Chapter VI: Part 6

“But courage is the best of them that kill; courage that lays hold on things; courage puts even Death to death, for it says to life: ‘War das das Leben? Wohlan! Noch einmal!’”

* * * * *

Noch einmal! To make one ready to cry _da capo_ to life, that is the test of a philosophy! Nietzsche’s doctrine of the Wiederkunft has no scientific importance, but this fact is itself unimportant. It makes little difference whether the River Ocean flows in upon itself, or flows endlessly on, or falls at last into Hades. The important thing is that worth and happiness lie in playing the game of life as experience reveals it to us, no matter what that game may be.

“Thy will be my will, O Nature,” cried the Stoic Emperor. Is this will the will to conquer, is it the will to produce the higher type, is it the will to flow, is it the will wheel-like to turn in saecula saeculorum--the word of life is “That also will I”; the word of sickness and death is, “That will I not.”

There is enough of the dramatic for such as have a taste that way in the circumstance that just this lonely, pain-wracked, finally brain-sick man should have begun his philosophy with the phrase: “God is dead of pity for men,” and should have concluded it with that other: “War das das Leben? Wohlan! Noch einmal!”

VIII

PRAGMATISM

Nothing could be easier, you would say, than to distinguish the things man has made from those he has merely stumbled upon and found. The suns and their satellites, with the laws of their turning; the earth, with its seas and continents and the ways of its winds and weather--surely no man took thought on these things to make them. Whereas, from the first bit of flint chipped to serve a human need to all our world has now to show of instruments of power and works of art we have a record of human ideals wrought in material, while man, surrounded by his handiwork, has come to live more and more under laws of his own making.

Aristotle thought the difference between products of nature and works of art so plain that he need not pause to explain it. The years that have passed since then have developed no better mind than Aristotle’s, no keener wit than Plato’s, but they have brought us a wealth of experience--of an experience at once enlightening and disillusioning, until

Jetzt sind wir so klug und witzig
Es verblutet uns das Herz.

We are no longer sure of very much, and among the things we are most doubtful about is just this distinction between what man has made and what he has found. To prove this, no one need go further afield than just to consider himself. Surely I may say of myself, my character, my private life that it is man-made, for am not I the man that made it? It expresses all my ideals so far as I could realize them, and never would it have been just what it is had I not moulded it that way. And yet, who among us has not sat up of nights with that strange being he calls himself, and wondered however he came to bring so uncompanionable a companion home with him and where the devil he found him? Ernst Mach tells an amusing anecdote at his own expense. One day he was mounting the steps of a bus when he noticed at the other end of the aisle a man’s face peering into his. He had no more than asked himself “Where have I seen that degenerate looking pedagogue before?”--when he discovered he was looking into a mirror.

And who, wearying of this sorry companion, has not tried to change him for a better, only to find himself after a longer or shorter while with the same old fellow at his elbow--a trifle more set in his ways, perhaps, but otherwise little altered? Of the sadder sort of autobiographies I should put the Journal Intime of Henri-Frédéric Amiel easily first. Not from pain or poverty, not from the malice of other men nor any disgrace of outer fortune did he suffer, but just from the being that was himself. “From the beginning,” he writes in 1858, “I have been a dreamer fearing to act--in love with perfection and as incapable of renouncing her demands as of meeting them. In short, a mind of wide vision and a character of no strength; curious to feel all that is to be felt, unfit for any action.” “Here,” comments his friend, Edmond Scherer, “we have Amiel’s cross. He wanted--he wanted to want--to will, and will-power was wanting in him. He cursed the inner spell that was on him, but he could not shake it off. After each attempt to break it he fell back into himself again, more bewildered, more weary and bruised than ever. In the waging of these combats the years wore on, until the moment was near when Amiel would have to acknowledge to himself that the circle was definitely closed behind him.” Would you say that Amiel had made his destiny or found it? Would you say that any of us is of his own workmanship, or does our life slowly unfold itself to us as to Oedipus his fate?

What is thus suggested by self-examination is confirmed by the study of other lives. The friend whose wayward course has made your affection anxious for him--can you, with the best will in the world, change him from himself? Some, out of bitterness of their experience, have said it would be easier to repeal the law of gravitation than in any way to alter human destiny. Others to be sure are more sanguine, and will not give up seeking a way so long as there is a will to save. But whether, even when they appear to succeed, it is not rather their patience that is rewarded by being allowed to live long enough to witness what would have come about without any of their doing, or whether character is more truly a thing made by human effort than a thing found and unfolded to our observation--respecting these matters there is divergence of opinion.

