bisect a line. Leave out the condition this _if_ introduces, and the _ought_ with all that follows on it loses its meaning. No decalogue could be imagined to contain among its commands an injunction to describe arcs and draw lines. Let us call this use of the _ought_ the hypothetical use, let us call the command such an _ought_ introduces a hypothetical command or in Kant’s own phrase a “_hypothetical imperative_.” An _ought_ that is inseparable from an _if_ is a hypothetical imperative.

On the other hand when I say, “You ought to speak the truth,” “You ought not to steal,” I seem to be using the _ought_ in a sense that needs no _if_ to make its meaning clear. More than that, attempts to supply an _if_, so far from making the meaning of the _ought_ clearer, have more often than not the effect of changing, of travestying the meaning we instinctively see in it. Truthful speaking and honest dealing be indeed useful devices for getting along in the world, but one who is honest because honesty is the best policy seems to us hardly honest--at all events he seems to have missed the point that honesty is enjoined on us without _ifs_ or _buts_. The obligation to be honest is an unconditional command, a “_categorical imperative_.” It is of such stuff as decalogues are made on--it is so the voice of duty speaks in us.

It needs no pointing out that so far as our examples go, the hypothetical ought has no moral flavor. No sin attaches to one who has left undone the things he ought to have done _if_ he aimed at bisecting a line. Sin does attach to one who has done what he ought not to have done in the way of lying, no matter what end seemed to justify the means. This hypothetical _ought_ finds its reason in pure science, this categorical in pure morality.

All this is true, and yet one would form a poor opinion of Kant’s thoroughness if one represented him as having rushed from one or two examples to the generalization: All hypothetical uses of the _ought_ are scientific and non-moral; all categorical uses are moral and non-scientific. To such a generalization Kant does indeed come, and to it he clings through difficulties more than enough to discourage one in whom the conviction of its truth were less a matter of heart than it was to Kant. But however it fitted in with Kant’s character to view the command of duty as sternly categorical, it was equally part of his character patiently to seek a reason for the faith that was in him.

If Kant had wished to establish no more than that there must be _something_ categorical about the moral _ought_ distinguishing it from the many _oughts_ that suggest nothing of morality, his task would not have been hard. For suppose that to every command there was really a hidden condition attached; suppose that the categorical was really a hypothetical imperative in disguise. Then the goodness of the act commanded could mean no more than its fitness to bring about a certain result. But what of the result? Is it, too, good? The question can obviously have no meaning, for only the way can be good; the goal cannot. And yet we seem to revolt against such meaning of goodness: there is a difference to us between a good way of cheating one’s neighbor and a way of being good. Either then there is some way of defining a good end--an end which justifies the means--or else there must be a moral excellence that belongs to certain types of act irrespective of what they may lead to, if indeed they lead to aught in common. In either case we come upon the categorical _ought_--the end that ought to be pursued for its own sake, or else the type of act that ought to be followed for its own sake with no view to consequences. The first interpretation of the moral ought would be illustrated in a theory that pointed, as did Hume’s, to the happiness of the community as an end imposed without condition, while it defined good actions to be such as were well calculated to bring about this end. The second interpretation is in the spirit of the Decalogue, or of the classic saying, Let justice be done though the heavens fall. It is not the business of the actor to consider the consequences of his just dealing; if the world is so divinely ordered that not the heavens but heaven’s blessing fall on the just man, this is a truth to be independently established. Duty first, consequences after!

No theory of the moral _ought_ can escape a recognition of a categorical command; but we must choose between the end and the act as that to which the _ought_ applies. If we are sometimes doubtful whether Kant abides at all points by the decision he first makes in this matter, there can be no doubt that he comes to a decision at once in favor of the view that the moral ought applies to a type of act, not to an end this type of act might be calculated to bring about. We should still know our duty if we knew of no such end, we ought still to follow duty if there were no such end. It is in trying to carry through this idea, which we may call the Decalogue idea, of the categorical _ought_, that Kant meets his most serious difficulties. Yet the motives which made him accept and cling to such an interpretation are such as the simplest may grasp--yes, the simpler one is of heart, the more easily may one sympathize with them.

In the first place a scientific insight into the means best calculated to bring about an end is obtainable only by study and thought. Even the simple device by which a line may be bisected is not at every one’s disposal, while the highest science has but imperfect means to suggest for accomplishing the ends we most crave. But it seemed to Kant that duty must make a universal appeal, to the poor understanding as clearly as to the richly endowed; morality must be no privilege of the high, but a treasure of the humble. “Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever,” is a word of homely counsel that has crept into our language to show how good a Kantian the plain man may be.

Or again--but really it is the same thought differently expressed--duty ought to make no hesitating uncertain appeal. No one should have a chance to excuse himself on the ground that he was ignorant of the law. But ignorance of scientific law is the portion of all of us. Alas, if we should have to grope after goodness as we do after wisdom! The intellectuality of pagan Greece might and did contemplate such a state of affairs with equanimity or even with favor. The spirit of Christianity expressed the deep desire of the unintellectual that at least virtue might be theirs for the willing.

Kant had a name for any law that was thus universal (that is, applying to everybody) and necessary (that is, free from uncertainty). He called such laws _a priori_; that is, not dependent for their authority upon the slow uncertain gathering of experimental evidence. To him then, the one chance of possessing a moral law _a priori_ lay in the recognition that such a law must in decalogue fashion prescribe a type of act, not an end which might be uncertainly tried for now by truth-telling, now by lying--not an end in short which justified the means so dubiously that it might be taken to justify any means.

* * * * *

To us mortals wandering in the mazes of life and perplexed--we think honestly perplexed--by the way issues of right and wrong present themselves, the possession of an indubitable law of duty whose authority was higher than any consideration of consequences would be a godsend. Yet because such a thing is desirable, it does not follow that it is possible, and we are quite prepared to find Kant at this point setting up as the deepest problem of ethics the question, “How is a categorical imperative possible?” That is, what sort of a world would it be in which men recognized the authority of such an _ought_ and were free and willing to obey it?

An image of one such world is the common possession of our race. God created this world, and the beings that dwell in it. On these beings he lays certain commands in the form of a decalogue, and their authority rests on the will of God regarded now as King. If God had purpose in laying these commands on his subjects, their duty to God’s will must not wait on their insight into his purpose and their acceptance of it as theirs. Man has been created free to obey or not to obey God’s commands, and is told that happiness will be meted out to him in the measure of his obedience, unhappiness in the measure of his disobedience. But to deserve reward, he must not only obey God’s law, but do it uniquely because it is God’s will. He must conceive himself as prepared to obey without promise of reward or threat of punishment. Moreover, it is not pretended that this justice will accomplish itself within the limits of human life on this earth, but in a future life and in another world whose existence must be taken on faith. Here then we have an image of a world in which a categorical imperative in the form of a decalogue is possible, and not only is possible, but has exactly the relations to purpose and to happiness that Kant required of such an imperative. Duty may serve a purpose; but the assurance we have of this is no part of the authority duty has for us. The performance of duty may bring happiness; but duty would remain authoritative if we knew nothing of any happiness it would bring.[4]

This world, we might call it the Old Testament World, is then exactly the kind of a world in which morality as Kant defines morality could and would exist. Moreover Kant is prepared to show that it is the only kind of a world in which true morality could exist. If we are to have such a thing as a command of duty, we must have the three things characteristic of our Old Testament world-image: the freedom of man, the immortality of the soul, the ruling power of God. If we take these, as well we may, to be the essential beliefs of religion, then it appears that for Kant morality is inseparable from religion.

I say that Kant is prepared to prove that without these three assumptions, God, freedom and immortality, no categorical imperative is possible; but I am far from asserting that a conscientious thinker will be prepared to follow Kant in every step of this proof. It is in most parts a tortured process of reasoning at once over subtle and over simple, and back of it all, one feels that Kant’s deepest motives for arriving at his conclusions are the instinctive demands of his heart, which demands a marvelous intellect is made to serve as best it may.