Now, confidence in our ability to tell what we have made from what we have found once shaken, there is no saying how far our questioning mind may carry us. No saying, I mean, in the case of any individual man--for it is easy enough to tell the general history of this doubt and uncertainty. It reaches all the way from those who think that back of all apparent creating by finite beings there is a Nature with its laws that was never made, but can only little by little be made out. Let us call those who think in this way “Realists.” Historic uncertainty then reaches all the way from the realists to those who think that heaven, the earth, and all that in them is, have no reality save as they are the thought and work of finite minds. We will call these thinkers “Idealists.” From realist to idealist and back again, through all intermediate phases, the dialectic of history swings; but it does not merely mark time therefore, it also measures progress. It is of one moment--I think a rather interesting moment--of this progress that I would speak in due order. Let this, then, be my prologue--and so to the tale.

* * * * *

In 1907, William James wrote of the philosophy to which he had devoted the last ten or twelve years: “I fully expect to see the pragmatist view,” so he called this philosophy, “run through the classic stages of a theory’s career. First, you know, a new theory is attacked as absurd; then, it is admitted to be true, but obvious and insignificant; finally, it is seen to be so important that its adversaries claim they themselves discovered it. Our doctrine of truth is at present in the first of these three stages, with symptoms of the second stage having begun in certain quarters.”

Looking back over the years that have lapsed since this was written, I cannot say that James’s prophecy as to the future of pragmatism has been fulfilled; but that the world, at least the world in which I have lived, has lost its first sense of the absurdity of pragmatism is undoubtedly true. No one was more bitten than I with this first feeling of the absurd, unless it was some other of my kind among those who gathered of an evening in 1896 to listen to a reading of James’s now famous little essay on “The Will to Believe”--the essay which, so far as James was concerned, opened the campaign for pragmatism. James had written the paper that winter as a lecture to be delivered before the Philosophical Clubs of Yale and Brown Universities, and I cannot recall what the occasion was that brought a small number of us graduate students at Harvard together to hear it re-read; but I do recall that we were very much bewildered and not a little shocked by the reading.

Not all, I dare say, who afterwards read this “Will to Believe” will have experienced any such shock and bewilderment, nor will many have felt what we found so upsetting in a bit of writing that was, as writing, certainly, altogether delightful. But you must know that this particular gathering was made up of students who had been brought up in that theory of truth which I have called the realistic, and their habitual attitude toward truth was such that they held their truth the truer the more they were its discoverers and the less they had had to do with the making of it.

There were, to begin with, the laboratory men. Now, a laboratory is a school of the most rigid discipline--a discipline whose first principle is “keep yourself out of your experiment.” I think you will understand what I mean by this when I say that a scrupulous experimenter about to take conclusive readings in a matter that promises to be of some value to science will, if possible, get another observer ignorant of their import to take these readings for him, lest something of his own excitement and anxiety corrupt his very touch, sight and hearing, and warp his result to his will. And, what was this James was defending--a “Will to Believe”? No wonder some wag of the lot dubbed it “The Will to Make Believe”! And what was this again James was saying--“For purposes of discovery ... indifference is to be less highly recommended, and science would be far less advanced than she is if the passionate desires of individuals to get their own faiths confirmed had been kept out of the game.... On the other hand, if you want an absolute duffer in an investigation, you must, after all, take the man who has no interest whatever in its results: he is the warranted incapable, the positive fool.” Had James addressed a gathering of the Sons of St. Patrick, in the sense of demonstrating to them that the Pope of Rome was the Beast mentioned in Revelations, he might have called forth a noisier response, but none less sympathetic than ours.

One who would invite a man to bring his enthusiasms, his likings and dislikings, in short, any will of his other than the will to persevere, into a laboratory with him would naturally not forbid him to keep all this equipment by him in whatever pursuit of truth he might engage, whether of history, economics, morals or religion. And just as James shocked the realist spirit of that little Harvard gathering of a score of years ago, so have his writings fallen afoul of realism wherever they have been read--and perhaps few writers on philosophy have been more widely read than William James. This is to have made enemies indeed, for the genius of realism, the spirit of the seeker who would find what he might find and call it truth, naked, unclothed upon with garments of human interpretation, has sometime breathed in every science and every art.

* * * * *

Take the realistic historian now--but you will doubtless know this character better if I show him to you, and the effect he produces upon other temperaments, than if I merely describe him as a type. Among the most entertaining of the reviews that Anatole France contributed to “Le Temps,” in the late 80’s and early 90’s, is one that he devotes to a work “tout à fait solide et puissant” of Louis Bourdeau, “L’Histoire et les Historiens, essai critique”--a critical essay on history considered as an objective science--“in which,” as France remarks, “M. Bourdeau puts works on history in a class with fables and Mother Goose tales.

“‘History,’ says M. Bourdeau, ‘is not and cannot be a science.’ The reasons he gives for this have not failed to make an impression on my mind, and perhaps there is a special reason why they should impress me--the sum of which is that I had tried to point out these reasons before he did. I had thrown out suggestions of them flippantly and in a spirit of badinage ten years ago in a little book of mine called the ‘Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard.’ I set no store by them then, but, now that I see they are worth something, I am in haste to claim them.