However, the first step is obvious enough: unless there is a sense in which the being on whom a duty is laid is free to follow or not to follow its command, there is no sense in which duty is possible. This ought ye to do; but alas you cannot! This ought ye to do, and besides you can’t help doing it! These expressions equally rob the ought of meaning. We can quite see that without freedom, duty is meaningless. Yet the beings on whom the commands of duty are laid are men like you and me, and in such beings we notice that what freedom they have is limited in a peculiar way. We are in the habit of attributing to each a certain nature or character that we try to regard as working itself out--if not in all--yet in many and various situations. But in this attempt to explain conduct in terms of character and its expression, we are constantly baffled by what seems to us a duality or even multiplicity of characters in the same individual. In this man we explain a certain part of his conduct as the outcome of a strong imperious animality; but another part shows his passion restrained by motives of honor, kindness, sympathy. Two natures are at war in him, and as we are likely to think of one of these as more really his than the other, we represent him as struggling to conquer himself.

Well, this warfare of a man with himself is one of the commonest things in life, and life itself shows that a higher or better self may often enough win the victory over and free itself from a baser and lower disposition. But life shows too that the struggle is long and bitter, so long that a lifetime is too short a span in which to secure a complete victory. Just in proportion as the higher self is high, does the struggle grow hard and lengthen itself out. If we conceive the self whose struggles we are watching to be the moral self as Kant describes it, all the love and lust of life seem to be arrayed against it. If it is to free itself, that is if we are to become completely moral agents, not a lifetime, nor a century, nor a million years, but the whole of eternity must be allowed us for our battling. But this means that the actor must be immortal, and so it is that for Kant the possibility of a completely moral being, free to act out his moral nature, presupposes immortality.

The existence of a moral being then involves the acceptance of him as a free immortal being. But though these are important traits of the Old Testament world image which Kant is trying to show to be the only image that makes morality possible, yet the recognition of a man’s freedom and immortality is not peculiar to it, but may be found in many philosophies. Both, for example, have a place in Spinoza’s system which is as far as possible from giving us an Old Testament account of reality.

When we add a third condition, the ruling power of God, we have a difference indeed, but also a difficulty in understanding the necessity of the assumption. To be sure, if we add the idea of justice to that of moral worth, if we require that worth should be rewarded with proportional happiness, then indeed we should have to go beyond experience to convince ourselves that such justice obtains, and we might very well identify the ideal of justice with the idea of a God-governed world. But Kant has insisted throughout that the idea of right and the idea of reward are independent, why then are they not separable? Why in order that there may be a thing that we ought to do, must there be an assurance that we shall be happy in the doing or because of the doing of it?

It is easy to give Kant’s answer to this question--it is difficult to make sure that one has understood it. His answer is simply that while morality may be the _highest_ desire of the human heart, it cannot be its _whole_ desire. It _must_ desire happiness as well as virtue.

Kant defines the happy man as one whose desires are satisfied. But if we think of this desire as being directed toward a _type_ of object, any attempt to interpret Kant’s motives for introducing a God into his system must meet the obvious difficulty that since morality is the highest type of desire and since it is admitted that all are free to be moral, then the Stoic happiness in virtue is assured quite without reference to a divine government of the world.

The only way we can hope to explain in what sense the will to do one’s duty cannot be a complete definition of the object of human desire is to understand that happiness depends upon our obtaining, not a type of thing,--morality or wealth or power or science--but an individual thing. Our demand for moral satisfaction may be realized in one situation as well as another. “To tell the truth,” if that be all we want, lays no conditions on the particular circumstances under which we tell the truth. We want to follow a principle, and principles are abstract enough. But is it not true that the kind of desire of which finite beings have the deepest experience is bent on just those things that cannot be generalized nor made abstract? What we want in them, and that on which our happiness depends, seems to be offered but this once in all possible life, and nothing like it could be imagined that would meet our desires just as well.

For example, when desire is for the love of a woman, it is for the love of _this_ woman, not of _some_ woman. Ask such love what it sees to love in this individual that could not just as well be found in another, and the lover will laugh you out. You are not speaking his language. You are looking for qualities, types, principles--what he wants with all his soul is not a kind of a woman but just _his_ woman. And to her he sings,

Who is it says the most? which can say more
Than this rich praise,--that you alone are you?