“‘In the first place,’ I said in this little book,--‘In the first place, what is history? History is the written presentation of past events. But what is an event? Is it any fact whatever? No, sir. It is a noteworthy fact. Now, how is the historian to judge whether a fact is noteworthy or not? He judges according to his taste and caprice, follows his own idea, in short, proceeds after the manner of an artist. For facts do not of their own accord divide themselves into historical facts and non-historical facts. Again, a fact is something extremely complex. Does the historian represent facts in all their complexity? No, that is impossible. He will represent them stripped of the greater part of their detail, consequently truncated, mutilated, different from what they were. As to the interrelation of these facts, the less said of that the better. If a so-called historic fact is brought about (which is possible) by one or more non-historic facts--and for that very reason unknown--how can the historian establish a relation between these facts?’

“These, if I am not mistaken, are the fundamental ideas upon which M. Louis Bourdeau rests his right to refuse to history any scientific value....

“Indulgent minds find a way to get along with the treacheries of history. This muse is false, they think, but she no longer deceives us when we have found out that she is deceiving us. Constant doubt shall be our kind of certitude, they say. Prudently, we will go our way from error to error toward a relative kind of truth, for even a lie is some kind of a truth....

“But as for M. Bourdeau, he does not wish to be deceived even knowingly, and he absolutely repudiates history. He drives her from his door as deceitful, shameless, dissolute, having sold herself to the powerful, a courtesan in the pay of kings, an enemy of the people, wanton and false.”

So far, the picture of non-objective history in all its ugliness--history as it has been written in the past. But now the history of the future, objective history, realistic history--ah, that will be quite another story. It is Bourdeau who speaks: “The historians of the future will have for their first task the gathering and interpreting of statistical data concerning the common events of life. The activity of thought always expresses itself in acts, and the only way to take account of these is, after having classified them under definite functions, to set them down at the moment of their happening, to count them under given conditions of population, of time and place, then to compare these results whether simultaneous or successive, to note the variations of the function and to make the inductions that they warrant. Thus, and only thus, may we some day know what the multitudes that make up humanity are doing.

“This is the way we must write history from now on, not only in the young countries which, like Australia, Canada, La Plata, are founded under new conditions, but even in the old societies of Europe that, like the others, hope to work out for themselves an ideal order of labor, of peace and of liberty. For one who has reached our point of advancement, any other way of studying history is inexact and childish. A reform is coming, and will either be made by the historians or in spite of them. The age of literary historiography is about to close; that of scientific history about to open. When it shall be able to reconstruct for us the life of a people in the way we have indicated, we shall see that no story can offer so much of interest, of instruction and of grandeur.”

I do not know that every one is bound to share Bourdeau’s enthusiasm for statistical history. Perhaps some will hope with France that they may not be spared to read history written in this way, and will solace themselves the meanwhile with their Thucydides and Herodotus. But at least, all will have caught the martial tread of realism resounding through these passages.

* * * * *

In the laboratory sciences the objective spirit sits as a strong man in his castle, impregnable, unattackable. There we see him dreaming dreams of conquest, the fair domain of history, in which we may include economics, seems ready to fall to his bow and spear for the world’s endless betterment. And what lies beyond? Lands that are the fairest, richest, most desired of all; and yet which will take all his daring, all his courage, all his steadfastness and an undying enthusiasm to make his own. They are the lands of morals and religion.

I like those chapters of history that tell how the spirit of the experimenter sets out to conquer the realms that have so long been ruled by masters with whom he can have no sympathy--tradition, coming out of the vague mists of the past; superstition, born of human ignorance; mysticism, inarticulate, ecstatic, offering reasons for itself that are reasons only to those who ask for none. To win all this for objectivity, for the kingdom of the kind of truth that believes only because the experiment says so, the experiment that any unbeliever may repeat for himself and abide by the result--this is surely a brave adventure, and whether they meet victory or defeat one cannot refuse one’s enthusiasm to those who have had courage to make it.

Of those who set forth in this way, I should call David Hume the father. Would you, for example, know what is right and what is wrong? Then turn not to inspired writings, but travel widely through the civilizations of different countries and different times and seek as you would seek any other historical fact, first, what people _called_ good and what they _called_ bad. Then, if underlying the vast contradictions of historic precept you find nevertheless an agreement in the purpose these precepts, set in their native settings, served, why, then, you will have arrived at the only meaning good and bad can have.

Or, would you know whether this is God’s world or no? Turn not to reputed miracles, and indulge not in idle dreams of another world in which the faulty humanity and utter finiteness of this one will have found its supplement and correction; but, take just the order and purpose of this world as your best experience reveals it to you. It may be that this seeking will leave you dark, puzzled, uncertain; but better the unrest of judgment suspended than the dream-like peace of faith unfounded.

It fortifies my soul to know
That, though I perish, truth is so.

wrote Arthur Clough. And, again, he has written:

To spend uncounted years of pain,
Again, again and yet again,
In working out in heart and brain
The problem of our being here;
To gather facts from far and near,
Upon the mind to hold them clear,
And, knowing more may yet appear,
Unto one’s latest breath to fear
The premature result to draw--
Is this the object, end and law,
And purpose of our being here?

Over these verses Clough has written: “Perchè pensa? Pensando s’invecchia.”

* * * * *

Why think, indeed, when thinking leaves one old--so old, so cold, so sadly wise? That thinking--the realist’s way of thinking--does leave one in melancholy mood may be no objection to thinking in this way; but it may not be ignored as a fact of history. Realism’s hymn of triumph is written by the best of its poets and the most sincere of its prophets--Leconte de Lisle. One does not attempt to translate a Leconte de Lisle, but the thought of the final verses of his poem on the Southland may be put in some such way as this--

Man, if with heart full of joy or bitterness
Thou go at noonday through these radiant fields--
Flee! Nature is empty and the sun consumes;
Nothing here is alive, nothing sad, nothing joyous.

But if having put tears behind thee and laughter
Thou be turned to forgetfulness of this troubled world,
No longer knowing how to pardon nor how to curse,
And would taste a last sad volupté--

Come! The sun speaks to thee a glorious language;
Lose thyself in its implacable flame
And return slow-footed to the vile city of men,
Thy soul seven times steeped in divine nothingness.

It is like that. This wondering in a world we did not make and cannot change, in which all our creating is illusory--a chance trivial expression of what the world has made us--with no other purpose in our wandering but

For to admire and for to see,
For to be’old this world so wide.

--why yes, the fulness of such experience comes as near as can be to bringing us to a seven-fold sense of the _néant divin_.

Well, when a man’s philosophy has turned bitter to his tongue and hangs heavy on his heart, there are three things he may do. He may abide by the consequences of his philosophy, and seeing no fault in the premises accept the conclusion with all valiance. Or, he may rebel against all logic and reason and trust that sympathies and antipathies are safer guides to truth than any evidence could be. Or, finally, he may examine the premises anew. It is, I must confess, only to the last--to the reasoners and critics who go patiently to work to re-examine old beliefs--that I lend a respectful ear. But I do not know that I can begin an account of the backward swing from such extreme realism as I have pictured to such extreme idealism as I can tell only part of before I close, better than by letting the mere spirit of unreasoning revolt against this selfless objectivity express itself.

* * * * *

With an exquisite insight into the psychology of those he calls “Wir Gelehrten,” and with no care for the truth or error of the ways of the objective spirit, Nietzsche registers his revolt against all this spirit stands for. “However gratefully we may still welcome the objective spirit,” he writes in his “Jenseits von Gut und Böse,” “in the end we must learn to put some caution into our gratitude and some restraint on the enthusiasm with which selflessness and impersonality of mind have come to be extolled as ends in themselves, as an emancipation and an enlightenment. The objective man who no longer curses or upbraids, the ideal scholar in whom the scientific instinct after a thousand whole or half failures has at last come to full growth and blossoming, is surely the most precious tool there is; but his proper place is in the hands of a stronger man than he is. We say he is an instrument--he is a mirror, he is no end in himself. The objective man is indeed a mirror. Accustomed to subject himself to all that is to be known, without any other pleasure than such as the knowing, the mirroring gives, he waits till something comes his way, then spreads himself delicately before it so that the light foot-steps and ghostly passing of spirit things may not be lost to his surface and integument. What there is of a person still left in him seems to him accidental, often arbitrary, oftener still disturbing; so much has what was his very self become a medium through which pass and in which are reflected foreign forms and happenings. If he tries to think about himself at all, it is an effort for him and more often than not a failure. He changes easily; he tries to grasp his own needs, and only then is he clumsy and awkward. Perhaps it is his health that bothers him, or the petty pent-up character of wife or friend, or the lack of companions and companionship. Oh, yes, he tries to think out what is the matter with him. No use! Already his thought has swept on to the more general case, and tomorrow he will know as little as he did yesterday what’s to be done about it. He has lost serious interest in himself, time spent on himself is wasted. He is cheerful, not for want of things to worry about, but for want of fingers and hands to lay hold on his trouble. His way of taking whatever turns up, his sunny unconstrained hospitality to anything that comes along, his way of wishing everybody well, his dangerous indifference to the difference between yes and no--ah, how often he has to pay for these his virtues! And, as just a man, he is too often taken for the caput mortuum of these virtues. Would you have him love or hate--I mean love or hate as God, women and brutes understand love and hate--why, he will do the best he can and give what he can. But no one should be disappointed if this is not much; if just here he shows himself ungenuine, unattached, unreliable--rotten. His love is thought out, his hates are trumped up and rather a _tour de force_, little side issues and exaggerations. He is only genuine when nothing prevents him from being objective. His mirroring and everlastingly even soul can no longer say ‘yes,’ no longer say ‘no.’ It imposes nothing on anything, neither does it upset anything. It says with Leibnitz, ‘Je ne méprise presque rien.’”