Or do you ask as the thing on which all your happiness hangs that death keep his hands off just this child? Then what meaning would it have for you if a condoling friend were to point out that you had other children far more remarkable? It was not for his qualities you cared when you cared for him, nor yet for his value as a unit in counting your offspring.

I don’t pretend to explain why this is, or what it all means;[5] but when Kant maintains that to will a principle and nothing but a principle is not what we mean by willing, these instances of objects of desire that are purely individual and can not be reduced to principle naturally present themselves as facts of experience that may help us to catch Kant’s meaning.

Of all principles of willing, the moral principle is the highest; but the willing of individual human beings cannot from its very nature be completely defined by principle. The only world in which will can have an object; _i.e._, the only world in which there can be such a thing as will, must be a world of individual things. If it is to be a moral world, it must be possible to struggle for these individual things without disobeying the law of duty.

Happiness, defined as getting the individual thing you want, must be guaranteed, or else, since you can only want something that is individual, willing is objectless. Who or what is to guarantee that the world in which we willers of concrete things may will consistently with moral principle exists? Not experience, surely; that has a way of arranging things so that the woman one wants is just the one principle denies one; the child one has set one’s heart on is just the one death has set his seal on. The chapter of “life’s little ironies” is a full one. Then does it not require the guarantee of a world maker or a world ruler that life’s indifference or irony have not the last word? Does not the possibility of a moral will hang upon the assurance of God? So at least for Kant, God makes goodness possible.

* * * * *

“God, freedom and immortality,” these three are traits inseparable from a world in which duty can speak and be obeyed; the Old Testament world is not only _a_ moral world, it is _the only_ moral world. And if, so far, Kant has clung very closely to the Old Testament, we should find him in his later writing--his “Religion within the Domain of Pure Reason”--clinging just as closely to the spirit of the New Testament. Those who find his reasoning obscure and faulty, would explain all this in terms of his personal psychology and his early environment, for Kant was a child of that deep Pietism, one might say Quakerism, that characterizes the Germany of the eighteenth century.

But if we look upon him as the child of his age in his devotion to Christianity, he was no less profoundly influenced by that other and equally characteristic movement of his day and generation--the inheritance of Rationalism. The Old Testament and even the New Testament world images may have deep truth hidden in their symbolism--so the child of pietism would be likely to think--but the authority of this truth was not to be sought in revelation. It must be established, if at all, by one’s reason--so the disciple of rationalism was bound to maintain. Now Kant is not only a rationalist, rejecting revelation as a source of authority. He is also a critic, to whom the arguments of rationalism for the existence of God appear flimsy and irrational. Neither in reason nor in experience can we find grounds for accepting the existence of God as a scientific fact. Hume could be no more convinced than Kant that no aspect of the world with which our experience acquaints us justifies a belief in divine purpose. Kant went further--no extension of experience in future ages could give us the assurance we now lack. God is unknown to our science and unknowable.

Well then, if neither the necessities of thought nor the facts of experience, however we conceive our knowledge of them extended, can force upon us a belief in God and all that hangs on him, what is left of religion and of morality that cannot be separated from religion? Kant’s answer to this question is so confusing that it is little wonder the interpreters of Kant are confused, in disagreement with each other and each doubtful of himself. I am obliged then, since we have not the time to try out all the ifs and buts of the case, to present dogmatically one line of thought that is to be found in Kant, the one along which post-Kantian thought developed. If anyone tell me that he fails to find this thought in his edition of Kant, or that he finds others that do not run parallel with it, we shall not quarrel about a matter commentators have always quarreled about.

If Kant as a critic has been keen to point out the inadequacy of any proof of God, he has been no less earnest in his purpose of showing that no disproof can come to us. This world is one that for aught we know _may_ be God’s world, and if we choose to live as though it were God’s world and we were of his kingdom, we need fear to meet no facts that would block our way and deny us.

Doesn’t it lie near to hand to say--You can make this God’s world if you want to? You can make yourself free, immortal and blest of heaven if that is the deepest desire in you, for in all its moral aspects this world of yours is a plastic world and will respond delicately to your touch. Live then as though there were a God, and there will indeed be one; the world will be divine.