If in this passage Nietzsche reveals his delicate antipathy for a character we had all been taught to worship, in others he shows himself a pragmatist before that word had been heard of. The philosopher for him is no wanderer of the seas, accepting what shores he comes upon whether they smile on him or frown. For Nietzsche, the philosopher is a Caesarian conqueror who has his way with truth, and truth is such a thing as a strong man may have his way with.

* * * * *

But, “I am not of those of whom one asks ‘why?’” Nietzsche has somewhere written, and this is so true that I can use him for no more than a vehement example of spleen. If I am to enter upon the path of a more or less reasoned reaction against that objectivity we have all sometime held sacred, I must turn to those of whom one can ask “why?” And, notably, to William James.

Now, if I do turn to James to ask him “why?”--Why is not the realist, with all his sad heroism and resigned courage, the noblest and best that man has imagined?--he answers, or I take him to, Because realism is a philosophy of little faith! Faith it is that makes worlds, realistic science has only the wit to acknowledge and the strength to suffer what faith has wrought. Bold to endure, it is timid to change, and a world in the making needs its makers, needs its poets and actors more than it needs audience or spectator. At the bottom of the realist’s brave heart lurks an abiding fear--the fear of making a fool of himself. But a world in the making like a battle in the fighting cries out for fools and the foolhardy. Faith risks to the point of folly, and because all making anew is a colossal risk, let us have colossal faith.

Here, if I am not mistaken, you have the principal difference between the realism that went before and the pragmatism that came after. The faith which the builders rejected is become the head of the corner. For there are such things, the pragmatist contends, as faiths that realize themselves, beliefs that come true only because they are firmly held and courageously acted upon, hopes that would never have been fulfilled had not he who held them gone ahead in the confident expectation that they would be fulfilled. Take, James would have you, just that familiar class of questions of fact, “questions concerning personal relations, states of mind between one man and another. _Do you like me or not?_--for example. Whether you do or not depends, in countless instances, on whether I meet you half way, am willing to assume that you must like me, and show you trust and expectation. The previous faith on my part in your liking’s existence is in such cases what makes your liking come. But if I stand aloof, and refuse to budge an inch until I have objective evidence, until you shall have done something apt [as the realists say] _ad extorquendum assensum meum_, ten to one your liking never comes. How many women’s hearts are vanquished by the mere sanguine insistence of some man that they _must_ love him! He will not consent to the hypothesis that they cannot. The desire for a certain kind of truth here brings about that special truth’s existence, and so it is in innumerable cases of other sorts. Who gains promotions, boons, appointments, but the man in whose life they are seen to play the part of live hypotheses, who discounts them, sacrifices other things for their sake before they have come, and takes risks for them in advance? His faith acts on the powers above him as a claim, and creates its own verification.”

These be but trifling affairs of commonplace life if you will, but the imagination sweeps easily on from the relation of man and man to all that man’s work which is done shoulder to shoulder. “A social organism,” James goes on, “of any sort whatever, large or small, is what it is because each member proceeds to his own duty with a trust that the other members will simultaneously do theirs. Wherever a desired result is achieved by the co-operation of many independent persons, its existence as a fact is a pure consequence of the precursive faith in one another of those immediately concerned. A government, an army, a commercial system, a ship, a college, an athletic team, all exist on this condition, without which not only is nothing achieved, but nothing is even attempted. A whole train of passengers (individually brave enough) will be looted by a few highwaymen, simply because the latter can count on one another, while each passenger fears that if he makes a movement of resistance, he will be shot before anyone else backs him up. If we believed that the whole car-full would rise at once with us, we should each severally rise, and train robbing would never even be attempted.”

Have you ever, O patient reader, in the heat of a political campaign for what you thought were better things met with that cool chilling intelligence that hastens to warn you against trying to change human nature? As it was in the beginning it is now and ever shall be, gangs without end. Amen! And he is right, this unduped and undupable intelligence is right--but on one condition only: The world will always be as it was at the beginning if it is exclusively inhabited by unduped and undupable intelligences--by realists, in short. Or, have you ever tried to refresh your tired soul with what the Germans have written of Realpolitik? If so, you will already know a great deal of what pragmatism is _not_. It is not a philosophy of the “what never has been never can be” temper of mind.

“There are cases,” James puts it, “where a fact cannot come at all unless a preliminary faith exists in its coming. _And where faith in a fact can help create the fact_, that would be an insane logic which would say [with Huxley] that faith running ahead of scientific evidence is the ‘lowest kind of immorality into which a thinking being may fall.’...”

I am afraid there is about the pragmatist something of that dangerous citizen who will not hesitate on occasion to grasp this sorry scheme of things entire and shatter it to bits, full of the faith that it can be remoulded closer to the heart’s desire.

* * * * *

“But now,” James returns to his argument, “these are all childish human cases, and have nothing to do with the great cosmical matters, like the question of religious faith. Let us then pass on to that....

“To most of us religion comes in a way that makes a veto on our active faith illogical. The more perfect and more eternal aspect of the universe is represented in our religions as having a personal form. The universe is no longer a mere _It_ to us, but a _Thou_, if we are religious; and any relation that may be possible from person to person might be possible here. For instance, although in one sense we are passive portions of the universe, in another we show a curious autonomy, as if we were small active centers on our own account. We feel, too, as if the appeal of religion to us were made to our own active good-will, as if evidence might be forever withheld unless we met the hypothesis half way. To take a trivial illustration: just as a man who, in a company of gentlemen made no advances, asked a warrant for every concession, and believed no one’s word without proof, would cut himself off by such churlishness from all the social rewards that a more trusting spirit would earn,--so here, one who should shut himself up in snarling logicality and try to make the gods extort his recognition willy-nilly, or not get it at all, might cut himself off forever from his only opportunity of making the gods’ acquaintance. This feeling ... that by obstinately believing that there are gods ... we are doing the universe the deepest service we can, seems part of the being and essence of the religious hypothesis.”

I do not lay this passage before you as an example of clear thinking and cogent reasoning. Who does not find it baffling, elusive, leading to no kind of action, must have a mind differently constituted from mine or from any with which I am more intimately acquainted. It is, if you please, the groping of a faith that feels it has a right to exist, but does not know as yet what is right for it to do. All of which is most unpragmatic--not at all practical. But perhaps this very quality, this manner of James’s of feeling his way through the dark _en tâtonnant_, with his heart’s courage for his only light, is what most endears him to our age. We sit with Zarathustra midst shattered tables of the law, and our awkward fingers cannot grave new ones hurriedly. We fumble, we hesitate, we begin again. We fumble, we hesitate, but we _do_, if we are idealists, begin again.

Now, one of the new things we have tried is just this manner of meeting the universe half way in the matter of religious faith. And this trial has been no interchange of philosophical abstractions; but a struggle of very living men. To tell about it will perhaps illustrate better than anything else the appeal pragmatism made to some and the offense it gave to others.

* * * * *

We have all known, though doubtless our fathers knew him better, that studious theologian who, as proof of a devout life’s industry, left behind him a Testament worn to something like its elemental dust. He was a realist in temperament, and sought God and God’s meaning in documents as an historian might seek to reconstruct some character of the past from the archives. He was supplemented in his labors by learned indefatigable searchers of other remains of the past from whose ruins they sought to bring corroborative testimony. He was opposed only by other students who had pored over their Testaments with equal devotion, if to opposite purpose, and by other archaeologists who had searched the ruins with equal pains, if with other result. But protagonist and antagonist alike of the Christianity into which we were born were realists. Neither dreamt that the existence or non-existence, the benevolence or cruelty, the oneness or manyness of God were matters with which his personal wishes and strivings, his finite wantings and not wantings could have anything to do. If you had suggested to either that perhaps God was still in the making and that those who would know Him must strain their eyes toward the future, not keep them fixed on the past--it is a question which would have been first to put you down as an impious fellow and a blasphemer.

How different from all this is the spirit of that recent movement within the Christian church that is generally called Modernism! “Defined and condemned in the encyclical _Pascendi_,” writes J. Bourdeau, in 1907, “modernism continues to fill the reviews and the periodicals, even those that ordinarily treat of matters profane. This internal crisis of Catholicism, this new attempt to reconcile the church with the times, aimed at internal reform, not at schism. It was destined to end in the excommunication or interdiction of some of its more refractory spirits and in the submission of almost all. And yet, by those who shared its hopes, modernism is not looked upon as the bed of a torrent from now on to be dry; it runs like an underground river, and some day, perhaps, will come to the surface again with sufficient force to sweep away the dikes.”

Well, this modernism which M. Bourdeau, in his little volume, “Pragmatisme et Modernisme,” brackets with pragmatism as being of the same temper, is, like all other modernities, not very new. We associate it with such names as Father Tyrrel, in England; l’Abbé Loisy, in France; the senator and novelist Fogazzaro, in Italy, and if the matter has interested us, with a host of other writers no less distinguished. But it is really of the essence of Newman, and goes back to Pascal. For “The heart,” Pascal has said, “has its reasons that the reason does not understand.” It was to these reasons that Newman listened, and offers us again in his “Grammar of Assent,” and it is these reasons that modernism would have to be the only ones on which Christianity can be safely founded.

But what are they, these reasons, and what does this voice of the heart say? Its first clear utterance is negative. It does not care who wrote the various books of the Scriptures, or what corroborative or contradictory evidence those who study the documents and monuments of the past may come upon. “Higher critics,” so far from being its enemies, are welcome participants in its cause. As little does it cling to the literal sense of the various dogmatic interpretations the Church has from time to time put upon the sacred writings. Would you know, for example, whether there is a Real Presence? Modernism would answer: The Eucharist is indeed meaningless unless there be a Real Presence; but whether Christ is really there for you or not depends on you alone. And the like of other dogmas.