I have called Kant’s world the Old Testament world and you have seen in what sense it may be called so; but if you try to think of this world as the mediaeval writers are supposed to have thought of it, then Kant’s religion must be in flat contradiction with itself. If God is such a God, if his creative act is such a gesture as a Michael Angelo might paint, if life after death is such a life and spent in such places as a Dante might describe, then all Kant’s religion is but a leap in the dark. The thing reduces to something like Pascal’s wager--bet on God, and if you lose you lose nothing; if you win you win everything. If God, freedom, and immortality are facts hid behind a curtain that we may never tear aside, we can only take a chance with such facts. I have already made my bow to those who find other things in Kant than the religion I pretend to have drawn from him--and I had particularly in mind such as understand Kant throughout to be thinking of the truths of religion as just such facts hid behind the curtain. I have refused to quarrel with those interpreters because Kant does think, because Kant can not cure himself of thinking in such terms through many pages. But this I take to be obvious--if this fashion of thinking were the only one possible in view of the situation in which science and religion find themselves, if it is not merely a peculiarity of the man Kant and his personal psychology, then those who followed on him, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, were deeply deceived in supposing that Kant was their inspiration; the post-Kantian development was not a development but a new creation.

* * * * *

Viewing Kant then in the light of the appeal which he made to his own times, we may see that for him religion is not a matter of what one decides to believe, but of what one decides to do. And the religious consciousness may express the law of its doing in the determination to live as though there were a God. But we must ask it of Kant to explain to us what sort of a life this religious life would be.

One can quite make it out that the first condition to the living of such a life is to obey the voice of duty as though it were the voice of God. That is, to obey it without letting our obedience hang on our insight into the purpose to be worked out, or on the satisfaction we are to find in or because of the doing. Just so was the Decalogue presented for the acceptance of the Children of Israel. But for them the way of duty was revealed by God himself; for Kant it must be revealed by the reason which accepts it. What sort of a law does this “practical reason,” as Kant calls it, reveal?

Kant’s first formulation is imperfect enough, and seems to be based on an effort to deduce the content of moral law from the meaning of law itself--as though to say, the command “Be law-abiding” furnished one with all needed information respecting the law by which one was to abide. For, as Kant puts the matter, law must prescribe a type of action that is possible for everybody--a meaning of law which is well rendered by the common phrase, “What is right for one is right for all.” And just as one might try to convince a man of the iniquity of some particular act of his by putting to him the question, Suppose everybody were to do that? so Kant at this stage feels that we could try out the validity of any given type of act by putting the same question to ourselves. Suppose the right to lie were up for consideration; if lying is morally right, then it must be possible for everybody to lie. But if everybody tried to lie, there would be no such thing as a lie, for a lie requires someone to believe it as well as someone to utter it. Universal lying would be impossible; the maxim, “Be a good liar,” could not be generalized into a law.

“So act that the maxim of your conduct could become a universal law.”[6] This is the formula that Kant finds first of all for the full duty of man. But of course on this basis one could not sell a share of stock, for if everybody were to try it, there would be no market. On the other hand Kant himself has only a tortured and inadequate account to give of the reason why one should not commit suicide, for it looks as though we might all do that much together.

More interesting is Kant’s second attempt to formulate the law of duty. Almost against his will, one would say, Kant is forced to consider the act from the point of view of its purpose. The purpose of a moral act must be such that everybody may pursue the same purpose.[7] An immoral world is one in which many want a thing that can not be shared--Kant recalls with humor the remark of King Francis, that he and his brother Charles were in perfect accord for both wanted the same thing--namely the possession of Milan. A moral world is one in which no desires are contradictory.

The moment Kant has said this he has made the moral world an ideal, an image of a world not identical with this present one, but into which our faith demands that the present one may by our effort evolve. It is impossible so far as I can see to make Kant’s first impression of duty square with this account of it. It cannot be that duty is a simple certain command that the humblest understanding can grasp. It must be that duty is a more or less vague striving toward this ideal, a striving to make the world in which we live with one another approximate more and more closely to this beautiful republic whose motto might be modeled after Rabelais, “‘Fays ce que vouldras,’ et ne nuis pas à ton voisin.”[8] Religion then is the determination to allow nothing to divert us from this struggle which it would not be out of place to call the struggle after divinity. Immortality would be a direction, not a condition. Happiness--the religious happiness--the sense of the progress to which we are contributing. All this seems to flow naturally from the Kantian conception, but Kant has that in him which will not let such results follow. He stands divided against himself. His theory of duty as decalogue law, his less confident but no less enduring conception of the object of religion as facts behind a veil, stand in contradiction with his view of duty as a struggle that must be more or less blind, baffled, and empirical toward a goal infinitely remote.

* * * * *

In this contradiction we must leave him. Religion, as the name for a search after the kind of reality in which the multiple strivings that leave us divided each within himself and one from another, was the deep inspiration of those who followed Kant. They thought they owed this inspiration to the master, and so indeed they did; but it is not surprising that Kant himself refused to recognize his immediate offspring (Fichte) and would probably have been greatly shocked at the speculations of his more remote progeny. Nor is it surprising to one accustomed to the disappointments of which the history of thought is the living chronicle that one of those inspired by Kant to this very search should have ended his seeking with the tragic finding that the harmonious will is an illusion and a contradiction. Will is essentially war, cries Schopenhauer. There is that in the experience of every man which forces him to give ear to this cry, voicing though it does the deepest and final denial of all that is religious.

VI

ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER

1788-1860

We live in a room that has a dark corner. The shadows are there and we know they are there; but we will not look their way. We busy ourselves with a thousand things that are doubtless important; we sit by the lamp and are doubtless full of cheerful thoughts. It is held to be wise to behave in this way, and if the things we busy ourselves with are really important then it may be admitted that our conduct is really wise. But back there among the shadows, the darkest of them all, lurks the spirit of questioning. “What is the use?” it keeps asking, “What is the use?” If we listen we are lost, yet those who have listened and lost themselves tell us that there is such peace to be had of knowing the worst that compared with it the prizes of struggling life are but children’s toys.

“To see where the worst problems of life lie,” writes a philosopher of our own day, “is a very black experience. And yet, so much does human reason live on insight that I have never met a man who was alive to those deepest problems and who repented him of his insight.”[9]

Now the one to whom of all men this insight into the deep abyss has been vouchsafed was Arthur Schopenhauer. According to the older ideas of tragedy, the world has at times and in spots seemed sad enough; but Schopenhauer invented a new conception of tragedy, more ingeniously painful than any that had gone before, and then he showed that the play which most completely set forth this idea was just the whole of life.

The work in which this thought is most systematically developed bears the double title, “On the World as Will and Idea (Vorstellung),” whose first edition appeared in 1818. We may safely confine ourselves to this single work in our present study of Schopenhauer, for his life was one of those lives that move rapidly to a moment of maturity then subside into a ruminating reflection on their achievement.

To have reached at thirty a life-view from which one never afterwards departs might be taken to argue either a certain shallowness of mind or an unusual depth of conviction. One recalls the sixty-year-old Kant, painfully struggling with a bare theory of method, and then for some twenty years more laboring to apply this method to the problems of life with results so vigorously reacting on the method itself as to have created a suspicion of change of view. It is certain that in contrast with Kant, Schopenhauer leaves an impression of facility in thought and style. This effect is no doubt partly to be accounted for by a difference in upbringing and in the circumstances surrounding production. Kant was the very complete university professor; Schopenhauer, a man of the world whose one early experiment in academic life was a most convincing failure. He alone of all the great names that recognize Kant as master--Fichte, Schelling, Hegel--had the assured position and material means to spare himself the laborious training of one who would enter the academic lists. Free then to live as he would, he develops the tastes and the methods of the private scholar of means, reflecting the experience of an easy bachelor existence of inns, and travel, and wide unsystematic reading.

It is the early training doubtless of one intended for a higher social stratum, that imposes on Schopenhauer a sense of obligation to be lordly; a style that is free, rather grand, perhaps a bit overdressed; a certain insolence of tone from which even his friends suffer at times, and which when it is question of his enemies sinks to a level of abuse whose epithets must be shadowed forth with initial and dash.