Yet it would appear that history, sacred, ecclesiastical, or profane, is no dead letter to the modernist. He is intensely conscious and amply studious of the past. Nor will he, if I make him out, permit its episodes to be treated as symbols, parables and allegories. No, the past tells the story of a great religious truth in the making. If you ask him what Christianity is, he will tell you it isn’t, it never has been, it never will be any definitely finished thing; but for him it is the best guide to living that he with all his devotion and all his thought can make it. The modernists are Christians because they are heirs to, and imbued with the spirit of Christianity, as they are not inspired of the Buddha or of Confucius. Yes, they are devout Catholics because they can work better at the making of a religion in the atmosphere of their ancestral church than in any other air. Religion to them is to aid in the way best suited to their temperaments and traditions in the evolution of religion; for them Christianity is in process, and we are the potters that mould it, not the explorers that discover it.

Well, J. Bourdeau is not wrong; modernism and pragmatism are indeed of like temper and children of the same age--an age of troubled outlook, but of brave if chastened hope. The contrast between the realistic theologian with his ancient texts, documents, monuments, and the idealistic theologian who turns to the past not for authority but for guidance, not for facts but for a sense of tendency and direction--this contrast is not unlike that other one pragmatism has brought about between “Natural Religion” and what I may call “Human Religion.” Natural religion sought in the order of nature evidence of its designer, of a thoughtful purpose back of or in it, the same spirit that a naturalist might hunt for the tracks of a mastodon or follow the wanderings of a glacier. For the humanist, the purpose of nature is a thing in the making, and we are here to help make it. It will turn out as our finite efforts form it--good or bad, as we are good or bad; wise or not, as we are. The practical message of “Human Religion” is pretty much that with which James closes his little essay, “Is Life Worth Living?” “Be not afraid of life. Believe that life _is_ worth living and your belief helps create the fact. The ‘scientific proof’ that you are right may not be clear before the day of judgment (or some stage of being which that expression may serve to symbolize) is reached. But the faithful fighters of this hour, or the beings that then and there will represent them, may then turn to the faint-hearted who here decline to go on with words like those with which Henry IV. greeted the tardy Crillon after a great victory had been gained: ‘Hang yourself, brave Crillon! we fought at Arques, and you were not there.’”

* * * * *

I have tried to show pragmatism as a moment in the swing of thought from realism to idealism, and how for it the most vital, that is to say, the moral and religious aspects of our world are things to work and fight for, to make and to mould, not just to find and come across. Its god is indeed a god of battles, and we are his soldiers on whom his victory depends. But as I view this battle, it is not to be fought out in heart throes and outpourings of sentiment. These may indeed change and better human relationships; but it must not be forgotten that human relationships exist in a physical universe that is older than they, and promises to outlast them. Now, just the physics of things show a strong tendency to be amoral and atheistic. “You all know the picture of the last state of the universe which evolutionary science foresees. I cannot state it better than in Mr. Balfour’s words: ‘The energies of our system will decay, the glory of the sun will be dimmed, and the earth, tideless and inert, will no longer tolerate the race which has for a moment disturbed its solitude. Man will go down into the pit and all his thoughts will perish. The uneasy consciousness which in this obscure corner has for a brief space broken the contented silence of the universe will be at rest. Matter will know itself no longer. “Imperishable monuments” and “immortal deeds,” death itself, and love stronger than death, will be as if they had not been. Nor will anything that is be better or worse for all that the labor, genius, devotion, and suffering of man have striven through countless ages to effect.’

“That,” comments James, “is the sting of it, that in the vast drifting of the cosmic weather, though many a jeweled shore appears, and many an enchanted cloud-bank floats away, long lingering ere it be dissolved--even as ours now lingers for our joy--yet, when these transient products are gone, nothing, absolutely _nothing_ remains to represent those particular qualities, those elements of preciousness which they may have enshrined. Dead and gone are they, gone utterly from the very sphere and room of being. Without an echo; without a memory; without an influence on aught that they may come after to make it care for similar ideals.”[14]

Has not, then, realism the last word in this argument and does not the rolling mechanism of things have its way with us in the end--since it compasses not only our death, but the collapse of the very theatre in which our little lives have played themselves out?

No, I should say, this is not the moral of the tale, though there is a moral to the tale. “Knowledge,” writes Francis Bacon, in his “Novum Organum,” “knowledge and human power are synonymous.” So are human impotence and human ignorance synonymous. The child that dips a cup of water from the fountain is subduing nature’s mechanism to its needs. It is only a question of how great is our knowledge if we would know how great is our power.