But apart from these external conditions, one recognizes in Schopenhauer the spirit of the fighter rather than that of the critic. He is a man of one idea, embraced as soon as encountered, then defended with boldness and eloquence and wit. Such a character hardly develops the great thinker; but it may well be possessed of a great thought. The thought of Schopenhauer is none the less great for being gloomy and repellant.

* * * * *

The double title, “The World as Will and Idea,” hints at a double aspect that experience presents, the one to the eye of the observer, the other to the mind of the thinker. To the observing eye, it is a spread of bodies in space and time, obeying the laws of mechanical necessity; just such a world as Kant has described in his “Kritik der reinen Vernunft.” Schopenhauer, following Kant, calls this the world of appearance, the phenomenal world.

But when we say “a world of appearances” we seem to hint at a something that appears, and appears not to the eye that follows the mechanical behavior of bodies in space and time but as revealed to the thought of one who asks: Wherefore this agitated phenomenon? Just as, watching my neighbor move and gesticulate, I ask myself: What is it all about? so, seeing Nature a-quiver, I ask myself: What does she mean? And just as my neighbor’s conduct is understood when I have caught the purpose, the motive that inspires it, so I may be expected to have reached the “real nature” of the fleeting world if I can but find the _will_ which it expresses.

It is then the World as Will that profoundly interests Schopenhauer, as it has profoundly interested all men, from the most primitive that have implored the gods, to the most cautiously reflective who, like Kant, have felt confident of at least this much, that no definition of a good life was possible that did not postulate a world-purpose.

Now the plainest man can assure himself that there are enough--alas, too many--purposes to be found in nature for the looking. There are mine and yours, that of our country, of our human race, of other races too, for the lower animals have disputed the world with us, as the vegetables have disputed it with them. But when one asks oneself: What ultimate purpose is served by all this disputing for a foothold? then indeed one’s imagination is put to the test. There are too many purposes, there is too little purpose, to let this search for nature’s will with us end in a quick and happy finding.

All this is matter of common knowledge and common experience, yet how few have had the courage to give up hope in an ultimate happy finding, and how easily is this hope deceived with dreams, how willingly does it dispense with proof. Here indeed is the region in which “the heart has its reasons that the reason does not understand.” Well, it is Schopenhauer’s great act of courage that the purpose he was unable to find he refused to hope for; the reason that the reason could not understand he closed his heart to. Resolutely, he searched the dark corner and finally stared at the shadow.

“Everywhere in nature we see strife, conflict and alternation of victory.”

“Every kind of being fights for the matter, the space, and the time of the others. This strife may be followed throughout the whole of nature, but most distinctly in the animal kingdom. For the animals have the whole of the vegetable kingdom for their food, while within the animal kingdom every beast is the prey and food of another. So does the will to live everywhere prey upon itself till finally we come to the human race. This, because it subdues all others, regards nature as a manufactory of things for its use. Yet even the human race reveals within itself with terrible distinctness the same conflict; the same variance with itself of the will to live, and we cry _homo homini lupus_.”[10]

This picture of universal warfare is the first scene in Schopenhauer’s world-tragedy; but it is far from the climax. It is in itself not even tragic, for is it not an aspect of nature that however much it may suggest of defeat and suffering it must reveal just as much of triumph and glory? For every victim a victor, and may we not suppose that some principle of justice awards the pains and pleasures of it all?

But no, Schopenhauer goes relentlessly on. The conqueror is crowned with vanity and his spoils are illusions:

“The inner being of nature is a striving without rest and without respite.... a willing and striving that may very well be compared to an unquenchable thirst. But since the basis of all willing is need, deficiency and thus pain, the nature of brute and man alike is originally and of its very essence subject to pain. If on the other hand, it is deprived of objects of desire through too easy satisfaction, such void and ennui fills the heart that existence becomes an unbearable burden to it. Thus life swings like a pendulum from pain to ennui, from ennui to pain.” And Schopenhauer finds an odd unconscious recognition of this truth in the popular imaginings concerning heaven and hell. “After man had transferred all pain and torments to hell,” he notes with an amused cynicism, “there then remained nothing but ennui to furnish heaven with.”