We die, our world dies, only because we know no better, have thought of no way of preventing; but knowledge and human power are indeed synonymous, and I know of no end to either. But, as for those of us bound to die before we have learned how not to, and as for our children whose world may well vanish before they have thought of a way of saving it, we have always this solace--that we know we are facing the only way salvation can come from when our face is toward science. “For nature,” says Bacon, with his queer crooked smile,--“nature is only subdued by submission.”

IX

PROGRESS

We little realize, until we have met them socially, how engaging the manners of cannibals can be. It is unfortunate that so many obstacles lie in the way of our making their better acquaintance,--they live so far out of town for one thing, and for another are so clannish a set that only occasionally is one of our sort welcomed to their inner circles. Yet when one who has had this fortune returns to tell about it,--which happens too rarely--we can see it has been a revelation to him and an enlightenment. There is that friend of our youth, Herman Melville, who about the year 1840 was entertained by the Merquesan Islanders--I swear that as I read him I find something very winning about the ways of these people. It is true they were what Melville calls “occasional cannibals”; but although cannibalism, however occasional, cannot win our entire approval (perhaps because, as Montaigne suggests, we have learned how much better it is to torment our enemies alive than to consume them dead) yet it is not wise or just to allow our prejudice against an odd local custom to blind us to so much that is fair in their lives.

For much there is that is fair in the lives of the Typees. Dwelling on that enchanted island of the Pacific, their lines are cast in pleasant places. The asperities which civilization seems rather to have aggravated than smoothed do not roughen their way. Their existence is passed in the midst of tropical plenty, on which their numbers, few and hot on the increase, make light demand. They toil not to cover what nature has conceived in innocence, and spin but lightly to adorn what nature has fashioned fair. Little thought do they take on their housing. “There are few villages,” Melville tells us, “the houses stand here and there in the shadow of groves or are scattered along the banks of the winding stream; their bamboo sides and their gleaming white thatch forming a beautiful contrast to the perpetual verdure in which they are embowered. There are no roads of any kind in the valley; nothing but a labyrinth of foot paths twisting and turning without end.” Yet the morals of these people do not seem to have been so far below our standards as their benighted condition might lead us to expect. “There seemed,” says Melville, “to be no rogues of any sort in Typee. In the darkest nights the natives slept securely with all their worldly wealth around them, in houses the doors of which were never fastened. The disquieting thought of theft and assassination never disturbed them. Each islander reposed beneath his own palmetto thatching, or sat under his own breadfruit tree, with none to molest or alarm him. There was not a padlock in the valley.”

I had gone so far in one of my readings of Melville, and was beginning to wonder in the back of my head what a Typee introduced into our civilization could find to say of us half as pleasant as the things their guest had noted of them, when I recalled that another had long ago put the like question to himself when he was in much better position to answer it. It was when the New World was very much newer than it is now, that Villegaignon landed in a country he surnamed Antarctic France, where dwelt a people of cannibals the very counterpart (as I judge) of our friends the Typees. “Three of these people,” the Sieur de Montaigne records, “were at Rouen in the reign of our late King, Charles the Ninth, who talked with them a great while. They were showed our fashions, our pomp, and the form of a fair city; afterwards some demanded their advice, and would needs know of them what things of note and admirable they had observed amongst us. They answered three things,” ... of which Montaigne seems particularly impressed with this one: “They had perceived [they said] there were men among us full gorged with all sorts of commodities, and others which hunger-starved and bare with need and poverty begged at their gates: and found it strange these moieties [they have a phrase whereby they call men but a moiety one of another]--strange these moieties so needy could endure such an injustice, and that they took not the others by the throat, or set fire to their houses.”

I do not suppose Montaigne approved, any more than we can, the touch of savagery that concludes these observations; but on the whole they seem to have confirmed him in certain opinions he had already formed on the pretended advantages of civilized over barbarous life. For this occasion on which he actually met and conversed with the cannibals was not the first acquaintance he had with them. There had long been with him a certain serving-man who had spent some ten or twelve years in their country, and seems to have given his master much the same account of them as Melville has given us of the Typees. I cannot refrain from recalling in Montaigne’s own words his reflections on the whole spectacle of savagery and civilization:

“Now I find,” he says, “as far as I have been informed, there is nothing in that nation that is either barbarous or savage,--unless men call that barbarism which is not common to them.... They are even savage as we call those fruits wild which nature of herself and of her ordinary progress hath produced,--whereas, indeed, they are those which ourselves have ordered by our artificial devices and diverted from their common order we should rather term savage. In those are the true and most profitable virtues, and natural properties most lively and vigorous, which in these we have bastardized, applying them to the pleasure of our corrupted taste.... And if notwithstanding, in diverse fruits of those countries that were never tilled, we shall find that in respect of ours they are most excellent and as delicate to the taste, there is no reason art should gain the point of honor over our puissant mother Nature. We have so much by our invention surcharged the beauties and riches of her works, that we have altogether choked her; yet wherever her purity shineth, she maketh our vain and frivolous enterprises wonderfully ashamed.