The survivor of the struggle for existence is on these terms hardly a being to be envied, and the “_terque quaterque beati_” must often come to his lips as he recalls those who have fallen. Indeed, it is exactly that place in the scale of existence which gives advantage in the struggle, that brings with it a consciousness of the vanity of this same struggle. It is exactly to man, who in his moment of pride has thought nature a “manufactory of things for his use,” that is given the most poignant sense of alternating hunger and satiety. This most necessitous of all beings “stands upon the earth, left to himself, uncertain about everything except his own lack and misery. Consequently the care for the maintenance of that existence under exacting demands which are renewed every day occupies as a rule the whole of human life. To this is directly related a second claim, the propagation of the species. Here he is threatened from all sides by the most different kinds of danger, from which it requires constant watchfulness to escape. With cautious steps and casting anxious glances around he pursues his path--thus he went as a savage, thus he goes in civilized life; and there is no security for him.

“Qualibus in tenebris vitae, quantisque periclis
Degitur hoc oevi, quodcumquest.

“Life is a sea full of rocks and whirlpools which man avoids with the greatest care and solicitude, although he knows that even if he succeeds in getting through with all his efforts and skill, he comes thus but the nearer at every tack to the greatest, the total, the inevitable shipwreck, death.”

And Schopenhauer rounds off the whole with these lines, “Thus, between desiring and attaining all human life flows on. The wish is in its nature pain, the attainment ... satiety: the end is an illusion and possession takes away charm. The wish, the need, presents itself under a new form, or when it does not, follows desolateness, emptiness, ennui against which the conflict is just as painful as against want.” And just as the superior animal is the most suffering of all animals, so the superior man is the most suffering of all men. The calm joy of science, the pleasure of the beautiful, the delight in art--“these things demanding rare talents are granted to very few, and to those few only as a passing dream. And then even these few on account of their higher intellectual power are made susceptible of far greater suffering than duller minds can ever feel. Moreover such men are placed in lonely isolation by a nature obviously different from that of others, so that here too accounts are squared.”

As for the ordinary man, his being “is a weary longing and complaining, a dreamlike staggering through the four ages of life to death--accompanied by a series of trivial thoughts.”

“Every human being and his course of life is but another short dream of the endless spirit of nature, the persistent will to live; is only another fleeting form which [nature] carelessly sketches in its infinite pages ... allows to remain for a time so short it vanishes into nothing ... and then obliterates to make new room.”

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From a previous passage touching on the life and character of Schopenhauer it may have been gathered that his was no very lovable personality. And being unlovable, it is not surprising that he was little loved; neither by wife nor child, which he had not; neither by mother nor sister, which he had and offended; nor yet by close friends which if he had for a moment he usually managed to estrange. It is true, perhaps, that his dog loved him, the inseparable poodle whom the children of the neighborhood used to call der junge Schopenhauer, for the tenderest side of Schopenhauer’s make-up was turned toward dumb animals. But the love of a dog is a poor substitute for all other loves, and it is not surprising that certain minds to whom optimism is a foregone conclusion should have dismissed Schopenhauer with the observation that to him who looks through clouded glasses the world must needs be dark.

If we are tempted to make this easy comment, we should remember the note that Schopenhauer is never tired of appending to his pages, the reminder that he stands not alone but is the expression of whole races and civilizations. He is heir to the deep pessimism of the East, of Brahminism, of Buddhism, that called life a “veil of illusion,” and figured one attached to its purposeless turning as “tied to the wheel of things.” He is the voice of that Christianity that fled to the desert, and hid itself in monasteries. He could repeat after the “Imitation of Christ,” “Truly it is misery even to live upon the earth. The more spiritual a man desires to be, the more bitter does this life become to him; because he sees more clearly and perceives more sensibly the defects of human corruption. For to eat and to drink, to sleep and to watch, to labor and to rest, to be subject to the necessities of nature is a great misery and affliction to a religious man, who would gladly be set loose.”